How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (6 page)

To everyone involved in Factory and to anyone who had witnessed them play live, Joy Division seemed capable of making a definitive record. Andrew Lauder had started enquiring about the group for a new imprint he had started with the record producer Martin Rushent. CBS and Warner Brothers had also made approaches. Any A&R man wishing to discuss Joy Division’s future had to do so with their manager, Rob Gretton, whose occasionally bluff demeanour, along with his south Mancunian accent – which always thickened in conversations with record companies – disguised a mercurial intelligence and laconic wit. As he evaluated the various major-label offers on the table for Joy Division, Gretton grew more and more interested in the possibility of releasing an album with Factory, something that would allow him and the band to remain wholly based in Manchester, a factor which, as he fielded calls from the London companies, became of increasing significance.

‘Some time early ’79,’ said Wilson, ‘Gretton says, “What about doing the first album with you and then going to Warner Brothers?” My first reaction was, no fucking way. What’ll it cost? Six grand. We sketched out the deal on a napkin, or whatever. What I didn’t know was that Gretton was thinking, “This Factory stuff works.”’

Gretton’s decision to remain with Factory also provided the nascent Rough Trade Distribution with one of its first large-scale selling releases. ‘
Unknown Pleasures
really lit a fire under us,’ says Geoff Travis, ‘and we got to release it on Rough Trade in America.’

Unknown Pleasures
had been recorded by Hannett at Strawberry Studios in Stockport, a state-of-the-art recording complex owned by 10CC. The studio was equipped with the latest digital outboard which allowed the producer to synthesise his concentrated sense of atmosphere, a sense which had been developed in part by his incipient use of heroin. ‘I started it must
have been ’78, ’79,’ he said. ‘I’ve always been a rather solitary smack abuser. I think there are loads of people doing it, but I don’t know many of them. Even people who get completely off their trolley smoking freebase look down on smack.’

After producing the album, Hannett started to have misgivings about how Wilson wanted to structure the legal framework of Factory. Wilson had assumed that he, Erasmus, Hannett, Saville and Gretton would work in partnership. ‘We agreed that we were partners, ’cause it sounded good,’ says Saville. ‘Partnerships are very dangerous things but no one cared, because a partnership meant nothing – it was not as if anyone’s gonna make any money. When it transitioned from a partnership to a limited company it turned out we couldn’t get [the name] Factory Records so it became Factory Communications.’

The name Factory Communications had been forced on the label, but it suited Wilson’s idea that the company would reach beyond the activities of a record company and become a contemporary media organisation; one that would showcase Manchester at its dynamic, metropolitan, best. Factory’s partners, empowered by the success of Joy Division, were also determined to enjoy themselves. Saville noted, ‘Everybody was in this sort of play zone – this is one of Tony’s terms. The art of the playground – that’s where we were, this was a stage upon which each person was able to realise their own idealised way of doing these things. Tony has a platform to be a cultural entrepreneur, for Rob it was a platform to manage a group – he’d never done it before. I thought Martin was a very experienced producer, he actually wasn’t … and Martin produced the way he wanted to produce and Alan was just Alan, having quite obtuse, crazed ideas, and I became whatever you want to call it, the art director. It was a kind of multichannelled, free-form, self-indulgence. No one told anybody else how to do what they did.’

As well as free-form self-indulgence Jon Savage observed a bohemianism at work in Alan Erasmus’s flat. As the ideas behind Factory started to take shape, so did its sense of irreverence and against-the-grain self-confidence. The success of the records, along with Wilson’s profile at Granada and Saville’s heightened sense of design, gave the label an aura that separated it from its rivals. Added to this was the Factory partners’ dry wit and love of stoned ideas and barbed retorts, which had the effect of turning Erasmus’s sofa in Palatine Road into a mumbling and occasionally confrontational conversation pit.

‘It was an extension of that free-floating punk you-can-
do-anything
spirit,’ says Jon Savage ‘and also a bit of the Warhol Factory, putting all these very disparate characters together. You’d have the ACR [A Certain Ratio] boys, who were these ferocious unpleasant kids from Flickston and Earnston, and Martin, who was completely manic and mad and wonderful, Rob being very laconic and Tony talking nonsense.’

