ABOUT NAKED & THE NAKED TEAM

NAKED Record Club is a young independent business founded by two Brits living in South West France - musician Simon Parker and his business partner Rachel Lowe. 

NAKED was founded with a dual mission – to release exceptional albums by unique and trailblazing indie artists and to increase usage and awareness of eco-friendly vinyl records to help fight climate change. 

Here is a little information about our key people

SIMON PARKER

Simon's love of vinyl can be traced back to when, aged just four years old, he instructed his mother to buy him a copy of T.Rex's 'Ride A White Swan'. By the age of eleven he was paying for his own records and by fourteen he had formed his first band, The Wasps. 

It's accurate to say Simon has devoted his entire life to music. Playing guitar, bass and keyboards he found himself in bands during the late 1980's and throughout the '90's. Signing to various record labels and publishing deals along the way, he retains a small but enthusiastic cult following! Diversifying in the early 00's Simon became an author, live music promoter, record label owner, record store owner and occasional university music lecturer before forming NAKED Record Club. 

Simon remains an avid record collector and self-professed music junkie whose time is spent either watching, listening to or reading about music. Occasionally, he still writes and records albums.  

As a schoolboy Simon was inspired by CND and Michael Stipe of R.E.M. kick-started Simon's environmental awareness in the late 1980's.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO SIMON'S MUSIC

RACHEL LOWE

Rachel is a nature lover and a force of nature. She's been a conservationist since early childhood and has a passion for the ocean where she loves to scuba dive. Rachel spent the early part of her career working as a sales specialist in the corporate world of financial technology which took her around the World signing multi $M deals. She later founded a business growth agency where she helped young businesses achieve their growth goals and provided management coaching services as a representative of the UK government's Growth Accelerator scheme.

Rachel is responsible for overseeing the business side of NAKED.

Simon and Rachel survive living and working together by wearing headphones in the office and drinking lots of wine!

TOM HUGHES (MSc, FdA, MIET, MSET, QTLS, PIEMA)

Tom is our resident academic and NAKED’s sustainability specialist. Environmental sustainability is at the heart of everything NAKED does and so we are thrilled to have such a knowledgeable, experienced and passionate expert on our management team.

Tom started his career as a production manager and worked in light industrial manufacturing, where he gained knowledge in plastics and injection moulding. This knowledge has already proved to be invaluable to NAKED. Tom also developed an early passion for all things sustainable and it soon became second nature to him to manufacture quality products whilst successfully minimising waste and increasing recycling. Tom later trained to be an electrician and became involved in the design and installation of PV solar systems and the commissioning of electrical controls for solar thermal, rain and grey water harvesting systems. It was as an electrician Tom discovered a love of training and this led him to work with organisations including Heathrow Airport where he implemented training curriculum and assessment to standardised operating procedures.

Tom then joined Chichester College as a professional lecturer and course leader in electrical installation and hasn’t looked back since. The past 15 years have seen Tom combine his Built Environment sector expertise and passion for climate science to gain a Masters Degree in Environmental Management. He has also obtained PIEMA status by using his work on college sustainability projects and he has contributed to a notable report published in 2023 by the Royal Anniversary Trust entitled “Accelerating the UK Tertiary Education Sector towards Net Zero”. His participation and leadership in sustainability projects are too numerous to mention here but recently Tom has been working in the English Further Education sector and leading a team of lecturers and assessors delivering Advanced apprenticeships to Town Planners, Project Managers and Surveyors. All of Tom’s teaching has sustainability at its core.

Tom’s work at NAKED will ensure that we never just talk the talk but always walk the walk in helping to combat climate change. Tom will support sustainable practices within NAKED’s own operation and help us to evaluate and ensure sustainability within NAKED’s supply chains. He will act as a critical friend for new incentives, evaluate new developments in the fast-moving sustainable vinyl industry and will also work with us to ensure transparency of all NAKED’s sustainability claims.

Music plays an important role in Tom’s life, and he has an eclectic taste which will see him listening to anything from Bob Marley, Metallica, and a cheeky bit of Country. One of Tom’s favourite albums is Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, often taken in whilst watching the sunset with a spiced rum in hand when chilling out on the canal boat that he and his family are currently restoring. And to top it all he cooks a mean BBQ.

RONNIE GURR

Ronnie is NAKED's resident Scot and a bit of a music industry legend! He's a former journalist who has worked in the music business since the 1970s. As a teenager, he produced his own punk fanzine, Hanging Around, before going on to write for the NME and Record Mirror.  He joined Virgin Records as a press officer in 1982 where he orchestrated the launch of Boy George and Culture Club. During his time at Virgin, he also worked in press and as an A&R manager with a roster of artists that included Simple Minds, Danny Wilson, The Blue Nile, The Big Dish, Endgames and XTC. He later became A&R Director at Sony Music’s Columbia label where he signed Kula Shaker and worked with artists as diverse as Michael Ball and Cypress Hill. Sir Richard Branson then re-recruited him to oversee the formation of his V2 record label, best known for the success of one of Gurr’s signings, Stereophonics.

Ronnie lives and breathes Scottish music, he has sat on the Scottish Arts Council's Performing Arts Committee, The British Council’s Creative Industries Advisory Committee and the Scottish Parliament's Cross Party Group on Contemporary Music and was a member of Creative Scotland's Music Reference Group. He organised and coordinated the presence and showcase concerts of Scottish artists at the South By SouthWest music conference in Austin, Texas, Folk Alliance in Memphis and Kansas City and more recently at Canada’s East Coast Music Week on behalf of Showcase Scotland Expo. He curated Rip It Up: The Story of Scottish Pop exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland in 2018 as well as the more recent Don’t You Forget About Me: Celebrating Scottish Rock and Pop exhibition at Liverpool’s British Music Experience and is the U.K. representative of two U.S. companies - experiential event company Dreamcatcher Events and Soundtracker AC, a digital royalty collection agency.

Ronnie established the Hanging Around Books publishing imprint in 2017 to work with photographers and their archives in releasing rare and previously unseen images through an ongoing series of music-related photozine titles. More recently he became Chief Executive Officer of the Scottish Music Industry Association and advised Scotland’s first vinyl pressing plant, Seabass Vinyl. Ronnie has a long abiding passion for footie and is a director of his local club, Dunbar United F.C.

A devoted family man Ronnie takes great joy in spending time with his young Grandson and it was his role as a Grandad that inspired him to join NAKED and  fight climate change. 

AND THERE'S MORE....

NAKED is far more than just a management team. We enjoy strong support from an international team of knowledgeable, passionate and committed friends, advisors, freelancers and commercial partners. These include (but are not limited to) the mastering and cutting genius that is Johanz Westerman, graphic artist and music nut Marcus Galley, film-making whizz kid Phill Brown, those crazy inventors Harm and Pieter at Green Vinyl Records and investor and advisor Pete Wollaston.