John Earls
There’s a long-standing debate as to whether The Charlatans qualify as a Manchester band – half of them are from the West Midlands – but it’s no surprise the city’s Factory Records was a key influence on Tim Burgess when he started his own record label, O Genesis, in 2011. Not only did Burgess hire New Order sleeve overlord Peter Saville to design O Genesis’ logo, the singer also copied Factory head Tony Wilson’s vision that every O Genesis catalogue number was important – even if it wasn’t anything to do with the music. In the same way FAC51 was the Haçienda club and FAC81 was a Factory board meeting, so too OGen11 is a badge of Saville’s logo, while OGen34 is a letter from
The KLF’s Bill Drummond politely declining an invite to record anything for Burgess. “I knew it was unlikely Bill Drummond would say yes,” admits Burgess, who has also given OGen catalogue numbers to the label’s poster and standard record contract. “So long as we got a response from Bill, we could give him a catalogue number.” As well as Factory, Burgess admired Postcard, Crass, Alternative Tentacles and Creation when he was growing up in Cheshire. “Catalogue numbers, like Factory and Crass had, was the first thing I thought of when people mentioned record labels to me,” he explains. “Then it was the artwork, and then it’d be a few of the records. I wanted something similar when I started O Genesis: good cataloguing, nice artwork. And I could help with producing the records. I wanted to sign nice people and to like what they were about as an artist.”