Dot's Entertainment

Domino Records founder Laurence Bell came across his most recent signings, Archie Bronson Outfit, after a gig of theirs down his local. They had heard of him, to say the least.

“Well, yeah, it was kind of hilarious, actually,” confirms Laurence. “We were their favourite label. They almost fainted. They were going, ‘You don’t understand. We’ve always dreamt of being on Domino. You’re not really from Domino, are you?’”
Currently celebrating ten years in business, Domino have not only successfully survived a decade of huge pop-cultural change and unprecedented music industry fluctuation, but are still in a kind of miraculously ongoing artistic prime wherein turning a CD over to find the familiar white rectangle still means you can pretty much hand over your money sight unseen. There are probably fewer than ten labels on the planet currently operating at this consistently high qualitative watermark – fewer again whose roster covers such a broad musical sweep, of which more later – and fewer still who remain independently owned.
“I had a pretty clear idea about what I wanted to do,” Bell says of his music-industry worldview circa 1993. “It was a funny time, culturally: grunge was sort of fading, and Britpop was exploding, and everything was kind of about… winning, it seemed, at the time. And there didn’t seem to be a lot of interest in art, and longer-term development of artists, and so forth: things that are characteristics of great independent labels. I thought there was a gap for a true independent label.”
Domino’s maiden release was by local contenders The Tender Lugers (“a Velvets-inspired garage band with kinda funny, sick lyrics”) but “what we were also doing,” says Bell, “because we didn’t have the budget to [send people into recording studios], was licensing American music for Europe and the UK. There was this wave of music that I thought was really important, and that wasn’t being represented, this kind of antidote to grunge - bands like Sebadoh, Royal Trux, Will Oldham’s Palace Brothers project and Smog.”
Worlds Of Possibility, the double album compilation released to celebrate Domino’s first decade, gives the lie, however, to the common misconception that Domino are ‘merely’ a top-drawer weird-Americana label, as its beginnings might suggest. It reminds you that Domino is not only the label Will Oldham rang when he was looking for a deal: it’s also the imprint that has unerringly located the best, most singular exponents of various new-music vogues - neo-blues (The Kills), electronica (Max Tundra, Four Tet), nu-post-punk artrock (Franz Ferdinand) - while at the same time giving a home to sundry wayward geniuses (Jim O’Rourke, Dave Pajo, Bill Callahan, Dave Berman) and landmark songwriters (Stephen Malkmus, James Yorkston, the late Elliott Smith).
“They’re so disparate,” Bell says, when asked whether he sees a commonality among his artists. “Not musically, no, but there’s an ethic there, an aesthetic there. I think there’s a respect and knowledge of the past, but also a desire to push things forward, one way or another – lyrically or musically – and, you know, to bring something fresh to the plate. Nobody’s really repeating anything. People are trying to do something true.”
Thus, while the rest of the music industry in 2003 is making like Leonardo and Kate at the end of Titanic, Domino are experiencing a boomtime. They now have a European staff of twelve, including a Dublin office, and, after years of bringing US acts to Europe, now have a full complement of UK signings as well and have just opened a base in New York.
“It’s a strange era for the music industry all right,” agrees Bell, “but you know? We haven’t felt it. People are feeling the pinch at the higher end, but we’re actually in a really good place.”

Various Artists: Worlds Of Possibility is available now on Domino