“Oh I want to heap scorn on those who pathetically apologise ‘IT’S ONLY POP MUSIC’ because they know as well as you and I it isn’t, it’s life and that’s important. Even more important, it’s not just their life, but mine, my life they’re screwing up with their no stomach compromises and sellouts.”
Punched in commanding red typeface, these words appear in the 1988 Sarah Records fanzine. The legendary Bristol label’s Clare Wadd covered a lot within its dozen pages: she plugged the latest releases from bands such as McCarthy, The Orchids, and 14 Iced Bears; bemoaned the market’s deprioritization of 7-inch singles; and recounted life in the damp basement apartment that doubled as the label’s HQ: the “curled up cat, kitchen table coated with molted cat hairs, [and] cold wet cold cold COLD feet.” But most pertinently, she affirmed her commitment to “jangly pop escapism,” to “POP MUSIC,” the lodestar that guided Sarah Records throughout its existence.
Wadd and co-founder Matt Haynes abruptly ceased operations in 1995 after eight years of championing bands at home and abroad, raging against Thatcher’s never-ending Conservative government, and promoting their faith in feminism, socialism, and pop. Sarah’s dissolution only enhanced its cult status, of course. Its spirit and sonics manifest in the slew of contemporary artists and labels with like-minded, anti-capitalist approaches, from Glasgow’s GoldMold to South of England-based Skep Wax Records, the most evident successor to Sarah. The latter’s Under the Bridge compilation albums seek to future-proof Sarah’s legacy in a way that is antithetical to nostalgia.
“The only stipulation was that it was new music; it couldn’t be old music,” says Amelia Fletcher. The Skep Wax co-founder is better known as the frontwoman of legendary Sarah signees Heavenly, and a bunch of other bands, including Talulah Gosh and, most recently, The Catenary Wires. She and Rob Pursey, a member of the aforementioned acts and co-founder of Skep Wax, began the project during lockdown. The pair sought to reunite songwriters spread across disparate geographies and professions (Fletcher herself earned a CBE for services to consumer economics, and she and Pursey now reside in rural Kent) by emailing to ask if they’d like to write and record a brand new song.
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The stray mp3 attachments eventually coalesced into 2022’s Under the Bridge, which features 14 songs by bands previously signed to Sarah Records. “I thought it was risky,” Fletcher continues, noting that the initial idea came from Pursey, “because all we know about these people, really, except for a few who we’d kept track of, was that they were once on Sarah. They could be doing…jazz! Anything! It could have been a terrible album. We invited them without knowing what the music would be like.”
But several of the contributors, such as Boyracer and The Orchids, had been active on and off since the late ‘80s/early ‘90s. Members of other bands, including Robert Cooksey from The Sea Urchins, the first band Sarah ever released, appear on the compilation under new monikers. “You felt a very strong sense of solidarity really—people in their own little places had carried on, like we had, making music that they thought was good,” Pursey says. “There’s strength in numbers.”
For Stewart Anderson of Leeds-via-Oregon band Boyracer, “the greatest gift about the Under the Bridge series is having the opportunity to re-evaluate the music without the complications of youth,” which he feels is especially crucial given our tendency to romanticize “slogging around the toilets of Northern Europe for beer money.” For Pursey, “the whole point was to be the opposite of nostalgic because there is an awful lot of nostalgia around old bands and Sarah bands. And we’re as guilty of it as other people—we’re playing a Heavenly gig at the weekend—but we wanted the thrust to be about now, and the future.”
Anderson adds, “It’s sometimes frustrating to be referenced by songs you wrote and recorded 30 years ago. Boyracer has always been about the people who were in the room with me at the time, where we were geographically, and capturing the laughter surrounding those moments. I always say it’s nice to look at old photos, but it’s more important to remember to take new ones.”
Released exactly two years after the first, Under the Bridge 2 is even more varied and expansive, a double LP that Pursey suggests is more “intense.” Indeed, one of the misconceptions about Sarah—and there were many—is that its bands adhered to what the British music press scornfully dubbed “twee pop” (“to our surprise and somewhat horror,” Fletcher says). “The boys were accused of being bedwetters, and the women were accused of, effectively, not being sexy enough,” Pursey recalls. “There was a kind of hostile attitude that partly came from that self-styled ‘alternative’ side of the music press and industry for whom these bands were guilty of doing ‘pop music.’”
