Blood Records CEO Craig Evans has spoken to NME about the company’s infamous vinyl release of the film soundtrack to Saltburn. Revealed last month, the record is filled with cloudy bathwater in reference to the movie’s most notorious scene, which sees Oliver (Barry Keoghan) spy on Felix (Jacob Elordi) as the latter masturbates in the bath. Oliver later licks the bathwater from the plug hole.
Released via Bad World, a Blood Records subsidiary dedicated to liquid-filled vinyl, the announcement immediately went viral. A typical response on Twitter/X concluded: “This is mega nasty on so many levels”, while comments on the Bad World Instagram account were more enthusiastic. “Yessss easiest purchase choice I’ve ever made right there,” wrote one fan.
This is the second release from Bad World, following the blue liquid-filled edition of The 1975’s ‘Being Funny In A Foreign Language’ that was also announced last month. Blood Records, meanwhile, has been in operation since 2018 and specialises in more general special-edition vinyl. Evans claims Bad World’s top-secret, patented and machine-led means of producing liquid-filled vinyl means that, unlike other manufacturers, they do not rely on manual methods that compromise on sound quality.
The 37-year-old, who heads up Blood (which employs four members of staff including himself) from his home in Milton Keynes, discussed going viral and revealed how many copies of the Saltburn soundtrack they’ve sold. He said that, at the time of our conversation, Bad World had “seven or eight campaigns” earmarked for 2024.
NME: Hi Craig! Have you been surprised by the response to the record?
Craig Evans: “No, I haven’t actually been that surprised by it. We knew it was gonna be very evocative. And it was sort of the perfect thing, because obviously Saltburn itself was supposed to shock people, and we wanted to match that with a product that equally shocked people. In terms of responses, some of the national press headlines have been fairly amusing. We’ve been laughing at all the ways the tabloid media can avoid saying the word ‘semen’.”
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Do you enjoy winding people up, then?
“The worst kind of art to me is vanilla art. You want something that causes a really visceral reaction. When I showed anyone that record prior to us releasing it, in label meetings and things like that, I watched people recoil in horror. That’s the exact response we wanted. And the social media behind it has done very well, which again we expected because it’s something that creates quite a strong reaction. It’s the sort of thing people can put on WhatsApp groups to share with their mates.”
What was it like in the meeting when you first had the idea?
“The minute the word Saltburn came up, we all just laughed and immediately went: ‘Yeah, gotta be bathwater.’ It was so stupidly obvious. Even when I went to people before announcing it, I’ve gone: ‘Oh, we’re doing the Saltburn soundtrack…’ And people have gone: ‘Oh no, you’ve done bathwater, haven’t you?’”
The sold-out Saltburn vinyl retails at £45 and you’ve said you want Bad World’s records to be “affordable and available to all”. Is semen-filled vinyl really a basic human right?
“With vinyl in general, there is an elitism to the format. We make records that have special effects and are limited and things like that, so our company could be very elitist. We could be very pretentious about the format, but actually we want everyone to feel they could own records and we don’t want price to be a barrier to entry. That experience of physical music is really important and the younger generation have never had to have that experience, so it’s really astounding that they’re buying [vinyl] in the way that they are. We should keep that going because it’s a great experience. It connects them to music more.”
So your liquid-filled records are actually about appreciating music?
“We’re always looking at ways we can enhance the art direction around records. Artists spend so much time and energy and so much of their lives creating these albums, and so many of those albums end up with really, really underwhelming physical releases where the art direction doesn’t match the quality of the music. We’re always looking at: ‘How can we create something where we bring our bit to the table?’ We’re like, ‘You’ve made this amazing record; we’re now gonna try and make the artwork match how great that record is.’ And this gives us a ton of opportunities to do that.”
Billie Eilish and Coldplay recently made headlines with records made of recycled materials. Are you contributing to a Bad World with gimmicky products that might be forgotten once the owner has snapped them on Instagram?
“The good thing about this is that because it’s made in the same way that normal vinyl records are made, we can use bio-vinyl to make them. There are five or six different formats coming to market at the moment that are massively reducing carbon emissions during the manufacturing process. And we know that vinyl records are very rarely thrown away – they’re usually resold and moved on to different places. So the actual carbon input is the thing that as an industry we need to focus on more than anything. [Those new compounds] are reducing emissions by 60/70 per cent.”
And what about the liquid inside the Saltburn record? Is it, er, man-made?
“I can’t say exactly what the liquid is in the middle, but it is derived from vegetables, so it is actually an organic material. I would not recommend it, but you could actually drink it…”
How many copies of the Saltburn vinyl have you shifted?
“We are probably gonna do 20,000 units on that. On an average week, that would probably give you a Number One album in this country. To be honest, with 15,000 you’re up there and with 10,000 you’re in the Top Three. With Blood Records, we track our sales with the Official Charts versus other retailers and we’re almost always the top-selling format. We’ll often find we can move the chart metric with our sales – sometimes it’s as much as 30 or 40 per cent of the vinyl sales on an album campaign.”
How many copies did you sell of The 1975 album?
“18,500… The volumes are pretty wild. Those are quite jaw-on-the-floor-type numbers. To give you an idea, on Blood Records the biggest run we’ve done to date is Oasis – we did 15,000 copies of ‘The Masterplan’ reissue.”
What’s the essential ethos behind Blood Records/Bad World?
“I look at going into a retailer and buying a vinyl record like riverboating, and I want the experience that people have, when buying records off of me, to be like bungee jumping. I want it to be this adrenaline-fuelled experience. I want a lot of emotion attached to it… We’ve tapped into a particular kind of zeitgeist with young people. It’s about moving a conversation forward. It’s about creating something that hasn’t been created before.
“Ultimately, it’s the same as if you walk into an art gallery [and see] people making art that’s a nice scene, or a landscape, versus a piece of street art that’s supposed to evoke a really strong reaction. That’s what we want to do.”
The tracklist for the official Saltburn soundtrack is:
Bloc Party – ‘This Modern Love’
Ladytron – ‘Destroy Everything You Touch’
Cold War Kids – ‘Hang Me Up To Dry’
Arcade Fire – ‘No Cars Go’
Tomcraft – ‘Lonliness’
Mason Vs Princess Superstar – ‘Perfect’
Sophie Ellis-Bextor – ‘Murder On The Dancefloor’
MGMT – ‘Time To Pretend’
Babybird – ‘You’re Gorgeous’
Girls Aloud – ‘Sound Of The Underground’
The Killers – ‘Mr Brightside’
Benny Benassi & The Biz – ‘Satisfaction’
The Cheeky Girls – ‘Have A Cheeky Christmas’