HOW SOON IS NOW?

The Madmen and Mavericks

Who Made Independent Music 1975–2005

Richard King

For my parents

and

my wife and son, Sarah and Elijah

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Cast of Characters

PART ONE

I Hope to God You’re Not as Dumb as You Make Out

1 Time’s Up

2 All Night Party

3 What Presence?!

4 The Tinderbox (of a Heart)

5 Oblivious

6 You’ve Got Everything Now

7 Thieves Like Us

8 Primitive Painters

PART TWO

I Get This Feeling I’m in Motion, a Sudden Sense of Liberty

9 Everything Counts

10 Stereo Sanctity

11 Gigantic

12 We Love You

13 Getting Away With It

14 Trancentral Lost in My Mind

15 Leave The Planet

PART THREE

You Are the Latest Contender, You Are the One to Remember

16 Turnaround

17 Alcoholiday

18 Medicine Bottle

19 Cold Blooded Old Times

20 Is This It?

21 Fake Tales of San Francisco

Select References

Index

About the Author

Copyright

Illustrations

Set list from a Smiths concert at the ICA, London

Buzzcocks advertising for Spiral Scratch

Echo & The Bunnymen in New York

An early Orange Juice photo session

Cocteau Twins, Head Over Heels, CAD 313

Set list from a Go Betweens concert at the Boston Club, London

Memo from a Rough Trade marketing meeting

New Order, Thieves Like Us, Fac 103

Flyer for Bay 63

Daniel Miller

Sonic Youth on stage at the Mean Fiddler, London

Pixies, Gigantic, BAD 805

Jeff Barrett with Loop

Electronic, Getting Away With It, Fac 257

Image for the KLF’s single ‘Justified and Ancient’

Cover of Rough Trade’s in-house trade paper, The Catalogue

Dave Barker

Teenage Fanclub in Motherwell

Red House Painters, Down Colorful Hill, CAD 2014

Smog, Cold Blooded Old Times

Jeannette Lee and Geoff Travis

Flyer for Franz Ferdinand tour

Acknowledgements

My heartfelt thanks to the following for agreeing to talk to me for this book, some of whom had to put up with my interview technique more than once: Tim Abbot, Mike Alway, Tom Atencio, Dave Barker, Jeff Barrett, Steve Beckett, Dave Bedford, Laurence Bell, Richard Boon, Rebecca Boulton, Mark Bowen, Cally Calloman, Cerne Canning, Chris Carter, Jimmy Cauty, Andy Childs, Edwyn Collins, Nick Currie, Dai Davies, Pete Donne, Bill Drummond, John Dyer, James Endeacott, Joe Foster, Marc Geiger, Lesley Gilbert, Dave Harper, Simon Harper, James Horrocks, Mick Hougton, Robin Hurley, Gareth Jones, Nicki Kefalis, Martin Kelly, James Kyllo, Bob Last, Andrew Lauder, Jeannette Lee, Jason Macphail, Johnny Marr, Grace Maxwell, Alan McGee, Nathan McGough, Stephen McRobbie, Daniel Miller, Martin Mills, Mark Mitchell, Paul Morley, Stephen Morris, Joe Moss, Liz Naylor, Vaughan Oliver, Mike Pickering, Judith Riley, Malcolm Ross, Ivo Watts-Russell, Richard Russell, Jon Savage, Peter Saville, Richard Scott, Tina Simmonds, Paul Smith, Mike Smith, Seymour Stein, Alexis Taylor, Richard Thomas, Peter Thompson, Geoff Travis, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Gary Walker, Colin Wallace, Russell Warby, Ben Wardle

All interviews were conducted with the author apart from those with Tony Wilson and Martin Hannett, which are from the archive of Jon Savage.

For other quoted material the sources were: page 79 ‘Major developments are afoot at Glasgow’s Postcard Records …’ Ian Cranna, The Face issue 19, November, 1981; page 112 ‘beatbox business sense’ Cynthia Rose, Design After Dark: The Story of Dancefloor Style Thames & Hudson, 1991; page 123 ‘First we had no intention of sneaking out’ Claude Bessy, Slash, editorial, vol. 3 #5 (final issue) summer 1980; page 165 ‘Nothing spurs you on like anger …’ Morrissey interviewed by Bill Black, Sounds, 19 November 1983; page 152. ‘We introduced them as an antidote …’ Morrissey interviewed by Dave McCullough, Sounds, 4 June 1983

My thanks to the following websites: http://cerysmaticfactory.info/ for its peerless index of Factory catalogue numbers; http://www.passionsjustlikemine.com/ for its Smiths gigography; http://caughtbytheriver.net/ for providing me with an anecdotal infrastructure and so much else.

I am grateful to staff at the British Library, particularly in the collection of music newspapers which proved indispensable in my research.

Thanks to my agent Jonny Geller at Curtis Brown for his advice, patience and encouragement.

Thanks to my editor Lee Brackstone, whose understanding and enjoyment of the subject, along with his energy and enthusiasm, has been a constant support.

Thanks to everyone at Faber and Faber, especially David Watkins, Paula Turner, Ruth Atkins, Sarah Christie, Lisa Baker, Hannah Griffiths and Stephen Page.

Special thanks to Jon Savage for his morale-boosting phone technique and for kindly allowing me access to his archive, which allowed the voices of some of those who are no longer with us to be heard.

A series of (often rather one-way) dialogues and conversations with the following proved invaluable in helping me organise my thoughts: Sarah Chilvers, Sam Davies, Owen Hatherley, Robin Turner, Ben Thompson, Alexis Petridis and Steve Yates.

Thanks to Domino Records for teaching me about the highs and lows of independence, especially Laurence Bell, Jacqui Rice, John Dyer, Harry Martin, Bart Mcdonagh, Jonathan Bradshaw, Fiona Ghobrial, Colleen Maloney, Mark Mitchell, Paul Esposito and Dan Papps.

Thanks to everyone who dreamed the dreams of Planet Records and the Revolver Records shop, Bristol.

My warmest thanks to Anne Hardy, Angus Mill, Anna Jebb, John Wilcox and Barbara Budd, for providing me with a series of base camps.

And most of all thank you to my family, to my parents Edgar and Joan, who heard much of the music in this book being played in my teenage bedroom, and to my wife Sarah and my son Elijah (who was born somewhere around page 176) for their unending support, confidence, humour and love.

What was the shell doing, on the shore?

An ear endlessly drinking?

What? Sound? Silence?

Which came first?

Listen.

R. S. THOMAS, ‘Questions’

Introduction

Set list from The Smiths concert at the ICA London, 5 October 1983, the night that Seymour Stein first saw the band and was hit on the head by a gladiolus flower (Matthew Cooper archive)

Each generation, to put it another way, rescues a new area from what its predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as ‘the lunatic fringe.’

CHRISTOPHER HILL The World Turned Upside Down

Today the word ‘indie’ has a myriad of meanings, as likely to refer to the cut of a band’s trousers as to their music. ‘Indie’, originally used as an abbreviation of the word independent, has become a catch-all term. ‘Indie’ music is a genre, a type of music played by four or five white young men. An ‘indie’ band’s songs document their passage into adulthood with the odd jarring chord sequence, a sense that no one has been through this kind of thing before, vague or confused lyrics and an underfed look in their video. Away from music there are such things as ‘indie’ real estate, ‘indie’ rom-coms and even ‘indie’ pizza.

Though ‘indie’, both literally and metaphorically, likes to hide behind its fringe, for the major record companies it is big business. In 2007 a leaked memo from one major label VP to another outlined how important their priority breakthrough act’s image of scruffy hair and leather jackets was in securing the right demographic. As the executive noted in his email: ‘That aspirational indie vibe is pretty important when reeling the 25–35s in.’ The etymology of ‘indie’, from a definition of means of production and distribution to a meaningless adjective, colours our story. But the word ‘indie’ itself, ubiquitous as it is today, was long ago dispensed with by the independent music business.

Independent record labels have been around since music started being recorded. Self-financing, artist-friendly and the product of a music fan’s desire to engage directly with his or her obsession, the independent label usually started with zero financial planning in the bedroom, garage or shed. Many, if not all, of the world’s greatest record companies began in such inauspicious circumstances: Sun, Chess, Atlantic, Elektra, Virgin and Island were all the product of one person’s visionary moments and spare time. The independent label prides itself on its autonomy. Nurturing talent, financing, marketing, releasing and distributing music solely on its own terms, the independent label operates in splendid isolation. Or, as Geoff Travis, founder and director of Rough Trade and, more or less, the éminence grise and architect of the independent industry succinctly puts it, ‘Independence means not having to answer to anyone, really – that’s what it means in my mind.’

According to Alan McGee, forever ‘the man who discovered Oasis’, and whose colourful exploits and releases on his label Creation illuminated and invigorated the independent industry in the Eighties and Nineties, the inspiration for running a record company is clear: ‘Atlantic is the blueprint for every great indie label there has ever been – even if they don’t know it. Ahmet [Ertegun] invented the first one in 1947.’ Ertegun, who died in 2006, was a music business legend. Urbane, multilingual and a natural bon viveur, Ertegun was happiest cutting deals at the ball game or in a bar, anywhere that an artist would feel they were being treated to a level playing field in an atmosphere of informal largesse. Ertegun counted Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, John Coltrane, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones among his signings, and he was as erudite and fluent discussing the harmonies in a gospel arrangement as he was the contents of Truman Capote’s bathroom cabinet.

Charming, generous with anecdotes both salacious and musical, and immaculately turned out, best of all he was a music fan. McGee was always in thrall: ‘I loved Ahmet – he was a legend. He knew every genre of music back to front. When I met him he told me so many great stories. I said, “Ahmet, you should write a book,” and he replied, “Alan, it would get me killed.”’ In 2006 Ertegun, now in his eighties, entertained Laurence Bell, founder of Domino Records, to dinner at Elaine’s in New York. During the proceedings he expressed an interest in buying the American rights to one of Bell’s newest signings, the Arctic Monkeys. In his pitch Ertegun referred to each of the band members by their full name, ran through the album’s tracklisting and paused to reflect on just how good their drummer was. Having heard that the band were not keen on releasing singles from their albums, Ertegun was able to point out that he’d been through all that with Led Zeppelin and added, with a twinkle in his eye, that he’d made it work out all right for them. ‘I hung on his every word,’ remembers Bell. ‘He drank me under the table.’

To aspiring moguls like McGee or Bell, Atlantic, with their care and attention to detail in the recording process and the depth of colour and feel of their artwork, shone as a romantic archetype of how to succeed in the music business. But by 1969 the harsher realities of running an independent label had impacted on Atlantic. In the Warner Brothers entertainment conglomerate WEA, Atlantic now represented the ‘A’, with ‘W’ for the Warner group itself and the ‘E’ for Elektra. Founded in his Boston college dorm by Jac Holzman in 1950 to record the nascent folk music coffee-house scene, Elektra went on to sign the cream of the late Sixties counter-culture: Love, the Stooges, MC5, The Doors and Tim Buckley all added lustre to the label’s stellar roster. However, by that time Holzman, as many before and many more after, found himself in the impossible position of trying to square critical and cult success with the market realities of the entertainment industry. Holzman sold out to the major, consoling himself with financial stability and the fact that he found himself in good company next to Ertegun, the likes of whom, in the Warner Brothers corporate structure and its parent company, the Kinney Corporation, were thin on the ground – a situation that according to McGee persists to this day: ‘The people who run the music business now are yes men and accountants. Very few people in the higher regions of the business are there for the music, but Ahmet Ertegun and Jac Holzman were two of them.’

In the UK at the end of the Sixties, while Ertegun and Holzman were shoring up their balance sheets with Warners in the USA, two of the world’s greatest independent labels emerged out of the counter-culture miasma: Virgin and Island. Both companies provided the soundtrack to the ongoing long-format late-night sessions as the Sixties turned into the Seventies. Their founders, Richard Branson and, to a less public extent, Chris Blackwell, would go on to become paragons of liberal entrepreneurship. Before diversifying into aviation, finance and mobile communication Branson was releasing records by Faust, Captain Beefheart, Gong and Henry Cow on Virgin – pure pass-the-bong-head music. While masterminding the superstardom of Bob Marley, Chris Blackwell and Island were promoting bucolic Albion Arcadia in the form of Joe Boyd’s Witchseason Productions imprint. Witchseason albums were intensely recorded affairs, full of reflective, personal, folk-edged music by the likes of Fairport Convention, John Martyn and the then little-regarded Nick Drake.

Island and Virgin were both maverick independents developing a catalogue of artfully created albums by Roxy Music, Van Der Graaf Generator, Robert Wyatt, Brian Eno, Kevin Ayers and John Cale – a frontline of artists that would have far more of an influence on punk than the impending confrontational politics of 1976 would allow.

Despite the waywardness and envelope-pushing of their acts, according to punk’s scorched-earth cultural dictates, the loose denims and salon beards marked Branson and his generation out as hip capitalists; pioneers of the double-album statement, the lowest of the low.

Punk’s impact as a transfigurative force was instant and extremely powerful. Overnight, hair was cut, clothes were torn and a newly empowered noise started exploring individual, anarchic freedoms. One of the most tangible aftershocks of punk, both in its immediate aftermath and in its wider impact on pop culture, was its urgency to prompt individuals into action. Document your reality: do it yourself.

The Sex Pistols and Malcolm McLaren had run riot through the British music industry. The scale of their project, which, in McLaren’s eyes at least, was the subversion of commodity capitalism, meant they had to start their witch-hunts in the corporate boardroom. Self-releasing the band’s records held no interest to McLaren, as its impact would be limited. The band needed the recording facilities, marketing departments, and distribution and promotion divisions of a major label to maximise their impact. Ironically, once the band had been handsomely financed and quickly dropped by both EMI and A&M, the Sex Pistols ended up on Virgin. Unlike the majors, Richard Branson had no board members in Home Counties suburbia for McLaren to vilify and wind up.

What Branson and Virgin did have, however, were strong distribution channels via the majors and, despite being outsiders, the wiliness to play the market on its own terms. Branson also recognised a chancer when he met one and was able to react quickly and instinctively to whatever McLaren, realising he had met his match, threw at him. Irrespective of which company released the Sex Pistols records, in the first rush of punk’s acceleration, the message was clear. The major labels, if not the record industry at large, had been either hoodwinked or caught napping by a far more seductive riot of noise, energy, confusion and ideas. ‘Cash from Chaos’ was the retrospective soubriquet McLaren gave his hoodlum carnival-ride through the record industry, and it caught on. The message he had screen-printed on to one of his Sex boutique T-shirts, ‘Demand the Impossible’, proved equally seductive.

McLaren had shown that the heady combination of theory, design, philosophy, bullshit and hucksterism could generate front-page headlines, notoriety and financial reward. Most importantly, however, the Sex Pistols had made music accessible, dangerous and exciting again. The result was emancipation: anything was possible and off you go. McLaren’s tactics were to exert a great influence on the fanzine writers, bedroom dreamers and cultural theorists who were about to unwittingly configure the independent record industry. Whether through Tony Wilson and Factory Records’ continual referencing of the Situationists or through Alan McGee’s tabloidesque attempts to capitalise on the riots the Jesus and Mary Chain started at their early concerts, McLaren’s ability to provide a running commentary on culture just as it was mutating and contracting would remain a touchstone of independence.

Empowered and awake to the index of possibilities punk had thrown up, a generation of young men (and it was sadly, nearly always men, although today, in Jeannette Lee, Rough Trade now has one of the most respected and influential label owners in the music business) would start mapping their own physical and mental space where they could carry forward their own set of outlandish and impossible criteria, waywardly walking across the hot coals of punk’s embers, to create their own reality. Their names were Geoff Travis, Tony Wilson, Daniel Miller, Martin Mills, Ivo Watts-Russell, Alan Horne and Alan McGee. They would later be joined by a younger generation of backroom entrepreneurs: Steve Beckett, Richard Russell, and Laurence Bell. This book, with an additional cast of bands, artists, co-conspirators, miscreants, drug dealers, DJs and other visionary chancers and con men, is their story.

Remembering his contemporaries, Daniel Miller reflects on their similarities: ‘If you look at all those people – we were all roughly the same age, in our mid-twenties, when we started, which meant we were old enough to remember the whole ’68 thing. We were all involved with the protest movement in some way or other. We were all young, but we were also old militant hippie types turned on by punk.’ A lack of music industry experience was a benefit not a hindrance. ‘Everybody was in the same boat – OK, Geoff had owned a shop for a little bit, Martin Mills had owned a shop for a little bit and Tony had had a TV show. But nobody had a clue about running a record company and that was the best thing about it … and I try to know as little about running a record company today.’

The labels this generation started: Factory, Rough Trade, Mute, 4AD, Beggars Banquet and Creation, would trade on an ethos and identity no brand consultant would now dare dream of. Their releases enabled a fierce loyalty from their fans, resulting in a confidence on the part of the consumer to buy whatever the label released. As well as the music recorded, the distinctive logos and typefaces found on releases by Factory, Mute and 4AD were signposts to a secret knowledge. The sleeves celebrated the sense of artefact inherent in a 12-inch record cover and stretched its design possibilities to an almost ecstatic breaking point.

Factory, in particular, under the guidance of graphic designer Peter Saville, who favoured mixed media card and die-cut or fold-out designs, revolutionised the concept of what a record sleeve could be.

Between them Miller, McGee and Wilson, along with Travis, Watts-Russell, Mills and the labels that followed their lead, discovered and released music by artists who represent the DNA of popular culture: Orange Juice, The Smiths, Depeche Mode, Joy Division, The Fall, New Order, Cabaret Voltaire, Cocteau Twins, Happy Mondays, Sonic Youth, Primal Scream, Aphex Twin, Teenage Fanclub, Pixies, the Strokes, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, My Bloody Valentine, Autechre, White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand, Antony and the Johnsons, and Arctic Monkeys to name but a handful. The above bands barely scratch the surface of the independent catalogue but they represent the spine, if not the centrifugal force, of any record collection, etched as they are into the musical consciousness of generations. The independent catalogue has provided the soundtrack to self-discovery, teenage kicks and every other type of hedonism; it can be viewed almost as a contemporary art collection, but functions just as easily as a backdrop to everyday life. Above all, it’s the sound of musicians and artists being not only allowed, but actively encouraged, to do whatever the hell they want and damn the consequences.

In today’s climate of demograph-dictated consumerism and the corporate desire to access the ‘reputation economy’, it is ironic that the independent music industry was birthed, and chaotically nurtured, in a scruffy anonymous shop in down at heel, if not downright knackered, Ladbroke Grove. In February 1976 Geoff Travis opened a record shop at 202 Kensington Park Road, Ladbroke Grove, London. The cheap rent and the premises’ former role as a head shop reinforced the area’s reputation as an ashtray for the burnt-out remnants of laissez-faire hippie lifestyle experimentation. In the back room Travis would set up a desk and, phone in hand, start fielding calls and making decisions that fell well beyond the remit of buying and selling records. Within a year of its opening, any surface not occupied by the shopfront activities of 202 Kensington Park Road was used to start organising and negotiating a new kind of ad hoc business.

‘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 …

Cast of Characters

Mike Alway, A&R Cherry Red, Blanco y Negro, founder él records

Tom Atencio, manager New Order (USA)

Dave Barker, founder Glass Records, A&R Fire Records, Creation Records

Jeff Barrett, promoter, PR, A&R Creation Records, PR Factory, founder Heavenly Records

Steve Beckett, founder Warp Records

Laurence Bell, A&R Fire Records, founder Domino Records

Richard Boon, manager Buzzcocks, founder New Hormones, staff Rough Trade

Rebecca Boulton, manager New Order

Mark Bowen, A&R Creation Records, founder Wichita Records

Cally Calloman, A&R Mercury, Polydor, Island

Cerne Canning, promoter, staff Rough Trade, manager

Jimmy Cauty, the KLF

Edwyn Collins, Orange Juice, Postcard Records

Bill Drummond, founder Zoo Records, A&R Warners, solo artist, the KLF

Dick Green, partner Creation Records, founder Wichita Records

Rob Gretton, manager Joy Division and New Order, partner Factory Records, the Hacienda

Martin Hannett, record producer

Dave Harper, PR Rough Trade, Factory et al.

Mick Hougton, PR Warners, Creation, the KLF et al.

Alan Horne, founder Postcard Records

Robin Hurley, label manager, Rough Trade America, 4AD

Bob Last, founder Fast Product, manager Human League, Scritti Polliti

Andrew Lauder, A&R United Artists

Jeannette Lee, partner Rough Trade

Johnny Marr, The Smiths

Grace Maxwell, manager Orange Juice

Alan McGee, founder Creation Records

Nathan McGough, manager Happy Mondays

Daniel Miller, founder Mute, record producer

Martin Mills, founder Beggars Banquet

Stephen Morris, New Order

Joe Moss, manager The Smiths

Liz Naylor, editor City Fun, staff Rough Trade, Blast First

Vaughan Oliver, graphic designer 4AD

John Peel, broadcaster

Mike Pickering, A&R Factory Records, DJ and promoter the Hacienda

Scott Piering, radio plugger, Rough Trade, the KLF et al.

Ivo Watts-Russell, founder 4AD

Richard Russell, MD XL Records

Peter Saville, graphic designer Factory Records

Richard Scott, founder The Cartel, partner Rough Trade

Tina Simmons, label manager and partner, Factory Records

Paul Smith, founder Blast First

Seymour Stein, founder Sire Records

Richard Thomas, concert promoter Factory, Rough Trade et al.

Geoff Travis, founder Rough Trade

Russell Warby, booking agent Nirvana, the Strokes, et al.

Tony Wilson, founder Factory Records, broadcaster

PART ONE

I Hope to God You’re Not as Dumb as You Make Out

1 Time’s Up

Buzzcocks control the means of advertising as well as production for Spiral Scratch (author’s archive)

In 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.’

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 & Queen 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.

In just over a year Last had packaged and released music by Joy Division, Human League, the Mekons, Dead Kennedys, Scars and D.A.F. in a mess of beautiful texts and signifiers. Last had proved that an artfully constructed label could be much more than the sum of its parts and discerning record buyers were now literate in the possibilities and language of releasing and designing records – none of which was lost on many of Last’s contemporaries. In a matter of months the combination of sharp design, playful marketing, and a broadly anti-industry stance would be the lingua franca of small new record companies.

*

Just as Last had done in Edinburgh, another group of individuals from a similar, if more extreme, non-musical background found themselves turning to music to work through their ideas about society. Like Last they were thinking theoretically, although the theory around Industrial Records is still a shape-shifting point of argument that continues to engage and entrance today.

Along with Chelsea’s Lots Road and the avenues of squats in north Kensington which were home to many of the people affiliated to Rough Trade, London’s East End remained one of the undeveloped areas of the capital. It contained London’s highest density of post-war council rehousing, which had been built alongside semi-demolished terraces that were now derelict.

‘It was a very charged atmosphere much of the time; Hackney was a strange place then, nothing like it is now,’ remembers Chris Carter. ‘There was still a strong racial tension then, that and skinheads and gay bashing. East London was still finding itself and didn’t have a specific vibe, unlike, say, north London, which was always more chilled out and liberal. You really did take your life in your hands if you went out alone at night in some areas.’

Carter was a teenage long-hair with a deep love of kosmische electronics, who first visited the studio of COUM Transmissions on Martello Street in Hackney in February 1978, at the invitation of its founders, Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti. ‘It’s funny, because when Gen and Cosey first introduced themselves to me they just seemed like a couple of colourful hippies with a lot of mad ideas,’ he says. ‘Even though we were obviously from quite different musical backgrounds, within hours we discovered all these shared interests and points of reference and really bonded.’

The difference in backgrounds between Carter and his new friends was pronounced. Carter was a shy bedroom engineer who had done lighting for Tangerine Dream and was sufficiently dexterous with a circuit board to build his own synths. Tutti and P-Orridge were performance artists who had decided to explore music as part of their practice. To the technologically astute Carter, it looked as if they needed some help. He recalls, ‘They invited me to their studio in Martello Street. They were playing with all these half-working, broken-down and borrowed instruments: guitars, drums, keyboards – some things were home-made and many were on the verge of self-destruction. And there was Day-Glo paint everywhere. It took me days before I could take them seriously; I thought I’d come across some offshoot of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.’

Tutti and her partner P-Orridge had formed COUM Transmissions during the swell of the early Seventies performance art movement, rising through provincial beginnings in their native Hull to appearing at the Venice Biennale. Joining the duo and Carter was Pete ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson, a freelance sleeve and graphic designer whose clients included Hipgnosis, the iconic design studio who framed progressive rock in witty, often photographic-based, abstractions that complemented the self-consciously complex music contained in the record covers to perfection. This was the basis for the project Carter, Christopherson, Tutti and P-Orridge undertook together: Throbbing Gristle.

‘Sleazy’s work with Hipgnosis, and his knowledge of layouts, printing, photography and so on was a real asset,’ says Tutti ‘because we had at our fingertips first-hand knowledge of all these techniques used by the industry. He put together the finished art works, knew about printing methods and the best printers to use. Between the four of us we had everything necessary to be TG and run a label.’ The Industrial Records/Throbbing Gristle quartet had a unique skill set which allowed the label to have a distinct modus operandi, one which had the lingering air of analysis and enquiry, and of a risk-taking avant-garde sensibility.

‘Chris’s technical ability was the key, really,’ says Tutti. ‘He did the final production and mastering on all TG releases.’ Carter’s hands-on ability as an engineer, along with Christopherson’s knowledge of design ensured Industrial releases had an incredible attention to detail.

Industrial’s sleeves had the clarity and authority of Hipgnosis, but in a monochrome, austere reverse. Making their own equipment meant Throbbing Gristle were elevating the idea of taking control to a higher level. The band rejected the format of bass, guitar, drums and vocals and, although they were releasing records, Throbbing Gristle were wholly detached from the conventions of the record business. The early releases on Industrial pre-dated punk, a style and movement of which Throbbing Gristle were dismissive. ‘Although punk painted itself as “revolutionary”, it wasn’t, in my opinion,’ says Tutti, ‘because business was its master, it didn’t crack its own whip, it still sought idolatry via a raw form of rock ’n’ roll dressed up in designer clothes.’

If Hackney suffered from dereliction and tensions, it offered a cheap or free environment for creativity. ‘I’d always operated in this kind of atmosphere,’ Tutti remembers. ‘Living in derelict squat-type buildings that no one else wanted meant we could have large spaces for small money and we were reasonably isolated too. I personally liked the feeling of living and working in disused buildings. They provided an additional disconnect with mainstream society and became like my own territory. Society’s failure assisted our “success” in a way; because of all the political unrest of the Seventies it was easier for us to operate under the radar because people were focused on the inconvenience of the power cuts, uncollected rubbish. Me and Gen having the Martello Street studio was also an enormous advantage because we had a space in which to experiment to our hearts’ content. And just across London Fields we had our house in Beck Road, so when we had extended jam sessions, or were working late in the studio, we all bunked down together.’

As well as COUM’s studio in Martello Street, which the duo leased from the Arts Council, P-Orridge and Tutti squatted in a terraced house in nearby Beck Road where Throbbing Gristle often slept side by side to achieve a group mind/dream state when sleeping.

Throbbing Gristle’s self-confidence meant the business of running a record company was an enjoyable experiment. ‘In the beginning,’ says Tutti, ‘it was all a real novelty and we enjoyed discovering all the nuances of manufacture, distribution and promo. Of course, we played around and twisted things around a bit to suit our own needs. There was and continued to be a lot of game play. But the mundane day-to-day slog of going to collect mail, answering that mail, packaging orders and duplicating cassettes took up a lot of our time. Chris and Gen went to do the test pressings, deliver stock to Rough Trade. After a while, as things got more intensely active, we had to bring in two people to work for us in “the office” so we could get on with creating our music.’

Upon its release Throbbing Gristle’s debut album Second Annual Report sold well and eventually achieved sales of over 100,000. In Rough Trade the record had a secondary use. ‘When it got too overcrowded,’ says Richard Scott, then a new recruit to the fledgling Rough Trade staff rota, ‘we’d put on Throbbing Gristle to clear a bit of room in the shop.’

At a Throbbing Gristle concert at the Crypt in London, the support band was The Normal, whose only band member was Daniel Miller, a bedroom boffin with collar-length hair and the air of an amateur inventor. ‘I was mucking about at home with synths just as the first independent labels were starting and I just wanted to put out a single,’ he says. ‘I had very low expectations. I was listening to the Ramones and I was listening to Kraftwerk. I was disillusioned with the straight record industry, because everyone thought that the music they were putting out was shit and now if you were so inclined you could do it yourself.’

Miller had recorded two songs that he intended to release as a single at home. Once he had mixed the tracks on to a cassette, he summoned enough courage to approach the counter of Rough Trade. ‘I didn’t know any of the people there,’ he says, ‘and I felt incredibly nervous.’ The tracks ‘TVOD’ and ‘Warm Leatherette’ were two corrosive and minimal songs that sounded as though they had been intimidated out of a synthesiser. Geoff Travis, as he did for anyone who walked into the shop, gave Miller a reassuring smile and inserted the tape into the Rough Trade tape-deck. A few feet away Jon Savage was flicking through the week’s new releases; he was in conversation with his fellow Sounds journalist Jane Suck as the pair debated which records might be worthy of further investigation or a review. ‘I remember Daniel coming into the shop with a tape of “TVOD” which he’d just made,’ he says. ‘Jane Suck just went berserk when she heard it – she thought it was Lou Reed’s new record.’

To Miller’s relief and surprise Travis offered to manufacture and distribute ‘TVOD’ and ‘Warm Leatherette’ on the spot. ‘They listened to it and liked it and took over the distribution, which was fantastic,’ says Miller. ‘I’d walked in with a tape, and came out with a record deal. The weird thing for me was before that that I had no contact with the music business whatsoever.’

Miller settled on the name Mute for his label and attended to the requirements, if only for one release, of becoming a record company. ‘I put my address on the back of the sleeve,’ he says ‘because that seemed to be what people did. And I started getting demo tapes from people with long letters saying, please will you put my record out.’

The atmosphere in the Rough Trade shop was buoyant. More and more 7-inches were being manufactured by Rough Trade on their customers’ behalf, and the racks of one-off statements, angular ideas about music, and primitive essays in pop started to swell. As well as over the counter at the shop, each release was also sold via Rough Trade’s ad hoc mail order system; a new haphazard form of supply and demand was being slowly created away from the established music industry.

Richard Scott was tall and hirsute and still carried the air of his former occupation as an architecture tutor. He was now de facto in charge of the embryonic distribution of all the material flooding into Kensington Park Road and trying to organise a way for it to leave, the impetus of the moment almost willing the records out of the door. ‘There was just a huge energy,’ he says, ‘and very soon we could see that we could sell 10,000 of anything that was halfway decent and 10,000 actually generated a lot of money even then. I walked in there, I think it was late one afternoon, to talk to Geoff and they were busy collating any spare copies of Sniffin’ Glue and I was sort of spat out ten years later. I’d walked into something which was so dense that really there was no time to stop and think or catch your breath.’

A community was building, but despite its energy and nervous ambition, it was still localised and small. ‘We used to go to gigs every night,’ says Scott, ‘and there was always a saying at Rough Trade that if there were more than six other people in the audience you were at the wrong gig. John Peel used to hang around the back. He used to come in and go through the shelves … he was so gentle.’

Rough Trade were ready to take the next step and become a record label, releasing singles that extended the DIY production values and sensibility. The early releases came from the diaspora of ideas fermenting around the shop, and drew on a regional and international talent pool. Kleenex were from Austria and Augustus Pablo maintained the store’s connection with reggae. Cabaret Voltaire were from Sheffield, and had been brought to Travis’s attention by Jon Savage.

‘I stayed at Richard Kirk’s one night,’ says Savage. ‘You could hear the factories, and they sounded just like Cabaret Voltaire. Richard was really into Kraftwerk, so they gave me a whole load of tapes, one of which became a cassette release on Industrial, another, Cab’s first vinyl release, Extended Play, on Rough Trade. I regarded that as part of my job at that time, putting people in touch with each other.’

Jon Savage felt that things around punk London in general were starting to dissipate. ‘I felt that the Rough Trade scene was getting very dislocated. I didn’t want a whole load of people telling me what to think. I was desperate to get out of being a lawyer; I got in touch with Tony and said, “I want to get a job in telly,” and Tony said, “Right, well, Granada are having boards for researchers,” and I went up for a board in November ’78 and I got the job.’ The Tony in question was a fellow Cambridge graduate, a suave former grammar-school boy from Salford: Tony Wilson.

* The manager’s name was John Webster. As well as taking a box of Spiral Scratch on commission, Webster would go on to work at Virgin in the marketing department, where he would be part of the team behind the Now That’s What I Call Music series of compilations. A decade later he would come up with the idea of the Mercury Music Prize. All of this suggests that the impact of Spiral Scratch was far-reaching.

2 All Night Party

Echo & the Bunnymen on their first visit to New York, April 1981. The band’s bassist Les Pattinson is out of shot as he took the photograph. From left to right: Bill Drummond, Will Sergeant, Ian McCulloch, Pete De Frietas (photograph by Les Pattinson used by kind permission of the photographer)

‘My dad’s a poet,’ says Nathan, son of Roger McGough, ‘and Wilson was posted at the Liverpool Daily Post in Liverpool as a journalist just after Cambridge and he was a fan of my dad’s poetry. My dad had bought this stucco townhouse built by the Earl of Sefton in the early 1800s, but it was basically in the postcode of Liverpool 8, which the outside world knows as Toxteth, and because of that people didn’t want to live there. Wilson used to come and knock on the door; my mum used to hate people calling round, so she just used to be very rude to this guy who turned up on the doorstep. He’d start saying God knows what and she’d just close the door on him. He kept persisting and one day, when I was about thirteen or fourteen, I came downstairs; and by this time Tony Wilson was a young broadcaster on Granada TV, and he was sat in our front room.’

The young Tony Wilson, perfecting the mix of provincial but urbane, louche but culturally thrusting, that was to define his media person for the decades to come, made a big impression on the teenage McGough. ‘There was this dude off the TV sat in a blue velvet armchair with a denim shirt on and a white tuxedo jacket, and he was rolling this spliff. He was very charismatic and kind of became a friend of the family and he turned me on to Kurt Vonnegut and Shakespeare and music. At that time, it was about ’74, ’75, and Tony was a bit of a hippie.’

Wilson worked at Granada TV, which, before the advent of Channel 4 in November 1982, could easily compete with LWT as the leading independent televisual cultural voice of the age. As well as reading the local news Wilson had aspirations to be a more authentically northern, and much more streetwise, Melvyn Bragg. One thing he particularly coveted was the chance to put contemporary music in front of a television audience, something with which he initially struggled. ‘When I started putting music on the TV in ’74,’ said Wilson, ‘I thought it would be appreciated by my generation, but it was hated and detested by my generation then and I just couldn’t understand it.’

Once punk broke through into the mainstream, Wilson’s attempts to put the bands in front of the camera resulted in his temporary resignation from Granada. ‘Wilson was the only one of the intelligentsia, or even the pot-smoking hippie lot, who embraced punk immediately,’ says McGough. ‘He saw its power and its radicalism, and all his mates were, like, “This is rubbish,” so he stuck up for it.’

Wilson’s in-tray filled up with correspondence from punk bands keen to gain some access and exposure. The pile included an envelope from Buzzcocks, inviting him to the first of the Sex Pistols Lesser Free Trade Hall concerts. Wilson recalled, ‘I got a letter and a cassette from a guy called Howard Trafford, and he said, “This is a really wonderful group, just started up in London, they’re coming to Manchester on June 2nd, Lesser Free Trade Hall,” and I went, of course, and apparently 18,000 people attended that first gig. Something I found very interesting about pop music was that it was a genuinely popular, i.e. classless, art form, in a way that television isn’t. There’s a demographic to people who watch Coronation Street, to a degree. There is no class demographic to the received experience of being a Sex Pistols fan. It has the same intellectual content for a Cambridge undergraduate, and a kid on the dole.’

Wilson’s ability to distance himself from the editorial protocols of Granada allowed him a unique perspective, one he would hold on to throughout Factory. As well as the free-for-all experience of being a member in the Sex Pistols audience, he also noticed a distinct sensibility developing among the crowds at Manchester concerts. Behind the aggression and theatricality of punk, a more thoughtful, if no less intense, space was opening up. ‘One of the great achievements of Manchester,’ he said, ‘was that when Suicide supported the Clash the following year, they were bottled and canned and fucked over at every gig in the country, including London, except when they played The Factory. Fifteen hundred people went berserk, loved it. We were that advanced. There was a subculture there; the Residents and Suicide seemed to go together with a certain bunch of people.’

Jon Savage had recently moved to Manchester and was now a colleague of Wilson’s at Granada and was equally seduced by Suicide and the burgeoning new electronic sensibility. ‘It was kind of dark, electronic, psychedelic and it was very comforting,’ he says. ‘During that period there was a lot of bombing around in a crap car all over the north of England … late at night, listening to this analogue electronic music and it was sounding very warm and although it was alienating, it was very pleasurable.’

Wilson had been the only UK broadcaster to book the Sex Pistols on to live television on his late-night music and culture programme So It Goes. He had planned to cover the group in depth and film their appearance at Eric’s club in Liverpool on the band’s ill-fated Anarchy tour. Granada had tired of what his producers considered to be his obsession with the band and decided against the idea, a decision that led to Wilson’s resignation. ‘I resigned at Granada over the Anarchy tour,’ he recalled, ‘I’d had a documentary I was making on the Pistols cancelled on the morning I was to start shooting it, because my producer had called Granada and said, “Don’t give Wilson his crew.” This was four or five weeks after Grundy – things are going around in the press.* The next day Roger Eagle rang me to say the police had been down to Eric’s and said, ‘If you put this group on, you will not get your licence next time it comes up.’

The late Roger Eagle was a totemic presence in Liverpool and the north-west throughout the Seventies and Eighties. Having cut his teeth on the northern soul circuit, he brought Dr. Feelgood and Captain Beefheart to mid-Seventies Lancashire before opening Eric’s on Mathew Street in Liverpool. Preceding The Factory Club by nearly two years, Eric’s was quite possibly, and certainly in the eyes of its clientele, the hippest club in Britain. It was undoubtedly a peerless seedbed for post-punk and a bohemian watering hole, where the juke box played 7-inches by Howlin’ Wolf, Ornette Coleman and the Seeds.

Wilson and Eagle, friends since Wilson’s posting on the Liverpool Echo, had been mutually supportive as punk spread across the north, Wilson making sure Eric’s received its fair share of listings in the Manchester media. ‘I prepared for the What’s On show that week. What’s Not On is the Sex Pistols, and I then got a memo saying, “There will be no mention of the Sex Pistols in this programme,” and I walked out. Same day my accountant is saying to me, “You don’t make any fucking money at Granada, do you?” And my daughter says, “You put groups on television and three months later they’re big stars, is this true?” Yeah. “Well there’s a lot of money in that.”’

Wilson decided to develop his interest in punk further, and he and his friend Alan Erasmus, whom Wilson had met through a lifelong love of marijuana, launched The Factory Club, a regular live music night at the Russell Club in Manchester’s Hulme estate.

*

‘I didn’t know Tony, but by virtue of his regular, almost daily, television appearance, I felt that I did,’ says Peter Saville. ‘Everybody in Manchester, and most of the north-west, felt that they knew Tony Wilson and he was accessible and I would imagine that to a certain extent he got a certain ego thrill out of that. The downside is that people also can be quite rude or critical as well.’

Saville was a student at Manchester Polytechnic where he was studying graphic design. A school friend, Malcolm Garrett, was on the same course; the pair of them had grown up with a hunger to be involved in the seductive process of record sleeve design, a process Garrett was now engaged in through his work with Buzzcocks, whose United Artists sleeve he was designing.

‘I was not that connected to the scene,’ says Saville. ‘I didn’t live in the city, I lived in the kind of greenbelt stockbroker area outside, in Cheshire. I was a dreamer out in the semi-rural belt around those industrial cities, where the whole notion of the city and of industry has a kind of romantic dimension to it.’

Saville’s dreaminess would combine perfectly with an elegant and detached aesthetic that would define the Factory style. His inspiration also came from the discourse and photography he was discovering in upmarket magazines which enabled him to go on flights of fancy that were something of a contrast to the realities of inner-city Manchester.

‘At art college I started reading Peter York’s essays in Harpers,’ he says, ‘which were really, really, influential, and I eventually discovered Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdain in Paris Vogue, but that was not an easy thing to discover in Manchester in 1976, ’77. You had to have a bit of a mission to start seeking out Paris Vogue: the only tangible reality in your existence that expressed alternative visual culture that was there for you was the record cover.’

Saville met Richard Boon through Garrett’s work with Buzzcocks. While Boon was unable to offer Saville any sleeve design work, he suggested he contact Wilson about the broadcaster’s plans for opening a club. ‘I had a friend who knew him,’ says Saville, ‘and somehow it was arranged that I would go to Granada television one afternoon and meet Mr Wilson in the lobby.’

Although he didn’t yet have a portfolio Saville had a head full of ideas that he was keen to explain to Wilson; he was particularly interested in typography and the possibility of exploring new avenues for the uses of lettering in graphic design.

‘I knew what I wanted,’ he says, ‘which was to go somewhere much harder. In the work of Jan Tschichold I discovered a manifesto that he’d done in 1919 called Die Neue Typographie and that was brutal – it was very refined, but it was brutal, and Malcolm hadn’t been there, Barney Bubbles hadn’t been there, none of the people who were doing the groovy new work had gone anywhere as cold as Tschichold.’

Wilson was impressed with the young designer’s creativity and, although he didn’t understand his references to modernist typography, he suggested Saville design a poster for the club. To Saville’s surprise, the next commission he received from Wilson was not for further concert posters but ideas for a record sleeve. The nights at The Factory had prompted Wilson into taking a further step towards embracing the DIY ethos and releasing a single. ‘We got together Christmas ’78 at Alan’s flat,’ he says, ‘and, very surprisingly to both Alan and I, Tony said, “Let’s do a record from the club – I’ve got five grand or so my mother left me – some of the bands that have played the club don’t have record deals yet.’

Having seen Buzzcocks sign to United Artists and the immediate wave of Mancunian bands that had followed them become the subject of major-label interest, Wilson felt it was necessary to intervene. ‘I remember Wilson saying to me, “We can’t keep losing bands out of Manchester,” ‘says Richard Boon. ‘He was definitely one for civic chauvinism.’ Boon had had long conversations with Wilson over the morality or otherwise of Buzzcocks’ departure to a London record company. ‘Pride is one thing,’ he says. ‘I’d sit down and talk to Tony and he’d say, “Why have you done that, love?” Manchester is full of men who call each other ‘love’ and sometimes mean it.’

Wilson had become aware of the groundswell of new independent labels through promoting the concerts at The Factory. He realised that many of the bands were beginning to release their own music and sensed that, having made an initial DIY move, most bands were hoping to sign to a major. Still convinced of the broader possibilities of seizing control that had been suggested by punk, he started to consider whether The Factory could become some form of record company.

‘I was in the car’, he said, ‘thinking, this guy does it, that guy does it. Everyone thinks of Factory as the arty label but Fast Product was the first arty label. I had got around to the point of view that you merely take your artist on to the major label. Bob Last had done it with Fast. At the time it seemed like a good idea; looking back it seemed like a terrible mistake. Joy Division were getting really hot, and Andrew Lauder became interested in them.’

Along with Cabaret Voltaire, John Dowie and Durutti Column, Joy Division were one of four bands featured on A Factory Sample, the first Factory release. Inspired by the sleeve of an imported Asian copy of Santana’s Abraxas, in which he’d been absorbed while tripping one night, Wilson suggested A Factory Sample should be housed in rice paper.

Saville duly obliged and produced a minimal design which featured clean lines against a silver tone and used numbers to indicate the bands and their track listing. ‘It seemed appropriate that this first record, which was a collective of different people, should just basically echo that … so the numbering system crept in – we like numbers … numbers were Kraftwerk, industry, technologies, the reductive notion of model numbers as opposed to the kitsch of names. I mean BMW 3 series, compared to Ford … Capri!’

The Factory numbering system, although playful and innovative, would become something of an albatross around the label’s neck. Dental work, unfinished projects and drug deals would all be assigned individual Factory catalogue numbers. ‘It was the kind of coolly abstract element of numerology that was appealing’, says Saville, ‘but it became a bad habit; it became banal, I’m afraid … this notion of giving numbers to everything, and that was it really.’

Jon Savage, newly relocated to Manchester, found himself duly summoned to what would be the Factory premises for the next twelve years: Alan Erasmus’s flat on Palatine Road, in leafy Didsbury.

‘It was very much quid pro quo with Tony,’ says Savage. ‘He got me the gig at Granada, and one of my first tasks when I went up to Manchester was sitting in Alan Erasmus’s flat, spending several evenings bagging up this ridiculous package.’

Once A Factory Sample had recouped, Wilson, Erasmus and Saville started releasing a series of singles and cassettes that suggested, in their black-and-white photographic artwork featuring images of cropped hair and overalls, a post-industrial, Mancunian Bauhaus. As an identity started to form around the label, Factory’s design sense and aesthetic were fixed in the minds of the record-buying public as distinctive and elegant, gaining the label a reputation for individuality and quality. To fulfil its ambitions to become an independent northern counterpoint to the London music business, Factory needed to start releasing albums.

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.’

They were thinking more in the abstract, calling their prospective project The Zoo. ‘It was called The Zoo – it wasn’t called Zoo records, and we wanted to do all sorts of things that were nothing to do with actually making records. Most of the stuff we never realised because what happened, by putting it out to a bunch of friends, “OK, do you want to put a record, we’re doing this label,” they say, “OK, yeah, we’ll do that,” and so the Bunnymen and Teardrops appear within that little hothouse of a scene in Liverpool.’

Amid the plethora of shared band members’ egos, cattiness and thrillingly confident music, Echo & the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes emerged as the bands with the strongest melodies, choruses, haircuts and self-belief in their own mythic powers. Alongside them were Lori and the Chameleons, Wild Swans and Big in Japan. Zoo’s catalogue sounds like a Liverpudlian Nuggets, relocated from the garage to the four brick walls of Eric’s and the hours of discussion of Penguin Modern Classics over the same cup of tea at Aunt Twacky’s.

Two of the first singles released by The Zoo, Echo & the Bunnymen’s ‘Pictures On My Wall’ and The Teardrop Explodes’ ‘Sleeping Gas’ quickly made ‘single of the week’ in the music papers and before it was even ready to be opened to the public The Zoo was in business.

‘We very quickly ended up having to become their managers,’ says Drummond. ‘Not that we knew what management was, or that we were particularly any good at it. It’s very hard to be good at something if you didn’t even know what it is, but that completely took over from whatever visions we had for The Zoo.’

Sparked off by the ideas in Drummond and Balfe’s heads, not to say a rivalry between lead singers that ensures a heroic sense of one-upmanship, The Teardrop Explodes and Echo & the Bunnymen avoided the standard route to commercial pop success. In the years to come, the Bunnymen would play tours of the Outer Hebrides, building an anti-career of elemental glamour; they would be the first band to play the Albert Hall in a generation, selling it out for two nights in 1983. The huge – Top Ten, Top of the Pops – success of The Teardrops’ ‘Reward’, was followed by Julian Cope’s compilation of the then unsanctified Scott Walker’s solo recordings for Zoo: Fire Escape in the Sky: The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker, one of only a handful of records that Zoo actually put out.

Containing a discography of only two albums, both compilations, Cope’s Scott Walker collection and To the Shores of Lake Placid, a collection of Zoo’s single releases, Zoo’s catalogue was, as Drummond intended, a micro-regional representation of the local talent.

However, before all these myths-to-be could be constructed, Drummond and Balfe had the small matter of trying to finance their artists’ direction without any collateral other than the ambitious series of ideas running in their heads.

‘The next thing with Zoo’, says Drummond, ‘is that I’d got to know Tony Wilson from The Teardrops and Big in Japan, ’cause we did his TV show, and we started doing gigs at the first Factory nights out on the Russell estate and he was totally, “Fuck those bastards down in London, we can do this.” We didn’t have that attitude, Dave and I – for a start I’m not from Liverpool, Dave is – but we used to think, “It’s all right for you, Tony. You’ve got this paid job. We can’t afford to do this – we have to do this thing for the bands – so we went and sold our soul or whatever down to record companies and that, basically, was the end of Zoo and we put out the last Wild Swans single, and put out a compilation. But I remember having this whole conversation with Tony, and he was saying, “Bill, it’s the album. If we can actually make an album, we’ve got them beat … if we can actually put all that together …’ Of course, he did that with the first Joy Division album.’

Like everyone else trying to get their box of records sold, Drummond and Balfe drove down to Ladbroke Grove and headed over to the counter of Rough Trade. ‘Dave had somehow got his dad’s old car for nothing,’ says Drummond, ‘and we used to just drive around. We’d go in and see Geoff and his team at the time, and we did a lot ourselves, just going into shops, and say[ing], “Heh, we’ve got a box of these,” and doing just a deal over the counter.’

One Zoo single was bought by Seymour Stein on one of his regular visits to Rough Trade where he would binge on the latest vinyl. ‘That store was like a listening post for me,’ says Stein, ‘and those three – two guys and a woman – that were there behind the counter, they were almost like my A&R staff.’

The 7-inch Stein had bought was ‘Touch’ by Lori and the Chameleons, Balfe and Drummond’s post-Big In Japan band fronted by a teenage art student, Lori Larty, in which he had heard commercial potential.

‘We’d already put it out on Zoo,’ says Drummond, ‘and got “single of the week”, stuff like that, and then Seymour had licensed it, and he had an option of a second single but not on an album. I remember writing him this whole letter, actually, ’cause he’d turned round and said, “We want to do an album.” The idea of an album – I loathed the idea of it, I thought it was just the late Sixties: it comes from the same place, it comes from 1969, early 1970, just thinking like, these English rock heads, it’s rubbish, that’s what I was thinking.’

However strident in his opinions about the music business, Drummond felt he was still green. ‘I’d got no idea how the music industry works,’ he says, ‘but the money we got from that – the advance we got from that – was enough to make The Teardrop Explodes album. We’d recorded the album before they were signed, ’cause nobody wanted to sign them. People were bending over backwards to sign the Bunnymen, which we couldn’t understand, and Julian definitely couldn’t understand, but nobody wanted to sign The Teardrop Explodes, so we used all the money we got from Seymour, this is about £4,000, and spent it on making this Teardrop Explodes first album … We then sold all the rights to it.’ Rehearsing an often repeated line about losing one’s music industry virginity, Drummond is succinct: ‘We gave it all away, basically.’

But if Drummond liked to think of himself as antithetical or uninterested in the music business, his ability to disengage with its player politics was to his advantage. Stein certainly thought he was up against another keen operator.

‘The idea that Bill didn’t know what he was doing is absolutely not true. Bill Drummond was very difficult and very wily. I was over in London, February 1979. I had heard that there were four bands playing at the YMCA on Tottenham Court Road and the one everyone was shouting about was Teardrop Explodes. But Echo & the Bunnymen went on first. But before that I had to walk down six flights of stairs … which meant I was going to have walk up six flights of stairs, so I said to [Stein’s partner at Sire] Michael Rosenblatt, “I think we better find something here,” and the minute I heard [it] … I said, “We’ve found it” and that drum machine …the songs and the voice it was like poetry … Mac [Ian McCulloch] was so fabulous and I did a deal with them right there at the YMCA and when I got home, New York was shut down already, that’s how late it was, but I called LA and I called up a lawyer and I said, “Look, I’ve done a great deal, worldwide for this band, Echo & the Bunnymen … they’re really fantastic” … “Seymour, I’ve got news for you, you’ve signed too many artists this year” – at least he was always on the level, so I said, “How the fuck am I going to sign this band?”’

Prone to over-signing in his desire to constantly be on top of the next possibly big thing in England, Stein had a tendency to collect bands in the way he collected art deco. Realising he had run out of funds on his Sire account with Warner Brothers, Stein had hit a brick wall in the States, but he remembered that he had an ally at Warner Brothers back in London.

‘I’d done a few projects with Rob Dickins’, says Stein, ‘who was running Warner Publishing, so I went in and I said to him, “Rob, you’re the best A&R man in Britain,” and he loved that. “You’re the best A&R man in Britain, you could have your own label,” he says. “Oh, you’re right, I should,” I said. “Why don’t we start one together? … In fact, I’ve got the band to kick it off with, you can sign the next one.” So he said, “Well, let me hear it,’ and if anything I have to say he probably loved them even more than I did.’

Drummond, thinking he and the Bunnymen were going to be signing to Sire, was trying to keep a handle on Stein’s manoeuvring. ‘Seymour set up a company with Rob Dickins, who was the head of Warner Music,’ he says, ‘this thing called Korova, so it was a British-based company for the world, which meant the American company, Warners on the West Coast – there wasn’t that much money in it for them. The Bunnymen weren’t bothered about that – they weren’t that bothered about the hard work like U2, they weren’t interested.’

The work ethic of relentless touring and meet-and-greets of every regional radio station and sales force was a world away from Aunt Twacky’s tearoom, and in terms of the Bunnymen’s frames of reference – wintry coastal skies, moonlit walks and Parisian absinthe bars – practically worthless.

‘They were far more into Europe,’ says Drummond, ‘far more into the idea of making European music, even though they were doing rock music. It aspired to something European, and so did I. We just thought, “Fuck America.” So we go over to the States for the fourth album, do a three-week tour and I lost interest. They knew I wasn’t gonna deliver for them.’

Whereas The Teardrop Explodes had burned out in the aftermath of their euphoric commercial success after two and half albums and a mess of drugs and diminishing returns, Drummond had guided the Bunnymen through four albums in as many years.

Each record was sleeved in an elemental landscape: earth for the debut Crocodiles, sky for Heaven Up Here, the whiteness of the tundra for Porcupine and a richly shimmering aquamarine blue for Ocean Rain.†

‘Once Ocean Rain was made I thought that was it, actually,’ says Drummond. ‘You’ve made your great record. It took you four albums to get there, there’s no point in doing any more. You should never make any more records, you should just now tour, and that’s it, don’t do records. You’ll become this huge cult band around the world. Although I hated the Grateful Dead, I liked the idea that just they built this world that’d got nothing to do with the passion of the era or the industry. It somehow existed outside, and I saw that as a fantastic thing. I just thought, “This is it, boys” – I wouldn’t have said boys, and sounded as patronising as that, but I felt this is it, this is as good as it’s gonna get.’

However grand and widescreen his vision for his managerial charges, Drummond acknowledges that his romantic ambitions for their careers took precedence over the day-to-day business of handling their affairs. The industry may have let him have his creative run, but in the end its orthodoxies and accounting procedures got the better of him.

‘I fucked it. I fucked it up, I did, with the Bunnymen and The Teardrops. I did worldwide deals, so I didn’t have that position of them going to American companies, so the American companies were never that bothered. We went our separate ways, the Bunnymen got American management – that’s when the kind of joint headlining tour with New Order happened, and they made certain inroads into the States and got that college radio level of whatever.’

In his dealings at the Warners office Drummond had made an ally in the press department, a witty and discursive former journalist with an encyclopaedic knowledge of psychedelia, Mick Houghton. ‘I started working for Warners in ’79. Without it sounding arrogant, I sort of almost invented the modern school of PR, which was just to kind of know what you’re talking about,’ he says. ‘My first month there, Warners licensed Sire which at the time was [releasing] the second Talking Heads album, second or third Ramones album – nobody at Warners actually saw any potential in those bands. It was unbelievable, someone like Tom Waits – almost to a man I’d say, the whole label was resistant to that music. I think it’s true of journalists then and to a large extent true of journalists now. Journalists don’t understand how the music industry works at all, and I don’t think you do until you become part of it. When I went to work for Warners it was such a shock to me to suddenly find myself working for a corporation where nobody seemed to like music at all. The radio department was about getting on the playlist and getting on Top of the Pops and that was the be all and end all of it, and if a record didn’t have, as they would say at the time, legs, they just weren’t interested.’

Stein’s presence at Warners, however, was an antidote to the rest of the company’s indifference. ‘It was kind of weird with Seymour, he had the heavyweight background but at the same time what was remarkable about him was that he just had the extraordinary talent for seeing the potential in bands.’

As much as Drummond and Stein were in business, Drummond was resistant to the epicurean side of Stein, declining Stein’s endless invitations to lunch, dinner and whatever else. He became familiar with Stein’s storyteller persona through the simple act of making deals together. ‘You know, I wasn’t interested in going to restaurants and doing the whole raconteur bit that Seymour can do and is great at. I’m not saying I’m a better person than that, I was just too driven by, you know, making records or what a band could be within the psyche of a generation, all that kind of stuff. But I learnt a heck of a lot from Seymour, a hell of a lot. You couldn’t have conversations with Seymour without learning tons and tons of stuff. And I found him eternally fascinating because his history that went back to eras of music that I really loved, late Fifties, early Sixties, to telling me about his first job, how he worked the charts, plugging, working for [people at the] Brill Building, you know, all of those things and he was the epitome of that – New York, Jewish, music, wheeling and dealing, the whole thing – and he had an incredible love of music as well as being that clichéd Jewish music business hustler, and making things work.’

Among the anecdotes, salacious gossip and hustler’s advice that poured out of Stein was a piece of wisdom that, in its hard-headed pragmatism at making the music industry work for you, Drummond found astonishing. One particular piece of advice horrified him: ‘Seymour says, “Bill, this is how you make money out of the music business: you do a deal with a record label. You say, ‘I’ll give you six albums, and you give me x thousand dollars.’ So, say he gets 100,000 dollars for six albums, you go out and you sign six bands, any old bands, it doesn’t matter who they are, you stick them in a studio, you record an album and you record the album for 5,000 dollars. The band will love you ’cause they get to record an album – that’s all they’ve ever wanted to do all their lives. You tell your band, ‘OK you’ve got to get it done in four or five days,’ and you get the album done. So you’ve got your six albums done for under 20,000 dollars, whatever. You’ve just made yourself 80,000 dollars. It doesn’t matter a fuck whether these records happen or not.”’

This cold-hearted reality was an eye-opener for Drummond, who couldn’t help but notice when, a few years later, Stein’s business model had failed him. ‘Seymour came a cropper doing it his way. This was in parallel with his total love of music: these two things were running in parallel but once he got Madonna it was fucked. It wasn’t really even in his interests with Talking Heads or for the Ramones or any of us, or any of them, to sell a lot of records, ’cause suddenly he’d be owing them royalties – money he’d already spent on art deco stuff, and on his houses. So when Madonna starts really selling, he’s rumbled. He can’t do it any more, so that’s when he has to sell his whole thing to Warner or whatever it was – 51 or whatever per cent – I mean, he ended up selling the whole lot and that’s the reason.’

With Dickins in with the money side of the deal, Stein had his elliptical northern band tutored in Drummond’s air of mystique. Stein’s vision of an alternative Eighties would pay dividends throughout the decade as a succession of pale British boys from the provinces would find themselves flown across the world by Sire, walking out on to the arena stage, blinking into the Santa Monica sun.

As the decade was just starting, all Mick Houghton was witnessing in the Warner press department, however, was real horror at the thought of any of this kind of music succeeding. ‘The first year I was there, the groups like the Bunnymen, Talking Heads, Ramones were getting mountains and mountains of press, the guys in promotion and radio just thought it was unplayable. Warners at that stage didn’t see any kind of commercial potential in those records. I think they were also reeling, to a certain extent, from the reaction of punk against their stable of artists, the Foreigners and Fleetwood Macs. But obviously the whole thing about punk was that it didn’t change anything in terms of certain rock dinosaurs – Genesis, Yes, the Moody Blues of this world – who were possibly more successful after 1980 than they were before, and after Live Aid it just expanded those bands’ horizons to an even greater extent. I was always aware anything coming out of America had that kind of corporate clout behind it. If it was Foreigner, there’d be a big hoo-ha you know, getting them press, getting them radio, and there was inevitably some huge lavish reception. The only reason I remember the Foreigner one is that there was an album called Cold As Ice, and they threw this massive reception at some Intercontinental hotel and they thought it was a really good idea to have the Cold As Ice logo, in ice, but it was delivered some time in the afternoon so by the time everyone got there, this thing just melted and dripped all over the floor.’

For Rob Dickins, the young English executive running the London offices of an American company, having hatched a scheme for him and Stein to develop home-grown talent, the future lay somewhere over the horizon with this new emerging guitar music.

‘The Bunnymen happened quite quickly in that sense,’ says Houghton. ‘The Bunnymen only made one single for Zoo, and I think Rob Dickins was astute enough – Rob wanted a label that was like Stiff, he wanted a label that had hit records.’

But Dickins would have to wait for his hit from the Bunnymen, for all the press inches Houghton racked up for the band, and for all Drummond’s mise en scène, the radio department at the record company, never mind the playlist controllers at daytime radio, remained hostile. ‘It took the Bunnymen three albums and countless singles before “The Cutter” went Top Twenty, says Houghton. ‘Before that they had the odd “single of the week” in the music press and being played on John Peel, I mean that was it.’

For Drummond, beyond his mythic approach to managing his charges, which meant his idea of planning a campaign was a day of bike rides culminating in a performance at Liverpool Cathedral, the record business remained a thing of blunt, bemusing nonsense. ‘The demograph,’ he says, ‘is a word I learnt in California. “What is the demographics of Echo & the Bunnymen?” “What are you talking about?” Demographics? The demograph is whoever buys the record, that’s the demograph.’

Drummond, who would draw rabbits’ ears over maps and plan a tour accordingly, was on a different path. The Bunnymen’s performances of ‘A Crystal Day’ at Liverpool Cathedral, touring the leylines of the Orkneys and playing the Albert Hall, while securing their position as the ultimate cult band of the 1980s, were above all an article of faith in the grand gesture.

‘The Orkney Islands tour, the Crystal day, the romance of it all,’ says Houghton, ‘the romance of it all but also the gesture – what Bill has always been good at was the gesture.’ And if his love of the gesture was only half-realised in his managerial capacity for Echo & the Bunnymen, when he re-entered the music business as an artist several years later these gestures, traceable in part back to the ideas of The Illuminatus! at the Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun, and partly, an outrageously self-confident response to the rave culture spilling out around him, would be magnified, contorted and escalated into one of the most astonishing acts of theatre in the history of independence. Not to mention one of its most lucrative.

* Bill Grundy famously attempted to interview the Sex Pistols for Thames Television on 1 December 1976, but the broadcast deteriorated into an intergenerational swearing match.

† The advertising campaign for Ocean Rain contained the strapline ‘The Greatest Record Ever Made’. ‘That was my idea’, says Drummond. ‘I mean, why fuck around? The marketing department never spoke to me again.’

3 What Presence?!

An early Orange Juice photo session featuring Alan Horne standing in for absent bassist David McClymont. From left to right, Steven Daly, Alan Horne, Edwyn Collins, James Kirk (photograph by Tom Sheehan used by kind permission of the photographer)

‘At the time when we were forming Postcard,’ says Edwyn Collins, ‘the things that got adopted later by the jingly-jangly groups … I never really liked the interpretation of it, I just remember a lot of spitting going on.’ In Glasgow, punk had happened a little later than the rest of the UK, but its in-your-face brutish side had found an affinity with the city’s take-no-prisoners night-time etiquette. ‘Punk in Glasgow’, says Collins, ‘was a lot of groups called The Sick and The Vomit, The Drags, The Jokes. Glasgow was comfortable with that and always had that tough guy, no messing, obsession.’

Collins was still at school when the first wave of punk arrived in Glasgow. His fellow pupils at Bearsden Academy, a secondary school in one of the city’s less turbulent suburbs, included Steven Daly and James Kirk. ‘All the Postcard people came from a teenage thing of not being tremendously confident,’ says Collins. ‘We were never the kids at school that people wanted to hang out with. When we met each other, we were all coming from an outsider perspective, it informed the way we were with each other.’

Collins, who read NME on the school bus, first noticed Daly, a few seats further down, reading the Melody Maker. Any potential kudos Collins thought he might gain by reading the less prog weekly was negated by Daly’s horror at the fact Collins proudly wore a Buddy Holly badge.

Their mutual passion for devouring music, hinging on such teenage minutiae as David Bowie’s hairstyles, Donna Summer’s appearances on Top of the Pops and forgotten Sixties B-sides, blossomed into Collins, Kirk and Daly dipping their collective toes into the punk ripples by starting a fanzine. Rather than covering The Sick or The Vomit, their fanzine was, tellingly, more interested in music from the past.

‘We did a fanzine in ’77 called No Variety,’ says Collins. ‘James wrote political pieces. When the Scotland football team were going to play in Chile, in the stadium where they’d had the executions in ’74 during the military coup, James wrote about why they shouldn’t do this, which ended with the line, “Will you wipe the blood from their football boots, Willy Ormond?” There were also retrospectives on the Troggs and I wrote a retrospective on the third Velvet Underground album.’

In the course of trying to sell fanzines in the local record shop, Daly had come across a fellow fanzine editor and self-publicist, Alan Horne. If Collins, Daly and Kirk had the textbook schoolboy desire to overcome their gawky shyness through their fanaticism with the pop world, Alan Horne seemed to be coming from somewhere slightly more perplexing:

‘Steven always wanted to be very hip,’ says Collins. ‘“Teenage Depression” came out the same week as “White Riot”, so he had two contrasting single reviews of them. He wrote, “Go fuck yourself, masters, fuck off with your pathetic old rock band. This is the only teen record that matters: ‘White Riot!’” Steven knew Alan Horne through the record shop Listen – they’d met through Alan’s fanzine, Swankers.’

Swankers took the fanzine template into slightly uncharted waters. Instead of profiles of Ayrshire’s nascent punk scene or live reviews of what was happening around town, Swankers was a series of character assassinations by Horne. Those unlucky enough to be counted among his nearest and dearest found themselves on the receiving end of his barbed and hostile surrealism. ‘He’d done Swankers solely to annoy his flatmate, Brian Superstar. They’d come from a seaside town south of Glasgow, a popular resort near Ayr. Alan called himself Eva Braun, and his friend the Slob, and he wrote about himself and Brian Superstar and this girlfriend character, Janice Fuck.’

Swankers seemed to blend small-town xenophobia with the more decadent end of Sixties rock and its amour fou for the stylistic trappings of fascism. ‘There was a bigot’s quiz,’ says Collins, and the picture of Brian Jones with the SS uniform, with Brian Superstar’s head over it.’

Dismissing Horne’s politics as that of a bright but ignorant hick, Collins and Daly had detected an astonishing musical knowledge in Horne, coupled with an archness that frequently reduced them to hysterics. ‘We thought it was silly. Steven was very intolerant of anyone wearing swastikas, but he tolerated it in Alan, because Alan was also very camp. Alan insists that all the ideas he had then are the ones Morrissey had, and, because he’s adopted, he thinks Morrissey must have been his lost twin. Rita Tushingham, that whole frame of reference.’

With a piercing liquid gaze staring from behind glasses with either translucent or wire frames, Horne had cultivated a look that suited his thin build, somewhere between Truman Capote’s Factory screen test and a spikier version of Alan Bennett circa Beyond the Fringe. Holding it all together was a remarkable ability to project a fiercely vituperative intelligence.

Starting a shaky punk band of their own, the Nu Sonics, Collins, Kirk and Daly, though pleased to be making a racket, realised punk, especially Glasgow meat-and-potatoes punk, was creatively a dead end. ‘By ’79 none of us wanted to be associated with punk’, says Collins, ‘because of bands like Sham 69 and UK Subs coming up. All the neds.’

The Clash’s White Riot tour, however, would provide Scotland with a glimpse of a more interesting, subtle and less dogmatic musical style. Supporting the Clash in Glasgow were The Slits, Subway Sect and Buzzcocks.

‘I hung about at the stage door like you do when you’re a teenager,’ says Collins, ‘asking if I could help with the equipment. The Slits and Subway Sect were an astonishing proposition. Subway Sect’s guitarist, Rob Symmons, had a Melody Maker guitar. The sound made a big impression, as did The Slits because they couldn’t play but made a really charming noise.’

The White Riot tour had also called at Edinburgh and been seen by Malcolm Ross, a teenager who, along with school friend Paul Haig, had begun messing around with the idea of starting a band. ‘We were all at school together,’ says Ross. ‘We’d started jamming in 1977. I don’t think any of us would have made records if it hadn’t been for punk. I’d seen the White Riot tour, and Subway Sect was the one that stood out for me, the whole thing, the way they dressed as well.’

Along with creating a thrillingly feedback-saturated pop noise, Subway Sect eschewed the torn T-shirts and leather of punk. Instead they wore a subdued assemblage of v-neck sweaters, desert boots and shirts, often dyed grey. The band had an unaffected onstage gait that completed the look: a cross between a ’68 enragé and a postman from a GPO film unit documentary winding down his shift at the sorting office. The blurring intensity of the sound and the second-hand tank tops and guitars would leave a huge impression on anyone who saw Subway Sect during their first year of touring. Ross could, however, detect one influence within Subway Sect’s monochromatic, brittle sound. ‘They were very much inspired by Television and so were we. Of all the groups that put out records in ’77, Television was the one that really connected. Paul Haig and I decided to try and play guitar together because we both bought Marquee Moon and before them it was the Velvet Underground. Alan Horne used to talk about how Postcard was completely inspired by the VU.’

Collins, Kirk and Daly drew a line in the sand and started again; the new band would ignore what was happening around them and invent a new world of their own. ‘We had a whole load of new ideas,’ says Collins, ‘and we thought that the name Orange Juice would stand out like the proverbial sore thumb amidst all the punk names. I didn’t think of any of the connotations the name would have with freshness, or anything like that. Steven liked it because he thought there was a psychedelic thing going to happen, and he thought, wash away the acid trip with orange juice. I wasn’t thinking of that. Alan liked it. We were briefly a three-piece, and I asked David McClymont to join as a bass player and Alan thought he was perfect. He thought he was like a little girl.’

