Record label boss is helping musicians reach an audience
Record label boss Sean Hocking is giving musicians from around the world a platform, writes Mathew Scott
He might be seated at the back of a bakery café in Sheung Wan today, but Sean Hocking is hoping the noise he helps generate from here will sound out across the globe.
"It's all about getting the music out," he explains. "What I'm trying to do really is install a little of a DIY ethic in music regionally and string a lot of people together. It's about letting musicians who aren't part of any 'scenes' feel confident enough to get their music out there."
The 50-year-old Briton is the founder of Metal Postcard Records which originated in Sydney in 2001, but for the past eight years has called Hong Kong its home. Specifically it works out of a small space at the back of the Saffron Bakery Café in Sheung Wan, one of four outlets the chain now operates since being founded by Sally Krantz 15 years ago.
Sometimes the only way a band can become successful at home is if they are successful overseas
Krantz and Hocking are partners in the café business and in life, and the space that makes up the Metal Postcard Records outlet fits the Saffron feel, a gathering place for the local community and visitors. Today there are a few kids testing their skills against a Pac-Man machine while their mother takes a breather. The surrounding walls feature posters of the musicians who helped inspire Hocking's own journey over the past few decades which has taken him from Britain, to Australia, to the US and to Hong Kong.
The room takes its lead from Rough Trade in Ladbroke Grove, London - "I first went there when I was 13, so this is a little homage to them," says Hocking - and its mixture of CDs, vinyl and assorted music-linked paraphernalia seems to be the way such establishments are headed these days.
Music, of course, has moved with and even sometimes ahead of the times, and that's part of the magic Hocking searches for when it comes to artists he works with. "It's not world music, it's music from around the world," he says. "Somebody with a laptop in some godforsaken part of the world is going to change music. The technology is at people's fingertips now."
Counted among the recent successes Metal Postcard has helped along their way are the Cambodian Space Project, whose recent release Whiskey Cambodia, the band's third, was recorded at the famed Motown studios with producer Dennis Coffey at the helm.