Interview With Nick Hollywood (10 Questions to…)
I’m sure you’ve had the opportunity to listen to tracks released by the Freshly Squeezed Music label many times – you’ll no doubt be familiar with artists such as Swing Republic and Swingrowers, among others. Behind the success of Freshly Squeezed Music is primarily one person who founded the label and has been running it for 20 years – that person is Nick Hollywood. Today you have a unique opportunity to get to know him better, to find out things about Nick that you may not have had the chance to read anywhere else before. Freshly Squeezed celebrates its 20th anniversary in June, so it’s the perfect excuse to go behind the scenes of the music label’s work for a while. I’m delighted to present you with 10 questions to… Nick Hollywood!
01. LadyDot: Hi Nick, thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions. As well as being the founder of the Freshly Squeezed Music label (which I’ll ask you in detail later in the interview), you’re additionally a DJ and multi-instrumentalist. So let’s focus at the beginning of this interview on what were your beginnings in the adventure of music? What instrument did you learn to play first? Was music production your first choice, or did you want to pursue something completely different professionally in life?
Nick Hollywood: Hello and thanks for inviting me. I like how you’ve rolled 3 questions into 1. Kicks things off in style!
I learnt piano and violin as a child but it wasn’t until my friends at school decided to form a band together that we all learnt instruments and learnt to play as a group. One of us was already a drummer, another a guitarist, the 3rd person wanted to be the singer (he later quit of course. In a huff!) – which left me to learn the bass:
From the very first moment I hit the low E string through a massive borrowed amplifier I was in love!
I went on to play bass in many bands from post punk to new wave to goth before switching to saxophone. I also did a lot of production.
Much later became a DJ as part of running club nights.
I re-learnt piano most recently in lockdown. Like a lot of people!
In answer to the 3rd part of your question – I was always passionate about music but I actually trained as a Theatre Designer at Central/St Martins College of Art in London. So my working life started doing sets, costumes and lighting as well as production and lighting design for music videos.
02. LadyDot: While doing research for this interview, I found out that your first musical project was Lemon. As Lemon, you released two albums and one ‘The Best Of’, all kept in a lounge style. What was your biggest success as a solo artist? Who did you work with on this project? Why did you stop producing your own tracks? Or did you continue to do so, just under a different pseudonym?
Nick Hollywood: Another multifaceted question! The connection between things is complicated. (Sorry!) It’s mostly about doing a number of related things in context simultaneously. Fingers in many pies as they say.
So yes, Lemon was a solo project, born mostly as a side project to DJing and producing records that were relevant to the nightclubs we were running at the time. Oh – and there was a record label too!
I played most of the instruments on those albums (except as indicated if you buy the CDs or Vinyl), but the first album has a lot of samples. That project grew out of the 11-piece in-house band at London’s Club Montepulciano which was a hugely influential lounge club we ran for 11 years. That’s probably a story for another day.
Regarding biggest success, I would say I’m most proud of just doing it… the first Lemon 12″ vinyl single sold out very quickly and was a club staple at the time, getting released right around the world on a variety of labels. It felt like a big creative step for me then and opened a lot of doors to DJing internationally.
In the end though, I stopped because I had my first child who was born disabled. It was impossible to continue working as I was and look after him. That cemented working primarily from home in Brighton and concentrating more on the label side of things.
Finishing and releasing the 2nd Lemon album and starting Freshly Squeezed all happened around that time and was an incredibly difficult change of direction as you might imagine.
The last solo record I was really able to make (and finish) was Deep Henderson which is the only thing I put out under the Nick Hollywood name but might have been the start of a 3rd Lemon album if things had been different.
03. LadyDot: I can’t help but ask, of course, when and why did you become interested in Electro Swing as a musical genre? What impressed and captivated you most about it? When did you realise that this was the musical genre that your label should follow (which, by the way, I’ll ask you about in the next
question)?
Nick Hollywood: Back in 2008/9 there was no genre called Electro Swing. I remember when I was creating the centre-spread artwork for the first White Mink album, trying to conceptualise what would form the template for a look of Electro Swing. (pic to follow)
The style was actually based on more of a 1920’s style (as I said, I had studied period costume as part of my degree course) while swing is of course a music more associated with the 40’s. But it seems that the 20’s look fitted better… it’s certainly stuck.
Anyway, I had fallen in love with a few one-off records which shared a similar sound namely Chambermaid Swing by Parov Stelar, Memories by Waldeck, the first Caravan Palace album of course and Lucas with the Lid Off by Lucas. When I then heard Gry with FM Einheit’s Princess Crocodile, I knew I had to make a compilation of this new sound.
Princess Crocodile was the first record we tried to license and the last to finally come on board.
So the White Mink : Black Cotton series was born, subtitled Electro Swing versus Speakeasy Jazz. I had a friend, El Nino (RIP) who ran a very cool, very dressed-up vintage club called Black Cotton playing old dirty swing and jazz, often 78’s! This formed one side of the album with the new Electro Swing releases the other.