As Collins, Kirk, McClymont and Daly made plans for the newly configured Orange Juice, Horne recognised the need to stay one step ahead and decided that he would not only manage the band, but start a label to release their wares: Postcard Records.

For a record company that in its lifetime released only a handful of 7-inch singles and a stillborn album, Postcard’s legacy and influence is almost unquantifiable. In his third-floor tenement flat at 185 West Princes Street in the West End, while he and Collins filtered through their tastes to fix a Postcard aesthetic, Horne was equally interested in maintaining as high a level of cattiness as possible.

Orange Juice understood the need to elicit a reaction from the prevailing orthodoxy of Glaswegian punk, so took to the stage looking gauche and fey. Collins’s boyish baritone carried the courage of its convictions, revelling in its triumph of hope over experience in hitting the high notes. The rhythm section of McClymont and Daly, while hoping to sound like Chic, sounded exactly what it was, two boys in their early twenties thrilled at the idea of trying to sound like Chic.

As well as sounding charmingly insouciant and giddy from its self-consciousness, Orange Juice had developed a look that put its unorthodox individuality stage front. Collins would take to the stage in cavalry boots and a Davy Crockett hat, his fringe almost long enough to collide with his toothy grin. The rest of the band, in sports jackets and checked shirts, looked like country and western intellectuals who were enjoying the idea of being in a group while also coming to terms with their second-hand equipment. While it was provocative to the punk neds down at the front of the stage shouting abuse, it had an infallible warmth and charm. ‘I bought the boots and the Crockett hat in a shop in Edinburgh,’ says Collins. ‘We were deliberately camping it up and feying it up in order to provoke, and of course the audience duly responded with “Poofs poofs poofs”.’

After a particularly challenging gig at Glasgow Technical College, Collins, Horne and the rest of the band were wheeling a borrowed Vox Continental organ up Byres Road when they were set upon by youngsters out on the street looking for some late-night thrills – and who were deeply unimpressed by Orange Juice’s attitude and appearance. ‘Alan Horne ran away,’ says Collins. ‘I got beaten up. James Kirk said to me, “That, Edwyn, is the definition of grace under pressure,” then the police arrived and found it all very confusing and looked at us very suspiciously. And of course, Alan loved all that.’

Camping it up in Glasgow, despite Horne’s delight at the provocation, was proving to be not without its perils. ‘I mean, it was quite hard to be gay in Glasgow in 1980,’ says Collins. ‘Almost impossible. I remember, there was one gay bar but you had to keep your head down.’

All this campness was no less in your face than the Glaswegian hard-man archetype – it was practically its feminisation – so much so that it struck a nerve. Along with Collins and Horne’s switchblade wit and uncompromising way with a put-down there was, behind the charm, something confrontational about Postcard and Orange Juice’s gaucheness.

As Orange Juice took a step into the unknown and began recording their debut single, Horne and Collins’s ideas for Postcard began taking shape. On Postcard, singles would feature photography on the sleeve of their first pressing, subsequent repressings would be housed in a uniform pastel beige in-house sleeve which would be stickered with Caledonian imagery: clansmen in kilts, tins of shortbread and lochs at sunset. The Postcard logo would be a grinning cat and, completing this détournement of nationalist boosterism would be the label’s mission statement: ‘Postcard Records, The Sound of Young Scotland.’ These tongue-in-cheek signifiers were as much an expression of Horne’s supreme yet deeply fragile self-confidence and sarcasm as of Postcard’s irreverent sense of playfulness.

Instead of the monochromes or scratchy xerox and biro aesthetics of the singles filling up the back room of Rough Trade, here was sly, stylish fun, openly willing to embrace such exiled ideas as wit and naivety. This sentiment was particularly echoed in Orange Juice’s music: a chiming mix of the Sixties and the contemporary sleekness of chart disco, cherry-picked to bounce off attempts at conveying late teenage soulfulness. ‘I liked the Byrds, the Velvets, the Beatles, Creedence Clearwater Revival. We were big on the Lovin’ Spoonful and all Stax stuff,’ says Collins. ‘We already knew about all of that by the time we started Orange Juice.’ Alongside such sleekly escapist chart staples as the O’Jays’ ‘Love Unlimited’, for the first time since punk, Postcard, via Orange Juice’s willingness to open up to their influences, was happy to allow in the past.

All the labels that had started around the energies of punk had been preoccupied either with the future or the insistent now of the present. Mute, Factory, and Industrial had developed an aesthetic based on the austerity of clean lines while Rough Trade, taking its cue from Spiral Scratch’s photostatted presentation of the facts, had the aura and cut-and-paste energies of a fanzine in vinyl form. Fast Product’s imagery codified the DIY impulse, setting it in a playfully theoretical context – pictures of gold discs on the front of the Mekons’ ‘Where Were You?’ – that revelled in its high design values. Zoo, though awash with a romanticism that looked in all directions, shared the greyish raincoat hue of post-punk, and in Echo & the Bunnymen had a band with that most modern of instruments, a drum machine. Postcard, with its sporrans and cat’s whiskers, was asking the listener, before they even put the record on, to forget all that. This was a Warholian pop art commentary on commodification and culture, Glasgow West End style, on a budget and with a truckload of attitude.

In his high-ceilinged room in Princes Street, taking up space next to the stereo, tucked behind a tailor’s mannequin upon which he kept his sunglasses, Horne had a battered suitcase full of 7-inch vinyl, a treasure chest full of the mythic properties of the 45-rpm single whose contents were laid out in rows. ‘He had original presses of things like Big Star’s “September Gurls” on Ardent,’ says Collins, ‘Sue, Motown, Stax, red label Elektra, all lined up.’

Horne’s box of 7-inches was both a meticulously curated time capsule of the past and an index to a possible future. The contents would be reconfigured into a celebration of melody and attitude that played with form in a pop context, borrowing equally from black and white music as long as it had a distinct personality and style at its core. If ‘indie’, that most indefinable catch-all, has a source, it is here, in a suitcase next to Horne’s Dansette in his rooms on the third floor of a Glasgow tenement. Once Postcard was up and running, even though it fell hundreds of thousands of miles short of its ambitions of being a label that would take over the charts, it would start a vital and immediate rush to take shiny guitar pop to number one. Forget punk, this was the counter-revolution.

The debut Orange Juice single was released by Postcard in April 1980; the original sleeve, breaking with presentational post-punk etiquette, featured a neckerchief-wearing Collins smiling gleefully as he suspended his semi-acoustic guitar over his band mates’ heads. The sleeve’s contents were equally refreshing. The A-side, ‘Falling and Laughing’, had a confidence in its fragility and lightness of touch that ensured that the listener’s natural reaction was to swoon. With its walking bass line, four-on-the-floor drum fills and double-stroked guitar, the song was stylish and infectious on its own terms. Above all by singing ‘Only my dreams satisfy the real need of my heart’, mixing the wistfulness of Noel Coward with the assertiveness of Lou Reed, Collins had introduced a new lyrical style for his generation. For the rest of the decade anyone with a tousled fringe and second-hand guitar would rehearse this combination of the lovelorn and the preoccupied. What Orange Juice’s legions of followers would find harder to replicate was the joy of hearing Collins’s laughter in his voice as he delivers the line ‘So I’m standing here so lonesome’. As well as falling, there was the laughing. Orange Juice’s self-awareness may have been coloured by shyness and inexperience, but it was communicated with the most inviting and inclusive warmth and wit.

Like the majority of visitors to the counter of Kensington Park Road with a demo tape and a small degree of self-promotion, Horne had hustled a production and distribution deal out of Travis for Rough Trade to handle Postcard. Horne was deeply unsure about Travis, whose Afro and affability, not to say his ultimate control over whether Postcard had a short- or mid-term future, sent him all the wrong signals. Putting his doubts to one side once back in Glasgow, Horne carried on with the daydream of playing out the Warhol Factory charm school approach to managing a creative project: non-stop speed-assisted bitching and an ever hardening approach to who or what was in and who or what was out.

‘I took speed and Alan took speed as well for a short time but we didn’t really have the constitution for it,’ says Collins. ‘I was always a lightweight but we really enjoyed it. Steven Daly has this great line: he said, “Instead of concentrating on how we could really grow the label or working out any sort of long-term ambitions, we were putting most of our efforts into thinking up the next best put-down.” So everybody outside of Postcard got put down, inside it as well, we were constantly putting each other down. You had to be really quick off the mark. We functioned on this insidious quick-wittedness.’

Over in Edinburgh, in the aftermath of Bob Last’s Fast Product, an equally charged, but less intensely personality-driven scene was developing. Much to Horne’s annoyance, a new Edinburgh group, the Fire Engines, an exhilaratingly speeded-up teenage deconstruction of Beefheart, were about to sign to Last’s new label Pop Aural. ‘With Alan it was completely a local rivalry,’ says Last. ‘We would occasionally bump into each other, and he’s never forgiven us the fact that the Fire Engines were our band. In his head, the Fire Engines were one of his finest moments, but the Fire Engines had been hanging around in my flat since they were at school. They were clearly as much influenced by the way the Gang of Four or the Mekons played with ideas as they were by what Alan did.’

Not to be outdone by Last, Horne concentrated his sights on another new Edinburgh band, Josef K, who, with a small degree of hesitation, agreed to Horne’s suggestion that they should do a single on Postcard. By releasing Josef K’s ‘Sorry for Laughing’, a more uptight, but no less funky, three-minute piece of existential pop than ‘Falling and Laughing’, Postcard ensured that the label could authentically claim to be the sound of young Scotland, not just the sound of young Bearsden Academy Glasgow. It was one of Horne’s shrewdest moves: Edinburgh had a more rapidly expanding cache of groups than Glasgow.

‘There was the Scars, Josef K, Fire Engines, Associates,’ says Ross, ‘all of us in Edinburgh.’ Although it wasn’t merely geography that ensured Postcard and Glasgow felt separated from Josef K in Edinburgh. ‘The thing about the four guys in Orange Juice and Alan is, they’re all really clever people,’ he continues. ‘They were hilariously funny sometimes and the next minute they could be very bitchy and nasty. Alan’s mood could change with the wind, and what he thought the label should be doing could change with the wind too … I met Alan through Edwyn and Steven. Alan said that he’d like to make it a label rather than make it a vehicle for Orange Juice; we felt a great affinity for Orange Juice so it felt quite natural. I was very into garage, Nuggets and made tapes of Pebbles LPs. We had less of that Postcard pop aspect, we were more interested in bringing things from psychedelia and the Magic Band into the present.’

Josef K had an accessible and detached angularity. Their songs, funky and abstract, in contrast to Orange Juice’s chiming pop euphoria, seemed to twitch unintentionally, a trait they shared with many of their contemporaries in 1981. The Postcard and Orange Juice aesthetic of obsessively referencing the past only went so far with their Edinburgh colleagues.

‘In Josef K we certainly bought into a lot less than the others,’ says Ross. ‘We saw ourselves as being forward-looking and modernist. Edwyn and Alan would sit around talking about Lovin’ Spoonful and Creedence. Edwyn would say at the time it was great that Orange Juice had the monopoly on roots music. Everyone else was into experimentation and industrial music.’

Horne’s catty misanthropy, despite the sense of momentum that Postcard was quickly building, remained unchecked. In fact, the fledgling instances of success that Horne was experiencing, however small, made him worse.

Into this viper’s den of Elektra 7-inches, fake Ray-Bans and hissy fits came Grace Maxwell, a fiercely bright and engaging Glaswegian, who had moved to London to work in the theatre.

‘We all knew Grace,’ says Ross. ‘She lived with a guy called Harry Papadopoulos who was from Glasgow who took a lot of pictures for Sounds at the time, and we first met Grace when Postcard had our great outings to London. We would always stay with her and Harry.’

‘I met Edwyn in 1980, when they first were doing those trips to London,’ says Maxwell, ‘before “Blue Boy” came out. When I first met them I used to think, what the hell are they talking about, I thought you just listened to a record and thought, oh I like that, and that was as simple as that. It turns out, apparently, it’s not like that at all. It’s about intense, heated debate. The way Alan dealt with people, his private world and his love of music and his understanding of it all meant he would decide whether someone’s existence was pointless depending on what records they liked and why. Alan and Edwyn would be able to banish people to outer darkness. Especially Alan, he was more or less mental about it.’

*

If Postcard was fizzing with attitude at the prospects of the glittering future ahead, Geoff Travis, who, while finding Horne’s confrontational tactics wholly unnecessary had nevertheless marvelled at ‘Falling and Laughing’, was starting to weary of Horne’s grand designs and speedy attitude.

Having heard the next Postcard single, Orange Juice’s second release, ‘Blue Boy’, he felt disappointed and, tiring of Horne’s relentless provocations, let Collins and Horne know on their next visit to Rough Trade.

‘Geoff didn’t like “Blue Boy”,’ says Collins. ‘It felt like a bad tutorial, “I’m disappointed with you.” We’d been in a cafe and Alan Horne is angry, furious. We went to the park and he was hot with fury. “I’ll just tell you what, we’ll leave these fucking tapes here and just let fate take care of whatever happens to them,’ I said. “No we won’t. I’ll find someone else to put them out. If he doesn’t put this record out, you think we’re going to just give up because we get rejected by an old hippie?” and Alan was outside in the street spinning around, dizzy in the middle of the road. He could have got himself knocked down. He was speechless with fury and rage.’

Travis in a rare off-moment had missed something on ‘Blue Boy’. The single, aided by radio play secured by Rough Trade’s in-house promo specialist Scott Piering, and glowing reviews across the board, meant that not only did ‘Blue Boy’ sell enough to need several re-presses, but suddenly ‘The Sound of Young Scotland’ was being taken seriously as a commercial proposition. A&R men, seeing Orange Juice being profiled as a new, friendly pop sensation, started flying up to Glasgow in search of the next young thing.

But the damage between Horne and Travis was irreparable.

‘Scott Piering loved “Blue Boy” but Alan never trusted Geoff Travis after that,’ says Collins. ‘He didn’t trust his judgement, didn’t trust his integrity. Postcard carried on with Geoff but Alan, having never really trusted him in the beginning, certainly never trusted him again.’

Whatever Horne’s feeling about Travis, both Orange Juice and Josef K were beginning to notice that Horne had his own issues with business decisions. ‘You couldn’t trust Alan with the finances really,’ says Collins. ‘There was no notion of anything you call promotional or marketing strategies, no commercial acumen. Alan would say, “I’m too creative, it’s not where my head’s at.” Alan was tight with money but he was also dodgy with money, while on the other hand he was not at all good at making money. His head was always stuck in ideas and arguments and debate about music. Later on he always found it quite difficult to make music as a producer, because he always had an idea in his head of the perfect record and nothing can ever live up to that.’

At the end of February 1980, just six weeks after ‘Falling and Laughing’, Postcard released Josef K’s single, ‘Radio Drill Time’ along with the second Orange Juice single ‘Blue Boy’. ‘I don’t think we had any expectations of the original pressing of “Radio Drill Time”,’ says Ross, ‘because “Falling and Laughing” hadn’t really done anything. But when Postcard released “Blue Boy”, the label started to get a lot of attention and none of us had any kind of long-term plan. No one to do with Postcard had any careerist attitude – we were nineteen or twenty years old.’

In early 1980 the brightness and ramshackle flamboyancy of Postcard sounded both vibrant and like something of an intervention. ‘We were outsiders in whatever the music scene was in Scotland,’ says Ross. ‘In Edinburgh you had the guys who did Regular Music who ended up managing Simple Minds. They were kind of old pre-punk guys who’d been social secretaries at their student union and they suddenly realised they could make a lot of money putting on gigs. It was the same in Glasgow, all the established music people there looked down their nose at Postcard and thought they were weird, sort of poofy and crap. We were always apart from all that; it was great when we started being successful.’

Releasing ‘Radio Drill Time’ and ‘Blue Boy’ together meant that Postcard’s profile had been given a boost. Journalists wanted to talk to the brains behind the operation and Horne delighted in rising to the occasion, settling into the role he felt he was born to play: the erudite hustler looking down his nose at the pop world, just when its dominance is within his grasp. Using the Warholian technique of leaving long gaps before answering a question and distancing himself from the whole interview process altogether, Horne got to work. In a Postcard feature with Paul Morley in NME, Horne was introduced as ‘a lad [who] is angry all his waking life’. Ensuring Postcard’s pop ambitions were not to be confused with those of his elder contemporaries, Horne poured scorn on the rest of the independent establishment. According to Morley, Horne was ‘an insolent whizkid equivalent to Wilson, Last and Travis, he has a very grudging respect for Fast, Factory and Rough Trade. [Horne] snarls in disgust at the grubby, hippie state the independent market has degenerated into.’ And Collins, who was interviewed alongside Josef K, was happy to point out the creative differences in Orange Juice, bemoaning his band mate McClymont’s taste. ‘David is into Eno and Kraftwerk,’ he said, ‘who personally I can’t stand’ – dismissing the sacred cows of the post-punk canon with the wave of a hand.

But Horne’s attitude also managed to ruffle the feathers of his own acts. ‘Edwyn and Alan were very close and tight and I got on well with them,’ says Ross. ‘It caused a schism early on in Josef K in a way, because Paul and Alan the drummer didn’t really like Alan Horne.’ Promotional trips to London aside, Horne didn’t like to stray from the comfort zone of West Princes Street. The roles of manager, label boss and band member were all starting to blur as Collins began to realise that it was increasingly difficult, according to whatever codes and rules he and Horne had dreamt up on any given day, to differentiate between Postcard and Orange Juice. The rest of Postcard’s roster were consequently feeling more than a little disengaged from their label’s ethos and activities. ‘Malcolm Ross and Josef K will always say, “Everybody felt that we were playing second fiddle to Orange Juice,”’ says Collins, ‘and you can understand that, because they definitely were.’

‘Alan and Edwyn did a lot of fighting,’ says Maxwell. ‘They were the front men of Postcard.’ But they continued to spend inordinate amounts of time playing mind games with the idea of what Postcard and Orange Juice really was. ‘They’d say things like, “We want to make records like sheep” – that just sounded mad,’ says Maxwell. ‘You had to have your head in a certain place to understand what they were saying.’

A Postcard act that definitely felt second fiddle were Aztec Camera, who were the first act to leave the label. The band, more or less a solo vehicle for the songwriting and guitar prodigy, seventeen-year-old Roddy Frame, released two singles on Postcard in 1981, ‘Just Like Gold’ and ‘Mattress of Wire’. Both showcased Frame’s talents as a songwriter and a precocious arranger and guitarist. Such refined talent in a teenager didn’t go unnoticed and Frame didn’t have to look far to find new home. Travis, clearly seeing the potential that he thought had been lacking in ‘Blue Boy’, instantly transferred Aztec Camera to Rough Trade and Seymour Stein, as was his wont, picked up the North American rights for Sire. Australia’s Go Betweens followed suit and quickly joined Aztec Camera on Rough Trade, where, in a way Horne would doubtless approve of, if through speed-gritted teeth, both bands formed the vanguard of Rough Trade’s first push for mainstream crossover growth.

Burying his head away from Postcard’s unmanaged finances, Horne realised that his hand-crafted stable of artists had a future that might not involve him. Whatever the state of Postcard’s non-existent accounts, the speed with which events had turned was remarkable. Not only had the bands been through the white heat of Postcard’s rapid trajectory – ‘Josef K played our first and last gig in 1981,’ says Ross – Horne’s ideas were being repeated.

A new generation of Scottish bands had quickly fallen in line with the Postcard version of confidence and pop music. ‘The Sound of Young Scotland’ had set new groups of teenagers on a path that would take them further, on major-label budgets, than any of the Postcard bands had managed.

‘I didn’t really pay much attention to Altered Images or any of those bands at the time,’ says Ross. ‘When I first saw them, they really wanted to be the Banshees. Then the idea Edwyn and Bob Last both had, of validating pop music – suddenly the penny dropped for them and they went from these black-clad Goths to pastel-shaded pop.’

Maxwell noticed Horne becoming less assured as events started to turn against Postcard. ‘Edwyn was a great foil for Alan, because Edwyn was a real quick-decision maker for Postcard,’ says Maxwell. ‘Edwyn was very decisive and trusted his instincts and judgement implicitly and was quite happy to stand or fall by it, which Alan wasn’t really. Postcard was very introspective. They were terribly down on themselves most of the time.’

Orange Juice, long courted by the majors, considered leaving Postcard. ‘Alan went on with Postcard in a desultory way,’ says Collins. ‘First to go was Aztec Camera, because he didn’t look after them properly and so Postcard more or less stopped. None of us realised what we had with Postcard.’

‘You look back and think, God, the label could have really gone on to establish itself, but it wasn’t to be,’ says Ross. ‘The original plan just before the label folded was for an Orange Juice LP to come out, then an Aztec Camera LP.’ The one album Horne managed to release on Postcard was Josef K’s debut, The Only Fun in Town. The band had scrapped an earlier attempt at a debut, Sorry For Laughing. The Only Fun in Town sounded jaded compared to the band’s rush of singles, as if their energies had been spent keeping up with Horne’s mood swings rather than focusing on making a record. It was released finally in 1981 when Postcard had more or less stopped functioning and the original impetus had faded into the reality of trying to run a small business.

‘If Alan had released The Only Fun in Town and waited for the royalties to come in, Postcard could have gone on to become a Factory, Mute or Domino,’ says Ross. ‘Alan had no business sense; he was great at talking to people and promoting it when he was in the right mood. But he never kept proper accounts, so in the end you had to keep an eye on things to make sure the money came through. To get our money back for the Josef K album we had to go to Rough Trade to get all the sales figures to work it out. Alan would sell a few records then he’d have the money in his back pocket. It was all very chaotic.’

Orange Juice and Horne were as argumentative and combustible as ever and struggling to agree on the next move. ‘Steven Daly wanted to go to a major,’ says Collins. ‘There was a lot of confusion, mainly because of the fighting that went on, which was a constant stream of backbiting and bitching. It was the bitchiest label you could ever have imagined.’

The demise of Postcard didn’t go unnoticed. Among its many supporters in the press, The Face, which had launched within a month of Postcard, had covered the label and bands in depth and, in Orange Juice’s forward-looking mixing of styles, recognised a kindred spirit. The magazine covered the label’s end with a feature that assessed the impact the loss of Postcard would have on the early Eighties pop landscape:

Major developments are afoot at Glasgow’s Postcard Records, some of which could have decisive consequences for the future of successful independent labels and for the direction of the record industry as a whole. The most immediate of these developments is that Orange Juice, who seemed to embody all that was bright and hopeful about independent bands have signed to Polydor Records.

With Orange Juice the last to leave, Horne now found himself in the invidious position of having started a cultural revolution that he had no say in, let alone control of. He also had very little to show for his efforts.

Horne bravely talked up the dissolution as only he knew how, insisting the next generation of Postcard signings would be joining Orange Juice in licensing their releases to whichever major was best suited to their needs. The Postcard grinning cat logo would, Horne assured anyone who would listen, take pride of place. ‘I think the independent thing was going to kill us if we’d kept on trying to plug away at it. We’d have ended up being the guinea pigs to try and break the system and it would probably have broken us.’ If Horne couldn’t admit it to himself, he had made a painfully accurate assessment of Postcard’s fate.

With no cash flow and reluctant to try his luck in the London industry, Horne had nevertheless dreamed up the next phase of Postcard in his head. Along with the upbeat Celtic pop of the Bluebells and a pianist neighbour of his, Malcolm Fisher, whose Postcard releases were to be credited as The French Impressionists, Horne had intended to release a single by the Jazzateers, a young Glasgow band whose quiffed lead singer Paul Quinn had a rich, almost Vegas-era Elvis baritone, and a striking stage presence to match. The Jazzateers came to nothing, releasing a posthumous single on Rough Trade they had recorded for Horne. Quinn regrouped and quickly turned the band into Bourgie Bourgie, one of the many bands swept up in the major-label A&R rush to Glasgow that saw them alongside Altered Images, Del Amitri, the Lone Wolves and the Bluebells, pushed towards the charts with varying degrees of success. Bourgie Bourgie managed only two singles before being dropped. Their second single, ‘Careless’, featured a highly entertaining video, bearing all the hallmarks of Horne’s dry wit, in which the band, monochrome and dressed like extras in a lost Jacques Tati movie (from his hitherto unknown Glaswegian pop period), escape from a mental hospital.

In Paul Quinn Horne was sure he could see a route back to the entry point he’d secured with Postcard. ‘Alan was thinking about Paul Quinn all the time,’ says Collins. ‘He was trying to get Paul Quinn’s career on the go. Alan Horne basically kept saying to me, “You can’t sing, you should be Paul’s whipping boy, you should just give up, get used to it.”’

Collins and Orange Juice signed to Polydor and moved down to London and were duly followed by Quinn and Horne, who entertained vague thoughts of approaching the majors but whose confidence was in bits. Grace Maxwell, whose home had become something of a headquarters for the dispersed Postcard family in London, witnessed Horne and Collins’s attempts to find Horne a new direction and deal. ‘All Alan wanted was the fun of the sparring partner,’ says Maxwell, ‘and that was the meaning of life, really, to Alan. Edwyn said, “Phone up Roger Ames at London and ask him to give you a label.” Edwyn did an Alan impersonation, Alan then had a meeting with Roger and, lo and behold, he ends up with a new label, Swamplands. Orange Juice were in Polydor and Alan was next door down in the basement with London Records and the rallying call at that time was, “Transfer to Swamplands, transfer to Swamplands.”’

Swamplands released even fewer records than Postcard. Horne, having secured a deal, was determined to regroup in London and enjoy himself in fine style, with his own office at the heart of the West End’s music business. London Records A&R department was run by Roger Ames, an executive with a degree of creativity and mischief that was lacking in many of his contemporaries. Scoring hits with the likes of Bananarama, Bronski Beat and Blancmange, London was quite possibly the oddest environment for Horne to find himself in, and one in which he duly thrived. Thrived, that is, by equipping his office in his own inimitable style and spending as little time as possible at work. ‘Alan had an office and a salary and all of that’, says Collins, ‘along with a dentist’s chair and futons, at the point when futons were very exciting.’

Rather than running around town trying to sign up the freshest new faces on the block, Horne proved his A&R credentials by more or less reconfiguring the Postcard stable on Swamplands. Of its ten-odd releases, Swamplands featured either Orange Juice alumni – James Kirk with ‘Memphis’ and Paul Quinn, who along with Collins, in Horne’s most overt tribute to his influences released an excellent twangy version of the Velvet Underground’s ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ – or the former competition, such as the Lone Wolves, whose singer James King had previously released tracks on Fast Product, as had the Fire Engines’ Davey Henderson and Russell Burn, who now called themselves, somewhat optimistically, Win.

With Altered Images, the Bluebells, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions all making sparkling post-Orange Juice pop a going concern at Radio 1 and on Top of the Pops, Horne’s timing to relocate his Caledonian pop stable to London could not have been better.

Horne’s main problem, apart from not turning up at the office, was an inability to make decisions and, perhaps more profoundly, to make a clean break with the Postcard agenda of non-stop critiquing and thinking on one’s feet. ‘The logo for Swamplands was a black leopard, which was meant to be a grown-up version of the Postcard cat,’ says Maxwell. ‘For ever onwards, if Alan made something he’d say, “Is this any good, it’s shit isn’t it?” and he kept doing it and Roger Ames cut him a lot of slack. Roger Ames was an interesting guy, not your average music business guy at all and he thought Alan was a talent. But they had fights. Alan loved having Roger to bounce off, but Roger was in despair with him and would run around shouting, “Horne, Horne!”’

But if Horne was struggling to make a second chance in the music industry work, he certainly hadn’t lost his way with a bon mot. ‘Alan gave Roger Ames a hairdresser’s name,’ says Collins. ‘He called him “Roger of London” and, of course, Roger loved it.’

Ames soon tired of justifying Horne’s presence to his superiors and Swamplands was shut down with a stillborn film project, The Punk Rock Hotel, that had been fermenting in Horne and Quinn’s consciousness, slowly gathering dust as it turned into another lost artefact of the wider Postcard legend. ‘It was Alan’s pretend project,’ says Maxwell. ‘He was always going to make this film called Punk Rock Hotel and it had a theme tune which was brilliant.’

Collins and Orange Juice were themselves finding life on a major label no less perplexing than Horne. Their A&R at Polydor, Malcolm Dunbar, was a Scot who had signed another bookish songwriter who had tried and failed to ingratiate himself with Horne, Lloyd Cole. Whereas Orange Juice’s debut album You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever, barely troubled the charts, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions’ debut Rattlesnakes had gone Top Twenty and become a halls-of-residence staple. Postcard-type music was selling, but none of it was on Postcard. ‘Malcolm Dunbar fell out of love with us’, says Collins, ‘and he liked Lloyd Cole. He liked anything but us by the end of it.’

*

‘Polydor didn’t know what to do with Orange Juice,’ says Malcolm Ross, who had, after a brief period with the band as a five-piece, replaced James Kirk on guitar, along with Zeke Manyika replacing Daly on drums. ‘The contract we had with them meant they couldn’t really do anything without our approval,’ he says, ‘so it was all a bit hard.’

For Orange Juice, having the final say over their releases meant their wry attention to detail from the Postcard era was maintained. On the sleeve to the Rip It Up album the band changed the name of their record company from Polydor to Holden Caulfield International. In the video for the ‘Rip It Up’ single, the band’s customary raffish debonair style is scrubbed up to match the state-of-the-art studio set. Collins, McClymont, Manyika and Ross duly mince around signature high-end, early Eighties MTV production values: a rotating back projection shifting around them in their futuristic playground. Intercut, with the band lip-syncing, are scenes of all four members wandering on Regent Street on a wet and grey January afternoon. Dressed uniformly in Hawaiian shirts and sunglasses, the band strut about the pavement as if in Palm Springs. And should anyone fail to understand quite where they were coming from, in the final scene, Collins, Manyika, Ross and McClymont all don wetsuits, flippers and snorkels and try, unsuccessfully, to gain access to a wholesale shop in Chinatown dressed as frogmen.

The video perfectly captures Orange Juice’s position as they valiantly tried to negotiate a major-label career on their own terms: capable of genuine chart pop success, but too intelligent a band to take Eighties pop life seriously. ‘We wanted the video to be really bizarre,’ says Ross. ‘The person making it was trying to humour us, but really they were just trying to make what Polydor wanted, which was to have something that could be shown on TV.’

All the while, the smiling fresh-faced guitar bands in jumpers taking up residence on Top of the Pops were starting to get on Collins’s nerves. ‘I was quite bitter and twisted about it,’ says Collins, ‘especially Haircut 100. I used to get quite furious but they would always make a much better commercial job of it than Orange Juice ever managed to.’

Accompanied by a suspiciously box-fresh-looking assemblage of such Orange Juice signifiers as Aran jumpers, Gretsch guitars, Breton tops and checked shirts, Haircut 100 took the Orange Juice funkiness into Essex soul boy territory, revealing a highly proficient musicianship and willingness to play the game: in Haircut 100 videos the viewer was only ever a frame or two away from some scantily clad female accessory.

‘With Haircut 100’, says Ross, ‘it was right in our faces, seeing them coming out straight on to Top of the Pops, played on the radio all the time; that was what Orange Juice had always been seeking, mainstream pop success.’ Orange Juice did finally get the opportunity to cross over with ‘Rip It Up’, a genuine hit single reaching no. 3 in the charts. When the band were duly invited into the Top of the Pops studio to perform during the single’s four-week residency in the Top Ten, they treated the enterprise with their customary sense of professionalism. Ross recalls, ‘It was amazing, we’d been desperate to get on Top of the Pops for two years. Then once [we’d had] our first appearance, we were really excited, then two weeks later we were already pretty bored and we got in trouble for mucking about.’

After ‘Rip It Up’ Orange Juice produced the rather hamstrung mini LP, Texas Fever. Although sympathetically produced by Dennis Bovell, it sounded, by Orange Juice’s standards, dislocated and brooding, or as Collins puts it ‘an unconvincing attempt to be weird’.

The follow-up full-length album, The Orange Juice, arrived when Polydor had just about run out of patience with Collins, who, having grown equally frustrated with the label, was determined to have some fun playing Polydor at its own game. ‘I marched into the office and said, “I want television advertising,” which they never did, only for massive groups. They laughed me off and I retorted, “Well, if you won’t pay for it, I will.”’

The video for the band’s penultimate single had been shot by Derek Jarman, featuring an ad hoc cast of punk femmes fatales, Patti Paladin and Jayne County, the bassist from Amazulu, and Maxwell’s neighbours’ children. Shot in Maxwell’s house in Willesden, it was Orange Juice at their most waspishly playful make-do-and-mend best.

‘The person who produced the video with Derek was Sarah Radcliffe, who became a very famous film producer,’ says Maxwell. ‘I phoned her up, asking, “How should I go about getting TV advertising?” and she goes, “Well, I’ll do it.” She just took it on, brilliant, and they did it for nothing. We got the ad made and I phoned up Channel 4 and go, “Hi, I’m just nobody and how do I go about getting an ad on the telly?” and they go, “Come for lunch.” Channel 4 was very young then and Channel 4 advertising was handled by the various independent people.’

As a final act of playful, knowing subterfuge, the television ad for Orange Juice’s final album was a masterstroke. Collins and Manyika, holding a large salmon, which they had bought from Harrods, look straight to camera and deliver their promotional message. Collins starts the ad by saying, ‘Hello viewers, this is to announce our new record The Orange Juice.’ Without missing a beat Manyika picks up the theme, ‘Which includes the flop singles “What Presence” and “Lean Period”.’ Along the bottom of the screen, instead of the usual message of ‘available at the following stores’, the Orange Juice sales pitch, ‘flop flop flop’, passes elegantly by.

From the start, says Ross, ‘The aim with Edwyn and Alan was always to have a hit, an independent hit. I don’t know what record you could say was the first independent record really in the charts. You’d get weird reggae records in the charts but after us came Blue Monday and The Smiths.’ But Orange Juice as a band had ceased to function.

Back in Glasgow the impact Postcard had made was sustaining an influence beyond Orange Juice’s contemporaries in the charts as a younger generation of teenagers were now hyped up on guitars and smart DIY vinyl.

‘By the time we were doing things in Glasgow,’ says Stephen McRobbie, whose group the Pastels were among the first wave of Glaswegians to pick up on Orange Juice’s deconstruction of what an independently made pop single might mean, ‘Orange Juice was a London-based group. Postcard and Orange Juice was inspiring for us; the bands in our situation, like Strawberry Switchblade, the Pastels, Primal Scream and the Jesus and Mary Chain, could exist because of them, but, really, in a way we made our own scene rather than joining in with one.’

The legacy of Postcard would ebb and flow before reaching its first zenith in 1986. But the Postcard agenda of well-informed DIY pop-modernism had been immediately understood in its home town of Glasgow.* ‘I think a lot of Glasgow music was very subject to our city and maybe slightly more open-minded than other things in Glasgow,’ says McRobbie. ‘In Glasgow David Bowie and the Velvet Underground were enormously influential by the time punk rock had spread out. I remember going to see an Orange Juice and Fire Engines show and thinking that it had a really amazing level of intensity.’

While the blue-eyed soul of Hue and Cry and Wet Wet Wet would proclaim its antecedents in Orange Juice’s listener-friendliness, this was merely using birthplace to its full advantage. ‘A lot of the bands in Glasgow in the Eighties were incredibly careerist, stampeding over each other to get to the treasure chest,’ says McRobbie ‘and although Orange Juice had a high level of ambition, they seemed like something else.’

Horne’s influence was pervasive. The nascent Pastels had one Brian Superstar, formerly of Swankers and Alan Horne’s flat, as a rhythm guitarist. Jim and William Reid, two brothers from East Kilbride who had formed a band called the Jesus and Mary Chain, had forlornly sent a demo tape to Horne hoping he might pick up on their shared love of the Velvet Underground’s wall of noise. In Birmingham, the lead singer of a mysterious new band called Felt, who used only his first name, Lawrence, had managed to engage Horne in a correspondence about a demo he had sent Postcard. Horne, though less dismissive than usual, had critiqued the Felt tape as being too like the Velvet Underground’s Loaded (and not, perhaps, enough like the Velvet Underground’s eponymous third album).

Another teenager in thrall to Postcard was Nick Currie, an Edinburgh student whose band the Happy Family had tried to get the label interested. ‘Josef K happened to split up the week that I’d handed Malcolm Ross a demo tape,’ he says. ‘I was at their last gig in Edinburgh and I asked him to pass it on to Alan Horne, but he never did because the whole thing had imploded by that point. I met Alan once, very briefly on the street, he was just this legendary figure when I started.’

And the legend has grown ever since. In the eighteen months it lasted, Postcard and Orange Juice, Horne and Collins, had managed to start a bedroom pop revolution that would eventually scale the pinnacles of the charts. Postcard created a new way of thinking about guitar music that would ultimately change the soundtrack to British daily life.

With the exception of restarting Postcard briefly in the early Nineties, Horne has been largely quiet since. He is known to take afternoon tea in the faded Victorian splendour of Glasgow’s Western Baths Club in the West End, just a stone’s throw from the flat in West Princes Street where Postcard began, one well-appointed Glasgow institution playing host to the razor-sharp mind that created another. If Horne is an enigma whose lasting legacy is a legendary, and legendarily flawed, record label, then that, one assumes, is exactly the way he likes it.

* Another of Postcard’s legacies was the Sarah Records label of Bristol. Sarah evinced a robust yet twee approach to releasing 7-inch singles and albums, which celebrated a distinct, enthusiasm-first, pop sensibility. (One of the bands signed to Sarah was called Blueboy, which gives you an idea of where they were coming from.)

4 The Tinderbox (of a Heart)

Cocteau Twins, Head Over Heels CAD 313 (Vaughan Oliver/4AD)

Nick Currie may have missed out on working with Alan Horne but his band soon found themselves working with another newly formed label. In tone, design and musical ethos, it could not have been further removed from Postcard: 4AD.

‘I worked with Ivo from ’81 to ’82 making an LP with my group the Happy Family on 4AD,’ says Currie. ‘We first met him in the Beggars shop on Hogarth Road, and he looked faintly disappointed when he clapped eyes on us. We were these rather gawky, very young-looking idiots. Even then, with Ivo there was a sense of this refined style, he was living in this rather grim suburban British house in Acton, and Ivo had a whole floor all painted lilac. There were orchids, birds in cages and he had a fantastic record collection.’ In 4AD Ivo Watts-Russell would, with this refined sense of style, create a label whose musical and visual identity was as distinct as his piercingly good taste, his thin frame and his handsome, aquiline features.

‘He was a great host,’ says Currie. ‘He’d obviously put up the Birthday Party and all sorts of people who would crash in his spare bedroom and he’d play records by John Cale and Tim Buckley, things I’d never heard before.’

‘I grew up on a farm, youngest of eight, in rural Lancashire, says Watts-Russell. ‘Jimi Hendrix on Top of the Pops – that and Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn made me realise that that’s what music could be. That was my club. My relationship to music was very, very personal the way I responded to it on my own, and in isolation, and that’s what I felt 4AD became’

As a teenager Watts-Russell’s tastes were informed by listening to John Peel’s Perfumed Garden and Top Gear programmes, on a transistor radio under his bedclothes, bringing the sounds of Can and Bridget St John to a countryside childhood. ‘Without John Peel none of us would have had a shot,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘He was my professor. I was kicked out of school but it didn’t matter – it gave me more time to concentrate on what proved to be my education and my passion.’

After being expelled from school and working through a variety of record-store jobs, by his early twenties Watts-Russell was managing the Earls Court branch of the Beggars Banquet chain of independent record shops that looped around London. Started by Martin Mills and Nick Austin, the Beggars shops, like Rock On and Rough Trade before them, and countless others to follow, set up a record label of their own.

‘Earls Court is a strange place,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘and it was open till ten or eleven at night. So at night time there’d be tourists, but it quickly got a reputation that there was a record label there – but the music they were putting out wasn’t that good.’

The early releases on Beggars Banquet lacked a convincing or cohesive musical style. However, the label’s releases, as disparate as the suburban Bowie pop psychodrama of Tubeway Army to the punk by numbers of the Lurkers, sold healthily in a market gasping for product. Tubeway Army managed a staggering half a million sales, all coordinated from the upstairs room of the Earl’s Court branch of Beggars. Tubeway Army’s success was an early indication of Mills’s capabilities. An Oxford graduate in PPE, Mills would steadily and methodically become the backbone of the independent sector. Combining a quick-witted shrewdness with a deep love of music, in the late Seventies Mills was, like other storeowners, indulging his passion by releasing records.

‘It surprised us when we put out our first record,’ says Mills, ‘in that we sold ten or fifteen thousand just like that. In the early days of punk there was so little available that whatever you put out, people bought and even a few years later in the early days of 4AD there was a thirst for, and a scarcity of, music like that.’

Behind the counter in Earls Court, Watts-Russell noticed the steady queue of hopeful bands waiting for the right moment to drop off their demo cassettes growing bigger. A self-released 7-inch single placed alongside the pile of tapes caught his attention. ‘Modern English came in and we heard a couple of songs they put out themselves. The next thing I know the Beggars owners, Nick Austin and Martin Mills, were approaching me saying, “Why don’t you start a label?”, but indicative to that, they gave me a contract, which was just absurd.’

Already, before he had even really begun, the orthodoxies of the industry perplexed Watts-Russell. Mills, while operating as an independent, was in no way interested in the amateurish largesse and faux mutualism of the kind of fifty-fifty deals offered by Rough Trade, Factory and Mute.

‘It reached a peak’, says Watts-Russell, ‘when I sat in with Rema Rema and Beggars were signing their publishing for an EP. That’s all it was going to be, one record. And here was this document that covered a lifetime of publishing. It crystallised so many things for me. It became clear from then on we were going to be doing deals on our own terms and leave the Beggars way of doing things behind.’

Mills recognised that Watts-Russell was able to fulfil some of the goals that had already been superseded by Beggars’ breakaway success. On the back of Tubeway Army’s commercial breakthrough, Mills had had to sign a distribution deal with Warner Brothers, which, while ensuring that Beggars didn’t suffer from Rough Trade’s regular headaches in reaching the wider market, meant Mills was putting all his efforts into keeping up with the Warners release schedule.

‘At the point when 4AD started,’ says Mills, ‘Beggars was being hugely successful with Tubeway Army, and we were only four people so it was pretty difficult not to get completely overwhelmed by having three albums in the Top Twenty at the same time, by the same artist, which was unimaginably huge. Whilst that was great, we longed for what we’d lost in lots of ways, which was doing interesting new smaller things as well.’

As well as being sensitive to what he perceived as Beggars’ traditional music biz sharp practice, Watts-Russell was increasingly aware of his surroundings; Beggars Banquet acts may have had residencies in the Top Ten, but according to his more nuanced criteria the label and shop lacked identity.

‘Rough Trade was cool and Beggars wasn’t,’ he says. ‘I spent x number of years of trying to get out of the shadow of the infrastructure Beggars had, because I didn’t want to be associated with the stuff they were putting out. Which was great, because it fanned the flames of being bloody-minded, single-minded, all of those things I was often accused of.’ Taking up Mills’s offer to start a label, Watts-Russell and his behind-the-counter Beggars colleague Peter Kent, settled on the name Axis, quickly pressing four singles, only to be told that another Axis records already existed. Rechristened 4AD their label, devoid of anything as prosaic as the word ‘Records’, or any words at all, would fit perfectly with the aesthetics Watts-Russell would begin to develop. 4AD derived from a flyer which had been printed to promote the Axis releases, centring on some rather awkward wordplay and an early attempt at Eighties design minimalism:

1980 FORWARD

1980 FWD

1984 AD

4AD

However, Watts-Russell and Kent quickly realised they had conflicting ideas for their new imprint; the third single planned for Axis, ‘Dark Entries’ by Bauhaus, sold so well the band and Kent felt they had already outgrown a nascent start-up like Axis/4AD.

‘It was summed up by Bauhaus,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘Pete and I learnt we had different ambitions. When we met Bauhaus, they played “Telegram Sam” and there was no way they would record it, but by 1980 not only had they recorded it but they’d put it out as the A-side to a single on Beggars. I was serious enough and passionate enough to know I didn’t want anything to go from 4AD to Beggars. Bauhaus were the first and last band to make that move.’

None of this was lost on Martin Mills, who was happy to see 4AD flourish on its own terms. ‘The idea was that it would be a feeder label for Beggars Banquet but it became pretty clear, immediately after Bauhaus, that 4AD was developing its own identity and was going to be more than a feeder label and fairly soon they developed along parallel paths.’

A relationship developed which meant Mills was a background presence offering advice and informal consultation to 4AD, bringing his astute readings of the technical aspects of putting out records to bear, while Watts-Russell could start building a creative hothouse in the image of his own, highly developed sensibilities.

‘Later on, even to the peak of our independence,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘when we were far more solvent and successful than the Beggars label, we still used their accountants. I never wanted to employ anybody, never mind accountants. We were very lucky as a company not to have to worry about that side of things and that’s where Martin was just fantastic – he never influenced me at 4AD but he was always there.’

Now that he was operating solely on his own terms, Watts-Russell was free to start signing. The first artists that drew his attention were the expat Australian blues maelstrom, the Birthday Party. Fronted by Nick Cave they had arrived in London with the hellfire determination of landing a record deal, although their attempts at sparking interest were floundering a little. ‘They’d been to see Daniel Miller,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘who had got them to open for DAF. I saw them at the Moonlight where Mick Harvey was playing a Farfisa. No one in the club liked them. I went to see them again at the Rock Garden and told Mick I really liked that song, “The Friend Catcher”. He said, “We got a recording of that. Do you want to put it out?” Just like that. It was all exciting. 4AD was just me at this point.’

For a sole trader still finding his way around releasing records a year into 4AD’s lifespan Watts-Russell, to his great surprise, had his first taste of transatlantic crossover success. The second Modern English album, After The Snow was achieving breakaway sales thanks to the inclusion of one of its tracks, ‘I Melt with You’, in a movie soundtrack.

‘The second Modern English album was our first platinum album,’ he says. ‘“I Melt with You” was in the first Nicolas Cage film Valley Girl; the soundtrack was a million-selling album in the USA. “I Melt with You”, the track, is in the top 500 most-played tracks on the radio. They were hugely successful without having a hit. People were fired at Warner Brothers because they didn’t get out their Top Forty chequebooks at the right time to translate that into the colossal hit that it should have been.’

‘I Melt with You’ was an early example of the polished new wave track that would cross over from John Hughes’s iconic run of coming-of-age movies in Eighties America. Valley Girl was directed by Martha Coolidge and, in its tale of star-crossed lovers from different sides of the Reaganomics tracks, was a precursor to the Hughes template. Setting a precedent for movie tie-in tracks like Psychedelic Furs’ ‘Pretty in Pink’ and Simple Minds’ ‘Don’t You Forget about Me’, ‘I Melt with You’ was a hook-laden rush of lustful teenage anxiety. Unlike the singles used in the John Hughes soundtracks, the video for ‘I Melt with You’ lacked any of Valley Girl’s footage, denying the track the benefit of the emerging marketing tool of the MTV age, synergy. The track reached only no. 70 in the Billboard chart. Despite all of this, 4AD had a six-figure-selling album on their hands. For Watts-Russell, still operating the label from behind the counter of the Beggars shop, the experience was bewildering.

The combination of the ineptitude of Warner Brothers in missing an open goal and the realisation that discreet levels of payola and insider trading still permeated the mechanics of Top Forty America meant that the success of ‘I Melt with You’ left a nasty taste in the mouth. Everything Watts-Russell distrusted about the music business – sloppy work, sharp practice and a wholesale lack of attention to detail – had given him his first hit.

‘That experience put me off licensing stuff to America and record companies in general for many, many years,’ he says. ‘I never even wanted to feel like I had a record company. From working in a record shop, you’d see the reps from places like Phonogram – they were like shoe salesmen, they knew nothing and cared nothing for music. We sold half a million albums; it culminated in the band playing a matinee performance and teenage girls throwing underwear and cuddly toys at Modern English. Quite extraordinary. Then they’d return to England to play at the Venue in New Cross if they could.’

Much to Watts-Russell’s annoyance, 4AD was starting to gather a reputation, via the Bauhaus and Birthday Party catalogues that continued to sell in great numbers, for black-clad cheekboned art-house records that fed the High Street underground phenomenon of Goth. One of 4AD’s next releases couldn’t have been further from the stereotype: an unsettling hybrid of a singer-songwriter album and a collage of soundscapes that might colour an Industrial album: Matt Johnson’s Burning Blue Soul. ‘That was our fifth album,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘The first time I met Matt he was more interested in the football, so we got on really well; he’d played me this tape that had been produced by Graham and Bruce from Wire and that’s what we put out.’

Mixing some early examples of sampling with a twelve-string acoustic and discordant rhythmic textures, Burning Blue Soul had been pieced together by Johnson, a tape op, using dead studio time. The album’s cover, featuring a Thirteenth Floor Elevators-style psychedelic eye, was a fitting metaphor for the music – jarring and intoxicating, it inhabited its own private sphere.

Releases like Burning Blue Soul ensured 4AD was developing a roster of distinct and individual pedigree, but it was Watts-Russell’s next signing that would fix the label’s identity and aesthetic: the Cocteau Twins. ‘To this day I remember hearing their music for the very first time,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘I’d driven to Spaceward Studios, where you watched them erase the masters at the end of the session, all kind of depressing. I was driving back, stuck the tape in and remember really enjoying this Siouxsie and the Banshees-esque distorted guitar where you could hear someone clearly sort of singing over the top.’

Watts-Russell had received the tape from the Cocteau Twins bearish guitarist Robin Guthrie who, having travelled overnight from the refinery town of Grangemouth on the Firth of Forth to see the Birthday Party, killed time by loitering in the Beggars shop, hoping to catch a moment with the man who had released their records. Hearing the tape, Watts-Russell was convinced enough by the two tracks to invite the band down to record. What Watts-Russell hadn’t heard on the tape was the voice of Guthrie’s girlfriend and Cocteau Twins vocalist, Liz Fraser, which had been submerged beneath the distorted guitars of Guthrie and bassist Will Heggie.

‘I didn’t invite the Cocteaus down to London to record two songs at Blackwing because of Liz Fraser,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘so being in Blackwing when Liz opened her mouth it was “Oh My Fucking Lord!” Talk about icing on the cake.’

Blackwing studios in Southwark was located in a deconsecrated church, with its bell tower used for storing master tapes and a walled garden. It was a location with which Watts-Russell had a great affinity. As his workload as a producer increased it became a second home, the studio’s ecclesiastical architecture providing an echo-chamber for his thoughts, and its mixing desk a means of unlocking them.

Hearing Fraser sing resulted in an epiphany that would resonate within Watts-Russell with the intensity of first love. Having initially asked the Cocteau Twins to record an EP, Watts-Russell, realising he was smitten, immediately asked them to agree to a more long-term arrangement with 4AD. ‘I heard Liz for the first time and said, “You’ve got to record an album, right?”’ he says. ‘“You’ve got the songs?” – and, of course, I found out later that they didn’t and so I had those two songs they’d done at Blackwing pressed on to an acetate just for John Peel, and it took him for ever to listen to it and, when he did, he liked it and we got the session.’

Watts-Russell’s relationship with Peel had blossomed from that of a boy having his world changed by radio to one of mutual respect as the broadcaster recognised a kindred spirit in Watts-Russell.

‘John Peel was so supportive,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘All our communication was by letter. Someone invited him to a session saying, “Please will you come down?” but he said, “No, everyone stands around staring at their shoes.” And when I first met him, sure enough, I looked up from staring at my shoes. I was so nervous. I went up and went, “Hi, how are you doing?” and he went, “You don’t have to talk to me like that.” I saw someone I admired enormously, but who was probably as shy as me.’

The Cocteau Twins’ first tentative attempts at delivering on the promise Watts-Russell had heard were fraught: a combination of shyness, the inability to communicate and being thrust from their detached incubation in Grangemouth into the strange world of early Eighties show business. Colin Wallace their friend, confidant and roadie had come from the same background as Fraser, Heggie and Guthrie. ‘Liz’s mum and my mum used to work in the same factory and I worked there for five years’, he says, ‘and, God it was awful, and I became their roadie through default. The first Cocteaus album, Garlands, was written off in the UK as another Siouxsie copy band, and Elizabeth was a huge Siouxsie fan – she had Siouxsie tattoos which she’s had lasered off since.’ If the music was, at least in the UK, brushed over lightly, the Garlands sleeve was arresting in the extreme. A mixture of colour photography and extravagant handwriting, it looked like a cross between a poster for a low-budget European horror movie and a fine arts student’s degree-show interpretation of their dreams. The startlingly contemporary artwork was credited, for the first time on a 4AD sleeve, to 23 Envelope.

23 Envelope was the name of the graphic design practice that Vaughan Oliver, a young graphic design graduate – whose retention of his Mackem accent from Sunderland instantly earthed any pretension that could be detected in his designs – had started along with his colleague Nigel Grayson. ‘Vaughan came in when we moved to Alma Road in 1983,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘He taught me so much about how to use my eyes, and there was an absurd coincidence in how I got to meet him.’

Alma Road was in Wandsworth, London W18, where Martin Mills had opened Beggars Banquet’s offices and the Beggars Group remains today. The premises were located on a quiet side street and housed a small 4AD office; and along with moving out of the record shop into a new workspace, Watts-Russell hired Oliver as his first employee on the recommendation of a friend of a friend.

‘All I knew was, this chap called Vaughan was going to come and visit me one night. Modern English had used this Diane Arbus image on a T-shirt and they wanted to use it on a sleeve. Whatever, all I had to tell him was to use this Diane Arbus image. He walks in with his portfolio, and in it is the very same Diane Arbus image that he’d treated in his own usual way. Huge coincidence, we got on very well. It was the two of us for a year, 1983.’

Oliver would, with designers Peter Saville and Neville Brody, introduce a new graphic language into the teenage bedrooms of the Eighties. Through the sleeves in the record-shop windows to the type, print and collaging in publications like The Face, they would educate the music- and style-orientated audience into a new visual awareness. The intensely creative collaboration between Watts-Russell and Oliver meant that 4AD had a musical and visual character with a particular and singular resonance.

‘There was mutual respect going on,’ says Oliver. ‘I was kind of educating him visually and he was very definitely educating me musically. I think he had the impression I was a different person to what I actually was in the daytime. So he thought I was going to do all the radio and the plugging, go out there amongst them – that’s not me in the daytime. I was his first full-time employee, and that gave me great confidence, that that was how much he cared about the packaging of the whole thing that he was prepared to stick his neck out and do that.’

In making Oliver his first employee, Watts-Russell was, like Tony Wilson before him, putting his company’s visual presentation in the hands of a young graphic designer. Watts-Russell had also assumed that as well as developing a visual language for the label Oliver would be equally hands-on with the mundane tasks of running a small business. ‘I thought I need some help,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘As far as I was concerned, you design a couple of sleeves, then you get down in the warehouse and you start packing boxes.’

For Oliver, however, the idea of multitasking and helping out as an ad hoc warehouseman was anathema to the creative process. With Watts-Russell at his desk, keeping his eye on the production schedule, and Oliver in the corner, lost in his ideas for a new language of record sleeves, the atmosphere between the two staff members of 4AD was redolent of an isolation tank.

‘One of the first things he said to me’, says Oliver, ‘was, “I don’t do conversations … not interested in small talk … me and you … right?” I just sat there quietly in the corner. I’d never had an easel or a drawing board before, so I remember, for the first six months mine was completely upright. I hadn’t worked out how to put it back. I’m struggling with one of the first sleeves and it must have taken me three weeks. I’d found an old encyclopaedia, photocopied this face, blew each letter up to giant size, for all the track listing, etc., and I remember sitting there for ages … doing these letters up to there and putting them all together and then reducing them on my PMT machine* … and I’m also being introduced to printers and I couldn’t do printers’ talk.’

Watts-Russell was increasingly worried that, along with the inability to help out in the everyday tasks of shifting stock and packing boxes, all of which he would regularly attend to, Oliver’s design process would start hindering the momentum of the release schedule.

‘One of the first things Vaughan did in 1983 was design an Xmal Deutschland logo,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘and I sat there and I watched him, and it took him two and a half weeks. So he dictated when our records came out. That was tough and frustrating, I’m sure I gave him a very hard time about it, I now recognise’.

Watts-Russell, who loathed meetings and brainstorming sessions, could work in a detached, highly concentrated manner. The dreamy overlap between music and art that formed the outward perception of 4AD was in reality often a terse and incommunicative set of encounters between the graphic designer and label boss. Whatever they lacked in social skills, the pair were creatively on a high.

*

Oliver’s designs utilised photography and layers of inks printed over dreamlike imagery which he dispersed and refracted in saturated colour. His photographer of choice and partner in 23 Envelope was Nigel Grayson. ‘I was at school with him, college with him, and we did a lot of the early sleeves together,’ says Oliver. ‘Instead of Nigel and Vaughan, we gave ourselves a studio name, 23 Envelope, so out of that studio might come all these various styles or ways of seeing, if you like … but the thing is, with me and Nigel, we had too much of a similar aesthetic.’

While 23 Envelope would come to be seen as an innovator in sleeve design, rendering their images with the broadest possible brushstrokes to make full use of the size of a record sleeve, the name 23 Envelope was originally a rather ordinary trouvaille and a world away from the Mannerist flourishes with which they coloured their sleeves.

‘There was a packet of envelopes next to us and there were twenty-three of them left,’ says Oliver, ‘and we ran out of Letraset, so it was 23 Envelope, not Envelopes. Twenty-three is the most recurring number in the world and every time I read a newspaper it’s in there somewhere. It was nonsense. Where does 4AD come from? Nonsense. I like the idea that 23 or 4AD has come to mean something in time and it’s not a string of names, it’s not an agency name it’s not Rough Trade, it’s not Factory, which already has an image – if you hear the word “factory” you think of a factory. 4AD has no image other than the one it made.’

The 4AD image being made was in the likeness of Watts-Russell’s tastes and intensity. The music was otherworldly, lambent and wrapped in a shroud of reverb. However much the 4AD catalogue was starting to sell and connect with an audience, the press were dismissive of what they perceived as a world of cobwebs, floral prints and rosaries. In the UK the music weeklies were quick to paint Watts-Russell and 4AD into a stripped pine, Laura Ashley fabric-shrouded corner.

‘Journalists weren’t always supportive of what we did,’ he says. ‘I was attracted to people whose easiest method of communication was by music and with whom I shared a shyness. And shyness is often interpreted in the world as arrogance, so words like pretentious would creep in later. I didn’t have mates at the paper, put it that way.’

The negative press reaction had taken its toll on Liz Fraser, who decided that she would now sing in her own language, disguising her feelings in an enchanting and powerfully sung gobbledegook. ‘I remember talking to Liz about the reviews,’ says Wallace, ‘and how they were slagging off the lyrics, and I remember her saying to me, “They’ll never fucking slag my lyrics off ever again.”’

The retreat into a private linguistic universe made Fraser’s voice richer and more assertive. The combination of Guthrie’s arrangements and Fraser’s unfathomable rhapsodies was an intense deluge of aqueous sounds and soaring melodies whose otherworldliness was earthed by the strict crack of a drum machine. Watts-Russell rose above any ridicule directed towards the Cocteau Twins and felt a strong emotional bond between himself and the band. ‘I just loved them so much I didn’t care what anyone or any journalist thought about them,’ he says. ‘I didn’t care one iota. I was proud to represent them.’

Within the band themselves, ominous tensions that had been building caused their first crisis. They had embarked on a disastrous tour, which resulted in the firing of bassist Will Heggie, and a decision for ever more to shun the conventional methods of the industry. ‘We sent them on a tour with OMD in 1983,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘England and Europe, and it was a huge mistake: they did fifty of fifty-two dates, came back to England and I was left with the job of firing Will Heggie.’

The realities of being a support band with meagre resources had worn down what little enthusiasm the band had for touring. ‘We toured for three months non-stop,’ says Wallace. ‘The sound guy from OMD was out of his nut on coke the whole time, we were sitting in the dressing room and he said, “It just sounds like Liz is singing, we’re all gonna die, we’re all gonna die,” which summed it up. At the end of that tour, Will accused Elizabeth of being a pop star, because she wanted to go out and talk to fans and stuff like that. It all kicked off and the dressing room was totalled, everything was smashed.’

On completion of the tour the band returned to Ivo’s flat to deal with the tensions that the three months away had produced. ‘Liz was jealous of everyone around Robin and was jealous of his relationship with Will,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘It was a nightmare – the phone ringing, thunder and lightning in my flat. I think round about then I offered to quit 4AD and start managing them – thank God, they never answered me.’

The Cocteau Twins were increasingly prolific, releasing two EPs of non-LP material and their second album, Head Over Heels, in 1983 alone. Head Over Heels, which Peel played in its entirety on consecutive nights, was more or less a duo album with Guthrie playing and programming all the instrumentation. ‘Head Over Heels is where Robin took over,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘I did him a huge favour by producing Garlands and Lullabies and I made him use Alan Rankine for Peppermint Pig. By then he could turn round and say, “Fuck off, I can do it better than that.”’ In the meantime Watts-Russell had found a likely candidate to replace Will Heggie on bass. ‘Simon Raymonde was working in the Beggars shop and I suggested him, and they got on. So that was the end of the Cocteau Twins ever doing traditional anything. And I think they recognised the power in that position’.

The image of the Cocteau Twins was developed by 23 Envelope’s baroque sleeves, which featured a Lewis Carroll suburbia that was amplified by Fraser’s waif-like appearance; in videos she would wear gowns and lace, while drapes billowed elegantly and a cat might scamper by. ‘Victoriana had been attached to the Cocteaus,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘It was hard to get rid of it, but get rid of it we did. Having been well aware of Nigel and Vaughan’s working methods I would say no more effort, energy, or pretension could have been applied to any record cover than Head Over Heels and Sunburst and Snowblind. Borrowed completely and utterly from Tarkovsky.’

In a bid to lose the trace of the pea-coat surrealism with which they had become identified, 23 Envelope’s designs for Head Over Heels and Sunburst and Snowblind were a miasma of colour and abstraction. Featuring a glowing red shape, part unopened rose, part shimmering sea-plant, the imagery took liberally from Tarkovsky’s Stalker, adding a blaze of colour to the film’s high-contrast brown monochromes. In one of the film’s most celebrated scenes, a single shot is used as the camera moves steadily over a pool containing a never-ending detritus of objects and signifiers of industrial and spiritual malaise: coins, a rifle, an icon, a coil spring. All are submerged in water and plankton before a hand emerges, resting upwards in the pool. If the sequence were to be paused at any random moment, the still in the frame would look uncannily like a 4AD sleeve from the era.

Amid this heightened creativity, Wallace, for one, was noticing that Watts-Russell was carrying a great deal on his shoulders. ‘As it sort of progressed and progressed, he was the eye at the centre of the storm,’ he says. ‘In retrospect, he should have delegated more, but because he’d always done it himself he was in total control of it.’

Along with being a hands-on A&R man who was deeply involved with the studio process, Watts-Russell usually sequenced the records and supervised their mastering. He was also in sole charge of 4AD’s intricate manufacturing and production schedule.

From behind his easel and PMT machine Vaughan Oliver was wondering how Watts-Russell wore so many hats. ‘I don’t know how he did it, to be honest. He would be on the phone to a band saying, “Why don’t you do a little bit of this with it a little bit of that with it in the studio,” then straight on to the plant the next minute, “Where’s me fucking records? I should have 10,000 records in there by now.”’

The Cocteau Twins’ ravished chamber music was a measure of Watts-Russell’s ability to create a private world, one with which 4AD remains synonymous. It was a world immersed in the musical language of reverb, female vocals and meditative song cycles and one to which Watts-Russell added his own project, This Mortal Coil.

‘I was upstairs at the Ritz at New York’, says Watts-Russell, ‘at a Modern English show. They come on for the encore and run two tracks together – “16 Days” into “Gathering Dust” – and I suggested they recorded a version of it. For some reason I thought I’d try and do it. To give this thing shape I asked Liz to sing it and asked Gordon Sharp to sing with her. It sounds like what it was, which was people who didn’t know what they were trying to do, but it had been recorded so it had to come out. I needed a B-side so I asked Liz to sing “Song to the Siren”. My intention was for it to be a cappella. I didn’t want to have any music at all. So the guitar that is on there is one take of Robin leaning against the studio wall bored out of his mind playing these chords.’

The depth and intensity of Fraser, Watts-Russell and Guthrie’s feelings for one another would be recorded in an almost unbearably beautiful context. Fraser’s reading of Tim Buckley’s ‘Song to the Siren’, part crofter’s lament, part three minutes of haunted eroticism and part one long echo drifting into a mist of tape hiss, is rightly regarded as one of the high watermarks of the 4AD catalogue. Its feeling of intimacy was a product of the hushed atmosphere in which it was recorded.

‘Liz threw us out of the studio,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘and we went and sat at the garden at Blackwing and I couldn’t take it, so I crept in on the floor. She didn’t see me coming in – she was sitting on the floor right in the corner – the tape machine was on a loop and I sneaked in and heard her sing very quietly, exactly what was on the record, except quieter and I just jumped up and screamed in astonishment. She said, “Go! Get out!” And then she did it in one take.’

Guthrie in particular was keen not to get distracted by This Mortal Coil and was concentrating on the next Cocteau Twins album. ‘I invited Eno to meet them with a view to him producing Treasure. He turns up with this very quiet chap called Danny who sort of sat in the corner and Eno said, “I don’t think I should produce the Cocteau Twins because I don’t think I’d be as brave as you were on Head Over Heels, to use that size of reverb – it was extraordinarily brave, but if you want a good engineer why don’t you work with Danny?” Of course, Danny is Daniel Lanois, but by that time, Robin wasn’t going to work with anyone. He tolerated the idea of Brian Eno but it wasn’t going to work.’

Guthrie taking over the producer’s role in the Cocteau Twins also meant he began to assert himself over Watts-Russell and began to distance himself, and refused to play the customary promotional games – a move that they would all come to regret. ‘Before they moved to London they always stayed with me,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘We were very close, and I really agreed with them about not doing television with balloons, and it was probably a mistake. I think they came to resent me for what they perceived to be their lack of success, when they themselves had refused to do interviews or refused to release singles from albums. The love was that intense that when it dies it cuts to the core and to this day one of the biggest tragedies for me is that I told them to go when I did. Everybody was on the same page – the graphic designers, Vaughan and Nigel, weren’t interested in putting groups on the sleeve and the bands weren’t interested in putting themselves on the sleeves either. They were serious about their art, and so was I.’

4AD’s intricately constructed house style gave the impression of a salon in London full of like-minded bands with cockatoo hair, all exploring the mysteries of the voice and the effects pedal. The impression was strengthened by the fact This Mortal Coil was something of a house band made up of different members of 4AD acts all collaborating over Watts-Russell’s exquisitely selected cover material.

‘There is this idea or perception that people have of the label, that it was a happy family with its own in-house sleeve designers so everything looked the same – the same engineer, me, John, Brendan, Robin – we were exploring reverb, all of us, because we loved it. Very briefly, around ’85 for about six months, it was like that. Everybody helped each other. Robin would produce Dif Juz or whatever it was for nothing, Manuela would play with the Wolfgang Press – everybody was friends, and playing on each other’s records. Then, of course, years later Robin would go, “I produced that Dif Juz record for nothing! You ripped me off.”’

Whatever the outside world made of This Mortal Coil and 4AD’s air of a heady and aesthetic boudoir, the records were constructed in as workmanlike a manner as possible. Rather than arrange the musicians to play together, Watts-Russell made the records in near isolation, piecing them together part by part, layering the songs into completion. ‘Because of my lack of confidence,’ he says, ‘I never ever wanted there to be more than one musician in the studio if I could help it. From ’83 to ’91, until the photo session that was done for Blood, people who’d played on at least two of the albums had never met each other.’

Watts-Russell’s choice of material for the first This Mortal Coil album – Big Star, Gene Clark, Roy Harper – was drawn from the same pool of introverted experimental singer-songwriters that he had played to Nick Currie a few years earlier. If Postcard had playfully referenced the Sixties and Seventies, This Mortal Coil were paying solemn homage to them and taking the spirit of the original recordings and turning them into tone poems, refracted through the gauze of 4AD’s sound world.

‘I still don’t think This Mortal Coil improved on anything we covered apart from “Song to the Siren”. Gene Clark – the beauty of that man’s voice. I [exchanged] letters with Chris Bell’s brother and with Larry Beckett: getting correspondence and being in touch with these people who were involved meant so much to me. Their response and their kind words was fantastic.’

One band Watts-Russell had signed were testing his A& R skills: a trio featuring two brothers who would regularly fall out, Martin and Steve Young, and a vocalist Debbie Curran. Colourbox were not quite a dance floor act. Their mix of cutting-edge technology and heartfelt lyrics ensured their debut single ‘Breakdown’ was not only a mysterious and soulful listen, but, with its electro keyboard stabs and Street Sounds rhythms, as far removed from the art-house menagerie of the label’s reputation as possible. While Colourbox certainly answered 4AD’s critics who thought the label one-dimensional, the band struggled to find an audience. ‘I really liked “Tarantula”, which was the B-side of their first single, “Breakdown”, and ended up covering it in This Mortal Coil – which rather proves the point,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘but we kind of felt it slipped through the cracks so we re-recorded it.’

They re-recorded both tracks, and in doing so Colourbox explored the emerging world of studio technology even further, extending and dubbing music as sleek and smart as any that was now influencing them heavily, New York first-wave electro.

‘We recorded “Breakdown” again,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘I’ll never forget watching all the cuts on the tape. At that point on trips to New York, hearing pirate radio and having mix tapes on the first Walkmans, you’d hear all this electro stuff, cut up and chopped to pieces, I mean brilliant stuff, then you’d go and buy the 12-inch, and it was all a load of nonsense because it was what they’d been doing live in the studio, but that cut-up process highly influenced Martin Young.’

