Fellaheen Records: An Interview with Steven “Stav” Stavrakis
Fellaheen Records was an independent Australian label that unfortunately closed after only five years. They released the first music by locals Gerling and Ben Lee, as well as albums from international acts like Pavement and the Beastie Boys often with bonus tracks exclusive to Australia. In 1995 they released a series of clear 7” records pressed by lathe master Peter King in New Zealand, including a double lathe 7” of the Beastie Boys Aglio E Olio EP. This release put Peter King on the map, and has also meant there has always been international interest in Fellaheen. But for whatever reason, the label’s story has mostly remained untold outside of discussions around the other labels Fellaheen’s founders ran.
To get the full Fellaheen story I spoke with Steven “Stav” Stavrakis who co-founded the label with Stephen “Pav” Pavlovic in 1993. Additional information and photos have been gathered thanks to Adam Yee who was Fellaheen’s Assistant Managing Director/ A & R.
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When Steven Stavrakis, better known to his friends as Stav, left school he didn’t know what to do. At the time, he worked for his parents’ business delivering fabrics, and would finish early each Friday to spend the afternoon visiting Sydney’s record stores along Pitt Street.
“I’d get my pay packet and walk from the corner of Waterloo and Kippax Streets in Surry Hills uptown, and first you’d hit a secondhand record store called Martin’s and then you go to Lawson’s and Ashwoods, and then a block up the road was Phantom Records. Then you’d go to Anthem Records, Record Plant, Utopia, and Peaches, and then by the time you finish that you’d be at the other end of town, and I’d catch a train from Circular Quay back to Central and I’d go home with a whole lot of new records.”
Of those, Phantom Records eventually inspired a change in career for Stav. Phantom was opened in 1978 by Dare Jennings, who at the timeowned Phantom t-shirts and later the Mambo and Deus Ex brands. Phantom Records was managed by Lee Taylor and staffed by John Foy who would, many years later, eventually start the Redeye Records label.
Lee Taylor had originally owned pioneering Sydney punk rock store White Light along with Mark Taylor from the Psycho Surgeons/Lipstick Killers, and when that store closed they moved its stock to Phantom. The new store specialised in punk/new wave but also stocked a range of reggae and soul. At the same time, ex-Radio Birdman manager Jules R. B. Normington was in America acting as their buyer for Phantom focusing on the burgeoning punk/new wave and 60s garage punk/psych scene. When Dare Jennings asked Normington to come back and manage the Phantom store, he returned to Sydney, arriving in July 1979. Soon after, they were joined by a new employee, Steven Stavrakis.
“When Phantom advertised that they wanted a person to work for them I wrote a deliberately quirky application so as to gain an interview, and I got the job. That’s how I started working in music. Until that point I was just a fan. I didn’t know any musicians, didn’t know any people that ran labels, didn’t know anyone who was involved in the scene at all. I was just the lucky guy who could pen a good application and got a good gig.”
“Working at Phantom Records was really kind of mind blowing for me, I was probably 20 going into 21, and it was just fucking mind blowing. Because not only was it a great record store, but it also had a record label attached to it.”
Phantom Records, the label, was born thanks to all of the bands that visited the record store, and who were friends with the owners. Dare Jennings was dating a member of Flaming Hands, and Jules Normington was dating someone in Shy Impostors, and both bands had made recordings without much thought into how to get them out. After calling the EMI pressing plant to find out how to get a record made, Phantom Records was born, with Normington later saying it was only intended as a hobby project to break even because the record store did so well.
Phantom Records released their first 7” in 1980, The Passengers’ Face With No Name. The band had split up before the record was pressed, but reformed with a new singer as The Flaming Hands, who released their debut as the third 7” on Phantom Records. Shy Impostors were the sixth release, with other early releases by Surfside 6, The Visitors, Sunnyboys, and Hoodoo Gurus.
