The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Eight million records. That is the figure Digby Pearson gave for his label's total sales in an interview published in December 2005, seventeen years after his third catalogue number had been a Birmingham band's twenty eight track debut and roughly nineteen years after he had dropped out of Nottingham University at the end of his first semester. Earache Records was not a label with a business plan. It was a roadie and gig promoter with a bedroom in Hyson Green, a network of correspondents and a very clear view of which unfashionable scene was about to stop being unfashionable.
The rest of the country's extreme metal history assumes this label the way a road assumes tarmac, which is why it is worth looking at as a business rather than as a taste. Where the money came from, what it bought, who was paid and who was not: that is the actual history. The music it carried has been dealt with elsewhere, in the story so far.
Flexi discs, sold record collections and the Cartel
The first Earache products were flexi discs, chosen for the least romantic reason available, which is that a flexi cost a fraction of what a pressed record cost. Pearson and Kalv Piper of the Nottingham band Heresy pooled what money they had and sold their own record collections to pay for them, putting out compilations that carried The Stupids and Septic Death alongside a Heresy release. The catalogue proper opened in 1987 with MOSH 1, the American band The Accused and The Return of Martha Splatterhead. MOSH 3 was Scum.
None of that would have reached a shop without the piece of infrastructure nobody writes about. Tim Bennett arranged distribution through Revolver, one of the companies inside the Cartel, the network that moved independent records around Britain in the 1980s and gave labels of this size an actual shelf in an actual shop. A bedroom label with a Cartel distributor is a business. A bedroom label without one is a mail order list with ambitions. Everything Earache did between 1987 and 1991 rests on that arrangement, and the bands who benefited from it are set out in the survey of english Death Metal Bands.
The pivot that paid for everything
Grindcore made the label's name and could not have kept it alive. A grind record is twenty minutes long, sells to a few thousand people who already own the previous one, and cannot support a European tour. Death metal was longer, better suited to a full price album, and had an audience that was still growing in three continents at once. So from 1989 Pearson simply bought the better market: Morbid Angel and Altars of Madness in 1989, Terrorizer and World Downfall in the same year, Entombed and Left Hand Path in 1990. An English label was releasing the defining American and Swedish records of the genre before either country had a label capable of doing it.
The buying continued eastward. Earache took Vader out of northern Poland and released The Ultimate Incantation on 16 November 1992, which for a band from a country with no convertible currency and no record industry was the difference between a career and a rumour, and the wider account of the polish death metal bands turns on that kind of intervention. By 1993 the roster read as a map of the genre rather than as a scene report, and Pearson's stated principle held: take the unfashionable thing, ignore the prevailing trend, wait.
An English label was releasing the defining American and Swedish records of the genre before either country had a label capable of doing it.
Eighteen months inside a major
In the early nineties Columbia Records took the obvious next step and licensed the catalogue for the Americas. By Pearson's own account it was seven albums for eighteen months, with the rights reverting to Earache when the term ran out, and records by Godflesh, Carcass, Napalm Death and Cathedral duly went out with a major's logo on the back. It is widely accepted that Columbia failed to reach the sales it had projected for itself and moved to end the arrangement early. Mark Greenway of Napalm Death had objected to the deal on principle when it was signed.
Look at what each party walked away with. Columbia spent major label money promoting extreme metal into a market that did not want it in those quantities, then handed the recordings back. Earache received a catalogue that had been marketed at somebody else's expense and was free to sell it again. Carcass, whose Heartwork was the record the deal was built around, ended the process without a contract on either side of the Atlantic. That is the whole economics of a licensing deal in three sentences, and it explains why labels of this size chase them.
When the bands stopped being the point
The relationships did not age well, and the pattern is consistent enough to be worth naming. Napalm Death left after Words from the Exit Wound in 1998. Greenway told Blabbermouth in October 2012 that he had refused to appear at the label's twenty fifth anniversary event because of how other bands had been treated, that he had taken his union to the label's door when obligations were not being met, and that Pearson "doesn't like people to stand up to him". Pearson's position throughout has been that he invested in bands nobody else would touch, which is also true, and the two accounts have never been reconciled.
Meanwhile the label changed shape entirely. Rival Sons signed in 2010, The Temperance Movement in 2013, Blackberry Smoke in 2014, and Earache started charting in the British top forty with straight rock records made by musicians who had never heard a blast beat. The extreme catalogue became an asset to be reissued rather than a scene to be fed, which is a reasonable commercial decision and also the end of something.
The argument over the paintings
The clearest picture of how the label treats what it owns came in October 2020, when Decibel published Dan Seagrave's account of a dispute over merchandise. Seagrave painted Altars of Madness, Left Hand Path, Clandestine and a great deal else, and says his agreements covered album covers only. For Clandestine he produced a 1991 invoice carrying Pearson's signature that permits sleeve use and nothing further. Earache's Al Dawson stated that since 1990 the rule had been that anyone commissioned to make artwork signs the copyright over. Seagrave also pointed to United States copyright registrations that Earache filed between late 2016 and 2018 claiming work for hire, with creation dates that fall before he was first contacted. No resolution was reported.
What Earache was, then, is not a patron and not a villain but a functioning independent record company that behaved like one, in a genre whose participants had assumed the ordinary rules would not apply to them. It found Tampa before America did, Stockholm before Sweden did and Olsztyn before anyone at all did, and it has kept the recordings. The next country on the list had a label of its own and a very different problem, which is dutch Death Metal.