The cut-and-splice sounds of Kiss FM, the endless loops of possibilities as beats were edited into a seamless flow and cut to vinyl as a white label for that week’s radio show or club date, made perfect sense in the sidewalk environs of what journalist Cynthia Rose called ‘beatbox business sense’. For Colourbox, their releases framed in some of Oliver’s most vibrant and ultramodern artwork, being tied to the 4AD release schedule ensured the sense of stasis around the band was hard to break.

‘We released a mini LP of material that had been dubbed up by Paul Groucho Smykle, who was a house engineer at Island who was doing all the Black Uhuru stuff and Sly and Robbie stuff,’ remembers Watts-Russell. ‘At the time it felt like Martin was never going to do anything again, and he never really did.’

The self-titled Colourbox, or Horses Fucking as it became known from its artwork, was as fresh and euphoric in its use of sampling as anything else released in 1983 and sounded more like a release on Island’s electro imprint Fourth & Broadway than anything on 4AD. A new vocalist, Lorita Grahame, had brought rawness to their sound on their debut full-length album The Moon Is Blue. Veering from futuristic lover’s rock to dubbed torch songs and making full use of cut-ups from B-movie dialogues, Colourbox’s genre-hopping only managed to confuse most listeners. ‘That was a bit of a messy collection,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘The album came out in 1985 and because we’d effectively released three singles from it I encouraged them to do more, which is why it became a double – which they began to resent me for, but, you know, we weren’t selling any records.’

If 4AD were struggling to connect Colourbox with an audience in the UK, the band’s futuristic – if erratic – series of releases was not going unnoticed at other record companies. ‘I was in New York and this bloke kept talking to me about Bauhaus,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘and turned to me and said, “Tour over? I tell you what you should do. You should stick around and listen to American radio for a couple of weeks.” He thought I was Kevin Haskins from Bauhaus! But that didn’t stop him from paging me at the airport to tell us he wanted to sign Colourbox to A&M and, stupidly, I did.’

The move was disastrous. Watts-Russell signed the band over to Arista, an A&M subsidiary, and once again found himself at the mercy of the whims of American executives with no real understanding of the product they had now been asked to market. ‘I just thought, oh shit,’ he says. ‘Nothing’s changed.’

For the first time, Watts-Russell was also being courted by the mainstream industry in Britain. ‘Paul Russell, who was the face of CBS, invited us, as in Colourbox, over,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘then I got called over again on my own and had a very private lunch in the bowels of CBS Soho Square, which was Paul Russell doing a number on me. He was trying to sign them through us. I called up Colourbox and said, “If you want to do it, you are free to go but I cannot work with these people.” I rang up Paul Russell and he said, “You tell them, when their kids are old enough to go to school and they have to end up going to Brixton comprehensive or something, and they still need a little bit of help, you tell them to give me a ring then.” It just confirmed that I didn’t want to work with the record industry.’

If Watts-Russell had had his worst fears about the record industry confirmed by being wined and dined by CBS, fate held an enormous and unsettling surprise for him around the corner. Colourbox’s digital and sampling skills would be put to use on another 12-inch single that would turn 4AD, its distribution company Rough Trade and the world of ‘beatbox business sense’ on its head.

* Photomechanical transfer (PMT) was a method of preparing artwork using a camera, now obsolete, but no doubt worthy of a revival.

5 Oblivious

Set list from the Go Betweens concert at the Boston Club, London, 12 August 1985 (Cerne Canning archive)

‘I remember Paul Conway coming round, the person who actually drove Stiff,’ says Richard Scott, ‘asking us to stop putting out some new record of theirs, because it meant that they didn’t have time to actually establish an act, and work the media. I mean, that was the whole point.’

By 1982 Rough Trade had developed at breakneck speed to the point where it was now operating in parallel to the established industry and in its own nimble way moving much more quickly. Among any advances it was making as an alternative infrastructure, it was also developing a reputation as a talking shop. The lasting impression was of an environment run by worker committee with a communal kitchen and a cleaning rota.

‘We sat and talked a lot about what to put out and how to put it out,’ says Scott, ‘and how to organise people to clean the place and all that kind of stuff. In the Kensington Park days, at the most there were only ever about ten people working there. Upstairs all kinds of really weird things used to go on, but it was just pressure, pressure, and it was great fun.’

In this atmosphere of knocked-together shelves, hastily typed stock lists and overflowing ashtrays, an ever-increasing quantity of records was being sold and shipped around the country. Travis, who has been perhaps unfairly characterised as a corduroy hippie owing to the position Rough Trade took in its early years, concedes the company’s beginnings were of their time, when the radical politics of the Seventies was being absorbed into the mainstream, informing the records, delivery methods and payment percentages that Rough Trade was creating.

‘Certainly at the beginning there was more of an ideology,’ says Travis. ‘It was more like we’re a collective getting the same wages. I’m not the boss, that’s your area, that’s my area, it wasn’t like I was walking around telling them what to do, it really wasn’t like that. It was great: those were the good times at Rough Trade, really those first few years, and having Factory, Tony and Rob, John Loder at Southern and Daniel, all that wonderful explosion. There wasn’t a hierarchy or politics other than, “You can be Skrewdriver but we’re not distributing your records – someone else can support you but not us, these are our reasons, take it or leave it – we don’t care.”’

Although operating under the auspices of a collective, and certainly perceived as one by the outside world, Rough Trade was in fact a partnership with Travis as the senior stakeholder, an arrangement that would be of significant consequence through the ups and downs of Rough Trade’s lifetime.

In the wider culture of the times, ideas like co-operatives and self-critiquing organisations like Rough Trade that promoted feminism and vegetarianism and were anti-apartheid were encouraging behaviour that would get criticised as PC during the ascendency of the New Right and the New Lad backlash of the mid-Nineties. Rough Trade and its perceived ethos crystallised at a moment when the Left, enthused by movements like Rock Against Racism, held great sway over the emerging DIY and alternative cultures.

Richard Thomas, a Welshman with an owl-like countenance that would earn him the nickname ‘the Druid’, was a student at North London Polytechnic dipping his toe into concert promotion. ‘I started in 1980 when I was at the North London Poly,’ he says. ‘They still had these things called social secretaries: if you were in the right political party [and] had lots of friends, you’d be elected into a job which you had no experience of whatsoever. I had an 800-capacity hall to pledge. Every other thing that they had ever done had been a disaster, because if you get 800 students wanting to go to one show, then probably that act is capable of pulling 15,000 people. So I just came up with the idea of aiming at a student-type audience.’

The student-type audience was coalescing around the music press, particularly the NME which was taking a deliberately Leftist stance. With regular features on the Socialist Workers Party and interviews with left-wing politicians featuring alongside ads for the Greater London Council’s Christmas concerts for the unemployed, the weekly had firmly aligned itself to an anti-Tory narrative. Nearly all gig promoters differentiated between waged and unwaged in their pricing structure, in full realisation that in an era of widespread youth unemployment most of its audience would be jobless. The term ‘trendy lefty’ just about summed up this marriage of hip(ish) cultural awareness and centre-left(ish) politics. It would reach its apogee in Neville Brody’s rebranding of New Socialist magazine in 1986 and during the 1987 election, when Red Wedge, a collective of left-leaning musicians, toured in overt support for Labour. In the early Eighties this emerging sense of the Left being on the side of street culture was disseminated through concerts against apartheid and benefits for Nicaragua and Afghanistan; and as Thomas discovered, there was a market for the music associated, however vaguely, with the prevailing ideas of protest and counter-culture of the time.

‘In the two years that I was at North London Poly,’ says Thomas, ‘I did New Order, Pere Ubu, Cabaret Voltaire, The Fall, Au Pairs, Young Marble Giants, A Certain Ratio, Aswad, Nico, Virgin Prunes, bands like that, and it was basically a financial success.’

Indicative of the idea that Rough Trade had a constituency of Leftish students, nearly all of the bands Thomas promoted were either released or distributed by Rough Trade. Though never directly politically aligned, Travis and Scott’s idea of building a separate channel for the open-minded and curious music fan was gaining traction with an ever-widening audience.

‘It was a very interesting political and social era,’ says Thomas. ‘You had people who were teenagers then who were sort of the first of their generation to go to university. If you were in one of the major cities, you’d be the first generation to have grown up with black people in your school, but that would’ve been only the major cities – if you were coming from west Wales, Devon, Cornwall anywhere else, you met black friends for the first time. It coincided with things like feminism, and someone admitting to being gay. As an example of how underground the gay scene was in those days, someone started a gay society there and asked me, “Do you want to be the DJ?” and in all honesty there were about ten or twelve genuinely gay people and about a dozen people came from the college branch of the SWP to show their alliance. My friend in the SWP comes up and he goes, “You know the music that unites everyone? Sixties soul music.” I had a box of all my Sixties soul, so here I am at the gay society disco playing “When a Man Loves a Woman”. All those things were fermenting in those days.’

The combination of the music press, the John Peel show and the likes of Thomas’s concerts at North London Poly and their regional equivalents provided a genuine alternative to the mainstream music business. Simultaneously Rough Trade label’s roster of This Heat, Swell Maps, YMG, Raincoats, Scritti Politti and Red Crayola was at its most clearly defined as the sound of a group of loosely affiliated artists, all expressing their impulses through often thrillingly individual and, in most cases, reasonably accessible music.

As Rough Trade expanded, its staff came to include some very sharp-minded and eccentric individuals, light years away from the standard music industry character, but brimming with ideas. Among those finding a corner to work in above the Kensington Road Shop were Claude Bessy, an acerbic Frenchman who as Kickboy Face had helped start the LA wave of street-level punk through his fanzine Slash. Bessy shared the upstairs office space with Scott Piering, an American émigré with a ferocious appetite for new music and first-hand experience of American college radio, and Mayo Thompson, formerly of Red Crayola, a Texan ideologue with an acute analytical mind who had been introduced to the conceptual British Left through collaborating with Art & Language.

‘Claude Bessy worked for Rough Trade in the promotion department,’ says Richard Boon. ‘This is when bits of Rough Trade started developing – booking agency, promotion department – all working inside but in a sense outside of the shop and Geoff.’

Boon had first met Claude Bessy in his Slash-editing pomp when Buzzcocks played LA. ‘Claude had to leave America because he’d been involved in a car accident and went through a windscreen and had lots of surgery,’ says Boon. ‘He didn’t have any insurance, and when the time to pay the bill came round he fled to London, where, of course, he was welcomed with open arms, because everybody loved Claude.’

Bessy’s gleeful mix of iconoclast, agent provocateur and back-room philosopher was perfectly captured in The Decline of Western Civilisation, Penelope Spheeris’s hand-held 1979 documentary on the underground LA punk scene. Asked for a definition of ‘new wave’, his eyes and skin glistening with the distinctive pallor of Venice Beach after dark LA, Bessy launches into one of his trademark riffs:

There was never any such thing as new wave. It was the polite thing to say when you were trying to explain you were not into the boring old rock ’n’ roll, but you didn’t dare to say punk because you were afraid to get kicked out of the fucking party and they wouldn’t give you coke any more. There’s new music, there’s new underground sound, there’s noise, there’s punk, there’s power pop, there’s ska, there’s rockabilly. But new wave doesn’t mean shit.

Bessy’s articulacy displayed a mind full of interventionist ideas on permanent rotation. Together with Piering he started working in the nascent Rough Trade promotions department, which helped internationalise and corroborate Rough Trade’s reputation. In the same office the Raincoats manager, Shirley O’Loughlin, and a friend, Mike Hinc, developed a booking agency for Rough Trade artists, All Trade. In addition Mayo Thompson and Travis became Rough Trade’s in-house record producers, recording the Raincoats, The Fall, Scritti Politti and Pere Ubu in crisp lo-fi vérité.

‘Somebody like Claude’, says Richard Scott, ‘we asked to join ’cause we got all our information from Slash, and it was such a great source of information, so we spoke to him quite a lot … I think Mayo just came by – I’m not sure about his politics even now. I have a great deal of time for Mayo, perhaps not so much musically, but he did Panorama and stuff like that. He comes from a very interesting background.’

Pete Donne, a teenager who worked in the shop, would notice that as he started locking up at the end of the working day the off-stage activities above and behind the shop would carry on late into the night. ‘Scott and Claude were there through the night loads of times making tapes. Scott was just incessant, the whole C86 thing came out of Scott’s tapes. He’d make these tapes every week of the new releases. Scott would listen to everything, just a workaholic, Claude as well; Claude was a drinker, smoker, speed, the lot, Capstan Full Strength – he was very rock ’n’ roll.’

Along with cataloguing every new release on cassette, Piering would record nearly every concert related to any of Rough Trade’s artists live from the mixing desk, amassing a highly detailed archive of the era. Piering and Bessy who bonded, among other things, over their shared experience of the music business in the States, brought a more extrovert and social side to Rough Trade, one that was engaging and intelligent. The artists they represented on Rough Trade benefited from their around-the-clock approachability, something that Rough Trade, at least outside opening hours, had previously been lacking.

‘Claude was a very close friend,’ says Richard Thomas. ‘An absolute genius … Claude’s last editorial in Slash, which summed up everything, was 1980 … it’s along the lines of “If you’ve got a great idea, do it now, ’cause the days of the amateur are about to end” and that’s what it was. If Claude had a weakness, it was that he loved starting things but often wouldn’t see them through.’

Bessy’s valedictory editorial highlighted his waspish romanticism just as he was acknowledging that Slash’s moment had passed. Written in his trademark jive it even manages to carry an air of wistfulness, revealing that despite the frozen-stared cynicism, the author may in fact have been experiencing a small pause for nostalgia:

First we had no intention of sneaking out of the back door like adulterers in the night, we’re not done with the incomprehensible propaganda yet and there was such an overload of information to lay on your frail intellects, such a gorgeous display of terminal confusion and unexplained phenomena to report and inflict on your village sensibilities as well as much local cliquey foulness to deposit on your elegant rug and offend your world-conscious sophistication (we welcome all types – even the proxy thrill seekers who go slumming thru our X-rated binges), there was so much to give and share and communicate (oh what a sense of duty) that even Jah Jah the old tea head himself couldn’t have stopped this cultural apotheosis. A man with a mission delivers the goods, and when many are involved and they all come thru (take a bow boys and girls) watch out, timber, the impact might kill you. Potent stuff everywhere, droogies, a panoramic scope without equal even if it occasionally blurs out, stunning absence of manifestos and editorial unity (meaning respect in the reader and a stand still at the office), obscure beliefs exhumed from the tomb, cover symbolism (Indian land and punk music meet with …) that doubles as a fashion exclusive. No one asked for it but we can’t resist showing off, there was more but you can only take so much of a good thing. And you ought to know when to stop. Like now?

Piering’s incessant recording and collating, and his excellent working relationship with John Peel, ensured Rough Trade had a certain, if limited, degree of clout and access to the Top Forty. While nearly all releases either on or distributed by Rough Trade would fall outside the charts, the company managed to occasionally penetrate the mainstream Top Forty. Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’ would go on to make no. 2 in the Top Ten, but only once it had been taken off Rough Trade’s hands by Warner Brothers.

‘Something like Laurie Anderson, “O Superman”, is a typical Scott Piering record,’ says Richard Scott. ‘I think Scott probably introduced that record into Rough Trade, probably sent a copy in to Peel who played it, and then we got import copies because of the contacts that Scott had or whatever, and sold hundreds through the shop and thousands more through the distribution. That network of conversation, whether on the radio, Peel, fanzines, word of mouth, meant that records like that would just fly. You’d have a Saturday when something like that came in and every customer that was coming in was getting that as well as a batch of other stuff.’

If Rough Trade could score the odd unlikely radio hit in the form of ‘O Superman’, its continuing wish to put ethos before hard commercial profit meant its air of amateurishness was maintained. Having bought in thousands of copies of ‘O Superman’ from America, Rough Trade needed to sell it at a higher than usual import retail price, as was standard on all imported records. Pete Donne was horrified to discover that both the shop and distribution had been making a 50p loss on every copy sold. ‘The idea was, “This is a £3 record, that’s its value to the customer”,’ says Donne, ‘but it had cost us £3.50 per unit to import. It’s a good example of how the business was run.’

Its international contacts meant Rough Trade had exclusive access to the kinds of music that echoed its own principles around the world. It particularly developed contacts in New York, where many of the bands on the label found themselves the toast of the downtown club scene and returned to London with DIY American releases packed in their bags.

‘All the 99 and Lust On Lust releases, all that New York batch of things were definitely coming through directly to the shop,’ says Donne. ‘With Claude, Mayo and Scott there was that network of conversations going on and obviously Rough Trade was exporting as well, so it was a two-way conversation, people like Viv Goldman that were doing things themselves and using the phones or the telex machine or whatever.’

Viv Goldman’s single ‘Launderette’ not only remains one of the best songs of the era, but it captures the feel of the early 1980s West London of Rough Trade. Featuring a series of photos shot in the house Goldman shared with Travis at 148a Ladbroke Grove, along with images of the streets up and down the Grove, the sleeve of ‘Launderette’ is Portobello at its most dowdy and seductive. A dubbed-up pop song about a relationship gone sour, ‘Launderette’ was played by an ad hoc frontline supergroup of Keith Levene, Jah Wobble and sundry Raincoats and released on the ultra-hip New York-based 99 Records, named after its address, 99 MacDougal Street. If Rough Trade had an equivalent anywhere in the world it was 99, a record and badge shop that under the direction of its owner Ed Balham started releasing records by Liquid Liquid, ESG, Bush Tetras and Glenn Branca. The label’s releases were a document of the cross-fertilising sounds emerging from a New York that had only just avoided bankruptcy, but whose downtown was becoming an after-dark laboratory of wired neon rhythm.

Buzzcocks’ erstwhile manager Richard Boon had been keeping an eye on developments at Rough Trade, and was perennially on the verge of being asked to work there full-time. He was also one of the first visitors to Rough Trade’s new headquarters. Having outgrown the premises of Kensington Park Road, the company had moved to premises around the corner at 137 Blenheim Crescent. The building was a three-storeyed house that accommodated all Rough Trade’s growing portfolio, the most significant and lucrative of which was its distribution division.

‘Distribution had faced several challenges in keeping up with the amount of material being put through its channels,’ says Boon. ‘Richard Scott’s idea was to co-ordinate a network of like-minded retailers to serve as a national distribution arm – The Cartel.’ Though London would be its nexus, the idea was that no cog in The Cartel’s chain would be more powerful than any other. Each distributor would provide a point of access and egress for any band, label or fanzine writer that wanted to lock into Rough Trade Distribution’s perpetually turning wheel, thus ensuring nationwide distribution without the need to supply and co-ordinate their releases via the hothouse of London.

‘First of all he wanted to develop the independent retailers that were increasingly the hub of their local activity,’ says Boon. ‘You’d have a shop like Probe in Liverpool, who’d phone all these other people saying, “Well, I’ve got this, listen.” If you’re developing a programme or policy of access, decentralisation is something to support and encourage. There was a sense that there were people out there on the same wavelengths who would talk to each other and there was a community of interest, even if you didn’t necessarily like what someone else in the community was doing.’

Richard Scott, while permanently pressing for The Cartel to be run collectively, was its de facto organiser and head. Along with Rough Trade, The Cartel drew together six other distributors: Probe in Liverpool, Revolver in Bristol, Red Rhino in York (whose owner Tony K was a vociferous and pragmatic counterpart to Scott), Backs in Norwich, Fast Forward in Edinburgh and Nine Mile in Leamington Spa. The idea of a nationwide distribution network was simple and fitted perfectly with the Rough Trade ideals of access via mutual, co-operative control, and for many years The Cartel succeeded on those terms.

What few of its members could see was how easily and how rapidly such a system could overheat. As with many of Rough Trade’s ideas, what began as a pragmatic solution became coloured by its internal politics. ‘It started as a conversation,’ says Boon, ‘which later became an argument.’

*

‘The whole of the Postcard story is a good issue,’ says Scott. ‘I didn’t realise, but Geoff by that time was after hits, and in Roddy Frame and Orange Juice he saw a good chance to achieve that kind of chart success. I was in Canada when he did the deal with Postcard and I was absolutely livid, because by my definition we should have got them going in Glasgow. We should’ve actually really established them there. I don’t actually think Alan Horne would’ve gone for it, but the actual politics of it should’ve been to make them a successful Glasgow-based operation.’

Bob Last of Fast Product established the Scottish link in The Cartel chain in Edinburgh. Although agreeing with The Cartel’s broader programme of access for all, Last’s interests were now more aligned with Travis’s desire for hits.

‘One of the things I enjoyed about pop music was its functionality’, says Last, ‘in popular culture and in people’s lives. So although others and I brought this substantial theoretical and intellectual ferment of ideas, I wanted to engage with that functionality. The intellectual ideas were fundamentally about a Leftist tradition, trying to find a way of engaging with the popular, because the Left had somehow disengaged with the popular; it was entirely about finding a strategy to be aesthetically adventurous and engage with the popular.’

One of Rough Trade’s most Left-leaning acts was having the very same debate as Last – with itself. Scritti Politti had overhauled their ideas about collectivity and were firmly interested in engaging with the popular. Following a long recuperation after the speed and squatting lifestyle had ended in exhaustion, Green Gartside had fallen in love with contemporary R&B music and its combination of functionality, optimism and hedonism. Above all he was becoming convinced of its ability to achieve entryism into the mainstream, where Gartside’s playful intellect and engaging way with a melody would have more of an impact. Travis and Gartside quietly began a conversation about how Scritti might gain access to the charts, though all such talk was held in confidence, as the idea of commercial crossover success was still anathema to most of the staff at Rough Trade. The results of Gartside’s pop ambitions were Scritti Politti’s almost polished debut album, Songs to Remember and its accompanying leadin single, ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’, whose parenthesis-heavy title suggested Gartside hadn’t quite shed his love of linguistic theory. Reaching no. 64 in the charts, it was another example of an act on an independent, despite its pop ambitions and the label’s attempts at a marketing push, failing to reach the Top Forty; and in doing so, lacking the all-important badge of mainstream validity. Songs to Remember, was released six months after ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’ and fared far better, entering the album chart at no. 12. If it was only its fan base propelling it there, Gartside had enough approval to suggest that his ideas of Scritti making mainstream music were worth pursuing. The whole campaign around Songs to Remember was to prove one of the most divisive moments within Rough Trade to date.

‘I can remember people at Rough Trade being absolutely livid that all the money was being spent on Scritti Politti, and not on This Heat,’ says Scott. ‘I now think back and think that that was where the fault line was first shown. Scritti were fantastic. As a live band I thought they were excellent and I think that “Sweetest Girl” is a great song, and I think that the drum track on it is possibly the worst drum track I’ve ever heard on anything, and how the hell anybody thought that they could get that past any audience, I’ve absolutely no idea.’

As manager of Human League, Bob Last, in contrast to anyone at Rough Trade including Travis, was used to dealing with the corporate structures of major labels in America. He could see that in its attempts at breaking Songs to Remember, Rough Trade was having difficulties reconciling its ethos with the realities of distributing consumer goods to the market. ‘Rough Trade Distribution had a completely and utterly different perspective to me,’ he says. ‘The cheap shot would be to dismiss it as coming out of a hippie thing, but obviously that hippie thing in the UK had much deeper roots, going back to the Luddites and so on, and you could see that with Crass and people like that. At the time when Scritti were thinking in terms of success, that was certainly something that Rough Trade, to the extent that it stood for something specific, were deeply, deeply uncomfortable with.’

While expensively recorded, part of Songs to Remember’s problem was that despite Gartside’s mellifluous and confident vocals, the music still carried a hint of the striving amateur. The mix was muddy and drew too much attention to the record’s more expensive components: drum machines, backing vocals, programmed keyboards and brass, as though the fact of pointing them out to the listener might encourage sales. It was the sound of a band putting itself under commercial pressure.

‘Rough Trade spent a lot of possibly other people’s money trying to make Scritti Politti the cash cow,’ says Richard Boon. ‘Geoff was accounting across the little bits of Rough Trade, possibly being not very professional. I think Daniel Miller woke up one day and said, “Just a minute, they owe me money,” but it had been spent on shuffling Green’s tapes across from here to Jamaica and Green didn’t make it – and Songs to Remember, albeit a great record, didn’t sell. And that provoked a big rift between the label and distribution side, particularly between Geoff and Richard Scott.’

Scott grew increasingly weary of what he perceived as Travis’s interest in chart success and was under no illusions that the company’s ambitions were beginning to diverge. If Travis wanted hits, it was the distribution side that would have to pay for them. ‘I realised that that was the push,’ he says. ‘Songs to Remember was just phenomenally over-produced. I can remember hearing the sort of girl choruses on it thinking, “God, has it really come to this?”’

After the half-hearted success of Songs to Remember, Gartside realised he would need more structured support than Rough Trade could afford or provide, and approached Last with firm evidence that his intentions were serious. ‘Green had a demo which had Nile Rogers on it, which was what really swayed me’, says Last. ‘More than anything else, although it was very cool, the fact that they’d actually gone to Nile Rogers told me, “OK, they get what this journey’s going to be about.”’

Last signed Scritti Politti more or less as a solo vehicle for Gartside to Virgin, who were now enjoying their first real multi-platinum success in over a decade thanks to Last and the Human League – the success of Dare, having, as Last puts it, ‘saved Virgin’s arse’.

Despite Gartside and Travis’s attempts at achieving a crossover for the band, Scritti’s departure from Rough Trade was a turning point. While highlighting the company’s modest skills and budget for marketing, it was also the first moment an artist so heavily ingrained into the Rough Trade ethos, once its living, breathing, communally living theoretical conscience, had left the label – for a more formal career in the music business. Whatever the pragmatism of the move, it threw Rough Trade’s position in the market into sharp relief.

Last, who had so effortlessly been able to make the move from Fast Product’s witty post-modernism to LA power lunches, could see that Rough Trade had arrived at a point where it had outgrown its initial impetus to provide an alternative to the market, but was now treading water in terms of where to steer itself next. On the brink of the aspirational Eighties thrust, Rough Trade’s loose collection of policies and orthodoxies was being superseded by ideas about style and entryism. The ideas Rough Trade had started with no longer felt so relevant.

‘The particular musical moment in which Rough Trade started attracted a vast range of people’, says Last, ‘who thought long and hard intellectually about popular culture and economics, and given the number of people it attracted it’s not surprising that something sort of emerged from it, but I think it does go back to the real political instability particularly in the UK in the early to mid-Seventies: if that hadn’t been there, none of this would have happened, because it created a sense of belief that things suddenly might be a bit different.’

However much Rough Trade had made a difference and created its own corner of the market, and in doing so built its own hermetically sealed world, there was an inevitability that, once the buzz of the Rough Trade level of success had worn off, many of the bands would now want the real thing: legitimate gold-record-sales commercial success and not the Rough Trade version.

‘The label had been through some dramatic changes’, says Boon. ‘Apart from trying to make Green a star, they’d tried to make Roddy Frame a star. I made a delivery to the warehouse at Blenheim Crescent and Geoff was pushing a broom around the warehouse and I said, “Geoff, what are you thinking about?” and he said, “I’m thinking about producers.” Inflammable Material was a big hit, Young Marble Giants was a big hit, Weekend had been a big hit – distribution hadn’t failed on those, the game might be on.’

Last was under no illusion that Travis had outgrown Rough Trade’s experiments with mutualism and co-operation. As the upward arc of Eighties conspicuous consumption was starting to take shape, intelligent pop music was a key component in its exponential curve, and Travis wanted in. ‘Geoff had seen other people do it,’ says Last, ‘and he wanted to go that route.’

Despite Rough Trade’s parlous position after the overspends on Scritti Politti and Aztec Camera, the label recruited a new member of staff, Dave Harper, who had walked into the remnants of Rough Trade – a collective idyll, which, having been broken in the move from Kensington Park Road to Blenheim Crescent, was now disintegrating into a series of every-woman-and-man-for-themself entrenchments and petty squabbling.

‘My first day at Rough Trade, somebody handed me an A4 sheet that had been posted in Mark Smith’s handwriting, and I was told, “This is the new Fall biography. Can you type it up and photocopy it?” I typed it all up, put The Fall logo on top of it, printed up 200 copies and stuck it in the filing cabinet marked “The Fall”. Then Mark Smith turns up and says, “Who are you? I want to see my biog.” I handed him the one I’d just typed and he says, “Where’s the handwritten one? I wanted you to photocopy the handwritten one. Where’s the fucking original?” I’d got rid of it, so he takes out a cigarette lighter and burns the lot of them. I thought, “Hello, I must be working for Rough Trade now.” Everyone who worked there in one way or another was a fucking freak and they all had their own little agendas.’

Harper had been in a band signed to the label Cherry Red, whose A&R man was Mike Alway. A dapper man, whose dress sense reflected his incredible working knowledge of such moments as Peter Sellers’ relocation to Hollywood and Nico’s walk-on part in La Dolce Vita, Alway had turned Cherry Red from a punkish DIY start-up label into a menagerie of sprightly musical talents that he had curated into a living breathing Penguin Modern Classics series for the more romantically inclined members of the John Peel demography.

‘When I was doing Cherry Red,’ says Alway, ‘it was a question of my sights were like this: here is Factory and here is Geoff at Rough Trade and here is Ivo, here’s Mute, and I just thought, I just want to get to that level, let’s just get to that level and have some degree of credibility and let’s have things that don’t fit easy categorisation, let’s get away from this post-punk idea of rock music. I completely wanted to do things that had strange shapes, that were incomprehensible and actually quite English, or European at least.’

Alway was able to finesse his vision thanks to a previous Cherry Red signing, Californian punk archetypes Dead Kennedys, whose debut LP Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables had charted in the Top Forty, bringing in a considerable and unexpected revenue stream to a company still being run from the label’s founder, Iain McNay’s, flat. ‘There was one group that was selling records, and that was Dead Kennedys,’ says Alway. ‘I wasn’t in a position to march into the office and say, “I don’t rate them,” and all that, but the rest of it was completely up for grabs really.’

Alway’s solution to frontloading his vision on to Cherry Red was a masterstroke. The compilation Pillows and Prayers showcased the artists Alway had hand-picked to make Cherry Red as iconoclastic as possible. Jostling for space amid the latest batch of John Peel-sponsored acts like the Nightingales, Everything but the Girl and The Monochrome Set were venerated contrarians like Quentin Crisp and Kevin Coyne and arcane Californian Sixties punks, the Misunderstood.

The album was also most listeners’ first exposure to Felt, the band led by Lawrence, whom Alan Horne had turned down for Postcard with the backhanded compliment of ‘classic rubbish’. With its Spanish guitar, whispered vocals and heightened drama, Felt’s track on Pillows and Prayers, ‘My Face Is on Fire’, was an exemplar of Alway’s desired English or European music. Housed in a monochrome sleeve and retailing at 99p, the package was a beguiling and cryptic mission statement of Alway’s tastes.

‘What I tried to do with Pillows and Prayers was just to form a focal point where people could see what this was’, says Alway, ‘very cheaply and very easily, and access that, and judge this progress from that piece of material. What it probably amounts to is a successful marketing idea. I always thought that it sold about three-quarters of a million copies – I don’t think it was quite as many as that.’

The success of Pillows and Prayers ensured Alway had a free rein to push through his roster, expecting them to capitalise on the compilation’s residency in the independent album chart. Realising that the likes of Everything but the Girl and Felt had the potential to sell healthily, Alway was growing frustrated at Cherry Red’s inability to move through the gears and engage in marketing and promoting his charges.

‘There was a time for a couple of years where it was quite marvellous round there. It was a really good era,’ says Alway ‘and we could have done pretty much anything really, but Iain in 1983 was still very anti-majors, and I had no patience at all; I thought I could walk on water.’

Alway, sensing Travis was encountering similar frustration at Rough Trade, pitched a proposal to Travis. Why didn’t Alway and Travis approach the majors about funding a new kind of record label? One that had the production values and instincts of an independent, but that was given backdoor funding, marketing and production budgets by a major. In other words, a facsimile of an independent label, trading on the values Travis had fought long to develop but without the constant anxieties over cash flow and the lack of means to enter into the competitive and costly exercises of breaking an act to the mainstream. The attraction to any interested major would be Travis and Alway’s finely honed A&R skills, delivering an act that could be fast-tracked through the independent charts into the Top Forty without any accusations of sell-out. It was an idea that, to the majors who had little grasp of the nuances and moral hazard associated with a band transferring from an independent to a major, had great appeal.

‘I didn’t know Geoff at all, actually,’ says Alway, ‘but he came back to me and said, “Shall we go and talk to some labels?” and we were in – Christ, I mean we were in. Geoff and I at one point could have had a non-exclusive label with just about every major record company that was there at the time.’

Rob Dickins, Seymour Stein’s partner in Korova and Echo & the Bunnymen’s career, was now chairman of Warner Brothers UK, and when Travis approached Dickins about funding another venture he had in mind, the major label was keen to listen to his ideas. The new company was called Blanco y Negro, funded by Warners and A&R’d by Travis in partnership with Alway.

At Blenheim Crescent, the news that Travis had been in negotiations with Warner Brothers was perceived as something akin to independent class war, and sent shockwaves through the building as the realisation that an era was drawing to a close started to take hold.

Richard Scott was struck dumb at what felt like an act of betrayal. He had spent the last five years developing an infrastructure that proved that the majors were unnecessary.

‘I just cannot believe that I was so naive not to actually understand what was going on,’ he says. ‘It caused a big row at the time and if I’d known what I know now it would’ve caused a much, much bigger row. The amount of money was completely out of proportion with anything that was going on at Rough Trade. There was a very, very strictly understood rule, that people didn’t work outside, so suddenly things just fell apart. In terms of the politics of what was going on Geoff would argue that he did the Blanco deal to finance bands in the studio, and I’m not sure that that’s even the case, but that’s what he would have been saying to himself at the time.’

Rumoured to be around £150,000 – by Rough Trade standards in 1983, a fortune – Travis’s Blanco y Negro budget met with sharp intakes of breath at Blenheim Crescent.

‘I think it was something like £150,000,’ says Travis, ‘split between me and Mike Alway and then also employing Michel Duval to do the artwork and a press officer. I’m sure doing Blanco was actually a big issue for a lot of the people at Rough Trade, I can see that, but for me it was a way of preserving my sanity. It wasn’t like I thought, “Oh, I’m going to start a major label and put two fingers up to all these whiny Rough Trade people.”’

If many of Travis’s colleagues at Blenheim Crescent thought that commercial ambition had become the prevalent mood in his thinking, they were still in for a surprise. Halfway through 1983 the staff of the shop and majority of the workforce were summarily fired. Rough Trade’s ongoing ineptitude at running its various business strands meant it was haemorrhaging money and a quick fix had been needed to keep the company viable.

‘It was a bit of a shock at the first instance,’ says Pete Donne. ‘The three of us who were working at the shop at the time got called over to Blenheim Crescent to see this guy, Will Keen, who had been called in to basically sort it out, on a pretty superficial level. They’d gone, “Well, the shop is no longer a priority, what we are is a record label and distribution that’s where the big money is.”’

For Rough Trade big money meant an end to the rarefied squalor-and-low-rent-spontaneity way of doing business as Scott, Travis and Keen tried to get a handle on the company’s operating costs. The shop was the least of their concerns. Rough Trade Distribution had accumulated a never-ending ledger of accounts with distributors and shops, and in addition to the overheads of the record label were the countless bands and artists Rough Trade were supporting on manufacturing and distribution deals. Added to this were the monies Rough Trade Distribution owed to their colleagues in the sector, some of whom – Factory, Mute and Industrial – were enjoying a purple patch and were owed six-figure sums. There was also a problem in the company’s diversification into booking agency and PR: neither had been ratified or legally defined. Surveying an almighty mess, Travis’s first instinct, perhaps more out of panic than anything else, was to jettison as many of Rough Trade’s constituent components as possible. Having been fired, the shop staff decided to try and carry on their own.

‘We asked if we could keep the name and buy the stock,’ says Donne. ‘The original meeting had been with Richard and Geoff and I went back to Richard and said, “What about …” and my recollection is that he just went. “Yeah.” It’s thirty years ago now, but you kind of felt pretty grumpy about it and immediately after we’d ostensibly been made redundant a lot of other people got fired.’

Although Travis was chairing the dismissal meetings, Donne was sure the blame lay equally with Scott, who had himself been asked to quit by Travis, and who had responded with a flat ‘No’. ‘Richard, who’d been kind of an architect, seemed to be an architect of some of the redundancies,’ says Donne ‘was also suddenly made redundant, although he successfully defended his position and was reinstated, but I can’t imagine that the relationship between Richard and Geoff ever recovered.’

Rough Trade’s expansion, along with the turnover of the distribution company and the shop, had been financially controlled on the back of an envelope. The result was a chaos of unpaid bills, outdated invoices and no real stock control or accountancy.

‘That’s only sort of half of it,’ says Scott. ‘Will Keen had been working for Branson. He turned up on our doorstep one day, and we gave him a job, and the first thing he did was an instant audit, largely because we’d overspent on building work at Blenheim Crescent. We’d sold a lot of Joy Division and a lot of Depeche Mode, and when there are hits about, you have financial problems. Geoff sacked Scott Piering, which was the best thing that ever happened to Scott, but he was very displeased by that and stayed on working, as I did as well, so there was quite a clear-out, but we were still under huge pressure.’

From his first day at Blenheim Crescent, Dave Harper had noticed an atmosphere at Rough Trade, that of a company caught between its ideological motives and the reality of near bankruptcy. ‘There was tension in the whole thing,’ says Harper. ‘There was distribution, which was Richard Scott, which in retrospect was propping up the vagaries of the record company, and there was still a cooking-rota-slash-cleaning-rota, because it was ostensibly a co-operative where everybody was still ostensibly on the same wage. It was the Eighties now, though, and yuppies were on the horizon, so most people thought that Geoff wasn’t on the same wage as everyone else. Nobody paid attention to either of those things, cooking or cleaning, except for Peter Kent, who started 4AD with Ivo. He turned up one day like a madman. He was living in Spain, he’s the fucking chef, and starts cooking all this macrobiotic nonsense.’

The clear-out of personnel meant that Claude Bessy, Mayo Thompson and Scott Piering, to many the most accessible and engaging element of Rough Trade, were told to clear their desks. ‘Claude packed up the contents of his little office,’ says Harper. ‘That took a week, and they got the fumigator in once these five bin liners had gone. Then Scott Piering went, “That’s fine, Geoff, but I’ll come in Monday and work freelance, so don’t change a thing, same number.”’ Bessy was welcomed with open arms by Factory in Manchester. His experiences in Hollywood, however vague, ensured he was of great use to the label’s nascent video division, Ikon. The more relaxed surroundings of Didsbury, along with Factory’s default position of stoned conceptualisation, were an environment in which he couldn’t help but flourish.

Harper, aware that he had entered an idea in decline, scanned the Rough Trade release schedule, which by the label’s standards was looking pretty thin. ‘When I walked in, the Raincoats were about to release the Moving LP,’ he says. ‘They’d been there a while. Rank and File were about to release an album. It was those two, The Fall, and that was more or less it. Distribution had that freak-show counter-culture side going on. There was a guy called Nazi Doug who had a BMW motorbike and was in Death in June. It was that lot in the warehouse and the remnants of a record company that was more or less in tatters.’

*

The early draft of Blanco y Negro’s release schedule was looking no more promising than Rough Trade’s. Despite being given the go-ahead and budget by Rob Dickins at Warners, Travis and Alway were struggling to decide on what their new label was for.

‘Rob Dickins’ attitude was, “If the two of you come together, to me, with ‘We want to sign this,’ I will do it, but if you don’t do it like that, I can’t” … it’s a perfectly reasonable attitude,’ says Alway, ‘but Geoff and I couldn’t agree on anything. I know that he thought that I lived in a bit of an ivory tower because I didn’t tend to go to gigs, and, believe me, Geoff Travis went to gigs, the guy was just everywhere. I would rather get my inspiration for records by sitting at home all evening watching The Avengers, that to me, was A&R, but to Geoff – you had to be on every new group and I just thought, “Well …” but there was definitely now a commercial ambition.’

Alway’s first idea for Blanco was to rehabilitate Vic Goddard, the erstwhile leader of Subway Sect who had, through a combination of over-zealous management and personal problems, fallen through the cracks after punk. Alway, who was sure Goddard still had plenty of untapped genius to release, saw Goddard as a figure for the emerging jazz and torch-singer scene that, through bands like Working Week, was becoming the soundtrack to the gradual regeneration of Soho.

‘Vic had his sort of demons at the time,’ says Alway. ‘I don’t know how to describe somebody like that, really. He was so hard up he did demos for Geoff where he only had two strings on the guitar, and he’d be singing this song in his bedroom and you could hear his mum on the tape, going, “Vic, tea’s ready” … on the tape, “All right, I’ll be down in a minute” … and that’s what he gave us … brilliant, completely.’

Travis, who had already released Subway Sect records years earlier, was concerned that Alway, whose influences were firmly located in the daydream gauze of the Sixties, was becoming regressive in his tendencies. ‘I always wanted to have something in there that was unexpected,’ says Alway. ‘The records that inspired me were “L.S. Bumblebee”, and “I Love You, Alice B. Toklas”, which I thought was incredible. I liked all the wrong records. The Electric Prunes record I liked was Mass in F Minor which everybody hated, because the Prunes had been shafted by David Axelrod, but I thought David Axelrod was an absolute genius.’

Alway’s ideas for working through his inscrutable knowledge of lost psych-pop ephemera couldn’t have been further from the kind of music Travis was envisioning for Blanco’s Warners-assisted route to market. Travis had something much more MTV-friendly in mind. ‘Geoff wanted to sign Wet Wet Wet,’ says Alway, ‘and he wanted to sign Cyndi Lauper – and I didn’t see Blanco as the vehicle for that.’

Harper knew Alway’s habits reasonably well, and was aware that his more recherché tastes would be unable to match Travis’s more upwardly mobile ambitions for Blanco. Travis had witnessed the cold market realities of the early Eighties music business and knew what was achievable and what was going to fail. Alway, whose levels of impatience ran high, was ignoring the practicalities of running a newly formed joint venture, especially one funded by a successful no-nonsense corporate executive like Dickins. ‘Alway was busy living a fantasy world,’ says Harper. ‘He was falling out with Geoff and Michel – Michel was just Michel in Brussels doing pretty sleeves, but Geoff and he weren’t seeing eye to eye. There were acts that Mike wanted to sign that Geoff didn’t agree with, so Mike signed them anyway.’

The result of Alway’s capriciousness meant The Monochrome Set and Felt, whom he had brought with him from Cherry Red, would never be in position for their big Blanco-funded break. Another of Alway’s Pillows and Prayers stand-outs, Everything but the Girl, were about to feel the full tailwind of Travis’s new commercial instincts. All of which would pass Alway by as, realising how far ahead of Travis, Dickins and Duval he’d gone, he resigned, handed back his shares in the company and retreated home to lick his wounds. Everything but the Girl’s Eden, a sophisticated pop record with jazz flourishes in the style Alway had envisioned for Vic Goddard, entered the charts at no. 14, the only band on Pillows and Prayers ever to trouble the charts, by which time Alway was long gone.

‘Geoff had played an incredibly clever game,’ says Harper. ‘He’d ended up with complete control of Blanco y Negro just as Everything but the Girl had started to become successful. It was Mike’s idea, but Geoff suddenly had it all and knew how to make it work.’

Blanco y Negro had been taking up a degree of Travis’s focus but his primary concern was still, resolutely, the future of Rough Trade, and especially the future state of the Rough Trade label.

The Blenheim Crescent address, despite its internal sense of ominous fiscal collapse, still had many positive aspects. Having survived the recent culling, it housed a leaner version of Rough Trade: a record company, The Cartel’s London headquarters, a record distribution company, a plugging and promotions company and a booking agency.

It was still the de facto international headquarters of the independent music industry and still held great attraction to any band attempting to start a career on their own terms, which is why a new Manchester group paid the offices a visit en masse in the spring of 1983.

‘I’d been there a week or two,’ says Harper, ‘and Scott Piering was sitting there and said, “What’s Geoff’s paying you? I’ll give you another £25 and you can help me manage The Smiths.” “This Charming Man” had just come out and the whole thing had gone completely mad.’

6 You’ve Got Everything Now

‘Wider doubts’: a memo from a Rough Trade marketing meeting on 1 September 1983 highlights the label’s internal debate about The Smiths’ commercial potential (Cerne Canning archive)

Whatever the ongoing problems of Rough Trade’s finances and the factionalising of the workforce caused by Travis’s dalliance with Warner Brothers, Travis was beginning to realise that if Rough Trade had a future he would need to reconsider its purpose. It had continued to lose acts to the majors, including, in the likes of Scritti Politti and Aztec Camera, bands it had invested in beyond its means. Rough Trade’s role as an incubator for nurturing wayward talent was assured, but that was of little comfort to Travis once the talent had walked out of the door and been buffed up by his corporate rivals. Pushing his broom around the Blenheim Terrace office Travis began to realise that living and working in the moment had been a highly successful experiment for Rough Trade, but one that hadn’t guaranteed the label any future. The answer to these problems, in the form of a quartet from Manchester, was beyond Travis’s wildest dreams.

‘The great thing about Blenheim Terrace was, people could just walk in,’ says Travis, ‘and that’s what happened with Johnny and Andy. They walked in with a tape of “Hand in Glove”.’ If The Smiths benefited from the remnants of Rough Trade’s open-counter policy, Rough Trade would benefit far more from a quality in The Smiths that had been absent from their forbears on the label: live-or-die rock ’n’ roll ambition. ‘The Smiths were a real band,’ says Travis. ‘Morrissey might have ended up as a journalist or a writer – who knows. According to people there, Morrissey was just a lunatic around town wasn’t he? They were in a Manchester tradition, maybe there’s a slightly different mentality there. Johnny rescued him. If Johnny hadn’t have done that who knows what would have happened to him. They saw themselves in the traditions of the Beatles, or the Stones, but most of all they were musicians.’

Joe Moss was the softly spoken proprietor of Crazyface jeans on Chapel Walks near Manchester city centre’s Deansgate. As well as running a clothing business, Moss had an encyclopaedic musical knowledge, particularly of American Sixties R&B and the auteur pop songwriters of the Brill Building – prepossessing musical styles which would leave a huge impression on one of the sales assistants from a neighbouring clothes shop.

‘I had a manufacturing business, wholesale business, and I had a couple of shops in Manchester as well,’ says Moss. ‘Johnny worked next door to one of them. I had a lot of music pictures on the wall and he introduced himself as a frustrated musician. Johnny wanted to be a musician, a professional musician, and whatever it took, he was going to do it. He was a really impressive young man.’

Moss and Marr’s insights and love of monochromatic Sixties culture encouraged the young guitarist to draw on the inspiration they were mutually discovering in the mythic past of hustlers, independent operators and outsiders as they pored over VHS documentaries and out-of-print histories of pop. The ephemeral impetus of writing a single in time for next week’s TV appearance, or the deification of the art of the girl-group song, along with permanently staying one step ahead of the entertainment industry, became a series of codes that Marr learnt by heart, as, desperate for some kind of engagement with music, he stood in any corner of where the action might be.

‘I was a sixteen-year-old walking around Manchester’, says Marr, ‘and all my waking hours were spent trying to be plugged into the musical mains, whether it was hanging around at gigs, at rehearsal rooms, the record shops, trying to get into clubs. Within all of that, one of the most interesting things was the older, more intellectual people, who were the more radical Sixties guys who’d stuck around, making the connection with switched-on younger people.’

Manchester had its fair share of radicals with a rich vein of anecdotes and ideas to share.

Along with the Granada intelligentsia and the group around Martin Hannett’s hire company, whom Wilson affectionately called the Didsbury hacks, were luminaries from the northwest’s counter-cultural past, a lineage that started with the English Beats and had been reawoken by punk.

‘People like Brian Epstein appeared to be very maverick,’ says Marr. ‘I got to learn about Joe Orton, and that quality definitely resurfaced during the early Eighties. Andrew Loog Oldham was very important to me, his story and his attitude and legacy, without an understanding of which it would’ve been very difficult to just form a four-piece group out of nothing. It even made me want to make my first 45 rpm record with a navy blue label, which is what I did.’*

The Smiths’ debut single ‘Hand in Glove’ would be dressed in the same blue livery as the mid-Sixties releases on Loog Oldham’s Immediate Records label. As well as influencing his ideas about song structure and providing a context in which to develop them, the well-heeled ideas of Loog Oldham and Orton had a definite influence on Marr’s guitar sound. Lean, plangent and mercurial in its flourishes of melody, Marr’s style, which he had worked night and day to perfect, blurred the divergence between rhythm and lead guitar to produce a rigorously distinctive voice that was, particularly in the context of the synth-heavy Eighties, utterly unique.

‘I knew sixty Manchester bands and musicians that all played quite well,’ says Moss, ‘but I’d never heard anything like Johnny.’

Moss heard The Smiths play every day on and off for six months as the band secluded themselves in a rehearsal space on the top floor of one of Crazyface’s warehouses. Rather than play live immediately, the band wrote and rehearsed until they were able to make a note-perfect arrival. ‘They came out just ready to go,’ say Moss. ‘They really did. They had the sound absolutely down.’

The result of The Smiths’ period of isolation was that by the time they were ready to play live, their individuality was apparent from the first song. So much more than the sum of their parts, The Smiths had developed an internal logic about song craft and performance that, together with their name, meant that they stood apart from any discernible influence. The only band they sounded like was The Smiths.

As well as having an armoury of songs, Morrissey and Marr, putting the moves they had studied in Loog Oldham and Epstein into practice, started drawing up a game plan for the band which included, as a priority, the decision not to align themselves with Manchester’s newest and most prestigious company, Factory Communications.

‘The second day Morrissey and I got together,’ says Marr, ‘we laid out this manifesto. Really, it was just two young guys verbalising their pipe dreams but incredibly every one of them came true, and in that discussion we planned to sign to Rough Trade. The very fact of not signing to Factory was a statement in itself. It’s become part of the Factory story that they could’ve signed us and we tried to get a deal with them and turned them down but that was never on the cards, I would’ve never let that happen.’

Through Morrissey the band had a connection with Rough Trade. Richard Boon, having wound down New Hormones, was on the verge of moving to London to work alongside Travis as, among other things, the editor of Rough Trade’s in-house trade magazine, The Catalogue. Of greater significance was a more personal connection. Linder, Morrissey’s oldest friend and confidante, had not only been Boon’s housemate but had also designed Buzzcocks’ early sleeves.

‘I could talk to Morrissey’, says Boon, ‘and he could talk to me and we did have a bit of history, having known each other around Manchester for ages. It was Linder who wanted the rented room in Whalley Range. Essentially Manchester then was a village – now it’s a 24/7 full-on city. Money didn’t used to mean anything and everyone in Manchester knew that Morrissey was going to do something but he didn’t particularly get on with Wilson. He was always sort of in the margins from that first flush of ignition of bringing the Pistols, but, within the village, he obviously wasn’t the village idiot.’

The Smiths’ decision to ignore Factory was one Moss wholeheartedly agreed with. The band’s desire to be perceived as a separate phenomenon, sharing only a superficial geographical similarity, was made plain when the band played their third-ever gig at Factory’s newly opened Haçienda. Making sure the stage was sufficiently bedecked with flowers and holding a bunch for almost the entire set, Morrissey was keen to let his fellow initiates of Manchester’s punk awakening know that an aesthetic difference was opening up between them. In one of the first pieces on The Smiths, Morrissey instantly made it clear that Factory’s design codes of minimalism and anonymity were, as far as he was concerned, a dead end. Asked why The Smiths had taken to covering the stage in flowers he was trenchant in his response:

We introduced them as an antidote to the Haçienda when we played there; it was so sterile and inhuman. We wanted some harmony with nature. Also, to show some kind of optimism in Manchester, which the flowers represent. Manchester is so semi-paralysed still, the paralysis just zips through the whole of Factory.

The Smiths’ first appearance at the Haçienda was supporting Factory’s 52nd Street in February 1983. A few months later, in July, they headlined the club to a small crowd; after that show it would be almost another four months before The Smiths played their home town again. ‘The first time they headlined the Haçienda was the last Manchester gig that we did,’ says Moss. ‘There were about thirty people there, some of them on the floor. So we decided then that that was it. We weren’t gonna play Manchester again until we’d made it.’

Before approaching a record company The Smiths had started recording a projected first single, ‘Hand in Glove’, and contacted Boon for advice while exploring the possibility of working together.

‘I remember Morrissey saying, “Can you help?”’ says Boon, ‘and I said, “No, I’ve got no money, no resources, but I know I love it, take it to Simon Edwards at Rough Trade.”’ Spurred on by Boon’s encouragement the trip they would take down to Blenheim Crescent turned into an opportunity to hustle a record deal out of Rough Trade. Simon Edwards, who had become Rough Trade’s de facto label manager, was duly door-stepped by Marr with a cassette of ‘Hand in Glove’.

‘The myth has it’, says Boon, ‘that Simon said, “I’d really like to move this from being a distribution, M&D [manufacturing and distribution deal], one-off to the label getting involved, but Geoff’s about to leave the building.” And Johnny pins him against the wall saying, “You’ve got to listen to this.”’

Marr, channelling his inner Keith Richards, as he often had to throughout The Smiths’ career, caught Travis walking out the Blenheim Crescent door and let him know that the band were serious and Travis needed to react accordingly. ‘We went down as a band’, says Moss, ‘and Geoff didn’t want to know, but it was Johnny that forced him into having a listen. We told him that if they weren’t prepared to put it out we were going to put it out ourselves, but Geoff immediately agreed to do it, and I was straight in the booking agency part of Rough Trade and Mike Hinc organised us a gig at the Rock Garden.’

Both ‘Hand in Glove’ and its projected B-side had deeply impressed Travis. In his own considered way, having spent a weekend with the tape, he realised like Moss that the band had a rare potential for both commercial and critical success. Determined that the band should sign long-term to Rough Trade Travis began commuting to Crazyface and spending what he calls ‘long afternoons’ convincing the band of his intentions. Apart from Simon Edwards, as far as anyone at Rough Trade label or distribution was concerned, he was in a minority. There was very little enthusiasm either for the tape or for a new Manchester band at Blenheim Crescent. The misgivings of the staff were confirmed a week or two later at the Rock Garden, when the sight of The Smiths on stage, their jubilant major-key confidence and proficient musicianship on full display, was, to the bulk of the Rough Trade staff, perplexing to say the least.

‘The first time they played at the Rock Garden people from the warehouse were just totally bemused,’ says Travis. ‘It wasn’t, “Wow, listen to that song! They’re going to change the course of rock and roll!” That all came later, if it came at all.’

Among the staff at the Covent Garden show was Liz Naylor, who along with Richard Boon was part of the new staff intake at Rough Trade. As co-editor of Manchester’s witty and vituperative City Fun fanzine which had critiqued the original Factory impulse, Naylor had also spent many an hour with Boon in the New Hormones office. An early resident on the Hulme estate, a modernist Sixties series of terraces that had been deserted as a result of Manchester’s overstock of council housing in the mid-Seventies, Naylor had lived in its enclave of post-punk bohemianism as the estates became home to A Certain Ratio and Section 25, who could live there cheaply and without interference. From her vantage point on the concrete walkways neighbouring the Russell Club site of The Factory, Naylor had witnessed the circulation of punk energy around Manchester in all its glory, and like Steven Morrissey before her had been left bemused by what she saw as Factory’s stringent aesthetics.

‘I’d never been to Cambridge and I didn’t understand the situationists,’ says Naylor, ‘and I thought Tony Wilson was in a different world, a kind of scary world where people were confident. In a way he was being post-modern before we understood what it was he was being ironic and post-modern about, and I just thought he was a wanker, purely because people were just thrown into something and we were making it up.’

City Fun was far more supportive of The Fall and Linder’s Ludus project which Naylor and her co-editor at City Fun, Cath Carroll, ‘managed’. Wilson took the barbs and spite of City Fun in the manner they were intended, as an ongoing critique of the Factory project, determined not to let the label either run away with itself or start overstating its significance in early Eighties Manchester.

‘Manchester was very small and it was really competitive,’ says Naylor. ‘All those major industrial cities functioned a lot more coherently as post-punk, but it felt like Factory were the mill owners and we were the proletariat. You’d go to a club, this is before the Haçienda, and there’d be twenty people there, all giving each other the evil eye because it was totally factionalised and Factory felt like a very alienating kind of project. I don’t quite see where it brought Manchester together.’

Within Factory, as well as outside the company in the broader groundswell of the city’s independent community, City Fun had a warm relationship with many of its readers which could all detect, in its penetrating humour, a print version of the dry northern wit with which the city operated.

‘Rob Gretton was fairly approachable’, says Naylor, ‘and Richard Boon was and is a great mediator. And, of course, we loved Kay’.

Kay Carroll was for several years Mark E. Smith’s partner and The Fall’s manager. A relentless and vituperative operator she would, despite her small frame, have no truck with anyone, whatever their position, who either got in the way of her charges or tried to pull a fast one. Behind her chain-smoking aggression lurked a fierce intelligence (which Martin Hannett once illustrated as the desire to ‘talk dialectics all night long’) and an uncompromising ability to hold her own in the music business.†

‘Kay felt much more like us,’ says Naylor. ‘She’d be on the phone screaming, “Where is my fucking money?” She was just like somebody that had come out of fucking Holloway. She had a certain quality.’

With Boon and Naylor joining the Rough Trade staff in London, the company was drawing on a wider range of experience. This strengthened the company, shifting its focus away from the Ladbroke Grove milieu in which it had been founded and was of great use to a label that had just signed a band from Manchester. It also meant Rough Trade’s sense of irreverence and bolshiness, more or less a default position for Boon and Naylor, was becoming increasingly ingrained.

Having decided that ‘Hand in Glove’ would be released as a one-off single, Travis, to yet more disapproving noise from his colleagues in Rough Trade Distribution, continued to make it clear that he would like The Smiths to be the first-ever Rough Trade act to be offered a four-album deal. The band, happy to let some momentum build around them, outwardly gave the impression that they were undecided as they began to be courted by every record company in London. The reality was that The Smiths, despite whatever concerns they might have, had all but decided to sign long-term to Travis.

‘We knew Rough Trade was in trouble,’ say Moss, ‘but figured that they were in trouble because they didn’t have anyone that sold any records. We were the ones that were gonna change that. They had a booking agency with Mike Hinc inside the building, an art department, a press department and they had every independent record that was being distributed in England in the back room. So rather than being a small fish at a major we decided to go to Rough Trade, to take it over really. We knew we could sell them some records.’

Rough Trade was still a company coming to terms with its position in the music business, which by 1983 was no longer one of post-punk alternatives but, with the imminent market launch of the CD and the increasing influence of MTV, a far more competitive climate than the one it had set out to be an alternative to five years earlier.

‘At the time, and not just at Rough Trade,’ says Marr, ‘there was a “We fought the war for the likes of you”-type vibe. A lot of people I thought a bit old at that time, probably in their early 20s, were a bit lost because punk was over, in the press especially. Factory had a bit of it, Rough Trade definitely did, and maybe my generation brought a new optimism and ideas and energy.’

With that optimism and energy came a realisation from Travis that the game had changed. If Rough Trade was about to secure The Smiths for any length of time, it would have to start thinking very carefully about marketing and promotion, not as an experiment in proving to the mainstream how differently things could be done, but to compete, as Travis had tried and failed to do with Scritti Politti, on the mainstream’s terms.

To the likes of This Heat and The Fall this change in thinking didn’t go unnoticed. The Smiths were now occupying most of Travis’s thoughts and a break had been mentally made with Rough Trade’s recent past. The open-door policy of Blenheim Crescent was tightened up and all the company’s limited means were being spent in proving to The Smiths that the label meant business.

‘I saw a few funny things on the stairs at Rough Trade,’ says Moss. ‘Artists complaining, and asking, “What d’you have to do around here to get some attention these days?”’

But, true to their word, Rough Trade acted quickly and efficiently, booking the band a series of club shows in London on the eve of the release of ‘Hand in Glove’. For Moss, who was keen to see the band being taken seriously nationally and outside the boundaries of Manchester, this was all to Rough Trade’s credit. The Smiths played two nights spread over a fortnight at the Brixton Ace, ensuring that the rush of A&R men desperate for the band’s signatures only had to cab across town to see the band that was suddenly the talk of the London industry.

‘The Smiths were big in London before they were big in Manchester,’ says Moss. ‘We played the Ace, then again two weeks later, and it was just chaos. This guy, Gordon Jarvis from EMI, kept getting on stage and dancing, he was dead keen. We played Warwick University the night after, we were about to sign to Rough Trade and Muff Winwood [head of A&R at CBS] came up to Warwick and said he’d really like to do a deal. I told him we were definitely going to sign to Rough Trade and there was no way we were going back on that.’

For Marr, being courted by the majors was flattering, but the difference between Rough Trade and the corporate companies was made obvious the moment The Smiths walked through their glass doors. ‘We got pretty serious invitations from CBS, and Warner Brothers,’ he says. ‘We went over to meet them just for the experience and I was immediately struck by the lack of records in these buildings. As someone who was a record freak, it immediately made me want to run across London back to Blenheim Crescent. On the few occasions that I’d been in the Factory flat or whenever I’d been around Rough Trade, it was almost like a record company trying to operate under mounds and mounds of vinyl. All that CBS and Warner Brothers had to show that they were record companies were huge posters of their artists on the wall, and that was a big thing for me.’

*

After the release of ‘Hand in Glove’ Scott Piering booked the band a quick-fire series of radio sessions for the John Peel and David Jensen evening shows on Radio 1. Piering was now working freelance at Blenheim Crescent, allowing him to concentrate on breaking The Smiths through the Radio 1 evening shows and, he hoped, have his and Rough Trade’s first act on the playlist of daytime radio. The idea of The Smiths being an act suitable for national airplay was helped by Moss and the band’s desire to play in London as much as possible, a hitherto unknown quality in a northern band.

‘Scott Piering kicked it off with John Peel,’ says Moss. ‘We supported Sisters of Mercy at ULU [University of London Union] and the place was absolutely packed, but there wasn’t one person in the actual hall, not bloody one. Morrissey was on stage shouting out “Come alive!” trying to get people from the bar, Scott Piering was there with John Walters and myself, and the three of us stood there watching as John Walters flipped.’

Walters, Peel’s gregarious and similarly bearded producer, also acted as his gatekeeper, insulating the DJ from the ups and downs of BBC scheduling and programming policies, something he mixed with a ceaseless appetite for going to gigs to uncover new talent.

‘I know Walters gets credit,’ says Moss, ‘but he doesn’t get a tenth of the credit he deserved for the Peel shows, ’cause he did all the legwork, and he certainly introduced Peel to The Smiths.’

One newly written song was first aired at the band’s second Peel session, recorded just after the release of ‘Hand in Glove’. ‘This Charming Man’ had a buoyant rhythm over which Marr’s guitar, at its most delicate and assured, rippled through an arpeggiated riff. The song fitted Morrissey’s range perfectly as he sang yearnfully about a hillside encounter drawn in the imagery of the black-and-white Sixties films of which he had a peerless grasp. At three and a half minutes long, its insistent melody and sense of drama made it the band’s most commercial song to date.

‘Geoff and I went along to Maida Vale,’ says Boon. ‘We were both familiar with all the live material because we’d seen them so often. During the session this song emerges that’s totally new to us, and we huddled in the corridor while they were still mixing saying, “That’s a single and possibly a hit,” and we both agreed, and a lot of effort went into making “This Charming Man” a hit.’

Whatever pennies were dropping among the more dynamic and media-savvy staff at Rough Trade, some of the company’s long-term problems had come back to haunt them. Upon its release initial pressings of ‘Hand in Glove’ were mismanaged, and Rough Trade Distribution was unable to supply many of its stockists. The combination of members of The Cartel being behind on their credit terms and the unprecedented nationwide interest in the single meant that many of Rough Trade’s frontline High Street shops could not stock the record. Most disconcertingly Probe, The Cartel’s north-western link, was unable to supply copies to any Manchester shops. Determined to circumvent the problem, Moss decided on a hands-on solution, and to the delight of the band, went around the city, walking up to record shop counters offering copies of the single for sale from a box under his arm. ‘I’m glad to have that on my CV,’ he says. ‘We did it old-style out of the boot of my car.’

From the May release of ‘Hand in Glove’ through to the November release of ‘This Charming Man’, The Smiths hardly came off the road. The sense of a working band was palpable. The band played London alone nineteen times in the year and mixed the concerts with an endless string of radio and studio sessions. For Mike Hinc, the band’s agent at Rough Trade, the demand for The Smiths was unprecedented. Rather than having to drum up interest for a new act on the release schedule, he found his phone was constantly ringing with promoters outbidding each other to book The Smiths live.

‘I had a lot to do with Mike,’ says Moss. ‘Mike you’d never forget. I spent most of the time hoping that Mike was OK. He’d say, “If I don’t speak to you before midday, forget it.” He’d get in there at half ten and he’d be straight on the cans at eleven.’

Sitting a few desks down from Hinc was Dave Harper, who was now starting to handle the band’s PR alongside Piering and whose exposure to Hinc’s working methods was something of an education. ‘Mike was a nutcase,’ he says. ‘I was twenty-three and he was about forty. Mike was one of these people who works the phones. He’d snort speed off a bowie knife and drink a can of Lilt, usually followed by a can of lager. His favourite expression to a social secretary at a university who didn’t give him the right offer was, “Fuck off and die” – he spent the whole day going, “Fuck off and die.”’

Piering’s work on radio meant that while the band had only released one single, audiences were starting to hear new Smiths songs through the radio sessions, which meant the demand surged beyond anyone’s expectations. Initially booking the band a run of dates around their debut single, playing clubs on the first rung of the touring circuit, Hinc found that most of the venues were being sold well over capacity and the venues were duly upgraded.

‘Around “Hand in Glove” you could actually see it grow,’ says Moss. ‘The dates were all switched to the university venues, which were the bigger halls. We played Kingston Poly, which was just absolutely crazy – there were more people locked outside than had made it in.’

The Smiths, who weren’t interested in video, may have been promoting themselves the old-fashioned way by playing live, but their rise was as meteoric as anything witnessed by the MTV-assisted overnight successes of their contemporaries. Insisting on playing in auditoria where there was no crowd barrier between band and audience, the only divide was the lip of the stage; their live performances from their first year were a chaotic, jubilant and celebratory run across the UK. Compared to anything else he had experienced before, as far as Travis was concerned, this was Beatlemania. ‘The pace of things was so fast. It was crazy, and they certainly lived up to expectations on every occasion,’ says Travis. ‘That whole thing of, “We’ve got to do a session next week, let’s get together and write a new song over the weekend,” they were like that, and that was wonderful to see. They had that thing, “This is our job, this is what we do,” in a very nice way.’

Moss and the band’s decision to concentrate their energies away from Manchester had paid off in spades. The Smiths were now a band on the national stage; the sense of isolation or, perhaps, the vague hint of regional snobbery that had run through an earlier generation of Mancunian bands had been replaced by an intense and growing bond between band and audience.

‘Factory used to play the Moonlight or the North London Poly with Richard Thomas,’ says Moss, ‘but The Fall mainly played around the north. We were the first to concentrate elsewhere.’

Despite the presence of the city in much of their catalogue and its locus in their mythology, The Smiths played Manchester only eleven times in their entire career – a decision that had had its roots in their earlier appearances at the Haçienda.

‘At that Haçienda gig, when there was only twenty people there, the two guys in front of me were talking to each other between numbers,’ says Moss. ‘One goes, “They’re great aren’t they?” and the other guy said, “He’s got a shit shirt on.” And I think that sums up Manchester then, and it sums up quite a lot of the attitude.’

*

‘After “This Charming Man” you could feel it was just all happening,’ says Travis. ‘I had a huge responsibility on my shoulders, I knew that we would have to deliver for them and I knew that they deserved it.’

The pressure on Travis, having signed the band to an albums deal, was enormous. He was convinced more than ever that mainstream success was within his grasp and had worked with the major-label competition to ensure ‘This Charming Man’ had been a hit – a decision that had been the subject of some involved debate among the independent community.

‘Part of the Blanco y Negro thing seemed to be a way to get a cash injection’, says Boon, ‘so that Rough Trade could hire the London Records sales force, to make “This Charming Man” a hit. There was an awful lot of discussion around that, not only internally but across other independent labels, “What do we think about using major-label sales forces?” This is in the day when players within labels would talk to each other about what they were doing and call meetings for very kind of small-print discussion.’

After the pig’s ear Rough Trade had made of ‘Hand in Glove’, Travis had reasons to be pleased with the way the company had delivered on the promise of ‘This Charming Man’. Not only did the single break into the Top Thirty, but the marketing campaign, centred on the sleeve’s image taken from Cocteau’s Orphée and rendered in elegant sepia tones, caught the attention of the industry trade magazine Music Week who anointed Rough Trade with an award for best marketing campaign.

‘We did up our game tremendously,’ says Travis. ‘We employed the London sales team, and Roger Ames tried to steal the band and all the rest of it. There was something about that period, I don’t know where it came from – arrogance, confidence – that I thought we could take them all the way. You just don’t know what’s going to happen, you just think, “This is it.” You don’t worry about what you’re going to see when you go to the gig, you just can’t wait to get there.’

Harper could see that the press were now starting to take a serious interest in the band and in particular in the copy-ready opinions and world-view of Morrissey, whose pronouncements on vegetarianism, celibacy or flowers were, after what felt like a lifetime’s rehearsal in his bedroom, reeling elegantly off his tongue. All of the singer’s eccentricities were now given a sense of legitimacy by the band’s breakthrough into the mainstream with only their second single.

‘It was very much made up on the hoof,’ says Harper. ‘There was nothing about steering the band the right way. Morrissey gave the press quotes, and it was controversy every time he opened his mouth, and, of course, they lapped it up. It was all done on a whim: “I’m not going to do it – oh, I am going to do it, but I’ll need a hearing aid or I’m not doing it.”’

