"DON’T put your money in the music business if you want to make cash,” suggests Alan Wills. He should know – he runs Liverpool’s most successful record label, Deltasonic.

The former drummer and sometime irregular member of the band Shack has been running his label since 2000.

He’s done pretty well with two of the region’s biggest bands – The Coral and The Zutons – on his label and others about to break through.

It is a success he celebrates on December 22 with a big charity show at Liverpool’s Carling Academy with all the proceeds going to Alder Hey Hospital. “It’s our way of putting something back into the community,” he says.

The show will feature The Zutons, The Rascals and other Deltasonic artists at a bash due to go on into the small hours. All the artists are working for free.

Anglesey-born Wills was 20 when he arrived in Liverpool. “I moved here to play music and I worked in a number of bands,” he explains. He played with the Liverpool band Shack on three or four different occasions. “I kept trying to leave and then going back.”

He played until he was 33. “I thought I was getting too old for it and had a few grey hairs. I was not U2 so decided to pack it in.”

He worked for Polygram as a talent scout in the North West. “I didn’t need to go farther as the best bands come from here. They have an attitude to life that I like.”

It is why he established his record label in Liverpool, based in a row of shops in Mossley Hill. The offices where he works with a small team are surprisingly bare, apart from some magazine covers on the walls.

“We have been here six years and they have gone up only last week,” he says. “But we are going to try and make things a little more homely.”

His window looks out on two rows of terraced houses with an alley between, almost like the opening credits of Coronation Street. “You can’t get more Northern than that, there’s even a cat on the roof,” he proudly points out.

It was while in the Lake District on the eve of the millennium with his friend and business partner Joe Fearon that the decision was made to start the label. “I was stupid enough to re-mortgage my house to do it,” he says with an ironic smile.

But he soon signed his first band, The Coral, having spotted them in a rehearsal studio playing pool. “They had this aloofness, arrogance and superiority and just looked right. You know when people have something special.”

He checked them out live and was impressed, even offering to manage them when he failed to find anyone willing to take them on.

It was James Skelly, of The Coral, who suggested he sign “my mate Dave” and thus Dave McCabe and The Zutons were added to the Deltasonic roster. He now has eight bands, “quite a lot for a small label”.

The label was originally titled EVA (Entertainment Versus Art) but changed to Deltasonic when he decided it would be a “guitar label”. Delta came from the blues guitarists, sonic from Sonic Youth, “the best band name ever”.

Since Wills, 46, started the label, technology has moved on apace. Things are changing fast, he suggests, and in two years they may not even be Deltasonic but Deltasonic Media.

He remains a huge fan of vinyl, however. “Vinyl records carry more information and sound better than CDs.” So all his artists are on vinyl as well as the usual CDs, downloads, and whatever else is going.

Whatever happens to record companies, music will continue, he says. “It is an amazing art form which can take life to a higher level. I am not saying we have done that or ever will, but it is what we aspire to.”

* DELTASONIC Records Christmas Party is at the Carling Academy, Saturday, December 22. Tickets, £20.