As the label grew, bands would drop their demo tapes into the store for consideration, and one day a band called J.F.K. And The Cuban Crisis dropped in theirs. While Phantom liked it, they decided to pass on it as the band wanted it released as a four track EP, while Phantom wanted to do a single instead. But Stav was a fan and thought it should be put out.
“I really liked it. It was poppy and catchy. It was where my head was at at that point in time, so I spoke with Jules and Dare about the possibility of me operating a label whilst working at the store. They agreed on the proviso that it didn’t interfere with my work, and that’s how it started. That’s how I started Waterfront and JFK and The Cuban Crisis’ Careless Talk Costs Lives was our debut release”
Waterfront Records was Stav’s label, run in the hours of the day he wasn’t working at Phantom, starting when Careless Talk Costs Lives was released in January 1983 as a four track 7” EP. A few other Phantom rejects came to Waterfront, but as the label built its reputation Stav began to be approached by bands wanting to specifically be on Waterfront, and he soon expanded by opening his own store.
“So, the label started whilst I was working at the record store, and a couple of years later, Phantom hired a guy at the store called Frank Cotterell, and then a couple of years after that, Frank and I opened our own record store named after my label Waterfront.”
Waterfront Records, the store, opened on 25 June 1985 at 119 York Street, Sydney, and they were joined by Chris Dunn the following year. Dunn had also worked at Phantom before Stav and Cotterell left, and had helped secure bands like Ups And Downs and The Hard-Ons for the Waterfront label.
“With Chris, the label grew at a pace, and if you look at the independent charts of those days, if they’re doing a Top 20, then there’s going to be a minimum of six and a maximum of 12 records that were Waterfront records. Now, that’s a testament to two things. We released really great records, and we released a lot of records. We were the biggest independent record label in terms of volume of releases. It was all over the shop. It was punk rock, it was hardcore, it was pop. It was crazy. But that was the sort of stuff that we liked, and we got away with it.”
With so many records coming out, Waterfront created what was Australia’s first independent national distribution network, with a warehouse full of records being sent to independent record stores across Australia. This included manufacturing and distributing other labels like Aberrant Records, Greasy Pop, and hundreds of non-aligned label releases from Australian bands, as well as acting as local distributors for international labels like Sub Pop and Alternative Tentacles.
“At first, we started importing the Sub Pop records solely for our retail store but as their profile grew and demand increased we were buying 30 for the store and 100 extra for our distribution network to sell to other retailers. We got to the point where we thought we wanted to be more involved with Sub Pop and put some money behind the marketing, plugging releases to radio stations and print media, and eventually releasing titles on Waterfront.”
Among those, Waterfront released the Australian pressing of Nirvana’s debut album Bleach, with several different coloured vinyl pressings and coloured sleeves available. A special Australian Tour Edition was repressed on green vinyl in January 1992 when Nirvana arrived for a tour organised by Stephen “Pav” Pavlovic that included their show at the first Big Day Out festival in Sydney.
The final Waterfront releases arrived in March 1992, after Stav felt they’d strayed too far from his original idea of the label he wanted to run. At the time, he was completely involved in managing administration and production for the label, while also working in the record store. Chris Dunn was spending more time managing Waterfront recording artist Tumbleweed and had signed them to a contract with Atlantic Records in the US, when the band were in fact signed to Waterfront internationally. The fallout from this action ultimately led to Stav deciding to close the Waterfront label down and start a new label closer to Waterfront’s original ideal.
“Ben Lee had posted a cassette of the very first Noise Addict recordings to Waterfront, and every time I’d go out in the shop I’d put that in the cassette player and think, well, this is just fucking crazy. It was hilarious and awesome at the same time. So, I kept saying I wanted to start this label, and this is going to be my first release, and at the same time, we’d started a relationship with [Stephen] Pavlovic to create a touring company.”
