Label of Love: Night School Records

Night School Records started in 2011, in North London, in a former porn studio-turned-warehouse living space. After playing music for 15 years, working in retail, I'd entered a premature midlife crisis needing to do something other than commute my hours away. At that time my friends' band Golden Grrrls back home in Glasgow were looking for a label and without much deliberation I thought, "I'LL DO IT!" It was instinctual and intuitive, progressing from formless idea to concrete reality in a matter of weeks.

I sold half my record collection to fund the first 7" vinyl pressings, teaching myself screen-printing to make the sleeves. To save £30, I potato-stamped the labels, coating my room in starch for days afterward. Despite help from friends, I made mistake after mistake in those first years. For the first DIVORCE single I neglected to use a guillotine to cut the sleeves, opting for a cheap boxcutter that sliced open my finger in the first hour. Luckily the artwork was red.

Those first releases were jumbled genre-wise, but the music had an approach in common. I released a diverse menagerie of artists: to me the most important criteria was that I had to feel this almost mystical frenzy for the music, a feeling like I wanted to jump out of my skin with excitement. I sold enough of one release to fund the next and somehow ended up doing the same thing for the next 15 years with the same intuitive approach.

I soon learned that this enthusiasm was sometimes a barrier to success, particularly of the business kind. Dysfunction and personal enthusiasm were everywhere in equal measure and not just in my own practice. At one band's launch party for a record I'd pressed 1000 copies of, they had a stage fight with blood splattering the walls before storming off, leaving me to lug boxes of records home in a black cab, destined to be forever unsold.

Despite financial hardship, the label has opened up a universe of unique experiences and life-affirming relationships for me and, most importantly, for listeners. The first success for the label was 2013's The Space Lady's Greatest Hits. A street busker who'd created a cosmic persona to play her angelic music on the streets of San Francisco, The Space Lady became an "outsider" icon in the process. I decided to book her first ever US tour with nothing but a couple of email addresses. Despite being detained by a border official, I joined as "tour manager". I couldn't tour manage my way to Tesco, I just wanted to be there.

Aged 67 at her first ever concert, The Space Lady beamed as she heard her music through a loud PA before hiding in the broom cupboard during the support band: a 20-minute cacophony by an eight-piece called 8-Bit Pussy Stranglers or something, with naked musicians writhing around. At another show I fought tears as she sang a song penned by her deceased ex-husband in front of her toddler grandchildren. It was a whirlwind three weeks that cemented my belief that I was doing something worthwhile, important even.

Around the same time, I discovered some hand-made CDs by singer Molly Nilsson and had a eureka moment. We developed a friendship that has taken us to four continents on tour. Molly's underground success grew in tandem with Night School's growing confidence. Together we've seen scarab beetles in jazz clubs in Cairo and been stranded in the scorpion-infested Sonoran Desert. We've screamed futile abuse at billionaire condos in New York after a sold-out show and I've been there as she played to 800 people in Paris, her on stage and me hawking T-shirts. Ethically and spiritually she's a guiding light for Night School and just happens to be, I think, the greatest songwriter of my generation. Zenith (2015) is a landmark release for Night School. Her song 1995 is a masterpiece. When she sent me it I cried my eyes out and I feel proud to be associated with it.

Night School has always skirted the border between something resembling pop and more challenging music that defies categorisation. After being introduced by a mutual friend, I embarked on a reissue campaign with 80s Glaswegian stars Strawberry Switchblade and member Rose McDowall. A cult icon and pioneer, her music also lives in this murky between-world. Within a 12-month period we released a lost Switchblade demo (which unexpectedly became a viral social media song eight years later) and the transcendent music of Cucina Povera. Ten years on, Night School released a Welsh-language goth trio called Tristwch Y Fenywod whose primary instrument is a home-made zither. The success of their album was one catalyst for Night School becoming a full-time job.

Against this backdrop the label somehow crafted a legacy from fragments of joy and chaos. The most important achievement has been that I've seen the love these artists and I have for their music reflected back by audiences. On the last weekend in August we're celebrating at the Fairfield Social Club in Govan, where many of the label's leading lights will be playing.

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Night School Records celebrates its 15th anniversary with Forever Is a Long Time, Fairfield Social Club, Govan, 29 & 30 Aug

Saturday's lineup: Tristwch y Fenywod, The Space Lady, Yu Ching, Cucina Povera, Gichard, Guttersnipe, Lady Neptune, Karl D'Silva
Sunday's lineup: Molly Nilsson, Free Love, Whait, Susannah Stark Band, Amor, Mary Jane Dunphe, Suppression Field

Follow Night School Records on IG @night_school

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