Unsung Podcast

If you've been tuned into the news around the Scottish grassroots music scene at any point in the last few weeks, you'll likely have seen there's been a bit of controversy brewing around King Tut's Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow and their owners, DF Concerts.
Following a piece published in The Bell, where numerous people spoke out about the poor terms that King Tut's offers to emerging artists, various corners of social media were ablaze with righteous fury. It prompted DF to threaten to take The Bell to court, and also saw The Herald get in on the action. So we think it's fair to say that this is a blaze that might be threatening to run amok.
The terms that King Tut's offers has been something of a known issue in the Scottish music community for a number of years, and whilst there are certainly reasons for small artists to be aggrieved (reasons which we share), the matter is not quite as clear cut as The Bell article would have you think.
On this week's episode we draw from our own experiences as musicians and promoters to try to give a more complete picture of the issue. We also do a wee exercise where we map out whether putting on gigs yourself is more cost effective, using examples of the rates offered by many venues in Glasgow to paint a picture of what the costs of running a show yourself actually are.
Which ultimately leads us to ask a few questions: is what King Tut's offer fair? Is it just better to put on gigs yourself? And if King Tut's parent company, DF Concerts, used their corporate backing to pay artists more, what might be the outcome of that on the wider grassroots scene as a whole?
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This week we sit down with Jon Zipp of The Zips — one of Glasgow's original 1977 punk bands — for a conversation that doubles as an oral history of Scottish punk.
The Zips' story is a strange and charming one. Formed in '77, gigging by '78, split by the end of 1980 after two small-run EPs — 500 copies of the debut, sold out in six weeks — the band lay dormant for over two decades until a record collector tracked down the drummer via the West of Scotland phone book. It turned out The Zips' records had been bootlegged all over Europe, their EPs had become prized collectors' items, and a new generation of bands citing the Clash and Buzzcocks as influences had made the world safe for them again. They've been at it ever since, complete with a "Zips USA" franchise lineup, European squat tours.
But the real revelation of this episode is John's first-hand account of Glasgow's infamous punk "ban". In the late 1970s, Glasgow City Council — having decided after a Stranglers gig at the City Hall that the city "had enough hooligans without importing them from down south" — made it known that any pub or venue hosting punk bands risked losing its licence. The effect was chilling: a generation of would-be Glasgow punk bands strangled at birth, touring acts like Elvis Costello turned away on the day of the show, and a city now famed as one of the great music capitals of the world temporarily hostile to the most vital music of its era.
Along the way we get John's reflections on punk's flirtation with fascist imagery and provocation, why John Lydon is his biggest disappointment (and Paul Weller one of his quiet triumphs), the surprising resurgence of very young audiences going wild for original 77-style punk, and a truly outrageous tale of how, with his post Zips band in the 80, how he blagged — via the Mitchell Library's phone books and Harvey Goldsmith's office — onto a 30,000-capacity bill at Ibrox with Rod Stewart in 1983.

We reach into the vault this week to extra an old bonus episode that has a fairly unique format we liked to called the Split 7". In this episode, we talk build our own festival line ups.
ORIGINAL SHOW NOTE
We’re going to be 4 years old soon and for pretty much every single week of those 4 years (with the sole of exception of around this time last year when a technical issue made us lose an entire episode) we’ve been able to release an episode a week. However, this week we just couldn’t. Some life things got in the way and we had to take care of that. We couldn’t just leave everyone hanging though, so we decided to reach way back into our vault of bonus content and excise this little gem from back in October 2019. One of our subscribers, Chris Hynd, asked us what our perfect festival line-up would be and we duly obliged. So enjoy as Chris, Mark and Dave talk about who would play their festivals. We will return next week with special guest Neil from The Accordion Podcast as we talk about Finelines by My Vitrol.