Really, though, “pop music” was the only genre descriptor that Sarah and its bands could embrace, partly as an act of reclamation, sure (why should mainstream pop have all the fun?), but more so because no other umbrella term could encapsulate the breadth of sounds delivered by Sarah and subsequently by Under the Bridge.
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“We were all influenced by a similar group of bands, but there were a lot of bands in that group,” Fletcher explains. “I think we all knew what we were not,” Pursey agrees. Indeed, there’s a tendency when discussing this ilk of music to rely on certain names as shorthand, such as The Smiths, R.E.M., or The Jesus and Mary Chain. Although those names aren’t a million miles away, you’d get closer to what Sarah was all about with Postcard Records and thus bands like Orange Juice, Josef K, or the Go-Betweens. More than the sonic similarities, the Glasgow label’s localized, aggressively independent outlook was one of Sarah’s chief influences.
Even so, for every jangle pop single Sarah released, there was another that turned the fuzz to 11, another that leaned into electronic tones, and another that was just a porous, acoustic, one-chord strum-along without a drumbeat (looking at you, Brighter). In other words, much like Sarah’s compilations from the ‘90s, Under the Bridge champions and testifies to the miscellany of pop music.
The foggy slumberer “Dodge the Rain” needed to come first. “I thought it was right to start with a slow, gentle song rather than kicking off with something high octane, and then all the rest of it feels like, ‘Okay, we’re tired now; gotta sit down,’” Pursey jokes of the volume 2 sequencing. Conversely, “Look Alive!” by Jetstream Pony—“who have as much energy as they did 25 years ago [when they were called Aberdeen], possibly more”—is a shambling barnstormer that kicks the album into a higher gear; unsurprising considering the band borrowed their name from a racing greyhound.
Anderson’s Boyracer contribution, “Unknown Frequencies,” lets “three very distinct and different guitarists mesh their sound together” while he holds down the bass groove and sings. Meanwhile, “Double Ninth,” an ersatz lounge instrumental by Mark Tranmer of the band St Christopher, arrives at the exact midpoint, separating the two sides, and Fletcher and Pursey’s Catenary Wires cut, the medieval lullaby “Alone Tonight” is a world away from Heavenly’s goofy riot grrrl grins.
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Pursey says of his favorite track, “Just Who Are The Cockleshell Heroes?” by Action Painting!, “It’s a song about some little unloved part of Portsmouth [UK], where they live, where you can look out and on a clear night you can see the Isle of Wight. It’s about very mundane stuff, but it feels pretty epic. There’s something that makes me think of the spirit of Sarah Records in that song, because you’d have a picture of a bloody bus on the sleeve [of a Sarah single], and [inside] you’d have a song that might be quite transcendent.”
Speaking of bus pictures, Fletcher brings up the fact that Sarah’s founders cared a lot about local public transport and infrastructure. To mark Sarah’s 50th release, Wadd and Haynes created the infamous Saraopoly board game, a play on Monopoly, which guided players across Bristol via landmarks associated with the label. And the cover art of Sarah’s swansong compilation, There And Back Again Lane, featured a snap of the city’s venerable Clifton Suspension Bridge. The name Under the Bridge, then—its artwork a lino print created by Fletcher’s and Pursey’s daughter—“makes some kind of sideways nod to the aesthetic of Sarah without just copying it,” Pursey explains, though he did consider changing the title after realizing it was shared by a “really horrible” Red Hot Chili Peppers song.
Naturally, Under the Bridge won’t be on streaming platforms, whose subjugation of artists’ interests conflicts with the project’s objective, but it is available on vinyl, CD, and as a digital download with an accompanying booklet of photos featuring each contributor posing with a nearby bridge—from the Bixby Bridge on California’s Big Sur coast (Boyracer) to Brisbane’s Go Between Bridge, under which Even As We Speak float serenely. In addition to three record release shows—in Sheffield, London, and Bristol, where several of the contributors will perform—there will be a Bandcamp listening party on April 5th, so that these geographical boundaries can be, well, bridged.
Thirty years after Sarah’s dissolution, Under the Bridge ensures that its sounds and sentiments live on, unencumbered by nostalgia. After all, the songs collected here are not from legacy acts on pocket-lining laps of the festival circuit. This is new music—these are creators and writers who have been here the whole time; clearly, they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
