How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (3 page)

Trafford and McNeish in Bolton and Boon in Reading, along with, it would seem, half their generation, had their curiosity piqued and their self-belief aroused by the first Sex Pistols review in the
NME
in February 1976. ‘The Neil Spencer review is fundamental,’ says Boon, ‘because there was a feeling around and it seemed to crystallise it.’

Beginning with the words, ‘Hurry up they’re having an orgy on
stage’, the review was certain to catch some teenage attention. The review concluded with a description of a chair hitting a PA and a quote from a member of the group declaring, ‘Actually, we’re not into music we’re into chaos.’ This was incentive enough for Boon, Trafford and McNeish to investigate further and visit the source. ‘Peter and Howard came down from Bolton to stay with me in Reading and we went to McLaren and Vivienne’s shop Sex. Malcolm said, “Oh, Sex Pistols are doing Welwyn Garden City tonight and somewhere else tomorrow.” We just went and talked to them and they were very excited by the fact we’d come from up north. It was very energising and very exciting stuff.’

The surnames McNeish and Trafford became Shelley and Devoto and their band, Buzzcocks, was formed in order to support the Sex Pistols, whom they had invited to play at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in June. Such was the success of the concert that they invited them for a second performance a month later. By arranging and promoting these two Sex Pistols performances, Boon and the Buzzcocks ensured that Manchester was feeling, along with that summer’s stifling heat wave, the motivational shockwave of punk. In the weeks after the concerts the Buzzcocks found themselves at a loose end and assumed that their temporary moment in the spotlight had reached its natural conclusion. Still motivated by the experience of the Sex Pistols concerts they decided to take the unusual step of making their own record, a four-song EP,
Spiral Scratch. ‘Spiral Scratch
coincided with Howard having had enough,’ says Boon. ‘Howard was thinking he really ought to go back to college. We thought, “Well, we need to make a record” – for no other reason than to make a document.’

Once Boon had made a few phone calls he found a local engineer, Martin Hannett, who was willing to make the recording. Although still young, Hannett was already a veteran
of the more whole-food end of the Manchester music business. ‘Martin and his then partner, Susannah, were the last generation of Manchester bands that had some hippie, collectivist idea,’ says Boon. ‘They were trying to run a little booking agency, in this very sad little tiny room with the phones actually not ringing.’

Hannett was credited on the sleeve of
Spiral Scratch
as Martin Zero, a name he briefly took in response to witnessing the Sex Pistols live. His interest in the first wave of punk was brief, as he had found its recorded documents one-dimensional and too willingly adherent to the industry’s standard practice. ‘I was running an office called Music Force,’ he recalled, ‘and anyone who was any kind of musician used to come up there eventually, ’cause they’d need to rent a PA. I went to the second Free Trade Hall gig, in June. I was really looking forward to the first Pistols record, and when I got it home I thought, oh dear, 180 overdubbed rhythm guitars. It isn’t the end of the universe, as we know it, it’s just another record.’

Boon’s choice of Hannett as a producer was made out of necessity rather than any awareness of his gifts for producing. ‘We just thought, he knows what he’s doing, he can run that fader,’ says Boon. ‘This is all before he got his toys.’ Hannett’s alchemical relationship with the mixing desk was still in its infancy. Rather than inhabiting the depth of field of his later work, the four tracks Buzzcocks laid down on
Spiral Scratch
have an audio vérité that convey the creep of boredom with a celebration of bad nervous energy.

‘That’s what they sounded like,’ said Hannett. ‘It’s a document. Mr McNeish, Pete’s dad, came up with the money and we went into Indigo, a 16-track. I was trying to do things, and the engineer was turning them off. He said, “You don’t put that kind of echo on a snare drum!” It was never finished. I would have loved to have whipped it away and remixed it, but the owner of the studio
erased the master because he thought it was such rubbish.’

Boon’s first move was to contact the local manager of Virgin Records in Manchester to canvas some retail interest at street level.
*
The buyer assessed his wares and agreed to place a box of singles on the counter. ‘In ’76 majors still had regional offices,’ he says. ‘EMI and CBS had an office in Manchester for their sales force. This is all before centralised buying, when people like Virgin Records store managers had a degree of autonomy, and, I thought, we’ll actually get rid of them and we’ll get the money back.’

