Goo Records is the brainchild of two music-mad mates who have managed to turn a “stupid idea” into a cult label with a big heart.

Founded in 2022 by Dorian Rogers and Tony Bartholomew after first signing sarcastic synth-pop success Welly, Goo has quickly become a fixture of Brighton’s grassroots music infrastructure. Their past and present roster is distinctive in its indistinctiveness, a unique blend of punk, glam, pop, country and surf rock from the likes of Canned Pineapple, Jopy, Owners Club, The Stanford Family Band and The Roebucks. What ties these bands together has little to do with their sound and much more to do with their strong identities, original style and capacity to have fun with their art, something Tony and Dorian clearly have an eye and an ear for. 

Photographer Alex Thomas met Tony and Dorian upstairs at The Actors, home to Brighton’s Slack City Radio, and instantly recognised a story worth documenting. “In my world, as a photographer, I typically only have the opportunity to meet people briefly. It's in these briefest fleeting moments that impressions stick.” 

Intrigued and inspired by the label owners’ openness, Alex began a year-long photo study, following Goo around to capture what a Brighton label looks like behind the scenes. Influenced by the early Rolling Stone work of Jim Marshall, his photographs taken 2023-24 materialise small, human moments from the point of view of the artists themselves. “Bands are tricky to pin down, they're full of 20 somethings, busy surviving, jobs by day and band life by night.” Shadowing meetings, music video shoots, local showcases, London gigs and live radio interviews and sessions, his work provides a lovely, candid insight into the goings-on of this indie outfit.

Alex shot the series as an outsider looking in on label life and wonderfully captured how the owners celebrated and lifted the bands on their roster, in both photos and his own words:

When we caught up with Goo, Tony was slightly worse for wear after a night out at The Roebucks’ headline show at Green Door, excusing that the band often lead him astray - as they did in Rotterdam the previous weekend at Left of the Dial, whilst Dorian held things down at the LollapaGOOza all-dayer at the Hope & Ruin. Far from “some faceless blokes running a label somewhere”, this is an indie label well and truly living it with their artists. From rainy-day admin to booking tours and releasing 7” singles, Goo are label-come-agent-come-management doing everything in their power to support their artists.

Physical and live output is what keeps Goo ticking. Taking cues from label legends Sub Pop and 4AD, the pair aspire to become a trusted mark of quality by supporting bands to release standout singles and play in front of as many audiences as possible. In both fear and awe of algorithms, they keep things honest and simple for longevity. There’s a wicked irony in that, as Tony reflects that Pavement’s B-side ‘Harness Your Hopes’ is now their most popular song thanks to the witchcraft of playlists and TikTok. The point, perhaps, is that no one can predict a hit. So we keep investing and platforming - who knows when that Goo B-side will enter the consciousness of the next generation and hit 230 million streams. 

In all seriousness, there’s real hope for artists working with Goo Records: a label that gently nurtures and believes wholeheartedly in the brilliance of the young people they work with.

Goo launched in 2022 and quickly became a cult name in Brighton. What sparked the idea and how did it all come together?

Dorian: Me and Tony have worked together for quite a long time in our day jobs. We've both done music related things in the past: Tony used to do some music journalism, I ran a music blog and we were DJing together a bit. It was just something we’d chatted about and these things always start off as a stupid idea before you decide to take it seriously. My wife actually gave us a bit of encouragement to just get off the fence and do something. It was just a matter of come up with a name, register a domain and find a band.

Tony: Six months before I'd come across Welly at the Hope & Ruin supporting someone else. I knew nothing about them and just thought they were incredible. Me and Dorian started going to see them and watching them and getting to know them. It was sort of like, “well, if we're going to start a label, that would be the sort of band we’d like to start off releasing with.” We talked to them about it and they were up for doing a 7” with us. That gave us extra impetus because you have a funny thing with a label, where you start a label but you have no output, so you just exist as an abstract concept. Once we had Welly on board, that’s what got us going.

It’s cool to hear it happened so organically.

Tony: I think it was mutually beneficial for us and Welly. I think it gave Welly a bit of extra legitimacy before they got picked up on because they had a record and a label behind them. And for us, we were immediately associated with one of the real buzz bands in the country. It gave us visibility and I think it made other bands around town think “oh that might be nice” and hopefully gave the impression that we were nice people - that it was really important to us to be visible and accessible and friendly, not some faceless blokes running a label somewhere, that we're actually out and about.

Dorian: Whether this is foolish or not, all of our arrangements with bands are very much: we'll do a release with you, or a couple of releases, and then you can do more with us if you want, or you can move on if you want and we'll split any profits we make with you. We didn't want a situation where you're tying people into arrangements they're not comfortable with. We try to make it something that’s good for them, as well as us.

That’s a great ethos and way to run a label. What did you feel was missing from the local or wider industry that Goo set out to fill?

Dorian: We're swimming against the tide a little bit. The way a lot of people are releasing music is very much about digital drops. We were really keen on giving people the opportunity to get a record out. That's quite a difficult thing to do because most young bands don't have the money to do it. So, we could support that and actually create something, have a single that was a really good song that you could put on your record player rather than it just being something that's dripping into playlists.

Tony: There are Brighton labels like Jazz Life and FatCat but they’re onto bigger things and harder to reach. Apart from Crafting Room and Archie Sagers who’s doing a similar thing, we felt like we were filling a gap with a more small, DIY, cult label feel. Although we didn’t necessarily think that we’d be releasing majority Brighton bands. It’s just really fortuitous that there’s such a glut of brilliant talent in the city. 

