The name might be commercial coquetry, but Island Records are not promoting their new Obscure label as mass appeal music, though a price of £1.99 should encourage people to take a chance. With low recording costs, and minimal promotion, the flexible project of 10 to 12 records a year is not a major investment. The most amazing thing about the project is that a rock record company should be starting a series devoted to minority music at all. The next most amazing thing is that the idea came from one of their own recording artists, Brian Eno, late of Roxy Music.
I presented this idea to Island by saying that they ought to be working towards the kind of research and development situation that you find in larger industries. This idea is to launch a few things out of the mainstream and watch their progress very closely. Most record companies do the opposite; put out a lot of mainstream projects, and the most successful is pursued in a big way, and the others quickly dropped. In business terms, this isn't a very healthy situation. Multi-national industries exploit a lot of different things at once, so that if the market takes a sudden turn in a different direction, they've already got a number of mutations that can cope with it. So it did have a business rationale. The first five Obscure albums will have cost much less than a single rock album. An ordinary rock album costs about £10,000. These will have cost about £6,000. I think a company of this size should be able to afford this kind of experiment.
All the time I've been signed to Island, I've been very interested in their affairs. Most musicians aren't, and regard the record company as a kind of enemy, really. I don't regard it as that and always try to stimulate some kind of co-operation between us.
I only started the thing on the assumption that Island would market and distribute them. As it is, I do everything, including the accounts, the pressing, and making a finished art-work for the cover. So I present them with a finished record, in fact.
Eno first came to rock in 1968. But before that, his interest in music had been encouraged at art school by Tom Phillips. Phillips introduced him to the kind of experimental musicians whose background is often neither classical nor popular, which hints at the kind of territory Obscure records have so far explored:
My main reason for starting the venture was that I wanted to be in a position where I heard anything interesting that was going on. I wanted to be a magnet for tapes. Otherwise, it's a case of rooting through music history to find enough interesting pieces which can change sufficiently to justify a new recording. We're going to do a Cage percussion album well as those pieces we've already done, since a lot of his percussion music hasn't been recorded. Another interesting thing is to put older music through new recording techniques, not treating them as performances that happen to be in front of microphones, but making a record with a piece of music.
With the early stages, the first 12 albums or so, I want to give the impression that the label is capable of taking a very wide range of material. But I'm not interested in releasing records of young rock groups. The main decision is whether I like a piece or not. I think the borderline area between rock and experimental is a very interesting one. The present stance is: Whatever happens, I'm not going to use my intellect. The experimental stance is: 'Whatever happens, I'm only going to use my intellect.'...
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Adrian Jack @'Time Out' (March 15-18, 1975)
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