Bakelite
Records

Bakelite Records began in 1969, in a small studio hidden on an ordinary American street.

It was never a famous place. The equipment was modest, the budgets were small, and most of the artists came from nearby. But the studio had a sound: warm, raw, imperfect, and full of life.

Its first great voices were Goldie Cameron and Ruby Valence.

Their records were pressed in small numbers and rarely travelled far, but locally they mattered. People played them at parties, in cars, in kitchens, and through open windows. Over time, the songs became part of the neighbourhood’s memory.

Then the sessions slowed.

By the late 1970s, the studio had almost gone silent. The original team moved on, the doors closed, and Bakelite remained untouched for years. Inside, the equipment, photographs, vinyl records and tape boxes stayed where they had been left.

In the late 1990s, a new generation reopened the building.

While restoring the studio, they discovered forgotten recordings by Goldie Cameron and Ruby Valence: alternate takes, unfinished songs, lost sessions and unlabelled reels. Instead of turning Bakelite into a museum, they decided to bring it back to life.

The old recordings were restored. New artists were welcomed in.

At the heart of the studio is The Bakelites, Bakelite’s ever-changing house band. Part all-star collective, part musical laboratory, the group reshapes itself according to each project. Its music can move from soul and funk to jazz, acid jazz, cinematic scores and stranger territories, with a catalogue built mainly around instrumentals.

Today, Bakelite Records produces contemporary musicians such as Steve Macwin and Lou Vernet, while continuing to uncover fragments of its past.

The street has changed. The studio has changed.

But the idea remains the same:

some songs deserve to exist, even before the world knows it needs them.

Goldie Cameron and his band were in Italy for a short run of concerts. That evening, they were due to play a small club in Brera, the kind of place where the stage was barely higher than the audience and every instrument had to fight for space.

During the afternoon soundcheck, Leon Bishop sat behind the Rhodes while the engineers adjusted the microphones and monitors. Goldie tested a few lines at the front of the stage. The drummer tapped the snare. The bass player repeated the same four notes.

Then Leon began to play.

It was not part of the set. Just a loose sequence of chords at first, something to test the keyboard. But within seconds, the chords became a groove. Leon shifted the rhythm, opened the harmony, and turned an ordinary soundcheck into something nobody in the room had expected.

The local sound engineer, a man from Piedmont, stopped what he was doing and listened.

When Leon finally lifted his hands from the keys, the engineer laughed, shook his head, and said:

“Robadmat.”

Leon looked at Goldie, confused.

“What does that mean?”

The engineer explained that robadmat was a Piedmontese expression meaning something close to “crazy stuff”, “something completely mad”, or simply “that’s insane.”

Goldie smiled.

“Robadmat,” he repeated. “That’s you.”

The nickname followed Leon onto the stage that night. Then into the next rehearsal, the next recording session, and eventually onto the tapes themselves.

Leon Bishop remained his real name.

But from Milan onward, whenever the music went somewhere nobody had planned, he became Robadmat.

When Bakelite Records began reopening its archives, the first discoveries were the recordings themselves: unfinished reels, unmarked cassettes, acetates, alternate takes and old vinyl pressings whose histories had become difficult to reconstruct.

The musicians were another matter.

Names appeared on tape boxes, session sheets and handwritten studio notes, sometimes without surnames, dates or any explanation of who had played what. One name kept returning beside the keyboards: Leon Bishop.

On Goldie Cameron’s recordings, Bishop’s Rhodes was unmistakable. His playing never crowded the song. It moved underneath it, bending the harmony slightly, leaving small spaces and unexpected turns behind the voice.

The label eventually found him and invited him back to the studio in 2015.

He arrived older, quieter and largely uninterested in nostalgia. Rather than recreating the old sessions, he listened to the surviving tapes and began playing against them: new chords beneath unfinished vocals, alternate passages, slower versions and fragments that had never become complete songs.

Those sessions became known as the Robadmat Edits.

Over the following decade, Bishop continued working with a new generation of Bakelite musicians. He played with contemporary singers, producers and engineers who knew his recordings long before they knew the man behind them.

Some sessions began with an old tape. Others began with nothing more than a Rhodes, a rhythm and a conversation.

The result was not a reconstruction of the past. It was a continuation.

Leon “Robadmat” Bishop had returned to Bakelite, not as an archive discovery, but as a working musician whose sound could still move naturally between eras.