In this interview, Mark Davyd, founder and CEO of Music Venue Trust, mentions the "famous" and famously misattributed Hunter S. Thompson quote about the music industry. It goes "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
It's now common knowledge that Thompson didn't actually say this, or at the very least if he did it wasn't about the music industry. Mark acknowledges as much in this interview. And yet, it remains a perfect summation of the music industry at large even today, and in this interview Mark expounds upon that at length.
In April 2026 he unleashed a series of 4 Substack posts which shone a light on the dodgy dealings of the UK's performing rights body PRS for Music. In them, he details how each year millions of pounds earmarked for artists who perform in grassroots music venues is "held" by PRS because they are unable to attribute it to anyone — ostensibly because many of the artists who are due it have never signed up to PRS, and thus the money goes unclaimed. After 3 years, this money is then distributed to the largest music publishers and most successful songwriters in the world.
The true figure is difficult to ascertain due to the opaque nature of PRS' reporting, but it is estimated to be around £18m — more than the combined profit generated by all 800+ grassroots music venues in the UK each year. What's happening is, in effect, a reverse Robin Hood scenario where huge amounts of money are being transferred to the most high-profile, wealthiest musicians and publishers.
In this episode we dive deep into those 4 articles with Mark, getting to the heart of all that is rotten with the current PRS model, the organisation's response, and some suggestions for how it might be fixed.
You can read Mark's articles here: Part 1: https://markdavyd.substack.com/p/prs-for-music-and-the-grassroots Part 2: https://markdavyd.substack.com/p/prs-for-music-and-the-grassroots-5a0 Part 3: https://markdavyd.substack.com/p/prs-for-music-and-the-grassroots-618 Part 4: https://markdavyd.substack.com/p/prs-for-music-and-the-grassroots-3d9
Highlights:
00:00 Grassroots Cash Grab
00:24 Meet the Hosts
01:46 What Music Venues Trust Does
03:30 COVID Crisis Response
07:23 Venue People Helping Venues
09:16 Why PRS Matters Here
12:45 How PRS Works
16:02 Unclaimed Royalties Problem
21:35 Archaic Setlist System
23:22 Tariff LP vs Tariff P
27:35 Real World Money Example
30:40 Show Me the Money
32:00 Unclaimed Royalties Black Box
32:58 Venue Economics And Losses
34:00 Rules Court Case And Publishers
35:53 Broken Reform Promises
39:20 Why PRS Won't Change
42:00 Estimated Bills And CCJs
44:44 Scale Of Grassroots Impact
48:18 Audio Recognition Solution
55:08 PRS Rebuttals And Backlash
59:16 Wrap Up And Where To Read

You might think you don't know Christophe Szpajdel's work. You almost certainly do. The Emperor logo. The Metallica Mankind clip. The Rihanna lettering that went a hundred feet high at the MTV VMAs. If you've spent any time near heavy music, his hand has been on things you've stared at without knowing his name.
This week we sit down with the man known as Lord of the Logos — Belgian-born, Devon-based, currently on shift at the Co-op — to talk about a career that has produced somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 logos, and counting. We get into his early years doodling in school notebooks in Liège, the Art Nouveau obsession that underpins everything, and how a chance encounter on the Tube ended with his work displayed at one of the biggest awards shows on the planet for £500 — a fee he only learned was for Rihanna after he'd already quoted it.
We cover the Emperor logo that defined his reputation, the Metallica commission that required him to draw at Heathrow five hours before a flight to Japan, and the Foo Fighters Christmas jumper that was a mutilation of his work, and what he did about it. We also discuss the readability question that divides the scene, the three-month creative block triggered by a South Korean band, his forestry degree and why nature sits at the centre of everything he makes, and the political stance on Ukraine that has cost him ten logos in one go.
The question running through all of it: how does someone this prolific stay original?
Highlights
00:00 Intro
01:00 Meet Christophe Szpajdel — Lord of the Logos
04:00 Logo Count and the Goal of 20,000 by 2030
06:00 The Process Explained
09:00 The Unsung Logo and Chris's Tattoo
10:00 Background: Belgium, Poland, Ukraine, Devon
11:00 The Co-op Day Job and Why It Works
13:00 Side Projects: Murals and the Polish Calendar
17:00 Musical Influences: Kiss, Motörhead, Celtic Frost
19:00 First Logos and Early Career
21:00 The Emperor Logo
25:00 Chilean Influence: Rick Zuniga
26:00 Nature, Art Nouveau, and the Forestry Degree
28:00 Best Work Comes from Anger or Obsession with Death
29:00 Symmetry, Creative Block, and the Client Problem
33:00 Live: Working Through the Drag Logo
38:00 The Readability Debate
43:00 The Rihanna Story
47:00 Metallica at Heathrow
53:00 The Foo Fighters Bootleg Response
54:00 The Mandy Soundtrack
57:00 AI and Market Saturation
59:00 Ukraine, Politics, and the Russian Flatmate
01:02:00 Losing Ten Logos Over a Political Stance
01:03:00 Black Metal, Church Burnings, and Forbidden Fruit
01:08:00 The Trump/Putin Artwork
01:09:00 The Books: Lord of the Logos, Archaic Modernism, Oracles in Black