Wax Enter­tain­ment: How Inva­da Records pio­neered a vinyl sound­track boom

When Dri­ve arrived in UK cin­e­mas in the sum­mer of 2011, few could have antic­i­pat­ed its impact on pop­u­lar cul­ture. Ryan Gosling’s star was well and tru­ly on the rise, satin jack­ets were offi­cial­ly cool again, and tracks from its brood­ing, oth­er-world­ly sound­track would soon find their way onto the playlists of film fans. One of those peo­ple was Redg Weeks.

“I was already a bit of a sound­track head,” he mus­es. ​“I’d come from work­ing with elec­tron­ic music on my old record label and one of my favourite scores was Solaris by Cliff Mar­tinez, so when Dri­ve came out I was blown away by it. I wait­ed for the cred­its at the end and I lit­er­al­ly took notes.”

Dri­ve struck him as the per­fect fit for Inva­da Records, the Bris­tol-based record label he’d been man­ag­ing since 2008, which was at that point known for its eclec­tic, exper­i­men­tal out­put. Inspired by what he’d heard, he imme­di­ate­ly got on the phone.

“I noticed that Lakeshore Records had been involved with the sound­track, so I con­tact­ed them and got through to Bri­an McNelis straight­away. It turns out he was the music super­vi­sor for Dri­ve. I told him who I was and he was like, ​‘We don’t real­ly want to do vinyl. Do you want to do vinyl?’ I was like, ​‘I’d love to do vinyl, please.’”

Inva­da had nev­er released a film score before and Weeks was mind­ful that he hadn’t con­sult­ed the label’s co-founder Geoff Bar­row, known for his work with Por­tishead and Invada’s own BEAK. As it turned out, Bar­row had recent­ly watched Dri­ve on a plane and was thrilled with the signing.

“I think he was in Aus­tralia at the time,” Weeks recalls. ​“He rang me and I explained ​‘There’s this film called Dri­ve. You should try and see it. I hope I haven’t sort of over­stepped my posi­tion here, but I’ve signed the sound­track, so that was a mas­sive thing.”

Dri­ve was some­thing of a coup for Inva­da, though hard­ly off-brand. Co-found­ed in Aus­tralia at the turn of the mil­len­ni­um by Bar­row and fel­low musi­cian Ash­ley Ander­son, the label had always been buoyed by a can-do, benev­o­lent spir­it. If the duo liked an artist and could help plat­form them, they would, which led to an ear­ly focus on hip-hop and beat-dri­ven releas­es, includ­ing those of Anderson’s own Kat­a­lyst project. When Bar­row returned to Bris­tol in the ear­ly 2000s, he teamed up with entre­pre­neur and pro­mot­er Paul Hor­lick, aka Fat Paul, to estab­lish its UK arm.

“Geoff and Paul had this vision of putting out music that they would come across,” Weeks explains. ​“Bands like Gonga, The Heads, and a lot of Bris­tol-based, avant-garde exper­i­men­tal bands.”

When Weeks was invit­ed aboard, the label had already estab­lished a dis­tinct iden­ti­ty of its own. Hav­ing worked at NRK, an elec­tron­ic label born in the ear­ly 1990s, Weeks was aware of Invada’s rep­u­ta­tion and saw poten­tial in its unique direc­tion. ​“My first job was to eval­u­ate where the label was and to make some kind of busi­ness sense of it. It had plod­ded on and I think it was haem­or­rhag­ing quite a bit of cash and it was pret­ty unsus­tain­able. There was a big scene change at the time. Inde­pen­dent music had kind of surged for­ward again and I think there was a healthy appetite for what we were doing.”

Fol­low­ing the release of BEAK’s debut record in 2009, Inva­da began to expand its reach inter­na­tion­al­ly, licens­ing the album to Amer­i­can label Ipecac, which helped solid­i­fy its rep­u­ta­tion on the glob­al stage. But while Dri­ve was Invada’s first major sound­track sign­ing, there was anoth­er score clos­er to home that would play its part in estab­lish­ing Invada’s film cre­den­tials – DROKK, the project Bar­row orig­i­nal­ly com­posed along­side Ben Sal­is­bury for 2012’s Dredd, based on the graph­ic nov­els pub­lished by 2000 AD.