Pav had been working as a promoter in Sydney when he began collaborating with Waterfront. He told them he wanted to start his own label alongside their new touring company Golden Sounds, but Stav convinced him to just join him in the label he was starting, with Noise Addict to be their first release.
Noise Addict were made up of teenagers, each around 15 years old at the time, and after seeing them play some local shows, Stav and Pav went to meet the band’s parents and signed Noise Addict to their newly formed label Fellaheen in 1993.
“That was kind of how that started. Pav brought some bands in the early days like Magic Dirt. Other bands like Budd, Fur, and Midget, we got because of the touring bands sending us tapes. So, I basically did all the label stuff, and he did all the touring stuff.”
The Fellaheen catalogue number prefix JacK is a reference to Stav’s favourite author, with the two capital letters standing for Jack Kerouac, and the name Fellaheen also came from a Kerouac quote.
“I was an avid Kerouac reader. Like crazy! He’s still hugely important to me, and when I was trying to come up with a name for the label, I was just rummaging through some books and came across a paragraph in a Kerouac novel where he describes what he sees and likens it to Fellaheen.”
The quote appears in a short story titled Mexico Fellaheen that appeared as chapter two of Kerouac’s 1960 short story collection Lonesome Traveller. It reads, “It’s a great feeling of entering the Pure Land, especially because it’s so close to dry faced Arizona and Texas and all over the South-west — but you can find it, this feeling, this fellaheen feeling about life, that timeless gayety of people not involved in great cultural and civilization issues…”
Stav explained why this passage resonated with him.
“A Fellaheen is an Egyptian or Arabic worker, like a regular person, a person who is unseen. They could be creating great works of art or they could just be putting a shovel into the ground, or picking fruit, or bringing up children, but they’re the workers, the unseen. Without them we’re nowhere, and that’s where the Fellaheen thing came from.”
The label’s logo was created by Paul McNeil, who also created tour posters for Golden Sounds, and each Fellaheen release has “Made in Marrickville” written on the sleeve, as Stav lived there at the time.
When Fellaheen started in 1993, Stav had a young family and was more interested in being home with them than out seeing bands, so he hired Adam Yee as Fellaheen’s Assistant Managing Director / A & R. Yee played bass in the bands Smudge and Headache, and became Stav’s right-hand person, signing bands such as local Sydney trio Gerling after they dropped their tapes off at the Waterfront store.
“Gerling were customers of ours. They were all from the western suburbs, so you get these three fucking out-there kids coming into the store, bugging the shit out of you and giving you tapes to listen to. Some of them were fucking crazy. Eventually we said, Okay, cool. We’ll do a record with you.”
Fellaheen released Gerling’s debut single Sedatives For Dead Radars in 1995. It was followed by A Day of Research EP that reached #13 on the ARIA Alternative Albums Chart. This was the only time they’d chart with Fellaheen, but other artists on the label made appearances too, with Budd, Fur, Magic Dirt, Midget, and Sandpit all entering the ARIA Alternative Top 20 for their releases on Fellaheen, with several peaking at #3.
International acts licensed to Fellaheen also entered the charts, with Pavement, Beastie Boys, Guided By Voices, and Superchunk all appearing in the ARIA Alternative Charts. This chart was compiled from “alternative music retailers” in Australia, and tended to include less mainstream releases than the main ARIA charts. But two Fellaheen releases from Pavement did cross over. Pavement’s second album Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, peaked at #86 in the ARIA Album Chart in 1994, while their fourth album Brighten the Corners peaked at #64 in 1997.
Alongside Stav and Adam Yee, Fellaheen also had another unofficial staff member, thanks to the close relationship maintained with their distributor Shock Records, who had bought Waterfront’s distribution network from Stav when Waterfront Records closed. Shock went on to become the largest independent music distributor in Australia, and appointed Tom Larnach-Jones as their label manager.