*

‘The nation recognised this creature,’ says Harper. ‘The euphoria was remarkable. Top of the Pops, in the charts – this was extraordinary. It was genuinely exciting and ground-breaking, but they did some extremely naff TV: kids’ shows, where they go round on a bus with children asking Morrissey questions. It was all wrong, dumb, it all got carried away. There were lots of really bad things, like Smash Hits.’

Embracing the pop-star life and engaging with its customs, from trivial news bites to searching profiles in more serious media, had always been part of The Smiths’ master plan. Though scattershot, the result was that the band, in stark contrast to their contemporaries, had widespread across-the-board coverage.

‘If you think about New Order and Depeche Mode,’ says Harper, ‘Depeche Mode’s problem for a decade was, “No one takes us seriously, everyone thinks were a pop band” because Mute went straight to Smash Hits and it was Dave Gahan with his little hair, whereas New Order, similar band, wouldn’t do anything like that, not in a million bloody years. And they had a serious reputation, and it took heroin and dying and a long time for Depeche Mode to get taken seriously, whereas New Order did their self-harm in private.’

The Top of the Pops appearance had a particular thrill for the band. As well as granting them the tea-time status of overnight national celebrity, which an appearance on the show in 1983 still guaranteed, it formed part of a triumphal homecoming. On the night of broadcast, The Smiths played the Haçienda for the third and final time to unprecedented scenes of adulation. Morrissey, a keen student of the programme, was well aware of the history of Top of the Pops and was delighted to be asked about the validity of The Smiths’ appearance. ‘Nothing spurs you on like anger,’ said Morrissey, ‘and we were angry about all the ugly people who control this business and all the ugly faces on Top of the Pops.’ Why all the ugliness? Morrissey’s own bid for TOTP immortality was just as colourful: waving a large bunch of gladioli in a manner that bordered on aggression, his oversized shirt undone, while strings and strings of pearls hung down round his neck. The Smiths’ arrival in the charts became a talking point. As soon as the band had taped their performance they were whisked on to a train back to Manchester where a waiting crowd would toast the band’s success with a barely contained hysteria.

‘We sound-checked at the Haçienda on the Wednesday night, left all the equipment on stage,’ says Moss, ‘went down to London, did Top of the Pops, and obviously the gig’s announced on Top of the Pops as well. It was already a sell-out gig. We went back up, got off the train in Manchester and we got cabs to the Haçienda and you couldn’t get on to Whitworth Street, there were so many bloody people outside the place.’

Richard Boon accompanied the band on the trip up from London. ‘They did “This Charming Man” the first time on Top of the Pops. Back on the train, it was my birthday – big trip back up north for everybody, and they go on stage and Morrissey says something like, “It’s Richard’s birthday,” and they go straight into “Handsome Devil”.’

The Smiths hadn’t played their home town since their London debut at the Rock Garden, and the atmosphere inside the club was rabid with expectation and excitement. ‘Inside it was madness, on a 1,200 capacity place they paid us out on 2,400,’ says Moss. ‘There was probably even more than that; the last time we’d played Manchester there’d been an audience of thirty.’

Joe Moss had been as good as his word: once the band had progressed from the fifth floor of his warehouse on to Top of the Pops in little over a year, he promptly quit as the band’s manager. In doing so he ended what was to be The Smiths’ longest period of stability; a revolving cast of managers would attempt to gain some control and order over the band’s affairs, which given the runaway start and near workaholic schedule they insisted on, to say nothing of their resolute sense of doing things their own way, would prove all but impossible.

Amid everything was a realisation that from day one the foundations of the deal between The Smiths and Rough Trade were not the soundest. If Travis was confident in his ability to deliver on his promise in getting The Smiths into the charts, there were plenty of dissenting voices at Rough Trade who felt that the four-album deal had meant that the label were now hostage to whatever might become The Smiths’ fortune. While the absence of backslapping and glad-handing at the record company was one of the reasons The Smiths had signed to the label, it was equally direct in letting the band know of the pressures they would both be under. It was made very clear to the band that Rough Trade had gone out on a financial limb to lock the band into a long-term deal, and that the label was terrified at the prospect.

‘They only let us know that about five times a day,’ says Marr, ‘and not necessarily in a way to make us feel good or feel less pressure either. Geoff was dropping it in right from the off, and you could tell that they were sweating it a bit and that it was … a big financial first step for them.’

The recording of The Smiths’ debut album was more difficult than Travis was expecting.

The band had recorded sporadically, in between touring commitments for ‘This Charming Man’, and found it hard to settle in the studio. The initial sessions, produced by former Teardrop Explodes keyboard player Troy Tate, had been scrapped.

For a band on a roll with a fast-growing canon of material fine-tuned by months of celebratory and incandescent performances, the results of the recording were oddly flat. After the first attempt with Tate, the band had chosen John Porter, who had engineered their Peel sessions. As a former keyboard player with Roxy Music, Porter clearly had the kind of pedigree the band approved of yet, for all his provenance, the band’s debut now sounds their most dated. The gated drum sound and keyboard lines in ‘Reel Around the Fountain’ have the feel of studio gloss. Elsewhere the separation between Marr’s overdubbed guitar lines smothers the elasticity of the interplay between the guitarist and the rhythm section of Joyce and Rourke. The album was an unsatisfactory compromise between the wit and drama of the lyrics in Morrisey’s delivery and the band’s sparkling proficiency, none of which prevented it from arriving in the album charts at no. 2.

‘Troy Tate, John Porter? Who was choosing these guys?’ says Harper. ‘This was coming from Geoff somehow, and the debut album did actually sound shit, and the band knew it. Everything felt unhappy; Hatful of Hollow sounds a lot better.’

Hatful of Hollow, in collecting the band’s sessions and B-sides, captured the first rush of The Smiths at their zenith. Deliberately priced cheaply and housed in a gatefold sleeve, it was released in November 1984, just eight months after the debut. The gatefold opened on to a black-and-white picture of the group tuning up backstage in a PortaKabin at Glastonbury festival, then sponsored by CND.

‘I can’t separate us playing Glastonbury from us being a Rough Trade band,’ says Marr. ‘Glastonbury was a million miles away from what it means now, but I’m so glad that we did it because, subconsciously, it was one of the last opportunities to get together in the community and be political.’

Glastonbury festival before television coverage was more radical than it is now. Combining the remnants of Seventies alternative thinking – which had a larger constituency than the mainstream media realised – with the various Leftish strands with which Rough Trade was still associated, the event was a focus for free-spirited activism, hedonism and a celebration of anti-Thatcherite values, all of which was given added resonance in the summer of 1984 as coverage of the national miners’ strike started to dominate the news.‡

Preceding The Smiths’ Glastonbury performance had been an appearance, ten days earlier, at the GLC Jobs for Change festival. Both performances suggest that The Smiths were a political band; to the group, the fact that The Smiths were on an independent label was enough to signify their position.

‘People assume that you’re standing up there going, “It’s shit being on the dole and this is wrong”,’ says Marr, ‘and just being slightly sanctimonious, but the political aspect of those times – and Rough Trade had it in spades – was so multifaceted because it was a given that you were political. It really was, “If you weren’t part of the solution, you were part of the problem.” You were either mainstream or by definition you were anti the government.’

A new dialogue around politics and culture had been created by the mid-Eighties that had been absent at Rough Trade’s conception. Rather than the application of the Marxist or feminist ideologies that had informed post-punk, a broader narrative driven by lifestyle was coalescing around new media like Channel 4 and style magazines like The Face, which had launched after Rough Trade’s inception. Both The Face and Channel 4, via its music programme, The Tube, profiled the band as early as ‘This Charming Man’. To many onlookers, the band included, these were shifts in the culture that Rough Trade had yet to come to terms with. The label still carried the whiff of collectivism and utopianism with which it had started, which in the light of the realpolitik of Thatcher’s second term seemed outdated.

‘Rough Trade established their model over a number of years, and let’s call it roots,’ says Marr. ‘You could also call it dogma in some cases and it worked in the market place that we were in. But aesthetically Rough Trade needed to shake some of that off, because that Ladbroke Grove and Portobello Road scene was not of the times we were in, and the times were not Thatcher, the times were very much anti-Thatcher.’

Despite the occasional caricatures of Morrissey as a dangerous eccentric in the tabloid press, the band’s commercial appeal and pop classicism meant that The Smiths’ views on vegetarianism, class and politics were increasingly understood and popular with their growing audience.

‘There’s this brilliant photograph of Johnny helping a guy up on stage to dance with them at Glastonbury and that was it,’ says Moss. ‘We had that vision of it being something that everyone could get into.’

Whatever Travis’s headaches in financing the band’s and Rough Trade’s ambitions for The Smiths, in America the band would find their natural home with Seymour Stein and Sire. Stein’s background reached as far back as the girl-group song-writing teams that had so inspired Marr: as far as the guitarist was concerned there was no other competition in the running. ‘There was absolutely no other option for us because of the work he’d done around the Brill Building, and his connection with Andrew Oldham,’ he says, ‘and his friendship with Patti Smith and the Talking Heads and Ramones was once again just a given, but it was all that early Sixties Broadway culture that I was pumping him for, and still do to this day.’

Stein’s first sighting of the band was when The Smiths played the ICA in 1983 just prior to the release of ‘This Charming Man’. ‘I was up in the balcony at the ICA’, says Moss, ‘stood with Seymour watching and he flipped, he absolutely flipped, ’cause the live thing just then was just phenomenal – it was a celebration. An aggravating thing about The Smiths is that people think it was miserable but it was a pure celebration.’

Signalling the celebration was the now customary shower of flowers that gave the impression of a horticultural waterfall throughout the band’s set. Often spending their performance fee on flowers alone, Morrissey would dispatch bunches into the audience only to be met by the bouquets the crowd had brought along themselves, resulting in a giddy and heady atmosphere. ‘You couldn’t get much less football crowd than giving flowers out to the audience before the gig,’ says Moss. ‘At the start we figured we’re only gonna earn £50 tonight but we’re gonna have to spend all that on flowers … and that carried on through that first year. There was nothing short-term about any of the ideas.’

Stein in the balcony, spellbound by what was happening, was directly involved in the floral carnival. ‘I got hit in the face with one of the gladioli,’ says Stein. ‘I had a phone call from Geoff Travis, all excited about them, and I had so much trust in his judgement that I just jumped on a plane and came over and, oh God, it was amazing and … Geoff was saying to me, “Morrissey,” and I said, “It’s not just Morrissey. You’re very lucky here, this band has two superstars in it,” – and usually I’m a song person, and they certainly had the songs but even I who cared more about songs than actually the instrumentation – you could see that Johnny was a very special guitarist.’

Having signed the band, Stein secured for The Smiths a first American date, a one-off show at Danceteria in New York; it was The Smiths’ final performance of 1983, on the last night of the year. For a band that had played only its second concert in January, their rise and their work rate had been remarkable. The band had been booked into the club by Ruth Polsky, another industry maverick who would be sufficiently smitten by The Smiths to try, unsuccessfully, to manage the band. The support act was a PA performance from Danceteria’s hat-check girl and Stein’s newest American signing to Sire, Madonna. Stein, at the utmost peak of his uptown and downtown powers, was partying on an epic scale, holding the keys to the city high in his hand, especially after dark.

‘The very first night in America, I played a very woozy set, purely because of jetlag,’ says Marr, ‘no other reason, but then I remember standing in the long, dark corridor of an underground club at half three in the morning, with Seymour saying, “I’m going to show you what New York’s all about right now,” and he did, and I thought, this is one of the things I signed up for.’

‘It just all fell into place,’ says Stein. ‘New York was so magical. I was so crazy in myself I don’t even remember it all. I was out every – every – fucking night and it was just incredible.’

Back in London, Travis and Rough Trade were coming to terms with the impact the whirlwind of The Smiths’ rise had had on the company. Unprecedented for many bands, let alone any that had been signed to Rough Trade, the scale and rapidity of The Smiths’ success was something Travis had previously dared not imagine. The band and the label would eventually define each other’s identity, but something was becoming apparent as pallet after pallet of Smiths releases got packed and dispatched from Rough Trade. None of the other releases on the label were achieving anywhere near the amount of sales as The Smiths’ output. As Moss had predicted, the band were now in such a considerable position of authority within the company, they virtually owned it. The top-heavy relationship between Rough Trade and The Smiths would become increasingly dangerous to both their futures.

‘It was the only place for us to go,’ say Moss, ‘and I think it worked out well overall, but small businesses are volatile. It’s not just Rough Trade, it’s the nature of it. Bands like The Go-Betweens and The Fall all got their noses badly put out of joint, because The Smiths were the only thing keeping the place going.’

* ‘Hand in Glove’ features a harmonica intro, as does the Beatles’ debut single ‘Love Me Do’, making The Smiths’ debut a perfect homage to Loog Oldham and Epstein.

† According to Liz Naylor, such was Kay Carroll’s distinctive presence and approach to life that, in an act of post-punk will-to-power, Cath Carroll had taken her surname.

‡ Alongside Robert Wyatt’s ‘Shipbuilding’, one of Rough Trade’s most political releases was ‘The Enemy Within’, a 12-inch by Adrian Sherwood and Keith Le Blanc. The record took its name from Margaret Thatcher’s provocative (and contemptible) phrase for Britain’s mining communities and families. All proceeds of the release went to the striking miners’ fund.

7 Thieves Like Us

New Order, Thieves Like Us Fac 103 (Peter Saville/Factory)

The Smiths were not alone in finding New York clubs a welcoming environment for British bands. New Order and Factory were taken to the city’s heart, a relationship that would be reciprocated by Factory opening their own version of a Manhattan club in central Manchester, a decision that would both define and help ruin the company.

‘An enormous injection of cash happened,’ says Peter Saville. ‘Record sales were significant, and there was nowhere for this money to go. There was no company, no staff, no salaries, there were no offices, there was nothing, out of which came the Haçienda which was a misguided moment of idealism.’

Accompanying the steady and growing flow of money from Factory’s catalogue was an attendant accountancy black hole: running a company with an international million-pound turnover from a flat inevitably meant Factory’s paperwork was a mess. Though thriving on the sense of permanent chaos, Tony Wilson approached Rob Gretton’s wife, Lesley Gilbert, the first of many women who would manage Factory behind the scenes, to put the company’s affairs in some kind of order.

‘There was me,’ says Gilbert, ‘later on there was Lindsey Reid, Tony’s ex-wife, and then Tina Simmons took over, and Tina was a person who should’ve been there from the start because she was industry-based and super-super-efficient and on the ball. It was chaos. Although I don’t think it was really that much of a problem, records still got released, things got done.’

Tina Simmons had become familiar with Factory through working with Alan Erasmus. In contrast to Wilson’s permanent on-camera charisma and Gretton’s steeliness, Erasmus was a quiet member in the Factory partnership. Spending much of his time following up leads, Erasmus had met Simmons as a contact at one of the manufacturing companies Factory used in London, getting to know one another over the phone while trying to turn Saville’s sleeve designs into Pantone and cardboard reality.

Rather than ignoring the intricacies of Saville’s sleeve designs, Simmons had tried to accommodate them as best as possible. Impressed by her commitment and thoroughness Erasmus invited Simmons for an interview at Palatine Road where, true to form, she found Wilson, Gretton and Erasmus deep in their directorial obligations – vehemently disagreeing with one another in a haze of blue smoke.

‘It was the most bizarre interview,’ says Simmons. ‘They spent most of the time arguing amongst themselves as to why I should be there … Wilson said “There’s queues of people in Manchester wanting this job – why should I give it to you, ’cause you’re a southerner?” Everything was Manchester, Manchester.’ Wilson was outvoted and Simmons moved up to Manchester and started to try to make sense of the various strands of the Factory business.

Recently the label had set up Factory Benelux and Factory USA. Though giving the impression of international reach, the reality was an elegantly designed Factory Communications logo subtly projecting a corporate identity from some friends’ desks in Brussels and New York.

The ubiquitous Michel Duval, who had been an early partner in Blanco y Negro, along with his own Les Disques du Crépuscule label, ran Factory Benelux in Belgium. Michael Shamberg, a film-maker friend of Wilson with excellent connections in Eighties downtown Manhattan, was nominally in charge of Factory USA in New York. Though Shamberg had easy access to all the best clubs and fun New York had to offer, there was an inherent problem with the arrangements of Factory USA that was characteristic of Wilson’s priorities.

‘Michael Shamberg set up Factory New York,’ say Simmons, ‘but the distribution and licensing was being done through Rough Trade San Francisco, so all the monies went from San Francisco into New York and then out from New York to us, or not as the case may be.’

Factory Benelux was a reasonably serious proposition. Duval’s background in sleeve design and attention to detail ensured Factory unsurprisingly gained a serious reputation in Belgium, to such an extent that many of the label’s smaller bands played to the biggest crowds of their lives in Brussels. Duval was able to operate his own release schedule featuring one-off Factory Benelux releases by the label’s roster that included New Order. While the tracks in question may have been little more than off-cuts or spare recordings, they were nevertheless an example of Wilson’s largesse.

In the UK with barely any promotion other than a Peter Saville sleeve appearing in the racks of the record shops, some sessions and spot plays for John Peel and a cursory announcement in the music press, New Order were effortlessly selling increasing numbers of records.

‘There were somewhere between 50–70,000 people,’ says Saville, ‘usually young men who would buy everything and anything that they released, so it meant that New Order could continue without a record company, without advertising, without promotions, without ever joining the industry, because that 50 or 60,000 sales, concentrated usually within one week of release, would force the release into the playlist, where we didn’t want it.’

New Order’s anti-career business model suited both the band and the label, allowing them to operate entirely at their own pace and within their own framework. It also validated Wilson’s ideas about the meaning of Factory. New Order entering the charts without recourse to interviews or videos featuring the band, proved its ability to be an ideas-first organisation, more a think-tank for a new northern creative identity rather than anything as prosaic as an indie label.

Tina Simmons arrived in 1983, after the release of New Order’s third single, ‘Blue Monday’. Had she been there as the record was being put into production she would have witnessed Factory’s working methods – an incredibly detailed sleeve, a stand-alone single release with little promotion and no attention to any of the record’s costs – blow up internationally, as the single became an enormous worldwide hit and Factory’s finances, for the first time, took a huge loss.

‘“Blue Monday” was us getting into Euro disco,’ says Stephen Morris, New Order’s drummer. ‘It was driven by Giorgio Moroder and then going to New York. It was in that kind of order and doing “Blue Monday” was trying to glue those things together.’

Immersing themselves in the production of their first album Movement – while an unravelling Martin Hannett tried unsuccessfully to finish the record with them – had been an introspective but productive process, one during which the band’s Bernard Sumner had changed some of his habits.

‘I guess for a long time after Ian [Curtis] died I was really depressed and sad,’ says Sumner. ‘Then I started smoking draw and I found when I was smoking draw that electronic music sounded great, and I started taking acid. Electro music: E=MC^2 by Giorgio Moroder, Donna Summer albums, early Italian disco records – it had a wonderful effect on me. I loved the precision of it, the precise little blips.’

Recorded at the same sessions for the band’s second album, Power, Corruption & Lies, ‘Blue Monday’ was New Order making expressive use of precise little blips with an economy and elegance to which they added a seductive English dourness. While it might have been inspired by the erotic assertiveness of Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’, ‘Blue Monday’ replaced Summer’s euphoric declaration with a question, ‘How Does It Feel to Treat Me Like You Do?’ Thanks to ‘Blue Monday’ the dance floor underwent an intervention of passive-aggressive northern introspection.

The single gained an unstoppable commercial momentum due to the combination of it being playlisted on daytime radio and it reaching a hitherto oblivious Club Med 18–30 demograph for whom ‘Blue Monday’ had become the soundtrack to their fortnight away in the sunshine, where the local Mediterranean DJs playing the song relentlessly, mixing it together with its Italian disco source material.

The single’s floppy-disk-inspired sleeve – the most widely known and purchased Factory artefact – was Saville at his most creative and innovative, incorporating the technology at the heart of the music into his design, all at a cost that ensured Factory and the band lost money on every unit sold. ‘When I finally did “Blue Monday”, the famous bone of contention, nobody at Factory saw the design,’ says Saville. ‘It went from me to the printer. Who would see it? Tony couldn’t approve it, New Order didn’t approve it. I would talk to Rob, because I felt that that was responsible. I said, “Have they seen it?” He said, “Yeah …” This was typical Rob. He said, “Hooky hates it, Stephen really likes it.” “And Bernard?” … “Don’t mind really.” And that was it.’

‘The sleeve is fantastic,’ say Morris, ‘but we were absorbed in making music, and Saville did his thing. He would mention the Futurists’ work and we just thought, “Marinetti, who’s he play for?”’

The band’s continuing disregard for the conventions of the industry were maintained throughout the run of ‘Blue Monday’ in the charts. The band insisted playing live for the supporting Top of the Pops appearance, a feat that put them beyond the technical expertise of the show’s engineers. The result was an awkward performance that sounded completely out of character on the programme, only adding to the band’s detached reputation.

With a single taking up residence in the Top Ten, Gretton as usual asked Richard Thomas to book them a London show. Rather than capitalising on their crossover momentum by playing Brixton Academy or the Town & Country club, New Order promoted ‘Blue Monday’ with a concert near Surbiton. ‘We did Tolworth Recreation Centre for “Blue Monday”,’ says Thomas. New Order may have become multiplatinum pop stars with ‘Blue Monday’, but their total indifference towards the capital only grew stronger.

While never really interested in succeeding in London, now the band, Gretton and Wilson had even turned their attention away from their home town and were spending as much time as possible in New York.

‘I got the idea for the bass drum sound on “Blue Monday” from going to Heaven,’ says Sumner. ‘Then the next step was, we went to play in New York a lot, the Fun House and Paradise Garage, and there was a New York version of that electro, Puerto Rican sound, with a gay disco influence, a mixture of dope, acid and clubs.’

‘It was very refreshing to go over there and see people having a good time with a total sense of innocence about it,’ says Morris. ‘There were no preconceptions about, it was just having a good time.’

The band at every level was absorbing the gentle sense of hedonism, the infectious thrill of the clubs. ‘We’d sleep during the day. We’d get an alarm call for half past eleven at night, meet in someone’s room – we’d all drop a tab of acid except for Rob,’ says Sumner, ‘and Michael Shamberg would drive. We’d go to about five clubs in a night, and we’d all just go mad. Very much how E turned on people later. It happened with us with acid in 1982.’

New Order’s image also changed. The raincoats and shirt sleeves of Joy Division were replaced by polo shirts and slip-on shoes. The band now dressed with a hint of the casual or Perry Boy look; a Manchester City Eighties terrace mix of French and Italian high-end tennis clothes, polo shirts and pastel colours (although they continued to wear leather jackets as a punk badge of honour).

‘Rob always dressed like that anyway,’ says Morris. ‘He was into the casual thing, and bought shirts for us and I suppose he styled us. We had to get rid of the fucking raincoats; it was a semi-unconscious thing – you’re getting away from the raincoats with the music and you’re getting away from that with the clothes as well.’

The band recorded the follow-up to ‘Blue Monday’, ‘Confusion’, in New York with Arthur Baker, a producer at the heart of the city’s club scene. The video, a narrative of the song being mixed to quarter-inch tape then played in the Funhouse by Jellybean Benitez as the band, Baker and the DJ gauge the crowd’s reaction on the dance floor, is highly evocative of the New York culture in which the band and label were now immersed: kids of all races straight off the street in sneakers and high socks break-dancing to the Funhouse’s enormous bass bins.

Such a seductive environment caused ideas to ferment in Gretton, Wilson and the band’s heads. Wilson and Gretton in particular started having a series of after-hours conversations all based around the question, what if we could repeat this experience in Manchester?

‘It wasn’t straightforward,’ says Morris, ‘and it still isn’t straightforward. We got into going to clubs and doing music to play in clubs and it had a big effect on us. Tony and Rob saw lots of big warehouse spaces and thought, “What have we got a lot of in Manchester?”’

If a combination of Factory and New Order were going to entertain opening a club, Gretton had a clear idea of whom he’d like to run it. Mike Pickering, a friend of Gretton through a shared passion for Manchester City away-days had left Manchester for Europe, odd-jobbing his way around kitchens and had settled in a large disused space in Rotterdam. ‘I met these people who’d squatted in an old disused waterworks on the banks of the river Maas,’ says Pickering, ‘and they had this big hall, Hall 4, which was full of pigeon shit, and each person that squatted there was either an artist, musician, electrician or a sound engineer.’

Hall 4 became a contemporary performance space and Pickering, using some of his Manchester connections, started booking No Wave bands who had made it out of the Lower East Side, along with some of his friends from home and the odd legend. ‘We put on loads of stuff. I don’t know how the fuck we did it to be honest. We had Captain Beefheart. Tuxedomoon lived there for a while. James White and the Blacks, Arto Lindsay and DNA – and I got a Factory night with A Certain Ratio and Section 25 and I started DJing a lot.’

Gretton, who had chosen dates in Belgium as a water-testing exercise for New Order to start performing again away from the glare of Manchester or London, was impressed by the scope of Pickering’s booking policy and its broad-church functionality.

‘Rob saw it,’ says Pickering, ‘and he said, “You’ve got to come home, ’cause I want to do a club.” So I almost immediately went back and lived with him and Lesley in Chorlton.’

The loosening up of Factory through its exposure to NYC clubs was reflected in its release schedule. Alongside staples like New Order, Durutti Column and A Certain Ratio were 52nd Street and Pickering’s own band, Quando Quango, all of whom were more interested in the free expression of the dance floor rather than the introspection of the bedsit.

‘We all loved electro music and the NME hated us, absolutely hated all of us,’ says Pickering. ‘They thought we were soul boys, but we didn’t give a fuck. We could go to New York and Quando Quango played two nights at Paradise Garage as guests of Larry Levan and New Order.’ And if Quando Quango were dismissed at home, the club audiences of New York voted with their feet sending the band’s second single, ‘Love Tempo’, to no. 4 on the Billboard Dance chart.

A growing release schedule and a raft of new signings meant that for the first time, whatever NME might make of them, Factory were willing to consider hiring a London PR company. Dave Harper, who was about to quit Rough Trade and go freelance, was recommended to Gretton by Richard Thomas, who was now managing The Fall and had been impressed by Harper’s ability to cope with Mark E. Smith’s fluctuations in mood.

‘I had to go up to Factory and meet Tony and Rob and Alan Erasmus,’ says Harper. ‘I was intimidated, obviously. Tony Wilson was his usual charming self. Alan Erasmus was odd and Gretton was … he was a very clever man, Rob Gretton, but he could have had a job in human resources … “Let’s cut through the crap … Why the fuck should you do the press for Factory?” So I made up some nonsense and he went, “Uh.” He still had that old punk attitude. Rob was one of the funniest people in the world and was able to stare down the barrel of a gun. Compared to anything else, particularly Rough Trade, it felt so exciting and completely untutored.’

The notion of opening a New York-style club was no longer fermenting but being discussed as a possibility as Wilson and Gretton started scouting the city for premises. With New Order permanently in the position of being Factory’s main creditors, Gretton approached the band for their approval to invest in the idea. ‘The downside of no contracts was that it also meant no accounting,’ says Morris, ‘and so there was a lot of money around. The way it was explained to me by Rob was that, we’re going to do a club, and the reason we’re going to do this club is because it would be a good way of getting money out of Factory … and we all said, “Yeah, I can see that.”’

Factory had started as a club before it became a record company, and had found early success in doing so. Back in Manchester, Wilson and Gretton’s ideas for the club were now far more ambitious and on an altogether larger scale. The band had seen the idea germinate from a stoned conversation into an ambitious project involving bricks and mortar, one that was producing in Wilson, even by his standards, new levels of empirical grandeur. Although still positive about the idea, New Order were growing a little sceptical.

‘I imagined it would be like The Factory,’ says Morris. ‘Go and rent a space and do the same sort of thing. Then Rob said they had a building in mind, International Marine. I knew International Marine. I’d been driving past this place for years, so this place had this element of mystery. I didn’t feel like I should go in, in case someone expected me to be a potential boat buyer, which I clearly wasn’t. But one thing I did know was that it was bloody massive.’

A space large enough to accommodate gin palaces and ocean-going yachts, International Marine was as large as any of the buildings on Whitworth Street West, which was in 1982 a series of mainly empty warehouses that backed on to the Rochdale Canal. Even for the recession-ravaged property market of early Eighties Manchester, the building’s wholesale renovation was a substantial investment in real estate, an investment that was given added risk by the fact the label had only secured the leasehold on the promises.

The Funhouse and Danceteria both used space to encourage the interaction between the crowd and the dynamics of the music played in the clubs. Wilson and Gretton’s New York epiphany grew into the conviction that a wide-open space in Manchester for the city to experience freedom of movement and no dress restrictions would be a revelatory break with the basement dives and late-licence watering holes that represented the city’s nightlife, a point that many of the city’s DJs and clubbers, who enjoyed the vibrancy of venues like Legends, would find contentious. The club’s design by Ben Kelly combined the utilitarianism of Factory’s early sleeves with a similar re-imagining of functional objects – traffic beacons, cat’s eyes, galvanised steel. The mix of industry and sense of airy possibility spreading upwards across its three storeys was Factory’s identity in three-dimensional form.

However, two crucial elements of the New York clubbing experience were missing in Manchester. ‘I remember going to The Loft and just thinking, “Wow”,’ says Pickering, who was now firmly part of the New Order inner circle. ‘I didn’t really feel a total part of that ’cause I didn’t know what Ecstasy was and a lot of them were on it and it was very gay, but the very fact that clubs were built round sound systems rather than drink culture was amazing. At Danceteria I met Mark Kamins and heard him play the Anne Clark record on Rough Trade and mix it in with Afrika Bambaataa, and I’d never heard anything like that and I thought, this is how it’s gotta be, this is just amazing.’

It would take a good six years before Ecstasy would be used in the Haçienda to achieve a similar level of communal euphoria. Meanwhile the building, through trial and error, revealed itself to have terrible acoustics, especially for live music.

The early Haçienda booking policy was a hybrid between the same kinds of acts that had played The Factory club – buzz bands on the independent circuit – and the contacts Pickering had made in New York. Mirroring Danceteria’s excursions into multimedia, the Haçienda proudly printed VIDEO MUSIC DANCE on its flyers, placing the emphasis on its desire to be a contemporary performance space, somewhere between an arts centre and a warehouse party. Claude Bessy, now resident in Manchester, was the club’s in-house video-jock, splicing together bondage films with animation and black-and-white B-movies, that he edited in the basement of Wilson’s house, which had been fitted with a small editing suite. The Haçienda performances were all initially videoed by Malcolm Whitehead, a Factory associate who had set up a fledgling video partnership with Wilson called Ikon. By opening a club and starting a video company, Wilson realised the name Factory Communications was starting to feel like an apposite definition of the company’s activity rather than one more piece of elegant pretension on his behalf.

The likes of Divine and Annette Peacock, who both played in its first year, were certainly proving that the Haçienda had one of the most progressive booking policies in the country; its lack of dress code and desire for an egalitarian audience was also anathema to the sophisticated habitués of mid-Eighties London nightlife.

For all the thrill of cultural experiment, the fact remains that the Haçienda, while magnanimous in handing out membership to anyone with a passing interest, was struggling to find an audience. Richard Thomas was one of the many Factory associates who had been bussed up from London for its opening night and had been a regular visitor since.

‘There are videos of the Violent Femmes and there are twenty people in the audience,’ he says. ‘Mike Pickering was probably too good a booker: he was doing the promotions in a way that an A&R person would work. A year later most of the bands he booked were huge and were too big to play there.’

‘Wilson breezed across the club saying “Darling”,’ says Harper, ‘but it was Pickering who was putting on the gigs. It was depressing as hell, a shit crappy venue; awful sound, grim, people didn’t turn up, really, except for New Order.” The lingering feeling was that outside of Factory’s wider circle most people in the city were bemused as to what the building was for. However lavishly appointed in elegant and witty designs, it remained a huge area to fill. While the Haçienda’s state-of-the-art design may have looked piercingly current in Blueprint and the style media, the scale of its ambition was beginning to be tested. Richard Boon had also been around the New York clubs. As an observer at first remove from Factory, he could see that the idea was potentially fraught with problems. ‘Hurrahs, Danceteria, they were just fantastic, but the Haçienda was kind of out of place, out of time. You’re not gonna fill these places unless you have dance, and as northern soul had proved, people in Manchester want to go out and dance. But not that many of them want to go out and listen to Cabaret Voltaire with looped videos of nonsense, certainly not enough to fill a 1,600-capacity club. And crucially, for the first year the sound was terrible.’

‘It was empty a lot of nights,’ says Pickering, ‘just twenty of us in … but Rob insisted it should be open every night … No club can do that, especially in those times so … but we had a massive Friday night, which was the first of its type, which had a reverse door policy just let everyone who wants to, come in. We had scallies dancing to salsa, it was brilliant.’

One of the Haçienda’s early regulars was Johnny Marr, whose flatmate Andrew Berry ran – and cut customers’ hair at – the Haçienda’s salon, Swing, ‘the most talked about hairstylists in the north’. ‘It was the same eighteen people with nothing to do on a Wednesday night,’ say Marr, ‘so if you were going to go and eat a vegeburger, you might as well go and do it in the Haçienda and get free vodka-and-orange that would last you all night.’

Gretton’s policy of being open every night except Sunday, to comply with the licensing laws, was an act of inclusivity. He wanted as many of Manchester’s citizens to share in the project as possible and, as a diehard City fan with an infinite collection of northern soul 45s, was deeply familiar with the currents and codes that carried British street culture. ‘Rob wanted to open it up to everyone,’ says Pickering. ‘He was interested in the fusion of it all. He loved it when people like the Jazz Defektors and a few of the dance troupes from Moss Side would get on the empty floor and do their bit.’

The Jazz Defektors were a Mancunian take on the nascent acid jazz scene, and would be joined in their zoot suits by Kalima, both bands continuing Factory’s move away from its early associations of austerity towards a sophisticated soul music. A young red-haired student at the Polytechnic, Mick Hucknall, was a regular at their shows.

Slowly, at the weekend at least, a new version of Mancunian nightlife started to coalesce around the club. Greg Wilson, a DJ who managed the break-dancing crew Broken Glass, was resident at both Legends and Piccadilly Radio, where he played sets of tough electro imports. Invited to do the same by Pickering at the Haçienda on Friday and Saturday nights, Wilson began drawing an audience into the Haçienda from outside the club’s early raincoat constituency. ‘The Saturday night was what I called The Face crowd,’ says Pickering, and just a hint of the energy and euphoria Gretton had imagined was starting to generate in the club. Johnny Marr was one of the audience who was enjoying the cross-fertilisation of the club and its new possibilities. ‘I hadn’t really put The Smiths together yet … and I had only, like, a fiver in my pocket on a weekly basis, but it didn’t really matter because if you were around you did think that New York was an extended part of Manchester. You didn’t have to be in some amazing in crowd to be a beneficiary, you just had to be around and you just had to be interested. Ironically, given its image, Factory was very inclusive, not at all elitist.’

Despite letters from members complaining about the preponderance of dance music, being exposed to the Haçienda’s music policy was having an impact on some of its more free-thinking clientele. ‘When I wrote “Girl Afraid”, we’d been literally listening to the Ze compilation all night,’ says Marr. ‘I was trying to marry something with that kind of urgent electro beat, and saw a correlation between that and making it like a Sun record on our instruments, but it’s essentially “Busting Out” by Nona Hendryx.’

Pickering’s attempts at a Mudd Club-style cross-pollination now read like the envy of any twenty-first-century curator/operator in the culture industry. ‘I had William Burroughs doing readings,’ says Pickering. ‘Gil Scott-Heron, Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five, fashion shows, The Legendary Stardust Cowboy and David Mach the conceptual artist doing an installation’. While these events may have drawn a crowd anywhere from twenty to two hundred, their resonance would linger. In perhaps one of the best examples of the extent of his connections in international subcultures and their customs, Williams Burroughs, noticing Claude Bessy making his way up to the video booth, was sufficiently moved to say, ‘Claude, what the fuck are you doing in Manchester?’

*

Along with Kid Creole and the Coconuts’ August Darnell taking up residence in the Britannia Hotel, and the Haçienda hosting a birthday party for Ruth Polsky, the most widely seen moment of reciprocation between Manchester and New York occurred on 27 January 1984, when The Tube was filmed at the Haçienda early in the evening on a wet Friday.

The event, Fac 104, featured the first appearance by Jellybean Benitez’s girlfriend Madonna on British TV, miming to her second single, ‘Holiday’ (although it was not, as Wilson would later pronounce, her first-ever appearance in the UK: she had done a PA at the Camden Palace several weeks earlier*). The other acts on the show were a testament to how vibrant Manchester’s love affair with New York and electro had become: one of Factory’s latest signings Marcel King sang his electro soul masterpiece ‘Reach for Love’ and Broken Glass body-popped on the Haçienda floor. The feature was the first time most television viewers had seen inside the Haçienda and the programme also featured interviews with Wilson and Paul Morley. The crowds turned out to appear on television and admission was ticketed but free. The programme gave the impression that the Haçienda really was the street-cultural hub, one that still only really existed, give or take the odd Friday night, in Wilson and Gretton’s heads.

The reality, once the cameras disappeared, was that the Haçienda and the label were still struggling under the weight of their ambitions. ‘Factory were adrift,’ says Harper, ‘living off New Order. The Durutti Column and ACR were doing what they were doing. The rest of it felt like The Face in Manchester, but no one outside Manchester, and certainly in London, really cared.’

One of Factory’s releases that was met with a wall of indifference was Marcel King’s ‘Reach for Love’, an exemplary piece of modern soul music that had been produced by Be Music, the production company that the members of New Order had set up to put their newly found studio smarts to use.

‘We’d explored studio technology through parting company with Martin, and all done the production to a great or lesser degree,’ says Stephen Morris. ‘Hooky ended up going into what used to be Cargo Studios and buying into it and that became Suite Sixteen in Rochdale. Bernard and Donald out of A Certain Ratio got together, and then if anybody had deep psychological problems they’d be foisted on to me and Gillian.’ Marcel King’s ‘Reach for Love’ came out of this loose affiliation: a track that combines heartbreak and, in its refrain of ‘We’ve got to keep on struggling’, inner-city frustration. “Reach for Love” was Bernard and Donald and it is absolutely fantastic,’ says Morris.

For a city that was feeling the full force of Thatcher’s local spending-cuts programme and a police force run by an evangelical Christian whose draconian application of licensing law would be a long-term problem for the Haçienda, ‘Reach for Love’ felt like a rallying call of resistance from the heart of the city. The track also sounded as urgent, funky and melodic as anything played on Radio 1 in 1984.

‘Reach for Love’, however, was destined to follow the usual Factory code of anti-promotion: very little or no advertising and the belief that the legend that was Factory Communications and a cutting-edge sleeve would secure it an audience. Such a tough-sounding piece of dance-floor soul was a stretch even for New Order’s audience, but none of this as such should have prevented ‘Reach for Love’ being a hit: it was as smart and direct a piece of pop music as Factory would ever release.

‘It’s intrinsic in the downfall of Factory,’ says Morris. ‘It wasn’t that it was good at cool – it was good at a certain shambolic coolness – but when it actually had a genuine pop moment like “Reach for Love”, it couldn’t translate those things to the extent it should have been. It should’ve been a massive record and it was Factory’s fault, because it couldn’t get beyond that wall of cool.’

Wilson still enjoyed the gamesmanship of taking a stance against the industry, insisting that Factory was above the orthodoxies of trying to promote records. Factory advertised only subtly and reluctantly (whereas the Haçienda had a weekly advert in NME events/live section), a policy that was placed in a far more mundane context by the fact Alan Erasmus was adept at keeping the city’s fly-posters happy and engaging in the low-level kind of quid pro quo arrangements that had been synonymous with achieving radio play since DJs first appeared on the airwaves.

‘There was a heated debate that me and Gillian had with Tony once, as we were sitting in the studio for hours waiting for Bernard to redo his guitar for the umpteenth time,’ says Morris. ‘We said. “It’s all right for you, Tony, this not promotion, no promotion,” – there were plenty of backdoor promotions that were going on – “you’re letting the bands down.” We were told, “The trouble with you two, you’re money-minded, that’s your bloody problem.” But “Reach for Love” is a case in point, it’s a fantastic record’.

The tension between running a business and running a creative, at times almost borderline absurdist, project was encapsulated by the newly introduced concept of Factory board meetings. The fact that Factory Communications didn’t have a board was not going to prevent Wilson and his colleagues enjoying a good opportunity to argue over the finer points of whatever agenda was in their heads. ‘Martin Hannett turned up at one and pulled out his gun,’ says Pickering. ‘It usually ended with Wilson and Gretton on the floor trying to land a punch on each other. Random people would be invited but no one knew why. They spent the whole time slagging Factory off, the whole thing was ridiculous.’

*

‘Tony’s personality kept Factory driving forward,’ says Harper. ‘He had bullet-proof skin. I met him once in Liverpool when Granada had moved out to Albert Dock. We met at the studios and he drove us back to Palatine Road. They were all so poncy about their cars – he was driving a Merc that was dechromed and had been resprayed matt black, everything was matt black. He gets in his car with his Armani saddleback and he says, “Right, Harper, we’re going to drive out of Liverpool now so be prepared, because everyone calls me a cunt and calls me a wanker.” He was so recognisable and the car was recognisable. We’re driving out of Liverpool and everyone’s going “Wanker” and he turns to me and says, “They love me,” and he waves at them like the queen.’

Thanks to Wilson’s regional media profile and Granada’s willingness to make culturally enriching programmes on a regular basis, Factory and Wilson were almost permanently on the north’s television screens. From schools and colleges broadcasts, featuring Wilson giving lessons on running a business and how a recording studio works, to Wilson interviewing The Fall and The Smiths early in their career for the evening news supplements, Factory had a presentational advantage over all its rivals. It received a disproportionate amount of television coverage that located the label and its front person at the head of a finely tuned cultural project. Wilson was a natural in front of the camera; the more nonsensical his monologues on the essence of Factory, the more sure-footed and beguiling he and it, whatever ‘it’ was, seemed.

But to dismiss Factory and Wilson as merely media savvy is to neglect the fact that Factory, amid the gestures and the postures, was making incredible creative decisions.

Along with the decor of the Haçienda and the sound of many of its records, the label glistened with a modernity that was streets ahead of its counterparts, particularly its London major-label rivals, to Wilson and Gretton’s ongoing delight. While shunning miming on Top of the Pops, New Order were slowly compiling a series of videos which belonged as much in an installation space as on late-night MTV.

For ‘The Perfect Kiss’, film-maker Jonathan Demme, a year after finishing Talking Heads’ ‘Stop Making Sense’, shot the band playing the track live in their rehearsal space. The 35-mm cinéma-vérité performance is around eleven minutes long and captures the band’s instrumental alchemy at a creative peak. Demme’s use of almost hyper-naturalistic lighting gives New Order and their equipment a luminous depth as one of their most epic songs weaves into a dense groove of Hooky’s bass notes, hand percussion and the track’s famous frog samples. Though on paper the treatment might have looked ominously banal, ‘Band play song in rehearsal space’, the film shimmies with the high-end cutting-edge aesthetic which was Factory at its very best. Low-Life, the album from which ‘The Perfect Kiss’ was taken, was promoted with a poster, ‘It isn’t only Low Life who record for Factory’. The strapline was more or less an admission that apart from New Order there was very little interest in the label’s other releases. The sales figures of the records listed – Section 25, Thick Pigeon and the Royal Family and the Poor – reflect a lingering sense that, however well-designed and executed a sleeve, not everything connected with the record buying public.

A large TV audience was given an insight into the Factory modus operandi by the film New Order Play at Home. Commissioned by Channel 4, Play at Home was a six-part series in which bands were asked to make documentaries about themselves and their home towns. With many of the bands enjoying the lack of editorial constraint, the series was at the vanguard of what made Channel 4 a creative powerhouse in the period.

An American voice-over reads the opening credits: ‘Factory Records, a partnership, a business, a joke,’ setting the tone for the programme’s witty self-analysis and deadpan character assassination. Alongside a photo of Wilson, who is shortly to be interviewed naked in the bath by Gillian Gilbert (who is wearing a dress) is the introductory line, ‘He thinks he runs a record company in his spare time.’ What follows is an insightful and hilarious series of interviews and monologues as Hannett and Liz Naylor tear into Factory’s current thinking – most noticeably the Haçienda. Rob Gretton appears interviewing himself, regularly saying, ‘That’s a good question.’ Alan Erasmus is interviewed on the back of Hooky’s motorbike and a narrative develops in which all three of the company’s directors openly contradict and blame each other for the chaos of Factory.†

In the Haçienda’s Gay Traitor bar Wilson is interrogated by members of Durutti Column, Section 25 and ACR as to where the accounts are and why Wilson is so hard to get hold of. For a band and record label offered a prime-time window to their audience, the programme takes Factory’s anti-promotion strategy to new levels of self-deflation. However, the brio and candour of the cast and the unassailable sense that whatever the grievances (nearly) all concerned are having incredible fun, makes Factory and Manchester look like one of the most exciting places in the world. Asked of his future plans Wilson mentions he ‘wants to do lofts in Manchester’. Having been exposed to Soho loft-living in the mornings after the nights before in the downtown clubs, Wilson was clearly inspired by the downtown scene’s living quarters as well as their working conditions, so much so that the idea was given a Fac number – Fac 101 Lofts Concept. The empty warehouses around the Haçienda that feature as an interview backdrop in Play at Home would all be developed in time, and Wilson and Saville would decades later become ambassadors and consultants for the regeneration of Manchester. Just as the artists who colonised lower Manhattan and lived cheaply in its run-down warehouses were dangled as aspirant and edgy neighbours offering the frisson of cool to Wall Street bankers, Manchester developers would consistently present Factory, and particularly the Haçienda, as a template for New Emerging Manchester, the Richard Florida metropolis in excelsis – though neither Wilson nor Saville would enjoy a part in the regeneration riches offered to the developers as the totemic Factory founders added a curatorial sheen to Manchester’s creative class property gold rush.

In Play at Home, as a tracking shot starts in the Pennines and sweeps across the city, New Order start playing ‘Thieves Like Us’ to a sold-out Haçienda. As the camera shifts through disused mills and feeder roads, one of the band’s most tender melodies soundtracks a cityscape: Manchester in the sunshine, glowing with a battered yet burnished self-confidence. The optimism of the Factory project, the ability to make things happen and the belief that anything is possible, echoes out from the high notes of Peter Hook’s bass line and up into the Manchester sky.

‘There’s a pub called the Peveril of the Peak round the back of what was the Haçienda,’ says Harper, ‘this ancient, tiled, wedge shape. It’s where ACR and Pickering used to drink in this dark industrial area, this lovely Victorian pub. It’s now surrounded by executive housing. You’d go in there and they’d all be talking about music – it was hip as hell, and it had this wonderful sense of resilience.’

The juxtaposition of civic pride with pop culture was not confined to Wilson and Manchester. In February 1986 the Royal Court in Liverpool hosted a benefit for Derek Hatton’s Liverpool City Council – With Love from Manchester. Featuring their neighbouring city’s favourite sons the evening comprised The Fall, John Cooper Clarke and The Smiths, with New Order headlining. The evening was curated by Wilson, having been approached by Hatton, who was by then six months into his illegal ‘deficit budget’ campaign against the government’s squeeze on the city’s finances. Hatton was also in need of as much assistance – and cash – as he could find. Advised by Wilson to go direct to Gretton, Hatton, with an advisor in tow, duly invited Gretton and Pickering for a meeting in Liverpool at the Adelphi Hotel. ‘Rob kept asking the bloke with Hatton, “Are you a gangster?”,’ says Pickering. ‘Hatton ignored him and kept asking if New Order could play for free. Rob kept replying, “Is he a gangster?” Rob went to the toilet and I turned to the bloke with Hatton and said, “Just say ‘Yes’, he’ll agree to do it.” Rob came back, sat down and straight away asked the bloke, “Are you a gangster?” He said, “Yes,” and Rob said, “All right then, we’ll do it.”’

‘There was this do with Derek Hatton,’ says Harper, ‘and there was this whole “Liverpool loves Manchester” that Tony created, so Hatton’s involved, Wilson’s involved, these two monstrous egos both making ridiculous claims on behalf of the north-west.’ With Love from Manchester was a mere taster for what was to follow five months later when the Festival of the Tenth Summer, a week-long celebration of the anniversary of the Sex Pistols’ visit to Lesser Free Trade Hall, and the root of Factory’s sense of its destiny, was held at the newly opened GMEX, the Greater Manchester Exhibition centre, on 19 July.

‘The massive GMEX show was poncy as hell,’ says Dave Harper. ‘It was completely and utterly a Factory wank, but spectacular.’ Featuring over a dozen acts that encapsulated Factory’s conception of Manchester’s punk heritage, the concert was a celebratory launch for the city’s newest, largest venue that placed Factory squarely at the heart of the city’s cultural life. During the day everyone from Wayne Fonda and the Mindbenders, John Cale, OMD and Pete Shelley joined The Fall, ACR and New Order. Headlining the bill were The Smiths, whose appearance was one of the many gestures of bonhomie between the band and Factory that gives the impression that their rivalry was largely theatrical. Rising to the occasion, Morrissey raised a placard during an incendiary version of ‘The Queen Is Dead’ bearing the legend, Two Light Ales Please.

The Festival of the Tenth Summer featured ten multimedia events from fashion shows at the Haçienda to a book written by Richard Boon, Liz Naylor and Cath Carroll and a seminar on the music business. The week also marked something of a high point in the Factory fetishisation of the object: Saville designed ten numerical sculptures for an installation at the Manchester City Art Gallery, along with an accompanying range of merchandise involving badges, posters and a boiler suit. The city also hosted a photography exhibition by Kevin Cummins and a mini film and TV festival. Firing on all cylinders in terms of mapping the city’s cultural landscape, the Festival of the Tenth Summer signalled the beginning of Factory’s over-use of the definite article. Nearly every event involved the word ‘the’ a habit that would begin to stick, and start to grate as the label began to be defined by its style rather than its content. In a witty and knowing gesture, Bill Grundy, the TV presenter who had fallen foul of the regulators after his interview with the Sex Pistols had disintegrated into a tea-time swearing competition, was chosen as the Festival of the Tenth Summer’s lead compère.

The NME, aware of the playful significance of Grundy coming out of retirement for the Festival, dispatched a journalist, accompanied by Harper, to Grundy’s home in Hebden Bridge. ‘Obviously no one had interviewed or heard of Bill Grundy since ’76,’ says Harper. ‘No mobile phone, we’re an hour or two late and we start walking up the garden path to this cottage and Bill Grundy comes barrelling down shouting, “Fuck off, fuck off, you cunts!” So we go into this cottage and his wife makes us cups of tea and more or less the first question is, “So Bill, seeing how your TV career ended the moment you interviewed the Sex Pistols, what have you been up to?” And he went absolutely fucking mental, “You fucking wanker, you don’t know anything about my career, how dare you! You fucking kids, you don’t know anything. I used to be in the navy, you know. I’ve had more prostitutes …”’

*

For all the grand-scale events and totemic products being planned in Palatine Road, by the summer of 1986 the esprit de corps at Factory was faltering. Behind the media narrative of Britain’s most innovative and stylish record label, it was clear to all involved that New Order had reached a point where Factory needed the band more than the band needed the label.

Simultaneously Wilson was exploring more highbrow assignments at Granada and trying to escape the pigeonhole of local news reporter. ‘He’d changed from being Tony Wilson to Anthony H. Wilson,’ says Tina Simmons. ‘I can’t remember exactly, but he started signing Christmas cards AHW … and he did a lot more journalistic-type stuff.’

Rob Gretton was also undergoing changes; his health was deteriorating, as was his relationship with Wilson. Towards the end of 1985 he resigned as a director of Factory and hired an assistant, Rebecca Boulton a colleague from the Haçienda. ‘When I started working with Rob, I think it was clear there were probably a few misunderstandings between Factory, Rob and New Order,’ she says. ‘I think everybody believed that it wouldn’t just be New Order making money in the future. Because New Order was so successful, Factory seemed to be so successful, so they’d have somebody else coming along that would be equally as good and it didn’t really happen.’

Having often come quite close to losing his and Lesley Gilbert’s home in Chorlton, Gretton had, for almost a decade, regularly put everything on the line for both Joy Division/New Order and, by proxy, Factory. The stress of maintaining the band’s momentum, along with permanently having to share, whether he was willing to or not, in a large part of Factory’s workload had stated to take its toll.

‘It all got to him,’ says Gilbert. ‘It was a combination of lifestyle, worry about becoming a father, drugs – it was a mixture of all those things.’

Gretton still maintained his co-directorship of the Haçienda, but a fissure had opened up between him and Wilson that went beyond their customary squabbling. Factory was still only on a semi-legal footing in terms of its accounting obligations and Wilson was permanently uninterested in such back-office mundanity. The question was, who was motivated to take responsibility for the actual running of the record company? Without New Order’s record sales there would be no Factory, but if New Order were on any other label they would have none of the freedom around which they had now built a career. It was a typical Factoryesque impasse, a Catch 22 of commerce and creativity that was too seductive, and too exhausting, to try to resolve.

In his more carefree moments it was exactly the sort of thing that brought a smile to Wilson’s face. Gretton, on the other hand, was starting to develop some premature grey hairs.

‘There’d been an escalation of issues between the two of them,’ says Boulton. ‘Rob had been ill but was pretty calm when I started working for him, but I got the impression that they were standing away from each other a lot more than they had.’

With Gretton withdrawing from Factory and Wilson concentrating on his media career, Simmons and Erasmus were focused more on the day-to-day running of the label. ‘Tina Simmons was very much in charge and everyone felt quite confident in her abilities,’ says Boulton. ‘She was quite a forceful character. I think she struggled a bit, being a woman, in that it was quite a male-dominated environment, even though they treated her with a lot of respect.’

Simmons’s first major decision was to put an end to Wilson’s chaotic magnanimity and instil a degree of technical professionalism in the company. The days of signing bands in blood or shaking hands were over. ‘Factory didn’t have contracts,’ she says. ‘We had to sort it out. I said to Tony, “You do know that what we’re doing is actually illegal … ’cause we don’t actually own this?” Even Tony had to admit that and we were actually giving advances, which they’d never done before.’

Even if he was resigned to submitting to the industry’s standard practice, Wilson acquiesced in the Factory style. Contracts with bands were contained in a bespoke binder involving two sheets of Perspex and three or four bolts; the package was completed with the lightly embossed, over-specified title, ‘The Factory Contract’, and a designated serial number. Neither the paper on which the contract was artfully typed, the packaging conceit or the legal contents would be of much use or validity when Factory ran into financial trouble. For now Wilson, who rarely drew any money for himself from Factory, was not going to let the fiscal side of Factory interfere with his capriciousness, particularly as his own circumstances remained unaffected by Factory’s finances. ‘Tony didn’t need a wage because he was freelance and got quite a lot of money doing his work for TV,’ says Simmons. ‘The only people that took a wage as such was Alan and myself, and I was on less than half of what I’d been earning in London.’

*

Along with Boulton another new character joined the New Order circle. If the band had previously been given the keys to Manhattan, the aristocracy of the LA music industry was now courting them.

‘Rob walked in one day,’ says Simmons, ‘and said to New Order, “How’d you like to be signed to Quincy Jones’ label?” He was absolutely bowled over about Quincy and that’s the only reason they went through Warner Brothers. It was absolutely out of this world.’

Quincy Jones had three years earlier produced Thriller, the most successful album of all time, which duly made him one of the most powerful men in the global music industry and ensured he was given a label by the head of Warners, Mo Austin, called Qwest. Although delighted to be approached, Gretton was not prepared to let his guard down, and he summoned Jones to fly into Manchester to discuss his motives. ‘We picked him up at the airport in Rob’s Audi Quattro,’ says Pickering, ‘and took him out to lunch at the self-service restaurant at Knutsford services. Quincy loved it. He was made up.’

The deal had been structured by Tom Atencio, an LA music executive with a more refined sensibility than many of his rivals. Aware that Factory technically had an office in New York with Michael Shamberg, he had also seen the problems inherent in the band being distributed from Rough Trade America in San Francisco. Observing that the potential in New Order was being seriously underestimated in a burgeoning Anglophile market, he was determined to fund a serious American career for the band beyond the amateurish attempts of Rough Trade’s hand-to-mouth networks.

For the band, which had developed a fondness for the States having toured there frequently, the break into the upper echelons of Hollywood was equally attractive. ‘It was originally a combination of Tom Atencio in LA and Michael Shamberg in New York,’ says Morris. ‘Then through Tom, via Mo Austin, we ended up with Quincy Jones. He had got a record label and then we were all very interested.’

‘Michael Shamberg knew these artists,’ says Atencio. ‘It was such an interesting time in NYC in the early Eighties, when you could go to Danceteria and you could go to the Mudd Club and go downtown and sit at a bar with Russell Simmons and David Byrne. It was very fertile, this crush of ideas, this excitement. The stock market was blowing up, NYC was terribly decadent. I spent a week there every month because it was the centre of the world. I could go to England, come back with a stack of records, get them mixed with local beats and get them on the radio.’

A long queue of the cream of the American record industry had formed around New Order from their first recordings but once ‘Blue Monday’ had spent thirty weeks in the UK charts they were deemed a red-hot must-sign act. Every mogul in corporate American entertainment had attempted to penetrate the band’s detached mystique, whether by offering untold riches or attempting to bond with them in the time-honoured fashion.

‘I’d heard the stories that everyone had tried to sign them,’ says Atencio. ‘Bob Krasnow had literally offered them a blank cheque. David Geffen had come in famously and smoked a joint backstage with the band – only problem is, it’s the band’s joint and dope is hard to get on the road. I get that they’re punk. I understand there’s something at the core of this in Factory and the band but I’d never met them. I call up Tony. He says, “You got to talk to Rob.” So the combination of the time difference, the hard-wire transatlantic cable which meant there was a terrible connection, the fact the Rob had been in the pub since 11 a.m., probably been smoking draw since 3 p.m., and his Mancunian accent meant I couldn’t understand every third word. I swear to God. I just said, “Yeah … right … fantastic … Well, I should come over.”’

In deferring to Gretton, Wilson both displayed his disinterest in the business affairs of the band and realised that New Order would now be embarking on a new stage of a more professional career, one that necessitated them signing to a major label in America.

If Wilson had a fault, it was that he wore his learning rather heavily – something that was put into sharp relief when he attempted to act out the role of a record industry player with a head for figures and something that a cursory look a the state of Factory finances revealed to be questionable. With Gretton and Atencio in partnership with New Order in America, Wilson recognised a more comfortable position to inhabit, that of the eloquent and hip Brit in LA.

‘Our relationship with Tom was kind of a three-way thing,’ says Morris, ‘because you couldn’t stop Tony talking to Atencio, because Tony just wanted to be in LA and be driven around with the top down. But all the business was done between Rob and Tom.’

‘Tony was extremely idealistic,’ says Atencio, ‘but he saw that corporations could extend your mental brand. He was fascinated with the level of executives that were out here. It’s the exact opposite in the UK – the guys who tended to take the corporate jobs in the UK you rightly didn’t want to hang out with, but the guys who were running The Cartel were really cool, really interesting, but they didn’t have any money. They hated corporate money, there were no private jets. So here was a revelation to Tony, that cool guys could take corporate money – what a barn burning idea. It possibly elevated the thinking on Tony’s part and on Rob’s as well, of possibilities that hadn’t occurred before, for good or bad.’

One cool guy whose nose was put out of joint by the New Order Qwest deal was Seymour Stein. As someone who had had first choice on virtually every British act to have been distributed by Rough Trade, and who had had considerable success (and a great deal of fun) with a few of them, he felt it understood that he should have been Wilson and Gretton’s first port of call. As Sire, like Qwest, was financed by Mo Austin at Warners, however, Austin was happy to see two of his executives scrap over the hottest band in the UK.

‘Seymour had co-opted a lot of great UK music,’ says Atencio, ‘and I think that’s why it was so exciting to Mo when I said, “Let’s sign them to Quincy’s label.” He was probably beside himself, I know he was, “Oh God, I can take some leverage off Seymour and put some money into Quincy’s account.”’

Stein, thirty years later, still rather flinches at just for once being beaten in his own back yard. ‘I really wanted New Order,’ says Stein, ‘but I think that Mo was trying to make Qwest look hip. Quincy Jones is a true legend but Qwest records never got off the ground. It’s very hard for a producer who’s producing all the time to run a record company and I could cite up a lot of other examples, nothing against Tom Atencio or anything. I think they would’ve fared better had they been on Sire but, who knows, that’s just the way it went down.’

Having been the subject of a classic West Coast power struggle, New Order were for the first time joining the ranks of the professional music industry. In America at least, they were now a band in the corporate mainframe and were expected to undertake the rigours of lengthy tours of the heartlands.

‘Touring in the US requires structure,’ says Atencio. ‘It requires planning. It was expensive to amortise the costs of touring. You had to plan. They couldn’t do three dates in France then go home, wait a while then spend the weekend in Belgium, [but] that’s what they did. It wasn’t a business, it was a hobby with benefits.’

‘Low-Life was … “Let’s crack America”,’ says Morris. ‘Then, for want of a better word, the rot set in because it started turning into a job really, we were seeing corporate American record labels for the first time. Low-Life was getting on a treadmill, and I think Brotherhood was realising quite what that meant. Then you get into New Order politics. Hooky wanted to rock, whereas before we just did the songs. Now it was, “No, there’s two sides to this band, there’s the rock side and there’s the electronic side. So what we’ll do on this album is electronic on one side and rock on the other. No keyboards on this song, rock song.” “No, I disagree with that.” But part of being in a band is to have disagreements.’

Gretton, happy to have a degree of professional distance from Factory, understood that the band’s future and its finances were on a more even footing through Warners, something he became dedicated to ensuring was a success. If it felt like a treadmill to the band, in contrast to their dealings with Factory, it was certainly offering them incredible remuneration. For the first time since Joy Division they were working with a label that didn’t owe them money.

‘When you’re on a thin margin, like you are putting out records through The Cartel and Rough Trade, cash flow is really dangerous,’ says Atencio, ‘the razor’s edge. Everyone had seen that even Richard Branson and Chris Blackwell couldn’t pull off running their own company in America – so what was the point, why try? American deals were healthy and they paid.’

On top of the remuneration, New Order were holding their space at a midpoint between an enigmatic British cult band and an increasingly commercial proposition; they were capitalising on the mystique and appeal that had been cultivated by years of Peter Saville-designed sleeves appearing in the import racks of the country’s most discerning independent shops, an appeal Atencio in LA understood perfectly.

‘You put one of those 12-inches in front of you, there’s a lot going on,’ he says. ‘You had to piece together your idea of what they even look like, and that was very exciting too, before the time of digital instant gratification – where you already know far too much about the people. You had to work at it, put the needle down at the beginning of the record and track through the record and experience it exactly the way they wanted you to, and as you did, you look at a twelve-by-twelve piece of artwork.’

From Low-Life onwards the band did a series of ever-lengthening and increasingly hedonistic US tours. ‘There was no hierarchy to their partying,’ Atencio says. ‘It was another one of their refreshing aspects – everyone, the crew, Rob, the band, including Gillian I might add, all scaling the same heights, which were Olympian really.’

The partying also offered a degree of escape from the unfolding reality of events back home. ‘I can only speak for me personally,’ says Morris. ‘Touring the sheds, doing bloody meet-and-greets and to be quite honest burning the candle at both ends, which is what you do in a band … and you’re playing to thousands of people and it’s great, and then you sort of go back and suddenly realise that you’ve done all that, and the money’s just gone. It’s just gone straight into the bloody Haçienda. Instead of working to please ourselves, we were working to provide financial assistance. The Haçienda just wasn’t a success … it was the first thing Factory did that didn’t work straight away.’

* 4AD’S Ivo Watts-Russell had been in attendance at the first-ever Madonna UK appearance at the Camden Palace Music Machine on 15 October 1983. ‘We’d been invited by Sire in New York and we thought we’d go along to take a look,’ he says. ‘The woman who booked her was saying, “God, this woman is a nightmare.”’

† In one of Play at Home’s funniest scenes, Liz Naylor and Cath Carroll, in dungarees and spiky hair, interview Gillian Gilbert in a gym. As the three of them work out on rowing machines, Naylor suggest that Wilson is rather vain and over concerned with appearance, to which Gilbert replies, ‘Look at you.’

8 Primitive Painters

Flyer for Bay 63, the venue which the C86 generation made their own (Cerne Canning archive)

While Factory was a mess of videotape and ideas filtering out on to an international stage, Rough Trade was growing at a dangerous pace on the back of The Smiths’ catalogue and undergoing change of a more mundane kind.

‘The Rough Trade staff still had these notions of collectivity,’ says Richard Boon. ‘For a while I was staff chair and there’d be these regular monthly meetings. People were very concerned that there was a lack of coherent management. We’re just about to move from Blenheim Crescent to King’s Cross and there’s a staff meeting saying, “We really need an overseer, a real manager, not a label manager,” and Richard Powell was recruited from a cricket club called the White Swans, where lots of Rough Trade members of staff played.’

The arrival of Richard Powell coincided with Rough Trade’s move to Collier Street in Kings Cross. Spread across three floors and a basement, the company’s new headquarters were a former Victorian goods warehouse. Decidedly redbrick and mercantile, 61–71 Collier Street was a side street, a stone’s throw from the corner of King’s Cross and Pentonville Road and a few leisurely paces away from the Malt & Hops on Caledonia Road, a pub which became Rough Trade’s equivalent of a works canteen. Richard Scott had found the Collier Street premises, with the help of Rough Trade’s natural political allies.

‘The GLC had done a report on the cultural future of London,’ says Scott, ‘and had singled us out as being culturally worthwhile. We ended up in Collier Street, which we essentially got for free. We got the GLC to do it out, convert it to our purposes – including a fantastic scissor lift. I wrote to our local MP, Chris Smith – the first MP to come out – and it was just done instantly.’

Newly installed, with its first MD, Rough Trade completed the move spiritually as well as physically from Ladbroke Grove. The equal pay structure and co-operative ethos were abandoned in favour of a performance-related scheme and The Cartel was replaced with a centrally controlled distribution system. In its new offices, boasting such industry conventions as a receptionist and a layer of middle management, Rough Trade was now a small and reasonably orthodox version of a major entertainment conglomerate: record company, publishing company and distribution service, all contained in one central hub. These changes had been facilitated by The Smiths whose productivity ensured Rough Trade had a new release by the band at least once every six months. A far cry from its days of operating with a cleaning and cooking rota, Rough Trade was in the same cut-throat music market place as everyone else; it now even had a business plan and growth strategy courtesy of its new director.

‘Richard Powell came in after The Smiths, and there was money’, says Boon. ‘He had an interesting background, where he’d turned around the fortunes of a clock-making company in Clerkenwell, where there used to be lots of clockmakers, and they’d brought him in, but he’d had no experience of the record business whatsoever. He introduced something from Buckminster Fuller, the critical path. Every department was supposed to be self-financing, so you had your targets and you had to keep producing reports; there’s nothing wrong with that as a corrective managerial style but it’s very analytical.’

Powell arrived at a point when Rough Trade was solvent and, as he understood it, it was his job to keep it that way. The income from The Smiths ensured that the company’s creditors could be paid off and the various international facets of the business – Rough Trade Germany, Rough Trade America and Rough Trade Benelux – could all be run centrally. While such ratification made managerial sense, there were still inherent risks lurking under the veneer of professionalism creeping into the day-to-day running of Collier Street. The new building was large and expensive to run: although negotiated on highly favourable terms, there were various clauses in its usage that prevented it from being considered an asset. More immediately, should The Smiths break up or decide to leave the label, Rough Trade’s one source of real income would be gone. Added to this were the ever-present tensions between the label and distribution. Nevertheless, cosmetically at least, for the first time Rough Trade gave the impression of a company with its house in order. ‘There was a coherent structure,’ says Boon. ‘All this mess of where the pots of money were coming from and going to got tidied up, so it became the Rough Trade group of companies, with corporate notepaper. All of the points are arguable and Geoff had big issues about it, but there was a sense of control, but it was a very inward-looking structure, it was constantly analysing itself.’

In the rush to add to the roster, many of the label’s older acts were feeling marginalised. Rough Trade’s identity as a label was also being diluted by the volume of new artists arriving on the release schedule. In between the first Smiths album and Hatful of Hollow, Rough Trade had released ten albums; between Hatful of Hollow and Meat Is Murder that figure doubled. ‘The Go Betweens had been on an upward trajectory and got eclipsed totally by The Smiths,’ says Dave Harper, ‘and it got very bitter, “Fucking Geoff won’t return our calls, we’re going round in this shithole van and its not really happening.” By Collier Street there were more acts, The Woodentops, James Blood Ulmer, there was loads of stuff, some of it very interesting but none of it was commercial. There was no strategy: the game was on but it was ignorance. It was a scatter-gun approach. Scott Piering and I said, “We’ve had enough of this,” and left.’

The combined successes of Blanco y Negro and The Smiths meant that, whatever anyone thought of Rough Trade’s hippieish beginnings, Travis was now something of a quiet force in the music industry. Rough Trade Records could sign whatever it liked without the need for agreement of the other parts of the company. If Rough Trade Distribution didn’t approve of the label signing an act on aesthetic or commercial grounds, Travis could wave it through by using his Blanco y Negro funds. ‘Geoff would bring something to the table that he was interested in,’ says Boon, ‘but if the meeting didn’t like it he’d say, “Well, I’ll pay for it myself, then.” Geoff had become a conduit to major sources of capital.’

As Richard Powell’s process of rationalisation began, the utopian regionalism of The Cartel came to an end as Collier Street became the central point of Rough Trade Distribution.

Richard Scott had by now all but lost interest in the entire Rough Trade project. Barely on speaking terms with Travis, he scratched around the three floors of the new building wondering what it was all for. ‘I could see the changes happening in the market,’ he says, ‘and that the Rough Trade label just wasn’t competing. Apart from The Smiths there was nothing else. Also, the actual distribution side was going to have to be organised in a totally different and business-like way, which meant that it was becoming less and less interesting.’

