Mighty Force Records

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (March 2007)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

This article or section resembles a fan site.
Please help improve this article by removing excessive trivia and irrelevant praise, criticism, lists and collections of links.(December 2007)

Mighty Force Records was a record shop and influential early techno label based in Exeter, Devon, South West England between 1990-1995. It was founded by ex-punk, ex-free festival activist (having briefly worked with the Stonehenge Free Festival Campaign in 1983) and ex-warehouse party organiser Mark Darby and his partner, journalist Jess Shortis after they had visited various club-based events in Plymouth and realised there was no focal point for the burgeoning rave scene in Somerset, Devon and Cornwall.

The store soon became a regular stop-off point for many internationally known DJs including, Sasha, Andrew Weatherall, Lee Burridge, Jon DaSilva and Felix Buxton later of Basement Jaxx and was the catalyst for the fledgling West Country techno movement.^{[citation needed]}

The record label is best known for releasing Analogue Bubblebath and other works by the Aphex Twin, and works of Tom Middleton later of Global Communication, Jedi Knights, Cosmos and AMBA. Later releases included Middleton's own "My Splendid Idea" and the hard to find Fog City EP by Darby and Matthew Herbert.

Middleton, his Global Communication and Jedi Knights partner Mark Pritchard and Herbert met through the patronage of the Mighty Force store. All three also DJ'ed regularly at the weekly promotional club night run by the label along with the likes of Weatherall, Judge Jules and ex-Hacienda resident Graeme Park. Another regular DJ at these events was Dominic Jacobson then studying at Exeter University, later a member of Phil Asher's Restless Soul Productions crew and who now produces deep jazz inflected house under the name Modaji and Harvey Lindo. Middleton and Jacobson were often to be seen working behind the shop counter.

Although the store ceased to trade in 1995, the label relocated to London and continued to release music by deep house artists such as Peach Palf and the Classic / Music For Freaks recording artists, Luke Solomon and Justin Harris under the alias Robotic Movement until 1998. Label design was by Ben Drury, known for his innovative work with James Lavelle's Mo' Wax label and collaborations with former graffiti artist and The Clash's sometime sleeve designer, Futura 2000.

Other releases included a series of white label breakbeat EPs under the name of Old Skool Flava, nominally produced by Darby and "H" Warren, label manager of Global Communication's now defunct Universal Language Productions imprint.

Darby's connections with the early Eighties festival scene and involvement in organising free acid house parties centered around Pepper Box Hill near Salisbury in Wiltshire in the latter part of that decade - especially a joint event at that location in August of 1989 - led to an informal partnership between a DJ and sound system collective based around the shop and Nottingham's DiY Sound System, with whom they collaborated to stage many free parties throughout the South West during the early to mid 1990s.

Mark Darby writes: "I was involved with music on and off for 20 years, starting off playing bass in punk bands in 1978, through the free festival scene of the early Eighties and by chance ending up in Ibiza in 1988 with my girlfriend and future Mighty Force partner Jess (now my wife). When we got back from Ibiza, I started going to the big M25 acid house parties and helped set up and was buyer for Orbital Records (inspired name eh?) in my home town of Bournemouth, the first dance music store in the area dealing in US imports. We were bringing in Transmat, KMS and Trax releases when most people still didn't know what they were. In '89 I also started to promote club nights with a DJ duo called North & South (North was Nigel Casey, more recently of House Of 909 and South was Justin Harris who now records and DJs under his own name and as Freaks with Luke Solomon) and we started doing not entirely legal after-club warehouse parties around the Hampshire and Dorset area. These got to be much larger than we expected with convoys of literally hundreds of cars rolling out of town on Saturday night. We carried on until a lot of us were arrested, the sound system was impounded and Justin & Nige had their records confiscated by the police. By this time (late 1990) Jess and I had also been hanging out at a club called Wasp Factory in Plymouth a fair bit and decided a move to Devon would be a little more relaxing. But Plymouth was a bit big and far away, whereas Exeter was smaller and connected to the rest of the country by a motorway.

"So Mighty Force was born. That bit of the story you know, of course.

"We sold the shop in 1995 to move back to London (we'd lived there in the mid 80s) and Tom came with us. The new owners of the shop changed it's name and style and then moved location, so it's basically a completely different entity now.

"I went to work for the marketing and distribution arm of Rough Trade (RTM) based in Camden. There I was Label Manager overseeing production, marketing and distribution for Universal Language, Rephlex, Irdial, Clear and - deep breath - Harthouse, amongst others. The Mighty Force label continued with occasional releases up until about 1998, some of which were by my old mate Justin and Luke. At the same time I made some promo only white label electro/breaks EPs with "H" who ran the Universal Language Productions office and label. They were basically beefed up re-edits of some of my favourite old Electro, Miami Bass and Freestyle tunes from the late 80s so could never be officially released, we just made them for ourselves and other DJs to play out but they gained quite a following with Norman Cook and Weatherall being particularly enthusiastic about them.

"At the end of '98, RTM had gone under and what remained merged with Vital who decided to cut down on the more leftfield things I was dealing with. By this time I had two kids, soon to be three, to support and it was obvious that independent electronic music was going to have a few bad years so I left the industry and got a "real job" and faded into self imposed obscurity. I stayed in touch with Tom and Mark for a while but these days I gather Tom is spending much of his time in Italy and Mark's in Australia so I hear from them infrequently." Mark Darby then writes that he heard from Mark Pritchard recently. (Q.v., reloadonline.com, s.v. "Schizophrenia @ Analogue Bubblebath")