“When you talk about Fellaheen, it was me, Adam Yee, and Tom Larnach-Jones representing us in Melbourne. So Adam and I are in Sydney, and Tom was this teenage kid in Melbourne, working for Shock as the Fellaheen label manager. He also managed a couple of other labels on behalf of Shock, but he fucking loved Fellaheen and would see our bands when they played Melbourne. Tom eventually started his own record label Trifekta Records. They released the first Avalanches single and a stack of cool local stuff as well as international releases like Preston School of Industry, which is Scott from Pavement, that I feel was nurtured through his involvement and love of the Fellaheen label.”
Fellaheen also maintained international connections that had been built while running the Waterfront label. Since Waterfront had released Nirvana’s Bleach album in 1989, Waterfront had maintained contact with John Silva, who co-managed Nirvana, and later the Beastie Boys and Sonic Youth. Pav also knew Silva and negotiated for an Australian Beastie Boys tour in 1994, and one year later Fellaheen released the Beastie Boys’ Aglio E Olio EP.
“As the touring side of stuff got bigger so did Pav’s contacts. So, we got the Beastie Boys because of him and John Silva, and Pav got Pavement as well. It was like, okay, Pav arranges a Pavement tour and Fellaheen releases Pavement for Australia and New Zealand. In a nutshell that’s how it worked. But predominantly, it was things that were built because of the snowballing effect of releasing the Nirvana record, and releasing a couple of cool records, like the Beastie Boys or Guided by Voices.”
These international releases often contained songs exclusive to Australia, with Fluid’s Spot The Loon, Pavement’s Gold Soundz, Hurricane’s The Hurra, and Beastie Boys’ Aglio E Olio all featuring at least one exclusive song. The latter two releases were also part of a licensing deal with Grand Royal, the label run by the Beastie Boys, which saw Fellaheen also release Australian pressings of albums by Luscious Jackson and Kostars.
For the Beastie Boys’ Aglio E Olio EP, the Fellaheen CD features Soba Violence, that also appeared on the Japanese CD and later on the Beastie Boys Anthology compilation. But Fellaheen also released a special clear vinyl edition featuring another song, a cover of The Doors’ Light My Fire, featuring Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto and Butter 08. This song wasn’t released anywhere else until Capitol Records made their own clear vinyl version in 2021 for Record Store Day.
Unlike the repress, the Fellaheen clear vinyl release was unique because it wasn’t actually vinyl. The discs were cut on polycarbonate plastic using a lathe cutting machine run by Peter King in New Zealand. Fellaheen put out four lathe releases from Pavement, Sourpuss, Gerling, and the aforementioned Beastie Boys EP. They’ve remained collector items, even if their sound quality isn’t the best.
“The lathes go back to what I wanted to do originally, an independent record label where you could knock things out cheaply and quickly and do things in limited numbers or limited releases, and see how they went. So, doing those lathe records was a way of doing that, because you could do as little as 100. You could do as little as 10.”
The Beastie Boys returned to Australia at the end of 1995, when Pav launched the incredibly ambitious Summersault music festival over the summer and New Year period. The festival included international acts like Foo Fighters, Hole, and Beck, alongside locals Gerling, Noise Addict, and Bodyjar. There was also an art exhibition, pro skateboarder showcases, and a series of club nights from the UK’s Mo’ Wax Records. It’s remembered fondly now, but was not a financial success at the time, and threatened Pav with bankruptcy.
Fellaheen was planning a big tour of their own in 1996. Called Heen Beat, it was to feature Superchunk, Steve Malkmus, Fur, Sandpit, Gerling, and Diolene playing shows in Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne. A Superchunk / Guided By Voices split EP was created to promote the tour, as well as a Heen Beat compilation CD featuring songs from across the label’s diverse releases.
But the tour never happened. Unknown to Stav at the time, the Summersault tour had left Pav in financial distress, and after revealing the seriousness of his debts to his business partner, Stav had no alternative other than to begin the process of closing Fellaheen.
