The first time I meet Neil Milton, it’s November. We’ve grabbed a booth and a drink in the 13th Note, which has made for an hour of hard-to-decipher tape with the jukebox and the crowd and the fact that seemingly everyone in Glasgow seems to know Milton and has to stop to say hello. He doesn’t realise, but as he starts to talk about the history and the rebirth of his Too Many Fireworks label I’m distracted by a poster for a local Guy Fawkes-themed display over his right shoulder, the word fireworks seemingly protruding from his spine. It’s a picture-perfect moment, and I can’t shake the feeling of things coming full circle.

“I don’t even know where to start…!” he says, as the tape starts to roll. “But I suppose Troika was the beginning.”

HALLOWEEN, 1999. Troika, an alternative band from Glasgow, Scotland was born, consisting of drummer Paul Agnew, bass player Iain Murnin (briefly replaced by Gavin Thompson, formerly of Flying Matchstick Men and Findo Gask, before the band’s 2005 split), Milton on guitar and vocalist Andy Bonar. By 2001, the band was a well-known name making frequent appearances in the Glasgow and Lanarkshire area and they were ready to move things up a gear. Joking that the band had already “tainted” themselves with some of the local labels that they might have wanted to get involved with by sending them scrappy, early, home recordings, by the time Troika were ready to put out something more polished they decided to do it themselves.

The name Too Many Fireworks was stolen from an online fanzine that Milton and Murnin had been working on together at the time.“Iain might disagree [with how the name came about], but let’s just say this is canon,” says Milton. “The name came from the fact that, at the time, a lot of the bands that we were listening to seemed to have a song that referenced fireworks. And I think Iain just flipped out one day and went ‘bloody hell, there’s just too many fireworks’. And it stuck”

That first release, dubbed The Missing Passport EP, ran to a couple of hundred copies at most. Never intended to become a huge project, the label fell by the wayside for a couple of years. Troika carried on, playing gigs and making contacts – even briefly attracting the attention of 4AD at one point, on the back of The Missing Passport. Meanwhile, Milton was delving deeper into the music industry and the mechanics of running a record label through the “Electric Honey” course at Stow College and the course was to shake things up in unexpected ways – a trip to Manchester’s ‘In The City’ trade show, and meeting the team behind Valentine Records, reawakening Milton’s interest in his own fledgling label.

“When I met the Valentine Records team in Manchester, I just fell in love,” Milton remembers. “Dave was charismatic and I loved Sarah to bits and I ended up going along to their showcase. In fact I took so much away from the whole ‘In The City’ experience – even meeting the late, great Tony Wilson – if only to ask for directions. When I came back, Sarah and Dave had really talked me around how to release a 7” – how to get it printed, where to get it pressed – and I had such big ideas. I wanted to create a record label, I wanted to bring Too Many Fireworks back.”

Deciding to release 7” singles rather than CD-Rs like many of the small labels who were springing up at the time was a conscious decision on his part: “I was really pompous about wanting to be a Proper Indie Label,” he explains. The first 7” came together quickly. “Almost as if we hadn’t planned it!” laughs Milton. Trundlewheel, another local band the Troika boys had been hanging about with at the time, contributed a track for the split release, and Troika recorded “Catkin” at the old Chem19 studio.

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