Interview: Matt Collyer of The Planet Smashers and Stomp Records on the Label’s 20th Anniversary

When Matt Collyer and Jordan Swift formed Stomp Records in 1994, ska had yet to infiltrate the mainstream for it’s third (and most despised) iteration. Suburban kids hadn’t raided their grandfather’s closet in search of moth-eaten suits yet, and “The Impression That I Get,” was still three years away from skanking its way into our collective unconscious forty times a day.

In those simpler times, Collyer (The Planet Smashers) and Swift (The Kingpins) simply shared a passion for ska, and their outreach to bands across the county led to Stomp’s first release, The All Skanadian Club, a 16-band compilation of ska bands from across Canada.

Over the intervening years Stomp has released 150 albums, including influential releases from The Planet Smashers, The Creepshow, Bedouin Soundclash and countless others. Members from some of the label’s initial signings have gone on to form bands including The Stills, Patrick Watson, Walk Off the Earth and even Simple Plan (don’t blame Stomp for that one).

We caught up with label co-founder and Planet Smashers frontman Matt Collyer to see how the label has survived for two decades, what binds the varied bands on the label, and what the future holds for Stomp.

The label celebrates its 20th anniversary with a pair of Montreal shows this month, including a blow out at Club Soda on October 23 featuring The Planet Smashers, The Beatdown, Subb and Danny Rebel & the KGB, and a record release show for Brains at Katacombes on October 30 alongside East End Radicals, Los Kung Fu Moneys and Kman and the 45’s.

Bad Feeling: What was your goal when you started Stomp? Was there ever a hope of being able to do this for two decades?

Matt Collyer: No, never. Not even now! We’ve always been very frugal. We’ve never really planned for the future, but we never blew the present. 

BF: What do you think keeps people coming back to ska in Montreal?

MF: I would say even all over Quebec, there’s just something about the enjoyment of live music, and certainly fun music here in Quebec, that you see pretty much more than anywhere else in North America. It seems like people generally want to party. When it comes down to it, that’s what it is, and ska music fits right into that. I guess the bands that have been doing it for a while have found a way to keep in touch with that sort of vibe. I said the “V” word!

BF: Is it also because bands like Planet Smashers never drastically changed their style?

MC: That’s definitely part of it. There’s a familiarity there, and an an “It worked once, so why not try it again?” attitude. But a lot of people out in the suburbs have no idea about Montreal ska, let alone all the other stuff we’re putting out, so it’s pretty fresh to most people. And that’s a good thing. For some reason, it keeps on working.

BF: Looking back over the past two decades, what’s been the biggest change in how the label operates?

MC: The death of physical retail. Beginning in 2000 when everyone got high-speed internet, that was the big one, it just changed everything. We got quickly caught up on digital in terms of distribution, and then we realized, “We’ve got to do more than just a record label,” and that’s when we started the booking agency out of Stomp, and eventually management.

In terms of how you sell music, the band’s got to be out on the road. You can’t be a weekend warrior band, you can’t expect to do well if you’re not going to go play California, hit Florida, play D.C., and do all that stuff. It’s just not going to work. You can have the best record ever, and no one will hear it. We’ve released so many good records that haven’t worked out because the band hasn’t been able to tour for whatever reason – normally financial, let’s face it.

BF: Do you recommend that local bands don’t play their hometown too often?

MC: Yeah, you’ve really go to watch it, and we’ve seen some of our bands do that. You can’t do the pub gigs and then expect people to come out in force to your “real shows,” or whatever you want to call them. You only have so many cards to play. Smashers will occasionally do three shows in Montreal a year, but usually two, and sometimes one, and it’s hard for some bands to only do that few. If you’re a developing band you can get away with four or five local shows, but then it’s just a matter of getting out of town. That’s what Stomp has always been about—“How do we do this? How do we get this band to that city?” And a lot of it is just self-taught. You’ve just got to dig in and take some shit sandwiches.

BF: What did you think of the huge ska boom in the 90’s? Was that a great time for the label and the Smashers? Did you expect it to bust so quick?