While the day-to-day operation of Rough Trade may have become homogenised, that didn’t stop the new tier of product managers taking on more and more clients. The number of labels Rough Trade Distribution was handling since relocating to Kings Cross had almost tripled. The company’s overall market share had increased significantly; just like its new corporate notepaper, it gave the impression of a new business dynamic at work in Collier Street. The reality was that if Rough Trade had all this new space to fill, Richard Powell needed to make sure every corner was occupied with as much productivity as possible. It was all turnover.

‘It grew completely out of proportion,’ says Scott. ‘It came from Richard Powell, who we brought in to do exactly what he did with his MBA – just to sort of deal with it all, which he did extremely effectively. That only failed because in the end he and the rest of the management, Simon Edwards and Dave Whitehead, had actually decided there was no future dealing with Geoff.’

To the likes of Liz Naylor, who was working with Boon editing Rough Trade’s in-house industry paper, The Catalogue, this attempt at professionalism was merely a presentational device to project a well-oiled machine: a machine whose functionality proved that the success of The Smiths was no fluke and that Rough Trade was serious about being a competitor. ‘We just wanted to get pissed and take drugs,’ says Naylor, ‘because that’s what we thought you do. That was coaching from Richard Boon as to how you ran a record company: take enormous amounts of sulphates and run around and Geoff was like, “What are these people doing here?”’

Clearing his desk in preparation for his departure, Dave Harper could sense imminent collapse at Collier Street, whatever the attempts at streamlining. ‘The Richard Scott and Geoff thing was becoming an issue,’ says Harper, ‘and Richard Powell, a lovely bloke but completely unprepared for it, was trying to come to terms with the fact they were all heading for a disaster. It was clear the building was too big, as was the overhead, and there was probably a recession and there was still so much anger and tension and revolution in the air. Not 1970s Blenheim Crescent revolution but anger at the fact Geoff was burning through all the money they were making.’

Travis’s day-to-day dealings keeping up with The Smiths and whomever the band had just appointed as their manager took up the bulk of his time. He increasingly distanced himself from the managerial preoccupations of Rough Trade’s new officer class and concentrated on what he both enjoyed most and did best: immersing himself in working with his bands, and signing as many new acts as he could lay his hands on. The growing popularity of The Smiths and guitar music in general meant Travis was bombarded with new music, nearly all of which he ignored as his preferred method of A&R was seeing the potential in bands when they started to play live. Cerne Canning, a teenage Smiths obsessive, was hired as his A&R assistant to help Travis sort out a mountain of unlistened-to material. ‘I got a job at Rough Trade with Geoff clearing his tapes,’ says Canning. ‘He had brought over five hundred tapes in black carrier bags with him from Blenheim Crescent and everyone was moaning that they were blocking his office and couldn’t get through.’

It wasn’t just Travis who was drowning in cheaply recorded material. Much to Richard Powell’s disbelief, Rough Trade had lost control of the number of labels it was distributing. The company’s informal agreements to both manufacture and distribute almost anyone who walked through the door had gone beyond altruism to the point of liability. The new economies of scale of the critical path could no longer afford to tie up tens of thousands of pounds in a never-ending series of small-scale 7-inch singles – records that were released with enthusiasm but with very little ambition other than making a brief appearance somewhere near the bottom of the Indie chart and a paternal boost from John Peel. The success of Rough Trade’s contemporaries like Mute and 4AD guaranteed the company a healthy turnover from distribution, but it was increasingly being spent on labels with little prospect of repeating the success of their inspiration.

‘There were smaller labels’, says Dave Harper’s brother, Simon, who had been newly recruited by Rough Trade as a product manager, ‘not lacking in any passion, but the people running the labels were maybe having to hold down full-time jobs. Labels like Pink Records or the Subway Organisation, those guys were as passionate as anyone else but they were still at that stage when they didn’t necessarily have the man hours to do their children justice.’

Small ‘bedroom’ record companies, like Vindaloo Records in Birmingham, Bristol’s Subway Organisation and Ron Johnson Records, which was based in Derbyshire, were a new generation of micro labels that had sprung up as a result of the localism of The Cartel and been one of its grassroots successes. Wandering into their local independent retailer they could quickly arrange a production and distribution deal with Rough Trade. From Long Eaton, Ron Johnson would mange nearly forty releases without the need for regular trips to London. While rarely breaking out beyond a John Peel play and a run around the back rooms of provincial pubs, there was an energy and DIY sensibility at work that presented a genuine alternative both to the mainstream itself and to the mainstream indie crossover of The Smiths, New Order and Depeche Mode. For a music industry that still had four weekly music newspapers to fill, the enthusiasm of the bands at least provided copy, even if their labels were bereft of an advertising budget.

‘A Peel session was a very big deal,’ says Canning. ‘The bands that are now seen as key to the era would only play in front of forty people. The June Brides, the Shop Assistants, McCarthy – very few of those bands would ever play to a hundred people.’

The camaraderie of life-on-the-dole independence as lived by the roster of Vindaloo and Subway was one that was wholly shared by the staff at the Rough Trade Warehouse who would find themselves selling, packing and shipping records by the Nightingales and McCarthy into whichever shops would take them. ‘To me, watching the Nightingales in a pub felt much more of a genuine experience than anything else,’ says Liz Naylor. ‘They managed to play on some television show and we were in the warehouse watching and the whole place was cheering, but it was as if no one else in the building gave a fuck. It all felt very upstairs–downstairs.’

‘I remember doing a show with Vindaloo,’ says Canning. ‘There were only a hundred-odd people in the room and about sixty of them were Rough Trade-affiliated staff and they were all singing along to every word of Ted Chippington’s set.’

The gulf between Rough Trade, Factory, 4AD and Mute and the hundreds of smaller labels now passing through Rough Trade was pronounced. As the steady stream of willing amateurs sketched out an imaginary release schedule for the benefit of whichever label manager at Rough Trade they needed to convince, the company was doing little more than chasing its tail and hoping it might be backing a winner.

If the patronage of Rough Trade was still the only real way of making a record happen, another newcomer with a plastic bag of demos under his arm was, in his head at least, far more interested in the kind of language that had long since been banished from Rough Trade – if it had ever even been heard in the first place – along with sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, there was another crucial aspect to his desire: money.

‘I can remember, on a really hot summer’s day’, says Richard Scott, ‘Simon Edwards, who’s a man I have a lot of time for, said he had this new guy that he wanted me to meet. I was sitting outside on the pavement by the Malt & Hops and this person turns up in full leathers – on this blisteringly hot day –and says, “All right, I’m Alan McGee.” We sat down and I asked him, “What do you want from your label?” And he replied, “I want to make a million quid.”’

‘I’m pretty sure,’ says McGee, ‘I said I wanted his secretary as well, but because it was Rough Trade I don’t think he even had one. I couldn’t give a fuck about all that worthy indie bullshit, I got into music to have a mansion, take drugs and shag beautiful women, really, to be honest. And I remember feeling pretty gutted when we started releasing Jasmine Minks records and I thought that fucking mansion was pretty far away.’

As a teenager in Glasgow, McGee, a redhead with an interrogatory stare, had been a regular audience member of the kind of punk shows which had so bemused Edwyn Collins and Alan Horne, where the combination of theatrical aggression and onstage noise led to such a release of rabid male hormones in the audience that fights would erupt amid the spit, sweat and spilt McEwans before the first number had come to an end. ‘What people really forget about punk,’ says McGee, ‘is that it was more like going to a football match, just really macho. You could be standing at a Damned gig in ’78 and it would just go mental. I remember turning round and somebody punching this little guy, and it was such a strong punch the guy went about eight foot back before he fell down. Every gig was like that in Glasgow, fucking mental.’

Trying his hand as a bassist in a succession of embryonic punk and New Wave bands, first H_2O then Newspeak, McGee, a Rangers fan, had chosen music over football while holding down a day job as a clerk with British Rail, a job that, should he decide to take the plunge and follow the bright lights of the big city, he could transfer to London – a decision that was given impetus by a run-in with a fellow punk audience member.

‘Some guy threatened to stab me cause he thought I was a poseur who was a punk,’ says McGee. ‘He liked to decide who were the poseurs and who were the real punks. How the fuck you could think a guy with ginger hair was a poseur, I don’t know, but I remember thinking this guy had allegedly stabbed a lot of people, so when Innes from Primal Scream said, “Let’s go to London and be pop stars,” it sounded like quite a good idea.’ The pop group Innes and McGee had started was called The Laughing Apple.

London at the tail end of 1980 felt impenetrable and lifeless to Innes and McGee. Falling back on his considerable reserves of enthusiasm for whatever had his attention at the time, McGee started a fanzine called Communication Blur, which slowly grew into a semi-regular music night, the Communication Club. Taking their name from a Donovan track, The Laughing Apple found kindred spirits in the scene growing up around the Television Personalities, who had evolved from their earlier trash-song beginnings into a permanently Sixties-referencing pop-art band. Like Postcard, but without the exuberant disco inflections or commercial hooks, the Television Personalities were drawing heavily on references from the past. Ignoring the modern world in favour of an acute mod-into-psych reading of Swinging London, the Television Personalities and their label Whaam! were permanently framed by the black-and-white psychedelia of 1966, all refracted through their singer and songwriter Dan Treacy’s faux-naif voice. If the original Sixties flower children had been dreaming of re-entering the garden, the Television Personalities imagined themselves as schoolboys bunking off to audition as extras in Ready Steady Go!

‘There wasn’t anything going on at that point,’ says Joe Foster, who as bassist in the Television Personalities quickly became one of McGee’s closest friends and confidants. ‘There was psychobilly at the Hammersmith Clarendon Klub Foot where Nick Cave played and that’s all that was going on, so we wanted to do something very different.’

Foster, a keen student of rock history since his early teens, was a fount of knowledge when it came to the long-deleted records that he rightly considered ripe for reinvestigation. ‘Joe Foster was a train-spotter, and the hidden genius behind nearly all of it,’ says McGee. ‘He got me and a lot of people into a lot of stuff, Big Star, Velvet Underground, Fred Neil, Dylan. But his speciality was bad-behaviour bands and Joe was into bad behaviour by default because of his records.’

The bad-behaviour bands: Love, the Seeds, the Rolling Stones in their mid-Sixties imperial phase and all their imitators on the Nuggets and Pebbles compilations were to hold great sway over McGee and Foster as they started a new club, The Living Room, on Tottenham Court Road, upstairs at The Roebuck pub. The Living Room quickly developed into a small but enthusiastic scene, championing both new bands that met the three-minute psych criteria, as well as more established or partially forgotten acts that represented a lifeline back to the Sixties-inspired end of punk. Booked for either a Friday or Saturday night, The Living Room became a watering hole for anyone willing enough to imagine that it was part of a thriving underground network. A live compilation of acts playing at the club, ‘produced’ by Joe Foster with the sound quality of someone hitting a biscuit tin, Alive at The Living Room became the first release on the new record label McGee had decided to launch with his proceeds from the club, Creation.

‘We were kids really,’ says McGee. ‘I was twenty-three when I started Creation. I met Joe when I was twenty-two and to be honest I probably didn’t really know that much about music or the music business.’ Though lively and often sold to well beyond its fire-safety capacity, The Living Room was still firmly on the margins of the London live scene. In McGee and Foster’s heads, however, a new leather-trousered revolution was building to rival the Sunset Strip or Detroit in their mid-Sixties heyday. ‘We wanted to simultaneously be Sky Saxon and the new Motown,’ says Foster, ‘so we had to create a whole scene, a whole happening thing with loads of people. The thing was, we didn’t have loads of people so we pretended to be loads of people as well.’

Complementing the name of the label, taken from the British Sixties mod-garage band in excelsis, The Creation, the track listing of Alive at The Living Room reads like a best-of-Sixties garage-band drug songs. The Pastels cover Red Crayola’s ‘Hurricane Fighter Plane’, and the Jasmine Minks turn in a knock-kneed version of a Love song as well as a primitive run-through of Alvin Lee’s ‘Green Fuz’, as featured on Pebbles, volume two. ‘By the time we were playing our first shows in London, there was a massive lean to Sixties revivalism going on,’ says the Pastels’ Stephen McRobbie. ‘There were all these Sixties psych clubs and TV Personalities had that aspect. Dan Treacy released our records and I think we played maybe six shows with them just after we started. People could see photographs of the Byrds and Love and the Velvet Underground more easily, and everyone was bored with the punk-rock look. There was also an escapism in a way, because there was something depressing about the middle of the 1980s, very much so.’

Most of the clientele and performers at The Living Room rejected or loathed most contemporary music. A new release at the start of 1985 had as much impact as if it had been released by the latest music-press-sponsored buzz band. VU was a collection of lost mid-period Velvet Underground tracks restored to their original multitrack clarity. While a few of the songs had been previously available on low-quality bootlegs, the sound of ‘Stephanie Says’ and ‘Foggy Notion’ released in crystal-clear fidelity was a vindication of all that McGee, Foster and Treacy held dear. In comparison to the high-gloss smiles of the mid-Eighties charts acts, in the accompanying photographs to VU the Velvet Underground, in all their amphetamine black-and-white glory looked like the ultimate pop-art aristocracy. Anyone at The Living Room without a striped top, Sterling Morrison fringe or motorcycle boots now needed no encouragement to make the necessary purchases.

A band that had missed inclusion on Alive at The Living Room, but had regularly played there, was McGee’s new group, Biff Bang Pow, whose guitarist, Dick Green became the third member alongside McGee and Foster in the loose business partnership of Creation Records. Less extrovert than either Foster or McGee, Green, who was as much in love with the Creation mission of ‘Pushin’ Too Hard’ as his partners, had also studied for a degree.

‘Dick was handling a lot of the more adminy type things which Alan and I couldn’t grasp,’ says Foster. ‘He had the facility for doing that, which is not to suggest that he was somehow the straight man, which is what people sometimes assume. He was just as bad as the rest of us, he just had a particular area of expertise that was very important.’ As Creation was starting to try to turn into a real-life record company, McGee was signalling to his fellow ex-teenage punks in Glasgow to follow him down and join in the fun; one of them, Bobby Gillespie had started their own club – Splash One. Taking its name from a Thirteenth Floor Elevators song, Splash One shared the aesthetics and playlist of The Living Room with the addition of a forward-looking mix of contemporary music.

‘I knew Bob before Splash One,’ says McRobbie. ‘Bobby was the person that could get sleeves made because he worked in a printmakers. I really like Bobby. I think our personalities were very different even then, but I really liked him, and he was a really smart, intelligent guy and very uncompromising and passionate. Splash One was the place to go and they played fantastic music, and it had something semi-permanent about the fact it was always on a Sunday.’

As well as having immaculately prepared cassettes ready to play over the PA between the bands, Splash One had a self-confidence in its unique position, via Gillespie and McGee’s regular phone calls, of being able to book The Living Room bands for their only Scottish date. Glasgow also had a thriving scene in new DIY groups in the Postcard style: bands like BMX Bandits, the Soup Dragons, the Pastels and Edinburgh’s Shop Assistants were able to fill the club and brought along with them a Glaswegian bohemian attitude; both male and female audience members would take knitting to the Sunday afternoon sessions – a clear indicator that the Orange Juice sense of Warholian style was flourishing once more in the city.

After Alive at The Living Room, Creation issued a series of singles by bands that regularly appeared on the club’s flyers. Housed in fold-over paper sleeves printed by Gillespie in Glasgow, the Revolving Paint Dream’s ‘Flowers in the Sky’ or Jasmine Minks’ ‘Think!’, on cursory listens, gave the distinct impression that, while the audience of The Living Room may have known their way around the Nuggets and Pebbles compilations, their records were likely to remain a minority interest to anyone but the most regular visitors of the upstairs room of The Roebuck pub. Anyone unlucky enough to come across the two singles Creation released by a fanzine writer, The Legend!, who also went by the pseudonym Everett True, would be struck by their baffling incompetency. Both ‘73 in ’83’ and ‘Destroys the Blues’ were the sound of scrawled late-night editorials half-barked and half-mumbled inside a cheap recording studio – running commentaries on a niche part of the independent music industry that largely existed only in The Legend!’s head.

It was a band from nearby East Kilbride which had passed on a demo to Gillespie at Splash One that enabled Creation to take a step up from its Sixties fetishisation and back up its daydream hyperbole with a record of visceral rock ’n’ roll. ‘Creation was more a kind of theoretical project if you like,’ says Foster. ‘Songs had been written and stuff was being done, but nothing much had really been solidified, but Bobby brought the Mary Chain down and it all kicked off.’

‘When they signed the Mary Chain,’ says McRobbie ‘that felt like an incredible step up, like something far more vibrant and exciting was starting to happen. They looked amazing, too, like a real gang. In the Pastels, our style was more like ramblers or something.’ The label’s twelfth release, The Jesus and Mary Chain’s ‘Upside Down’ took the Velvets’ love of Motown and feedback for a walk around a Lanarkshire new town at chucking-out time. It had an urgency and aggression that everything else on the label lacked. The very act of putting on the single, which Foster and the band had recorded while the mixing desk was overheating with distortion – only for McGee to remix it to the point where the mastering engineer found it almost impossible to cut – tested the listener’s faith in preserving their hi-fi. The fact that underneath the noise was the best-constructed pop song Creation had released was now proof, as McGee was pointing out to anything that moved, that the label was walking the walk. Best of all, Creation had scored a hit: the first pressing of the single sold a remarkable 14,000 copies, beginning a run at the top of the independent charts that lasted until the single had sold over 35,000 copies. The Jesus and Mary Chain were on the way to becoming a genuine phenomenon and meeting instant music press hype.

‘Alan used to get these 7-inch PVC bags and sleeves shipped down from Glasgow into London,’ says Simon Harper, ‘and we used to sleeve those singles in one of the many offices at Collier Street, and we just couldn’t keep up. Everyone wanted it; it was such an important record. We couldn’t keep up with demand just in terms of the speed it was taking us to sleeve them.’

Simon Harper was one of McGee’s allies at Rough Trade, a place that he and Foster were, with their more carnivorous tastes, becoming increasingly tired of. The success of ‘Upside Down’ suddenly meant the press and the rest of the industry were taking notice of McGee and Creation beyond the niche of The Living Room. McGee talked up Creation and the Jesus and Mary Chain in the Loog Oldham/Tin Pan Alley vernacular, happily admitting he wanted whatever showbusiness might throw his way, especially money. Putting as much psychological distance between Creation and the company that was still funding it as possible, McGee was often entertaining, and started to win the ear of a certain section of the music press. McGee’s firebrand patter was becoming increasingly pharmaceutically assisted. ‘I just took whatever Joe put in front of me,’ he says, ‘and we were off. I didn’t even know what it was half the time.’

Foster in particular had always felt that the Television Personalities were never taken as seriously by Rough Trade as they deserved. Their debut single, ‘Part Time Punks’, which Travis had released on Rough Trade, had sold over 30,000 copies, but Foster felt the TVPs had been passed over in favour of the more intellectual Scritti Politti. Green Gartside in particular is still an object of Foster’s decorous ire: ‘They were always pushing their intelligence in people’s faces in the music,’ says Foster. ‘So where is your book? You’re not actually smart enough to write a fucking book are you?’ Now, as Creation’s house producer and provocateur-in-chief, Foster was feeling equally patronised by Rough Trade. ‘At the end of the day they just weren’t cool,’ he says. ‘They just liked the kind of cool music that you’d like if you were an estate agent who read the Guardian, they liked Bob Marley … fucking hell … yeah, sure you do.’

Creation thrived on confrontation, partly as a tribute to punk and partly because McGee, whose thick speed-assisted brogue was delivered so quickly as to occasionally render it impenetrable, felt patronised by the management at Collier Street. ‘Joe hated them worse than me,’ says McGee. ‘I saw them as condescending middle-class wankers and I just wanted to ram one right up their arse, so it was just war, class warfare, for me, so I didn’t really give a fuck how I achieved my ends, as long as I beat them.’

While despising Rough Trade, McGee would nevertheless have to deal with Geoff Travis as the Jesus and Mary Chain, after months of maximum shock value one-off London shows and the occasional full-scale riot, eventually signed to Blanco y Negro. As their manager McGee, with the band’s full co-operation, had played out his Malcolm McLaren fantasies using The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle maxim, cash from chaos, to stoke both an atmosphere of hostility in the band’s concerts and their asking price for signing to a major. All of this played well in the media, which quickly fell into line with a ‘New Sex Pistols’ reflex. But when Travis met the band in the Reid brothers’ parents’ front room in East Kilbride, it was no more confrontational a signing than if he’d been discussing a new recording with their imminent Blanco y Negro label mates Dream Academy or Everything but the Girl. ‘There was an attempt at provocation from Alan,’ says Travis, ‘but basically the band wanted to sign to a real record company; by then they’d had enough of messing about on Creation.’

Quickly realising that Travis had the best of both worlds by running Rough Trade as well as having access to major-label budgets for Blanco y Negro, McGee used his growing reputation to talk Rob Dickins at Warners into funding his own version of Blanco – an imprint called Elevation. The first two Elevation releases would allow two of Creation’s brightest prospects, Primal Scream and the Weather Prophets – Pete Astor’s wispish north London bedsit version of Creedence – to record their debut albums in professional recording studios as well as get a full major-label marketing push.

However, excited to have negotiated a deal out of them, McGee himself was a little adrift within the Warner Brothers Kensington High Street offices. He had, though, found an ally in Mick Houghton, who was handling PR for both Elevation and the Jesus and Mary Chain. ‘I’m sure Alan would say this himself,’ says Houghton. ‘He didn’t have a clue what he was doing, and Elevation certainly killed off the Weather Prophets and all but killed off Primal Scream.’

While Blanco y Negro went from strength to strength, cornering a foothold in the coffee-table market with Everything but the Girl as well as full support from the music papers, Elevation would singularly fail to live up to expectations. Both the Weather Prophets’ Mayflower and Primal Scream’s Sonic Flower Groove would, by Warner Brothers’ standards, sink without trace. There was another crucial difference. ‘I think Warners were a bit scared of Geoff,’ says Houghton. ‘They just thought he was a bit too smart for them, which he probably was. Geoff didn’t indulge in the rock ’n’and roll lifestyle. I always felt like I was in the presence of a schoolmaster who was sort of saying, “You’re a bit too old to be behaving like that.” He was probably right, but at the time it was great.’

Another member of the Warner A&R staff who found corporate life difficult to deal with was Bill Drummond who, having relinquished control of Echo & The Bunnymen, was held on by their parent company in an A&R consulting role; negotiating the power politics of the managerial decision makers around Dickins was something he had only a listless, passing interest in, a way of killing time while he was considering his next move. ‘I’d fucked myself,’ says Drummond. ‘I’d even bought a Paul Smith suit.’ Bumping into McGee in Warner Brothers, Drummond found someone who felt even more isolated from the executive processes but whose enthusiasm had remained undimmed. ‘He was totally into it all,’ says Drummond. ‘He’d done the deal for Elevation and it was a complete disaster. At that point he was as bad as me, you know, stick whatever he’s got into a major record company and see what happens and it’s just no good, that’ll never work.’

Drummond had been among the first to hear what McGee was bringing into Warners, and was struggling to see the connection between McGee’s enthusiastic flights of hyperbole and the finished recorded product that was played on the boardroom stereo. ‘I was aware of the Mary Chain,’ says Drummond. ‘We’d have a weekly A&R meeting at WEA and Max Hole, who was head of A&R, played this tape of a cat being taken hostage and I just thought it was rubbish. But McGee started making a presence in the building. He’d come round and get to know me and it’s like he thought, there’s that guy, he was in the Bunnymen.’

Making contact with Drummond was one of the few positive outcomes of McGee’s dalliance with Warners and having caught the ear of one of his heroes McGee was quick to share in the delights of the Creation roster, taking Drummond to one side for a close listen and discussion about the merits of the Moodists, Meat Whiplash and demos for the Primal Scream album.

‘He played me these things,’ says Drummond, ‘and I thought, this is rubbish, this is all rubbish, what are you talking about, “This is the greatest this that and the other.” I can’t hear it, these are badly made records, cheaply made records, but I found him endearing, you know, I found him – whatever.’

Finally tiring of Warners and the industry in general, at the ripe old age of thirty-three and a third Drummond decided to retire and issued a suitably self-mythologising press statement.

The very gesture of turning a resignation letter into a state-of-the-union address highlighted Drummond’s unique sense of occasion. ‘In some ways Bill was the best manager I think I ever worked with,’ says Houghton, ‘in terms of being an amazing catalyst and such an inspirational figure, but he was an appalling businessman, he really was. I probably did more of the relationship with the record company than he did because he just couldn’t deal with them. He didn’t feel comfortable with them.’

Drummond’s first decision upon ‘leaving the industry’ was to reverse roles and become a recording artist. ‘When I decided I was going to leave the music business for ever, I’m like, I want to make a record: write the songs in a week, make the album, release it and that’s it,’ he says. ‘I went along to McGee and said, “Look, I wanna do this, do you wanna put it out?” He says, “Yeah,” instantly. He didn’t even ask me what sort of music it was let alone, you know, the songs. So I went and did the whole thing and just took it round to his flat. And he was dumbfounded; he couldn’t understand how I’d made this record. Just couldn’t believe it.’

Listening to the album, which Drummond entitled The Man, is to be transported to the back room of an out-of-the-way pub in rural Dumfries & Galloway. In a rich brogue Drummond and a pick-up band rattle through eleven songs that combine those self-mythologising tendencies with Highlands surrealism. Its most remarked-upon song was ‘Julian Cope Is Dead’, a frontiersman’s response to Teardrop Explodes’ ‘Bill Drummond Said’. For a rendition of Robert Burns’ ‘Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation’, Drummond also invited his father, a Presbyterian minister, to recite the poem in his authoritarian and empathetic voice, accompanied only by a few notes on a banjo and the sound of wind blowing across the glen.

‘The Man is one of the most extraordinary records ever made actually,’ says Mick Houghton. ‘It was a cross between C86 and Ivor Cutler or something. I don’t think anyone else would’ve put that record out, and equally I don’t think anyone else could have made that record.’

‘It’s absolute genius,’ says McGee. ‘I nearly drowned when I heard it. I had no idea that he was going to be singing in a broad Scottish accent and I’m lying in the bath and it was like “and the eyes and the trees of the nation” … it was all pulling me under the water.’

Like all of the records Creation released, The Man was recorded in a matter of days but, with around five to ten years’ experience of both life and the record business and replete with backing singers and pedal steel, it has an alluring confidence in its simple arrangements and Drummond’s clear Lord Summerisle-style singing. Compared to the lost-in-reverb fumblings of the majority of the label’s early catalogue, The Man sounds like a gleefully recorded middle-of-the-road country and western album. It also, upon very close listening, reveals signifiers of Drummond’s future artistic direction.

‘Apart from it being genius, the great thing is, if you listen to that record you can hear The KLF in that fucking record,’ says McGee. ‘His arrangements of the pedal steel – four years later it’s the fucking KLF. I don’t mean it’s melodically The KLF, it’s the same way that it’s fucking put together. The pedal steel moves are acid house KLF. I couldn’t believe why he’d want to put a record out with me ’cause at that point we’d done fuck all really.’

The sound of Drummond intoning his approval of ‘dirty girls’ on ‘I Believe in Rock and Roll’ over a shabby acoustic guitar may be light years away for the stadium house grandeur of The KLF, but there are certainly cadences of some of the imagery that would follow as The KLF developed their myth on the grand stage. In the lyrics to ‘I’m the King of Joy’, ‘I’ve a heart like a Viking with the faith of a child/Have you ever heard the song “Born To Be Wild”?’, the Norse biker archetype that would be a feature of KLF videos is certainly present. Somewhat more prosaically, Drummond admits, ‘Alan might be on to something actually. I only know three chords.’

However much fun he was having by revelling in the capriciousness of his heroes, the reality for McGee was that Creation was stumbling around trying to turn its attitude into a coherent release schedule. Elevation had been no small failure, although as manager of the Jesus and Mary Chain McGee had not only earned himself a decent living, but he had also funnelled his share of the band’s income back into Creation. The label was still his priority, but meant little to anyone beyond his wider circle and their imaginary parallel Sixties punk universe. His fingers burned, McGee was determined to carry on his way, writing off Elevation as a failed experiment that had been condemned from birth by the short-sightedness of the suits at Warners. Moving Creation out of his front room, he set up camp in Hatton Garden, in one of the smallest rooms in a suite of maintained offices on Clerkenwell Road, in premises that had been found by Dave Harper while relocating from Rough Trade.

‘It was really cheap,’ says Harper. ‘Alan came in, then Wayne Morris, who managed the Primitives and sort of ran Lazy Records, followed. It was a very vibrant time, because everyone was doing more or less the same things. There was a pub opposite – and we weren’t too far from Collier Street, but believe me that was irrelevant.’

The tenants of 83 Clerkenwell Road all had ambitions beyond what they had left behind at Rough Trade. Harper and his partner Nikki Kefalas, with their newly formed Out Promotions, were handling Factory, Mute, Creation and 4AD, and they were regularly approached by the majors, whom the likes of Morris and McGee were perpetually working on to try to fleece a budget for their charges. The sense of hustle and enjoyment and of being in the heart of a more celebratory and less austere part of the industry, at least compared to the dowdiness of Collier Street, was given an added frisson by the character of the other occupants in the building.

‘There was a weird guy there who had been a plugger at a major,’ says Harper. ‘He was really sad, because he used to be Elton John’s plugger. He was desperate for friends and wired, and he had coke, and there was a private investigator opposite that was screwing the daughter of the woman who ran the front desk. He claimed to have worked undercover in Belfast and had had an axe put through his head – it was all very hush-hush. The place was full of all these really odd people – the music ones were sort of normal.’

It was an environment in which McGee couldn’t help but flourish. Despite the prevalence of attitude over anything else, especially record sales, Creation and McGee were, thanks partly to their largesse when it came to hospitality and the cutting-edge success of the Jesus and Mary Chain, considered a record company on the up. ‘NME at that time was quite obsessed with Creation,’ says Houghton, who was now the label’s PR, ‘and at that time the NME was king, not that Melody Maker people would accept that, but they kind of were.’

Very much wanting to project themselves as kings of speed, leather and sunglasses – a fanzine writer’s version of a biker outlaw – McGee and Foster along with most their charges were out every night, even if the extent of their decadence was the upstairs room of a north London pub and a tinny PA. ‘It sort of goes back to journalists actually being very naive,’ says Houghton. ‘At that point there was very little debauchery around the Creation offices. They were kind of like silly schoolboys, getting pissed and taking too much speed, but equally that was the extent of the debauchery of most music journalists. The most debauched band I worked with at that point was Talking Heads and they did it in style, fantastic parties, and they were very smart people. Compared to that, Creation was really quite provincial.’

A new addition to the Creation roster was Nick Currie who, now recording as Momus, had released a debut album, Circus Maximus, on él, a new label that the quickly rejuvenated Mike Alway had founded after his unsuccessful attempt at being a more conventional record industry player with Blanco y Negro. él was Alway, even by his standards, at his most quixotic. If Alway’s ideas for Cherry Red and Blanco had been a stylish and curatorial approach to the trends of the day, él was going to be something else entirely. Financed by a magnanimous Iain McNay, who was prepared to take Alway back into the fold at Cherry Red, él’s roster would be populated largely by figments of Alway’s vivid imagination.

Thinking as an auteur rather than as an A&R man, Alway had no interest whatsoever in scouting out whichever bands were playing on the first rung of the live circuit for él.

‘I stopped going to shows. I was just so bored with it,’ he says. ‘I watched a lot of television, and long-forgotten films, and went back over all this and started to put a label together based on all that. Admittedly, I saw things in a very Arcadian type of way – I wanted it to be this mixture of Surbiton meets Tuscany. You couldn’t go out in Richmond and buy a cup of coffee, so I spent most of my life in the West End in Soho in Old Compton Street, or up where the offices used to be in Bayswater, which were really cosmopolitan places where you could drink espresso all day and it was the best stuff.’

Alongside Momus, the él roster featured The King of Luxembourg, the Would Be Goods and Bad Dream Fancy Dress, all distillations of Alway’s current tastes: the gentle but fractious Sixties Eastman colour Sunday afternoon of Joseph Losey’s Accident interrupted by a visit from the cast of a Lance Percival B-movie. ‘I tried to make it like you would direct a film,’ says Alway. ‘You would have an idea of what you saw there and you would basically get the personnel that was appropriate to put that together. All the bands were basically grotesque enlargements of certain parts of their character.’

In Simon Fisher Turner, who had been Jonathan King’s child protégé, Alway had the perfect character actor to cast as The King of Luxembourg. Turner, who simultaneously composed soundtracks for Derek Jarman’s films during his ‘career’ as The King of Luxembourg, had, having been David and Angie Bowie’s babysitter of choice, a wealth of imagery and anecdotes to draw on. Covering songs like the Television Personalities’ ‘Picture of Dorian Gray’, Alway and Turner supercharged Sixties revivalism with something that had been missing from The Living Room and Splash One: high camp. Bad Dream Fancy Dress’s album Choirboy Gas was produced by Turner (who described his tenure at él as ‘like being a pantomime dame’); featuring such tracks as ‘Leigh-on-Sea’ and ‘The Supremes’, it mixed girl-group infatuation with seaside fish and chips, as if The Leather Boys had been the subject of ‘Leader of the Pack’. The Would Be Goods were named after an E. Nesbit book and their leader, Jessica Griffin, sang in an accent worthy of Jenny Agutter in The Railway Children. A couplet from the Would Be Goods’ debut single, ‘The Camera Loves Me’, ‘Another gin and tonic and I’m yours for sure/They never took my photograph like this before,’ sung as woodwind flutters around Griffin’s debutante ingénue delivery, encapsulates the él world of deportment, intoxication and a very British sense of pop abandon. ‘I was going back to the Monkees,’ says Alway, ‘and trying to add art.’

él’s sleeves certainly carried the air of an exhibit. With soft pastel labels and Kodachrome-style photography, the imagery, along with the acute lower-case ‘e’ on él, looked like travel brochures from a future where Huxley had written the characters of Brideshead Revisited into Brave New World.

‘él was about a world that was coming, a world of espresso and everything being out of doors, and affability,’ says Alway, ‘and none of this mean, nine-to-five stuff and a sad fried egg. It was the same thing that basically inspired Habitat; it was against things like stout.’

But if Alway had predicted the establishment’s naive yearning for a UK cafe society about fifteen years before it happened, his new label largely baffled the stalwarts of the independent-championing media. ‘I had quite good press with él in England actually,’ he says, ‘but Peel never supported me.’

Circus Maximus by Momus was él’s most successful release and had received favourable notices, thanks in part to Momus being a character drawn largely from Currie’s rather than Alway’s imagination. Momus was able to thrill journalists by referencing Brel and Bataille with the conviction of an erudite Edinburgh graduate exploring the impulses behind perversion. Circus Maximus was also a record that had held McGee’s attention.

The literate, caustic world of Momus was something of a leap for Creation to sign; though Currie did find common ground with McGee, as much with his interest in sex and decadence as with his learning. ‘I was getting a bit of press at the time in The Face and the NME,’ says Currie, ‘and I think Alan’s interest might have been perked by the fact I’d written an article about Jacques Brel in which I said that Brel was more thrilling and dangerous than a thousand Jesus and Mary Chains, and Alan had just lost them at that point, so maybe something in that resonated.’

Having left él, the first Momus album for Creation was the Gallic-flavoured song cycle The Poison Boyfriend, a record that shone a light into a meditative and reflective voyeur’s idea of romance. The opening line of ‘Closer to You’, ‘Maybe you’re the Circle Line girl’, muttered with claustrophobic intensity, confirmed that Currie’s ambitions were set in an entirely different context from the rest of Creation’s roster.

‘I think I told Alan at our first meeting that I wanted to be bigger than David Bowie,’ says Currie, ‘and he said, “Well, that’s great, because most people that come to me want to be bigger than the Mighty Lemon Drops.” I knew that Alan had a really positive profile with the press and that I’d get more attention on Creation that I had done at él, although aesthetically it would possibly be a more toxic environment in some ways and there would be a certain kind of hideous Sixties revivalism saying it all goes back to the Pebbles compilation.’

While Momus may have felt like a breath of fresh air to McGee as an act that was straying from the canon, Alway was casting his eye over material to sign to él that had nothing to do with music whatsoever. If his vision of an epicurean future of badinage and fresh air needed a front person, then he was convinced he’d found his man. ‘I wanted to make a record with Keith Floyd,’ says Alway. ‘I phoned him and his producer David Pritchard when they were shooting Floyd on Spain and he agreed. I thought, this guy’s a genius. He was saying, “We’re all idiots because we don’t eat fish.” It was a metaphor for things beyond food.’

Sadly, like many of Alway’s ideas, it was rich in its impulse but more difficult to turn into a reality and neither the meeting of minds nor the record came to fruition. At Cherry Red, Alway was struggling to get él taken seriously as a going concern. Iain McNay had joined the Rajneeshpuram community in Oregon, leaving the company in the hands of his label managers and publishers who, with their days spent working on royalty statements for Dead Kennedys and Tracey Thorn, were as mystified as anyone by Alway’s intentions. Meanwhile Currie’s decision to sign with Creation had allowed him to start thinking about making videos and taking McGee’s talk of world domination a little more seriously.

‘It was almost like Monopoly money with Mike,’ says Currie. ‘But there was a certain realpolitik in Alan’s discourse. He would call you into the office and say, “Look at this review in the Melody Maker, you’ve got half a page review here,” and on the facing page is some major-label album where they’ve spent £500,000 on it and they only got half a page as well. We spent £2,000 and we got the same amount of space in the music press.’

Six months earlier, a mile and a half north-west of Clerkenwell Road, Cerne Canning had an idea that he thought might help reconnect Rough Trade with the street-level buzz of the live sector in a way that had helped define the label in its infancy, something that had been missing since its move to King’s Cross. ‘Geoff and I were having conversations about how the live scene was sort of bubbling under,’ says Canning, who was promoting regularly at Bay 63, the former Acklam Hall in Ladbroke Grove. ‘McGee was doing The Living Room and Dan Treacy was putting on bands like Shop Assistants and the Pastels at his club Room at the Top, but I got the sense that Rough Trade wasn’t that bothered.’

Canning started promoting London shows for many of the bands Rough Trade distributed, ensuring that the likes of the Soup Dragons and Bogshed had a small foothold in the capital. Realising the bands could be collated into a spirit-of-DIY-type festival he booked five nights at the Hammersmith Riverside billed as ‘The Week of Wonders’ in October 1985. As well as featuring the June Brides and the Stone Roses playing their second London show, the week leaned heavily towards Creation whose night featured Joe Foster, the Pastels and the Membranes and an argument over the running order. Rough Trade’s latest signings, the Woodentops, who the label was hoping would develop some Smiths-style momentum, were also pitched heavily to the press. The result was that the week had the air of a showcase for the two most media-friendly companies. ‘I got in trouble with the other labels,’ says Canning, ‘for putting Rough Trade and Creation on the posters.’

The presentation of a cross-section of the DIY underground – an underground that was connected by occupying the same low-budget rung of the music business ladder rather than any musical style – caught the attention of the press, particularly the NME, which by the middle of the Eighties was facing stiff competition from the success of the style magazines and suffering one of its periodic crises of identity. Roughly divided into two camps, the paper was split between writers wanting to cover the innovative hip hop music emerging from the USA (along with its counterparts in electro and go-go) and those members of staff who were insistent that the paper stay loyal to its roots in the early Eighties as a champion of independent guitar-based music, the music with which its readership closely identified. The tendency to cover the more dynamic new sounds often won out; on the front page alongside writer bylines were pictures of Cameo, Mantronix and Schoolly D. The newspaper also attempted to appeal to the wider youth subculture, breaking out from exclusively covering music by running a series of cover stories on, for example, Jimmy White, the ubiquitous film Absolute Beginners and Olympian decathlete Daley Thompson, with the result that it came across as a Polytechnic version of The Face.

For the writers on the paper who still aligned themselves with guitar music and the indie charts it hosted every week, Canning’s mini-festival provided a sense of locus and occasion that they thought worthy of investment. ‘Out of the Week of Wonders I got approached to do the C86 live shows,’ says Canning, ‘which inspired the NME to do the cassette.’

C86, an NME-curated and cover-mounted cassette of the type of bands Canning was promoting, was an opportunity for the newspaper to realign itself with guitar music. The wider media, now run by many of those whose lives it had changed, had started the year noting that 1986 was the tenth anniversary of punk, prompting a protracted series of think pieces and histories. For its fans at NME, independent DIY guitar music, however amateurish in its conviction, was one of punk’s lasting legacies.

NME regularly cover-mounted tapes and flexi discs throughout the period. It had recently produced collections of northern soul tracks from the Kent label and on one cassette, entitled The Latin Kick, had tried to turn fans of The Fall and the Wedding Present on to the delights of Joe Bataan and the Fania All-Stars. The idea of doing a zeitgeist-defining tape of independent music was borrowed from C81, a cassette the NME had launched in conjunction with Rough Trade five years earlier. Featuring the Specials, Cabaret Voltaire, Orange Juice and Scritti Politti and others, C81 had captured the creativity and ambition of a sector of the music industry that, despite its hand-to-mouth precariousness, was awash with experimentation and ambition and that had its eyes fixed towards a future it was determined to write.

The twenty-two bands compiled five years later on C86 were at the apex of a very different career arc, drawn from labels that were taken seriously by fanzine editors and the staff of Rough Trade Warehouse but practically nowhere else. Close Lobsters, A Witness and the Shrubs, for example, were caught somewhere between a charitable John Peel session and a Top Ten appearance in the indie charts rather than the national Top Forty.

A week-long run featuring the bands on the tape was booked at the ICA for July. The NME heavily promoted the cassette and Rough Trade pressed up a vinyl edition. A few weeks after the tape had been played by its readership the newspaper began receiving letters complaining about the sound quality.

The recordings had been made cheaply and quickly and, inevitably for a collection of nascent bands still putting their first tentative steps into a recording studio, the results were mixed. While the energy of most of the groups was not in doubt, especially those like Stump and Bogshed who were used to working up a cider-and-black-fuelled crowd, the sense of being underwhelmed that this was the best the current generation of maverick independent artists had to offer was palpable.

What the compilation succeeded in doing was drawing attention to the network of fanzines and smaller labels that were still conceived in the ethos of DIY and self-expression. While musically wholly dissimilar, Big Flame and the Bodines, for instance, both represented the independent music sector in all is low-fidelity glory. One of the bands featured that would often be associated with the compilation once it had become an adjective was the Pastels. ‘In the 1980s I think the music scene was quite sprawling,’ says McRobbie. ‘People would meet up accidentally. We would often play with the Membranes and we really liked their energy. A lot of bands would just play together and at some point Rough Trade decided to try and define this scene. The timing of it was really good.’

Canning, who has now seen the C86 idea celebrated, reviled and rediscovered, locates the innocence and commitment of the groups as its lasting legacy. ‘The thing I really liked about C86 – and it does get a mixed press, a lot of the music was fairly naive and hasn’t stood the test of time – was the attitude. I did nearly a hundred bands during that period and nearly all of them would turn up to play talking about music and with their leads in plastic bags.’

‘There was definitely an idea that the interesting things were about getting stuck in and doing everything yourself, and that had a pure expression,’ says McRobbie. ‘You’re in charge of the sleeve and you end up with something that’s very much you.’ The bands included, whose sound has become synonymous with C86, the Bodines, the Soup Dragons and Byrds-influenced-period Primal Scream, combined the Sixties references of Orange Juice and the splayed wilful amateurishness of TVPs. The bands lacked Orange Juice’s charm – mistaking their schoolboy insouciance for a contrived awkwardness – and were too inexperienced to be familiar with the genuine darkness of alienation and addiction that ran through Dan Treacy’s songwriting. All of which, along with many of the bands’ fondness for anoraks, meant that there was something of the school project about C86.*

Creation was the most represented label on the compilation. Primal Scream, the Pastels, the Bodines and the Servants had all put out releases through McGee, but the label moved as quickly as possible to distance itself from the project.

‘C86 was a really bizarre, stupid and patronising collection of stuff,’ says Foster. ‘It also didn’t include loads of people who were very important. It included people who were like, “Who the fuck is that?” It got it completely arse backwards, totally wrong, to an alarming degree. You would think that people working with journalists would have a slightly better grasp of what was going on.’

Buoyed by the impact of the cassette the NME made unlikely and temporary cover stars of the Shop Assistants and the Mighty Lemon Drops. However, a glance at the 1986 end-of-year charts in the paper confirms that its alignment with independent guitar music – which it was now calling ‘indie’ as a genre – had been short-lived. In the top five there was only one guitar album, Evol by Sonic Youth at no. 4, with the triumvirate of Parade by Prince and the Revolution, Rapture by Anita Baker and Janet Jackson’s Control all resting above it. The Queen Is Dead by The Smiths, a record to which NME would dedicate whole issues in the future, was nestling at no. 9 in the list, lodged between The Album by Mantronix and Raisin’ Hell by Run DMC.

Such was the sense of deflation around C86 that many of the bands struggled to build on its rickety momentum, which only reinforced the sense that the compilation had front-loaded careerism and ambition on to a handful of bands who were quite happy playing to a hundred people in a pub. ‘Not many groups had managers at that time, and the concept of a producer, and a lot of what the music industry did, just seemed quite irrelevant,’ says McRobbie. ‘Of course, many people were very quick to re-embrace those more traditional aspects as soon as they were offered to them. A lot of groups became so messed up with drugs that they needed managers so that became part of the culture again. I remember the Mighty Lemon Drops had management and that seemed quite unusual to us; they seemed to quite embrace professionalism.’

The Mighty Lemon Drops were now being managed by Canning and his partner Simon Esplen, as were the Shop Assistants. Both bands had been signed to Blue Guitar, a boutique faux-independent financed by Chrysalis and A&R’d by Travis, making the imprint the third label Travis could add to his collection of record companies. Encouraging Canning to manage the bands, Travis helped educate him in the rules of the game by licensing the Mighty Lemon Drops to Seymour Stein and Sire, which resulted in the band achieving the kind of medium-grade college radio career they could only have dreamt of while playing in Bay 63.

Other bands on the compilation were consigned to be fondly, or not so fondly, remembered as being evocative of the tape’s happy amateurishness. ‘I remember being quite pleasantly surprised that Bogshed had made it on,’ says McRobbie, ‘but there were a lot of things that for a snapshot of things taking place that were interesting were missing. Felt weren’t on it, nor the Nightingales nor The Fall.’

‘Felt followed me to Creation,’ says Nick Currie, ‘and I remember speaking to Lawrence once about how we both loved the word Creation.’

In his attempts to woo the cream of his Pillows and Prayers roster away from Cherry Red, Alway had promised Felt a deal with Warners through Blanco y Negro. Rejected at the first mention of their name by Travis and Dickins, the band were left to rue their lot as they shuffled back to Cherry Red while Alway licked his wounds. Felt remained prolific, and a widening aura of mystery surrounded the band with each new release. The combination of Lawrence’s bedsit metaphysics and the guitar lines of Maurice Deebank, one of the independent sector’s genuine virtuosi, made for spiralling and intense records, each a more detailed illustration of Felt’s isolation from most of their contemporaries and label mates. By their fourth album, Ignite the Seven Cannons, Cherry Red could stretch to a budget for the Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie to produce them. Fans of the band, Felt had been asked to support the Cocteau Twins at the Royal Festival Hall, exactly the kind of break that Felt, with their lack of sound man, appeared, despite Lawrence’s ambitions of stardom, to treat with wilful indifference. Such detached nonchalance was coming to define Felt. In interviews Lawrence gave the impression he was settling for discovery and deification by future generations of listeners; the cultivation of an enigma was, it seemed, of equal priority to selling records. The album’s lead single, ‘Primitive Painters’, featuring Liz Fraser duetting with Lawrence at his most assured and assertive in front of the microphone, became an independent chart hit crossing into early evening radio. Both ‘Primitive Painters’ and Ignite the Seven Cannons had topped the independent charts, meaning Felt were now in a hallowed position usually occupied by New Order, The Smiths, the Cocteau Twins or Depeche Mode. Poised on the cusp of some form of mainstream breakthrough, with perfect timing, tensions in the band led Deebank to quit. McGee, having signed them the moment their deal with Cherry Red elapsed, couldn’t wait to work with a band he was convinced could be his generation’s ultimate cult success.

Felt’s Creation debut was, even by their standards, an obscure choice. A nineteen-minute album of instrumentals called Let the Snakes Crinkle Their Heads to Death, it highlighted, in the absence of Deebank, the organ skills of their teenage keyboard prodigy Martin Duffy.

*

The Felt album that quickly followed, four months later in the autumn of 1986, Forever Breathes the Lonely Word, was a masterpiece. ‘If I have one regret about Creation,’ says McGee, ‘[it] is that we didn’t know how to make that record happen.’ To record Forever, Felt had returned to Woodbine Street studios in Leamington Spa and its owner and in-house producer, John A. Rivers, with whom the band had made their early records. Though still recorded on only as high a budget as Creation could squeeze out of Rough Trade, one of the strengths of Forever Breathes the Lonely Word is that it sounds like a record that has been produced. Martin Duffy’s Hammond drifts like mist, either churning with a freewheeling melody or colouring the slower songs with a brittle texture. While lightly shrouded in the standard reverb of the day, rather than masking the inefficiencies of Felt, it highlights the band’s strengths. In its opening lines, ‘Seven brothers on their way from Avalon’, Forever instantly left the previous few months’ C86 world of satchels and la, la, las behind. At just over thirty minutes Forever was the first Felt album to contain no instrumentals, only Lawrence’s neatly structured songs set in an autumnal hue; it was as near to an album in the classic style of their heroes as anyone on Creation was likely to get. With an overall sound pitched between Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and, particularly in Lawrence’s Tom Verlaine delivery, Television’s Marquee Moon, the album aimed for a timelessness that twenty years later would have ensured performances on Later with Jools Holland and widespread coverage in the heritage rock media. In 1986 not even the fast-talking hustle of Creation could elevate the record beyond their comfort zone (although Lawrence, in an act of supreme wish fulfilment, was profiled in Smash Hits the following year). The NME, having decided to feature the band in depth, swapped what was intended to be a Felt cover story with a feature on the rise of teenage suicide rates. In its move into sociology the paper had blown Lawrence’s chance of front-page stardom. The interview, while lavishing praise on the record, highlighted Lawrence’s many idiosyncrasies, which included an aversion to vegetables and an OCD relationship with hygiene, air fresheners and anyone thinking of using his lavatory. An accompanying feature in Melody Maker started with the heading ‘Felt Make Brilliant Records that Nobody Buys’, spelling out Felt and Lawrence’s destiny in inky black.

For the bands seizing their post-C86 moment, Woodbine Street and John A. Rivers briefly became the Abbey Road of their generation, a Mecca for a gated drum sound, buzzsaw guitars and reverb. Initially used by Swell Maps, another touchstone for the C86 generation, the studio was now running sessions for Close Lobsters, Mighty Mighty and Talulah Gosh and the like. The Pastels recorded their debut Up For a Bit with the Pastels there. ‘It was quite strange for a while,’ says McRobbie. ‘We were recognised in the street in Leamington Spa.’

The breathless urgency and rush against the studio clock of those bands’ recordings was in stark contrast to the refined, lambent sound of Forever Breathes the Lonely Word. Felt entrenched their position as the éminence grise of both the Creation roster and their C86 contemporaries. The Creation office in Clerkenwell was an increasingly relaxed and happy place as the hedonism of rock ’n’ roll, even if was just the budget version, was now making its siren’s call. McGee and his acts were all cover stars in their heads and, in the blurred network of fanzines at least, they often were in reality as well. Creation’s ability to have a good time was not going unnoticed. A mess of cheap Ray-Bans and wild Dylanesque ginger hair, McGee was a regular feature in the NME gossip columns.

As C86 had been a press concoction, it needed to justify itself. Doing what only it knew how to do best, the paper invented a genre. The word ‘indie’ appeared as an adjective to describe a look and sound rather than an economic position. C86 may in time have become associated with a specific core style of twee guitar music, but ‘indie’ now had little to do with the charts or the way a record was financed. As far as NME and the rest of the music press were concerned, any passing gaggle of white boys and girls who had started a band, irrespective of which label they were signed to – a corporate major or a bedsit start-up – was now called indie.

Within this new world of indie, the acts on Creation proudly appointed themselves as its bespoke bad-behaviour bands: decadent, dissolute and, in a stopping-signing-on way for a handful of them at least, enriched. ‘The ambition was very attractive,’ says Nick Currie. ‘We were all Scots on the make in London. It was almost like being Poles or Lithuanians, having a little exiles’ club in a capital city. You feel this opportunity but it’s not exactly your culture. There was a sense that we were trying to sleep with beautiful girls and trying to make money.’ At Clerkenwell Road, rock ’n’ roll was alive and well and breathing out elegantly wasted plumes of smoke, with, just occasionally, the odd new substance being added to the speed. The opening lines on Forever Breathes the Lonely Word’s final track, ‘Got into something dangerous and strange’, were indicative that, for some, the partying was starting to get a little harder and a little darker.

* Primal Scream’s ‘Velocity Girl’, the song that opens C86 and is perhaps its most celebrated track, does have a dark lyrical content, starting with the lines, ‘Here she comes again, got vodka in her veins/been playing with the spike, she couldn’t get it right’. As it’s Primal Scream, it’s ill-advised to rule out the possibility that the song might be an Edie Sedgwick tribute.

PART TWO

I Get This Feeling I’m in Motion,

a Sudden Sense of Liberty

9 Everything Counts

Daniel Miller in the Eighties: recording artist, record producer and proprietor of Mute (Mute Records archive)

By 1986 the word ‘indie’ had become irrelevant to Daniel Miller, who had seen Mute grow from its first bedroom-recorded release to a company with a multinational turnover quietly taking up its position as one of the great successes of the first wave of independent labels started in the punk backdraught. ‘In Mute’s case, it never became indie, I hope,’ says Miller. ‘I mean, indie just became a genre which in most cases was music that came out on major labels.’

Having started Mute in order to self-release his own single as The Normal in 1978, he had waited over a year before Mute’s second release, ‘Back to Nature’ by Fad Gadget. Venturing into albums a year later, Mute released three LPs in 1980, the pulsating and confrontational Die Kleinen und Die Bosen by Dusseldorf’s DAF, Fad Gadget’s debut and Music for Parties by Miller’s new ‘group’ Silicon Teens. In a studio project that recorded electronic versions of standards like ‘Memphis’ and ‘You Really Got Me’, Miller produced an album of synthetic three-minute cutting-edge pop. The next debut album on Mute, Speak and Spell by Depeche Mode, was the Silicon Teens made flesh: a real-life teenage group playing catchy electro dance pop. An immediate Top Forty success, the band turned Miller and Mute into a record company with a presence in the mainstream. The process was repeated on an even bigger international scale a year later with the debut LP by Yazoo, Upstairs At Eric’s. ‘Within a period of less than eighteen months I went from nothing to having two platinum-selling artists,’ says Miller, ‘which was a bit confusing, not the kind of thing you can plan for. It was an accident, like all these things are.’

The move into albums saw Miller, who remained resistant to the idea of Mute being ‘a record company’, reluctantly start to introduce some formalities into the label.

‘I did want to avoid as much of the industry as possible,’ says Miller, ‘partly because it certainly wouldn’t work for me and my music and also, I didn’t really understand it. When the first Depeche album came out, we got an office. ‘When I started to do albums it started to get a bit more serious.’

Getting serious also involved hiring a skeletal staff but Miller was determined not to compromise on the original inspiration for Mute, a label and artist working together in contrast to the standard industry practice. ‘I didn’t want to be a normal record company situation, where it’s them and us,’ says Miller. ‘I didn’t really know if I wanted to be a record company at all but, if I was going to be one, I wanted to be partners with that person and have a proper equal relationship with them. I didn’t say to Fad Gadget or Depeche Mode, “OK, we want to do a five-album deal, we want to work with you for the next twenty years, we’re not going to do a contract,” it was like, “Let’s put out a single and see what happens.”’

Miller’s lean and streamlined philosophy was mirrored in Depeche Mode and their working methods. A quartet of boys unafraid to wear eyeliner, they danced behind their keyboards on stage with the detached confidence of youth in control of entry-level technology. ‘When we went to do Top of the Pops we didn’t need a van or anything like that,’ says Miller. ‘They brought everything up on the train from Basildon. It was very modern, very portable – no drums, no amps, just three synths and a microphone. None of the kind of rock ’n’ roll accoutrements that I hated. You could just do it yourselves because it was so minimal. I think that was still part of the DIY ethos with which I’d started.’

The early run of Depeche Mode singles sounded like Kraftwerk rebooted for children’s TV, infectious and playfully teenage. The band instantly connected with an audience who recognised the energy and modernity of their sound – the wide-eyed possibilities of a New Town Friday night disco; the band were already veterans of south-east nightclubs as Depeche Mode took up near-residencies in venues like Rascals in Southend or Croc’s Glamour Club in Rayleigh.

Seymour Stein who had worked with Miller since licensing The Normal’s Warm Leatherette, was instantly intrigued by Miller’s description of his latest signings and was desperate to see Depeche Mode play in their natural environment.

‘The only way I could get there at the time was to fly on the Concorde, which left at about ten and got there at six,’ says Stein. ‘I called ahead, they met me and drove me up to Basildon and I did a deal with Daniel right on the spot, and all of Daniel’s early bands all wound up on Sire – Erasure, Yazoo, Assembly – and Daniel and I have remained close.’

Stein and Miller’s friendship allowed Mute a direct route in to the States, where Mute’s releases found an immediate audience in a market starved of electronic experimentation. Miller was able to self-finance Mute with international sales from the beginning, a system that allowed his ideas about the autonomy of Mute, and its ability to operate as a partnership between himself and his artists, to flourish. At every opportunity Miller sought to cut out the middleman. ‘Certainly in the early days there were no managers around,’ says Miller, ‘no lawyers, and that made life a lot easier and nobody seems to have come out of it for the worse, because I’m still working with a lot of those artists today.’

For the third Depeche Mode album Miller, as the band’s producer, was interested in exploring the energies he had put into The Normal. Interested in a harsher electronic sound, the band and Miller approached John Foxx, whose album Metamatic, released in the second week of the decade, had defined the possibilities of marrying songwriting with electronic abstraction, a sound that was coalescing into an Eighties pop avant-garde. Foxx suggested they work with his engineer Gareth Jones who had helped him record Metamatic and been closely involved with the specifications of Foxx’s new purpose-built electronic studio, the Garden. ‘John had hooked up with a bunch of artists,’ says Jones, ‘and they took a warehouse in Shoreditch in Holywell Lane and John took the basement.’ By the early Eighties, Shoreditch had seen little of the regeneration plans that were starting to reshape the likes of Covent Garden and Soho. With a still-regulated City locked into a pre-globalised financial market, the East End was a hushed environment after office hours at the weekend and one of the few areas of London that still contained bomb-damaged side streets. ‘Shoreditch was a desert then,’ says Jones. ‘It was pretty much empty. John put together this studio and I helped him on the technical side. He was trying to do something minimal and clean-lined. No crystals in glass cases or carpets on the wall and all that kind of thing – John’s very stylish, a trained graphic designer.’

The opening of the Garden studios drew the synthesiser scene’s more adventurous artists. ‘British Electric Foundation came there to do Music of Quality and Distinction, vol. 1’, says Jones ‘I remember hearing Tina Turner’s voice coming up from the basement.’

Miller and Depeche Mode were equally keen to explore the Garden’s possibilities and at Foxx’s suggestion invited Jones to become co-producer on the sessions. Jones, whose kaftan and painted nails were at odds with the black-clad minimalism of the Mute aesthetic, was nevertheless hired. While completing a series of projects in between tracks for Miller and the band, Jones was spending increasing amounts of time in Berlin. Working with a series of Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW, New German Wave) bands, Jones had been using the city’s legendary Hansa Mischraum studios, or, as David Bowie christened it for ‘Heroes’, ‘Hansa by the Wall’, a state-of-the-art recording studio as rich in realpolitik as in shiny programmable equipment. Miller, paying a visit to Jones while in Berlin to see Nick Cave, realised the studio was also a cost-effective location for completing the Depeche Mode record.

‘The view from that building was roughly where the lookout towers were, very atmospheric,’ says Miller. ‘We worked it out that for the band to fly to Berlin, live and record in what at the time was one of the most high-tech studios in the world was cheaper than to do it all in London. It was half Gareth’s idea and half the fact that I was there with the Birthday Party.’

Having relocated to Berlin to regroup for what would be their last days as a band, the Birthday Party found themselves the toast of a city with a rich bohemian seam and squat culture that welcomed them as returning heroes and was able to attend to their every dissolute need. ‘The Birthday Party living in Berlin had a big impact on the music scene,’ says Miller. ‘Berlin already had some really interesting bands, Neubarten and Malaria and those kind of bands, but Nick being there was quite influential, then it changed really rapidly.’

‘The Deutschmark was cheap against the pound and Berlin was subsidised by the West German government,’ says Jones. ‘Loads of artists were in Berlin at the time … they still are … Recording Depeche there was really doable, and everyone loved it and then we ended up mixing three albums there back to back.’

Einstürzende Neubauten along with Non ensured Mute’s early release schedule was peppered with acts from the international electronic cutting edge (literally, in the case of Neubauten). Having connected with the group while in Berlin, Miller released Neubauten’s Strategies Against Architecture. A compilation of live performances and early tapes, the release was the band in their rawest state. The group’s use of plant hire, industrial soundscapes and collages of scrap machinery colliding into itself had an immediate influence on the newly relocated Depeche Mode.

‘I was working with Neubauten at the same time, so metal sampling was a big crossover thing,’ says Jones. ‘I introduced the samplers to Neubauten and then I introduced the metal noises to Depeche. I was a bridge between the two camps.’

‘We became friendly with Neubauten,’ say Miller, ‘even though I’d known them before … and Martin [Gore] got very friendly with Blixa, and Diamanda Galás was living there too.’

Hansa’s state-of-the-art outboard technology, the E-mu Emulator and the Synclavier, allowed keyboard-triggered samples and were programmed by the band’s newest and most technically gifted member, Alan Wilder, who had replaced Vince Clarke. Wilder, Miller and Jones were becoming hypnotised by the possibilities of Hansa’s equipment. Absorbed in the process of making an album from samples and the minutiae of time codes and programming, Miller, as producer, was the most integral and involved person in the studio. ‘Daniel did masses of synthesiser sound design. He was incredibly hands-on,’ says Jones ‘making sounds on synths, orchestrating and arranging Martin’s songs, he was doing all of that big time.’

However fertile and seductive the atmosphere in Hansa, Miller still had a record company to run and found his time severely divided. Back in London, Vince Clarke was repeating his songwriting success with his new band Yazoo. Their debut album Upstairs At Eric’s had slowly climbed the charts, and was now at no. 2 in the Top Forty.

‘Yazoo was going through the roof during Construction Time Again,’ says Jones. ‘He was on the phone doing all this Yazoo stuff a lot of the time as well.’

As well as keeping an eye on the sales of Upstairs At Eric’s Miller’s time on the phone at Hansa was often spent on lengthy calls to Rough Trade, who were having problems with the success of the release. Upstairs At Eric’s may have only been Mute’s seventh album release, but for Rough Trade Distribution it was the biggest release they had ever had to handle. ‘The first Yazoo album did unbelievably well very quickly,’ says Miller, ‘and basically Rough Trade’s cash flow at the time didn’t allow them to pay us.’ With a hit on their hands Rough Trade, despite enjoying a record turnover, had lost control of their ledger and Mute was effectively paying for Rough Trade’s running costs against which the distributor ran up a substantial six-figure debt.

‘We were lucky, because we had another distributor as well, Spartan, and we were selling records internationally so it wasn’t like we were relying on Rough Trade 100 per cent for our livelihood, but it was a huge amount nevertheless,’ says Miller. ‘It didn’t actually put us in danger but it did make me cautious about lots of things … if I was a proper businessman I would’ve said, nice guys but I shouldn’t really work with them.’

Miller’s loyalty to Rough Trade would be tested again a few years later when the stakes for Mute and the entire Rough Trade enterprise would be even greater. Experiencing periodic crises in Rough Trade’s accounting was still, for all its successful label partners, the price worth paying for remaining independent.

As a producer and a director of a record company, Miller found himself torn between the attempt to harness the vision and creativity of the band and the market realities of releasing the record once it had been completed. ‘Obviously I was flip-flopping,’ he says, ‘wearing my record company hat and wearing my co-producer hat … two very different hats, often there was a dialogue when I was basically arguing with myself.’

Though putting him under considerable strain as both the band’s producer and MD of their record company, Miller’s relationship with Depeche Mode flourished. As someone at the heart of their recordings, he was sensitive to their ideas and steered the band away from their early synth pop into a darker and more experimental identity. A normal record company might have fired an A&R for such acts of commercial suicide – turning a chart band into something weird. The luxury of Miller and Depeche Mode’s relationship ensured they could bypass such considerations and attempt to define success on their own mutually agreed terms. Miller, true to his idea of Mute being a partnership between label and artist, was happy to risk creative expression over the fix of a quick hit.

‘With Depeche particularly, I ended up doing things as a record company which if I hadn’t been involved in the studio I probably would not have done,’ says Miller, ‘and I think, on reflection, that was probably a good thing. We often put out tracks that were not very commercial as a first single. That actually did us a lot of good but probably didn’t make a lot of sense as a record company decision. It was one small part of the many things that’s kept them going, that we didn’t always go for the commercial jugular straight out of the box.’

In America Miller’s decision to let his producer, rather than his business, head make decisions was starting to pay off for the band. While in Europe and particularly the UK the band were still trying to convert their Smash Hits synthesiser appeal into a more serious reputation, in America their increasingly discordant and lyrically provocative songs were striking a chord with adolescents equally horrified by the home-grown saturation of Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson and the imported MTV hair-extension pop of Culture Club and Flock of Seagulls.

Marc Geiger, a youthful college DJ on the late-night show of his local station, was, like his listeners, hungry for more demanding and intelligent music. ‘The station was called 91X,’ says Geiger, who still retains the boyish demeanor of his freshman years. ‘It was in Tijuana, the most influential station was KROQ, which is terrible today, but on the air still, and was vital at the time, and so was a station just outside of New York called WLIR in Long Island.’

Playing a mix of releases on Factory, Mute, Rough Trade and 4AD, stations like KROQ and WLIR gained an Anglophile reputation that found an eager and large listenership. For Depeche Mode it was the perfect opportunity to recalibrate their image away from teen magazines and Top of the Pops into something that suited their new, darker material. A world away from the three-minute formats of daytime Radio 1, the American stations could stretch out their playlists to include extended mixes by New Order and Depeche Mode. While many of the releases were not available domestically in the States, the impact of hearing up-to-the-minute contemporary sounds on the radio resulted in an expanding audience keen to explore the bands’ music.

‘Depeche Mode started to bubble up through 12-inches,’ says Geiger. ‘Those artists – their fans knew how to dig deep and where they dug was in the import sections of all these record stores that were very vibrant at the time, and you could see the ones that understood what 4AD or Factory or Rough Trade was. If you were in that world and you were lucky enough to be near one of those radio stations at the time, you saw how big things could get, because on KROQ a new Depeche Mode track would come on and they’d sell out an arena much faster than one of the big rock bands would sell out. If you were tuning in, you could feel the subculture the same way you could in any subculture, before that and after that, but this one was ignored by mainstream media.’

To the astonishment of many of the artists on 4AD, Rough Trade, Factory and Mute, they suddenly found themselves with an eager fan base in the biggest music market in the world. With barely any promotional activity and the thinnest of media coverage for their releases, Cocteau Twins, Depeche Mode, Echo & the Bunnymen, The Smiths and Cabaret Voltaire now had the opportunity to tour America on a professional footing. The days of being the toast of Manhattan’s nightclubs were passing and a new world of young Anglophile record buyers became one of the fastest-growing audiences in America.

With the zeal of a music-obsessed young man in his early twenties, Geiger was convinced of the possibilities for UK acts beyond the cultural capitals of LA and New York. He was determined to invent a new touring structure that opened up America to the cream of the UK’s independent acts.

‘Sometimes, when I’m critical of people in the UK, it’s because there are fifty-foot walls round the British Isles and they don’t want to look outside of it,’ he says, ‘and New York has some of that – you’ve got New Order coming to play a club in New York and that’s it. Everything else is an afterthought. The Ruth Polskys and others – their modus operandi was to get them to play their club. I wasn’t that interested in hanging with the bands and doing coke with them. I was more interested in letting them and their label bosses know that I understood more about their 12-inches than they did.’

A generation of bands who had played a few club dates at Danceteria and possibly visited Boston, Chicago or the West Coast could now play to crowds whose size was beyond anything they could experience at home. ‘The cities were bigger,’ says Geiger. ‘The market place was pretty refined. The English just didn’t really realise it, ’cause they hadn’t really been here. Nobody really wanted to work with those artists, so I went immediately to the UK and I went and picked up The Smiths, the Bunnymen, New Order, Depeche Mode and a bunch of others.’

Depeche Mode was one of the first bands Geiger booked. Building on their status as one of the most played bands on KROQ, he concentrated on the West Coast where the band suddenly found themselves walking out on to the stages of sunlit open-air auditoria. ‘It was very unexpected and it was very surprising,’ says Miller. ‘They’d done a couple of tours, then they didn’t go back to America for Construction Time Again because they felt they weren’t getting anywhere with it and they’d hit a certain point, and things just took off. We were gonna play the Palladium in LA in 1985, a 2,000-seat club, and then that sold out overnight, so we booked another date, that sold out overnight, and then they booked Irvine Meadows which is in Orange County which is an open-air shed which holds 15,000, and that sold out, so before you knew it, three years later they were playing to over 60,000 people at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.’

