Rip It Up and Start Again (6 page)

The Normal’s sound was electropunk. “Warm Leatherette” especially—all harsh stabs of analog-synth distortion and dispassionately perverse lyrics about the eroticism of car accidents, via Ballard’s
Crash
—could hardly have been further from the floridly romantic keyboard synth arpeggios of prog rock. The single did unexpectedly well, selling thirty thousand copies, and inadvertently turned Miller into the CEO of his own record label. Mute Records was the name he’d put on the back of the single, along with his home address. Many people assumed Mute was a proper record label specializing in weird electropop. Within a week of the release of “Warm Leatherette,” all kinds of peculiar demo tapes started arriving in the mail. “Fad Gadget was the first one I liked enough to want to put out,” Miller recalls. “Before I knew it I was running a record company—working from home, with no staff or anything like that, but a record label nonetheless.”

In mid-1978, a curious spate of cultural synchronicity found “Warm Leatherette” being released at around the same time as several other lo-fi electronic singles, all put out on indie labels: Throbbing Gristle’s “United,” Cabaret Voltaire’s
Extended Play
EP, Human League’s “Being Boiled,” Robert Rental’s “Paralysis,” and Thomas Leer’s “Private Plane.” “There was this period when they all came out, one after the other,” recalls Leer. “And it was like, ‘Where are all these weird records coming from?’ None of us knew each other. There was obviously something brewing.”

Actually, Thomas Leer and Robert Rental did know each other. Two Scottish friends who’d moved down to London at the height of punk, Leer and Rental, like Miller, were inspired to put out their own records by the Desperate Bicycles’ example. Renting a multitrack recorder for five days, they took it to Leer’s apartment in Finsbury Park to record his songs, then moved it across the Thames River to Rental’s Battersea pad. “The records came out at the same time and they sounded similar, because we actually made them together,” says Leer. They also looked alike, with Xeroxed covers and hand-stamped labels. Leer and Rental were so captivated with the DIY ethos that they each decided to operate their own labels—Oblique and Regular, respectively—rather than jointly release via the same imprint. Leer only pressed 650 copies of “Private Plane” backed with “International,” but one of them made it to the office of
NME,
where it was made Single of the Week.

“Private Plane” sounded electronic, but Leer didn’t actually own a synth. Instead he processed his guitar and bass using various gadgets and played Rental’s stylophone (a gimmicky electronic keyboard played with a pen) through an echo effect. All these gauzy silverswirl textures gave “Private Plane” an ethereal feel perfect for its mood of remote serenity tinged with wistfulness, loosely inspired by a recent TV program about the reclusive multimillionaire Howard Hughes. Leer’s fey voice is equally perfect, but owed something to contingency: He had to whisper the vocal because the recording took place at night in his one-room apartment and he didn’t want to wake his girlfriend.

More so than on the electronic squad, however, Desperate Bicycles’ biggest impact was on the noisy-guitar brigade. Teenagers growing up in Solihull—a middle class suburb on the edge of the Midlands industrial city Birmingham—Swell Maps were a gang of friends centered around two brothers who hated their given surname (Godfrey) so much they renamed themselves Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks. When “Smokescreen” came out, Swell Maps had actually existed for five years already as a sort of imaginary rock band, getting together to record albums on reel-to-reel tape recorders and turning them into cassettes complete with cover art and even inner-sleeve booklets.

“We would set up recording studios in the house when our parents went on holiday,” says Sudden. “But it wasn’t until Desperate Bicycles did their first single that we realized you could actually go book a professional studio and make a record. We thought only major labels could hire them, which seems ridiculous now! As soon as we grasped that anyone could do it, we immediately booked this place in Cambridge called Spaceward, which used to advertise in the back of
Melody Maker
and cost one hundred fifty pounds for a ten-hour session.”

