How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (2 page)

‘Our motivation was really to take control of our own destiny’, he says, ‘by making our own records. It was all about not being interested in joining existing systems, but just getting on with doing your art – and then there being an independent structure that you could tap into which gave you access to the market, without having to engage with all the normal routes. You know, going to Sony records saying, “Please, sir, will you give me five shillings?” – and that’s what independence is, it’s about building structures outside of the mainstream, structures that can help you infiltrate the mainstream. We knew that, and we knew that someone somewhere else was making decisions about what you had access to.’

The name Rough Trade was delightfully apposite. It suggested a below-the-counter approach to commerce and a willingness to deal in black-market goods. In its appropriation of the slang term for male prostitution, Rough Trade carried a slyly knowing air of antagonism and wilfulness. The shop, as well as its name, caught the mood of the times and proved a success. Set up as a
co-operative
, it ran more or less as a collective with no real business plan other than to try to sell records that the handful of staff liked to anyone who was interested. Rough Trade quickly gained a reputation for both the depth of its stock and the knowledge of its staff. Rather than concentrate within a specialised genre it traded on the quality and diversity of the records it carried. Everyone who walked through the shop’s doors was energised by either the sweetly harsh buzz of the first punk releases pumping out of Rough Trade’s in-store sound system or the dubplate
pre-releases
the shop was importing from Jamaica. Or in many cases by both.

New forms of music were attempted, often by people with only a passing interest, let alone ability, in their particular medium. Musical dexterity or accomplishment were blunt instruments compared to a speeding mind flickering with a newly discovered articulacy. The shop had created a rapidly growing microclimate that was now expanding at speed via the newly fused circuit board of punk. It sold interesting music in a way that no one else did. Increasingly its stock was being bought directly from the artists themselves while the shop could bypass the usual channels of record companies, their sales reps and their distribution divisions.

James Endeacott, then a teenager, would go on, as A&R for Rough Trade, to help sign both the Strokes and the Libertines. He remembers the impetus abroad in the early and mid-Eighties. ‘No one knew what a manager was, no one knew what an agent was – we didn’t want to talk about that, we wanted to talk about records. I didn’t know when our records were coming out and I didn’t really care. I didn’t know the business – I didn’t want to know – now it’s
all
bands know. Now it’s, “Here’s this band who’ve done half a gig and they’ve got a lawyer.” It was never a career path to me, it was just what you did.’

Travis realised that as well as selling records full of new ideas in the shop, he was getting requests to stock these releases from other retail outlets across the UK. However small, a burgeoning alternative to the mainstream Top Forty market was developing. Rough Trade was in a position to represent this music outside London and 202 Kensington Park Road would have to expand its horizons from retail to distribution. It would have to start reaching out to sell these records and would do so quite easily. And the records kept landing on the Rough Trade shop doormat, and they kept being dropped off at the counter. The recordings they contained highlighted strange new forms of creativity, artfully, at times almost gnostically, packaged. Along with the urgent need to create, these discs revealed a heavy degree of purpose and consideration. As well as starting bands these people had decided they were starting record companies with names like Factory, Mute and 4AD.

Independence over the next thirty years would be tested,
reinterpreted
and frequently be pronounced dead. Despite all that, it would weather its way through the music industry and remain a constant source of new and irrefutable music.

When Rough Trade opened for business in the late Seventies there were around fourteen major record companies. Today there are three. Even if their share of the recorded music market is still greatly outweighed by the majors, and even if that market is in decline, compared to their corporate rivals the independent music industry is flourishing.

Bloody-mindedness remains a source of inspiration; for Factory, Mute, Creation, Warp, Domino and their peers, it has served as an engine room when all else has failed.

Along the way the individuals who ran these labels went mad and went to the wall in equal measure. They stood their ground or relocated to the wilderness, having tasted both the sweet and bitter fruits of the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle as much as any of their musical charges. Hedonism easily blurs the thin line between success and failure. Walking the high wire of running a multimillion-pound company in a volatile high-stakes industry, with no business plan let alone safety net, takes its toll on those in charge. ‘The success of any independent label is down to what is in the person’s head,’ says Endeacott. ‘Rather than try to follow the market or plan for the future – it’s down to what’s in their head.’ Reflecting on the characters behind the independent industry he continues, ‘There’s always a price to pay. We call them mavericks. All those people you talk about – Tony Wilson, Ivo, Geoff, McGee, Martin Mills – they’re all mental. In the USA they’re mavericks, in the UK they’re eccentric, but really they’re all a bit nutty, they’re all a bit crazy. It’s about the beating heart; it’s the passion that drives it. Ego has a lot to do with. All those guys have egos, you have to have an ego.’