What’s the best part about running an independent label? And what’s the toughest?

Dorian: Great question. The really nice bit is when you’ve been working with someone, they’ve done recording and it gets released out there. Not everything we release has a vinyl release but it is particularly nice when you get that delivery and you open the box and there's a new thing that you can play. The opposite side of it is that it's financially really tough. A lot of what you do isn't going to make money so you're always slightly limp. You want to do more but you have to limit yourself.

Tony: Our lives have changed completely. We know so many people now in Brighton and a lot of them are young people. We’re in our 50s but we know all these really bright, young, talented things. When you work with them and you see what a lift you give them by working with them, it’s priceless. It's just that human thing. I’m a parent so I can’t help being a bit paternal with it. 

The toughest thing, like Dorian said, is finances. You’re not just paying for records, you need to think about PR, press, radio, mastering, and the costs rack up. The admin can also be a bit boring on a rainy Tuesday night. But, you know, we put it on ourselves because at this level, you end up being a manager and a booking agent and everything. The Roebucks, for example, they’ve done two little tours and we booked them, reaching out to promoters around the country, trying to get them in front of people. They’ve just recorded with a guy called Ben Hillier who produced Blur, Depeche Mode, Doves and Elbow, and we instigated that to get them together. There's a lot of work behind the scenes that isn’t a downside, it's just tiring and time consuming when you both have day jobs.

All the expensive and tedious stuff that you do is so the bands can fly - so good on you. What is it that keeps you wanting to support physical releases?

Dorian: I don't want to sound like an old man shouting at changing technology but because we're very old, we come from a time where people would release a single and everyone would listen to that single, and it had to be a banger. I think that's fundamentally changed when you look at how a lot of big labels operate now. It's all about what they can get on TikTok and how they can be constantly releasing content. It’s not what I want. I really like the idea of someone writing and recording their best song, and people listening to it. It’s about the recognition of that and just taking it out of the wealth of music that’s out there. It’s democratic that anyone can release music, but it’s very easy for stuff to get lost.

Tony: I feel a bit mystified by the witchcraft of algorithms to the point where I'm going to try not to worry about it. Now, the most well known Pavement song, ‘Harness Your Hopes’, was a B-side that I barely remember and I’m a massive Pavement fan. It blew up because it got added to a playlist and used in TikTok videos! People say there’s a tipping point with the algorithm - you do this and you do that - but we can’t control that. 

Dorian: It’s hard and I think it’s going to change even more. There’s all this work that’s being done by Sam Altman and OpenAI working with Spotify. You can just imagine how much the market is going to get flooded by just stuff, and I think that’s a real shame because it makes it that much more difficult for the good stuff to shine. But you can’t synthesise a band in a venue, right?

Tony: You have to just go back to the tried and trusted ways. Which is, you work with a band, you tour them, you build up your fan base around the country or in Europe, and you get a good newsletter and you just build it the old fashioned way.

There’s a lot of doom around algorithms and being online but there’s a huge pushback as well, and that often prevails in the right spaces. 

Tony: Live music has never been more vibrant. I know we've got the whole debate going on about ticket prices and Live Nation dominating everything but on our grassroots level, you can see a great band every night in Brighton. Live is still where it's at. People still like being together in a room. 

On that note, you recently had your LollapaGOOza all-dayer at Hope & Ruin. How did the third iteration go? What drives you to put on these kinds of shows?

Tony: I was in Rotterdam at Left of the Dial with The Roebucks, over to Dorian.

Dorian: It was the first event we've done where we didn't have any bands that we're actively working with playing. We wanted this one to be a bit different and more international, but it turned out a bit more international than we first planned. We had a band called Wavepool from France, Mye_Taai from The Netherlands, Homework from Glasgow and Mary Shelley from New York. We only had one Worthing band and one Brighton band, so it was all from all over the place. Everyone I talked to had a different favourite band, and that's a real mark of success for me. I don't want it to just be 12 bands that all sound a bit like each other, you want people to hook with something that they really like. The feedback was good and the bands were super happy so it went down really well.

Tony: The reason for it was to show we’re not just about the bands that we work with. We think we've got pretty good ears and like to curate things when we can. People say things like, “I always find a new, excellent discovery at a Goo night”, so that's important for us. I think part of the label thing for us is to be a mark of quality. I hope that doesn't sound pretentious, but when me and Dorian were growing up we loved labels like Sub Pop and 4AD, and we'd probably buy something from those labels, even if we hadn't heard it, because we trusted them. That's what we've always wanted to be with the label. Everything we do, whether we put a band on or sign a band up, is because we both 100% absolutely love it. 

You have a really great and varied roster but as you mentioned earlier, Welly have particularly been a breakout band. What’s it been like watching their journey unfold?

Tony: I went to the show they played at Chalk the other day as part of their big tour. It was a little emotional because they're up there headlining Chalk, people going nuts and, we know them all very well, we know their mums and dads, you know, it's like seeing your kids grow up kind of thing. Then chatting to Elliot afterwards and he still says things like: “we couldn’t have done it without you at the start.” It’s amazing. Welly are so good, it was always going to happen and they were always going to get big management and a big booking agent. But it’s a lovely feeling because that’s what we always hoped the label would do: be a nice, warm, safe place to start doing professional stuff. Seeing them go onto big things is lovely. I mean, they drove us mad at times, but it’s really nice.

 Keep up to speed with Dorian, Tony and the Goo Records roster.