Courtesy of alternative radio, Depeche Mode were now a stadium band in California, figureheads for a new audience, one that the American music industry would start to call alternative. It was a market it would come to understand through the series of tours booked by Geiger. Initially, the American executives were weary and dismissive at this imported culture which seemed to attract black-clad teenagers in make-up into the ninety-degree temperatures for an afternoon – a crowd that was thrilled at the idea of singing along to the new, darker Depeche Mode lyrics for ‘People Are People’, ‘Master and Servant’ and ‘Blasphemous Rumours’, each song dealing with the kind of subject that was left undiscussed in the never-ending of ‘Morning in America’.

‘It was Some Great Reward that really blew it up,’ says Geiger. ‘I remember when they sold out a stadium, and the world still didn’t notice. I was like, “Everybody else, get out of the way.”’

Playing in the California heat, Depeche Mode dressed in leathers and chains in front of a full lightshow were more than adept at turning into rock gods while staying utterly connected to their minimal synth etiquette. ‘It was very Bon Jovi,’ says Miller. ‘Lots of leather and volume … but there was no drummer, and practically no guitar, at that point.’

For the next album Miller proposed that Depeche Mode build on their sense of risk. Miller suggested that Jones, himself and the band start the record at Hansa Mischraum and live every day of the record from beginning to end without a day off – a journey into the heart of studio darkness as they submitted themselves to the samplers and mixing desk.

‘It was a very light version of Werner Herzog,’ says Miller. ‘I was quite influenced by that kind of very focused, living-it, thing, I was thinking about how he had made Aguirre, the Wrath of God and undergone such extremes.’

Herzog’s idea of ‘ecstatic truth’, whereby the tensions and difficulties of making a film on a punishing schedule in an unforgivable location would reveal a larger truth in the narrative, had resulted in some extraordinary films, accompanied by equally extraordinary stories of tensions, fallings out and hysteria on the part of the actors, crew and director.

‘I’m a huge admirer of all that,’ says Miller. ‘I don’t really think I can do it properly myself, but I thought we could add just a little bit of that into the making of the record, so we did … and we all nearly cracked … and I was trying to run the label at the same time – that was the bigger problem.’

‘We did it without a day off,’ says Jones, ‘and I think we all drove each other a bit nuts … but it was all very song-led. We all thought the songs were really good and because it wasn’t a normal group, the machines played nearly everything. Martin played a little bit of guitar and Alan played a little bit of piano, but basically it was a sequencer playing everything – that was then orchestrated by whoever wanted to do it. We were doing what we thought of as ground-breaking work with sampling: the sequencer was liberating, we would sample a sound and make that sound play that beat, it was quite incredible.’

Just as Herzog had found his working methods produced intolerable arguments with Klaus Kinski and the process would break down through a lack of planning, the participating members of the experiments at Hansa also experienced waves of studio torpor, often enhanced by varying amounts of intoxication. ‘There were many days when nothing happened,’ says Jones. ‘There were some days where we literally didn’t do anything and there was a reasonable amount of pot-smoking going on, no hard drugs, but there was quite a lot of drinking and excellent pot – but this was long before Dave did his life-threatening junkie phase or anything like that. It was just a general bit of medium-grade partying.’

The process of Black Celebration had taken its toll on Miller, who realised the responsibilities of running a company with a multimillion-pound annual turnover could no longer co-exist in parallel with the highs and lows of letting creativity run wild in the recording studio. ‘After Black Celebration I came out with the sunlight in my eyes for the first time in four or five years,’ says Miller. ‘I realised that I wanted to get on with running the label and I kind of was a bit out of touch … We were doing great. We had the Bad Seeds, we were about to sign Leibach and Diamanda Galás, but I felt things were moving on and I really wanted to get out into the world and listen to music and figure out what was going on.’

One of the first decisions Miller made was to move Mute into larger premises on Harrow Road, a concrete, almost brutalist, building with basement warehouse and a network of corridors and offices. While getting a firmer handle on Mute’s day-to-day operations, Miller realised that the company, via Vince Clarke’s third group, Erasure, was about to have another platinum album. Erasure’s first album Wonderland, released in 1986, had been a modest success but a follow-up single, ‘Sometimes’, released later that year, went to no. 2, beginning a twelve-month period where Erasure were a fixture in the Top Forty. For someone who still flinched at the idea that he was running a record company, Miller was experiencing the kind of success for which major labels would spend months planning and a considerable fortune marketing.

‘Much as he loved mucking about with synthesisers and being in the studio, I think he realised he couldn’t be so hands on,’ says Jones. ‘It got a lot bigger when they went to Harrow Road, hugely bigger, and they started to lose the plot because there was no formal business training. Daniel told me someone said to him once, they came in to do financial trouble shooting for Mute, and they said it was bleeding money … from wounds all over the body of Mute. There’s all that money coming in and you want to get all this shit done, and you’re one visionary in charge of the company. You haven’t got time to do everything, you’re just on a big wave, surfing this wave, trying to stay up there.’

Back in the States, Depeche Mode’s tour for Black Celebration was a twenty-eight-date riot of debauchery. The band had an unstoppable momentum in America, one which was now being shared by New Order and the Bunnymen as the country was becoming something of a fantasy world for their generation of music press-feted groups. If New Order and the Bunnymen’s carefully nurtured reputations of outsider seriousness was still present at home, in America, away from such image constraints, the bands found an appetite for one of the finest products the country had to offer a touring British band – the gold-plated rock ’n’ roll lifestyle.

‘They’d all rather come over to America,’ says Geiger. ‘First of all, America was cooler for them to hang out in – more fun, and they could get better drugs. The more people they knew, it became a lot easier to go to a party in New York and then, “Heh, great, I’m going to party in San Francisco and then there’s this great party next week in LA.”’

Geiger started to combine the bands of the stature of New Order and the Bunnymen as a package. On what were known as ‘shed tours’, two British alternative bands, appearing together in secondary market cities like St Louis which Geiger made a point of booking into, had an impact and drew a crowd that was more than the sum of its two parts.

‘The question was, how could you really show that these artists were big in comparison to Def Leppard?’ says Geiger. ‘If you could create a mini event, where you put a couple of bands that had a shared fan base together, then you get an explosion in the number of bodies and that’s really what happened, so we found a format. Those bands actually liked it, ’cause when they were on the bus rides for eight hours, or they would go play Cleveland, they were a little bored but if they were hanging with each other, they weren’t that bored, so when you had New Order and the Bunnymen as an example together, they were having a great time all the way through – they’re still talking about it today.’

At the mention of the 1987 Bunnymen/New Order tour, in which his role was DJ-cum-northern-spiritual-advisor, Mike Pickering has the air of a veteran recalling a hard-fought campaign in difficult conditions. ‘I don’t know how we made it back from that tour to be honest. It took us nearly a year to recover.’ New Order’s American manager, Tom Atencio, was starting to field congratulatory calls from hard-bitten industry professionals who thought they’d seen it all. He says, ‘The promoters were doing incredible business. One of them calls me up before the LA show and says, “I’m not complaining, because tickets sales are really good, but I want you to know that your liquor rider is second only to the Rolling Stones, and they play stadiums.” We could go into incredibly lurid tales, they were incredibly punishing on themselves, I can tell you.’

One band missing from the shed tours were The Smiths, who, having played the States only twelve times since New Year’s Day 1984, were incredibly hot property, with a pent-up audience spread across America desperate for them to tour.

‘I got The Smiths’, says Geiger, ‘booked their first tour, then Ian Copeland, who had been my mentor in many ways, took them on. He was better at hanging with Scott Piering and Mike Hinc. I think it had to do with Charlie but I don’t know a guy named Charlie … and I’m not a Charlie person … never was … anyway … There was a lot of Charlie going on at the time.’

Geiger was not the only ally of the band frustrated at their inability to maintain a working relationship with a manager for more than six months. By the time The Smiths made their second and final tour of the States in 1986, they were capable of selling out two nights at Universal Amphitheatre in LA in a matter of hours, putting them on the cusp of the stadium league and in desperate need of a support infrastructure that could build on their momentum, something, since the retirement of Joe Moss, they had singularly failed to do. The result was a series of cancelled dates, including the last four shows on the ’86 American tour, one of which was a prestigious New York date where Stein and Sire had prepared an end-of-tour wrap party in the style only Stein knew how to throw. While the situation was frustrating for an American music industry finely tuned to notice when an opportunity was being so clearly missed, at home the band’s relationship with Rough Trade was starting to unravel.

Cracks had first begun to appear in the summer of 1985 when Morrissey insisted that ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’ be released as a single from Meat Is Murder, considering both ‘How Soon Is Now?’ and ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’, two non-LP tracks, had already been released since the album came out; it was a curious decision that went against industry practice and common sense.

‘I said to him, “That’s not a good idea,”’ says Travis. ‘“It’s a bad idea, it’s not a single,” and he wouldn’t have that and, being me, I said, “Fine, you want it to come out, it’ll come out.” It came out, it got to no. 34. “Rough Trade are useless.” Of course we are, that proves it. That was the first moment I can remember of any friction.’

Begun around the time of the release of ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’, the band’s next album, The Queen Is Dead had been recorded in extraordinary circumstances. Gossip around the band hinted that The Smiths would soon be leaving Rough Trade. In an act of hardball brinkmanship of which any major would have been proud, Rough Trade placed a high court injunction on the band recording for any other record company. The value of The Smiths to Rough Trade and the fragility of the band’s working relationship with them was now a matter of public record.

Ensuring that Rough Trade would be able to release another Smiths record by pursuing the matter through the law courts was one of the few options left to Travis; The Smiths’ career was reaching breaking point and internal communication over the band’s finances had ended in stalemate. Rather than agree on a way forward, Morrissey and Marr externalised their problems, laying them all at the feet of their record company.

‘The moaning came after they began to think they were a bigger band than they really were,’ says Travis. ‘It got really mad towards the end, cancellations, releases approved then disapproved, it was chaos.’

The tensions between Travis and The Smiths were accentuated by the closeness of their relationship. Apart from Morrissey’s concentrated and lengthy phone calls with The Smiths’ artwork supervisor, Jo Slee, it was left to Travis to deal directly with the band, an arrangement, in the absence of any kind of mediator, that was becoming increasingly difficult and personal.

Remarkably, in the middle of such constant turmoil The Smiths released their masterpiece The Queen Is Dead. Aside from ‘Frankly Mr Shankly’, a thinly disguised open letter to Travis from Morrissey outlining his grievances, there were few signs within the record of the travails that had been the background to its creation.

‘Whenever there was a problem, there was no one around The Smiths that you could just go to and say, “There’s this happening, what do we do, what do you do?”’ says Richard Boon. ‘Everything was diffuse. Other than Mike Hinc, who I think the band had a lot of faith in, and Scott Piering’s on–off attempts to manage them, the reality was, we just thought, Morrissey goes home and talks to his mum about this. And Johnny ends up booking the van. There were issues about control between the two of them; they weren’t ever going to get a manager either of them were happy with, Ken Friedman being a case in point.’

Ken Friedman was the last manager The Smiths appointed, a young and bright West Coast protégé of Bill Graham. With a reputation for being something of a bon viveur, he was in the perfect position to consolidate the band’s profile in the States and bring some straight-talking Californian ruthlessness into The Smiths’ dealings with Rough Trade.*

Having resolved the impasse of the court injunction by agreeing a compromise to let the band record one more album for Rough Trade (the contract had previously stated two), Travis was expecting one last Smiths studio album to follow The Queen Is Dead. It was quietly pointed out to him via the offer of a buy-out from the major that EMI were The Smiths’ preferred label to release the forthcoming Strangeways Here We Come. An increasingly isolated Travis remained tenacious and turned down the offer from EMI. Strangeways would be coming out on Rough Trade whether the band liked it or not. It was obvious to all parties that the astonishing trajectory that had been shared by Travis and the band since they walked into Blenheim Crescent had come to an end. ‘In the time I was at Rough Trade, and I was there every day for a year and a bit during the height of their success, I never remember the band coming in the office,’ says Cerne Canning.

Marr in particular had been frustrated by the limits of Rough Trade’s recording budgets, something that the label had failed to prioritise. ‘It was one of the label managers,’ says Boon, ‘Simon Harper I think. He was being driven around London on the back of a courier bike, knocking on studio doors asking if they’d accept payment for a Smiths session by credit card. It had gone beyond a joke – it really wasn’t funny any more – they always thought they weren’t being looked after, and they’d make demands and throw tantrums.’

The Smiths’ increasingly impulsive behaviour could turn on a whim or at the hint of any perceived slight, especially any on the part of Rough Trade. The last year of their career was a series of botched sessions and cancelled appearances, including turning down such prime-time TV appearances as Wogan, which earned the band a reputation, particularly at Collier Street, of remote, rock-star behaviour.

‘There were always completely unfounded rumours of Rolls Royces,’ says Canning. ‘It was like one of those films where the camera followed one person then changed POV as it walked past someone else. Rumours every day, lots of fragments of conversation and people shaking their heads.’

The reality was that the band, particularly Marr, who tried to keep a hands-on grasp on organising the day-to-day arrangements of the band, were exhausted. ‘Because we were young and immature, the nature of The Smiths meant we would’ve taken the effects of Rough Trade’s precariousness and been hotheaded about it,’ he says. ‘They were learning too, they weren’t necessarily that old as a company either.’

Ken Friedman, who had helped Simple Minds reach near-arena status in America, had anticipated that an injection of optimism and industry ambition into The Smiths would help facilitate a new and healthy relationship between the band and EMI as they embarked on the next stage of their career. If Friedman detected a willingness to finally start playing the game and abandon the haphazard point-scoring which had become the main feature of the band’s relationship with Rough Trade, then he was the only person who did.

‘We could never understand why they never wanted to make videos, because at that point the Eighties was being led by video,’ says Boon. ‘They wanted 60 × 40 fly posters all over the place, but there was only so much promotion they were prepared to do. They would turn around and say, “Shakespeare’s Sister” wasn’t a hit cause you’re not promoting us,’ but they weren’t giving us the tools to promote the product.’†

At Collier Street the departure of The Smiths was blamed squarely on Travis. Distribution would be losing its biggest-selling catalogue and the tension between the label and distribution had disintegrated into a complete lack of communication as Rough Trade’s internal politics turned venal.

‘Rough Trade’s deal with its own distribution company was the worst of any indie label in the world,’ says Travis. ‘We were on 28 per cent when Mute was probably on 12 per cent, so I mean, thank you, distribution. For every Smiths record that we were selling, they were making a fortune. The kind of characterisations – distribution was the golden egg and the record company’s run by this lunatic that’s spending all our money – that were definitely abroad – it’s just complete nonsense as far as I’m concerned.’

Marr had noticed the factionalising within Rough Trade first-hand, as his phone calls were passed around various staff members in an attempt to resolve the never-ending mess of loose ends and unpaid studio bills.

‘The last thing you imagine in any business is things getting so big that it becomes difficult for you to steer it,’ says Marr. ‘We became all four engines of Rough Trade and we hit turbulence. A lot of it’s to do with there not being enough people in that company, and that they became totally dependent on one band.’

The irony of the Rough Trade middle management’s attempts to rationalise the company along the lines of the critical path and to create a structure that was not over-reliant on The Smiths is not lost on Travis. ‘I think it just attracted people who thought, “This is glamorous. I can make lots of money,”’ he says. ‘We grew too big and grew out of our control and we weren’t experienced to be able to say, “You know what, this has got too big, we’re out of our depth.” I suppose we were trying to say we’re out of our depth by bringing in new people but unfortunately they weren’t the right people. We weren’t experienced enough to know how to get the right people with those kind of backgrounds and perhaps they didn’t really exist.’

However painful a denouement, the fact remained that during their lifetime The Smiths’ entire canon was released on Rough Trade, and the band and the label represent the perfect symbiosis of independence. The Smiths and Rough Trade grew out of proportion together, cutting a magnificent dash through the Eighties. The band pulled Rough Trade into the mainstream with them. In turn only an independent label would have let The Smiths call their album The Queen Is Dead, and only Travis would have understood why that was the record’s title.

From the band’s first brushes with the media in which Morrissey’s lyrics and opinionated playfulness sparked controversy to its ending in wilful and chaotic unprofessionalism, their arc could only have been achieved in the spirit of conspiracy that had been created by Travis, Marr and Morrissey. If Travis maintains the band thought they were a bigger group than they actually were, it was their ambition and self-confidence along with their inimitable DNA, as a group and a songwriting partnership, that set them apart from their contemporaries.

‘I think the simple way of putting it was that it was more soulful that way,’ says Marr. ‘You were working with people who you would, and could, sit down and talk to … not to say that it was all one big pyjama party and that we all totally hung out together, but we were all coming from the same culture.’

‘There is an irony, isn’t there,’ says Travis, ‘that you try and provide a community and a haven and I think they do appreciate that – but their real lives are really insecure – it’s a strange dynamic being a musician.’

Nearly thirty years after the fact, Marr is circumspect. ‘If you look back now and you look at the four or five big influential bands that came out successfully out of that indie scene, and if you lay all the record sleeves out on the floor, you can see who let their work be touched by the hand of the A&R man and therefore became product, took the quid, and those who didn’t, and those who didn’t were The Smiths, New Order and Depeche Mode.’

* Freidman’s reputation as a bon viveur was well founded. In 2008 he opened New York’s first gastropub, the Spotted Pig. One of his partners and bankers in the venture was Jay-Z.

† While The Smiths were ambivalent about video, the short film Derek Jarman made for the band, The Queen Is Dead, which included the songs ‘There Is a Light and It Never Goes Out’, ‘Panic’ and ‘The Queen Is Dead’, is one of the most evocative and innovative of the era. The film flickers with a sensual rage, as characters set in landscapes of back streets and empty industrial estates fix their uneasy stares on the camera and are intercut with images of Parliament and Buckingham Palace starting to catch fire. All of Jarman’s work is a far more accurate depiction of the 1980s than those endless clips of yuppies in red braces.

10 Stereo Sanctity

Sonic Youth on stage at the Mean Fiddler, London, 12 July 1987. Paul Smith is seated cross-legged centre, Pat Naylor is standing behind him (photograph by James Finch used by kind permission of the photographer)

The disintegration of The Smiths understandably left Travis reeling. It would be some time before the label would start to sign bands that connected again with a wider music press-reading audience, never mind achieving the kind of generational consensus afforded by The Smiths. One of the label’s most successful late Eighties signings, the Sundays, felt like a band that had been focus-grouped to try to fill the vacuum left and prove that Rough Trade could still break bands into the Top Forty. Away from the drama of The Smiths’ dissolution there were increasingly rowdy noises off at Collier Street, made by a section of the staff that couldn’t have cared less about the fate of Travis or Rough Trade. An altogether more vibrant if unruly cast of characters had started to congregate at the Malt & Hops at lunchtime; soon they would be working with some of the most invigorating and powerful music produced in the Eighties and, unlike anything that had previously been boxed up and shipped from Rough Trade, the music was American and imbued with the aesthetics of rock music: guitar solos, long hair, volume and raw power.

‘It felt very odd with Collier Street,’ says Liz Naylor, who with her sister Pat was installed on the first floor in the Rough Trade press office. ‘It was Sonic Youth versus The Smiths. We’d spend as much time as possible at the Malt & Hops and basically, at lunchtime, cue Paul Smith.’

‘It was a collection of people broadly from the north,’ says Smith. ‘Richard Boon would count the hours until the pub opening at eleven and be in there for twelve, and you could drink four pints during lunchtime, which I would do, as would Liz, Pat and everybody and we’d all get really jolly, then we’d go back to work in the afternoon and we’d get stuck in.’

‘I don’t know what cause we thought that we were advancing,’ says Naylor, ‘other than the cause of going to the pub at lunchtime, taking loads of speed and being crazy. Paul was coming down from Nottingham. He didn’t have anywhere to stay in London and slept on the floor in our kitchen. It was mad and free-form. It felt very much like Paul out on his own just going for it – I remember going back to his house in Nottingham with Sonic Youth, he lived on a Shane Meadows-type estate and they were all sleeping on the floor surrounded by their guitars.’

Paul Smith, whose tight curls and fondness for beads gave him the air of a Berkeley radical transported to a Midlands tap room, single-handedly brought the cream of a generation of American bands into the UK and Europe on an incandescent five-year trajectory that would see the groups operate a scorched earth policy, reconfiguring the British guitar underground in a manner that sent shockwaves through their C86 contemporaries and inspired a new generation of British bands to explore noise, aggression and distortion.

‘Lunchtime at the Malt & Hops was where I learnt the most about pretty much everything,’ he says. ‘Spending time with Claude Bessy – I don’t think you can say his name too many times … Claude Bessy … weird connector …. impossibly comedic French accent … having his first couple of pints, and trying to find the gram of speed that was in one of his pockets but he wasn’t sure which one, but super fucking committed to stuff. Both he and Richard Boon, a fantastically theoretical man who never quite got out there and got all the things done that he could’ve or should’ve done, were both very generous at passing things on.’

Smith’s route into the world of lunchtimes at the Malt & Hops had been via Cabaret Voltaire with whom he had set up a fledgling video company, DoubleVision. Now the technology was relatively affordable, Smith and Stephen Mallander and Richard Kirk of Voltaire had intended to build on their ideas about DIY multimedia, releasing long-form video cassettes of their like-minded contemporaries. Voltaire took the decision that DoubleVison would never release material by the same artist twice and they would concentrate on artists like the Residents, Chris & Cosey and Clock DVA, who trod a similar multidiscipline anti-rockist line. They soon realised, however, that releasing records as well as videotapes was going to be necessary to keep DoubleVison in business. One of their earliest record releases was In Limbo by the queen of Lower East Side confrontation, Lydia Lunch, now a temporary resident in the UK and a fully integrated member of the court of the Bad Seeds, many of whom were fellow Malt & Hops habitués.

‘Lydia said, “I have these recordings which I’ve never done any vocals for.” The two-inch tapes were underneath her bed,’ says Smith. ‘She was like, “I don’t suppose you’d want to put those out?” Lydia went up to Sheffield to do her vocals – terrified the life out of Richard and Mal – and we released it almost immediately.’

The backing tracks for In Limbo had been recorded in 1982 and featured in their line-up Thurston Moore and Richard Edison, two members of Sonic Youth, a band formed just as the brutal energy of No Wave was burning itself out and being replaced by a second, more conceptual wave of bands who were as likely to play at installations on the Lower East Side as they were the clubs in lower Manhattan.

‘We gave her enough money for a one-way ticket back to New York,’ says Smith. ‘She obviously hadn’t been there since the No Wave period more or less, and ran into Thurston and said, “I’ve met this guy. He was able to do this for me, maybe you should send him stuff.” So Thurston sent me about two-thirds of Bad Moon Rising.’

Sonic Youth’s second full-length album, Bad Moon Rising took its title from a Creedence song, which, along with its scarecrow-on-fire sleeve, signalled a move away from the band’s art space roots towards a deconstruction of the John Carpenter or Stephen King version of a primitive-gothic heartland America. The record left the New York grid for a trip down forbidding back roads. The title of the track ‘Ghost Bitch’ was a reference to the Native American Indian relationship with pioneering settlers. ‘I’m Insane’ and ‘Society Is a Hole,’ both coloured by the burnished open-wound textures of the band’s guitars, turned the record into a raw meditation on the corn belt. The album’s closing track, ‘Death Valley ’69’, a duet with Lunch, referenced the Manson murders. The cult of Charles Manson would become a trope that would spread through the American underground in the Eighties and beyond to the point where Guns N’ Roses would cover one of his songs. In 1985, before Mansonphilia took hold, ‘Death Valley ’69’ was a shock reminder of the unwanted houseguest at the macrobiotic dinner party. The song was a throw-down to the baby boomer settlement, which, in typical me-generation fashion was beginning to navel-gaze at its lost innocence and ideals through such pieces of retro-analysis as The Big Chill and Running on Empty. The tapes Moore sent to Smith had a depth of texture more akin to cinema than to the scratchy sounds of Manhattan performance spaces.

‘For somebody who’d loved and absorbed a lot of music, it was quite clear to me that this was an actual, living Velvet Underground,’ says Smith. ‘It just hit me incredibly hard emotionally.’ Convinced of the need to get the record a European release, and with an evangelical zeal that would sustain him until the end of the decade, Smith hustled every contact he had in the hope of finding Bad Moon Rising a home.

‘First of all I took it to DoubleVison,’ says Smith. ‘Richard said, “Well, it’s guitars … it’s rock ’n’ roll. We don’t do rock ’n’ roll,” so I trotted round various other labels, pretty much actually every independent label at that point, including Mute, and nobody was interested.’ Met with indifference, Smith resorted to doorstepping the staff at Rough Trade at every opportunity, turning lunchtimes in the Malt & Hops into lobbying sessions on the merits of Sonic Youth. Richard Thomas, another regular at the Malt & Hops (‘It was,’ he says, ‘the nearest I ever had to an office.’) worked with Smith from the start of Blast First. In less than four years Thomas and Smith promoted shows that saw Sonic Youth grow from an audience of 200 to over 5,000, but such a quick trajectory for the band was initially far from certain. ‘Pete Walmsley, who was in charge of label management at Rough Trade, offered him an M&D deal’, says Thomas, ‘to basically shut him up more than anything else.’

‘Peter Walmsley said, “You get the rights, I’ll make the records, let’s talk about something else,”’ says Smith. ‘He always wanted to talk about football. I’m not interested in football but there we go. The people that ran labels were all sports failures, and the people who ran the distribution side of it were all sports interested. We wanted to talk about catalogue numbers and Can out-takes, they all wanted to talk about how Arsenal did or whatever it was.’

Smith’s ambitions consisted of little more than seeing Bad Moon Rising released. In his off-the-cuff negotiations he was, however, becoming Sonic Youth’s semi-official representative, manager, booking agent and now their one-man record company – a position that would become more and more draining and problematic. ‘Walmsley said, “What’s the name of the label?”’ says Smith, ‘and I said, “What label?” and he said, “Your label” … I actually hadn’t thought it through to the point of having a name for the label. I’d always been a bit of a Wyndham Lewis fan: “Oh, Blast First, this is good, this is all about warm winds from America keeping England mild … here’s Sonic Youth making a bit of a racket” … a bit of English irony. But having a record label wasn’t in my plan, well, more than that – I didn’t have a plan.’

As an example of the opportunities Rough Trade still afforded anyone with a degree of enthusiasm and a tape of new music, Smith’s arrangements with Walmsley were among the last of the off-the-street Rough Trade deals. Simon Harper, who as a label manger was negotiating the increasingly difficult complexities of the company’s structure, could sense a wave of enthusiasm building around Smith and his ability to turn lunchtime drinking sessions into strategic meetings for the coming counter-cultural revolution, one that would be soundtracked by the white heat of Blast First; it would be, as Smith christened a label compilation he released four years later, Nothing Short of Total War.

‘Paul Smith was a remarkably social man,’ says Harper, ‘and a culture then existed of throwing ideas around in a very social environment, namely the Malt & Hops.’ It may have been pub talk turned into an improvised release schedule, but within three releases Blast First’s relationship with Rough Trade had already faltered. ‘Blast First’s first release or two was through the record company,’ says Smith, ‘and then we got kicked off after the cover of Sonic Youth’s Flower offended them.’

The sleeve of Sonic Youth’s Halloween/Flower 12-inch was a smudged black-and-white photocopy of a topless model in a downward-gazing pose. Alongside the image were the song’s lyrics in handwritten capitals: ‘Support the Power of Woman/Use the Power of Man/Support the Flower of Woman/Use the Word:/Fuck/The Word is Love’ At the bottom left of the sleeve is a single word, ‘Enticing’. The sleeve was a copy-shop approximation of the kind of sleeves Raymond Pettibon was producing for the SST label in California: illustrations of blank-eyed characters of SoCal suburbia inhabiting empty spaces, both physical and mental, that despite their best efforts, consumerism and sex couldn’t fill. What made sense in the context of the American underground, where such signifiers formed part of the bands’ running commentary on their surroundings, had an equal resonance with Sonic Youth’s connections with the Artforum sensibilities of New York galleries. In the context of Collier Street, it was given short shrift, dismissed as either a piece of New Yorker know-it-all provocation, or the kind of straightforward exploitative misogynist artwork that belonged on a heavy metal album.

‘I remember passing through big debates about the Sonic Youth Flower 12-inch,’ says Cerne Canning. ‘“I’m not fucking working that record”, that kind of thing. There was a lot of that which I must admit I quite like, some of it was time-wasting but there other elements, which revealed people’s passion for things. Without being misty-eyed, we live in a blander era. I quite like the fact that people felt strongly about things and felt empowered to kick up a fuss.’

The discussions at Rough Trade were enough to prompt a news story in the NME, in which Travis was quoted as saying, ‘It’s not that the naked form is sexist in itself, it just looks like another sexist piece of shit. We don’t want to be a party to their muddleheadedness.’

Smith relished the air of provocation starting to form around Blast First and the confrontational sound of its releases, and sensed that Travis, in such an act of censorship, was now being left behind; having just received a tape of Sonic Youth’s next album, Evol, Smith did, however, need to quickly find a way of maintaining enough good will to ensure both its release and Blast First’s momentum. With zero budget for anything resembling promotion or marketing, Smith used such episodes as the Halloween/Flower fracas to his and Blast First’s advantage. In deciding to work with Liz Naylor and her sister Pat, Smith found the perfect foils to maximise the label’s reputation for the ornery and unconventional. The Naylors were wholly unconvinced of the need to respect the orthodoxies of the music press. They also disliked nearly every journalist they had to work with. Blast First nevertheless received excellent coverage.

‘The opportunity to put out the records was one thing,’ says Smith. ‘The opportunity for either of the Naylors to be involved, due to their loathing of young male journalists and their sexual orientation and everything else, just created a whole other way of operating.’

Smith also built a power base among the more disenfranchised members of staff in the Collier Street warehouse who were far more at home with the Blast First work ethic of inebriation, amphetamines and loud confrontational music than with the target-led structure of the critical path.

‘One of the secrets of Blast First’s success, certainly Sonic Youth’s success, was the fact that I invited all the people that packed and unpacked the records,’ says Smith. ‘Those were the guys who would stay an extra hour to ship your records out so all those people were on the guest list. When Sonic Youth played at ULU, which is 800-capacity, there was a guest list of 270. The warehouse couldn’t get into a fucking Woodentops gig for love nor money, not that they’d necessarily want to go, but nonetheless …’

As Rough Trade grew more professional an us-and-them culture was entrenched within the building and Smith was becoming something of a union leader for the warehouse staff. It would prove a temporary rally. The professionalism that he railed against would never take hold at Collier Street but in the glass-fronted offices of Manhattan, Smith would come face to face with the realities of the American entertainment business.

‘It sounds incredibly simple-minded because it was incredibly simple-minded’, he says, ‘but I thought, I don’t really care if the third accountant or something can’t get in with his six faxes to see Sonic Youth, although later on I would learn the lesson that that would be a good thing to have on your guest list.’

‘Paul could handle a guest list remarkably well,’ says Thomas, who promoted the ULU show. ‘He was excellent at building contacts and the Rough Trade shop had become incredibly influential again. Word of mouth often started to sell things out there.’

The Rough Trade shop off Portobello Road, which had felt increasingly isolated from its former sponsor and partner, the Rough Trade record company, was finding its feet and a new audience for the kind of music Blast First was representing in the UK. Having wrestled ownership of the shop from Travis and Scott five years earlier, Pete Donne, Jude Crigton and Nigel House had seen the shop rediscover its primary focus as a nexus for non-mainstream music, becoming an alternative retail space, selling releases outside both the Top Forty and the clearing house amateurism of the bottom half of NME indie charts.

‘From our point of view the American post-hardcore things going on, the SST stuff, that was what we were really interested in,’ says Pete Donne. ‘We did some great deals buying direct from SST and Hüsker Dü. They were all our kind of music, for the three of us. We really liked that West Coast stuff much more than The Smiths, none of us were Smiths fans.’

‘Most of Rough Trade ran on speed,’ says Smith. ‘I think I only once mistakenly opened the photocopier and put some paper in without looking, to hear about twenty people go, “Oh my God,” and me go, “What, what? – oh, sorry guys.” I think I went out and bought them another gram. That’s how that how place ran, downstairs ran on drugs and alcohol, upstairs ran on camomile tea and some idea that they were doing something.’

While Smith’s metabolism ensured he was sufficiently wired without the need for anything other than a regular pint rush (‘God knows what it was like walking anywhere with Americans then,’ he says. ‘I’d always be two blocks ahead thinking, where are they, we’re losing valuable pints time here.’) He was still winging his every move with no base or structure other than whatever chair and telephone he could quickly occupy within Collier Street, bobbing between offices, quickly pulling strings and favours when the powers that be were looking the other way.

‘Because I didn’t have an office in London, or anywhere else for that matter, I used to squat, either in production, which was Richard Boon, or just lean over and make a few more phone calls on Pat and Liz’s desks. People forget about how you couldn’t communicate at that point – telex was a popular item – people would come and say, “Oh, look, the telex machine.” I’d do that and one day I was given a phone, saying it was Daniel Miller for me. I thought, oh, Daniel Miller, electronicy man.’

*

Having left the Depeche Mode producer’s chair behind, Miller was interested in expanding Mute’s operations to include other labels. Alongside Blast First, Miller would add Rhythm King and Product Inc. to the Mute portfolio. Intrigued by a Head of David single Smith had released, Miller asked him over to the newly purchased Harrow Road offices which Miller had bought with the proceeds of Depeche Mode and Yazoo but which were run on a make-do-and-mend budget.

‘I had to trot over to fucking west London to go and see him,’ says Smith, ‘and I met the Mute Beauties, as we knew them at that point – he had all these girls working for him. They weren’t like the 4AD super elegant girls, they were heavy-duty party girls who were looking at their watches, waiting for Dan to leave so they could rip it up. Their desks were all made out of doors on trestles as opposed to 4AD where everything had obviously been designed by Ben Kelly and money had been spent on furnishing.’

Miller felt that the Herzog-style tunnel vision he had applied to Black Celebration had left him behind the times. ‘I wanted to work with people who were starting to put out records that I didn’t quite understand,’ he says, ‘not to recapture anything, as Mute was doing fine, but more to work with people I found intriguing, and with music that I couldn’t initially work out.’

Having fallen out with Rough Trade over Halloween/Flower, Smith spent over three months in protracted conversation with Miller while struggling to raise the finance for Evol. ‘Dan was saying, “Well, I can’t A&R any more people and I’d like to expand,’ says Smith, ‘and I want labels that don’t in any way clash with what Mute is, but at the same time are run by people who think they know what they’re doing.’

Agreeing a standard fifty-fifty profit split and attending to Blast First’s modest running costs, Miller invited Smith into Harrow Road where Blast First were given a small office. Smith duly asked Liz Naylor to join him in what he called the Blast First ‘cupboard’, where they mapped out their release schedule in an environment they found increasingly comfortable compared to the uneasy bureaucracy of Collier Street. ‘As Collier Street got more professional, those of us who still had legs to run ran,’ says Naylor. ‘They were releasing Shelleyan Orphan,* which was really disgusting, and Richard was just sitting there in the middle of it looking like he always looks … bewildered. I came back from a six-month drug bender and Paul was already in situ in Harrow Road. Someone had just started at Rhythm King down the corridor and they’d ordered a cab. Daniel walks in the door and this woman goes, “Oh, you must be the cabbie” – so he had the sort of air of a cabbie about him. Daniel was nice: he wasn’t intimidating in that kind of Cambridge way that Geoff had, and it was ’86, in the middle of jangle which I hated.’

Miller, having given a platform to three new labels, was fully aware of the risks he was taking in letting such a disparate group into his operations, part of which involved factions arising in Harrow Road, as each of the labels competed over ownership of the zeitgeist. Smith and Naylor were unsurprisingly highly adept at being bloody-minded and bellicose. ‘Blast First became the Mute awkward squad,’ say Miller. ‘It irritated me occasionally, but I put up with it. There was definitely hedonism everywhere but I felt like there had to be one person around that wasn’t off their heads.’

Given a free hand by Miller, Smith was starting to feel like he’d landed on his feet. ‘We were not interested in integrating with anybody at that point,’ he says. ‘What I wanted was people I could argue with passionately, at length, in the pub ideally, about what we were doing and why we were doing it.’

The momentum of the label’s release schedule and its reputation for uncompromising volume, speed and aggression, along with the fact it was a UK company specialising in American music, gave it a cachet and outsider image that made it almost instantly iconic. John Peel, who booked all of the label’s bands for sessions whenever they were in the UK, in an unguarded moment of effusiveness declared Blast First the most important label of the age.

‘Days would go by without sleep on the incredibleness of the whole thing,’ says Smith. ‘There was always one more fax, one more phone call … I was completely driven, and I actually didn’t realise how fucked-up driven I was until it stopped. Bad Moon was like a starting gun and I was like, “Whoa, fuck, OK … nobody else around” …’

Alongside Sonic Youth Smith signed a handful of British bands but he concentrated on American bands who soon gained the status of visiting dignitaries when they made semi-regular tours into the UK. As well as London, Manchester and Glasgow, the Blast First bands played ‘rust belt’ cities like Nottingham, Newport and Bradford, where the music found a heightened connection with the audience.

Smith’s signings were a by-product of the intensive networking undertaken by Sonic Youth, who, having signed to the West Coast SST, had broken away from New York and were sharing cross-country tours with a peer group of like-minded bands on a zero budget. Moore in particular had an inquisitive enthusiasm that made him something of a spokesperson or statesman, regularly encouraging and boosting many of his contemporaries. As well as a charismatic front person he was also one of the finest A&R men of his generation, and Smith was made aware of his energies and ambassadorial instincts instantly.

‘One of the first things Thurston said to me – in fact I think it was the first thing he said to me when I met them at Heathrow – was, “Oh no, you’re just like us,”’ says Smith. ‘They had been hoping a businessman would meet them because he’d brought this list of twenty-two bands that had to be signed immediately. Thurston was like, “You’ve got to put this out, you’ve got to put this out.” … The ones that I met that I liked then I put their records out, the ones that I met I didn’t like, well then, I didn’t.’

*

The first contact Smith made with anyone on Moore’s list was Steve Albini, whose band Big Black was a rendering of the sound of power tools in human form. ‘I ended up in Chicago with Sonic Youth,’ says Smith. ‘They were playing at the Metro and there was a xerox poster of Steve in the box office saying, “Do not let this man in under any circumstance,” and I remember thinking, that’s funny I wonder why, and then an hour later walking a couple of blocks down to some Mexican restaurant with Steve and Sonic Youth and people on the other side of the street yelling, “Fuck you, Albini, fuck you,” and screaming at him from the street and I was thinking, this is an interesting little man, what’s his thing?’

Formed by Albini while still at college, Big Black used modified guitars and a drum machine to create a brutal, electrifying primitivism, the aural equivalent of their songs’ subject matter: abattoirs, serial killers, alcoholism and paedophilia, one loud confrontational song after another taking the listener into the heart of a highly dysfunctional Midwest. Albini, a journalism major, would never feel the need to defend his motives but if pushed would explain he was holding a mirror to society, using a similar reflex to Genesis P-Orridge’s defence/thesis of Throbbing Gristle’s material. In addition to the punch-to-the gut dynamics of Big Black’s sound and its lyrical content, Albini enjoyed getting his point across in the records’ sleeves. The Headache EP came in a ‘body bag’ plastic cover that sheltered the unsuspecting record shop customer from its picture sleeve – a pathologist’s forensic photograph of a head split in two. The band’s first release, the Lungs EP, had been accompanied by whatever detritus was to hand, the sleeve contained such bonus material as blood-stained tissue, torn-out magazine photos and used contraceptives.

It was through P-Orridge that Big Black had come to the attention of Stevo of Some Bizzare, whom Albini had considered signing with when Smith met him in Chicago. He had gone as far as organising a meeting in London. ‘They were going to see Stevo,’ says Smith, ‘and they had some contacts and I went, “Oh, I’m not going to be in my flat. You can have the keys to my flat and stay there and look for the deal,” and I came back the day that they were leaving and they were like, “We don’t have a deal but we’ve left you copies of the record, if you can think of anybody else that could put them out or something.” They left to go to the airport and I played the record and went, “I could do this.” All of Blast First was that, these happy accidents.’

In August 1986, just two weeks after the C86 week at the ICA, Big Black made their British debut. The drum-machine-led assault of the band on a British audience, which saw Albini shake his wire frame into contortions when he sang about psychoses and sadism as the trio lined up in a row playing their guitars in anger, could not have been in a more marked contrast to the performances of the previous month at the ICA. Big Black played at an incredible volume, the kick from the drum machine reverberated in the audience’s chests giving their air of confrontation a physical dimension. As Smith had noted in Chicago, even in the tightly knit mutualism of the independent network in the States, Albini was a divisive figure. Either dismissed as sensationalist and tasteless or embraced as a fiercely loyal operator with his own distinct moral compass, he split opinion easily. Liz Naylor was on hand to liaise with the band in Smith’s absence and found herself in the former camp.

‘It was so loud and so sweaty when they came over and I thought, wow, pretty impressive,’ she says, ‘and then – I don’t know why, I’m not schooled in feminism particularly – but Albini came over and I remember going for a drink with him and he was teetotal, and he was really fucking nerdy and pervy; he was really provocative and unnecessary. He was just this sort of virgin geek.’

Albini’s reputation for no-compromise and not suffering fools gladly was met by Naylor’s own rigorous indignation. Sensing a bully at work she flatly refused to deal with the band. ‘I just thought he was an idiot and I then just thought, I’m really not fucking doing this. I remember that being an issue between me and Paul. It wrangled everything up.’

Blast First released Big Black’s debut, the pummelling and concise Atomizer, along with a semi-official live vinyl album, The Sound of Impact, in 1986. When Big Black staged a return visit the following year the band played to rapt audiences.

‘If Big Black had stayed together, they would have been the biggest band on Blast First,’ says Smith. ‘Absolutely no doubt: they had the stadium, anthemic, simple-minded power and performance to be huge. I’m not saying Steve wouldn’t have been a very, very unhappy human being as a consequence but they really would have been massive.’

For Atomizer’s follow-up, Songs about Fucking, released just six months later in spring 1987, Pat Naylor, who had agreed to work with the band but on her own terms, issued a highly individual press release. ‘It was on one A4 sheet, of which three-quarters of the page was saying what a shit weekend she had, ’cause Derby had lost – she was a big Derby County fan – and the last thing was, “Oh, by the way, there’s another great record out on Blast First by Big Black.” That was it, and that got reproduced in the NME verbatim.’

Blast First had turned into a record-company version of its bands: alive with heated internal debates resulting in a playful and antagonising set of gestures, which the acts on the label largely appreciated. Working with bands with a road-hardened punk-rock work ethic, the label had a lean and focused release schedule that gave it a clear definition. In 1987 Smith released Locust Abortion Technician by the Butthole Surfers. The Buttholes had dirt-bagged across America, operating out of a decrepit station wagon and putting on shows that were a form of performance anti-art wherever they could find a booking. A panhandling, Reaganomics version of the Merry Pranksters, the Buttholes honed their act to include gruesome back projections of circumcisions and chemical testing, overlaid with a strobe-heavy lightshow that made for a disorientating sensory experience. In front of this retina-burning overload the band’s two drummers would pound out a merciless beat over which guitarist Paul Leary would dispatch bludgeoning riffs. Onstage the band were a partially clothed set of hallucinating dervishes. The result was dark, psychedelic chaos: a bad acid test.

Smith had first seen the band in their natural onstage habitat at a festival in the Netherlands where Sonic Youth were also on the bill. Standing at the side of the stage Smith was confronted by the looming, shaking, six-foot frame of the Buttholes’ vocalist Gibby Haynes. ‘The first thing Gibby ever said to me was, “What time is it, man?”’ says Smith. ‘“What time is it?” Five minutes later he came up to me again, “What time is it now?” They needed to know when to drop the acid, so that it came on to the maximum when they went onstage. They were like, “Who’s got the paint, who’s got the bandages …” Gibby was putting pegs in his hair and then binding his head up minutes before they went on stage and then blundering on in this nonchalant kind of fashion and this … this enormous metal riff, you saw that and thought, holy fuck, here’s another one of those bands …’

*

The European festival circuit in the mid- to late Eighties was in its infancy, consisting of little more than two weekends bookending the summer. The first was in June, around the longest day, when Glastonbury and its Danish equivalent, Roskilde, ran simultaneously and the second was at the end of August when Reading, Pukkelpop in Belgium and the Pink Pop Festival in Holland all took place. The proximity of the festivals allowed an American band to fly in for a whistle-stop whirl around northern Europe and return home having been handsomely rewarded. For Smith’s Blast First roster, after years of playing to empty clubs, there was now an audience hungry for a loud and raucous festival experience.

‘The Buttholes started climbing up the bills,’ says Smith. ‘At Reading in ’89 you could see the same people who were jumping around to the Wonder Stuff or whatever the fuck it was were struck with terror going, “What the fuck is this?” They weren’t really even getting Sonic Youth, but the Butthole Surfers they would vaguely get on a kind of spectacle basis.’

Smith’s timing was propitious. The generation of bands he had signed had started their careers with a sporadic and hand-to-mouth sequence of scattershot EPs, live tracks and mini-LP releases, allowing a slow progress across the USA via the network of fanzines and punk club drop-in houses that made up the American underground infrastructure. By the time Smith got to work with the bands, they had reached the peak of their powers. Butthole Surfers finally found a way to replicate the onslaught of their live show in a studio and released the startlingly heavy Hairway to Steven in 1988. Both Sonic Youth and Big Black were also turning in an album a year. The music weeklies became smitten, having found a garrulous set of characters with complex and contradictory personalities and stories from hard yards on the road. Distinctly not intimidated by the British press, they were excellent copy.

‘It wasn’t that considered,’ says Smith, ‘but we certainly sank a generation of English squat bands. Bogshed and all those guys sank pretty swiftly. I still run into those people and they still do bear a bit of a grudge, which I can understand; they were on the dole and they could get by and there was three newspapers a fucking week that had to get filled, so they got written about. But if you deal with the vast expanses of America, and the vast gap between any kind of media, then that wrought certain kinds of characters, Sonic Youth in particular. Thurston was always very outgoing and interested in [them] and wanted to see that kind of music come through. It was a disparate bunch that vaguely crossed paths and they’d done all their playing to literally two people and a dog and then driven 600 miles to do it again. Here you’d have been to Scotland and back. It produced a level of performance that, to be honest, sad Britons at that time could not pull off.’

A group with which Smith was initially hesitant to work proved to give Blast First their most radio-friendly material and an indie disco anthem. ‘Kim [Gordon] was the mover and shaker behind Bug,’ says Smith. ‘I went, “That’s fucking horrible.” It was almost as bad as Die Kreuzen, which was their mate’s band who were really bad, but they couldn’t see it, ’cause they thought whatever his name was, Butch Vig, was really cool. I played Bug and I went, “No, I didn’t get that,” then I was humming a couple of the melodies to myself and thought, oh, that was that fucking record I heard earlier. So I phoned Kim up in the evening and went, “Have you still got the tape? Can I hear it again, ’cause …’ and she went, “It’s under your pillow,” and I always thought that was very clever of her. She’d left the cassette under my pillow and then after that I was like, bang, very much into the record.’

Dinosaur Jr released the hyper-melodic Bug in 1988, the same year as Butthole Surfers’ Hairway to Steven and Sonic Youth’s masterpiece Daydream Nation; with most of their British independent contemporaries still taking tentative steps into the studio, it was as breathtaking a trio of albums as any British label released at the time. All three records were distorted and submerged in a mess of chaotic electricity; above all they marked a moment when records that actually rocked took up residence at the top of the independent charts. †

Alongside Big Black’s weapons-grade riffs, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers and Dinosaur Jr marked a wholesale return to the guitar, an instrument that in the last five years had been primarily used to jangle, if it had been used at all.

Keeping up with bands with no management who spent much of their time out on the road proved complicated for Smith. The force of the personalities at work within Blast First and its acts made the situation even more wearisome. With a staff of three, Blast First was riding the crest of a wave that threatened to crash at any time.

‘Paul was very sort of passionate and brilliant,’ says Liz Naylor, ‘but also I remember him ringing me from Japan, and I’d got Sonic Youth “single of the week” in NME and Melody Maker but not Sounds, and he really bollocked me for that. He was completely unpredictable and people were acting out on you all the time. Lydia Lunch came into the office saying, “Now, I don’t want to speak to the monkey asshole.” All these slightly deranged people were always ready to kick off.’

Smith was starting to get a reputation for being slightly erratic. The time difference between the UK and USA meant a never-ending series of late-night calls and negotiations. Added to this, the personalities of Haynes and Albini, for whom getting up in someone’s grille was often the equivalent of exchanging pleasantries, made communication tricky. J Mascis had the opposite problem, a mixture of shyness and awkwardness. He left people confused as to whether or not they had just had a conversation. ‘It was a nightmare trying to talk to J,’ says Smith. ‘Impossible to get anything out of him.’ By the end of 1988 the bands and staff of Blast First felt as shredded and explosive as their music.

‘We were all fucked,’ says Naylor, ‘apart from Sonic Youth. For them it was like an art project and I didn’t realise it was an art project. I thought it was a rock ’n’ roll band.’

Smith’s relationship with Sonic Youth had intensified with every release. He was now their manager, sound man, label head and all-purpose fixer, calling as many shots on their behalf outside the UK and Europe as he was at home; it was also a relationship in which Smith and the band’s love of music was a unifying bond. ‘We would be driving over the Pennines and out of nowhere Thurston would be going, “So, Joy Division, did you ever see Joy Division?” When they actually hit the realities of Manchester, they were quite spooked. Tony Wilson came down to see them and Hannett turned up and he was always pretty weird. I was going to Thurston, “Look, Hannett’s there, come over and meet him and say hello.” By the time I’d got the pints and come back, Hannett had got this gun which he put on the table and Thurston had turned white and was shaking. I was like, “Hannett, put your gun away, we don’t want that today,” and he was like, “Oh, sorry mate.” If you knew him even vaguely, you knew that he’s not going to fucking shoot anybody – he was far more likely to shoot himself in the foot, literally and metaphorically.’

However, a slight fissure was starting to open up between Smith and Sonic Youth. Having relocated to New York, Smith and the band were seeing an awful lot more of each other. While Smith was acting, he thought, as a de facto manager, the band were becoming increasingly weary of some of his behaviour. ‘I was always surprised, when I went to New York, that they didn’t go out. They didn’t have the money to go out, they didn’t drink and they didn’t take drugs,’ says Smith. ‘They’d go and see films, and they’d go and see bands but they didn’t go “out” out, and one of the key cultural rifts that developed was that I’d be going, “All right, well, so we’ve done everything and it’s only ten o’clock and I’m in New York … so I’m going out now.” This was when the Lower East Side was still a little bit dangerous and had prostitutes and I’d be like, “But there’s a great bar at the end,” and I’d come from a culture where you went out and enjoyed yourself and they never could get that. Kim particularly was uncomfortable with that kind of lifestyle.’

His allies and colleagues were also noticing a slight possessiveness in Smith over the band. When Sonic Youth played live, Smith was either behind the mixing desk or could be glimpsed stage right, cross-legged behind a monitor. Smith, with some justification, would explain that such closeness was a product of his intensity and commitment. Others detected a hint of claustrophobia.

‘Sonic Youth didn’t have a manager. They didn’t have a record label. They didn’t have an agent,’ says Richard Thomas. ‘What they had was Paul, who should’ve let go a little bit sooner.’ Thomas also saw that Sonic Youth were having an influence on their generation in the manner of a modern-day Velvet Underground, particularly in London, where Thomas was noticing several of the C86-era bands were growing out their hair and buying larger amps. ‘The impact of Sonic Youth and the Blast First bands was pretty instant,’ he says. ‘Overnight, bands I’d put on before all had twice as many effects pedals.’

American music was now a currency that other labels were exploring. Smith, having failed to interest anyone three years earlier, was now seen as a totemic presence around London, somewhere between a seer and a hustler who had revitalised the sector.

‘Ivo called me up,’ says Smith, ‘and said, “I’ve just signed a band that sounds like one of yours. I’ve looked at all the records and it doesn’t say who produces them. I assume it’s you. Would you like to produce this record?” Stupidly I said, “No, no, I don’t produce the records, they all produce themselves.” Really stupid, because if I had produced the Pixies I could’ve shut their fucking career down. Much as I have to say I love Kim Deal, and had some nice times with Kim … but if only I could’ve kept my mouth shut.’

The idea of putting bands with producers was not something that had ever occurred to Smith, who, for all the accusations that he was a control freak, acted as an enabler rather than a hands-on A&R. ‘You don’t need to be the man rushing up to Sonic Youth saying, “I’m just thinking a bit of a remix here, lads,”’ he says. ‘When those tapes arrived, you put it on, you sat there and kind of went, “Holy fuck.” You didn’t sit there going, “Hmm, I’m thinking if only we’d put you with the right producer,” or something.’

For Smith, in the eye of a hurricane it was full steam ahead in the small unit he had built in Harrow Road. But the idea of marrying the masthead group of the American underground – something that was now starting to be called ‘indie-rock,’ or ‘alternative’ – with the working dynamics of an industry-grade studio budget was on the rise in America. A handful of executives were starting to wonder what might happen if you dropped the ‘indie’ in ‘indie rock’ and see what occurred in the mainstream, never mind the alternative.

* Shellyan Orphan were the exemplar of what might be called ‘Merchant Ivory indie’. Their debut album (for which Rough Trade managed to afford Abbey Road) was named after an orchid. A notable performance by the band on The Tube included a string section gently playing while a painter got to work on a Cubist-style piece behind them.

† The video for Dinosaur Jr’s single ‘Freak Scene’ was filmed in the back garden of John Robb of the Membranes’ house in Manchester, which shows that at least some of the British bands Blast First displaced were disinclined to hold a grudge.

11 Gigantic

Pixies, Gigantic BAD 805 (Vaughan Oliver/4AD)

Watts-Russell was finding the growth of 4AD more and more difficult to negotiate. Along with Vaughan Oliver and Colin Wallace, by 1987 he had a staff of around six, including his partner Deborah Edgely and Ray Conroy who managed Colourbox. With his unwavering attention to detail as focused as ever, Watts-Russell was starting to spread himself thinly over a growing release schedule. Despite employing a small workforce, he was still micromanaging every aspect of the label to ensure that its reputation and aesthetic remained intact; he was overstretched and increasingly reliant on his energy reserves and stress was starting to takes its toll.

‘If I was out of the office I was always in a hurry to get back to check everything was getting taken care of, and then, when I had people there to take care of everything, I kind of lost the plot,’ he says. ‘It was every day, full on. I could never get off all year, then at Christmas I wanted sun, so I went to terrible places like the Maldives. Ray Conroy somehow tracked us down to this very remote place and rang up to say that Alex Ayuli, who was later in AR Kane, at this little company called Saatchi and Saatchi, had enquired about using “Song to the Siren” in a commercial, and I said no. I got another call to say that Alex had tracked down Louise Rutkowski, who I knew and had worked with on the second This Mortal Coil album, and she was going to re-sing “Song to the Siren” for this commercial. I think I swore at him and said, “Tell her not be so fucking stupid,” but that was that, she did it and suddenly “Song to the Siren” was in this ridiculous ad on televison. Any real knowledge of Rudy and Alex will ruin anything you think of them.’

AR Kane remain one of the most revered yet little known groups of the late Eighties. A duo of Ayuli and Rudy Tambala, AR Kane, after working with Watts-Russell, eventually released two albums on Rough Trade. The band’s music was a seductive hybrid of gently distorted guitar lines, dubbed vocals and drum machines; Ayuli, an advertising copy-writer, is credited with inventing the phrase ‘dream pop’, which described their music perfectly. AR Kane’s songs sounded as though they had been recorded in a flotation tank. Their first release, ‘When You’re Sad’, sounded like the Jesus and Mary Chain after a health regime, its crunching feedback pop delivering a sense of beatific contentment. ‘When You’re Sad’ had been released on One Little Indian, a label owned by Mayking Records, manufacturers to the bulk of the independent industry and run by Derek Birkett.

‘I already had the One Little Indian EP and really liked it,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘Alex came to see me and said, “We’d like to do another record, but One Little Indian haven’t got any money and they keep stringing us along and we want to make a record with you.” Next thing I know, someone buzzed at reception and said, “There’s somebody from One Little Indian here to see you.” Derek was there outside with Paul White, who did their artwork, and this smiley, shaven-headed bloke who, it turns out, was Einar from the Sugarcubes. He’d been to visit me in Hogarth Road in 1981 with some Iceland collective idea. Anyway it soon became clear Derek was going to fucking hit me.’

It was a short walk from the One Little Indian premises to the Alma Road office and Birkett had arrived agitated and mob-handed, determined to resolve the issue of, as he saw it, 4AD having stolen one of his bands. His perception of the situation had not been helped by AR Kane’s failure to tell him they had been in discussions with Watts-Russell. Having caught wind of what was happening, Colin Wallace mustered a response team from the 4AD warehouse, resulting in a stand-off between the two companies. It wasn’t quite the mafia power struggles of Broadway or the back-alley thuggery of Denmark Street in the late Sixties but as things threatened to get physical One Little Indian and 4AD started squaring up over one of the most ethereal bands of all time.

‘Derek came up,’ says Wallace. ‘All the boys in the warehouse stood in reception waiting for him, and I think Derek got a bit of a fright. His bark’s worse than his bite really. I became really good friends with Derek afterwards, but we were like, “You’re not gonna come up here and cause trouble, pal.”’

The conversation that followed was an animated debate between Birkett and Watts-Russell as the former accused the latter of pinching AR Kane. ‘Derek was furious,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘“You fucking don’t do that! You fucking stole my fucking band!”’ Putting the disagreement to rest, Watts-Russell signed the band for a one-off release and the vague agreement to work on a further release. AR Kane’s first release for 4AD was the Lolita EP. Its sleeve image was of a naked girl with a knife behind her back that perfectly captured the blissful menace of the music. It was also a premonition of the events that were to follow.

‘We did the Lolita EP,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘Jürgen Teller did the photo for the sleeve. They said the thing they were disappointed with at One Little Indian was that they had been promised they could work with Adrian Sherwood and they didn’t. I said, “Work with Martin Young from Colourbox, he’s much better.” That was my innocent suggestion.’

The result of the collaboration between AR Kane and Colourbox was a one-off release by M/A/R/R/S, a band name consisting of the first letter of each of AR Kane and Colourbox’s forenames. After a bad-tempered recording session, M/A/R/R/S had managed to come up with just two tracks in the studio, ‘Pump Up the Volume’ and ‘Anitina’, along with a lingering resentment towards one another.

‘They made the record,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘and they fucking hated each other. “Pump Up the Volume” has got one guitar part by AR Kane, the B-side has got Steve programming the drums, and that’s it, that’s the extent of the collaboration. AR Kane were really happy with it, Colourbox and their manager, on the other hand, were conscious that this was going to do something.’

‘Pump Up the Volume’, a collage of beats and samples threaded together over as modern and propulsive a rhythm as a studio could produce in 1987, was the record that Colourbox had always been threatening to make. As tough and funky as anything heard on pirate radio, it had an effortless and infectious groove; its use of samples was sufficiently futuristic and visionary to ensure it sounded startlingly contemporary.

‘Colourbox came to me and said, “We don’t want ‘Anitina’ on the B-side. We don’t want it to be M/A/R/R/S,”’ says Watts-Russell, ‘and I said no. The reason I said no was because the Colourbox singles had come out in ’86 and ’87 and Martin had been in the studio for a year and a half. So I thought no, don’t screw it up, it’ll take him another year and a half to do the B-side. Whatever. So this war started.’

Watts-Russell, his workload stretched even further, became a mediator whose primary function was to say no to the rival factions. Caught between the two camps, Watts-Russell cut his losses and decided the single would go ahead as planned and be credited to M/A/R/R/S, ruining his four-year-old relationship with Colourbox in the process.

‘We agreed that this was going to be a joint single,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘I fell out with Colourbox and told AR Kane to fuck off, because their behaviour just got dreadful; it was all just fucking awful. What happened with “Pump Up the Volume” was, we were a staff of five or six and I saw the impact it had on my employees – that they loved it. They loved the fact that they could be on the phone to contemporaries of theirs in the industry and say how great, excited and jealous or whatever they were. It was Rough Trade’s first-ever no. 1, and I was really proud of that, but it was the closest I ever got without drugs to a nervous breakdown.’

Upon its release ‘Pump Up the Volume’ instantly connected; as a white label it caught fire in the clubs and began picking up plays on daytime radio. Demand was growing to the point where 4AD, whether it wanted to or not, was poised to have its first hit single.

The events that followed took a drastic turn as Watts-Russell received an injunction to cease production of the record. The production team of Stock Aitken Waterman (SAW) had detected a snippet of their track ‘Roadblock’ on ‘Pump Up the Volume’ and, taking their cue from small, streetwise dance labels in America, issued 4AD with a writ.

If he had disliked its methods before, Watts-Russell was now in four-square confrontation with the music industry, with a date in the law courts in the diary to remind him. To make matters worse, away from 4AD, his personal life was adding to the pressure.

‘In the middle of [me] being sued, my cat died and my dad died,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘I remember being in the car with Deborah talking to me and just screaming at her telling her to shut up. I thought I was going to lose it, because she was talking and I couldn’t hear what she was saying.’

The one bright spot on the horizon was Simon Harper, 4AD’s label manager at Rough Trade who faced the challenge of negotiating ‘Pump Up the Volume’s uneasy chart life alongside Watts-Russell and provided invaluable support. ‘Simon was on the other end of the phone at Rough Trade going, “We’ve got to get more of these”, because it was flying. We had more injunctions arriving in but we were talking on the phone every day about stock levels. It was a great example of, just, a record taking off – there’s nothing you can do at that stage to stop it or try and make it more successful, it’s just got its own natural momentum and that was absolutely the case with “Pump Up the Volume”. It suddenly just exploded.’

‘Pump Up the Volume’ became a test case in the legality of sampling, a hitherto unknown aspect of music production as far as the entertainment laws were concerned. The single represented one of the first times the jurisdiction of using or ‘stealing’ another piece of work – via its having been sampled – would pass through the courts. What made ‘Pump Up the Volume’/4AD vs Stock, Aitken and Waterman even more labyrinthine and opaque was the fact that the piece of music Stock Aitken Waterman were claiming ownership of had already been taken from another source.

‘The thing SAW were trying to sue us for sampling was something they’d sampled!’ says Watts-Russell. ‘I had to go to cloisters up in the city to sit with wigged people. “Eugh Heullo!” reading a quote from Martin Young in Smash Hits saying something like, “We bunged ‘Roadblock’ all over it, they’d taken a bit of this track.” The judge looked down his nose over half-moon glasses going, “BUUNGED WOOOADBLOCK all over it!” To this day I believe in saying, if the experts are telling you for certain it’s one thing, for certain it’s not guaranteed. We’d sat with a musicologist we’d hired who confirmed that it wasn’t an infringement of a copyright and then two days later we had to go back and listen to their musicologist outline their version. So I was, “For fuck’s sake, we don’t need this. We’re settling.” We gave [£]25,000 to charity and that was the settlement.’

SAW, a very different company from 4AD but an independent label nonetheless, had shown their street smarts in knowing when to try their luck in the courts. 4AD had got off lightly: ‘Pump Up the Volume’ was almost nothing but uncredited samples.

‘We should have been sued to fuck by everybody,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘It was a brilliant record. Eric B and Rakim, who were sampled heavily, thought it was fine. We licensed it to Fourth and Broadway in the USA as they had a lot of the material that we’d sampled and could provide new ones. So it was a completely different version that came out in the USA, with all new samples that we got clearance for. We didn’t get one fucking sample clearance for the original one, that’s how maverick it was. This was done all the time on pirate radio in New York but no one had dared put it on the thing you actually paid money for. This was all pre-De La Soul. It was hair-raising stuff.’

While Watts-Russell’s energies had been taken up with the case, Rough Trade had had to cancel the record from its release schedule or be in contempt of court.

‘Pump Up the Volume’ had caught like wildfire then had to be withdrawn from the market place. The result was that once ‘Pump Up the Volume’ was cleared for release once more, such was the pent-up demand, the single became 4AD and Rough Trade’s first no. 1. ‘M/A/R/R/S sold, whatever, a million records,’ says Watts-Russell, who still single-handedly oversaw 4AD’s production schedule, ‘more than any records I’d ever physically handled – and we didn’t have any overstocks. Whilst I was doing production we never had any overstocks on sleeves never mind finished product.’

At Rough Trade Richard Scott was keen to mark the occasion of Distribution and The Cartel’s first ever no. 1; taciturn to the last, he also recognised that ‘Pump Up the Volume’ had opened a can of worms for both companies. ‘It was our first no. 1,’ he says, ‘and it was more or less suicide for 4AD. We’d arranged some party in Alma Road in the pub next to their offices there. I phoned the landlord, asking how big a bottle of champagne we could buy, and he was a bit non-plussed, so I phoned Harrods and we got this enormous bottle and we couldn’t get the cork out. In the end we had to cut the top off and push the rest of it in.’

Watts-Russell’s shyness was exacerbated by the stress of the ‘Pump Up the Volume’ debacle but he managed to drag himself across the road to the Alma pub where he stood in the corner, all but absent from his own feast, staring at his shoes as the staff of Rough Trade endeavoured to toast their mutual success.

‘They all came over from the Rough Trade warehouse and someone opened this champagne bottle, this tall, big, black thing, and they must have thought I was a right tosser. I was in the middle of being sued so I went over there for five minutes. I can’t speak in front of more than about three people so I’m sure I didn’t say thanks to anyone and I certainly didn’t drink any champagne.’

In the building next door, Martin Mills had kept a watchful eye on 4AD’s unexpected and unhappy brush with the top of the charts, acting as a counsel and confidant for Watts-Russell who, he had noticed, was under considerable strain. “Pump Up the Volume” being a no. 1 independent record through Rough Trade/Cartel felt different,’ he says, ‘and it was such an explosive no. 1, as well, accompanied by a writ. It was deeply stressful for lots of different reasons: firstly, 4AD was doing something it hadn’t ever really intended to do, which was have a no. 1 single; secondly, there was the Pete Waterman writ, and thirdly there was what turned into being the fighting between the component parts of M/A/R/R/S about money. All of which led, I think, to Ivo’s eventual disillusionment with the music business. In the meantime he was getting wined and dined by majors.’

‘Martin was a rock through all of it,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘I was seriously losing the plot by then and being courted by the music industry.’

‘Ivo probably only had about two dinners,’ says Mills. ‘I’m surprised he had any, but he hated them as much as he was always going to hate them.’

Watts-Russell had had a bitter experience. Blanching at the idea he was anti-success – an accusation that the majors regularly aimed at the independents – he had wanted his bands and his label to thrive, but on his and their own terms. ‘I always said that if a record existed, then that was a success,’ he says, ‘but everything had changed.’

As far as Watts-Russell was concerned, the terms on which 4AD had reached no. 1 had been undignified and sordid: having to deal with judges in order to release a record, even if it reached the top of the charts, was not remotely worth the time, effort and distraction. The substantial income 4AD generated from the single felt like blood money.

‘I think that first taste of success, and everything that brings to the table, be it business affairs, bullshit, the accounting issues, for anyone to get their head round that is a major pain in the arse,’ says Simon Harper, ‘and it absolutely left a bad taste in Ivo’s mouth. I know it did.’

*

‘I see a turning point in 1987 with the release of M/A/R/R/S,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘and hot on the heels of that, the Pixies going mental.’

In 1986 Watts-Russell had signed his first American band, Throwing Muses, a quartet of teenagers from Rhode Island, and with them came Watts-Russell’s first taste of having to work with an American manger, Ken Goes, who handed him a demo by a Boston band called Pixies which became known apocryphally as The Purple Tape. Watts-Russell immersed himself in the Pixies, playing the cassette on his Walkman while wandering around New York and wavering between signing the Pixies and rejecting them for being slightly antithetical to the 4AD ethos. He was nevertheless playing the tape relentlessly, as was Deborah Edgely back in London.

‘I was sort of thinking that 4AD was becoming a label that was abstract’, say Watts-Russell. ‘Also, having worked with Throwing Muses and their less than ideal manager, Ken, and the fact that he’d be doing these Pixies … Then Deborah said, “Don’t be so bloody stupid, sign them.” I called Charles [Black Francis] up and he said, “Come on, Pilgrim – Billie Pilgrim from Slaughterhouse 5 – let’s put it out, and I want it to be called Come on Pilgrim.’

Come on Pilgrim comprised tracks taken from The Purple Tape and was released to imminent acclaim in the UK in 1987, in the slipstream of Throwing Muses whose debut, a tightly woven set of shifting time signatures and the hallucinatory domesticity of Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donnelly’s lyrics, had garnered large amounts of critical praise.

‘England took Throwing Muses to their hearts – that first album got incredible press,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘They re-recorded the demos and we signed them for one album. Kristin was full-on pregnant recording the LP with what became Dylan. She was seventeen, and bipolar and a cutter, and a gorgeous person and so smart, scary smart. They were all such gorgeous people.’

Seymour Stein, seeing the reaction to Throwing Muses, signed the band for the world outside the UK and a Throwing Muses tour had been booked with the Pixies as support. As the reaction to Come On Pilgrim began to take hold, the running order was quickly reconfigured and the Pixies became headliners. While monitoring the success of the Pixies in Europe, Watts-Russell became aware that Throwing Muses, now with Sire and Warners in Europe, were losing ground.

‘Throwing Muses and Pixies did the Town & Country and then went off to Europe, and the billing by that point was switched,’ say Watts-Russell. ‘The Pixies were on 4AD – this tiny UK label – going absolutely mental with their first-ever record. Throwing Muses were turning up at Warners somewhere in the mainland and the people at Warners were enquiring when their singer was going to arrive. I just got on the phone to Seymour saying, “Come on, you’ve got to sort this out and do something for this fucking band.”’

