Last weekend, in a candy-striped tent at the Green Man festival in Wales, a funeral took place. It was a strange kind of funeral – one with live bands, video projections and dishevelled indie types throwing shapes on the dancefloor – but a funeral nonetheless. This was the swan song of Fence Records, the independent record label and musicians' collective based in the East Neuk of Fife that launched the careers of musicians such as KT Tunstall, King Creosote and James Yorkston.
According to the label's director, Johnny Lynch, who also makes music as the Pictish Trail, Fence is now officially defunct: the Green Man showcase, where Lynch played alongside more recent signings Kid Canaveral and Monoganon, was the last official Fence event. But it was also a christening: the debut of Lynch's new label, Lost Map, which he from a caravan on the Hebridean island of Eigg. "There's more relief than sadness just now," he told me at Green Man the next morning. "Fence was the focus of the last 10 years of my life. But Lost Map will have some of the same musicians as Fence and the same DIY feel."
But is this really the end of the line for Fence? In the kind of opaque, tight-lipped dispute that could surely only ever spring up between members of the folk scene – Fence, though defined by its lo-fi, electro aesthetic, has its roots in the homespun, collective spirit of folk music – Kenny Anderson, aka King Creosote, says the label is far from dead and buried.
Anderson founded Fence in the mid-1990s but bowed out last year, leaving Lynch – who joined Fence fresh from university in 2003 – to run the label. "Having become increasingly uncomfortable with Fence Records' direction I felt I had no choice but to bow out," Anderson said in a statement posted on his website. (I tried to reach him for this article, but he wasn't available.) "However, the nail hasn't been hit into the coffin lid of Fence. It is alive and well and relaunching in January 2014."
At the moment, then, it looks like Fence may well live on, but this is still the end of an era for a label that has long been a beacon for fans of lovingly made, off-kilter indie-folk. I came quite late to the Fence party – KT Tunstall's 2005 Mercury-nominated album Eye to the Telescope first alerted me to the presence of a homegrown music scene in the unlikely setting of Fife's fishing villages, far from the homogenising presence of the major labels. Tunstall famously earned her spurs as part of what was then known as the Fence Collective, a loose affiliation of musicians that included Anderson and his brothers Gordon, a founding member of the Beta Band, and Ian, who records as Pip Dylan.
Since then, I've loved many of the albums released by Fence artists, from James Yorkston's haunting When the Haar Rolls In, to King Creosote and Jon Hopkins's Mercury-nominated Diamond Mine, the only record I know that mentions a cheese toastie in its opening seconds. On a day trip to Anstruther, the spiritual home of Fence, which has also run many gigs and festivals in and around the town, I even asked the man in the renowned seafront fish-and-chip shop if he could point me in the direction of the label's HQ (sadly, he couldn't).
But there are many far more devoted fans than me, for whom the closure of Fence – or at least Lynch's parting from it – brings real sadness. One of them is Sarah Muir, a Fife native and longtime Fence fan, who got in touch on Twitter to tell me some of her best memories of the label. "I originally fell in love with Fence around 2005, thanks to some friends," she writes. "We all bundled into a car one night and went along to an amazing wee Fence gig in a pub. No matter where I've been living, I have always made it along to their gigs. I really hope it's not the end."