White Mink : Black Cotton was the first UK album to use the term Electro Swing and was released at almost exactly the same time as the first Wagram compilation which also used the name Electro Swing. Having come from a club background, we also launched the Electro Swing club in London at the same time. 2009. Mixmag called the album “Electro Swing’s first landmark moment”.
04. LadyDot: Okay, let’s perhaps get to the main thread of this interview. Your label Freshly Squeezed Music is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year (in fact, already in June). Huge congratulations! The first album you released was your ‘With a Twist’ album. How long did you have to wait for your first
big success? Of the albums (or singles) you’ve released so far, which is your personal biggest success?
Nick Hollywood: Everyone gauges success differently. We were already selling a decent number of the Lemon releases on my previous label as well as compilation albums and other artist albums. When I launched Freshly Squeezed we were having a lot of early success with syncs which really helped pay the bills.
(In those days sync fees were much bigger than they are now. We also had a lot of music in TV shows.)
The first Freshly Squeezed release, ZESTCD001 was my second Lemon album and launched the label in 2005. But it wasn’t until the White Mink series that things really started to take off in a different way.
As well as huge press success and the spin-off club nights, the album itself went Silver (which was quite a big deal at the time) and was having to be re-pressed 1000 units at a time every few weeks at one point as we had copies in stores like Urban Outfitters and fashion shops as well as traditional record shops.
It was a much higher volume of sales than we’d experienced before. It was actually incredibly hard to keep up at that point.
05. LadyDot: Actually, I would like to ask you about where you got the idea for this ‘citrus’ naming: ‘Lemon’ as your artistic pseudonym, ‘Freshly Squeezed Music’ as the label name, ‘ZEST’ as the numbering of the label’s catalogue…?
Nick Hollywood: Haha. Ok – lets clear that up. ‘Lemon’ is a slang term in the UK for an unreliable second hand car. I liked the name because it was ironic. To say something was a Lemon meant it was not very good.
The look of the first album was also kind of a parody of badly designed packaging… very kitsch. Lemon was quite well known on the underground dance scene in London, so when I started the new label and was set to release my second album, of course the label name had to be Freshly Squeezed.
Then we had to come up with a 4 letter identifier code for the catalogue numbers for our distributor. ZEST was the obvious choice…
06. LadyDot: On the Freshly Squeezed Music label, artists such as the Swingrowers, Swing Republic, Little Violet, Riff Kitten, Atom Smith and many, many more are releasing their music. How did you come to collaborate with them? How did it happen that you discovered these artists?
Nick Hollywood: With the success of the White Mink compilation series and also putting on all the events from the Electro Swing club in London to the White Mink events in London, Brighton and Bath, people started to approach me with their music.
I was just in the lucky position of being pretty much the only label putting out the music. Wagram released Caravan Palace but otherwise were a compilation label and Parov had his own Etage Noir label, but didn’t really sign much other stuff.
First was Jem Stone who was one of the founders of the world famous breakbeat label Finger Lickin’ looking for a home for some Swing tracks he’d created… he just had his finger on the pulse. Next were Swing Republic. I had heard On The Downbeat which I wanted to license as a track for White Mink 2. It then turned out there was an entire album of that stuff (the album ‘Electro Swing Republic’) which had been made but they couldn’t find a label for… Swingrowers then appeared with an incredible mix tape which I loved.
Loredana would sing over the top of Roberto DJing. I booked them to do a festival slot with me and we ended up signing them. They are very much family having stayed with me in Brighton so many times! Others just followed naturally.
07. LadyDot: Running a music label is not an easy thing to do, as there is a whole lot of work to do and coordinating other people’s work on a project. How do you manage this? Does anyone help you? What exactly do you do at Freshly Squeezed Music and what responsibilities do you carry out
yourself?
Nick Hollywood: Again, it’s complicated. I am lucky coming from a design background which I think really helped in the early days especially with graphics and developing a look and style to everything we do.
We still use a team of designers though on a project by project basis.
I have also been able to work with amazing people from Event Producers, to Festival Curators, to label staff and creatives. In Brighton we have a very vibrant music scene and some good music and art colleges. I have had a great series of people start their career in the music industry via Freshly. People I’ve had on my team have included lawyers, staff later headhunted to work for Google on Google Play, someone now the singer in a very famous indie band (I shan’t name them!) and many, many more…
There is also a network of other local labels that support and share info with one another like Tru Thoughts, Skint, Jalapeno, Catskills, Mr Bongo, Pussyfoot, Fatcat to name just a few. We also host The Great Escape music industry festival and conference every year.
Working at a small label such as ours usually means everyone getting on with everything. The best staff are all rounders who are working on social media campaigns one week and producing a video the next. The work is never done and there is never enough time to complete every task one could.
My main role these days tends to be A&R, working with artists to develop their sound and then to plan out a marketing strategy and campaign, contracts and syncs. Art and design. Oh and the dreaded accounting!
I met someone who had a great label job description I might borrow: Head of Risk Taking!
08. LadyDot: I have heard that you have also worked on Parov Stelar and Caravan Palace concerts in the UK, in addition to organising other various music events. Please tell us more about this. Also, please tell our readers what White Mink was?
Nick Hollywood: So White Mink as I’ve said started as a compilation series and we did double albums of Vintage and Electro Swing.