Jon Savage had been sent a copy of
Spiral Scratch
and saw Buzzcocks play the Roxy in London: having had his antennae alerted, he become one of their key supporters in the press. ‘The first time I ever went up to Manchester was to see them at the Electric Circus,’ he says. ‘I thought they were terrific and they weren’t up themselves. What everybody forgets now there’s this punk nostalgia industry is a lot of the punk groups were really shit; it just became a cliché really quickly, and the Buzzcocks just came in, no messing about.’

Along with the empowering impact they had made by putting do-it-yourself into action, the fact Buzzcocks were based outside London ensured their parochialism became a further asset. As well as proving that a band could take control of the means of production, Buzzcocks had shown that it could be done in Manchester, a fact not lost on many of their contemporaries in the region with little or no contact with the London music business. ‘All these nascent bands [were] getting in touch,’ says Boon. ‘Gang of Four from Leeds sent a cassette, Cabaret Voltaire
sent a cassette and by now we’re into the re-pressing cycle of
Spiral Scratch
. There was no intention to be a record label, so my policy was, well, if we’re going to play in London, we’ll take a Manchester band with us, just in case there’s a review. So we’d bring people like The Fall and The Worst to reinforce the regionalism.’

Whatever his attempts at showcasing the provinces, Boon was left with the realisation that the band could re-press
Spiral Scratch
and sell it in their own ad hoc way, but other than repeating the process by recording and manufacturing another single, there was little that could be done to build on the impetus that
Spiral Scratch
had created.

‘The trouble with all dominant cultural forms is they don’t invite you in,’ he says. ‘They just want you to buy. We got to 16,000 sales and we’d had enough – by which point labels were phoning up about Buzzcocks.’

Boon and the band were initially reluctant to sign with a major. They had hoped that they might find a deal which allowed them to remain outside the music business while being able to utilise its distribution systems. ‘What we saw as the difference was trying to get this material out,’ he says, ‘maybe over the same counters but through different channels.’

While Boon was trying to work out his next move, Geoff Travis in Rough Trade was echoing his thoughts. The shock of hair may have long gone but the concentrated glint of determination still burns brightly when Travis reflects on the start of a process that would slowly change the music business permanently. ‘We always saw distribution as a political thing,’ he says. ‘We learned when we were students that controlling the means of production gives you power. We wanted there to be an independent structure that you could tap into which gave you access to the market without having to engage with all the normal routes. That’s what
independence is: it’s about building structures
outside
of the mainstream but that can help you infiltrate the mainstream.’

‘You go to meet A&R departments and there are people who don’t even know why they’re interested,’ says Boon. ‘Morris Oberstein, the chairman of CBS, called me and I had to hold the phone a yard away from my ear: “How come you’re doing that? Why are you signing to United Artists? They’re just a tiny little company, you should be talking to us.” I just said, “We did talk to you, you weren’t interested.”’

The interest in Buzzcocks had come scattershot from the music industry. Boon and the band were as confused by the record companies’ motives as the companies were by a Mancunian band who waved aside their customary advances of fame and fortune. Andrew Lauder was the only A&R man the band met who seemed to appreciate the context in which the Buzzcocks had placed themselves. As enormous fans of Can, whom Lauder had signed to United Artists, the band were intrigued by what he had to offer, especially if it included lurid tales of Can’s studio experiments and alleged (and highly tenuous) connections with the Red Army Faction.

‘Andrew seemed to be more interested in music than business,’ says Boon. ‘He could seduce you with his stories of working with the original Charlatans, and anyone with any wit liked Can and Neu! United Artists was this funny little label that had had Beefheart and the Groundhogs, a fairly unique catalogue.’ Having found Lauder sympathetic and agreeing to sign to United Artists, Buzzcocks felt the inevitable charges of ‘sell-out’ directed their way. ‘People’s response in the community was, “Why have they done that?”’ says Boon. ‘From that early wave, Buzzcocks had done something else from within to start with, and some people were very disappointed.’

