Pink Triangle 1990
This interview first appeared in High Fidelity magazine in June 1990
If one looks at the leading turntable manufacturers in this country one sees a group of vociferous individuals, always eager to communicate or indoctrinate. With one exception – the makers of the Pink Triangle (and latterly the Little Pink Thing). The principals of this front-running company lead a very private existence. Their opinions can be elicited but they’re not thrust forward at the drop of a hat. High Fidelity wanted to know why so I made my way to Camberwell in South East London to invade Pink’s privacy.
The company was formed in 1979 by Neal Jackson and Arthur Khoubesserian; the former a technician who had studied bacteriology and whose only interest in hi-fi was that it provided a medium for listening to music, the latter described by his partner as a ‘technocrat who’d been designing tonearms since he was nine!’. In 1980 they applied for a small business loan from the GLC. The official who came to discuss this with them happened to be a neighbour of Ivor Humphreys of Hi-Fi News. Ivor asked if he could come along to the meeting, liked the turntable that he was shown there and set up a demonstration of it and other turntables for three other reviewers at John Atkinson’s (also of Hi-Fi News) home. That event started the ball rolling for Pink Triangle. Neal Jackson continued the story for me, whilst Arthur spent the ensuing three hours dashing animatedly between his desk, car and factory, giving Neal a running account of the problems he was encountering organising the week’s production. He paused only to enquire if I’d ever fancied becoming a manufacturer. I replied that I hadn’t. “A wise decision” he opined, with all the conviction of a man who actually thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of what he was doing. I asked how Pink Triangle came to be.
“Arthur had some novel ideas about turntable design – he’s a physicist and mathematician – and he looked at turntables in a very different way to everyone else. Other manufacturers were mechanical engineers, and they took a mech-engineering approach to design. Arthur thought that because the problems one had to deal with were at a molecular level – the information on a record is smaller than the shortest wavelength of light, so goodbye Finial! – they were more to do with the physics of the structure. He looked at it from the point of view of the stylus, what it was having to do, and everything related to the stylus in terms of transfer functions between materials. That’s the technical side of it, I gave him a lot of intuitive support, ideas input, and then I did the cosmetic and ergonomic design of the product. The deck came off the drawing board and worked from day one, mainly because Arthur got his maths right.”
How are the various disciplines divided between you and Arthur nowadays? “Badly! It’s the same now as it’s always been. Being a small company there’s a lot of crossover. One has to work in areas one isn’t necessarily comfortable with but that happens when one doesn’t have a large number of employees. However, it’s often beneficial. I’m a great believer in necessity being the mother of invention: I think you can arrive at better products through having to make compromises with your disciplines. For example, many companies simply pass on the responsibility for advertising to an agency; I prefer to be closely involved with all the creative processes and to have some of my ideas involved as well. It gives the company more of a feel, more of an intimacy with the product.” Many of your adverts are extraordinarily obscure. Do you think this is wise when your competitors are more matter of fact in their approach? “I think most hi-fi advertising is naff. One of the things that pisses me of about the other manufacturers is that they complain that they’re not penetrating a big enough market, but their advertising does nothing to change that. When you go into a newsagents and look at the magazines you get the impression that a lot of the quality of a magazine comes from its advertising, and that gives it reader appeal. If you pick up the average hi-fi mag with all its dull advertising, many readers, female ones especially, are turned off by that. Much of our advertising is lost on the industry but the public recognise and remember our name. People have called us and asked if our ads are available as posters: those ads can be seen outside the context of just advertising, more than just a means to an end.”
I have to ask you how the company got its name. “When we began we had a product but it had no name, rather like a baby sitting un-named in a carry cot. Every manufacturer tends to regard their first product in that way, but unlike babies where a host of possible names exist the same isn’t true for hi-fi. Most product names are unimaginative and uninteresting. I’m gay and so is Arthur, and I’d just finished reading a book called “The Men With The Pink Triangle”, about one man’s experience in Auschwitz and how – although I didn’t know it at this time – the homosexuals in concentration camps were baited by the Jews. The Jewish inmates were regarded as being low but homosexuals were lower still and Jews were allowed to beat and kill them to relieve their own tensions. That a minority group could treat a minority group within it that way appalled me. I was angry having read the book, and the way the product name came about was that instead of copying an industry standard and giving our product a serial number I wanted to find a list of the gay victims and give each turtable a specific name relating to someone who had died in one of the camps. That information wasn’t available – it had been destroyed after the war – so we ended up calling the deck the Pink Triangle instead.”