The partners all shared a characteristic that in Wilson’s mind connected the Factory hierarchy in an unspoken, clandestine manner: religion. ‘The whole Factory thing is Roman Catholic,’ he said. ‘There was a sexual thing as well – there seemed to be an enormous number of highly sexed people.’

All of the company’s partners were Roman Catholic,
something
which gave them a shared history and education. ‘Rob got a scholarship to the best Catholic school in Manchester,’ says Lesley Gilbert, Gretton’s partner. ‘Tony was in Salford at equally the best Catholic school. They were both Catholics and I think that had an awful lot to do with things. They were both highly intelligent people. Rob was from a council estate and a big family, never had two ha’pennies to rub together: poor, but he was very clever.’

The combination of softly spoken dry wit and the partners’
insistence on calling each other ‘love’ also prompted Savage to speculate on how Factory, behind the austere modernism and industrial symbolism, was somewhat camp. It was a trait that Savage felt extended throughout his new surroundings. ‘The north-west is a matriarchy,’ he says. ‘Tony Warren, a gay man, created
Coronation Street
, which was a defining Manchester and Salford statement. For a Londoner even when they’re stabbing you, the Scallies or Perry boys look fantastically camp.’

Wilson was lost in the possibilities of Factory. Through Saville’s artwork and Hannett’s productions, the label had made an impact that saw it rise above its peers and competitors with an effortlessly defined aura.

‘One of the most enlightening moments of my life,’ he said, ‘on a lovely summer’s day, feeling great, I dropped off at Martin Hannett’s house to get these two cassettes, of “Flight” by A Certain Ratio and
Closer
, which he’d just mixed the previous week and kept me away from.’ Putting the tapes into his car stereo and settling in for the journey, Wilson started beaming at what he and Factory had created. ‘I couldn’t believe’, he said, ‘that I was involved with this shit.’

*

Despite Granada and its local media infrastructure being based there, Manchester did not have the monopoly on the
northwest’s
desire for localised self-expression.

Thirty-five miles west, on Mathew Street, once home of the Cavern, Liverpool had its own bohemian enclave. The Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun, a multimedia performance-cum-debating space, with its own cafe, and second-hand clothes stall, Aunt Twacky’s, was a dole-head salon; a bespoke environment for the city’s romantic youth to hang around in and dream all day. Conceived and run by former merchant seaman and poet-philosopher Peter O’Halligan it was
a unique environment, situated at the exact spot, O’Halligan had been told in a dream, where Jung had located the pool of life. Despite the fact that Jung never visited Liverpool, his presence loomed large at the School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun. In 1976 the school staged a twelve-hour stage adaptation of
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

Adapted and directed by one of the mainstays of British experimental theatre, Ken Campbell, who had formed the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool especially, the sets were built by a tall, striking man in his early twenties who spoke in a
son-of
-the-manse Dumfries brogue, Bill Drummond: ‘[From] 1968 through to ’69 my sister was doing a thing called VSO, voluntary service overseas, and she used to send me back records,’ he says. ‘Some of them were white labels and I just thought, what’s the point of this? And some of them had really brightly coloured labels; maybe I only got six or eight of these records altogether, but they looked fantastic, something about them I loved.’

The teenage Drummond’s love of imported exotic vinyl stayed with him. As an art student at Liverpool in the mid-Seventies he was exposed to the culture of the day but preferred the more hyped-up hedonistic sounds, released on regional 7-inch labels, that were filling the local discos. He recalls, ‘I was an art school boy, but I wasn’t into whatever that represented. I guess a lot of the music I was into crossed over into the northern soul thing. I remember seeing Yes and just thinking “no”. I never idealised bands, I was interested in the record, and something that ignites and connects. And I tried to intellectualise this when I was jacking in art school, because I was into painting, and that’s what I wanted to be, a painter, and I just thought, fuck this, you know, art school, Liverpool, what’s happening? as much as I’m into painting, nothing seems to be happening in this room, but outside, in Liverpool itself, all this stuff seems to be happening
and all I’m doing is learning to make stuff, that if I’m successful, goes on rich people’s walls.’

