DIY Record Label

What do you do when your record shop goes bust?
Well, you buy the lease, obviously!

That's the kind of business acumen which led Kenny Anderson, better known to his fans as King Creosote, to realise that maybe running a record store wasn't for him. It was during this wayward venture that he discovered a lot of frustrated musicians within an ass' roar of each other.

So it was that Fence Records was born.

Based in the fishing village of Anstruther in Fife, Fence Records, or the Fence Collective, refers to itself as 'a micro-indie record label' but in reality, it's a family of great musicians recording, producing and distributing their own work, mainly from the back room of the local pub, the Ship Tavern.

Kenny's brother, Gordon, learned the hardships of the recording industry in his previous life as founder-member of folktronica sensation, The Beta Band, which dissolved in 2004 under a debt of £1m to EMI.

There had to be another way to make music.

Fence's DIY approach has found a modest kind of success. This isn't a multi-million pound enterprise, rather a group of people who love to make music without ego and share an audience-first philosophy.

But is this music any good?

With acts such as James Yorkston, The Pictish Trail, Rozi Plain and Withered Hand, not to mention King Creosote himself, the list is solid gold. The pervading theme is 'folk' but you can expect a healthy peppering of electronica and a few more rocky numbers. In short, Fence have a little something for everyone.

This is probably the closest you can get to what is often called the 'folk revival' - assuming, of course, you believe folk went anywhere in the first place.

The very first Away Game, on the island of Eigg in the Inner Hebrides, is scheduled for the weekend of the 24th of September. There are only 150 camping tickets available and they go on sale on the 24th of May on fencerecords.com. It's only 90 quid a ticket and if it's anything like the seventh annual Home Game, back in March, it's sure to be an intimate little festival like nothing you've ever seen before.