“Their score ulti­mate­ly didn’t get used, but for Geoff, 2000 AD is a mas­sive part of his life. We made a pil­grim­age to Oxford, met them and explained that we had this unused score, named after a swear word in the Dredd uni­verse. They were real­ly gra­cious and said, ​‘If you want to release it, you’ve got our bless­ing.’ So we did. And it blew up. 2000 AD let us put their logo on the back of the record, so it was almost like an endorsement.”

DROKK’s sur­prise suc­cess and the enthu­si­as­tic recep­tion of Drive’s first press­ing on wax came at a time when the vinyl revival was enter­ing full swing, with sound­tracks play­ing an inte­gral role in the scene.

“As a label, we were very much aware that we didn’t want to kind of tie our flag to the mast­head as an out-and-out sound­track label, because we weren’t that. We had a vest­ed inter­est in sound­tracks, but we didn’t just want to ring up any record com­pa­ny and go, ​‘Yeah, we’ll release this because it’s a sound­track.’ We want­ed to curate and we want­ed to be dis­cern­ing, we didn’t want it to be like, ​‘Oh, we’re going to be a sound­track label.’”

Along­side the work of fel­low UK-based sound­track label Death Waltz Records, the ear­ly 2010s would see Inva­da ush­er­ing in a shift in the UK inde­pen­dent music scene: there was suc­cess to be found in releas­ing film scores on vinyl, as well as con­ven­tion­al artist records, although there was much to be learned from the latter.

“We want­ed to treat the sound­track like an artist’s record,” Weeks explains. ​“We know it’s not that, but we want to put the same effort we would put into an artist’s album into a score, whether that’s a film, TV, or video game score. We didn’t want to just be a face­less label that does licences.”

It’s in that spir­it that Inva­da sought to build rela­tion­ships not just with inter­na­tion­al labels, but artists them­selves. Ear­ly releas­es from com­pos­er Bri­an Reitzell, whose Han­ni­bal sound­tracks were released on the label between 2014 and 2016, laid the foun­da­tion for the way the label would look to work with com­posers mov­ing forward.

“When we were doing Han­ni­bal, Bri­an came over to Lon­don,” Weeks recalls. ​“We met up and spent a cou­ple of days togeth­er. Bri­an curat­ed all of the Han­ni­bal stuff on his own and spent hours and hours on it.”

Anoth­er musi­cian whose endur­ing rela­tion­ship with Inva­da would prove invalu­able was Clint Mansell, who helped Weeks secure the rights to one of their most cov­et­ed releas­es: Cliff Martinez’s Solaris score.

“I chased that record,” Weeks recalls. ​“But I was talk­ing to Clint Mansell one night and he said to me, ​‘Do you want me to write a let­ter to 20^th Cen­tu­ry Fox?’ He’d done work for them on oth­er things and he wrote a let­ter say­ing, ​‘To whomev­er this may con­cern, these are my friends…’ And it mas­sive­ly helped. I got an email back and that deal was in the bag. And that’s been one of our biggest score releas­es in the last 14 – 15 years.”

Hav­ing already cul­ti­vat­ed an impres­sive cat­a­logue by the mid-2010s, Inva­da was find­ing itself becom­ing some­thing of a tastemak­er. Offers emerged to release a wider range of titles, yet Weeks and the team remained mind­ful of their roots. They couldn’t release every­thing, but they remained eager to advo­cate for releas­es on oth­er labels that felt like a good fit for their estab­lished audience.

“There were cer­tain things you’d get offered and things we missed out on that we wished we’d had, but we brought in a few scores that were noth­ing to do with Inva­da. I nev­er went after Mica Levi’s Under the Skin, or Clint Mansell’s Stok­er, for exam­ple, but I’d seen both in the cin­e­ma and loved them. I con­tact­ed Milan Records and said, ​‘I know it’s your prop­er­ty and I know you’ve planned a record, but can we buy some for our web­shop?’ It’s not because we want­ed to pre­tend that it’s our release, but we had a ready-made audi­ence in the UK and we must have bought 500 units. We were hap­py to do that.”

