Lorne Jackson speaks to the men who want to breathe new life into the music industry from beyond the graveyard.

There is a graveyard opposite the Loverock recording studio in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter.

Tombstones loom from a precipitous hilltop, and the merest pinch of moonlight – complemented by a sprinkling of owl hoot and soupçon of yellowish fog – would turn the scene into an image from Edgar Allan Poe.

A grim perspective. One that would throw most people into a fear-frozen funk.

Though not the men behind Loverock Records, who have set up their musical home here.

For them, the graveyard is a constant reminder of the challenge they have set themselves, as rock’s very own resurrection men.

Raising the dead is what they are about.

Not that Ray Loverock, Jon Morbin, Alastair Jameson and Tom Holland – the Birmingham collective known as Loverock – are remotely interested in digging up corpses, like graverobbers of old.

They merely want to breath life into the rotting stiff that is the UK’s popular music industry.

In other words, they plan on giving Midlanders an alternative to the mechanical musical dirge produced by Simon Cowell’s stable of pallid performers.

The intention is to nurture local talent – not exploit it. Which may sound like a pie in the sky philosophy, but these are serious individuals, who bring to the local music scene a wealth of talent and experience in the fields of playing, performing, writing and recording.

Now Loverock is ready to rock the world. The team have set up both a record label and their own recording studio. They are already working with a roster of acts, and hope to have at least one album on the shelves by the end of the year.

But surely being based in Brum is a hindrance to chart success. Don’t you have to make a lunge for London, if you want to bask in big time glory?

“Not at all,” says Ray, the man who gives a surname to Loverock Records, along with much experience in the recording industry.

Previously, he had a recording contract with Geffen, though changes in the record company’s management structure meant the album he recorded was never released. For a while he was based in LA, and fame seemed to beckon.

“I managed to bypass London, though I was in California for a bit,” he says “But it’s a false assumption to think that you have to go to London.