Temple of Bleh

[Beardo is echo-ey for the first quarter of this episode - calm your tits]
Jim went to Brutal Assault. Beardo went to Beyond the Gates. Neither of them wants to talk about the bands.
Instead: 5G across a fortress for five days, toilets with a traffic-light system, a wristband that means you never queue for a pint, and a round that came to £3.91. Then the harder question — why the UK can't do any of it, and who actually owns that problem.
Also: the £10 band you've never heard of, why every town needs a Big Gary, and a Swedish man with a bag of maggots.
No guest this week. Just a stock-take.

Tony Boden put on death metal shows in Brighton — four mates each risking £500 on a Tuesday to get Nile through the door. Twenty years on he's at Out Of Line in Berlin: booking, promoting, some A&R, some management, and teaching music export at Berklee.
He tells Jim and Beardo how it actually works. What an agent does that a promoter doesn't. Why your dashboard numbers don't predict who turns up. Why Facebook still outsells everything for tickets.
Also: a venue two hundred over capacity, the police at the door, and the time Watain sat down in catering.

Part Two of our Earache Records deep dive — and this one went off-script. We sat down with Al Dawson (Earache US) to fact-check twenty years of label history… and then founder Digby Pearson, who it turns out was one of two people watching the stream, texted his way into the call — bringing an announcement with him: a new signing he describes as "one of the biggest pop producers in the world", making a death metal album for Earache.
Also in this episode:
– The tennis match that put Entombed on MTV
– What Columbia really spent marketing Carcass's Heartwork — and what it sold
– The Bring Me The Horizon Warped Tour merch call: "$50,000… a night"
– The Repugnant demo Tobias Forge sent Earache, and never got a reply to
– Skindred vs Universal: twelve staff against four hundred for a UK number one
– Why Digby passed on Blood Incantation. Twice.
0:00 Preamble & setup
1:20 Part Two begins — picking up Part One's questions
12:54 Entombed, MTV, and a tennis bet
18:42 Why the Columbia deal really ended
54:26 "$60 million to sell out" — the last independents
1:05:47 Digby crashes his own label's interview
1:10:06 The announcement: the secret Swedish signing
1:13:07 The Ghost demo Earache ignored
1:35:27 Blood Incantation: the one that got away
1:38:44 BMTH: $50k a night in merch
2:04:56 Skindred vs Universal: the chart war
2:14:02 "I shunned all the -tions"
Temple of Bleh EP 42 — Earache Records: From Scum to Sofa, Part Two, ft. Al Dawson & Digby Pearson.

Get yer tinfoil hats ready - we're discussing Earache's transition from Grind to Grandad.

@BeardODoom