Fol­low­ing DROKK, Bar­row and Sal­is­bury were com­mis­sioned to cre­ate the score for Alex Garland’s Ex Machi­na in 2015, which would help fos­ter a rela­tion­ship with A24, which con­tin­ues to this day. Along­side sim­i­lar part­ner­ships with the likes of Net­flix and major US record labels, this has bol­stered Invada’s out­put significantly.

“That was ginor­mous for us,” Weeks states. ​“Ex Machi­na real­ly cement­ed us as a label that was putting out a lot of real­ly great sound­tracks, but it also hap­pened to be Geoff’s label. Peo­ple real­ly start­ed to under­stand that we were curat­ing what we want­ed around that time.”

While Barrow’s name had helped build Invada’s pro­file in its ear­ly days, he and Weeks were keen to ensure that, despite famil­iar names and high-pro­file intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ties, the music always came first. ​“I guess it’s a bit like Jack White,” Weeks mus­es. ​“He’s got his press­ing plant in Detroit, but at the end of the day, you want things to run on their own mer­it. I think we’ve done enough to kind of earn our sta­tus. We don’t have to lean on that and it’s great. Ulti­mate­ly it’s become its own enti­ty and that was always what we want­ed – to keep our under­ground integri­ty where all of a sud­den we’re work­ing with major Hol­ly­wood film com­pa­nies. That was the beau­ty of the label.”

Weeks’ approach to releas­es still holds true to the ethos upon which Bar­row and Ander­son estab­lished Inva­da, be it a Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­tion or a project clos­er to home. In par­tic­u­lar, one release holds a spe­cial place for Weeks – the sound­track to Mark Jenkin’s Bait.

“That’s one of my proud­est moments,” Weeks enthus­es. ​“I was in Wade­bridge in Corn­wall and there’s this cin­e­ma called the Regal. It was the sum­mer of 2019 and I remem­ber see­ing the Bait poster with Ed Rowe on it… I came back to Bris­tol, saw posters for it and went to see it. When the cred­its came up at the end, you could have heard a pin drop. Every­one was trans­fixed by it.”

Weeks prompt­ly texted Bar­row to explain what he’d seen, eager to find out more about the score.

“I said, ​‘I know this sounds weird, but it’s a thriller meets a sort of art film based in a Cor­nish fish­ing vil­lage and the score is like Aphex Twin.’ It was a hard one to explain, but there were no cred­its for the score, so I found Mark on Insta­gram and mes­saged him.”

For two days, Weeks wait­ed for a response. Jenkin lat­er replied, sur­prised by Weeks’ enthu­si­asm for a sound­scape that he didn’t even con­sid­er to be a score.

“I asked him who did it and he explained that there wasn’t real­ly a score and that it was just him on his key­board. I said that it was bril­liant and asked him if we could release it, but he didn’t real­ly know what to say. Even­tu­al­ly, we met up when he came to Bris­tol for a short film fes­ti­val and we end­ed up putting out Bait. And I love that score. I didn’t care how many units it sold, because the peo­ple who love it tru­ly love it.”

Invada’s abil­i­ty to release a major score, such as Dri­ve or the Stranger Things sound­tracks, doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly facil­i­tate a small­er pas­sion project like Bait. For Weeks, the approach to each project has always been the same.

“I don’t see the dif­fer­ence,” he states. ​“Of course, I under­stand the sales are big­ger, but I’m proud of both of them. That’s what I think the true spir­it of Inva­da is: we’re not just chas­ing mon­ey here. We have to have records that sell and we have to have cer­tain things we know we can do, but I see no dif­fer­ence between the score for a Net­flix show with a bil­lion streams and an eerie fish­ing dra­ma set in South Corn­wall. I’m not try­ing to make out that we’re any­thing oth­er than what we are.”