It was sometime back in the mid-noughties, in the era when myspace was king and queen of the musical world, that I stumbled across a CD sampler called Grace Records – The First Five Singles.
Five bands I’d never heard of – Fury of the Headteachers, Stopstarts, Orphan Boy, Linear, and The Homewreckers Club. I took it home and found there was some merit to the music, but none of it was really groundbreaking.
I don’t really know anything much about the label or any of the bands, as there were no bios or the likes offered. There may well have been all sorts of stuff put up on myspace, but that’s pretty much extinct nowadays. Discogs shows up that Grace Records was in existence between 2006-2007, with a total of thirteen singles as its complete output.
I had got round to checking out, on-line, a few of the unknown singers/bands on the hard drive that appear after Steve Mason, who was #325 in the series, when I stumbled across a couple of lines on Stopstarts advising they were from Glasgow and indeed one of our local papers had informed its readers of an upcoming gig in February 2007. But of the names of the musicians, there’s nothing.
mp3 : Stopstarts – My Watch Is Digital
This was the second single released on Grace Records. There’s mint copies going for sale on Discogs for £1 plus postage, so although each single had a limited run of just a few hundred, very few seemed to be sold to the general public and there’s been no increase in value whatsoever.*
mp3 : Stopstarts – Metronome
That’s your b-side.
*I hope I didn’t come across as sneering with that comment. The fact is that those behind Grace Records enabled a number of groups to leave behind a physical legacy of the time they spent together, even if the music failed to make any headway critically or commercially…..and I’m always in awe of those who make such things happen.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 