Exclusive interview with the man behind the most famous record store in the world
Interview : Ben Hogwood
Black Market Records have been in the game for nearly 30 years. It’s not always been an easy ride for them, but thanks to founder Rene Gelston they have stayed at or near the front of the game the whole way through. Now they’re diversifying, with a new range of headphones that bear the famed Black Market star logo, available in a number of sharp colours. Their website describes the headphones as ‘a quality, affordable alternative in a market place crowded with big brands and megastar endorsements’. That’ll be Dr Dre’s ‘Beats’, then. But as we talk to Gelston it soon becomes clear he’s not anti-superstar headphones, he just wants DJs in particular to have a chance of wearing decent quality cans. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, though, for our chat takes in Black Market’s origins right at the beginning of house music , where they are headed now, and what still keeps him going.
It’s a Thursday when we talk, and Gelston has spent the morning wading through the week’s new releases. “There’s lots of good stuff out there!” he proclaims. “I listen to hundreds of tunes every week. I log in every day, have a quick look and mark anything interesting. Some of it’s an instant reaction, and I wouldn’t say the charts we produce are necessarily everything that we would recommend – it reflects me and what I like. I picked out about 12 tracks today, more bass music and up and coming stuff.”
“I think it still comes from running record stores from Soho to Toronto”, he continues, “and you listen to everything and there’s good and bad that you’ve just got to sift through. There’s probably stuff that I miss because it’s digital. If you’re a dance music store you’ve got to recommend stuff that’s good for your head but you’ve got to be able to dance to it too. In my record collection I’ve got jazz, blues, Joy Division, New Order, Steve Reich – all sorts of music – but being known as a dance music brand I try and keep people on the dancefloor. I look too for records that leap out at you because they’re different. Some of the bass music is like soundtracks, you get classics like that Philpot record coming out of Germany, and there are also new young labels like Hypercolour and Planet Mu, with so much talent”.
One distinction has to be made clear early on, mind. Black Market is not in any way related to the shop in Soho’s D’Arblay Street. It used to be, but not now – and the parting of the ways, amicable at first, has become less so in recent years. “BM Soho is not Black Market”, explains Gelston, “When the license expired from me, and when I sold the store in 1990 to Dave in New York City, he came over to London and I sold him the store with Nicky and I went to work for Universal. It was a great offer, and I couldn’t turn it down. They had the license for ten years, and I didn’t renew it, but they redid the store and called it BM Soho and I was a bit…you’re taking the piss a bit, keeping that name. The website is what we’re doing, with the headphones and the clothing now part of it as well. Whether we reopen a store is another question, but you’ve got to go forward, you can’t stand still. When Phonica opened round the corner from BM, I saw that coming a mile off”.
Gelston feels he has kept ahead of existing trends. “In 2004 I was booking people like Skream before he was known, mixing it up with Steve Bug and people from Ghostly, and a lot of people hadn’t heard of that. I could see BM Soho wasn’t going in the right direction. What they do though reflects on me, and that’s not good. Maybe they’ll have to change their name; I have given them the option”. Having the Black Market website gives him the ultimate flexibility, though. “It does; totally, we can do what the hell we like.”
So what of the headphones? “The ethos behind it was two years ago. We have them made in China, but you’ve got to be careful and go to so many companies. In the stores a lot of headphones were overpriced, and the speakers some other brands are using and selling for £80, so I thought ‘let’s price these at a price that kids can afford, not like Dr Dre, which are £150’. I know they’re not industrially designed but they are specifically done for the price. I think we will do that for the next pair, come up with something that’s between a DJ headset and a design. The Dre headphones are right, they’re well designed, and hit the market, and that’s the market we want to move into, something that looks and sounds good, but not at that price. It’s expanding a bit but not in a corporate way, because we’re a family business.”
The headphones have a good response across a variety of music, giving comfort to the listener while bringing through the stabs of synthesizers in a track like Binary Finary’s ‘1998’, finding the widescreen sounds of Alcatraz’s ‘Giv Me Luv’ or the clarity in the percussion on the new Bonobo album. Acid house from Chicago puts them through their paces but the phones respond well, shutting off but not completely cancelling the noise outside.
What sort of condition does Gelston think house music is in at the moment? “I do think it’s in a good place. House music is changing but it’s found in UK Garage and Dubstep. There are some great tracks out there, it’s coming back again. A few years ago it was minimal techno but now it’s more soulful house coming back, and labels are rehashing the 303s and hand claps. It’s a revival of that sound coming back, with new vocals.”
In other words, using the classic sounds of house music’s beginnings but updating them for today? “That’s exactly what’s happening. The sounds are coming back around but they’re changing too. Records like that Dollskabeat one, ‘Bored of Shit’, is a good example of a totally jacking record where it’s all coming back around.”
What has running Black Market done for Gelston personally? “It has kept me awake at night!” He laughs. “It’s been a labour of love I guess. It made me rich in parts, but that’s the wrong word. It’s fed my soul, something I started in 1984 as a Wag club night, and many got their careers from that night.”
One thing still grates a little. “I don’t think Black Market has had its dues really. I sit back and watch these documentaries and a lot of people miss the point. When Danny Rampling – who’s a mate, by the way! – and Alfredo were playing in Ibiza, we already had a club playing house music in New York. If you remember in 1984 there were a few clubs in the West End, listening to jazz-funk and with Cool Tempo. When we started out as a rare groove night with Barry Sharpe and Lascelles, they were the ones who didn’t get their dues and have been forgotten. Norman Jay was clever and had a good PR agent, and it came out that London was supposedly behind.”
The reality was perhaps rather different. “The Balearic records coming in wouldn’t sell in the shops, apart from the obvious stuff like Sueno Latino. When they went to Ibiza I was sat in the studio with people like David Morales, and that’s why I saw it differently. I remember when we got hold of the X101 track ‘Sonic Destroyer’ – Black Market signed that and licensed it via Mute to Tresor. If you play that record, the backwards B-side you could put alongside a dubstep record and nobody would know the difference. I sent it over to Pete Tong, and I remember him sending it back and saying “I can’t play it…what is it?!”
Time is up – but Gelston is rightly proud of his achievements over the last 30 years. The headphones are a good representation of what Black Market is all about, thinking of the people benefiting from the music, not just seeing the chance to make a good profit. That, of course, could well follow!
Some technical details on the headphones:
Frequency Response: 20 HZ – 20 KHZ I
Impedance: 32 ohms
Sensitivity: 115+ / -3dB / mW at 1 KHZ Drive:
Diameter 40 mm
Cable: 150 cm+ / -3% Plug Type: 3.5 mm stereo
Maximum Power Handling: 1000 mW
Black Market’s new range of headphones is available from their own website (www.blackmarketlondon.com/headphones)
