After a two-year pause, Man Power reactivates Me Me Me

After a two-year pause, Geoff Kirkwood aka Man Power reactivates Me Me Me, the record label he launched in the mid 2010s as an outlet for his own productions and a network of artists orbiting his unique corner of electronic music.

Originally launched in the mid 2010s, Me Me Me’s focus on message and feel above genre and style became known for a left leaning approach to club music that moved between house, ambient, electro and darker, more open-minded experimental territory. Its catalogue, that resisted easy categorisation, became a mainstay in the record bags of the broadest range of DJs with releases from the most varied range of music producers including Andrew Weatherall, Roman Flugel,Cici, Prins Thomas, Alinka, Axel Boman, Paul Woolford, Gerd Janson and many more

The label also houses Man Power’s two experimental ambient albums as Bedwetter and developed a reputation where each release sat slightly outside prevailing trends while still carrying weight in club spaces. That positioning allowed Me Me Me to operate as both a DJ facing label and a cultural one, rooted as much in record shop discovery as it was in peak time sets.

In the years since, Tyneside born and raised, Kirkwood has since extended his focus beyond output toward the conditions that sustain it. Less a question of releases, more one of context, where scenes take shape through repetition, proximity and sustained use rather than visibility.

The return arrives now as part of a wider North East dynamic and cultural fightback taking shape around Man Power’s own club project Are You Affiliated and his ambitious grassroots venue King Street Social Club. From their North Shields base, Me Me Me have reinvigorated nightlife in his hometown and repositioned club culture as force for placemaking, social cohesion and community regeneration, bringing artists including Caribou, The Blessed Madonna, Gerd Janson, Optimo, Daniel Avery and others to the previously little known town to join a vibrant network of artists and collaborators practising across the region Together, overlapping with photographers, charities, filmmakers, record shops, designers and creative talent, they begin to describe a localised system that privileges contribution over extraction, and presence over reach.

Kirkwood’s original intent remains central to this next phase:

“Me Me Me was always just about finding a way to sustainably share the things we cared about. As we’ve grown as people that care has extended beyond immediate gratification, but it’s still just doing enjoyable stuff that you feel matters with people that you want to spend time with”

That early period saw the label develop a cult following, with consistent DJ support reinforcing its position as a trusted source of a distinctive electronic palette. That same impulse now returns with renewed clarity, shaped by the changing conditions around music and its infrastructure:

“I stopped Me Me Me 2 years ago because uncool stuff like streaming algorithms, social media strategies, artist managers, diminishing attention spans and diminishing returns made me think “What’s the fucking point?”. Things have arguably got worse during the intervening 2 years, but the perverse irony is that they’ve gotten so bad that it now feels like there really is once again a whole bunch of good reasons to run a record label, even if those reasons are protests against things like AI Music, Gross Corporatism and the erosion of musical value by greedy streaming sites.”

The official relaunch is proceeded by the drop of an unlicensed edit from North East based composer and producer Mac Seldom. 

Stream Mac Seldom – Affirmations of Eva here.

After close to a decade in Berlin working across film scoring, spanning shorts, documentaries and features, and moving between London, Los Angeles and New York, Seldom’s first foray’s into club music found an early champion in Man Power who, beyond playing and sharing his music with prominent DJ friends, also connected the artist for releases with Skream’s Of Unsound Mind record label, and Scuba’s “Hot Flush”.

The first official Me Me Me release will follow on 21st August with catalogue entry MMM41, a three track EP from Seldom that sets the tone for the label’s next phase.

Ahead of the release, he will appear in the region supporting Max Cooper at The Glasshouse International Centre for Music, Gateshead on Thursday 21 May 2026 (a venue Man Power is no stranger to having been appointed as its Artist In Residence for 2020-2021) before making his King Street Debut playing live on a bill which also includes HAAi, Man Power, and the first ever back to back DJ appearance of Gerd Janson and Optimo.

Me Me Me’s return reflects a deeper alignment with community, physical culture and forms of value that extend beyond immediacy, grounded in a slower and more deliberate understanding of music’s role within culture.

“I’d even go so far as to say that there’s probably more need now than there was 10 years ago for a record label that’s focused on authentically repping its own people and it’s hometown scene in a way that puts something physical in the hands of other people who see the world the same way as they do, and who want to cherish something that isn’t disposable in a way that doesn’t depend on stuff like fleeting social media virality.

We love record shops and record shopping and we’re happy for the music we release to be simply find its way to the right places and lie in wait for the right person to find it.” Man Power

This thinking reflects the values that originally defined Me Me Me’s direction of travel, where records were given space to circulate, finding their place rather than compete for attention. That approach sits within a wider commitment to sustaining the local cultures that shape it:

“We’re people who are interested in being part of subcultures, whether that’s Clubbing or Record Buying Culture. The survival of those cultures depends on people putting in as much as they extract and it’s our honour to do that after being able to take so much from our involvement in music and nightlife for so many years.”

The return of Me Me Me signals something steady and deliberate: A North East label grounded in place, with a presence intended to last beyond a single moment.