It’s a story that will sound familiar to producers everywhere. Belfast-based Scouser Simon Sheldon (pictured) is a prolific producer and DJ who has been immersed in electronic music with a back catalogue going back years, on a variety of labels.
Finding success with his live drum and bass outfit Spree and a strong run of releases on Chicago house label Unquantized and others, he found himself sitting on an archive of music that didn’t quite fit – downtempo, Balearic-tinged tunes with no outlet beyond his own DJ sets. So he decided to put them out himself.
“In the studio, sometimes you want to do something different,” he says when we meet in the courtyard of Belfast spot Bullitt on a sunny weekday afternoon. “I had loads of stuff – hundreds of tracks which didn’t really fit anywhere, label-wise. So I thought, why not do a label to release stuff that doesn’t have a home, that is not genre-specific?”
He decided to call it The Freebooter Lounge, a name that reflects the anything-goes ethos of his new venture. And being deeply embedded in the Belfast scene since he arrived in the Northern Irish capital during the mid-90s, he wasn’t short of like-minded fellow travellers who would jump at the chance to get their own music out there.
Because as much as house and techno run through the city and its surroundings like a stick of rock – think David Holmes, Iain McCready, Phil Kieran and long-running clubs like Shine and Twitch, not to mention Orbital’s classic track Belfast, its title inspired by a revelatory gig at the city’s Art College way back in 1990 – the place has always been home to nonconformists and psychedelic explorers who don’t always fit into neat little pigeonholes.
“Labels want you to get known for a certain type of music and they want you to fit this mould, because they know people will buy it,” Sheldon continues.
“Freebooter Lounge is not about the money at all. It’s just about doing whatever we want to do, with whoever we want to do it. More and more, it’s about doing it with artists who aren’t established and are struggling to find a home, because it’s so competitive.”
Citing long-term inspirations like Mute, Warp and LTJ Bukem’s Good Looking Records, he adds: “I like labels where you don’t know what it’s going to sound like before you listen to it.”
Starting with his excellent debut LP under his own name Four Of Swords in 2020, Sheldon has spent the last five years putting together a prolific and varied catalogue of releases under the Freebooter Lounge banner, working with hidden gems of the Northern Irish scene like Klark Bent, Deep Division, Muzka, Dan Dub Lounge, his own funk project Naked Bongo Band, and more recently the collaborative project Visions Of Light, recently signed to the Ibiza-based imprint NuNorthernSoul.
“If I want to release an ambient album, I will; techno, I will; if I come across a jazz band and I like it, I’ll release it,” he says. “That’s the whole ideology behind it, really. So that was why Freebooter came about – just to have no label constraints.”
Along the way, the label has picked up support from the likes of Gilles Peterson on BBC Radio 6 Music, BBC Radio 1, and tastemakers like François K, DJ Meme, Hippie Torrales and Chad Jackson. But a trip to The White Isle a couple of years ago crystallises the essence of what The Freebooter Lounge is all about.
“I was in Ibiza with a few friends, and went into Cafe del Mar for a beer,” Sheldon recalls. “The first song that came on was one of Dan [Dub Lounge]’s tracks that was signed to Freebooter.
“So we took Dan from Northern Ireland, who had never released anything before, to being played in Cafe Del Mar. It’s amazing. As a young artist, that would have been everything to me.
“Inflyte has been amazing,” he adds. “We’re getting it to the people that matter. For me, the buzz is to see these artists, and myself, being played globally and getting gigs. We’re getting offered a gig in Ibiza – great! That’s what it’s about.”
The Ibiza connection continues. Last year, Sheldon and The Freebooter Lounge crew were invited to put on an event at Word of Mouth cafe on the island, giving a crew of Belfast artists the opportunity to showcase their music in the place where the Balearic scene began all those years ago – and to hook up with the founding father himself, the late, great DJ Alfredo.
“He came down and played for an hour and had lunch with us, and a few drinks. He was ace. He was a brilliant DJ and it was amazing – just like it was 40 years ago. We had a few glasses of wine and he was chatting away, it was brilliant.
“I fell in love with Word of Mouth. It’s just like [Bullitt], but on a beach in Ibiza. We had five or six artists doing the whole day and it went so well we thought, ‘Why don’t we do two days?’. So [this October] we’re doing a Plan B/Freebooter Lounge two-day takeover at Word of Mouth cafe.”
Plan B is the monthly DIY party started by Sheldon’s friend Aidy McLaughlin, which has provided another outlet for Freebooter’s artists, as well as helping to coalesce the sense of community around Freebooter Lounge and their flavour of the Belfast party scene.
Freebooter and Plan B also run the monthly Sunday Circles event with Keith Connolly, the Belfast DJ and designer whose artwork gives Freebooter its distinctive visual identity, Belfast selectors, and guests from further afield.
Relaxed, inclusive and free, these events have given the community – many of whom have been sharing dancefloors since the heyday of acid house – something to rally around, and a vehicle with which to share their creativity.
“What Aidy’s doing with Plan B and what I’m doing with Freebooter are sort of dovetailing a lot,” Sheldon says. “They’re like two sides of the same coin, really. There’s a lot of the same people, we’ve got the same ethos, the same background.
“We’ve all been doing gigs around Belfast and Ireland, and in some cases around Europe, for 30 years. So we’ve kind of all grown up together and we’re all friends. It sounds a bit cheesy but it’s true. There’s a lot of good producers, and a real good scene, all of a similar age.”
But that’s not to say that there’s anything insular about The Freebooter Lounge. Sheldon is hungry for new music – and if he likes it, he’ll put it out.
“I’m hugely behind the artists we’ve got, like Klark Bent, Deep Division, Gary Dodds – all those who’ve had multiple releases,” he says. “I’ve got a lot of confidence in the ones that we’re nurturing and building already, but I’m totally open to anybody, and I listen to everything.”
The Freebooter Lounge’s latest release, Tokyo Nights EP by Feed Me Groove, is out now.
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Feature image photo credit: Tra Walls.