Pooling their savings and borrowing more from the Godfreys’ parents, Swell Maps pressed two thousand copies of their debut, “Read About Seymour.” Released on the group’s own label, Rather, the single is often said to be about Seymour Stein, founder of the New Wave–friendly U.S. label Sire, who’d signed Talking Heads and the Ramones. Actually, the title refers to a totally different Seymour Stein, this one known as the “king of the mods” in 1960s England. The lyrics, though, were composed in cut-up fashion. Another song spliced its lyrics together by combining text from an Enid Blyton children’s story with words from a book about fighter pilots. Swell Maps were obsessed with war, but in a whimsical and boyishly innocuous way. “Then Poland,” “Midget Submarines,” and “Ammunition Train” drew on military history (especially the Spanish succession wars of the early eighteenth century) and the boys’ adventure story character Biggles, also a fighter pilot. The Maps also loved Gerry Anderson’s marionette TV shows of the sixties,
Thunderbirds
and
Stingray
. A
Stingray
episode provided the title for Swell Maps’ debut album,
A Trip to Marineville
. “I’d say our biggest influences were T. Rex, Can, and Gerry Anderson,” says Sudden. “Which isn’t a bad combination. We always wished we could use Barry Gray, the guy who did all the
Thunderbirds
themes, to do orchestrations of our tracks.”

Along with their pals the Television Personalities, Swell Maps invented a whole strand of postpunk that made a fetish of naïveté, characterized by weak vocals, shaky rhythms, rudimentary droning basslines, and fast-strummed discords. The DIY bands reveled in the noise-generating potential of the guitar, but they didn’t exactly
rock
and they certainly didn’t
roll
. For believers, much more than the “sped-up heavy metal” that was first-wave punk, this was the true realization of the here’s-three-chords-now-start-a-band ethos—except some of the groups didn’t even have three chords. “It took me two years to learn two chords,” Sudden told
NME
. “I can’t ever see ourselves becoming polished, note perfect and all that. We hardly ever rehearse—about once every six months.”

Fervent amateurists, Swell Maps believed bands got ruined when they depended on playing gigs and releasing records in order to make a living. One of the reasons the group split, shortly before the release of their second album
Jane From Occupied Europe,
was that they were becoming too successful, with a tour of America looming. Many of the groups in Swell Maps’ wake, though, went a step further and equated amateurism with amateurishness, the deliberate avoidance of anything that smacked of professionalism or slickness. From the liberating declaration that “anyone can do it,” DIY became a confining injunction to
sound
like anyone can do it. Swell Maps themselves were always more expansive and experimental than this: For every frantic racket such as “Let’s Build a Car,” there was an eerie metallic instrumental, such as “Big Empty Field,” clangorous and full of cavernous hollows, the missing link between Neu! and Sonic Youth.

Swell Maps initially had some problems shifting “Read About Seymour.” Sales of the debut single stalled at around 750 copies, despite an early boost of support from Radio One DJ John Peel, who played the single more than a dozen times within three weeks on his late-night show. The day after coming up to London to record a Maps session for Peel, Sudden happened to walk past Rough Trade’s record shop, which also doubled as the headquarters of the fledgling Rough Trade distribution company. “One of the guys asked, ‘Have you got any of your single left?’ and I said, ‘Oh, about a thousand.’ So he said, ‘We’ll take the lot.’”

The alliance that subsequently developed between Rough Trade and Swell Maps was a prime example of the role the London label rapidly assumed as enabler in chief for the U.K. independent movement. Initially Rough Trade had seemed like just another one of the first wave of postpunk indie labels, no more central than other pioneers such as Small Wonder, Cherry Red, Rabid, Industrial, and Step Forward. But soon it started to dispense information, encouragement, and support to other young labels. Most crucially, Rough Trade fronted money to bands to enable them to start their own labels or press more copies of a release. Often it formed partnerships with small, one-band labels (such as Swell Maps’ own Rather) in which Rough Trade paid for the pressing of the record and got distribution rights for the release. On one level, this was a canny form of enterprise (Rough Trade made much of its money from distributing independent records). But these “P&D” (pressing and distribution) deals were also freighted with an intense charge of idealism. Rough Trade was ideologically committed to helping individuals achieve self-realization through creative autonomy. Daniel Miller, for instance, was given three hundred pounds to press an extra two thousand copies of “Warm Leatherette,” which Rough Trade then distributed. They also provided a base for his fledgling Mute label. Says Miller, “I didn’t have an office, so they let me get the records delivered there from the pressing plant, and do my mail-outs from their HQ.”