Once the tour was completed, the Pixies were ready to record their second album. An idea from Colin Wallace prompted Watts-Russell to call Paul Smith at Blast First and ask for Steve Albini’s number. ‘Wallace came up from the warehouse saying, “I think I know who should do the Pixies: Albini.”’

Throwing Muses and Pixies came out of a different milieu from the Blast First bands. Spared the rigours of the SST punk circuit and licensed early in their careers via 4AD to major affiliated labels in the States, both Pixies and Throwing Muses were perceived in their homeland as in the collegiate REM mould and would start to develop a medium-grade momentum on the CMJ college radio networks. In the UK they were the next logical, more accessible, generation of visiting Americans with guitars.

Wallace’s idea of pairing a band as direct and melodic as the Pixies with Albini, a producer who could emphasise the band’s dynamic shifts and bring out the rawness of their sound while doing so, was inspired. Wallace was part of the wider scene around Paul Smith and Richard Thomas that congregated long into the night in Thomas’s Kings Cross flat,* as various epicureans like Shane MacGowan and Nick Kent told ever taller stories of lives spent in rock ’n’ roll. Wallace had been a regular at Blast First gigs. ‘British indie music sort of went Wedding Present and all that,’ says Wallace, ‘and it wasn’t very interesting. I became quite friendly with Paul Smith. Me and the Cocteau Twins went to see the Butthole Surfers at ULU. The film they had showing behind them was of a castration and Elizabeth threw up – she had to leave.’

In the meantime, Watts-Russell had no time for any kind of social life. His post-‘Pump Up the Volume’ disillusion with the industry was starting to harden on the back of the Pixies’ success. Throwing Muses’ and the Pixies’ manager, Ken Goes, came from the American tradition of litigation and full exploitation of rights, a world that was both foreign and repellent to Watts-Russell, who was now having to spend more and more time renegotiating and arguing over clauses in the Pixies’ contract.

‘Ken Goes later refused to fly,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘but this was early on and he’d taken so much medication that he could fly over to England with the Muses and Pixies. But he got in a bad mood at the airport because Kim in particular refused to sign his management contract before she’d had someone look at it. Deborah had gone to meet them, and Ken gets off the plane completely valiumed out, and Deborah asks, “Where are the bands?” and Ken goes, “I don’t know, back there somewhere.” That was indicative of the calibre of management that we had to deal with.’

The success of the Pixies and the fact that 4AD had the band for the world meant that the transatlantic way of doing business was a permanent feature in Watts-Russell’s life whether he liked it or not. It was another indication that merely added to his sense that the more successful the label became, the less grasp he had on the company he had so carefully nurtured.

‘I love Ken, but he was a nightmare,’ says Wallace. ‘This is a massive generalisation, but American managers are quite brutal really, and very money-orientated and that’s probably what did Ivo’s head in.’

As Watts-Russell’s nerves were becoming more frayed, so his temper would start to make itself known in the office, an environment where he was feeling increasingly claustrophobic. A consummate A&R man who was happiest in the studio or going through the finer details of the production schedule, Watts-Russell had no interest in managing the office. ‘When there were more people working there,’ he says, ‘I would really resent people making me behave like a schoolmaster or an employer.’

‘Ivo was under a hell of a lot of pressure at the time,’ says Wallace. ‘The Pixies’ rise was meteoric, and it wasn’t just in the UK. It didn’t touch America really, but everywhere else, if you’d seen how many records we were selling – it was almost out of control.’

Still on the receiving end of Watts-Russell’s more incendiary outbursts, Vaughan Oliver was producing sleeves for the American bands with his customary witty juxtapositions. The artwork for the Pixies’ debut single ‘Gigantic’ was a photograph of a baby screaming, an image that had struck Oliver when he saw Black Francis singing on stage. ‘That was seeing Charles for the first time,’ he says, ‘the bald head, the rotund figure, the primal scream.’ Simon Harper, whom Watts-Russell had recruited in an attempt to let someone manage the office as well as keep up with the label’s developments overseas, witnessed the relationship between Watts-Russell and Oliver boil over regularly. ‘Vaughan is obviously extremely charismatic, a very funny and kind-hearted man in many ways,’ says Harper, ‘but he does get a little thirsty and he and Ivo had a very very fiery relationship often, which was no surprise, frankly.’

Oliver too was feeling the heat from having to work with a new layer of control. Having been given the freedom of an in-house designer that had developed a distinct and remarkable house style, he was now having to tailor his ideas to Goes’s interpretation of what might work in the market. ‘The beautiful thing when we started was that the bands never had managers,’ Oliver says. ‘That was crucial in terms of the creativity that came out of the graphic side of it. There’s no manager and upstairs, there’s no marketing person, there’s only Ivo. And Ivo would say at times, “I don’t know what you’re doing, man,” and he’d have the grace … six months … maybe four years … later to say, “Fantastic,” so he had confidence to let go. There was nobody else putting their oar in. It was great.’

Many of the staff at 4AD were becoming reliant on something other than their work ethic and the buzz of success to get through the day. Following the Top Ten crossover of ‘Pump Up the Volume’, the company had reached a new echelon of music industry approval – it had its own drug dealer. ‘We were all doing too many drugs, me included,’ says Wallace. ‘Vaughan’s dark room’s probably still got fucking razor marks on it, we were doing it all the time.’

‘My dark room was a focal point for that,’ says Oliver. ‘Everyone was doing lines of coke off the top of my PMT machine. Those were hedonistic days all round.’

The label’s sales were surpassing anything Watts-Russell had expected: the Pixies’ follow-up to Surfer Rosa, Doolittle, entered the national charts at no. 8; the momentum behind the band was vastly different to anything he had experienced with the Cocteau Twins, and unlike the success of M/A/R/R/S it was with an act that he had signed long-term for the world. Despite the interventions of Goes, the band and label also enjoyed a healthy, mutually respectful, working relationship.

‘I’ve never experienced that level of critical and commercial success [we had] with the Pixies anywhere else,’ says Harper. ‘You’re always wondering when the backlash is going to start, and with the Pixies that backlash was a long time coming. It was pretty effortless in some ways.’

In signing international bands to long-term deals, Watts-Russell was leaving the intimacy of 4AD and becoming more of a player on the main stage, occupying a role he felt ill-suited for, while simultaneously bending to the orthodoxies of the industry.

‘As you started doing contracts with options, you’re taking on a responsibility – you’re taking on a band’s life,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘So it’s your obligation and duty to do as much as you can to get their music across to people. Quite often I’ve wished I’d been more of a despot and just decided, no, we’re not going to release a single from an album, and, no, we’re not going to make a video because it’s a waste of money. I’ve still massive regrets about virtually every video we ever made. We could have given the money to somebody on the street and got more of a result, artistically and as a promotional tool.’

As someone who had always responded to the studio and the sound-world bands had imagined and carefully created for themselves, often with his help, Watts-Russell’s next move took his colleagues by surprise. Sensing that he needed to add to the release schedule, Watts-Russell did something wholly uncharacteristic. He went to a gig at the Camden Falcon and signed both bands on the bill: Lush and the Pale Saints. Not only was it the first time Watts-Russell had offered bands a contract on the basis of a live performance, but both groups bore the influence of 4AD quite heavily. Compared to the leap in direction he had taken in signing the Pixies, Lush and Pale Saints felt like a more orthodox pair of additions to his roster.

‘One had to be careful, because there was a lot of stuff that wasn’t very good and had been clearly influenced by what we were doing,’ says Watts-Russell, who had encountered a gentle sea-change in the indie nightlife from the austere atmosphere of the 4AD nights at the New Cross Venue. ‘I remember being at the Camden Falcon and people coming up to me going, “Oooooooh,” and rubbing me saying, “I really love you, Ivo,” – that was starting to happen. Not me particularly but Vaughan. You’d see it every day, there was loads of that going on.’

On top of cocaine the slow emergence of Ecstasy also started to make its presence felt at Alma Road, with Oliver finding the drug conducive to some of his more heightened flights of fancy. At his most ebullient and in his element when in his design studio going through proofs with a visiting band, he regularly held court in a manner his clients would never forget.

‘There was a band called Spirea X,’ says Oliver. ‘We had a glass roof over the studio that dropped two floors and halfway through the presentation I said, “Keep them talking.” All the stuff’s out on the desk and on the way upstairs I dropped everything. I was totally naked and slid down the roof with the whole scrotum flattened out and the band look up in horror. I suppose that’s a couple of Es later. We worked on the stuff and we were certainly productive on it.’

While 4AD didn’t have a reputation for heavy partying in the industry, behind closed doors at Alma Road drugs became a regular part of the daily routine. ‘Ivo really didn’t care what you did as long as you were there doing the work,’ says Wallace. ‘Because I grew up with such a strong Protestant work ethic, I was there every day. Didn’t matter what state I was in, I’d still be there and I’d still be doing it, and Ivo was the same. We’d still all turn up, but it did get a bit mental, not as bad as Creation – we weren’t party animals like fucking Creation became.’

* As he was his neighbour on the same Kings Cross estate, and in an arrangement that sometimes involved visits from the constabulary, Richard Thomas always kept a spare key to Shane MacGowan’s flat in case the Pogues’ front man should lose his own.

12 We Love You

Jeff Barrett, round the back with Loop, Croydon 1988. From left to right: Robert Hampson, Jeff Barrett, Neal Mackay, James Endeacott (photograph by James Finch used by kind permission of the photographer)

Creation’s reputation for becoming genuine rock ’n’ roll party animals – as opposed to a collection of people in thrall to the idea of being rock ’n’ roll party animals – was secured in euphoric riots of colour and carnality, thanks to McGee’s wholesale embrace of a new drug. Because of his links with Factory, while his contemporaries in the world of London guitar music were still content with a few lines of speed and a cider chaser, McGee became immersed in Ecstasy. For all his hedonism, the hand-to-mouth precariousness of Creation was still an issue that permanently played upon his mind as he balanced his ambitions with the realities of unpaid invoices and a tired-looking release schedule. Hardly anyone, including the bands, was getting too excited about the forthcoming Razorcuts and Jasmine Minks albums. In need of a renewed focus but feeling too listless to motivate himself, McGee was seriously considering giving up Creation.

‘I had a conversation with Tony Wilson and I was kind of going to chuck it in. Nobody seemed to give a fuck about Creation,’ says McGee, ‘and he went, “Just keep going keep going, be an indie, fuck the majors.” It was around the end of ’87: we’d failed with the Scream, we’d failed with the Weather Prophets, the Mary Chain had sacked me and Tony gave me the team talk ninety minutes in. I was thinking, well, I’ve had a good run. I’ve had four years. I’m not in a real job but whatever. And then we came back and I had House of Love, the Valentines, Ride and the Boo Radleys – we put out a lot of really good records around that time.’

The House of Love were Creation’s first new signing after the Elevation debacle. The group’s lead singer and songwriter was Guy Chadwick, a slightly haunted but resolute-looking man in his early thirties. Older, more experienced and, crucially, outside Creation’s extended family, the House of Love created a hit debut album that would result in the label’s first gold record. With a trail of missed opportunities with various major publishing and record companies behind him, Chadwick had been around the block in several different bands before settling on the twin guitar-effects-driven House of Love sound. Arriving fully formed with an impressive range of chord changes, crisp musicianship and enigmatic lyrics, the band were a well-drilled unit on stage which blew away the amateurishness of their contemporaries on the London indie gig circuit. Ambitious to take his songs well beyond the indie charts, Chadwick had also asked McGee to manage the House of Love; both band and manager were sure that lessons learned from the Elevation disaster could be put to good use and Chadwick duly instructed McGee to land the band as big a deal with a major as possible.

The band’s success on Creation and their reception in the press as 1988’s unreserved critical breakthrough gave them a kudos as well as healthy sales. It was clear to McGee’s inner circle, however, that unlike the usual array of bedroom dreamers and music press scenesters that usually made up the Creation roster, the House of Love, and Chadwick in particular, were serious careerists. Where Chadwick had failed in the past with pop rock and Bowie-esque synth numbers in his previous lives, he had struck gold with the House of Love in the music press and with John Peel; the major labels were salivating at the prospect of accepting the challenge to develop their career ambitions and turn them into the world’s first stadium indie band.

For the first time since ‘Upside Down’, the House of Love catalogue gave the Creation office at Clerkenwell Road a much-needed cash injection from material the label had actually released, rather than from commission, whether from Elevation or from one of McGee’s managing jobs. Creation was starting to function along the lines of a record company for the first time and McGee and Green were now in a position to take on another full-time member of staff, James Kyllo, an alumnus of Cherry Red, with expertise in the more technical aspects of running a label.

‘It was just Alan, his wife Yvonne, who was withdrawing from it all as they were getting divorced, and Dick and Jeff Barrett and his assistant Emma Anderson – a finer collection of people you couldn’t hope to work with,’ says Kyllo. ‘Ed Ball would be hanging around but I think Joe Foster had gone by then. I was the first person there who was not just a friend. The House of Love album was out. The band weren’t signed to Fontana but negotiations were going on. Alan was managing them and he and Dick wanted somebody to turn Creation into a real record company.’

One of the first things Kyllo was instructed to do was to find Creation a new office. He found a location and premises that couldn’t have been further away, both philosophically and geographically, from the independent nerve centre of Collier Street – a run-down unit in a former wholesalers in Westgate Street, a side road overhung by railway arches and brimming with a dead-end ambience in Hackney, which was, in 1988, an area untouched by either regeneration or anyone in the music industry.

‘I think as much as anything they wanted to separate themselves from Rough Trade,’ says Kyllo. ‘It was very much a M&D kind of deal, and everything was being funded by Collier Street. They were almost just an A&R going into Rough Trade.’

The premises, a warren of musty rooms with heavily trodden carpets and in constant need of rewiring, were offset by the smell of dampening cardboard. Tucked behind the main Hackney thoroughfare of Mare Street, it was something of a statement for a record company as media-reliant and extrovert as Creation to place itself in exile from the rest of the industry; as well as locating themselves at a complicated distance away from the West End, McGee was removing the label from the bustle of central pubs and venues that comprised the indie nightlife. Creation was instead going to submerge itself in the more colourful and more villainous lowlife of East London.

‘It had been a furriers beforehand but it was just full of empty space,’ says Kyllo. ‘There had been sweat shops, a warehouse. It was quite easy to take on more of it, and it was really cheap. The room that we took on first had a spiral staircase that went up into a glass-enclosed greenhouse thing and I just took Alan there; he went up the stairs and saw the glass room and said, “Yeah, we’ll have that” … he liked the idea of having his cabin up there. It became clear it wasn’t practical for anybody to be up there, though – it was far too hot if the sun was out.’

While it was stifling during office hours, increasing numbers of people would be watching the sun slowly rise over Hackney from the rooftop glasshouse in the small hours, as the distinction between work and play became more and more blurred in McGee’s mind. ‘It was an amazing building,’ says McGee. ‘James showed it me and I thought, we’re going to have some proper fucking rock ’n’ roll parties here.’

McGee’s love of partying had accelerated with his discovery of Ecstasy. While remaining undecided on the merits of the early acid house tracks that he was hearing, he was, as were many other initiates, evangelical about the drug’s properties. Waking up wherever he had happened to crash out, McGee was spending as much time in the flat above the Factory office in Alan Erasmus’s flat in Palatine Road in Manchester as in the new offices in Hackney. As he bonded with Wilson over drugs and the resilience of running an independent label, McGee, awestruck, held only Factory and Wilson in high regard among their peer group. In turn Creation was also popular at the Haçienda, a place that, Glasgow clubs aside, was one of the few venues at which its lesser lights were taken seriously. In particular, New Order had warmed to Primal Scream, inviting them to open for them at Wembley Arena in December 1987, an occasion for which Gillespie was so out of it that he had to be supported at the mic stand until he finally collapsed, singing the last number on his back. It wasn’t the first time Gillespie had shared a stage with New Order: he had briefly been in the Wake, a Glaswegian band signed to Factory whom Rob Gretton had invited to tour with New Order. The Wembley date was, however, the first time Gillespie had thrown up on stage in front of 10,000 people. Such rampant displays of rock ’n’ roll daring endeared Primal Scream to New Order and Wilson. The result was that McGee, Gillespie, Innes and their entourage were welcomed with open arms into the Factory inner circle. ‘Bobby always loved New Order and then I think they really got Creation and me,’ says McGee. ‘I hung out a lot with Bernard in Manchester, just socially at parties at six in the morning, talking to him. They were always really lovely.’ Completing two years of intensive international touring, New Order ended 1987 with a spectacular party in Manchester. Among the guests were the latest Factory signing, Happy Mondays. McGee, keen to try anything new, joined the small huddle around the Mondays as they started a brisk trade in some MDMA capsules they’d brought in from Amsterdam. Taking Ecstasy away from the pressures of London, in Factory’s after-hours playpen in the Haçienda basement with some of his closest friends and allies, McGee was empowered with an earth-shattering sense of empathy. ‘I was getting into E before anybody else really. The only person who was into it was Jeff Barrett,’ says McGee. ‘We were both bang into it. I was into drugs, he was into the music as well as the drugs and at a certain point I got the music. It took me about six months but I got there in the end.’

Barrett and McGee had got to know each other through Barrett’s ability to combine enthusiasm, organisation and hedonism; qualities that led McGee to ask Barrett to join Creation as its one-man promotions department in 1985, making him the first Creation employee. Barrett, whose shoulder-length locks and in-depth knowledge of black music set him apart, both visually and philosophically, from the other habitués of the Creation office, had first encountered McGee when speed and aggression was his behavioural code.

‘When I first got to know Alan he was like an expat Scot punk in London,’ says Barrett, ‘and a real punk, not just a King’s Road fancy. He was the ultimate indie kid – he loved the underground and he was making it up as he went along.’ Idly flicking through the sales sheets for a clutch of new releases in Revolver Records, Bristol, where he worked, Barrett was drawn to the angry screeds that accompanied Creation’s singles.

‘It was the anti-sales sheet,’ says Barrett. ‘These sheets are supposed to say, “Buy me,” and these were like, “Hate me.” And I loved it. I just thought it was fucking hilarious.’ Deciding to investigate further, Barrett rang up the the McGees’ flat in Tottenham, encountering McGee at his most dissolute. ‘I went, “Hello I’m Jeff Barrett. I’m calling from Revolver in Bristol…. this is the distribution company that do your records for The Cartel … I’m moving back to Plymouth and I’m going to put groups on. I was wondering …”’ says Barrett. ‘Then this voice interrupts, “You’re taking the piss, man” … “What?” “You’re taking the fucking piss.” I just went with it, then he kind of loosened up and he said to me, “Man, you know that fucking band you’re talking about … I live in London, right … I put them on in fucking Tottenham Court Road … Nae cunt comes – you’re ringing from 250 miles away – and expect cunts to come – you must be taking the fucking piss.” Then the phone went down.’

Relocated to Plymouth, Barrett proved highly adept at promoting underground bands, hosting the June Brides, Big Flame and much of the Creation roster for their only likely booking on the south-west coast. ‘We were putting the Scream, on all the time down there,’ says Barrett, ‘all the fucking time, then I joined Creation and there was no job description. But McGee put me on this enterprise allowance scheme – so he put £200 into my bank account, I’d go qualify, he took the £200 pounds out, and I’d get £25 a week on the scheme, which is obviously not enough money to live on. So I carried on putting groups on. Me and McGee ended up having these tandem lives. I think he wanted me to be pure McGee and I wasn’t. But Alan was great. The guy was enthusiastic and he was driven, in a different way to me and probably in a different way to most people.’

Barrett had an immediate impact on London live music. As well as taking over the promotion of Bay 63 from Cerne Canning, he started a succession of nights in north London, making the short walk between the Black Horse and the Falcon in Camden Town a path well travelled for a small section of the music-weekly reading community. In each venue they would soak up the atmosphere of steaming audiences enjoying loud music in shabby pubs, run by swearing Irish landlords who couldn’t believe their luck as their side-street backwater locals became over-capacity with a heavy drinking, if unruly, audience. ‘I’d walk in and say, “I’d like to put a gig on here, please, mate,”’ says Barrett. ‘The landlord would go, “We haven’t got a music licence.” “No, no, you don’t understand, I’d like to put a gig on here.’ I just love anything that’s round the back – it’s got much more of a frisson.’

The frisson of the Black Horse and the Falcon would become a popular experience for much of the London media that still took an interest in the indie charts. ‘Everyone would be sort of colliding with Jeff,’ says Dave Harper, ‘’cause Jeff was always one of the good guys, putting on the gigs, shooting his mouth off and genuinely, genuinely enthusiastic. There was a scene around Jeff more than there was with Alan really.’ Barrett started booking the next generation of bands that succeeded the C86 acts he had promoted in Plymouth. More raucous, dissonant and confident, people were leaving the Camden back rooms having had a good night out. ‘As well as putting on Happy Mondays when all the other promoters hated them, the groups that I liked putting on at the time were things like the Sperm Wails, the kind of band that were rubbish but were great – Silverfish, things that became the Camden Lurch scene.’ Like most, if not all, music press-sponsored scenes, the Camden Lurch scene was a figment of journalists’ imagination. Made up of scenesters and other band members, the nights in the Black Horse and Falcon were the first time since The Living Room that the capital had its own thriving guitar underground nightlife, even if its environs were far from glamorous. ‘The Black Horse was a shitty-arsed little room with no stage,’ says Barrett ‘with a mantelpiece with a stuffed heron. And you’d play there and it was really good. It was somewhere that was created by a bloke who cared and the posters and the flyers all had attention to detail. I called the first club The Back Door to Babylon, as a take on the Richard Brautigan chapter, ‘The Front Door to Babylon’ [from his novel Dreaming of Babylon]. So it was bohemian. I stood at the door and got hammered. It was fun.’

Barrett’s love of Americana archetypes like Brautigan would kindle an interest in the mythic West of cocaine highways and truck-stop satori as chronicled in books like Robert Greenfield’s STP and Stanley Booth’s Rythm Oil, full on rock ’n’ roll yarns that would become required reading at Creation as Big Star and Gram Parsons became totemic, elegantly wasted touchstones. Barrett called his next night ‘The Phil Kaufman Club’ in tribute to Parson’s legendary handler and fixer; though not every band he promoted was as refined as the club’s name and ethos. ‘There was one night, an Inspiral Carpets gig at the Falcon, and Richard Norris, who’d just done Jack The Tab, came up to me on the door and said, “You’re coming down to Clink Street later, acid house is happening and you need to be there.”’

As different an environment as can be imagined from an Inspiral Carpets gig at the Camden Falcon, Clink Street near London Bridge was the address of a fitness suite that was home to Shoom, London’s first acid house club, hosted by Danny Rampling and his wife, which throbbed to the sounds of Italian and Chicago imports. Two Shoom regulars were Richard Norris and David Ball, now calling themselves the Grid, who along with Genesis P-Orridge had recorded Jack The Tab, an album that had been influenced by the idea, rather then the experience, of acid house. Jack The Tab was heavily layered and spacy – the opening track was called ‘King Tubby’ – the sound of dilated studio experimentation interspersed with Sixties drug movies. The record sounded like a Timothy Leary trip companion record re-imagined for the emergent acid house culture.

‘Richard had just done it, and I joined the party six months later,’ says Barrett. ‘We had nothing to do with that party starting at all, me or McGee, we just took pills. Alan was like, “Barrett, man, they’re amazing, you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do this,” and he did lead me into pilldom, but Richard was the first person to say, “You’ve got to come and do this.”’

In the daylight hours Creation found itself in a market place that had changed. Dave Harper was now head of press at RCA, which, he was fond of telling everyone, made him Elvis’s PR man. On the basis of his track record with Factory and Rough Trade, Harper had been hired by Korda Marshall, an A&R at the major who felt Harper’s background would serve him well in negotiating the complexities of keeping the weekly press on side with two of his new signings: Pop Will Eat Itself and the Wedding Present, graduates of the school of C86 who were both now in competition with other RCA signings like Rick Astley to achieve chart impact and commercial breakthrough.

The chances of either band succeeding in the pop mainstream were remote. The weekly press, while enjoying the ad revenues from major-label signed acts, largely took the signing of its formerly championed bands to a major as the green light to consolidate the process of knocking them down once the process of building them up had been completed. Without radio play, the Wedding Present and Pop Will Eat Itself faced an uncertain future of low-ranking entries into the Top Forty from which they might squeeze a Top of the Pops appearance and the illusion of career-building momentum. Another band comprised of friends and former band mates of Pop Will Eat Itself had circumvented such quasi-ideological problems by signing directly to a major and were reaping the benefits. The Wonderstuff were, depending on who you asked, either a breezy outlaw pop band or a bunch of chancing buskers who got lucky. Their debut album, the appallingly titled The Eight Legged Groove Machine, had entered the charts at no.13 and the band were proving themselves equally professional at handling Saturday morning TV kids’ shows as the cover of NME; a fact not lost on their contemporaries who, rather than chart success, were left fielding probing questions about their motivation and accusations of sell-out.

‘There was so much jealousy and hatred between all these people,’ says Harper. ‘Pop Will Eat Itself hated the Mighty Lemon Pips, as they called them, and they ended up falling out spectacularly with the Wonderstuff in this intense rivalry. It was a booze-fuelled repetitive cycle of failure, cocaine and hatred.’

It was exactly this sort of cycle that McGee and Chadwick wanted to avoid for the House of Love. Well aware of the pitfalls awaiting a band making the transition between an independent and a major, they were in a rare and enviable position; the House of Love were subject to a major-label scrum. There was no need for conversations about development or crossover: as far as the labels competing for the band were concerned, the House of Love were hot property. McGee, under Chadwick’s instruction, was going to sign the band to the highest bidder. An offer for close to half a million came in from a bullish and charismatic major-label player, Dave Bates, head of A&R at Phonogram. McGee and the House of Love duly signed.

‘When I worked at Phonogram as a product manager,’ says Cally Calloman, ‘they said, “Well, you’re just starting you can have all the loons – Elton John, Bob Geldof, Marc Almond, Julian Cope, David Essex, all of the Some Bizzare roster. They said, “Right, that all happens in that room,” and it was a complete loon scene, but the most level-headed and engaging of them all was Julian Cope, because Julian’s an interesting bloke.’

Cally Calloman was a unique figure within a major record label. A twenty-four-carat music head, he had run the psych label Bam Caruso and published Strange Things, a psychedelic periodical with Richard Norris, earning him the coveted status of company freak. Calloman was equally adept at handling meetings with Elton John’s management company, giving him a rare three-hundred-and-sixty-degree perspective on the internal politics of a multinational like Phonogram. His senior, Dave Bates, a self-styled maverick in a world of major-label power games, was similarly able to talk at length about marketing campaigns and Deram B-sides. Such was his success at Phonogram, where he had masterminded the careers of Wet Wet Wet and Def Leppard, that he had been gifted his own imprint, the resuscitated Fontana label. It was to Fontana, his bespoke imprint, that he had signed the House of Love. From day one Calloman could see that a boutique label within a major-label structure was always a nice idea, but one that was unlikely to succeed within the framework of Phonogram. Unlike Geoff Travis, who had his A&R instincts continually sharpened at Rough Trade while being able to use the Warner/Blanco y Negro system, Bates was operating as an in-house tastemaker with no form of outside influence. Bates was quietly admiring of the independent sector but considered any debate between majors vs indies to be vacuous. As far as he was concerned, Bates had created for himself his own label to run with the finesse of a Tony Wilson or Ivo Watts-Russell but with all the resources Polygram had to offer.

‘Dave Bates didn’t see Geoff Travis as a competitor. He saw him as a role model,’ says Calloman. ‘Dave saw Chris Blackwell and Island, and thought, that’s what I want to be. I got on really well with Dave and I used to argue with him and say, “No, no, Chris Blackwell and Island is based on, for a start, fifteen years of putting out Ernest Ranglin singles. You’ve got to do all of that. Then you need a Spooky Tooth and then you need a Traffic. You need things that are a fair degree of unsuccessful music saleswise, but very successful credibilitywise, in order to be able to turn around and say, “Right, Bob Marley is now going to mean something.”’

The Island or Rough Trade ethos of music-first, hand-to-mouth survival was admired by Bates, but was one he considered an irrelevance to his own situation. In Fontana he had the best of both worlds: total control with which to implement his A&R vision without any interference or financial insecurities. If the House of Love were serious about succeeding they now had the resources to do so. Bates was rehearsing an argument that echoed through every major-label meeting room as executives tried to square the circle of once-considered stellar independent bands seeing their careers disintegrate quickly into major-label ignominy.

‘What Dave didn’t realise is you need to put the work in and you need to remortgage several houses in order to get there,’ says Calloman. ‘We were all highly paid executives and just said, “We’ll sign Tom Verlaine and Pere Ubu – that’s instant credibility.” I’d say, “Tom Verlaine and Pere Ubu are on the wane, what you should have done is sign Television.” Bates would say, “No, no, no, I’m just buying it in,” and they started getting bands to try and make records that sounded like great records, so you’d get the House of Love to sound like Television. It’s like greatness by proxy, it’s greatness at arm’s length.’

Calloman’s analysis of the House of Love’s position at Phonogram was piercingly astute.

However much the majors paid to buy the talent in, the cultural differences that existed between the independents and majors, however meaningless or dubious, were still an underlying factor in the perception of an audience’s relationship with a band. One CD single or picture disc too many could just as easily see the record-buying public turn away as send the single into the Top Forty.

Working with Phonogram had given McGee a crash course in protracted legal negotiations once the House of Love deal made it to the contract stage. With the majors prepared to invest close to half a million in a band that had been on Creation, McGee and Green realised that, whatever else their priorities for the label, they needed to put their relationship with its bands on a more professional footing.

‘There were pretty much no contracts,’ said Kyllo, ‘just profit-share handshakes. I think maybe My Bloody Valentine were the first to actually sign something, however vague it was, and from then on we had contracts.’

McGee had become familiar with My Bloody Valentine through their label Lazy, whose offices had neighboured Creation in Clerkenwell. While not quite dismissing them as also-rans or wannabes, McGee and Green saw them as no threat to Biff Bang Pow as they granted MBV a support slot on one of their infrequent shows at a club in Canterbury. The Creation MDs’ jaws dropped to the floor as the newly regrouped My Bloody Valentine put on a display combining the volume and intensity of a Blast First band with the instant rush of pop art.

‘Some bands really needed help,’ says McGee, who, as well as wholeheartedly enjoying getting messed up with his bands, was also rediscovering the thrills of being a hands-on A&R man. ‘The Scream in the beginning of their metamorphosis needed help, Ride and the Boos needed a little bit of help, but Kevin never needed help at all – apart from me choosing “You Made Me Realise” as a single, which he thought was a B-side.’

Kevin Shields, with his band mates Bilinda Butcher, Colm Ó’Ciosóig and Debbie Googe, arrived at Creation with perfect timing for both the band and label. Having hinted at a direction beyond Sixties-referencing buzzsaw pop on their Lazy releases, they recorded their debut album for Creation, Isn’t Anything, in a fortnight, trailing its release with two extraordinary singles, ‘You Made Me Realise’ and ‘Feed Me With Your Kiss’.

Aggressive yet feminine, the band sounded unlike anything else; a languorous blurring of Shields and Butcher’s voices with the hollowed-out sweetness of their guitars and a rhythm section that explored the low notes with ferocity. One of Isn’t Anything’s defining features was its use of bottom end. Ó’Ciosóig made full use of his kit, hammering the toms in counterpoint to the bass lines which flowed with an equally heavy precision. For a label that, if it had a trademark sound was that of hiss and reverb, Isn’t Anything introduced Creation to the full sound spectrum. It was the first time the label had released a record by a band that sounded like the future, rather than a join-the-dots reworking of the past, however shambolic or elegant.

‘I called it the weird stuff,’ says McGee. ‘I said to Kevin, “Give me some more weird stuff.” It got amazing reviews, and I think it sold 50 or 60,000 copies in Britain, it did pretty well for a weird album. Kevin knew what he was doing really from day one. That first album probably cost about seven grand to make, but it sounds incredible.’

Isn’t Anything was by far the most accomplished and disorientating album released by a British guitar band in 1988, and was worthy of inclusion of the year-end lists alongside Dinosaur Jr’s Bug and Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, the two bands who had clearly influenced Shields in his leap into pop abstraction. That year along with My Bloody Valentine were several other bands who were also experimenting with volume; though, in growing their hair long and stepping on the wah-wah pedal at a moment’s notice, they were a little more transparently in thrall to their influences. Two bands in particular, Loop and Spacemen 3, joined My Bloody Valentine in a vanguard of groups determined to rock out. Both bands were midwifed by a man for whom McGee had a growing affection: Dave Barker of Glass records, one of the unsung heroes of independence and occasionally his own worst enemy. Run on a shoestring from a room above a shop in Kilburn High Road, Glass had surreptitiously developed in the aftermath of C86 as a slightly eccentric but happening label. Rereleasing such curios as Mayo Thompson’s singer-songwriter LP Corky’s Debt To His Father, alongside a steady stream of albums by the Jazz Butcher, Barker earned a reputation as a man with an ear who knew his stuff. His earthy bonhomie and round-the-clock musical enthusiasm had been an open door to the Pastels, who joined Glass for their seminal piece of anorak garage, Truck, Train, Tractor.

McGee was alert to Barker’s blossoming relationships with the Glaswegian beau-monde and Glass became something of a testing ground for Creation. McGee invited one of Barker’s first signings, the Jazz Butcher, to sign on the dotted line.

A band out of time, the Jazz Butcher was based around Pat Fish, who sang wry observational and tuneful Jonathan Richman-esque songs, with a world-view framed in the Northants area rather than New England. It was in a biker pub in Rugby where Fish had seen a young band of teenagers, Spaceman 3, playing overloaded Stooges covers to a delighted crowd of Hell’s Angels.

‘I heard the tape,’ says Barker, ‘and thought, it’s good but it’s very derivative – but, you know, what isn’t? They had one song – I think it was the last track on the record “O.D. Catastrophe” – and it’s “TV Eye”, note for note, it’s “TV Eye” with different words. When I saw them I knew they had something. They played some show with the Butcher somewhere and you could tell … they’re sitting down … what’s going on … there’s two guys sitting down, the bass player standing up, and, you know, there’s like a ten-minute gap between each song while they’re tuning up and they had all the psychedelic lights going and stuff, which was retro, but no one else was doing it.’

The first Spacemen 3 album, Sound of Confusion, was a primitive, garage fusion of the Velvets and the Stooges. The record fell on completely deaf ears in the music press, even John Peel, who granted Loop three sessions, remained uninterested. The Perfect Prescription, Spacemen 3’s second album, was a much more measured work. The track ‘Ecstasy Symphony’ gave ample notice of the band’s drug-orientated perspective. It also sounded exploratory rather than derivative; on at least some of the tracks, their ideas, however pharmaceutically enhanced, went beyond reproducing their record collections.

‘No one give a shit,’ says Barker. ‘I couldn’t even get it fucking reviewed. I think they got a small feature in Sounds when The Perfect Prescription came out, in which Sonic Boom talked about heroin all the time, and that fucked up any opportunity of going to America.’

Someone who did start to take an interest in Spacemen 3 was McGee who, in typical fashion, decided to manage the band overnight and was now entering a period of perpetual debauchery. ‘I just liked taking drugs with Sonic. We were just both a couple of cokeheads,’ he says. ‘“If you could give me a good night out …” – you were in … do you know what I mean?’

Despite Loop earning a Melody Maker cover feature – which saw them permanently fall out with Spacemen 3 – both bands remained a minority concern. They were, however, starting a new underground, away from bands like Pop Will Eat Itself and the Wedding Present that Marshall had signed at RCA. And if the audience back home was meagre, Spacemen 3’s distorted take on the English Opium-Eater archetype found resonance abroad.

‘I admired it ’cause they were in their own world,’ says Barker, ‘and the commitment was 100 per cent. I went to Los Angeles – it was in 1987 – and there was a record shop on Melrose and I see this card up on the wall “Drummer Wanted for Band, must be into the Spacemen 3”. They couldn’t get a review in the fucking Melody Maker or the NME and yet in Los Angeles, in ’87, just about the time the second record came out, some kid wants to form a band in Los Angeles that’s the Spacemen 3.’

Barrett, the Spacemen and every other band and hanger-on at Creation was being invited to Hackney where the difference between day and night was beginning to dissolve as Ecstasy took hold.

Any unlikely excuse was conjured up by McGee to justify a three-day Ecstasy bender. In his evangelical zeal he would occasionally go to extreme lengths. In the early summer of 1989, with the days lengthening, McGee felt the need for an epic bacchanalian record release party to rival those thrown by Ahmet Ertegun or Seymour Stein in their Broadway pomp. McGee, determined to make full use of the greenhouse and roof at Westgate Street, scanned the release schedule only to realise he had a problem: Creation had nothing but a compilation by The Loft due for release in September. A Primal Scream album was in the can, but the band were still undecided on acid house music; their release party was sure to be rock ’n’ roll, but not in the manner the newly Ecstasy-saturated McGee was proselytising. Not to be denied the opportunity of a weekend’s hedonism, McGee immediately decided to release a ‘Greatest Hits’ compilation of Biff Bang Pow tracks. It was little more than a round-up of their best, if little known, material from the previous four or five years; McGee had nevertheless decided on a title that he felt encapsulated the essence of his and Green’s band: The Acid House Album. He ordered 5,000 plain white cardboard sleeves and some Day-Glo paint and the early Clerkenwell spirit of folding paper sleeves into plastic bags on speed was upgraded. Three days of spraying paint on cardboard sleeves pinned against a wall turned The Acid House Album launch party into an orgy of blissed-out deprivation. Paint and the painters started to melt together in a mess of white long-sleeved T-shirts and fringes as acid house tracks and early Seventies Stones numbers competed for supremacy over the sound system. Breaking into a smile while recalling what, in a crowded field, may have been possibly the highest point of Westgate Street debauchery, McGee is wistful. ‘There’s a few people who got high off the paint,’ he says, ‘and they were high for quite a long time.’

‘I was invited to those acid house parties,’ says Nick Currie, who, being both drug-free and Creation’s most self-sufficient artist, had not been exposed to the increased rush of hedonism in the label’s offices. ‘The launch of Biff Bang Pow’s The Acid House Album was a big and incredible Ecstasy party out at the Hackney office. I think I was the only person in the room not on Ecstasy, which was probably the most extraordinary thing to be, because I could witness these crashing tides of empathy where everybody was just slithering all over everybody else. The House of Love were all in a big human bundle of limbs and I got off with some girl who did the artwork at Rough Trade who ended up marrying Bill Drummond. You’d have these Ecstasy affairs with people and it almost didn’t matter who you were, or what you looked like, because the drugs did all the work for you.’

Once the cleaning-up process began, some time on the Monday morning, McGee beamed with pride as Creation now found itself with a purpose-decorated party space. ‘We now had another back room,’ says Kyllo. ‘This big empty area sprayed in fluorescent paint and it was a bit separate. From then on that’s where all the craziness took place.’

The life-affirming Ecstasy parties were accompanied by the crushing and destabilising drift of the midweek comedowns that followed, a cycle not everyone around Creation was sufficiently well-equipped to handle. ‘We turned a lot of people on to it,’ says McGee. ‘A lot of people tuned in, dropped out and never came back.’

The House of Love were still part of the inner Creation circle and were duly invited to the Hackney parties, but the band were finding life on Fontana difficult to navigate, the pressures of the size of their advance creating an artificial sense of what they could achieve. The band’s iconic guitarist Terry Bickers found the expectation around the band particularly hard to tolerate and suffered a breakdown, which was accelerated by the band’s drug use. As the House of Love’s recording sessions started to stall, his instability was kept from the press, but within Westgate Street his behaviour was making his problems self-evident. ‘Terry Bickers was very unwell and came into the office with a gun,’ says Kyllo. ‘It wasn’t really aimed at anybody. It wasn’t, “I’m going to take you all out.” I don’t suppose it was loaded but we had to talk him down from waving it around for a long time.’

Bickers eventually recovered and left the band; his fragility was a rare but very real instance of the downside of the Creation partying. McGee had thrown himself headlong into the hedonism of acid house and was starting to move in a different milieu, one that was more typical of his office’s Hackney environs than of the indie clubs.

‘I’d be dancing, if you can call it dancing,’ says McGee. ‘Fucking hopping on one leg more like, but I’d be on one leg talking to some girl who’d be sticking her tongue down my throat telling me it was great and then her boyfriend would give me a big kiss and I’d go, “What do you do?” and she’d go, “I work in a bank.” I said to her boyfriend, “What do you do?” “I rob banks.” In any other culture that’s a joke; in acid house, on stage at the Gardening Club in Covent Garden in 1990, that wasn’t a joke. You knew he was a fucking bank robber, you knew his message was “What’s in the bank?”’

The next logical step as far as McGee was concerned was to fully embrace the culture and start releasing acid house 12-inches as the offices were full of an ever-growing retinue of hustlers and dealers, all ready to offer their advice on the state of the culture.

McGee and the rest of Creation’s embrace of acid house was written in black and white on the label’s release schedule for 1990. It was also a success. Love Corporation, Ed Ball’s nom-de-acid house, released the epic ‘Palatial’ 12-inch which sufficiently impressed Danny Rampling for him to remix it. Rampling did the same for another Creation release, Hypnotone’s ‘Dream Beam’, which along with records by Sheer Taft and Fluke was played at nights at the Milk Bar.

The following year Creation released Keeping The Faith, a compilation of its acid house releases. Housed in a white sleeve, bearing a newly designed and short-lived fluorescent Creation logo, the album bore all the hallmarks of a dance label release. To the aficionado it was a decent collection of a fast-moving genre; to the indie kids scanning a track listing that included Crazy Eddie & QQ Freestyle’s ‘Nena De Ibiza’, it was a head-scratching introduction into the world to which McGee, who was managing the Grid and Fluke, had dedicated the last twelve months.

‘Everybody claimed to [have] put it together,’ says McGee, ‘but it was Grant Fleming that did it. We were actually pretty good at acid house, but really Grant more than anybody was really responsible for it. He was the one on a Saturday afternoon going round with the white labels.’

Grant Fleming, a teenage West Ham fan, was as far removed a character from the fanzine editors, who still occasionally braved the transport system to visit Creation, as could be imagined. McGee, in an attempt to liven up his relations with the House of Love, with whom he was now thoroughly bored, suggested Fleming join him and the band on the road.

‘I made him in charge of the merch on a big House of Love tour when I was still managing them,’ says McGee. ‘I never used to travel with the band, ’cause I found them too boring, and me and Grant were speeding up and down the motorway – and I use the word “speeding” in its right context. We just had three weeks of debauchery. We came off of that tour and I’d totally had it with the House of Love. We were more rock ’n’ roll than the band: the band were going to bed at fucking one in the morning having had their eight pints of lager, we were going out, coming back at seven, and then on to the next gig off our nuts for three or four weeks. At the end of that I just went to Grant, “Do you want a job?” and he went, “What?” and I went, “I want to a start dance label,” and he went, “What are we calling it?” “Creation.”’

Sharing space alongside Crazy Eddie and QQ Freestyle on the Creation release schedule for 1990 were three EPs and, in November, an album, by McGee’s newest signings, a quartet of Oxford art college students, Ride. Named after a Nick Drake song, the quartet were as boyish as the folk singer, and equally redolent of Arcadian youth. Enormous fans of My Bloody Valentine and the House of Love, they had arrived at a sound that explored the DNA of both bands: crashing drums, cooed harmonies and a different effects pedal for every chord change. Lyrically their songs were opaque and dreamy and sung with an affecting, if slightly mannered, hesitancy.

Ride’s debut EP Ride was released in the third week of 1990, and the band were instantly tipped as an act for the new decade. Ride had struck a chord. In the absence of any new House of Love or My Bloody Valentine material, they filled the gap the older bands had left and started drawing audiences in their image, late teenage or early twenties guitar music fans who read the music papers and were yet to have an interest in acid house. There were many more Ride fans than there were Hypnotone or Sheer Taft fans, and the Ride EP gave Creation its first-ever singles chart position at no. 72 and in its newest signings a perfectly timed lucky break.

The Ride demo had come to McGee via Cally Calloman, who had moved from Phonogram to Warners. ‘I was an A&R man then,’ he says, ‘and the scout Ben Wardle came to me with a cassette that just had the word ‘Ride’ written big in Letraset on it. I tracked them down and watched them rehearse and I just thought, this is the perfect group. I thought, there’s no argument – and I couldn’t get anyone interested in the record company at all, and Ride kept saying they were big fans of My Bloody Valentine and I was going, “But you’re so much better.”’

Word reached McGee that a tape made by a quartet of young Creation fans was being passed around Warners, who duly started chasing the band. ‘Alan phoned up and it was a bit like, “Your girlfriend doesn’t like you very much … do you mind if I go out with her?”’ says Calloman. ‘He was really nice, he said, “This is the sort of band I need to rebuild Creation and I want to do this and I want to do that,” and I thought, oh well, I can’t get anyone interested here, so good luck.’

Ride had a phenomenal run in 1990, ending a breakneck year of touring with an album, Nowhere, that entered the charts at no. 11, maintaining a coveted presence for Creation in the music weeklies while ‘The President’ carried on raving. In love with each release, McGee talked up every new signing, whether a guitar band from the Thames valley or an East End chancer with a sampler, as ‘genius’ and ‘the best band in the world’. It would take Primal Scream, who released Loaded in March in 1990, to bring the two Creation cultures of acid house and classic guitar music together.

Despite the chart success of Ride, Creation was still permanently on the verge of bankruptcy. ‘Alan’s priorities on what to spend the money on were not necessarily what a bookkeeper would advise,’ says Kyllo. ‘It was absolutely hand to mouth. We were always at the edge of what we could afford to do. Our success was growing and, because of the way that cash flow works, you usually have to pay the bills before you get the money back, so when you’re growing that quickly it creates even bigger cash-flow issues.’

McGee, while never losing sight of the need to hustle licensing deals for his signings in America to pour back into Creation, was distracted by Ecstasy. He had watched in awe in late 1989 as two bands had appeared on Top of the Pops on the same night. Two years after Barrett had started promoting them in London when no one else would touch them, Happy Mondays were now in the charts alongside their home-town neighbours, the Stone Roses. It had been a strange journey from The Back Door to Babylon to Top of the Pops.

‘We used to have an answerphone at Clerkenwell Road,’ says Dave Harper. ‘One of the most spectacular messages ever left on it was from Nathan McGough. He’s eating while he’s talking … going, “Harper, it’s Nathan, I’m managing the fucking Mondays now, so you better fucking pull your fucking finger out, all right?”’

13 Getting Away With It

Electronic, Getting Away With It Fac 257 (Peter Saville/Factory)

After the international success of Substance and concentrated periods of touring the US, New Order were determined that the recording of their next album should be a more relaxed affair. All four band members had agreed to start work on solo projects once the album had been completed, giving the sessions a relaxed atmosphere. Such was the leisurely mood in the camp that New Order had insisted on finding a recording studio with a swimming pool and beach access. The only residential studio that could match their criteria was in Ibiza. With perfect timing, the band arrived on an island awash with Ecstasy, and the warm pulse of Balearic beats drifting across the breeze.

‘It was a brilliant fucking holiday,’ says Stephen Morris. ‘It was a bit like going to New York the first time and seeing lofts. The only reason we went to Ibiza is because it had a swimming pool. The place was owned by Judas Priest’s drummer and it was a shit studio. We were there reading the NME and it’s like Balearic? That’s here isn’t it? It was kicking off – we’d seen a bit of it at Heaven but it wasn’t really a kicking off vibe.’

In Ibiza New Order experienced the relaxed energies of acid house in its Balearic, open-air, dancing-under-the stars form. They also failed to make any headway on the recording of their album and returned home with barely a drum track committed to tape. They transferred their recording sessions to the Wiltshire countryside and Peter Gabriel’s newly opened Real World Studios at Box, near Bath. New Order were Real World’s first clients and in late 1988, for a long, almost interminable weekend, the studio was transformed into a West Country version of the Haçienda’s Hot Nights.

‘We finished the record off and Rob decided we should have a party,’ says Morris. ‘A certain group of people talk about it to this day.’

Dave Harper was summoned to the studio for what he had expected to be a playback of the album, Technique, and an informal discussion about plans for the release. Instead he was met with scenes of unbridled carnage. ‘I went down on the train,’ he says, ‘and there was Showsec security in the middle of Wiltshire – buses and carloads from Manchester, all of Happy Mondays and their entourage. I walked in and I can’t remember much about it. But Mike Pickering, from that day on, has referred to me as “mad dog”, because, apparently, I axed a urinal off a wall, evidently with an axe.’ ‘That was just the start,’ says Morris. ‘“Dave, Dave – what are you doing … no Dave, put the axe down.” He was pickled.’

Mike Pickering had arrived at Box in the convoy of buses and cars that had been summoned from Manchester to celebrate the album’s completion. As Haçienda regulars and members of the wider Factory circle made their way through narrow country lanes, the effects of the pills that had been swallowed in anticipation started to take hold. ‘They were double-decker coaches and everyone was getting a bit flushed,’ he says. ‘They’d obviously dropped already so they were getting a bit like, “Fucking where is it?” Someone shouted, “Lights!” We all had whistles and everyone started whistling and dancing on the bus. Then we were like, “They’re just lights, it’s just a house, it’s probably some poor old bastard in a farmhouse.” It’s a wonder we survived it really ’cause they were very strong Ecstasies, wow.’

‘The hedonism was out of control,’ says Harper. ‘When the E hit, it was insane. At the party at Real World it was bacchanalia gone mental. I’ve been back there dozens of times over the years and never recognised the place. It was the end of the world. People didn’t recover for days on end.’

Pickering was DJing as the party reached yet another peak. As he started looking through his record box, his concentration was broken by the arrival of Graeme Park, his colleague at the Hot Nights. ‘He went, “Do you want to swap over?”’ says Pickering. ‘I went, “Fucking hell, mate, I’ve just come on.” I honestly thought I had. He went, “Mike, you’ve been playing for nearly five hours” … “Whoosh, fucking hell.” It was fucking amazing. And the best thing about it was, Peter Gabriel didn’t know.’

New Order’s first public engagement for the promotion of Technique was a Top of the Pops appearance for the single ‘Fine Time’. The track was the album’s most overt reference to the Balearic sounds they had encountered on Ibiza. Another point of reference was the single’s dichromatic sleeve – a picture of dozens of pills. The Top of the Pops performance was another highlight in the band’s ongoing attempts to break with the programme’s formula. After previously disastrous attempts at playing live on the show, New Order agreed to mime. As the cameras rolled, Peter Hook stood stock still with his hands in his pockets and his bass worn over the shoulder like a rifle, while Bernard Sumner danced wildly in front of the microphone. Sumner’s style of dancing would start to become familiar to television audiences as the man whose moves he had copied, Bez from Happy Mondays, followed New Order into the charts. ‘Bernard loved the Mondays,’ says Harper, ‘loved them. On Top of the Pops, Bernard’s wearing dungarees and he’s raving, looking insane. They’d gone mental’.

‘Fine Time’ was released in November 1988, in the same month Factory released Happy Mondays’ second album, Bummed. The album was met without much fanfare. Tony Wilson scheduled the band for an appearance on his new Granada television music show, The Other Side of Midnight, and the band remained a lively, if little-known, phenomenon. Jeff Barrett, who was now the band’s PR man, ensured that interest was kept up, but the record’s audience, despite the cachet of a launch party at Heaven and a handful of glowing reviews, was stubbornly small.

Bummed had a cavernous, almost whale-song, quality that left most reviewers perplexed; the fact that the promo cassette listed the first track as ‘Some Cunt from Preston’ (later renamed ‘Country Song’) only added to the general sense of apprehension around the band. Within a few months the record’s qualities would start to reveal themselves. As the proliferation of Ecstasy increased, Bummed’s dark energies began to take hold. Wilson had hoped that the Happy Mondays would become the rock ’n’ roll band for the Ecstasy generation and he would be proved right. But it would be a slowly evolving process before they were anointed as the raver’s Rolling Stones; and once the band had been crowned it was a position they would struggle to maintain.

‘Tony’s theory about why the Mondays failed was that there wasn’t a middle-class person in the band,’ says Nathan McGough. ‘He said the bands that always survive may have had working-class roots in them, but you need a middle-class kid in the band. They’re the ones who actually really understood the context of the band, and where it sat culturally within society. So that’s what the Mondays lacked. I guess the middle-class person within that outfit was me.’

McGough had been asked to manage the band by Shaun Ryder, a decision that had infuriated Wilson. ‘I was summoned to Tony’s house,’ says McGough, ‘and Wilson said to me, “You’re not managing this band,” and we’d been friends for, like, eight years or something. “You’re not welcome in the Factory office. You annoy everyone …” Mike Pickering mediates at this point. And Wilson went, “Fine, right, I want a contract,” and I was like, “That’s the greatest news I’ve ever heard coming from you, because at least now you’re going to have to state what you’re going to do for the band and it’ll cost you a bit of money as well.” So we did a deal, God knows how much, but enough to get things going.’

Happy Mondays had first come to the attention of Factory through Pickering and Rob Gretton, who had seen the band perform at the Haçienda. A Factory affiliate, Phil Saxe, who later became the label’s A&R, was given the challenging task of managing them. The band’s debut LP Squirrel & G-Man was released in 1987 to a handful of positive reviews but little else.* To all concerned, even their handful of supporters, Happy Mondays appeared to be another addition to the Factory B-list, but Wilson remained committed to the band and was convinced of their potential – the largest credit on the sleeve of their 1986 single ‘Freaky Dancin” read in block Modernist capitals: ‘Executive – Antony Wilson’† – yet however much he liked the idea of the Happy Mondays as a street gang ready to take on the charts, he was resistant to any thought of serious investment in the group.

As Wilson’s former lodger, and as his friend and collaborator, McGough knew the Factory modus operandi intimately. He was insistent that the traditional Factory approach to marketing and PR – a combination of laissez-faire northern snobbery and eye-catching graphic design – be re-evaluated for the Happy Mondays. ‘I told Wilson that I wanted a clean sheet and I wanted to get people focused about this band,’ he says. ‘They weren’t gonna carry on in the usual meandering Factory way, just putting it out without any promotion.’

McGough was aided in his approach by the fact the band’s artwork was produced by Central Station Design rather than Peter Saville. Two of Central Station, Matt and Pat Carroll, were cousins of Shaun and Paul Ryder, which helped the studio develop an instinctive rapport with the band’s music. Central Studio used hand-drawn, Day-Glo colours and thickly applied paints in their designs for Happy Mondays that captured the immediacy and hallucinatory energy of the recordings, giving them a vivid visual presence that was distinct from the customary detached Factory aesthetics.

All Wilson’s misgivings about McGough’s suitability to be Happy Mondays’ manager were confirmed by the choice of producer for the band’s second album; one of the few people with whom Wilson had permanently fallen out, the ex-communicated original Factory partner, Martin Hannett. Whatever Wilson thought of the situation, McGough had taken the decision based on the band’s new MDMA-enhanced music, rather than a Machiavellian desire to control Factory politics.

‘Me and Tony banged heads on a number of issues,’ says McGough. ‘The band were heavily into Ecstasy, which was really new, and I thought, well, we’re really making a kind of drug-inspired rock music, so it’s gonna need some kind of spatial dimension rather than just a literal recording. So I got together with Erasmus, who rang Hannett and we talked things through.’

Alan Erasmus, as he often did, mediated between Wilson and McGough. It was put to Wilson that if the differences between Factory and Hannett could be laid aside, and if the label was prepared to demonstrate it still had confidence in the producer’s abilities, Hannett might deliver the kind of epochal recording with which he had made his name.

Still unconvinced by the idea, Wilson agreed that McGough could meet the producer in person. Rumours had circulated around Hannett in his absence from the day-to-day affairs of Factory, and little had been heard from him, other than reports of a disastrous attempt at recording the Stone Roses’ debut album. There were also whispers that his heroin use had hardened into addiction and his physical demeanour suggested that he was in poor health, the kind associated with heavy drinkers.

‘I was really shocked when I saw him,’ says McGough. ‘I’d met him when I was, like, sixteen and he was very slim, good-looking guy. He’d become about twenty-five stone, huge beard, really long hair and a massive overcoat, and he had a two-inch long fingernail, which was used as a corkscrew. Wilson was going mental about it. Anyway he sort of conceded and he kind of patched up his differences with Martin.’

For the recording Hannett had chosen a studio in Driffield, a barracks town nearly 100 miles outside Manchester where, allegedly, Happy Mondays introduced some recruits to the joys of Ecstasy. The band worked quickly and within a month the album had been finished. Any lingering resentment between Hannett and Factory was being dissolved in the producer and band’s experiments either side of the mixing desk, which to Hannett’s delight included round-the-clock doses of Ecstasy. With relations between the producer and Factory MD having thawed, even if the conversation remained a little barbed, Wilson started visiting the studio regularly. As he listened to the tracks Wilson was growing more and more animated by what he was hearing; it was the sound, he was convinced, of a new kind of drug music.

‘The big issue for me and for Wilson was a cultural one,’ says McGough, ‘because the record was made on Ecstasy. They weren’t popping four pills at a time on a Monday night – basically they’d have quarter or a half and use it as a kind of therapeutic state of mind to get into the zone, as was Hannett, so everyone was locked into making an Ecstasy vibe record.’

Wilson was familiar with the Ecstasy vibe. The band had been pivotal in acquainting the Haçienda with the drug and, by proxy, Manchester, setting in motion the club’s transformation from an empty venue-cum-hangout, into the northern equivalent of the Paradise Garage or Danceteria that he and Gretton had initially conceived. ‘The band introduced it through associated drug-dealing friends in Amsterdam,’ says McGough, ‘childhood friends of theirs. Basically, they were given a bag of 15,000 and their mates said, “Right, you knock these out.” They were the first in selling them and kind of got everything going in Manchester. The Hot Nights, on a Wednesday, were the first time you ever saw anyone with their hands in the air dancing on a podium.’

Bummed’s dirty urban psychedelia certainly captured the disorientating vertigo of an Ecstasy rush. It also captured its animated euphoria. On the chorus of ‘Do It Better’, summoning every ounce of self-control he can manage under the circumstances, Shaun Ryder repeats, ‘Good, good, good, good, Double, double, good, double, double, good,’ as the band lock together over a groove that they play with a giddy instability. Although certainly an Ecstasy record, and one of Hannett’s finest productions, there was little on Bummed to suggest that the crowd at Hot would be dancing on a podium to Happy Mondays any time soon.

Despite two singles and a video for ‘Wrote for Luck’, which consisted of a pre-teen nightclub crowd enjoying the track under the disco ball and strobes of Manchester city centre’s Legends, Bummed failed to find an audience. Wilson and McGough were frustrated and felt that the band had stalled. Happy Mondays had made one of the first Ecstasy albums, and judging by the queues starting to stretch around the Haçienda, the market for Ecstasy was constantly growing. Happy Mondays may have been making a profit out of the demand for the drug while running a lucrative sideline in the club’s Acid Corner, but their music had yet to become synonymous with the drug.

‘The issue for me and Tony was that by the time you get round to the Easter of 1989, this had become front-page tabloid fodder,’ say McGough, ‘but the band, who were pivotal in all of this, had kind of been left behind and out of the picture because this was the rock ’n’ roll version. So we decided that we needed to get a club mix done of one of the tracks, and get that out there and hope we could build a bridgehead.’

A year after Bummed had been recorded, Factory released the 12-inch single, W.F.L. It contained two mixes of ‘Wrote For Luck’, one by the DJ Paul Oakenfold and one by Erasure’s Vince Clarke. A new video was commissioned. The location was once again a nightclub, but this time it featured the band and their friends dancing under lights in what looked like a user’s guide to Happy Mondays and the right conditions for experiencing their music.

A poster featuring the Bummed sleeve, an enlarged close-up of Shaun Ryder’s head in garish pastels, had been fly-posted around Manchester and the north. In late 1988, in a witty Warholian gesture, the walls of a disused building in Charles Street had been entirely covered in the poster. The address was the recently purchased site for the new Factory offices. In a career that alternated between large, magnanimous gestures and recklessness on the grand scale, Factory’s purchase of the Charles Street building marked the high point of hubris on behalf of the label, and especially, Wilson.

As Rob Gretton’s ill health continued to affect his abilities, Rebecca Boulton had become more involved with the running of New Order’s affairs. In contrast to Factory’s plan for a new suite of offices, most of the day-to-day running of New Order’s business took place in Gretton’s front room. ‘Factory were struggling, because they moved from Palatine Road and bought this huge great building on Charles Street,’ says Boulton. ‘Tony was getting a bit ahead of himself, and they had a lot of employees at that time. Tina left before they moved into Charles Street. She had come up with projections and figures to show that if they continued with the Charles Street building, they would go bankrupt within two years.’ Tina Simmons had started to tire of the lack of financial controls at Palatine Road.

Factory was selling records internationally, but the company’s ambitions were increasingly complex and grandiose. The Haçienda was finally working at its capacity and thriving as a cultural masthead in the manner in which Wilson had imagined. Its success prompted further ideas from Wilson about redevelopment, but the basic tenets of running a record company – royalties and accountancy and the tedious business of fiscal housekeeping – were subjects he still largely ignored. Wilson’s outlook and ambitions were being hardened by an increased use of cocaine. When a case of wine was delivered to Palatine Road, he complained that the company was being misunderstood: Factory was a drug label, he insisted, not a drinking one. His friends and associates also noted that, after the dominance of New Order, Wilson was finally enjoying the success of Happy Mondays, a band with which he felt more of a sense of ownership and conspiracy. The band’s air of licentious hedonism also gave Wilson an opportunity to demonstrate the difference between Factory and the suburban, shoegazing, middle-class, indie-dancing south.

Although the Haçienda was seriously over-capacity most nights of the week and the epicentre of a youth movement, all the debts it had accrued leading up to its success remained prevalent. Undeterred, Factory launched a new property venture, Dry Bar, a cafe/bar space in Oldham Street that was designed by the Factory architect, Ben Kelly, and the first of its kind in what would become Manchester’s emerging Northern Quarter.

‘Tony was looking at New York brunches and things like that,’ says Tina Simmons, ‘and the idea of somewhere to go after the night before. It was another thing that was totally different from anything else in Manchester at the time.’

Launched in 1989 during the city’s Madchester zenith, Dry Bar had received the blessing and financial backing from New Order, whose company Gainwest had financed the venture in partnership with Factory. ‘The Haçienda finally clicked for a bit,’ says Stephen Morris, ‘so everything’s great, and now they want to do Dry, so things were positive and the records were doing great.’

In April 1990 Happy Mondays unequivocally connected with an audience when their single ‘Step On’ reached no. 5 in the Top Forty. ‘“Step On”, to this day it still sounds fucking amazing,’ says McGough, ‘and it felt like we were exploding – when you have a hit record it changes everything.’ Paul Oakenfold had produced the track, adding an Italian house-style piano vamp. He had added a similar flourish to his mixes on the preceding Madchester Rave On EP, which had been released in late 1989 and seen the band enter the mainstream. The Madchester EP’s artwork consisted of the record’s title in a Hanna Barbera-esque font, accompanied by a registered trademark symbol, the circled R, ®. McGough had convinced Wilson to brand the moment of the Haçienda’s ascendency and give the media a name with which to celebrate and investigate its euphoric momentum.

The album that followed ‘Step On’, Pills ’n’ Thrills and Bellyaches, continued the band’s ascendency, entering the charts inside the Top Ten and the band’s popularity was such that they could book a date at Wembley Arena. Whatever McGough’s ambitions had been for his charges, the scale of the Happy Mondays’ crossover far exceeded his, the band’s or the label’s expectations.

‘I think we shipped 150,000 albums, first week,’ he says. ‘We knew a month before. You feel the heat and the energy, you know it’s gonna land out there and make a fucking huge explosion. And we knew that about Pills ’n’ Thrills and Bellyaches.’

Factory had delivered Happy Mondays into the Top Ten and the band had ridden a cultural wave, one that they had helped create. ‘What a major label would’ve done is, it would’ve had its first second and third singles lined up, it would’ve had its videos in commission. There was none of that planning. That’s where we came down. We made a huge explosion with that album, it sold really well, I think it did 400,000, but if we’d have been smart we could have gone on to do more.’

New Order added to the celebratory air of the city by releasing ‘World in Motion’, the England team’s official Italia 90 World Cup theme song. Even by the band and the label’s standards, its genesis was an unusual one. Had events turned out differently ‘World in Motion’s familiar melody might have been used in a wholly different context. ‘We were about to start a project with Michael Powell, the film director,’ says Rebecca Boulton. ‘He wanted to do a short. He’d cast Tilda Swinton and he wanted New Order to do the music for it. They all met up and they were going to do it.’

While the band were discussing the possibilities of working with one of British cinema’s most celebrated auteurs, an official at the Football Association had approached Tony Wilson. ‘Tony was friendly with someone at the press office at the FA,’ says Boulton. ‘I think they’d had dinner, and New Order doing the World Cup song got pitched as an idea. Tony brought it to the band and I don’t think they were desperately keen at first, but Steve and Gillian had been working on an instrumental theme for a TV programme called Reportage and that track was the basis of “World in Motion”.’

Though New Order missed the opportunity of working with Powell, ‘World in Motion’ remains the solitary example of a football song worthy of more than a cursory listen. Italia 90 was also one of England’s most successful World Cup campaigns, one that helped sales of the single and enhanced the feeling that, over the spring and summer of 1990, Factory and Manchester were effortlessly in command of the zeitgeist.

In true Factory style, the gesture of making an England World Cup song was of more interest than the possible remuneration. Most of the single’s profits went to another record company. ‘“World in Motion” was a joint venture with MCA,’ says Boulton, ‘because in effect the footballers were signed to MCA.’

*

‘Alan Erasmus was very good at finding properties and things like that, so we found the building on the corner of Charles Street. It didn’t have much of a roof,’ says Simmons, ‘but apart from that it was a shell. We bought the freehold for [£]85,000 and that was going to be the office. We were expanding and poor old Alan’s flat really couldn’t fit us in any more.’

The desire for offices was born out of necessity. Part of Factory’s charm, and a source of its general irreverence towards the music business, was the fact the label had released a succession of million-selling albums from Alan Erasmus’s flat. It was a situation it had now outgrown. ‘Substance, Technique, Bummed we’d done a tremendous amount out of a flat,’ says Simmons, ‘but we were getting too big, we’d got the building and Ben Kelly was brought in again to do the designs.’

Rather than move into an already functioning and purpose-built office and sustain the company’s momentum, Wilson insisted that the Factory offices follow the specification and vision of the Haçienda. The crippling costs of the seven-year time lag between the Haçienda opening and its newly found success were ignored as Kelly was given a brief for a state-of-the-art office suite. To compound matters, New Order’s sessions on their next album were stalling and Happy Mondays’ Pills ’n’ Thrills and Bellyaches had been a more expensive record to make than its predecessor.

‘That building, along with all the other things that were happening,’ says Simmons, ‘including the drug-taking and the fact that New Order’s album was running late, meant all the forecasting we’d done on projected sales and when those were coming in were getting further and further away and also the costs of the new offices were escalating.’

While the Haçienda’s success made it a media cause célèbre, it’s over-capacity nights represented a false economy to its owners. The additional running costs it incurred were large. Worse, its shift to ‘cultural phenomenon’ status meant that the police took a more robust interest in its operations. Once the Cheetham Hill gang started to target the club as a sales patch for drugs, the ensuing turf wars meant that the Haçienda was forced to shut down, a decision Wilson took without consulting the other partners in the club, including Gretton.

Events started to accelerate as the pressure on Factory’s finances began to grow. Although Madchester was still in full swing, its pioneers were facing possible bankruptcy.

New Order were kept abreast of the situation while in the studio. Their album was being recorded in strained circumstances and the intrusion of Factory’s financial problems into their slow-moving creative process only worsened the atmosphere. ‘There were loads and loads of meetings,’ says Boulton. ‘I remember going down to Real World and people from Ernst and Young were always there. So the band were having to deal with meetings, and record an album, so that’s not great.’

New Order weren’t the only Factory act ensconced in a studio and struggling to finish an album. To record the follow-up to Pills ’n’ Thrills, Happy Mondays had shipped out to Barbados where Shaun Ryder had developed a crack habit. ‘The writing was on the bloody wall,’ says Morris. ‘Sending the Mondays to Barbados – we’d just done the same thing and got absolutely nothing done in Ibiza, why the hell do you think you’re gonna get anything done in Barbados?’

With both of the label’s major artists in the studio, Wilson anticipated moving into the Charles Street offices with two albums ready for release and the launch of a new Factory era, one that completed the transition from Palatine Road to the three floors of corporate offices. To ensure the company’s profile remained distinctive, Wilson even commissioned a Factory style guide from Peter Saville Associates.

‘It was Tony’s ego gone mad,’ says Simmons. ‘The first q[uantity] s[urveyor’s] report came in and it was going to cost over [£]400,000, just to refurbish it. The commercial estate agents said a fully functional building that size as offices would be worth [£]150,000 – this is when I started having alarm bells. Tony had gone on a jaunt to see Tom Atencio in LA, so Alan spoke to Ben Kelly and said, “Right, you’re going to have to rethink all these specifications. All these materials have to change.” Tony’s come back and is furious with Alan and I.’

Kelly’s design, which included such early Nineties signifiers as exposed brickwork and aluminium girders, was certainly elegant. It made use of the building’s three floors by creating a triple-height space for a floor-to-ceiling atrium and featured details such as bespoke slate roofing and a series of interior gutters that contained treated pebbles. It was a space that would have been highly coveted by any media or advertising company, or the kind of thrusting property developer that wished to appear culturally relevant. Whoever the building’s occupants, they would certainly have to have been solvent to meet its running costs. Factory’s precarious cash flow was not guaranteed even to cover the costs of the building’s brushed steel gates that featured in their design a perforated rendering of the label’s new corporate logo.