Did you not think that giving the product such a political name could be a very unwise move? That it might stop people even listening to it? “Not at the time. I was younger, and I wouldn’t say naive, I was very politically aware, but I was angry. Not in an anarchic punk-rock sense, but in a personal and political sense. I couldn’t accept what had happened to those people. It is still a good name commercially – people remember it – and it meant something to me. But it has held us back in some areas. For example – and I don’t wish to appear anti-semetic – on the East coast of America many of the hi-fi dealers are Jewish and they will not accept our product in their stores. That angers me. As a company we hate oppression whatever form it takes. We do not sell to South Africa or any country where massive oppression exists, because the product isn’t accesible to all members of the public. I have letters from a dealer in Chile. He wrote, in 1983, expressing interest in the product and I wrote back saying that I wasn’t happy about supplying a country that wasn’t free – Chile was under Pinochet at that time. Commercial suicide again but it’s what I feel.I got into correspodence with this guy and it went so far that eventually I got a letter from the British Department of Trade and Industry who couldn’t understand why I objected to doing business with Chile!”
As you’ve said, your views aren’t too commercially viable, are they? “We’ve done lots of things a ‘proper’ business person wouldn’t do but we’re not commercially orientated although we respond to a commercial market. We’re not greedy people, not driven by the desire for wealth, so we can afford to be selective about with whom we do business. I’m not happy about apartheid or oppression, and the product demonstrates that with its name. And the company should demonstrate that in all its actions. If we remain a small company because of that then so be it.” How small is the company? “We have five full-time employees and about fifty subcontractors. At our old factory we employed about thirty people and we wanted to become a workers’ co-operative but, unfortunately, none of the staff wanted to take on that responsibility. We wanted to make everyone a director, give them directorial perks and stop them being just employees, but they didn’t want that. They seemed to prefer the ‘us and them’ syndrome.”
Pink Triangle has stayed outside the milieu of the hi-fi microcosm. Was that a conscious decision; as its gatherings tend to be rather ‘laddish’, were you avoiding the homophobia that tends to obtain within the hi-fi society? “No, we were ostracised! (laughs). Being gay is not a barrier to socialising, most people have friends or colleagues who are gay – whether they know it or not. But hi-fi is a bit ‘tits and go-faster stripes’, sexist and machismic. That, to some extent annoys me. We still get on well with the ‘establishment’ conservative companies like Quad and KEF, we were of the old school in our thinking. Not necessarily so narrow-minded as Quad, say, who stick to a very dogmatic approach marketing their product, but we saw our heroes, if you like, as people like Peter Walker. He’s the grandfather of British hi-fi, an amazing character. He represented how we thought hi-fi should be. But when we started a sub-culture was brewing and we hit up against it. We were entering a political market with a political product, making a political statement about ourselves and we encountered homophobia, and the Linn thing, and we basically ran slap into a brick wall. We had this stupid romantic notion that British hi-fi was like a hobbyist club, where everyone exchanged information and was very friendly with one another, which I’m sure in the early days it was. When the FBA was being set up there was a warmth about the industry which evaporated in the mid-to-late seventies and it became very cut-throat and paranoid. That might be vanishing now as people become more commercial and their commerciality becomes more apparent. They’ve got nothing to hide behind any more.” Why the new products, like the Little Pink Thing; is that a response to Linn’s Axis turntable? No, not at all. Had we taken that kind of commercial approach to the industry we would have done what most companies do. I think I’m right in saying we’re the first British company to have survived ten years on just one product. Most companies within a year or two have become commodity brokers or mass manufacturers. I can’t think of many who haven’t brought in cartridges, amplifiers or arms and put their names on them. We stuck to one product and would never think of bringing out another unless we thought it was sufficiently developed and a sufficient advance within its market place to warrant bringing it out. The Axis is a fine product but we didn’t think about it when we designed the LPT. We thought of the LPT many years ago but we simply didn’t have the resources to bring it about.”
Despite your being on the fringe of the industry you have received good support from many writers. “Yes, but it was a long time coming. We’ve never looked for support. We accept that we entered the industry at a difficult time, when a new writing style was occurring or had occurred, and also when the sun shone out of one individual’s arse. Nothing he could do was wrong, everything anyone else did was wrong. We didn’t care whether we got good or bad publicity and that holds true today. We didn’t go out looking for writers to be pro-us. If reviewers came along and liked our deck that was great, if they didn’t we saw it as their loss. We survived ten years with ten years’ worth of mostly bad reviews – not because of the product but because of industry politics. The ‘other factor’ has now developed and his influence has virtually disappeared. There are now, I think, more reviewers using PTs than any other turntable.”
Is that because it is, despite its political nature, an apolitical product; that it makes no statement about the person who uses it? “That’s true, but I do know of people who have bought Linns and Roksans because they are gay! They are closet gays and they do not want a product called a Pink Triangle in their home. It’s an absurd situation. You have straight people using one because they’ve nothing to hide, but a closet gay won’t use one because their friends might think they’re homosexual because they use a product manufactured by gay people. It makes the mind boggle but that’s what oppression is all about.” One wonders what would happen if it was suddenly disclosed that the Chairman of, say, the Ford Motor Company was gay. “I think there would be a lot of Cortinas and Escorts abandoned on the pavements with people saying ‘it doesn’t belong to me, I own that Vauxhall over there’!”
