26 Apr 2013

Rocket at 15 – An Echoes and Dust interview


The great website Echoes and Dust interviewed Chris from Rocket about the labels history and future:


"Rocket Recordings celebrates its fifteenth anniversary this year so we decided to get in touch with one of the founding fathers of the label, Chris Reeder, to find out how it all got started...

(C) Well it started on a drunken night at The Louisiana in Bristol sometime in 1997. Myself and close friend Simon Healey were there to see another good friend of ours (Gareth Turner, now in Big Naturals) band called Lillydamwhite. They were supporting other friends of ours The Heads. After Lillydamwhite played a blistering set, Simon turned around to me and set we should put out a 7" by them and I thought, wow, what an idea! Then we both sort of forgot about that due to The Heads cacophony of psych noise that we were bombarded with. In the morning though, once the haze of the previous night’s excess's had cleared the idea of releasing a Lillydamwhite 7" popped back into our heads and we thought, actually that is a good idea. Why not? Let’s give it a crack! We were both huge fans of the US underground scene and wanted to emulate the golden years of Sub Pop, Amphetamine Reptile, Sympathy for the Record Industry etc. So at the beginning that is what we wanted try and do.

The first thing we had to do though was come up with the name...and that took a while! After a lot of stupid ideas I saw an illustration of this Flash Gordon type rocket that looked fantastic, so I showed it to Simon and said, "What do you think? Let’s call the label Rocket and use that style of image?" He agreed and we went for it. Then we contacted underground poster artist Frank Kozik to draw us a logo using the image I found as inspiration and the logo you see today is what he created!..."


Read the full and very revealing interview here: Echoes and Dust

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