This is the story, set to an incredible soundtrack, of the enormous scale of those passions, the size of those egos, and the true extent of their madness; but above all, it is the story of the loud, wayward sound, reverberating around their beating, racing, and uncontrollable hearts …

I
n the summer of 1975 at the dazed and confused mid-point of the decade, the London office of United Artists at 14 Mortimer Street in the West End was somewhere where it could all hang out. Dai Davies had become David Bowie’s press officer while still in his teens and had recently returned to London from Bowie’s Diamond Dogs tour of America. He was a regular visitor to the United Artists office, which was something of a drop-in centre for the assembled misfits, outcasts and hustlers who comprised the record company’s roster. ‘The office was fantastic,’ he says. ‘There was a big long oak table and the whole place was decorated in late Sixties Rick Griffin posters. You’d go there and Andrew would be trying to work in the corner at one end of the big table, and at the other end would be Doug Smith or Jake Riviera or whoever happened to be in town.’

Andrew Lauder was still in his early twenties and had an encyclopaedic musical knowledge matched only by his hunger for vinyl. Lauder had started working in London’s Tin Pan Alley – Denmark Street – as a teenager and made his way up through the West End music business. He was now running the British division of United Artists, an American record company owned by the Transamerica Corporation, a multinational conglomerate that included Budget Rent-A-Car in its portfolio. With very little pencilled in for the United Artists British release schedule, Lauder was left to his own devices to run the label as he saw fit. As long as the company turned a profit his American bosses were
satisfied and Lauder developed a roster that reflected his love of esoteric, outsider sounds.

‘Andrew hijacked United Artists and turned it into an independent label,’ says Davies ‘The MD didn’t have a clue about music, but was happy for Andrew to take over once he’d had a hit with the Hawkwind single.’

That hit, ‘Silver Machine’ by Hawkwind, complete with an attendant film of the band playing live in Nuneaton in lieu of the compromise of an appearance on
Top of the Pops
, had allowed Lauder a free hand in running the label. For Lauder’s acts and their respective managers, United Artists was a unique record company environment for mid-Seventies London. Two frequent visitors to Lauder’s office were Jake Riviera and Doug Smith; both were promoters and managers with lively reputations. Riviera, a refugee from amateur boxing and the murky world of East End concert halls, was in the process of booking his current charges, Dr. Feelgood, their first big national tour. In January 1975 United Artists had just released
Down by the Jetty
, Dr. Feelgood’s stripped-back debut album. On the monochrome cover, the band looked like a firm considering paying a visit to the Sweeney. The music inside is equally taut and menacing, a collection of stripped-to-the-bone white Sunblest R’n’B recorded in mono. Riviera had booked the group on a three-band package review tour entitled ‘Naughty Boys’. The name encapsulated an attitude, part pub back room sparring match and part Max Wall vaudeville, which Riviera, along with his future business partner Dave Robinson, would finesse and distil into the identity of Stiff Records. In what would become an irreverent and uncompromising partnership, Robinson and Riviera started Stiff with a donation from Dr. Feelgood’s singer Lee Brilleaux, and some off-the-books funding from Lauder.

As well as Hawkwind and Dr. Feelgood, Lauder filled the United Artists release schedule with acts from America and
Europe and was in the process of finalising a release by one of his German charges, Neu! The group’s third LP,
Neu! 75
, was a perfectly nuanced synthesis of texture and rhythm. Thirty years later
Neu! 75
is as canonical as the Eno/Bowie ‘Berlin trilogy’, but on release its fate was similar to that of most of the records from United Artists: a cult following in the press and a small but well-informed audience of record buyers, who shared a deep relationship with music that coalesced with their experimental tastes and lifestyle. For Lauder and his acts, barring unlikely crossover tracks like ‘Silver Machine’, the prospect of commercial success was not so much elusive as ignored. Alongside Neu!, Hawkwind and Dr. Feelgood, the United Artists roster comprised a disparate collection of head shop favourites: Can, Amon Düül II, Man and the Groundhogs. The bands’ shared defining characteristic was having their records released by Andrew Lauder and United Artists.