MC: It’s weird, I can’t say I was a fan of all of that stuff. I was a fan of the dirtier stuff, like Rancid and the Bosstones, but I wasn’t so much a fan of the sunny ska, which is kind of funny because Smashers are pretty sunny. I was more into the two-tone ska punk thing at the time. So I wasn’t a big fan, but I knew it was helping out our bands a lot, especially getting into the States. Suddenly, if your band just had “ska” in the biography, you could get into the States, and that’s actually what led to the bust of ska in general. People were selling the genre, and not the bands.

Luckily for us, Canada was a little more sheltered, and it was never as big as it was in California. We still had a lot more control up here back then, even when Hollywood was dominating the cultural airwaves. But yeah, the ska boom was a disaster man. At that point we had already started putting putting out punk rock, and other kinds of music. We knew it was coming. A big label in the States told us, “You’ve got to push your bands, don’t push ska,” and they’re gone now, because that was their big mistake. We didn’t know about branding, but that’s what was were doing.

BF: What did you think when all of those bands dropped the horns and became pop-punk bands?

MC: There was a few things. You could either become a swing band, or you could become an emo band, a lot of bands turned emo. Swing was the worst man, a terrible moment in popular music!

BF: How do you know when a band is a good fit for the label?

MC: We’ve signed some bands that haven’t been, I’ll tell you that right now. Good fits are generally bands that look at Stomp as a tool, and not as the leader. They look at us and say, “This is what we’re doing,” and then Stomp can say, “This is where we can help you.” The ones that don’t work are the “hand it to me on a platter” types. It’s bands that have some sort of sense of urgency in terms of getting their band working, before they run out of money or have to get a real job. It’s totally a partnership, but they have to do the leading. It’s really the bands that will decide their future.

BF: What do you think binds all the bands on the label?

MC: There’s a sense of helping each other. That’s the other thing we do for new bands, we’ll try to put them in touch with the established bands. That’s how the whole thing started with the All Skanadian Club twenty years ago. We reached out to all these bands, and suddenly every ska band in Canada could – because every ska band in Canada was on that comp, we had no editorial at all (laughs). All sixteen of ‘em were now friends, it was that easy. All of a sudden there was a band in every city that you could play with.

So that same attitude of helping each other is something that we still preach today, and a lot of our bands pick up on it. The established bands really help us out, like Creepshow. Brains are taking our newest ska band across the country with them. Brains are like, heavy psycho-billy, and they’re willing to take Los Kung Fu Monkeys across the country, because they know what we’ve done, and the effort other bands have done for them. Smashers try to do as much as we can, but we’re kind of a weekend warrior band these days.

BF: Going through the label’s discography, is there one underdog release that you felt never got a fair shake that people should check out?

MC: Oh man, there’s so many, but my favourite is still The Frenetics’ Grey Veins to the Parking Lot, what an album. We put out a lot of new records, and some of them are doing well, but there are some of them that get kind of glazed over. One band that I think right now is absolutely fantastic that we put out is The Penske File. These guys are working their asses off, they’re going down to Gainesville to do Fest. It’s a great record from start to finish, and just hard to get people to hear about it.

BF: What’s up next for Stomp and the Smashers?

MC: We’ve got the Awesome Anniversary Tour, we’re doing five of ‘em, Brains are doing six. There’s a huge one in Vancouver with Real McKenzies, Brains, Isotopes, so there’s all that going on. It’s pretty awesome that all these bands have decided to do it. After that, we have the new Brains coming out for Halloween, we have Boids coming out later this week, and next year we’re already looking at new signings, which I’m super excited about. Real McKenzies, we’ll have to do something special for them, it’s their 25^th next year. I don’t know what it’s going to be, but we’ll figure something out. I’m as excited as I’ve ever been to be working at Stomp.

Planet Smashers headline the Stomp 20th Anniversary Show at Club Soda on Friday, October 23 with The Beatdown, Subb and Danny Rebel & The KGB. Tickets are $20/$22, available here. 

The Stomp festivities continue a week later with The Brains’ record release at Katacombes on October 30, along with support from East End Radicals, Los Kung Fu Moneys and Kman and the 45’s. Tickets are $15/$20, available here.