Saturday 4 June 2011

Pumpkin - Wwax


With the advent of the DIY punk movement in the 80's tiny bands were releasing 7 inch singles on their own labels in small numbers more often than not only to a handful of stores in one city. It was a great way of getting your name out there without the hassle of getting signed to a “proper” label. You could record it yourself, get it mastered cheaply and then get them printed up yourself. A large number of these releases will be forever forgotten except by a few die hard local scensters and the band members themselves. On the other side of the coin, some of these tiny releases were the launching pads for some big names. Hüsker Dü for example started off releasing their own singles on their own, tiny, Reflex Records imprint before moving to New Alliance, then SST and finally Warner Bros. Wwax's single Pumpkin kind of falls in between the two. Wwax never made it big but one of its descendents, Superchunk, became a pretty huge name in the 1990's indie rock scene.