bitten by the music bug

E-⁠resident rock star Simon Campbell runs his music recording business Supertone Records as an Estonian company, without having to leave his Portuguese base

E-⁠resident Simon Campbell was first bitten by the music bug as a boarding school kid in 1969.

"You can imagine what was happening then," he says. "Everyone was listening to Led Zeppelin, Wishbone Ash, and Black Sabbath, and I got it." Soon after he could not be seen without a guitar in his hand. He practiced eight or nine hours a day, learning anything he could, and vociferously.

Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin's mystical guitar slinger, was an early inspiration, but Tony Iommi, Black Sabbath's riff master, also helped to align and sculpt Campbell's talents as a guitar player.

As a session musician in the 1970s, Campbell also learned recording techniques from sound engineers who had worked with the world's most famous bands. "They had all been trained in the 1950s and 1960s and worked with the Beatles or Pink Floyd," Campbell says. "I was working with the people who designed modern recording, and I learned everything I could from them."

In a way, Campbell is still that curious guitarist from the 1970s, a living link between the golden age of rock music and the modern era. He is still in love with analog sounds, which are highly in demand. In fact, young musicians come to the Supertone Studio, maintained by Campbell and his wife and musical partner Suzy Starlite in Lisbon, just to get that retro feel on their records.

"I specialize in getting sounds from the 1960s, '70s, '80s," says Campbell. "People like the drum sound I get," he adds. "It's tight, there's not a lot of low-end, just like it sounded back in 1972."

Campbell is not a technology purist though. He uses digital platforms in the recording process, centered on the industry standard ProTools software, and mixes them both. As an e-resident, he runs his music label, Supertone Records, the same way. While musicians in the studio get his vintage touch, he can invoice them through his Estonian-based firm, which he set up in 2021.

Estonian e-⁠Residency allows thoroughly vetted applicants to open and operate companies in Estonia using the country's ecosystem of digital services as if they were physical residents. Campbell found out about it on the internet, naturally. There were various reasons for him to seek it out. Among them the somewhat sluggish and quaint bureaucracy around creating and maintaining businesses in Portugal, or Spain, where he previously had a studio in Valencia.

There was also Brexit, of course, which has prompted many Britons to take up e-⁠Residency.

"The fact was that we needed a company with a VAT number in Europe," he says. "We also do transactions all around the world, with the UK, with the US, and we needed something badly."

At first, Campbell says, he thought e-Residency was too good to be true. He applied though, was accepted, and went to the Estonian embassy in Portugal to pick up his kit. "I felt like James Bond," he says of the experience. "It was like something out of Mission Impossible. You get this beautiful box, you open it up, you get the reader and plug it in," he says. "I was like, this is cool."

His experience since has only been positive, saying:

Campbell has not been to Estonia yet, but he has recorded with Eeva Talsi, the vocalist and violinist for the Estonian folk group Curly Strings. "A lovely lady, she is," he says.

As for Campbell, he notes that Supertone is not just a studio-driven business, but also a label that allows Simon and Suzy, who perform together as the Starlite & Campbell, to own everything they record and perform, and to apply for and gain royalties for their music. The band put out a delicious blues record called Blueberry Pie in 2017, which was nominated for a European Blues Award.

A new album, called Starlite.One is slated for release in September. The new album, says Campbell, features more contemporary sounds. "It's like Roxy Music, it's like David Bowie, it's like Talking Heads," says Campbell. The group will also have a 16-date UK tour in October.

"It's going to kill us, because we're playing every night," says Campbell, "but I do enjoy it because you can connect with an audience, and music is primarily a performance art form."