#stuart leath

The hardest working man in music, Stuart Leath unpacks the 15,000-strong record collection behind the trailblazing Emotional Rescue, and his five (!) other labels.

Stuart Leath – Chuggy to his friends – is rightly known as one of the most-prolific one-man operations in underground music.

A fiend for rare post-punk, disco, house (and more), who cut his teeth raving in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Leath talks of himself as something of an elder when it comes to the reissues game, from digging in obscure locations, basements and via record dealers, to being an early adopter of the Internet and all its record buying possibilities.

But while contemporaries now mine YouTube algorithms for the next Midori Takada, Chuggy just keeps on doing his own thing in the background, living up to a nickname he received at those free party sound systems for his motorik stamina on the dance floor.

"I sort of know roughly what I’m looking for as it’s a sound, a vibe. This is my reissue pile, the ones that I’m either reissuing or want to reissue [pointing to a stack almost a metre long]. I usually find out who plays on each record and then go from there. [...] I was a big house music record collector, and I had already been into big post-punk and new wave before, but when I first started digging for disco I ended up joining the dots. [...] I used to hang around people who worked in record shops and they would pull out, say, Yusef Lateef’s Earthly Delights and that sends you off on a jazz journey. When I listened to Sun Ra for the first time and liked it I was so relieved because it felt like I’d passed the test. I guess you can’t lie to yourself."

Stuart Leath of Emotional Rescue Interview in Vinyl Factory