“I was kind of beside myself and didn’t really know what to do. We cobbled together the money that Pav needed, gave him the money and said fuck off, that’s it, finished. After that we had no money to release the records that were scheduled. Frank, my partner in the [Waterfront] record store, was finding it difficult to manage the store because I was spending a lot of time doing Fellaheen stuff so we made a decision, and it was a poor decision in hindsight, to close down Fellaheen, which Shock took over and maintained for a short period of time. That’s how I came to part with Fellaheen…There’s not much I regret in life, but I do regret that.”
Music industry reporter Christie Eliezer wrote in August 1997 that Fellaheen Records’ operations had been taken over by Shock Records. Through this arrangement, Fellaheen released CDs into 1998, before ceasing operations. But by then the label existed as a name only, with none of the original staff or founders involved.
Before they shut down, in early 1997 Fellaheen’s website listed four releases as coming soon:
· Budd — Debut Album
· Pavement — Tour EP to coincide with their July shows.
· Gerling — Follow up EP to “A Day Of Research”
· Eastern Dark — Where Have All The Single Girls Gone?
Budd’s album Prana arrived in 1998 as the final Fellaheen release, catalogue number JacK 067–2. Pavement’s Extending The Corners was released as a special EP for the bands Australian 1997 tour. It was released as a bonus disc with a special tour edition of the album Brighten The Corners, but could also be ordered separately for fans who had already bought the album.
Gerling’s next release Bachelor Pad didn’t appear on Fellaheen, and instead was released on Tom Larnach-Jones’ Trifekta Records in 1998. Similarly, Eastern Dark’s Where Have All The Single Girls Gone? was released on Half A Cow Records in 2000. The album is a compilation collecting the bands previous releases that appeared on Waterfront Records, so it makes sense it had originally been intended for Fellaheen.
Looking at the Fellaheen catalogue numbers, these ran from JacK 001 until JacK 065, but there are some gaps, with JacK 013, 044, 055, 058, 060, and 064 all left unused.
A test pressing of JacK 013 exists with Luscious Jackson’s Find Your Mind/Surprise/Queen Of Bliss, all songs from their first EP on Grand Royal. While JacK 044 was meant to be a Sourpuss release according to the catalogue included in the Heen Beat compilation. Others remain a mystery, though were likely planned releases that were scrapped during the handover to Shock.
When Fellaheen ended, most of their bands did too, with Sandpit splitting up just as they released their debut album On Second Thought. Gerling continued to be managed by Adam Yee, who took them to Trifekta and then Festival Records, where they released four albums before calling it a day in 2006. Noise Addict’s Ben Lee remained the most prolific, and after going solo during his time at Fellaheen, has continued to release new music, putting his most recent album out in 2022.
After Fellaheen, Pav started a new label Modular Records, where Ben Lee signed on and released his album Breathing Tornados in 1998. The album peaked at #13 on the ARIA Album Chart and was certified Gold, selling over 35,000 copies. Modular had other success with albums from The Living End, Wolfmother, The Presets, Tame Impala, and The Avalanches, and still exists to this day.
Stav briefly worked for Modular too before he moved to Melbourne. There, he ran In-Fidelity Records with Bruce Milne, before starting Shiny, a label that shifted into publicity and promotions. These days, Stav has stepped away from the music business completely, but his labels live on thanks to avid collectors and fans, with a Facebook group dedicated to Waterfront Records including over 800 fans all sharing their favourite items from their collections.
Although Fellaheen ended in 1998 with Budd’s Prana album, in 2023 a new addition appeared using the Fellaheen catalogue prefix when JacK 068–7 was released as a split 7” for Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice and Bench Press. Bench Press includes Stav’s son Jack on lead vocals, with Stav confirming it is an official addition to the Fellaheen catalogue. Unfortunately, it appears to have been a one off, with no further plans to resurrect the label for now. Instead, it serves as the perfect way to celebrate the 30th anniversary of one of Australia’s greatest independent labels.
