In 1995 Kenny Anderson, then lead singer/songwriter for the scottish bands skuobhie dubh orchestra and khartoum heroes, launched his own label fence with his own solo project king creosote. With a healthy cynicism of all things music industry related, kc set out to make home recorded music in as stress-free an environment as possible, and hunkered down in n.e. fife for the long haul.
With a few cdr titles released thru’ local shops, and with brothers een (pip dylan) and gordon (lone pigeon) forming the beginnings of a fence collective, by summer 2000 fence had taken over the running of a st.andrews cd shop, had an extensive website up and running, and were packing out the local pubs once a fortnight. collective member james yorkston made sure that the fence music came to the attention of labels like bad jazz and domino, and the legendary fence gatherings were soon on the move.
independent stores such as rough trade in london, avalanche in edinburgh, monorail in glasgow, and norman records in leeds were all pushing the fence collective cdr titles when in 2003 domino helped launch king creosote’s first album proper “kenny and beth’s musakal boatrides”, which made no. 5 in rough trade’s top 100 albums of that year. in the spring of 2005 kc put out a second album for domino, the self-produced “rocket d.i.y.”, and then went off to collaborate with the earlies from burnley, lancashire, supposedly to record an ep for names/679. it all gets a bit confusing from here. the resulting album “kc rules ok” released in 2005 caught everyone by surprise, but didn’t contain enough singles, and so certain tracks were re-recorded using the all-new kc band, and “kc rules ok” was re-released in summer 2006 with an invisible companion album “chorlton and the wh’earlies” (the original album working title, as it happens) which contained the original non-single recordings as well as some of the failed single edits and remixes, and all this sort of re-packaged with new sleeve notes, thus giving “kc rules ok” a further lifespan of 3 years? the most singley single recorded in january 2006, “you’ve no clue do you”, was considered too something or other, but on listening again it became the obvious lead single for the hastily recorded “bombshell” in 2007, as produced by jon hopkins.
things were much simpler when in 2008 kc recorded “flick the Vs” on the sly and handed it over to domino. one year on, and “flick the Vs” remains remarkably unaltered. in 2009 king creosote has recorded with the burns unit, reporter, jon hopkins and animal magic tricks.
