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Popkiss: The Life and Afterlife of Sarah Records
Popkiss The Life and Afterlife of Sarah Records Author:Michael White During its eight-year existence, from 1987 to 1995, Sarah Records was a modest underground success and, for the most part, a critical laughingstock in its native England-sneeringly dismissed as the sad, final repository for a fringe style of music (variously referred to as ?indie-pop,? ?C86,? ?cutie? and ?twee?) whose moment had passed. Yet now,... more » almost 20 years after its dissolution, Sarah is among the most passionately fetishized record labels of all time. Several of its releases sell for hundreds of dollars; devotees from London to Los Angeles to Tokyo hungrily seek out any information they can find about its poorly documented history; and countless new bands-some of them made up of people who weren't born when Sarah shut down-claim its bands as a major influence.
Popkiss will be the book that thousands of Sarah fans around the world have been waiting for. Drawn from dozens of exclusive interviews with members of the 30-plus bands that called the label home, as well as Sarah co-founders Matt Haynes and Clare Wadd, it will offer-for the first time anywhere-a deeply detailed account of the label's occasional triumphs and many tribulations, and its last laugh in posterity.
Popkiss offers a vivid portrait of something that is likely gone forever: the record label as highly personalized aesthetic statement, whose very name is a trustworthy 'seal of quality' to its acolytes. Following the rise of the Internet and the collapse of the traditional music industry, the uncommonly intimate relationship Sarah engendered with its audience-not only through its music, but through its artwork, self-written fanzines and newsletters, and unorthodox business decisions-is an accomplishment no new label could duplicate today.« less