The never-ending visits from characters and chancers to the Mortimer Street offices included unannounced appearances from acts with no formal connection to the label. Invitations were extended to anyone who shared Lauder’s love of experimentation. ‘It was towards the tail end of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band,’ he says. ‘They were pretty out of it and always kept coming around and then Lemmy would turn up with the Hell’s Angels.’

Lemmy, who had sung lead vocals on ‘Silver Machine’ only to be sacked from Hawkwind, was exploring the possibilities of forming a new group. ‘It was right at the beginning, we were trying to make something of Motörhead,’ says Lauder. ‘It was a bit tough at the time. There was no real management. Actually, there was no real anything at all. It was a pretty eccentric office; it wasn’t really a music business at that point. It felt like it was coming from somewhere completely different. We had to get heavy-duty smoke extractors put in and after that the MD just
thought, I’m not going anywhere near there again – let Andrew get on with it.’

United Artists’ UK competitors in the mid-Seventies record business were a diverse collection of labels that included several international companies with offices in London. The largest British label was the patrician EMI, which also distributed a set of smaller independent labels that had been started in the late Sixties, each with their own distinct personality, two of which, Chris Blackwell’s Island and Richard Branson’s Virgin, were still highly iconoclastic and adapting to the market place. Neither was now brimming with the confidence of youth with which they’d made their mark in the early Seventies. ‘Virgin felt slightly stuck in hippiedom but there were good people there,’ says Dai Davies. ‘And at that point, Chris Blackwell and Island were going through one of their periodic financial crises and couldn’t afford to sign anybody.’ In addition to the British companies were PolyGram, a Dutch conglomerate, and the London offices of the large American corporations like CBS, Warner Brothers, RCA and MCA, who all competed for dominance of the music market. Their London headquarters functioned as outposts of their parent organisations, housing a small A&R staff alongside a tier of management that supervised the British release of their major acts.

By the middle of the decade PolyGram were diversifying into film and television, a highly lucrative decision that would result in the international success of
Grease
and
Saturday Night Fever
. Most of the American labels had large back catalogues, as did EMI. Smaller companies like Virgin and Island were perennially under-resourced and, despite mainstream success, often found themselves close to bankruptcy. Once punk started to have an unassailable impact on London, many of the established record companies were temporarily caught off-guard. Lauder was
quick to react and signed the Stranglers, whom Davies was now managing, to United Artists. ‘Apart from Andrew Lauder, Dan Loggins at CBS who was Kenny Loggins’s brother was the only person who took an interest,’ says Davies. ‘He had a similar taste to Andrew.’

There was one other American record company that had always taken a street level interest in the bars and small venues of the British music scene, looking into every murky corner of every record shop and club to uncover something unbidden and new – Sire Records.

Lauder had been approached to open a Sire office in the UK and was well aware of the company’s reputation. ‘Sire was a very important label at that point,’ he says, ‘and that had such a lot to do with the sort of person Seymour was. Seymour really wasn’t your standard record exec.’

Seymour Stein was born in Brooklyn in 1942 had started at the trade bible,
Billboard
magazine, as a teenager. As a committed Anglophile he had not only taken an interest in the British music industry but also nurtured a lifelong working relationship with the UK, one that he conducted in the manner of a love affair.

Stein had co-founded Sire with record producer Richard Gottehrer in 1966. Two of his first British signings were the Deviants and the Climax Blues Band, two acts thrown up by the death throes of the Sixties who played dirge-like boogie as the come-down kicked in. With more success he had also released a three-volume LP compilation
History of British Rock
but by the end of 1975 his attention was closer to home. As well as working with the Flamin’ Groovies, he had just signed the Ramones and was in a desperate race to add Talking Heads to the Sire roster.

Lauder and Stein remained friendly and regularly bumped into one another while record shopping on the Portobello Market. Stein also had another reason to visit the Portobello Road; he
was a serious and committed collector of art deco antiques. One Saturday Stein mentioned to Lauder that he had just seen a new record shop open a short walk away from the bric-a-brac stalls. ‘Every Saturday that I was in London,’ says Stein, ‘and I’d come over quite a bit, I killed two birds with one stone. I’d go shopping for antiques on Portobello Road and then I’d go down another couple of blocks to Rough Trade.’

