...Anyone who still passes an idle hour thumbing through the racks of record shops will know the delight on espying the logo or name of a beloved label imprint swimming into view from a sea of crud. The legend Rough Trade, Mute, Factory, and more recently, Domino and Bella Union are all stamps of quality almost guaranteed to inspire a purchase.
The acts on those labels are well know and there have been countless books celebrating the artists who appeared on the UK's numerous indie imprints but rarely a book that looked beyond the music and examined the men (and it was nearly always men) who signed those acts and turned them into stars or, quite often, anti-stars.
Richard King's extraordinarily comprehensive How Soon is now: The Madmen and Mavericks Who Made Independent Music 1975 - 2005 does just that and it seems that over its 600 pages the author has interviewed everybody from indie MD to office boy in every imprint ever to have emerged from the UK...
How Soon Is Now - New Book on Indie Music
