LUCKYME®

An image on this page shows Ross Birchard’s bedroom circa 2006, in his mums basement-flat in Glasgow. It was around this time that his first demo Hudson’s Heeters was being passed around record labels. We used to grab his decks from this room before loading-in to a small vegan bar called Stereo, for an open mic hip hop night on the last Friday of the month. There was no label then. We were a group of friends at school, making music together and playing shows. Martyn Flyn came up with the name ‘lucky me’. It was his idea to actually release the hybrid music we’d been making on cracked software and throwing on myspace. To this day Martyn Flyn & Dominic Flannigan continue to run the label. At the time we were inspired by Bobbito Garcia’s Fondle Em and the underground hip hop labels who signed 50/50 deals with their artists. In Glasgow our scene coalesced around a record shop and distributor called Rub A Dub who helped us get started. At a certain point the music started to change: and we started club nights where we’d play alongside Rustie and the guys from Numbers. In late 2007 we put out the first Hudson Mohawke record. The record sold out and made us just enough money to keep going.

A previous draft of this article explained in detail how we all met but the stories are simply too long, placing too much importance on where we’re from. Needless to say we’ve been living and breathing this thing since the early 00s so for the sake of being concise, LUCKYME® began with friends playing shows around the Glasgow School of Art. We were influenced both by underground dance music and the super producers dominating radio. We launched our first website on 7.7.7 - an auspicious date in the Chinese year of the golden hog.

We came up in a time when subculture was being squeezed by brands masquerading as patrons and tech turned artists into influencers. The way we navigated it was to create a family: a group of artists who collaborated and added value to each other. We met like-minded scenes in Montreal, Vienna, Amsterdam, LA, London and New York. We became an adhoc network of colleagues who could travel and play each others parties. We noticed people talking about us on messageboards for our genre defying releases and press struggled to categorise what we were doing. Consecutive end-of-year lists would throw genre names at us that we barely managed to dodge. We chose to frame our brand like a museum identity: making our bright records feel reassuringly consistent while the industry shook around us. In 2012 we put out a co-release with Warp which was very successful. In 2015 we made our partnership permanent, gaining worldwide distribution. We haven’t looked back.

Now in our second decade, it’s dawned on us that we succeeded in the goal of making careers for our friends. So we’ve been considering what this label is for those to come: LUCKYME® as an institution. More than the sum of the people involved in it today. We used the term ‘post cool’, because cool is individualistic. Cool is a fad. Cool is micro. Cool is conservatism dressed in black. Cool can be co-opted. And so cool is dead. We need to be bigger than any one sound. To become a place where new, outsider thought can emerge. When a music journalist asked Miles Davis whether ‘jazz’ might die out, he replied immediately “it’s folk music… it’ll never die”.