Geoff Travis opened the Rough Trade shop in February 1976. A Cambridge graduate with a scruffy demeanour and an Afro, his soft-spoken voice and considered, patient manner revealed a piercing and analytical intelligence. The shop’s location was just in the shadow of the Westway running parallel to Portobello. ‘It used to be a famous head shop in the Sixties, where they sold those lurid posters and the DIY smoker’s kits and all that,’ he says, ‘so it was obviously meant to be.’ Jon Savage was a local boy newly down from Cambridge, where he had met Travis at a Lou Reed concert. ‘I was staying at my parents who lived just outside Holland Park,’ says Savage, ‘so I’d been going down Portobello road since 1967 and I remember wandering into Rough Trade in the autumn of ’76. Portobello at that time was still hippie-oppositional. It was the tail end of Hawkwind; there would be posters for the Derelicts up there, so you were still in that squat culture. I always thought of Rough Trade as being part of that too initially.’

Rough Trade opened before punk and specialised in reggae and American imports. Once the British punk bands had been put into recording studios the shop sold the fruits of their labour healthily and became a focal point for the emerging style. Both Sex Pistols and Clash albums sold in the thousands at Rough Trade, making the shop an unexpected market-leader in a new sound.

To Andrew Lauder, who had signed the Stranglers, and Dan Loggins at CBS, who had signed the Clash, the pent-up demand
for new music was obvious and punk’s instant commercial success suggested it might have long-term potential. ‘I was very friendly at that time with Dan Loggins,’ says Lauder, ‘and he’d got a Clash album out the week before the Stranglers album, and he rang up. We were discussing chart positions and he said, “Guess where the Clash is?” I think it was twelve or something, the next week I rang up and said, “The Stranglers are number four” and he fell off his seat.’

Where chart success led, the music business surely followed. ‘The “professional manager” quickly came to the fore,’ says Lauder. ‘Someone who’d previously been involved with
something
else entirely, bringing some tapes along – “Oh I’ve got this new lot, you’re going to like this one. I know what you like, here’s one for you mate.” It was pretty awful.’

If Lauder recognised the camel-coat behaviour of Tin Pan Alley negotiating its way through punk, Travis recognised something else. ‘I felt I’d seen it before. We’d seen the MC5 sold out, the corporate marketing game turning rebellion into a commodity. We’d seen the White Panther Movement become a laughing stock very quickly.’ In contrast to the second-generation punks that were making themselves available to the highest bidder, Rough Trade was now becoming a source of new interesting and unclassifiable music.

‘Geoff would be the first to have things like Pere Ubu and Devo, which sounded remarkably ahead of their time,’ says Lauder. ‘We’d go in every weekend, leaving with armfuls of records, mainly 7-inch singles.’ Such exotic items, imported from a strange-sounding middle America, were indicative of a shift in how music was being recorded and manufactured.

Articulate documents reliant on bedroom or rehearsal-room economics started to appear: 7-inch singles, fanzines and posters for ad hoc concerts in weird locations were being introduced into
a tentative new market outside the mainstream. Customers were approaching the Rough Trade counter and asking if they could leave a fanzine or tack a message to the shop’s noticeboard. Within a few months the same customers had become artists and musicians, and were asking if the shop would sell their
self-released
records. As he surveyed the new kinds of product being brought in, Travis wondered what type of system or infrastructure might support these new energies. ‘In those days, with Gang of Four, there was a lot of talk when they signed to EMI about how they would change the system,’ he says, ‘but all they were really doing was saying, “Please, sir, will you give me five shillings?”
Spiral Scratch
was the first independent record that people really wanted. We must have ordered thousands of them, and it was that that got us thinking we should become distributors. That’s how that all started.’

Richard Boon had been friends with Howard Trafford since childhood. ‘When I was in adolescence at school in Leeds with Howard and we were bored, we did a little xeroxed magazine called
Bolshy
that we’d sell for tuppence,’ he says. ‘The anarchist bookshop obviously took some; we sold some in the folk clubs and stood outside the school gates saying, “You want some of this?” It was a generation waiting to happen … I was an art student at Reading University and Howard was up at Bolton Institute of Technology, where he met Peter McNeish, [and] where they were being not that happy with what they were doing.’