I like radicality, people who are whole. Music professionals and virtuosos have always bored me. I prefer authentic and imperfect artists who will have flashes of brilliance that I will help to reveal.
Jean-Baptiste Guillot
These words were spoken by Jean-Baptiste Guillot on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Born Bad Records. Founder of the label, he is also the producer behind a series of French pop compilations that have since become cult, Wizzz, Bippp, Chébran, and others besides.
The man who cut his teeth on the benches of the majors and who founded his label twenty years ago, in the wake of a redundancy plan that struck the recording industry, is still standing! To have spent twenty years in Rock and Roll is to go well beyond maturity, it is almost an act of resistance. It means cultivating a state of mind, marked by loyalty to certain values (independence everywhere, compromise nowhere), as much as to artists, most of them French. Why? In order to support them over the long term and help them shine, without embellishment.
Today, Born Bad Records is far more than rock, indie, pop, or underground. Indeed, who can still claim to define what the underground truly is? No matter, no label adheres to the vinyls bearing the Born Bad Records imprint.
The label is resolutely alternative: from discovering the band Cheveu (blues) to Frustration (post-punk), via Bryan’s Magic Tears (shoegaze), La Femme (rock machine), Arthur Satàn (garage rock) and Zombie (krautrock), the list goes on. More than 200 albums!
And Born Bad Records has, of late, brought to light Star Feminine Band, an afropop group composed of seven women, born in Natitingou, in Benin, at much the same time as the label itself. Thus, make no mistake, as it celebrates its twentieth anniversary in the Grande Salle of the Théâtre du Châtelet, Born Bad Records will set the place alight!.
With Frustration, Vox Low, Gwendoline, Bryan’s Magic Tears, Zombie Zombie, Forever Pavot, Bracco, Arthur Satan and Île de Garde