The sound of the CDs set the blueprint for the events (“the sounds and style of the 1920s and 30s turned upside down and smuggled into the 21st century!”) where the nights began very vintage styled in terms of the music but became increasingly electro as the evening wore on… there was usually cabaret, burlesque and 2 live bands – one vintage and one electro swing, and a VERY dressed up audience. Doing it this way gave the events a trajectory that started sophisticated and jazzy but accelerated to become increasingly loud and, let’s just say, debauched! Fun.
Even from the very first branded White Mink event – a 700 cap Dome at the Brighton Festival in 2010 – it was a sell out. Leading up to that the first nights we ran before that were Electro Swing at the Book Club in London which I started with my friend Chris Tofu (who I’d known from back in the Club Montepulciano days and who had been part of Lost Vagueness – there’s a film if you’re interested. I think it’s on Netflix) and subsequently a programmer at Glastonbury festival – and literally from week 1 there were massive queues around the block to get in. That club night ran for many years. White Mink was a version of the same thing, settling into a residency in Brighton initially and was sold out at all but about 3 shows until I stopped it in 2019. (After 25 years running events!) I think at the peak we did 13 summer festival stages (programming anything from 2 – 10 bands in one evening) plus 3 gigs every month, Brighton, London Village Underground, and Bath Komedia. On top of the label, a home life, a radio show and working for Universal. It was intense.
Chris and I put on the debut London gig by Parov Stelar at Koko (if you watch his ‘Voodoo Sonic Documentary’, I’m in it telling the story of that show) and the same with Caravan Palace at both Koko and a year or so later at the Shepherds Bush Empire and Brighton Concorde all of which were also sold out in double quick time and almost all by word of mouth!
There’s a nice clip of the Caravan Palace show at Koko here. I’ll also send some photos of gigs with them. It was a very exciting moment.
The band kindly gave me copies signed by the whole band of their first vinyl albums… and actually Parov also gave me a signed copy of one of his records with a sleeve he’d printed himself!
I treasure those!
09. LadyDot: You once mentioned to me that you were a vinyl record collector for most of your life. Please tell us more about that. What do you like most about music played through a turntable? Which albums from your collection are your favourites? What tracks have you been listening to most recently (apart from those you release on your label, of course)?
Nick Hollywood: I always loved music of course but I really started to get hooked on rare and vintage vinyl when I stopped smoking. I read the Alan Carr book The Easy Way to Stop Smoking. He said to make a note of the amount of money you were saving by not smoking, to spend it instead on something else.
I decided to use the money to buy a record a week which is what I did. This coincided with the Rare Groove and first Acid Jazz movement in London and a guy called Jazzman Gerald (who has gone on to run his own successful vintage label) who used to have a small record and tape stall on the weekends at Camden. I bought many records from him which he brought over from the states – rare stuff like Maceo Parker (James Brown’s sax player solo stuff) or things like old Blue Note records. He introduced me to a lot of amazing music. A lot of people subsequently got into that stuff with the whole Jazz Dance scene, but in the early days it was a very small collectors group and the records weren’t as expensive as they became later. Some Blue Note titles fetch many thousands of £s nowadays.
The sound of vinyl of course is amazing loudly though a good system, especially old jazz, but for me the cover art, the quality of design and print are all what adds to the appeal. I love the vintage graphics and photography. The object. You can literally feel the quality.
I also always really loved to follow a label from companies like Stiff Records, 2 Tone, Factory Records, 4AD as I grew up – then to Blue Note, Impulse, Pacific Jazz through to more recent stuff. I love a well curated label. I worked for a time on a Joint Venture with Universal Records whose imprints included amazing labels like Island Records, Verve, Capitol, Decca, EMI, Fiction, Parlophone.
Personal favourites – I probably need to start a blog. Depends on mood of course, but I have some rare Chet Baker albums that I wouldn’t want to be without.
I do love my 60’s jazz. You can listen to some of my old radio shows here.
10. LadyDot: Finally, my favourite question, as always! What are your musical plans for the future? Can we expect any surprises in June to celebrate Freshly Squeezed Music’s 20th anniversary?
Nick Hollywood: The first surprise is that we won’t be celebrating in June… the 20×25 compilation in which 25 artists remix 20 classic tracks from the catalogue will be out in September and our ‘official’ celebrations will be around that.
As for the future, I feel amazingly lucky to have had such an incredible life and opportunity in music. None of it was by design, all the best bits by accident. This has been a full time job for me for pretty much my entire life which really is extraordinary and for which I am genuinely grateful every single day.
What I have learnt is to never try to second guess what you will end up doing. One of the best things about being an independent is you can change and move quickly as things develop.
I value the freedom to follow my instincts and go where they take me.
I always keep in mind the principle that everything we release has to be of the very highest quality – that is always the number 1 priority – but we have never been a single genre label and I am open to the ways in which things develop.
I also have a few other labels that are in completely different areas (for example a neo classical label releasing stuff like Nils Frahm) that is ongoing. So who knows? Certainly not me….
Interview by LadyDot; Date: 2025-05-26
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