The disposability and the ubiquitous commercial availability of the 7-inch single had struck a chord with Drummond. ‘The young idealist in me is thinking, look at that. 7-inch singles seemed to be paraphrasing an Andy Warhol thing: he was talking about the Coke bottle and how it’s everywhere the same, and I remember “Penny Lane”, “Strawberry Fields”, thinking, fuck me, that’s something, and Andy Warhol’s copy of this record is no better or worse than mine, and that’s how art should be. And that has kind of stuck with me.’

The idea of the avant-garde being available on the High Street in the form of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’/‘Penny Lane’ had an immediacy and an honesty that Drummond found missing in the music that wore its learning too heavily on its sleeves. ‘Roxy Music, as far as I was concerned, ’cause I was at art school, were like the tutors. They were being ironic and referencing this, that and the other – Marilyn Monroe and a bit of this – and I wanted punk then, basically, in 1971. I didn’t want it to be like the New York Dolls, I wanted something that was British, not limited to the intellect. I went along to see Dr. Feelgood live, and I thought it was phenomenal. You listen to a Dr. Feelgood album and it’s just this two-dimensional, very dull, very boring music, but fucking live, it just seemed to just forget about everything else. When punk did finally happen, I just thought I was too old to even contemplate thinking I was going to be part of it. I turned twenty-four in 1977. Then the Pistols announced they were making an album and I’m thinking. ‘What the fuck are they doing that for?’

Liverpool’s night-time musical life centred around the immaculate taste and hustler know-how of Roger Eagle, who had promoted the Dr. Feelgood shows, as well as counting
himself a friend to the likes of Screaming Jay Hawkins and Captain Beefheart (who had allegedly entrusted Eagle with his master tapes, in the midst of continuing litigation from record companies). A former DJ at the Twisted Wheel and with an intimate working knowledge of dub and its medicinal benefits, Eagle would filter his tastes into Eric’s, a few doors down from the Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun in Mathew Street. Eagle and Eric’s embraced and
fine-tuned
Liverpool’s romantic sense of itself as a city of free spirits. To Drummond and his contemporaries at Aunt Twacky’s, Liverpool’s dreaminess was self-evident. ‘The difference between Liverpool and Manchester is,’ he says, ‘one has a Celtic thing that’s kind of looking out to the new world and has a yearning, whereas Manchester is far more Anglo-Saxon. Just before punk, people on the estate where I lived were into Van der Graaf Generator and Nick Drake. It was a deeply musical environment, the John Peel show was on in every house.’

The impact of punk, together with Eric’s self-confidence meant that gathering in Mathew Street was a flamboyant,
self-intoxicated
crowd ready to spread their message of unorthodoxy over, if not the world, then at least one another. ‘There was one punk band, Spitfire Boys,’ Drummond says, ‘Paul Rutherford, who was the singer in Spitfire Boys, and Budgie, who was the drummer, were big friends of mine, but they weren’t convinced by it at all. They’d have band arguments saying, “What the fuck do you want to do that London racket for, there’s a whole world out there, what do you want to do that thing for?”’

Drummond was by now playing guitar in his own band, Big in Japan. Featuring such future Liverpool cultural luminaries as Jayne Casey and Ian Broudie, Big in Japan were the bitchy, flamboyant Liverpool version of punk in all its peacock glory. Drummond and the band’s keyboard player, Dave Balfe,
sensing the momentum starting to build around Big in Japan’s performances, realised they needed an outlet for all this artiness.

‘I thought, well now, actually having got myself involved in music,’ says Drummond, ‘I may as well do the bit that I really wanted to do. I wasn’t that bothered about being in a band; it was actually having one of these labels that was like the ones my sister had brought back. It was, basically, cut a record and make a sleeve and put the record in.’

Whatever the opportunities opened by
Spiral Scratch
and the burgeoning energies being organised in Rough Trade, the intentions and inspirations of Balfe and Drummond lay elsewhere. ‘As much as I think nobody can deny the iconic position that
Spiral Scratch
has,’ says Drummond, ‘that was not my inspiration at all. I had a whole great love of American music and those tiny labels, I wouldn’t have even known they were called ‘independent’ labels but they were independent, they were local labels, just trying to make money.’