‘Richard was more like a member of the group,’ says Lauder.
‘He wasn’t like a commercial manager thinking, “Well, if this doesn’t work I’ll go and sign another band.”’

To that end Lauder understood that, although they were from a different generation, Buzzcocks had a similar attitude to the first generation of acts on United Artists and he was amenable to the band including full artistic control in their contract. ‘We had a clause,’ says Boon, ‘which ends up being meaningless really, about controlling your artistic direction – but when things stop selling, which they did, then suddenly all the other clauses in the contract come out.’

As Buzzcocks embarked on the path of career pop stars as fully-fledged members of the recording industry,
Spiral Scratch
’s legacy ensured that there was an incipient, viable alternative cottage industry left in its wake. Boon now found he was managing a band on international tours and dealing with the corporate entertainment business, and he was as bewildered as anyone at what
Spiral Scratch
had achieved. ‘It just felt weird,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t prepared for any of it. I thought it was some kind of art prank, not business, and then it became business and I’m still not very good at business.’

Buzzcocks and Boon had unwittingly started a ‘record
company
’ by releasing
Spiral Scratch
. Some of their contemporaries were having similar, if slightly more refined, ideas. Bob Last was a twenty-year-old Edinburgh architecture student drawn to some of the emerging concepts of the day, principally the discussions taking place around art and design and in particular the emerging practices in architectural history. ‘I actually never had any interest in the music industry per se whatsoever,’ he says. What interested Last was what is now called ‘branding’ and the power of identity in the market place. ‘I had the political, cultural and theoretical kind of background from which emerged the popular form of postmodernism,’ he says, ‘the one that first
emerged in terms of architecture with Charles Jencks, then, in terms of popular culture, in Peter York.’

York’s series of articles for
Harpers & Quee
n magazine were widely read and discussed in the late Seventies and were eventually collected into books. In his breezy texts, York determined to join the dressier, theoretical elements of punk with the other, Peter Jones, end of the King’s Road. He identified what would come to be termed ‘lifestyle’, with its attendant concern for design and consumerism, in the way that previous contributors to
Harpers & Queen
had written about debs coming out. What threaded the components of York’s idea together was, inevitably, what he called ‘a bit of spare cash’. York’s postmodernism was a way of re-evaluating and reintegrating class distinction with a lowest common dominator of aspirational
vim
. Everything was of equal cultural value if it was stylish, reasonably pricey and helped guide the consumer towards the required level of product identification. The idea’s effect on the ensuing decade, and how the Eighties liked to talk about itself, often via York himself, was pronounced. For Last, part of a generation emerging from the long shadow of the attritional politics and economics of the Seventies, York’s conceits were, in their novelty, breathtakingly exciting. ‘It informed the brand. And the brand was driven very specifically by what postmodernism did,’ he says. ‘It mashed up populist instincts with classical and theoretical instincts, so that was very much the nexus.’

The name of Last’s brand was Fast Product, and the name came before any fixed purpose or decision about the brand’s function. ‘It came out of the same
zeitgeist
that punk emerged from, but as a brand it pre-dated punk,’ he says. ‘I didn’t know about punk; it probably was beginning to happen in London but certainly hadn’t reached us in Scotland.
Spiral Scratch
was a key moment when my girlfriend Hilary bought it for me, because
that was what made me think, OK, music is what we should do with this brand.’

Fast Product eschewed the conventions of record companies. Last had little interest in releasing albums or developing careers. Instead Fast Product released one-off 7-inch singles and compiled bands on to Earcoms, ear comics, which played around with formats.

A narrative on packaging and consumption, the Earcom series appeared with concentrated rapidity throughout 1978 and featured bands from the vanguard of the more theoretical space that had opened after punk: the Mekons, Gang of Four, Human League. Behind the layers of commentary was some
ground-breaking
music that proved Last had serious A&R skills and his ear to the ground. The second Earcom featured a nascent Joy Division contributing a track. After little more than a year Last decided to wind down Fast Product and began managing some of the Earcom acts, most notably Human League. The impact of Fast was intense and far-reaching – the iconography and style of the Baader-Meinhof gang for instance, which appeared on
Earcom 2: Contradiction
, is still being unravelled, co-opted and rebranded today.