Like many independents of this era and afterward, Rough Trade was a record store before it was a record label. A music-obsessed Cambridge graduate, Geoff Travis hitchhiked across America in his midtwenties. He picked up “literally hundreds of records by the time I got to San Francisco,” then shipped them back to London. A fantasy was forming in his head about “opening a shop where you could listen to records all day without anyone bothering you too much.” Acquiring stock from a bankrupt Cambridge record store, Travis eventually settled on scuzzy, low-rent Ladbroke Grove as a London location that offered sufficient “passing trade” thanks to its mix of bohemians and reggae-loving Rastafarians from the local Caribbean population.

Opening in February 1976, Rough Trade “became a magnet for the local community,” says Travis. “It was somewhere you could hang out and browse without anyone harassing you, this place where you could listen to music really loud all day long. We had comfy chairs, huge speakers pumping out music, and all the reggae prereleases, which I’d buy every week from a warehouse in North London.” Because Joe Strummer’s 101ers played nearby at the Elgin pub, and Mick Jones lived by the Westway flyover, “Rough Trade made the connection with punk really early,” says Travis. “And Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols would come in to sell records he’d stolen!” Rough Trade was the only place in London where you could buy American imports such as
Punk
magazine and singles by Pere Ubu and Devo released on their own tiny independents Hearthan and Booji Boy.

Although it was a privately owned company, Rough Trade was run as if it were collectively owned by the workers. Everyone had equal say and equal pay. “They actually had a ‘rota’ [rotation] system, with everyone taking turns to make the tea or do the sweeping up,” says Tony Fletcher, teenage editor of
Jamming
fanzine, who used to hang out at Rough Trade after school, still wearing his uniform. Constant meetings took place, during which weighty ideological issues and mundane operational details were discussed with equal fervor. This kind of communal ethos was easily mocked as a hippie throwback, but Travis stresses that “although people have this antileftist view of co-ops as disorganized, with people sitting around talking all day and nothing ever getting done, Rough Trade wasn’t like that at all. It worked for a number of years and we got
a lot
done. But the lines of responsibility were quite clear—people looked after different areas.”

Collectivist values of this sort were very much part of the radical culture of the midseventies. Both
Libération,
the French left-wing newspaper, and
Time Out,
London’s bohemian listings magazine, were run as cooperatives, with no hierarchy or pay differentials. By the late seventies, there were around three hundred cooperatives in the U.K., half of them whole-food shops, the rest ranging from radical bookstores to crafts stores. It was actually during the early to midseventies that the counterculture ideas of the previous decade were most widely disseminated and implemented. Squatting, for instance, was “huge,” recalls Travis. “I lived in squats all over London.” But the cooperative movement wasn’t just about grubby commune-dwelling hippies and anarchist dropouts. Collectivist ideas had currency in the political mainstream. In 1974, the Labour government’s resident hard Left cabinet member Tony Benn had grand plans for state-subsidized workers’ co-ops that would take over failed companies, something that actually happened with the
Scottish Daily News
and the motorcycle company Norton Villiers Triumph.

In addition to deriving inspiration from British socialist culture, Travis could also draw on his firsthand experience of kibbutz life in Israel. “I’m Jewish, and my parents sent me one summer to visit my distant relatives, and I spent some time on a kibbutz. There was a lot of idealism in the early days of the movement. The impetus was quite pure. I liked the way they were organized—people having breakfast together, living communally, making decisions in a relatively rational way. Everyone knows what’s going on. It seemed a more sensible way to run things—semiutopian, but not impossible.”

As with other record shops turned labels, the Rough Trade staff’s day-by-day activity—sifting through releases and judging which ones were good, the innumerable small decisions about how many of a particular record to stock and whether to reorder—soon evolved into an A&R–like intuition about what was “hot” musically and where postpunk as a whole was heading. Still, two full years elapsed between the opening of the store and the label’s debut release in February 1978: Metal Urbain’s “Paris Maquis.” “We thought they were the French Sex Pistols,” says Travis. Next came an Augustus Pablo single. But it was ROUGH 3—the
Extended Play
EP by Sheffield experimental trio Cabaret Voltaire—that really tapped the emergent postpunk gestalt.