Scenic route is underground music’s most exciting label

If you’re 19 years old, have recently moved to London, and you’re in search of the most inspiring music scene in town, where do you look? Certainly not Spotify, whose playlists only offer a dissociated, context-free version of ​“music discovery”. And probably not your local live music venue, whose bookings likely comprise menacingly ​“fun” electroclash revival acts and dour, rich-kid anticapitalist post-punk bands.

With any luck, you’ll see a pretty flyer flash across your Instagram feed inviting you to Spanners, a tiny oasis of a venue under an arch in South London best-known for fabulously mixed and esoteric line-ups. If you’re really lucky, the flyer will include those two magic words: Scenic Route.

Scenic Route is, simply put, a label and an events series. But lately it’s been feeling it might be much more than that: a genuine alternative to all the tastemaker festivals and club nights that claim to have a point of view, but actually just book the same small pool of industry-vetted acts over and over.

Founded in 2017 by Theo Fabunmi-Stone and Jon Phoenix, in recent years Scenic Route has been on a hot streak. The label has released two volumes of the The Road Less Travelled compilations – one in 2022, another last year – which almost act as scene reports, highlighting some of the most interesting underground pop acts from across the globe. There are plenty of cool labels around, but Scenic Route feels unique, in large part because it doesn’t seem to see pop music and challenging music as mutually exclusive. And then there’s the events, which typify a sense of freedom and open mindedness that’s otherwise in short supply.

Spanners is Scenic Route’s unofficial clubhouse, and it’s part of a network of intimate South London venues, including Ormside Projects and Avalon Cafe, which is energising DIY music in the city. At a recent Scenic Route show at Spanners, as I crammed into the side of the arch, I watched richly textured sets from the witty, emo and Americana-inspired Swedish band Horse Vision and Danish ambient pop musician Molina. Over the past year or so, I’ve also seen both the wobbly Bristol DJ K Means and atmospheric indie rock musician Mark William Lewis at Spanners; I wasn’t quick enough to get tickets to shows featuring buzzy artists like Chanel Beads and Milan W.

Jon and Theo have a knack for booking exactly what all of London’s coolest people seem to be interested in at the exact right moment. Spanners’ tiny capacity – less than 80 on a good day, especially if a full band is playing – according to Theo, is becoming a slight problem. ​“Spanners is in Scenic Route’s DNA, and we’re kind of outgrowing it, but we don’t want to move from there. We’re trying these other venues, but ultimately we want to still be showing up at Spanners,” he says. ​“It’s like: How do we keep doing what makes Scenic Route great while growing authentically at the same time?”

Last month, Scenic Route sold-out the ICA’s 400 capacity venue. Having released the first song by Coined, the duo of revered Danish songwriters Astrid Sonne and Fine Glindvad, on The Road Less Travelled Vol. 2, Scenic Route hosted the project’s first ever performance in the legendary art institution. Also on the bill was experimental New York producer Anysia Kym and South London rapper Jadasea, who shared the stage to perform material from their collaborative album Pressure Sensitive, as well as their own disparate catalogues.

That nearly every Scenic Route show is selling out, and selling out fast, is testament to its success: small and mid-sized venues across the UK are closing at an alarming rate. Bands are cancelling tours with increasing frequency, and the overall volume of live music events in the country has dropped dramatically. Shifting 80 tickets at Spanners might not seem like a huge deal, but it is reassuring to know that there’s still a strong community of open-minded music fans out there.

Jon and Theo met in the mid-2010s in a much more corporate setting: Red Bull’s London offices, where they both worked in the music department ​“selling cans and doing God’s work,” as Theo puts it. They bonded over each other’s fairly niche tastes – hip-hop inspired club producers such as Delroy Edwards, the prolific Belgian label Stroom, electronic label The Trilogy Tapes, and the alt hip-hop and beat LA label Stones Throw. Outside of work they’d bump into each other in the club and in 2017, at Croatia’s Dimensions festival, they became ​“bound by Theo Parrish” according to Jon.

The pair started throwing parties in Peckham, booking respected selectors such as OK Williams, NTS resident Anu and the Melbourne-via-Perth DJ Toni Yotzi. In 2019, they dropped the first Scenic Route release, an EP of crunchy club tracks by Liam Wachs, aka Desert Sound Colony. Jon says ​“it would have been super easy” to stick to house, but they opted to forgo aesthetic coherence in favour of a label that better represented their taste. Their second release was Immersion Chamber, the April 2020 debut album by London jazz-rock band Lunch Money Life. The Road Less Travelled Vol 1 featured off-kilter pop and experimental musicians like Spivak, System Olympia and Nourished By Time.

Theo and Jon discovered Nourished By Time – the critically acclaimed project of Baltimore songwriter Marcus Brown – via Newcastle-raised musician and dancer Bianca Scout, who sent them a link to Brown’s Soundcloud, which at the time had ​“single digit followers,” recalls Jon. Enamoured by his off-kilter combination of Arthur Russell-style weirdo pop and distinctive voice, Theo and Jon hit him up and asked to put his demo Wild Thang, Sweet Thang on The Road Less Travelled, and then a single that Brown ended up calling Erotic Probiotic.

“They told me what their goal was – like, they wanted to be that middle man between the underground and bigger labels, or help artists get signed,” says Marcus, who is now managed by Theo. ​“Jon and Theo both have really good ears – all the artists they’ve put out are really amazing. The deals are pretty fair, they’re 50/​50. For me, it was a good introduction to the music industry without signing a crazy multi-page deal with confusing words.”

Marcus found a small group of devoted fans, including New York producer Yaeji, who recruited Brown for guest vocals on her album With A Hammer, as well as cult London post-punk band Dry Cleaning, who took him on tour. The debut Nourished by Time album Erotic Probiotic 2, released in 2023, became Scenic Route’s first breakout success, garnering a Best New Music review on Pitchfork and selling out multiple vinyl runs. It boosted the profiles of both Marcus, who has since signed to XL Recordings, and Scenic Route, but it didn’t change Jon and Theo’s devotion to taking left-turns. They followed up Erotic Probiotic 2 with Eyes, an album by the London-based French violinist and singer Vanessa Bedoret, which was its own kind of success, earning a rave Boomkat write up and leading to a show at Pitchfork Festival London. ​“It’s super easy to go ​‘How can we find another Nourished by Time’,” says Jon. ​“But we knew that it was about finding an artist that we truly believed in and we’re in awe of, and that was Vanessa.”

Scenic Route capped off 2024 with the first vinyl releases of Mark William Lewis’s beloved underground indie EPs Pleasure Is Everything and God Complex, which sold out instantly. ​“Scenic Route feels very open in regards to genre, and feels like it’s more about good music, or artists who are just trying to find their own thing,” says Lewis. ​“It puts people together in a way that’s quite free – there can be a lot of contrast in a Scenic Route night, but it always works, and always feels like people are coming from the same kind of place.”

That blithely low-key approach to running a label is all too rare right now; Jon and Theo are, fundamentally, earnest and good natured music fans who want to share that love with the world. Lewis sees an appealing simplicity in what they do: ​“It’s about actually reflecting the multitudes of what’s going on in London, or what’s going on in music. I don’t know. I just think it’s cool.”