Factory’s income stream remained impressive, but its outgoings consumed the label’s monies as soon as they had been collected. ‘The first cheque for a million pounds from Pinnacle arrived one Christmas,’ says Simmons. ‘I think it was after Substance. Then it was, “Here’s another one,” and then another one. We were getting these big cheques in but everything was still costing a lot of money and Tony wouldn’t ever look at the balance.’

In his heightened self-confidence Wilson was also increasingly impulsive. One of Factory’s final signings was the former Miaow! singer and City Fun co-editor, Cath Carroll. Since disbanding Miaow! Carroll had married Big Black guitarist Joey Santiago and emigrated to São Paolo, where she had explored Brazilian rhythms and songwriting. The resulting album, England Made Me, was along with the debut by Electronic one of the few highlights of Factory’s final release schedule. Its recording costs were exorbitant and included studios and session musicians in Chicago, São Paolo, Sheffield and London,‡ all of which had been agreed by Wilson without informing his partners.

‘We were having a meeting one night with Cath Carroll’s management to discuss her future contract,’ says Simmons, ‘and Alan and I were somewhat surprised to find that they’d actually already been offered an advance of £70,000. This is the first time we’ve heard about this. We said, “Where’d you get this from?” and Tony came out with, “I made an executive decision whilst at Glastonbury, in the car park, talking to Cath Carroll” … and Alan went absolutely berserk. It was very embarrassing, ’cause, typical Factory, they start having a row in front of this manager.’

Simmons finally tired of arguing over Factory’s finances and decided to resign. Before her departure she had noticed a possible lifeline for the company’s cash flow. Factory’s agreement with its distribution company, Pinnacle, had elapsed and was due for renegotiation. ‘I mentioned that the Pinnacle contract was coming up,’ she says. ‘We were paying ridiculous amounts of distribution, so I said, “You could save a lot of money by renegotiating the deal,” and at the end of that day I handed in my notice but I had to stay until these negotiations were over with Pinnacle. Rob was in hospital, so I went with Alan to tell Rob I’d resigned; Alan wanted Rob to tell me not to go. Rob said, “I can’t ask you to stay, and I don’t think you should get yourself into being as ill as I am,”’ cause he was very ill at that point, very poorly indeed.’

‘Rob had a major problem with his thyroid,’ says his partner Lesley Gilbert. ‘The medication he had to take for that played a big part in Rob’s health and probably the stresses he went through, especially with the Haçienda, added to it all. We came so close, twice, to losing our house, so close. I was more philosophical about that than Rob, but he took it harder. And I think that obviously played a part in his bad health.’

Gretton had suffered through the ups and downs and complicated emotions that ran through the thread of Joy Division, New Order and Factory and was paying a heavy price. He could also see that Simmons, having been made a partner, was being dragged into the volatility of Factory’s finances and advised her against taking up such an insecure and perilous position, one that he had always tried to maintain with no small degree of common sense and nous. After a long illness, Gretton died in 1999. Perhaps due to his nonchalance and occasional diffidence towards the media, Gretton’s role in Factory has been misunderstood and occasionally downplayed, but his contribution to the company and his belief in the Factory project, to say nothing of the energies and finance he invested in it, cannot be overstated. ‘I get calls from people at Manchester City Council asking me if I’ll go back and open a street if they named it after Tony Wilson,’ says Mike Pickering, ‘and I always tell them, “Call me back when you open Rob Gretton Way.”’

Factory’s renegotiations with Pinnacle were a disaster. The label was one of the jewels in the crown of the distributor’s catalogue. Along with enjoying healthy Top Ten sales, Factory flattered Pinnacle’s reputation, anointing a rather workaday company with a little of its iconic Mancunian aura. Having not changed the terms of their agreement for several years, Factory was negotiating from a position of strength, and the company’s boss, Steve Mason, was expecting to have to make an impossible-to-turn-down offer to remain as the distributor; but Wilson and his team left Pinnacle having agreed a percentage that was only marginally better. While he would have been the first to admit that figures were never his strong point, Wilson had let an opportunity to turn around the label’s fortunes go begging.

‘The following January I went to MIDEM,’ says Simmons. ‘I bumped into someone from Pinnacle who said, “Steve Mason was laughing all the way to the bank. You could have got distribution at 10 or 12 per cent.” I think they settled for 16 per cent, or something ridiculous. When you’re doing that volume of records, that’s a lot of money. Then the rest is history; later on that year they had the receivers in.’

In one lasting moment of ignominy that has entered Factory mythology, Happy Mondays posed for a photograph on a newly commissioned meeting table, which promptly collapsed under the group’s weight. The table was suspended from the ceiling by thin metal wires, and had been given a Fac catalogue number along with a title, ‘Temporary Contemporary’. As a metaphor for the folly of the Charles Street offices it is unsurpassable. It also illustrates the breakdown in communication between the partners that blighted the end of the company. The table cost around £2,000 to make, but Erasmus and Gretton had understood from Wilson that the figure was nearer £18,000. ‘Temporary Contemporary’ may have been produced under its budget by £16,000, but every other piece of furniture and objet d’art in the building was wildly over budget, and Wilson had hidden his excesses in the table’s price. ‘That bloody table,’ says Gilbert. ‘God, Rob went ballistic at the money, utterly ballistic.’

Mike Pickering, along with Erasmus, Gretton and New Order, had been sanguine about the need for new offices, but Pickering was, along with his colleagues, dismayed by the scale and grandiloquence of the building. ‘We were never about having flash offices,’ he says. ‘We always had Lesley sat in the middle of a load of cardboard boxes in Palatine Road. Rob was Factory, he kept Factory going. He was really sharp, Rob, and he was the driving force, and even when he got ill he helped so many people, everyone loved him.’

The voluminous Charles Street space required an increased number of Factory staff to fill its open-plan design. Along with employing a set of chartered accountants, for the first time in its history Factory ran a dedicated A&R department. Many of the newer signings had long-term Factory associates scratching their heads. The label had often been accused of being insular or esoteric, but the Adventure Babies, Northside and the Wendys could only be accused of being a little pedestrian. ‘The thing that really was the nail in the coffin for Factory for me’, says Morris, ‘was, as soon as they moved into that bloody office on Charles Street and started taking on accountants, and pursuing this sort of A&R and signing bands, I just thought, “It’s a bit late for that now, isn’t it?”’

For New Order the situation was becoming increasingly difficult. Once the disastrous Happy Mondays Barbados recording sessions had been written off, it became obvious that Republic, their forthcoming album, was Factory’s only serious asset. In a bid to alleviate the pressures on Factory’s cash flow, the band’s international rights were sold to London Records. The label subsequently went into discussion about London buying a controlling stake in Factory, an idea that had once been unthinkable. Factory may have moved into a new corporate headquarters but apart from New Order it lacked any corporate finance. ‘Are you an indie pretending to be a major label?’ says Morris. ‘Or a major label pretending to be an indie? It was, “The London deal, the London deal will save us all.”’

In LA Tom Atencio could just look on. He managed New Order for the States only, where his expertise and industry experience had seen the band reach the pinnacle of critical and commercial success. He was unable to influence any decisions being considered in Charles Street. ‘When things started to unravel, the idea that there was a lack of professionalism, or astuteness financially, was making itself clear,’ he says. ‘That was disappointing because these were friends, and it hurt.’

Unsure whether they had a record company to release their next album or not, New Order were again coming to the financial aid of Factory. The profits of the band’s tours and recordings had always financed a stay of execution for the Haçienda, and they were now doing the same for the label. ‘We should have just downed tools, walked off and said, “Well, we’re not finishing this record until you sort yourself out,”’ says Morris. ‘’Cause how can you make a record when you’re just making the record to finance the edifice of your own misery? Nobody was happy. We were getting out of our heads and being miserable.’

Once London had audited Factory and undertaken due diligence on the proposed purchase of the label, the common knowledge about the company – that without New Order it was insolvent – became a matter of financial record. Rather than buying into a bankrupt record company, London bought the rights to the band’s forthcoming album Republic and New Order’s future recordings instead.

‘The thing that was going to save Factory was the London deal,’ says Morris. ‘It was dragging on and on. Gillian and me had never been on holiday and we went to the Seychelles to get away from it all. We’d go to the beach, come back, and there’d just be a pile of faxes waiting for us.’

Having made the record in difficult circumstances, the band’s only real option was to release it on London, a move that Gretton in particular regretted. ‘Rob couldn’t stand Roger Ames and London,’ says Morris.

At that point New Order were now signed to a major label whose name represented everything that Gretton and Factory had always ridiculed about the music business. ‘They ended up having to sign to London really,’ says Boulton. ‘For the first time ever they were a little bit hands-tied-behind-their-back.’

Despite increasingly strained and difficult relations, particularly between the members of New Order and Wilson, Factory’s closure was treated with a sanguine inevitability. Many outside the label had assumed that, in its love of grand projects and in Wilson’s intellectual capriciousness, Factory had, from day one, been on a trajectory that could only lead to bankruptcy – which is to deny the fun, adventure and peerless music that the label created by exploring Wilson’s ideas about ‘the art of the playground’.

‘The thing was, we were having a bloody great time,’ says Stephen Morris. ‘Nobody was sitting around weeping gallons. We were very happy. We were having the time of our lives, really, doing what we bloody wanted. I can’t turn round and say it’s his fault, or it’s his fault we were all there, we could all at any time have fucked off. And we didn’t.’

Few creative people are lucky enough to see their ideas fulfilled. That Wilson managed to see so many of his become reality is testament to his enthusiasm, intelligence and indefatigable self-confidence. Factory played a large part in Wilson’s life, but he was, perhaps, above all a Granada man, one of Manchester’s proudest sons who had firm ideas about the city’s cultural life, in which he had a definitive and significant role. Wherever his flights of fancy might lead, Wilson insisted that the city he loved go with him, even if it meant that the mundane aspects of running a company like Factory – its accounts, legal documents and deeds – be neglected or forgotten.

‘Who wants to be sober with financial responsibility?’ says Atencio, who observed the Factory project from the perspective of America. ‘It kind of kills the muse. The fact that it was around for so long is a miracle. I’m sure millions were squandered in not even being collected. You can see the number of accounts people that it takes to do a proper job in modern labels, and they probably had one guy out the back, with an abacus.’

Wilson, Gretton and Factory’s civic pride is indisputable. Manchester’s civil servants, property developers and new creative class busily align themselves with the established Factory narrative that places music and culture at the heart of the city’s regeneration. Others more closely involved with the label still smart from what they perceive as its amateur attempts at bookkeeping. Rebecca Bolton has managed New Order since the death of Rob Gretton and supervised the ongoing and canonical interest in Joy Division, a project that is occasionally hindered by Factory’s legacy of clerical lassitude. ‘There are people who’ve been involved that I think have a bitter side, and feel that they have been hard done to by the whole Factory experience,’ she says. ‘Still, even now, I come across loose ends that are a problem for New Order and Joy Division, that we can’t really properly tie up because nothing was written down.’

* In a typical act of boosterism Dave Haslam, in his NME review, thought the record as impressive a debut as Marquee Moon. One of only a handful of records ever to receive a 10/10 rating from NME, Marquee Moon was joined on its full-marks pedestal by another Shaun Ryder record released in 1995: Black Grape’s It’s Great When You’re Straight, Yeah.

† Anthony was misspelt Antony, and didn’t include the usual middle initial, H., making it a unique written example of Wilson’s name and a likely candidate for a Fac number, although the fact the record already had a catalogue number is likely to have ruled it out.

‡ The album’s credits included the line ‘Paid for in Manchester by Factory’

14 Trancentral Lost in My Mind

The KLF – Justified and Ancient (photograph by Kevin Westerberg used by kind permission of the photographer)

Over the Christmas holidays of 1986, six months after releasing his solo album, The Man, and nine months after leaving the industry, Bill Drummond was out for a walk in the countryside. Looking back on the year drawing to an end, memories of a visit from a larger-than-life character to his Warners office were looming large in his reflections.

‘One day Pete Waterman comes into my office,’ says Drummond. ‘I didn’t know who the fuck he was. He goes, “I’m a producer, have you got any acts for me to produce?” I said, “Well, I’ve got this act they’re on tonight, at the Wag club.” So he came along and said, “Sack the band, we’ll do a track with the singer.” I explained to him, “Well, we can’t sack the band because it’s the guitarist Jimmy Cauty’s band, and he makes it work.” So he said, “OK, we’ll sack the rest, we’ll keep the guitarist and bass player, as long as they understand they’re not going to play on the records.”’

Pete Waterman’s production and songwriting company Stock Aitken Waterman were in the flush of early success. After several false starts they had, in the previous year, achieved their first no. 1 single Dead or Alive’s ‘You Spin Me Round’. Dead or Alive’s singer Pete Burns was a veteran of the Zoo Liverpool scene and had in passing mentioned to Waterman that an ex-colleague was now an A&R at Warners. Waterman was permanently alert to industry openings. SAW’s finances were on a knife edge and Waterman followed any lead that might drum up business. His vision of SAW as an out-and-out pop production company had taken some unexpected turns; his first songwriting and production project had been the Cyprus Eurovision Song Contest entry in 1984. Waterman, delighted he now had a contact within Warners, wrote down Drummond’s details in his Filofax and demanded a meeting. ‘He walked in, and the first thing he said to me was that he’d made “You Spin Me” with Pete Burns,’ says Drummond, ‘and I just thought, who the fuck is this madman?’

Sufficiently charmed by Waterman’s bravado and fast-talking hustle, Drummond’s interest was aroused and he accepted an invitation to the newly built SAW studios in Borough, which Waterman had christened the Hit Factory, home to, as they would inscribe on the sleeve of their singles, ‘the sound of a bright young Britain’.

‘Pete invited me to meet Mike [Scott] and Matt [Aitken] down at his studio,’ says Drummond. ‘They’ve got the bank manager there. Pete introduced me as a record mogul, and he got the band to come down and it was all just to impress the bank manager – obviously, he was getting his loan. And there’s no real studio there just some samplers, but Jimmy and I learnt just how to go out on a limb, to really go out on a limb with something, through Pete Waterman.’

The band Drummond had taken Waterman to see were Brilliant, a trio of vocalist June Montana, Jimmy Cauty and former Killing Joke bassist Youth, who were managed by former Teardrop Explodes keyboardist and Drummond’s former partner in Zoo, Dave Balfe, who had duly signed the band with Drummond. The arrival of SAW, and their own take on Motown production-line, High Street pop, was an idea too simple yet ambitious for Balfe and Drummond, with their mutual distrust of the orthodoxies of record companies and the multi-album careers of the bands they promoted, to ignore. Brilliant were taken out of the Warners demo studios and started making their debut album at SAW studios with, in the minds of its partners at least, the UK’s hottest production team. ‘In Pete’s head it was like a Motown ethos,’ says Drummond, ‘or a Jam and Lewis type production style, but for a British audience. I think he thought they were making Jam and Lewis records they were that slick, but they were more of a Woolworth’s version.’

SAW stripped the recording process back to a minimal operation of state-of-the-art sampling, programmed drum machines and vocals. Not only were the conventions of a band playing live in the studio dispensed with, there was nowhere in the Hit Factory for a live band to play.

The production-line method worked perfectly for one-off singles as SAW started a run of chart success that peaked in 1989 with seven no. 1 singles, all of which were distributed by Pinnacle, Rough Trade’s arch-competitor in independent music distribution. Such were the technicalities of the Indie chart, whereby any independently distributed record qualified, SAW releases were no. 1 in both the Indie and Top Forty singles charts. Brilliant were, nominally at least, a band rather than a vocalist working with the production company, and the process of recording their album became, by SAW standards, longer and altogether more convoluted. Cauty and Youth had a background in rock and the group dynamics of albums and tours, where performance and integrity were touchstones of musical creativity. Waterman, in no uncertain terms, had told them from day one that the last thing he cared about was how well a guitarist thought he had played a solo; furthermore, if there were to be any guitar solos on the Brilliant album, they would be played by one of the SAW team. ‘I’d turn up at the studio with my guitar,’ says Cauty, ‘and they’d go, “Well, we did the guitar last night.”’ Rather than storming off with bruised egos Cauty and Youth were intrigued by SAW’s working methods and settled in at the back of the studio to observe the technological prowess of Stock, Aitken and Waterman at work in the Hit Factory.

‘We’d just sit there, gobsmacked, listening to Pete, ’cause he’d sort of hold court,’ says Cauty. ‘He’d start this little speech at the beginning of the day, and you’d just sit there and listen, and agree with it, because he really knew what he wanted, so you put your trust in him. Me and Youth sat there for a year watching them make these records, figuring out how they did the mixes and stuff. It was brilliant, we learnt a hell of a lot. They were sampling like crazy, everything – drum sounds, bass sounds – and nobody really knew they were doing that, they kept quiet about it all.’

As the Brilliant album started being pieced together, Warners were beginning to lose track of the band’s progress. Having signed them as a priority a few months earlier as a dance/pop/rock crossover act in the style of Prince and the Revolution, the label was in the dark as far as the events in Borough were concerned. ‘We were billed to be the next big thing,’ says Cauty, ‘to have everyone at WEA saying, “You’re gonna be massive, just go along with this. You’re gonna be huge” – and then you’re not. That was interesting as well.’

In the end, frustrated by the lack of progress and with Drummond having left the company, Warners decided to intervene. Balfe’s response was a typically counter-intuitive piece of music-biz theatre. ‘Dave Balfe took Warners to court,’ says Cauty. ‘He had this great idea that we’d take them to court, to try and get out of the record contract, for some bizarre reason that he’d thought of, so, of course, we went to the high court, and we were in court going, “Oh yeah, we hate them,” and they’re sitting there going, “We hate that band,” and then we lost the case, and then we split up, and then that was it, that was the end of that episode.’

Drummond was considering his next move. Having released the quasi-autobiographical The Man on Creation, he found himself re-reading books that had influenced him in his youth including The Illuminatus! Trilogy, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s work of meandering science-fiction conspiracy theory for which he had designed the set of the Liverpool School of Pun’s production a little over a decade earlier. Rather than setting off a glow of nostalgia for the bohemian days of Mathew Street, The Illuminatus! brought Drummond’s thinking right up to date.

‘Re-reading it triggered something off in my head, about doing a hip hop record,’ he says. ‘I was totally bored with aspirations of modern music and how it always seemed to be about looking for integrity or something from the past that makes the bands seem authentic. Oh fuck that. So when hip hop happened – particularly it was the Schoolly D album. There was something about the way he ditched everything, even though they were using old albums, but the hallway, couple of decks, beatbox, somebody on the mic and they could just do it on the street and just do it anywhere.’

Inspired by the stripped-back and practical immediacy of Schoolly D and remembering SAW’s equally functional approach to music making, Drummond made contact with Cauty. ‘Bill just phoned up out of the blue. I wasn’t expecting a call from him,’ says Cauty, ‘and said he’d got this idea for a record, was I interested. We nicked a lot of stuff obviously, from Illuminatus!, which sort of helped us.’ Cauty, in the kind of serendipitous moment in which Drummond, with his love of myth and happenstance, placed great stock, had seen the production of The Illuminatus! when it had played at the National Theatre.

Drummond’s idea for a record was to combine Schoolly D’s futuristic disregard of the past with the chaotic time-travelling mischief of The Illuminatus! and the beatbox immediacy of sampling. The band’s name, the JAMs, ‘sampled’ from Shea and Wilson, was an acronym of Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, who feature in the trilogy as the Mummu, spreading counter-factual messages of conspiracy and misinformation known by the ruling illuminati as discordians. For the next five years Drummond and Cauty would act as discordians, running rings around the music industry and media while selling millions of records.

‘A lot of the time, if we couldn’t decide what to do, we’d say to ourselves, “What would The KLF do in a situation like this?”’ says Cauty, ‘so we were always able to stand outside the band – the JAMs, The Timelords, The KLF – and say, “Well, look, there’s The KLF, this is the sort of thing they’d do, what would they do now?” It was almost like we were managing them, and we were able to go, “Well, if you do this, that’ll happen.” So that was very useful. We’d never have been able to have done it on a record company, ’cause everything we did was something that a record company would have said, “But you mustn’t do that.”’

The JAMs agreed a set of criteria: Drummond would be known as King Boy D, a rapper who delivered his rhymes in a Glaswegian accent, and Cauty, who retained a fondness for flowing locks and leather jackets, called himself ‘Rock Man Rock’. The painted JAMs would exist for only one year, during which they would sample their way through their record collections – cutting up the canonical history of music to present the JAMs’ version. The first single, ‘All You Need Is Love’, spliced the Beatles’ original with Sam Fox’s ‘Touch Me I Want Your Body’, and investigated the media’s response to AIDS.

An album, 1987 (What The Fuck Is Going On?), came out along with an accompanying JAMs act of self-promotion, a large white-washed graffito of ‘1987’ on a tower block. The press, initially intrigued, became supportive of the JAMs interventions and gave the album positive reviews, something that Mick Houghton, as the JAMs’ press spokesperson found perplexing. ‘There was a period, of about a year I suppose when I didn’t see that much of Bill,’ he says. ‘He came up and played me the JAMs and I thought it was absolute rubbish … I just couldn’t take it seriously, ’cause it was a racket. It was Bill Drummond pretending to be some kind of Glaswegian dock worker over a load of Abba samples, and I just thought it was complete tosh, seriously, I really did and I may or may not have said that to him.’

Drummond and Cauty had pressed up the JAMs releases as white labels with no press release, biographical information or publicity photos. The duo recognised that a few small-scale reviews would, however, generate enough interest to achieve some sales. ‘It was very much on the kind of level of, here’s a box, can you just get them round to the papers,’ says Houghton, ‘and in a way the only thing I could exploit – and I mean I really thought the music was awful – was that Bill had a reputation. Even though there was this nonsense that it was King Boy D, I don’t think I ever denied the fact that it was Bill Drummond and journalists loved him, journalists loved Bill Drummond, so they kind of bought into this thing, much to my surprise.’

Drummond and Cauty had wanted the anonymity of aliases to act as a wall between their past lives and the instant communication of the JAMs. The audacity of the project – the wholesale sampling of the Beatles and Abba along with Drummond’s somewhat theatrical lyrical flow – made instant and entertaining copy and the duo found themselves on the front cover of Sounds. ‘At first we decided to pretend that we were just two people from Scotland who nobody even knew about,’ says Cauty,’ ’cause we thought, if anybody knew our history – like I’d just been in this terrible pop band, and Bill being an A&R man – it would just destroy the whole concept of being, you know, two Scottish rappers from the estate.’

Under threat of an injunction from Abba’s management, 1987 (What The Fuck Is Going On?) was withdrawn from sale and the last remaining copies were destroyed. The JAMs turned the legal action into a small-scale media circus by travelling to Sweden with a journalist and photographer, to try and explain their motives to, if not negotiate with, Abba’s management company. The accompanying feature contained stories of copies being thrown overboard from a ship into the North Sea, and the JAMs’ first and only live performance: taking over the ferry band’s PA as Rock Man Rock and King Boy D freestyled to the amusement of Scandinavian long-haul HGV drivers.

Within less than a year the JAMs had instantly earned themselves a reputation for extreme risk-taking and an irreverent approach to music-making and the orthodoxies and legal technicalities of copyright and sampling. The element of risk and disregard for music industry professionalism was highlighted in their media coverage. The duo became synonymous with pranks, a charge that would dog them for the next five years, much to their annoyance and frustration.

‘I’ve got an artist’s ego but what I haven’t got is a front man’s ego,’ says Drummond. ‘I wasn’t twenty-one or twenty-two – what happens when you’re twenty-one or twenty-two [is] you want to be taken seriously. I knew I was fucking serious. Jimmy and I were in our thirties. We weren’t looking up to somebody, trying to be like David Bowie or Jim Morrison. That didn’t exist, so people didn’t know what to make of us.’

The JAMs lasted for a year, as agreed, until the end of 1987. Who Killed the JAMs?, a posthumous second album, which the duo quickly dismissed, was released in early 1988. The record’s sleeve contained two JAMs/KLF signifiers: on the back of the record, a photograph of copies of 1987 being symbolically burnt and, as a cover star, Cauty’s Ford Galaxie police car which had the JAMs/KLF logo sprayed on its doors as livery. The logo was a beatbox superimposed over a pyramid, where there might normally be a third eye. It perfectly captured The KLF’s distinct fusion of cheap immediate music technology and the secrets of the universe.

‘Theoretically, we started on the first of January, 1987 and we were to finish on the thirty-first December of that year,’ says Cauty, ‘so it’s twelve months. I can look back and I can see there’s a recurring thing there, but I always think bands just fucking hang around for too long. You should just do what you’re doing, get it done, and get on with the next thing.’

At the end of the year Cauty and Drummond realised that they had found an intuitive working method that had its own internal logic. ‘We got on incredibly well,’ says Cauty, ‘and fitted together creatively very well.’ Drummond and Cauty’s relationship also defied what Drummond considers a too orthodox breakdown of their roles: ‘It wasn’t like, oh, he does the words and he does the music,’ he says, ‘that’s the way a music journalist likes to perceive something. It was far more subtle than that.’

Entrenched in their own set of references and experiences, an indefinable combination of The Illuminatus!, the inner workings of the music industry, the studio techniques of Stock Aitken Waterman and their own distinct personalities, the duo established an almost telepathic way of communicating. ‘We’d always been like that right from the beginning,’ says Cauty. ‘We’d never had to discuss anything because we knew we both liked exactly the same thing. There was never any disagreement on music or on anything. It was quite weird, actually, ’cause I’ve worked with quite a few people since then and it’s never been like that. We were on the same wavelength, that whole period, though, in ’87, ’88, ’89. I guess we were still in a little bubble of our own.’

Having dispensed with the JAMs, Drummond and Cauty went back to the studio and started playing around with a sample from the Dr Who theme. As talismanic a piece of music to British ears as the BBC had ever produced, the Dr Who theme was an instantly recognisable and eerie riff, setting off in the listener an emotional connection of mild behind-the-sofa panic and time-travelling euphoria. ‘Right after the second JAMs album I think we just wanted to make a record that had the Dr Who theme tune,’ says Cauty, ‘but it was never supposed to be a hit. Not until a couple of days into it did we realise how terrible it was. It was just a one-off thing and it was supposed to be a proper dance record, but we couldn’t fit the four-four beat to it, so we ended up with a glitter beat, which was never really the intention but we had to go with it. It was like an out-of-control lorry, you know you’re just trying to steer it, and that track took itself over really, and did what it wanted to do. We were just watching.’

Eventually released as ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’ by Drummond and Cauty’s new alias, The Timelords, the record was an early example of a mash-up. The single blended the Glitter Band tribal beat with the Dr Who theme tune, tapping into the collective memory of every child of the Seventies and sending the record to no. 1.

The duo followed the single with a book, The Manual – How To Have a Number One the Easy Way, an entertaining and incisive how-to guide, featuring such insights as, ‘Firstly you must be skint and on the dole … being on the dole gives you a perspective on how much of society is run.’ The Manual’s narrative differs wildly from Cauty’s account of the record’s genesis, but tallies with Drummond’s interpretation of The Timelords’ motivation. ‘With the Timelords record, that was just wanting to mine that whole ludicrous British novelty record tradition,’ says Drummond, ‘knowing that we were only ever going to make one record like this, and it had to make Top Ten if not no. 1.’

For the first time the duo had a support structure for a release. Rough Trade distributed The Timelords and found themselves, for the first time since ‘Pump Up the Volume’, at the top of the charts. ‘It was pretty shocking, to be independently at no. 1 like that,’ says Drummond. ‘We didn’t have an office, we didn’t have anything. Rough Trade did a great job just getting those records out, because we didn’t know how they were supposed to do it. Everybody was really behind it, everybody who worked at Rough Trade was willing it to be a hit, and it was great, really good.’

The single reached no. 1 on 12 June and also sold healthily in Australia and New Zealand where the Dr Who series had been licensed by the BBC.

Reaching the top of the charts allowed The Timelords, along with Cauty’s police car now known as Ford Timelord, to put on a series of performances on Top of the Pops that followed in the lineage of the programme’s Seventies star-making heyday. The single also followed in the crossover novelty record tradition by achieving spectacular sales. ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’ sold over a million copies, meaning that Drummond and Cauty now had the means to finance whatever they did next.

‘The thing that brought the money in above all else was the dreaded Timelords,’ says Houghton. ‘That record’s a really good example of what they could get away with. I remember going into the NME offices and sitting down there and them saying, “This will be no. 1. We’re going to print that in the paper next week, on the cover.” In the end they didn’t put it on the cover – it was an inside page news story, “This is the worst record you’ve ever heard, it will be no. 1,” something like that.’

With serious financial resources and no overhead other than studio costs, Drummond and Cauty were, for the first time, wrong-footed. Their momentum stalled as a surfeit of ideas was put into various stages of production. After working to the rigorous constraints they had set themselves for the JAMs and as The Timelords, Drummond and Cauty were spreading themselves thin.

‘After “Doctorin’ the Tardis” was The KLF,’ says Cauty. ‘It was a bit complicated and it went through a lot of different phases. With the money that we made from “Doctorin’ the Tardis” we stupidly thought that we could just go and make a road movie, without a script, without a story, without anything. We thought, well, we’ll just go to Spain in the car, and just film what happens and of course we went there and nothing happened, it just rained.’

The road movie, entitled The White Room, was filmed by Bill Butt, a former colleague of Drummond’s in theatre in Liverpool who had also filmed the Zoo videos. Consisting of little more than footage of the duo driving around Spain in the Ford Galaxie the experience was deflating. ‘We came back with hundreds of hours of really boring footage,’ says Cauty. ‘Me and Bill were driving in the car that way, then that way, over a hill, then back up the hill, just tedious, a terrible disaster of a movie. But we learnt our lesson. If you’re making a movie, you have to have talent. You can’t just get away with it, like you can with other things. We hadn’t thought it out. So all we had was lots of bits of footage which we would use later in lots of different contexts, but we tried to finish it and put a soundtrack on it about three times and it was always incredibly dull.’

Neither the film nor the soundtrack was ever released commercially. Drummond and Cauty returned from Spain with their spirits dampened and gradually started to overhaul the material. Cauty lived in a large five-storey Georgian squat in Stockwell on the side of which he had painted a JAMs/KLF logo, as well as knocking out the first floor, creating a cavernous atrium. In the basement the duo had built their own version of the Hit Factory, a small studio with up-to-the-minute samplers and sequencers, which they called Transcentral. The basement, and the many parties held in the squat, echoed to the sound of acid house, the bleeps and low-end frequencies of which the duo mixed in with the aborted White Room material. Two pieces from the proposed soundtrack emerged as possible releases: ‘What Time Is Love?’ and ‘3 a.m. Eternal’. Both tracks throbbed with submerged frequencies and shifts in dynamic intensity and were released under the duo’s new name: The KLF, an opaque and meaningless acronym – as far as any activity by Drummond and Cauty could be considered meaningless – chosen, in tune with the emerging acid house zeitgeist, for its anonymity and emphasis of tunes first, personalities later. It was a zeitgeist that the duo greatly enjoyed.

‘We went to lots of clubs,’ says Cauty, ‘and raves. I never used to go clubbing, really, but when acid house happened I really got into that, and that sort of influenced the types of records that we made. We wanted to make some records that could be played in those clubs and at those parties.’ In KLF Drummond and Cauty had found their next direction but, having spent The Timelords’ profits on film stock and a production crew, had run through their funding stream. In an attempt to raise some capital, they released a pop single culled from the White Room sessions: ‘Kylie Said to Jason’, not quite a novelty single but certainly not a KLF acid instrumental. It proved a disaster.

‘At that point, we were £110,000 down at the bank,’ says Drummond, ‘with nothing to back it up. But then we decided to do a series of 12-inch singles. We wanted to do total minimalist stuff, not even using drums, just using pulses and things. We did all the sleeves – I think it was a series of five sleeves. We had a thousand of each of these sleeves printed up – had the titles, everything – before we recorded. And we did the first one, the “What Time is Love?” instrumental – put it out, and it starts taking off in Italy in the clubs. English DJs think it’s an Italian thing and they start playing it over here. KLF means nothing: the sleeves have no reference points, everything was really minimal, the music was really minimal – there was nothing for journalists to get into. It could only work on the dance floor.’

Cauty in particular was spending more and more time on the dance floor or, in the case of Heaven, in the pioneering chill-out room at Paul Oakenfold’s Land of Oz nights. Along with Alex Patterson, a former colleague of Youth’s in Killing Joke, Cauty started a side project called The Orb. Cauty and Patterson would play Steve Hillage and Steve Reich tracks over early Seventies Black Ark dubs as ravers would sink into beanbags to recharge among the beatific textures in the sounds and the films The Orb projected. Using the Land of Oz sessions as a template, Patterson started recording as The Orb while Cauty released the album Space on KLF Communications, an ambient masterpiece that relocated the pastoral, almost geological, starry-eyed minimalism of Eno’s Ambient Series in the early morning dawn of London rumbling awake. The Orb and Space had created a new genre at Land of Oz, ambient house, a genre of which KLF would be part with their first album, Chill Out. ‘Chill Out’s an imaginary journey through America,’ says Cauty, who has mixed feelings about the record. ‘Mostly it’s just a list of places. It was another disaster, really.’

The duo briefly resurrected the JAMs name for the track ‘It’s Grim Up North’, a harder-edged track which consisted of Drummond reeling off places names from the upper half of the country over a heavy beat, or as the accompanying broadside from KLF Communications put it, ‘Through the downpour and diesel roar – Rock Man Rock and King Boy D can feel a regular diesel thud.’ The release was accompanied by another graffito, the song’s title, located on an underpass on the M1 near the Watford Gap.

Alongside a further single in the Pure Trance series, ‘Last Train to Transcentral’, Chill Out helped KLF gain an underground reputation in the hazy network that was beginning to develop into an acid house industry, and the band were starting to be invited to play at raves, organised in such a haphazard fashion that even Drummond and Cauty’s logistical prowess was put to severe test. ‘It was always a nightmare,’ says Cauty. ‘I can’t remember how many we did, maybe about five or six, and I’d always start off with the best intentions – have everything set up with samplers and sequencers ready to go and attempt to play or at least mix live – but we were either too out of it on drugs to be able to see anything, or the equipment always broke down, so usually what I’d do is then, I’d just turn the DAT [tape] on, which would sound much better anyway. And everybody was so out of it nobody cared. The focus wasn’t on the group, it was on the music, so we sort of got away with that, but it was a total shambles. Half the time there was no stage. You’re just, “Oh well, we’ll go and over there then, next to Adamski, and just stand on the floor.” They were so badly organised’.

However messy or impractical, the rave culture was one Drummond and Cauty wholly embraced and enjoyed, much to the amusement of Mick Houghton who, while capable of psychedelic odysseys himself, was yet to experience acid house in its purest and communal form.

‘One of the things I used to think was vaguely ludicrous, was that Bill and Jimmy were part of this world,’ says Houghton. ‘Bill was a married man living in Aylesbury with a wife and two kids, but nobody ever questioned what they did, whatever kind of flaws there might be, because it was just such amazing copy. The other side of it was that the music press wasn’t at all geared towards acid culture. It was such an antithesis to indie music that KLF almost gave them a way in, and it was also very playful for The KLF.’

One of KLF’s first public displays of playfulness was at the Helter Skelter rave in Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire, midsummer 1989. In was also one of the first of the band’s gestures to involve their complicated relationship with money. The KLF performance consisted of Drummond and Cauty positioning themselves halfway up a lighting gantry and taping a plastic keyboard to its side which Drummond, can of lager in hand, pretended to play while Cauty played a DAT. A bug-eyed KLF, who had asked for their fee up front, then emptied a binliner’s worth of Scottish pound notes – roughly a thousand pounds’ worth – over the heads of the crowd.

‘They got a wind machine and blew the money out into the crowd,’ says Houghton. ‘They used Scottish pound notes because basically they were the only pound notes you could get, otherwise they would’ve had to use fivers. I think they’d always had this thing about money, and I think they’d talked about burning money before. Like a lot of their recurring ideas it got adapted, and they upped the ante the more successful they became.’

‘It was only that one summer, and then by the end it was over anyway,’ says Cauty. ‘It was good fun at first trying to get into a rave that was trying to be shut down by the cops, and the whole excitement of it all – half the time you couldn’t even get the van in, let alone get yourselves in. It was a pretty mad time really, obviously.’

By the end of 1989 The KLF was immersed in rave culture and were starting to think about reworking the Pure Trance singles, taking the space and pulse of the tracks and giving them a bigger, more euphoric, pop sound. ‘By the time we’d started becoming The KLF, we’d got ourselves organised a bit more; we could sort of try and work out a bit more of a long-term strategy,’ says Cauty. ‘We were just winging it from day to day, but we could see slightly further into the future and sort of plan things a bit, and because we were small we could move fast on our feet and react to what was going on around us. We were in the office of a rave promoter who was putting us on at raves; he also promoted Guru Josh, who was this real sort of lowest-common-denominator rave person, and he’d just had a massive hit single, and these people, who I didn’t really like, were saying, “Why don’t you do what you’re used to doing and have a hit single?”’

In 1990 more and more acid house singles were entering the charts. Guru Josh’s ‘Infinity’ reached the top five in the UK and was an equally big hit across Europe. ‘Infinity’ consisted of little more than a ‘Baker Street’-style saxophone riff and a suitably charged BPM over which Guru Josh intoned to his listeners that it was ‘1990, time for the Guru’.

‘I thought, it’s come to this,’ says Cauty. ‘We’re in competition with Guru Josh, and I remember saying to Bill, “Well, come on, let’s have a hit single then, ’cause we know how to do it. We haven’t really been trying that hard.” And so we went in to remix “What Time Is Love?” with the definite intention of having a hit single with it, and luckily it worked.’

The reworked ‘What Time Is Love?’, for which the duo were joined by engineer Mark ‘Spike’ Stent, included every hook, production trick and gigantic keyboard sound that a 45-rpm single could handle. The band added a rap and an insistent series of siren-like bleeps that attacked the listener in a thrilling pop rush. The production was also filled with sufficient crowd noise, a thumping bass line and a propulsive house beat so that, for three and a half minutes, the listener was transported and submerged in the disorientating euphoria of a rave in full swing.

‘It didn’t look like it was gonna work. You know, we were putting it out and the radio play wasn’t very good,’ says Cauty. ‘People weren’t really getting on board. It took ages for it to gradually go up the charts, then it got to number five, so that was it, really – we’d done it.’

‘What Time Is Love?’ was released in August 1990, and was the first of what became known as The KLF’s Stadium House Trilogy. Part of the record’s success was down to Scott Piering, who along with Houghton was now part of the band’s inner sanctum. After leaving Rough Trade, Piering had established himself as one of the country’s leading pluggers. A thoughtful man who devoured music, he was the antithesis of the jokey tour-jacket-wearing, larger-than-life personality plugger.

‘Scott Piering had a huge influence on how the finished record was edited and put together,’ says Cauty. ‘Scott was saying, “No, boys, you’ve got to have this, you’ve got to have that, you’ve got to have …” We would have a lot of meetings with Scott and a lot of meetings with Mick. Scott was brilliant because he’d sort of tell us things like, “If you want to get a record played on the radio, you’ve got to have the chorus coming in first,” something we didn’t know about. So we always did what he said. He was really brilliant and Mick was great. There’d be strategy meetings, and we’d let Mick speak to the press on our behalf so we could get on with everything else.’

‘What Time Is Love?’ was followed by ‘3 a.m. Eternal’ five months later in January 1991. The single reached no. 1 and like ‘What Time Is Love?’ was an international hit. An album, The White Room, followed in March, a reworking of the initial White Room material; it also reached no. 1.

‘The first no. 1 was so euphoric,’ says Cauty, ‘just out of the blue with ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’, that it just seemed like some sort of dream, and it only lasted for a week and then it was all over. You know this incredible thing, that it sort of dissipated in front of us. So with The KLF it was a much more of a sort of long term. We’d strategised it a bit more, had a bit more of a plan, so it was still kind of exciting but, obviously, the more it happens, the less exciting it gets and [it] just becomes the normal.’

Throughout their exploration of pop stardom The KLF were keen to retain the air of anonymity and mystique around themselves, both as a protective layering to keep them at first remove from the press and also to play around with their ongoing roles as discordians. ‘The more successful you get, the more calls you get from people wanting you to do things,’ says Cauty. ‘Quite early on in the sort of hit sequence, we decided to not do any more interviews or have anything to do with the outside world – just cut ourselves off completely and not say anything to anybody about anything – and that kind of worked in our favour, ’cause it made people even more interested in what we were doing. We got all the journalists who’d been wanting to do things, got them all together in one group, and that was our way of interacting with the media.’

Pressure on the duo’s time increased as Houghton was permanently handling requests, not just within the UK but also from abroad, for interview face-time with The KLF. As the world’s media started to enquire about the masterminds and master plan behind their releases, Drummond and Cauty’s solution was a remarkable piece of theatre. Over a hundred international journalists were invited by Houghton, at his most adroit, to meet at Heathrow airport for the solstice date of 21 June.

‘The KLF chartered a plane, and basically invited one representative of the press from every European territory. The only person from the UK was actually Sheryl Garrett who covered it for i-D magazine, and they flew to Jura, the island where they eventually burnt the million quid. Nobody was told where they were going, they were just told to bring their passports. Jura is obviously in the British Isles but it’s a very small airport, and as they got off the plane they had to go through passport control, which was actually Bill dressed up in a customs official-type uniform, and he stamped everybody’s passport with the pyramid ghetto-blaster logo. Even by then people didn’t really know what they looked like and nobody realised it was Bill.’

As confused representatives of the world’s media disembarked on to a remote island at the height of summer, they were handed robes and instructed to follow a horned figure into the sunlight. In silence a robed procession moved slowly across the island until it reached its destination, a giant wicker man.

‘We got them to process down the island to this little peninsula where we’d built this huge wicker man,’ says Cauty. ‘We did this whole sort of fake pagan ceremony and had this big PA system hidden around, and it was all really loud and I had a little radio mic on Bill, and I was working the mix. He was up on a sort of platform in front of the wicker man, dressed with this horn, and did this whole speech in a foreign language he’d just made up. It was totally, totally brilliant, everybody was completely gobsmacked, ’cause they didn’t know where they were going or what was happening. And then we put everybody back on the plane and took them down to Liverpool and we did this performance in the theatre in Liverpool that night where we first used the ice cream van. We were on a roll and, obviously, your worst fear in a situation like that is you’ll put a record out and nobody will buy it or they won’t like it – but we became so popular that virtually anything we did would be a hit.’

As the record sales began to escalate so did the group’s sense of theatre. For their first Top of the Pops appearance the duo had appeared in KLF T-shirts, hunched anonymously behind keyboards while a rapper and dancer performed stage front. By the time The KLF were promoting ‘Last Train to Transcentral’ on the programme, they had converted the Top of the Pops studio into a rave-saturated version of the stage production of The Illuminatus! as hooded figures appeared in a pyramid formation and Drummond and Cauty played sitars with feet on the monitors. ‘I think they got to the point where they thought they could almost do anything and people would just go, “Wow,”’ says Houghton. ‘What I love about The KLF was that for all the bravado of it and the scale of it that went on, there’s almost an Ealing Comedy element to it, a touch of the Whisky Galore or Passport to Pimlico.’

Such acts as flying journalists to Jura and having the event filmed and shown on Channel 4 were testament to Drummond and Cauty’s grand-scale thinking and their capacity to produce such grandiose events. For a band that was also selling millions of records, their activity was, astonishingly, still the work of six or seven people. Other than an international network of distributors, The KLF had no office, record or management company. ‘There was Bill and there was Jimmy,’ says Houghton. ‘There was Cress, who became Jimmy’s wife, and Sally Fellows, who used to work for Rough Trade as well, who then became Bill’s partner for a while, and there was myself and Scott Piering, and that was it. That was everything, and even though I only did what I did, which kind of went beyond just press really … it was just extraordinary that such a small group of people, who in a sense weren’t remotely business-oriented, managed to keep it going.’

In America The KLF were courted and eventually signed by Clive Davis of Arista, a venerated mogul who was in thrall and fully approving of the band’s approach to pop stardom. ‘The interesting thing about America,’ says Cauty, ‘was that labels always say, “Well, if you don’t come over and tour, nothing’s gonna happen,” and they always say that to bands, and in fact we didn’t go over and tour but we had a massive hit there, so I don’t know what that’s all about. You’re told you gotta tour round, do what all bands do, you tour round all the radio stations, you do your shows, you do your interviews, you do this, that and the other and it just turns out that it’s absolute rubbish. Record companies just say that to bands to get them to go away for a while and do something, otherwise they’re sitting at home, twiddling their thumbs.’

Such success and the attendant Olympian feats of planning were starting to take their toll on The KLF operation, whose workload was increasing daily. On the back of doing well in America Drummond and Cauty decided to make a series of high-end videos with large-scale productions for the MTV market, which meant they started booking weeks in Pinewood Studios using the sound stages usually reserved for Bond films.

‘When we went to no. 1, I remember I was helping unload the van,’ says Drummond. ‘There was never a point were I wasn’t unloading vans. From the beginning of Jimmy and I working together, Jan. first 1987 through to the Brits, 1992, you could be having no. 1s in eighteen countries but still be unloading vans of records.’

Drummond’s relentless work ethic and his determination not to be categorised meant that his drive was becoming almost maniacal. Genuine international chart success was vindicating his thoughts on the convention and consensus of how the music industry, particularly the cosy and self-important world of indie with its running music-weekly narrative, behaved.

‘It was important for me that The KLF was successful worldwide because I hated bands that somehow thought they were big, and really they were big in this fake world of the NME, Melody Maker,’ says Drummond. ‘They would have a fan following that could put them into the Top Twenty, but I was thinking, that’s not a real Top Twenty record, that’s just your cult following all buying it in a week, and I’m not interested in that. I want to know that the records we’re making are touching a vast amount of people that’s actually plugging into something that – that is what pop music is – that reaches out and people don’t care who the fuck these people are: this record makes me feel a certain way, I want it and I want that. And so that was incredibly, incredibly important to me.’

While Drummond was more theoretical and forthright in his ideas of what should constitute success, Cauty was equally driven as to their vision of what The KLF could achieve. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever worked with two individuals where [neither] one was more important than the other,’ says Houghton. ‘I think Bill was always perceived as the front man – and Bill already had a reputation – and Jimmy, by his nature, was very quiet and shy, but it was just one of those marriages made in heaven. They just complemented each other. A lot of it was just thought up around a kitchen table. I honestly believe they felt at the end that we could do anything and people would just accept it, and, because of that, there’s just no point in carrying on. It’s just like … we could do the most ridiculous thing on earth and people would say, “Genius.”’

‘Everybody else was sort of one layer back,’ says Cauty. ‘And people would always say, “Well, you two have got this sort of in-joke that nobody really gets.” Obviously Scott and Mick and Cressida and Sally, they did get it, but really it was only ever me and Bill who had the proper overview of the whole thing.’

The Stadium House Trilogy was completed in January 1992 with ‘Last Train to Transcentral’. A further single, ‘Justified and Ancient’, featuring Tammy Wynette, went straight to no. 1. In little over a year The KLF had sold two and a half million singles; in 1991, the band were the biggest-selling singles act in the UK.

In the video for ‘Last Train to Transcentral’ a model of the Ford Galaxie drove off the edge of an unfinished motorway flyover and became airborne. For those closest to them it seemed that an out-of-control car flying through the air was as apt a metaphor as any for the duo’s state of mind. Cally Calloman, who had known both members of The KLF, and the members of the inner sanctum had, along with the rest of the industry, looked on at the ascent of The KLF in wonder. At the back of his mind Calloman realised that the size of their success was bound to have repercussions.

‘KLF was so condensed and so crazy. Everyone at Island said, “Oh, Cally, you know Bill Drummond – do you think you can get him to do a remix on the new this single or that single?” Their ascendance from The Timelords on was so steep … it was fantastic, but they were sort of uncontactable apart from Mick, who I like a lot. Mick was the earthbound member of planet KLF. It was a tiny coterie. If you said, “I think Tammy Wynette would be a great voice on this,” you’d get Tammy Wynette, and they went to Clive Davis, to get Tammy Wynette … and he is very much from that school, an old guy who could turn round and say, “Fine, I’ll give you Tammy Wynette” … not “You’re crazy, the demographic is all wrong.” … Bill didn’t even have to explain.’

‘Justified and Ancient’ was a reworking of a track on 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On), another example of how the duo liked to play around with the same themes and ideas or, put another way, were able to rework the same material within the elevated aspect of The KLF. Drummond and Cauty certainly mined their recordings at length for source material – some of the pedal steel on Chill Out dates back to Drummond’s solo LP The Man.

‘The Stadium House Trilogy records are classic,’ says Houghton, ‘but they had recycled ‘What Time Is Love?’ three times, and got away with it. They weren’t exactly brimming with ideas but it didn’t matter, they just went, “Well, let’s do a rock version, ‘America What Time Is Love?’” and they got away with it. What Bill and Jimmy had was an incredibly strong sense of commercial potential.

‘America What Time Is Love?’ was the last KLF single and featured former Deep Purple vocalist Glenn Hughes who sang over a frenetic stadium-rock-house version of the track. Seasoned KLF watchers sensed that the song was a carefully constructed, if blatant, attempt to ‘crack America’. ‘A lot of people probably thought that maybe we did have a proper vision,’ says Cauty, ‘but we didn’t really. We were just making it up from day to day. I’m still not sure how any of it would look from the outside.’

The ideas were becoming more and more grandiose. The video for ‘America What Time Is Love?’ featured a longboat being lashed on the high seas and driving rain of Pinewood’s submarine studio as Drummond and Cauty, dressed as knights and playing Gibson Flying Vs urged the boat’s crew and passengers to row harder and faster. The song sampled Motörhead’s ‘Ace of Spades’, and the duo’s work rate was running at an equally frenetic pace that was becoming untenable as thoughts within the camp suggested that The KLF might now have become something of a monster.

‘By the time we got to the end, to “America What Time Is Love?”, it was getting a bit weird really,’ says Cauty. ‘It seemed like it was so easy to have a hit, even though we’d still be putting everything into these records. “America What Time Is Love?” has got so many things in [it]. We had to get two 48-track machines going in the studio, all at the same time, just to get everything we wanted in. It was ridiculous, it was like a Meatloaf record. I think we’d pretty much said everything that was possible to say on a record. It had reached its peak and then really really there was no more.’

The duo began work on a new project, The Black Room, a title that was representative of their mental state and their decision, having sampled Motörhead, to further explore metal and thrash music. They enlisted the help of Ipswich’s Extreme Noise Terror in the studio, starting to lay down tracks of aggressive rhythms and punishing vocals, but the sessions started to stall.

‘The risk just went on being even braver,’ says Calloman. ‘The self-destruct button just went on to be an ogre. They got bigger and bigger and bigger because they could say, “Oh we’ll destroy all this one day,” and one of them would say to the other, “Oh great, destruction that’s fantastic!”’

The KLF signifiers of horned men, capes, mise en scène on the grand scale, the Ford Galaxie 500, the duo’s choreographed dance ‘routines’ were all now facets of their lovingly created mythology. While they were always taken seriously by the media, the sense that Drummond and Cauty’s greater role was as pranksters or situationists is a charge that still rankles with them both.

‘Even though there was humour in it,’ says Cauty, ‘we were deadly serious about it, and really meant everything we did. I think that’s one of the reasons why it sort of worked so well, because people can tell when they hear something that these people really mean this. It’s like any kind of art that you do: you have to put everything into it, and if you don’t, then people can tell.’

For Drummond, who has continued to resist any attempts by the media to define whatever his particular preoccupations are at any given time, the idea that The KLF was a project or a scam is one that haunts him still. ‘Every note we played, every single thing that came out, I felt’, he says. ‘We completely meant every moment.’

The KLF’s runaway commercial success meant that they would be duly honoured by the BPI at the 1992 Brit Awards. The band were nominated for Best Artist and Best Single and were invited to perform at the ceremony.

‘Towards the end, because of the scale and success, and the sort of blind acceptance of whatever they did, I think they just felt that what they were doing was meaningless,’ says Houghton. ‘I think they were both pretty close to nervous breakdowns. I think they could have done serious damage to themselves at that point, when they did the Brit Awards. There were bits of that that were totally Ealing Comedy, like when they sent a motorcycle courier up there to pick up their awards. The courier gets there, he picks it up, walks off and then goes back and gets it signed for.’

Drummond and Cauty had planned to mark the Brits with a series of gestures on live television that would be an unforgettable assault on the sensibilities of an audience comprising the great and the good from an industry whose conventions, protocol and standards they had mistrusted and abused since the first JAMs release.

‘I remember meeting them, about six in the morning, that day and they had the dead sheep in the back of the van,’ says Houghton. ‘This is typical of what they would do. They did it all themselves. Bill had driven up that morning to somewhere in Northampton, to pick up this dead sheep, and they really were going to throw blood over the audience and I said, “You can’t do that, you really cannot do that,” and I did put that in the Mirror or the Sun, and it ran that morning: “The KLF are going to throw buckets of blood everywhere” and they were actually stopped from doing that.’

While their plans to cover the music industry in sheep’s blood had been scuppered by Houghton, The KLF still staged a career-ending performance to end all career-ending performances. An unhinged-looking Drummond, wide-eyed, on crutches and wearing a kilt, staggered onstage alongside the members of Extreme Noise Terror and Cauty, whose zipped-up clothing made him look like a petrol bomber. Drummond announced their arrival with the cry of ‘ENT vs The KLF This … is Freedom Television’. As the two bands launched into a hardcore thrash version of ‘3 a.m. Eternal’, the massed black ties of the phonograph industry sat in dumbstruck horror, as ENT treated the Hammersmith Odeon to the sort of set they were used to playing to a wall of stagediving hardcore thrash fans in a rock dive. The spectacle concluded with Drummond chomping on a cigar and firing round after round of blank ammunition from a machine-gun he pointed at all corners of the audience.

One crucial detail had been lost in the chaos of the performance, however. ‘I’ve always had this rock star fantasy, ever since I was young, that I’d have this massive guitar solo,’ says Cauty. ‘I’d been rehearsing it and rehearsing it. This was it. Hammersmith Odeon – I’m gonna do my guitar solo at last, them I’m finished. So of course I come up to the front of the stage and go “wrram” and my lead gets pulled out of my guitar. I’ve only got, like, twenty seconds to do my solo and I spend the whole time just finding the end of the lead to plug it back in and that was it – that was the last thing I ever did in the music business. So tragic, but I’m OK now – but what a lost opportunity that was, ’cause it was a brilliant solo.’

As the band walked off stage, Scott Piering’s voice boomed out over the PA: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, The KLF have left the music business.’

The performance left the audience feeling aghast and assaulted as, for the first time in its history, a performance by a multimillion selling band at the Brits Award Ceremony was met with silence.

‘It absolutely fucking terrified people,’ says Houghton. ‘Sir George Solti was up for a lifetime achievement award and he was in the front row, and as soon as they started up, he fled the building, hotly pursued by people with clipboards, “You can’t go, you’ve got an award to accept.” There was just stuff that people didn’t even notice, it was fantastic.’

The KLF had ended their career live on TV in a hail of hardcore metal and machine-gun fire, an act of visceral aggression that was indicative of the fragile mental state of both Drummond and Cauty. ‘We were both exhausted,’ says Cauty. ‘It just happened overnight. Nobody knew it was coming. We just said, “That’s it, we’re deleting all the records, we’re going away, goodbye.”’

With the studio bill and Extreme Noise Terror’s fee still owing (both were later settled), The KLF ceased to exist the moment they walked off stage at the Hammersmith Odeon. Drummond and Cauty, at least in the territories where the decision was theirs to make, deleted the entire KLF back catalogue.

‘I genuinely believe that Bill actually was of a mind to chop his hand off or, who knows,’ says Houghton. ‘They were so crazed at that time that nothing would’ve surprised me. It was kind of spiralling out of control, I think, at that point.’

‘We’d been going so flat out and then we both literally woke up one morning and went, “Well, that’s it, there’s no more,”’ says Cauty. ‘I just remember it was such a relief. It was so exciting, you know. We put this full-page advert in the NME and it was great, something new at last.’

Such was The KLF’s popularity and reputation for double bluff that the press second-guessed the duo’s announcement and assumed the band were performing another piece of KLF theatre. The reality was that the non-stop sidestepping and widescreen success of The KLF had tested the limits of both its members. ‘I couldn’t carry on,’ says Drummond. ‘I was about thirty-nine then, and I just had to stop, you know. This had taken over every area of my life. There’s a lot of other things I wanna do. I’m not saying I had a breakdown, in a classical sense, but that’s what it felt like. My marriage came to an end.’

Houghton had been on the journey, if once removed, from its beginnings and had seen their meteoric success and self-imposed isolation from the outside world combine to affect their health. ‘They could’ve done something which I think would have to have bordered on self-harm of some sort,’ he says. ‘That’s kind of where it was heading – or something that was actually seriously illegal to the point of getting them into serious trouble.’

The band’s success and legacy and the adventures of the K Foundation that followed are still something Drummond and Cauty are processing today. ‘We never did it for the money,’ says Cauty. ‘Anyway, I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody, as a job, being in The KLF.’

15 Leave the Planet

Cover of Rough Trade’s in-house trade paper, The Catalogue, October–November 1989 (author’s archive)

When Rough Trade Limited went into administration in 1991 the news was met with a mixture of incredulity and resignation. While more hardened observers in the business had long assumed it was only a matter of time before the inevitable happened to a company run by amateurs, Rough Trade’s turnover in the late Eighties had been increasingly on the up. By 1989 the independent distribution sector – Rough Trade and its more successful and more orthodox rival Pinnacle, plus a handful of specialists – accounted for over 30 per cent of the music market. Rough Trade was, on paper, enjoying its most profitable period; following the no. 1 success of ‘Pump Up the Volume’ and ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’, along with a series of Top Ten dance singles it was distributing, the company had shown itself capable of competing tooth and nail in the market.

Within Collier Street, despite the steady flow of chart-bound releases, it was becoming apparent that there were financial problems. Office Christmas parties were cancelled in 1989 and Richard Powell resigned, leaving the critical path in the hands of a new layer of management. If the London office was often volatile, the roots of the company’s demise lay further afield, in New York. Robin Hurley was running Rough Trade Inc., the American division of Rough Trade. As a former member of The Cartel he had an insider’s understanding of the company’s ethos and working methods which he had attempted to re-create in America.

‘When I moved to [the] USA in ’87 to run Rough Trade, it was in San Francisco,’ says Hurley. ‘It was really a shop and a wholesaler. It was run by a bunch of hippies and anarchists and it was really off the radar from what was going on in England. Rough Trade had had success in Germany, and there was an admittedly naive thought at Distribution, that, if we’re going to sign bands like The Smiths, we should have them worldwide and have them for the US, which at that point was half the world’s record sales. San Francisco had the best pot, was the nicest city in the USA to live in, as thought by a number of people in RT, and it was thought of as the right place to be. But when I lived there I realised, lovely though it is, it was something of a backwater both musically and in terms of the industry. For us to grow in the States we’d need an office in either New York City or Los Angeles. New York was closer to England there was more going on musically and we already had an office on the West Coast. So New York at that point was where the label happened: the A&R and the radio people and San Francisco was where the stock was held and distributed.’

Underestimating the size of the American market, which often required a chain of separate distributors to move stock from one coast to another and had a similarly fragmented media, Rough Trade did manage to successfully sign a number of American acts which gave the label a strong run of releases in its final years. Regularly spending time in New York, Travis’s downtown links remained strong. In 1987, to almost total indifference, he released World of Echo, Arthur Russell’s meditative tone poem for cello, voice, noise and filtered space,* one of the first records to address AIDS. Rough Trade’s release schedule featured one-off records by East Coast bands the Feelies and They Might Be Giants; Travis also signed Boston’s Galaxie 500 to an album deal along with San Francisco’s Opal and the band who subsequently emerged from their demise, Mazzy Star.

‘Geoff was the driving force,’ says Hurley, who oversaw the bands’ domestic careers in the US. ‘Galaxie, Mazzy Star, along with Camper Van Beethoven and Lucinda Williams, were all signed in the USA. And we kept trying to grow the distribution in the States. I was in touch with Ivo and we licensed the first two Pixies records, the first Breeders record and the Wolfgang Press album for Rough Trade USA.’

Travis’s American signings were proof that, if the politics and internal arguments were destabilising the business at Collier Street, his A&R radar was still at its sharpest. The label hit a purple patch of critical approval and strong sales as Galaxie 500’s Today and She Hangs Brightly, Mazzy Starr’s debut, were both rapturously received in 1990.

Despite the label’s successes Travis was becoming aware that the company’s ongoing problems were getting more and more serious, though the extent of the seriousness and the lack of leadership within Distribution to address the problems was being kept from him. ‘From my point of view I was running the label,’ says Travis. ‘Although we had a proper distribution board, I was pretty much marginalised because the distribution people had an issue with the record company. They were jealous because I think they thought the record company was glamorous and my profile was the highest for whatever reason.’

Rough Trade had severely underestimated the running costs of a bicoastal American distribution and record company. Hurley was watching Rough Trade Inc. haemorrhage money and was continually having to call London to wire more and more funds to keep Rough Trade’s American division in business.

‘We were the biggest drain on Rough Trade trying to grow in America,’ says Hurley, ‘trying to get over a certain point where sales would take care of themselves. The year we closed a distributor went under owing us a million dollars. Generally, in England people pay their bills, or in Germany they’re legally obliged to pay their bills. I would pick up the phone to London and say, “I think we’ve had our best month ever. We’ve just shipped x thousand records,” not realising that we might have to wait months to get paid. As our business grew the cash flow became crippled.’

In London a solution was found. The most successful of the Rough Trade distribution companies, Rough Trade Deutschland, would channel their payments to America rather than head office in London. What seemed like a good idea in the now permanently occupied Rough Trade meeting room was in fact illegal and illustrated the lack of technical expertise on the Rough Trade Distribution board.

‘There was a lot of money moving from Rough Trade Deutschland,’ says Hurley, ‘but the German government took a different view of it. Rough Trade Distribution was also suddenly hit by a big tax penalty, so those three things all hit at once. But Rough Trade America was the biggest single factor.’

Whatever the structures that had been put in place and the adherence, or not, to the critical path, the management’s lack of business skills ensured that the company was heading towards an inevitable conclusion. A sense of panic started to grip Collier Street, but in the short term the company, in a typical act of Rough Trade internalisation, was keeping its problems to itself.

‘I would go across every four months and sit in rather depressing meetings,’ says Hurley. ‘The writing was on the wall. There was a naive belief that we could pull through and we lost months with that sort of hope that something would come through. Warner Brothers showed an interest – they wanted 51 per cent and that was rejected. Arrogance is the wrong word. It was never arrogant, but it was a proud company that believed we had better music than other companies and the cultural philosophy was better. You were supposed to have a sabbatical after five years and as the company grew and got bigger that became harder – all those great ideas fell by the wayside.’

Many of those ideas had come from Richard Scott, who had left in 1988, dispirited that the idea of providing an alternative structure to the mainstream, which functioned around such ideas like de-centralisation and mutuality, had long been ceded to market share and competition. The Cartel, his lasting legacy, was disbanded in the summer of 1990. Two of its members, Red Rhino in Leeds and Fast Forward in Scotland, had already ceased trading. ‘I think I felt doomed,’ says Scott. ‘I felt that I was sort of, in a way, past my sell-by date. The actual structure that was evolving was one that I didn’t feel particularly comfortable with, which is why I decided to leave.’

The growing fiscal crisis at Rough Trade was finally starting to become common knowledge outside Collier Street. The production and release schedules of the smaller labels the company distributed were put on hold. Rough Trade’s biggest clients – Mute, KLF, 4AD, Beggars, Rhythm King and Jazz Summer’s Big Life, the latter being two dance pop labels with singles permanently on the radio and in the charts – were starting to realise the severity of the situation: Rough Trade had begun the long drawn-out process of going bust.

John Dyer was a young marketing executive at Mute who handled much of the label’s day-to-day dialogue with Rough Trade and became Daniel Miller’s eyes and ears as the situation at Collier Street started to unravel. ‘We were the last ones to know in a strange kind of way,’ he says. ‘There was an indie politeness. All these smaller labels were not getting paid and our frustration was that we were getting paid. If we’d have known a bit earlier about the problems that were mounting up, maybe we could have gone in and actually taken control of it more. It’s all hindsight. I don’t think anyone would’ve run off to the majors at all. There was a system and that was the only system: there was Pinnacle and Rough Trade and Pinnacle was a very different sort of headspace for our little crew of labels.’

The endless meetings at Rough Trade – for so long a withering characterisation of the company – were now no longer populated by members of staff mediating each other’s in-house difficulties. An emergency committee was set up by Rough Trade’s biggest-label clients who were, they now realised, the company’s biggest creditors. Rather than Geoff Travis or the recently departed Richard Powell, a new face was chairing the meetings for Rough Trade: Powell’s replacement George Kimpton-Howe. Formerly of Pinnacle, Kimpton-Howe was a man, most of the staff at Rough Trade was convinced, who had been promoted well above his capabilities. As events started to take their course, it became clear he was not someone well equipped to handle a crisis.

‘We were suddenly presented with a cataclysmic moment rather than a moment that we could have all managed a bit better,’ says Dyer. ‘Suddenly Mute were faced with millions of pounds of losses as were The KLF, as were Beggars, as were Rhythm King. And from Rough Trade we were just encountering pretty fucking awful business strategy. There was a guy called George Kimpton-Howe, who felt the need to drive to work in a BMW, and people had trusted him because he took a Pinnacle philosophy into a bunch of indie kids and he was out of his depth.’

To make matters worse Rough Trade were in the middle of moving offices. A large open-plan office and warehouse building spread over five floors had been secured on Seven Sisters Road in Finsbury Park. Compared to the GLC-financed fit-out of Collier Street, the Finsbury Park premises were a backwards step. The building was rickety and in disrepair. Once the workforce was relocated to Seven Sisters Road, while the lease was still to run on Collier Street, the first task Kimpton-Howe had to face was the process of dismissing them.

Travis, while present at the emergency comittee meetings, was keeping away from the increasingly tense winding-down processes of Rough Trade Distribution. The label still had a release schedule to honour and, while he had to make some of the record company staff redundant, he also hired a new label manager, Andy Childs. A former A&R who had signed Wire to the EMI subsidiary Harvest more than ten years previously, Childs was well versed in the realpolitik of the music industry. ‘As I was joining, loads of people had been made redundant,’ he says. ‘Geoff was just letting everyone go but at the same time he was looking at what he saw as the next phase of the label. My first week there I made myself scarce, because it was really an awkward situation. Everything moved to that big place in Finsbury Park, which was only temporary, while all the distribution side of it went into administration.’

Rough Trade now had to meet the running costs of two warehouses, Collier Street and Seven Sisters Road. Remarkably, a decision was taken to open a third warehouse in Camley Street, Islington, to accommodate all the overstocks of unsold vinyl that had accrued throughout Rough Trade’s trading history.

‘There’s this thing that label owners hate,’ says Dyer, ‘which is that they don’t like to destroy the stock … “Oh man, we might sell it next year … you know someone in Russia might buy it.” It’s absolute bunkum. What you end up doing is taking this stock around with you everywhere. So Rough Trade started paying for a multistorage warehouse, storing all our crap which we were too wimpy to destroy, because it’s sacrilegious to destroy vinyl. So, suddenly, from having one warehouse they’ve got three, then it all catches up with them.’

As a metaphor for the failings and naivety of the independent sector, a warehouse leased purely for the purpose of housing its unsold and, by the outside world at least, unloved stock, is entirely apposite. The piles of records stacked up by employees working for cash-in-hand and a few guest-list favours are testament to the passion and folly and eternal optimism of the music obsessives who try and swim in the shark pools of the entertainment industry.

‘Kimpton-Howe didn’t realise about the housekeeping that was necessary,’ says Dyer. ‘It was all, “Let’s keep this going,” instead of thinking, “Let’s get rid of the warehouse and have a purge.” The sort of thing that’s common sense to a twelve-year-old was not being exhibited.’

Andy Childs was also aware that he was entering a company in its death throes that was being severely mismanaged. For someone who had experienced the manufacturing schedules and tightly controlled production capacities of a major label, the endless overflow of vinyl at Rough Trade was startling to witness. ‘Whoever was doing stock control was on another planet. That warehouse was full of unsold records and unwanted records, it was unbelievable. You’ve got this cavernous huge space and records had just been dumped. There was no business going on. It had just been frozen. It was like walking into this huge subterranean cavern with records put up and you’d walk around the corner and there’d be people in the dark, sifting through records. It was really odd, thousands and thousands of records, just dead stock lying there.’

A further, fatal, blow was delivered to Rough Trade when a new computer system was installed. For an international distribution company that was still reliant on unreliable and often illegible handwritten orders and delivery notes, a computer system was doubtless a good idea. Unfortunately the system Kimpton-Howe installed at a cost of well over half a million pounds malfunctioned from the beginning. The switch to computer ordering meant that retailers were without several weeks’ worth of new deliveries and had their cash flow put into crisis; the demise of the independent record shop was being accelerated by Rough Trade’s attempt to upgrade the quality of its service.

The board of trustees at Rough Trade, whose exact number and identity has never been agreed upon, decided to call in the administrators and appointed accountancy firm KPMG Peat Marwick to undertake an audit and exert some financial controls over the company. For the first time in its history, Rough Trade’s offices were bustling with men in suits. Travis was now sharing his space with the kind of people whom he had spent his working life trying to avoid. Rough Trade’s layer of middle management had dispersed and it was left for the emergency management committee of Mute, KLF, Beggars and the other labels to reach a settlement with the auditors.

‘It grew too big. Other people were too egotistical, they were too inexperienced,’ says Travis. ‘They didn’t really know how to run that business and yet they didn’t put their hands up and say, “We don’t know what we’re doing any more, we’re out of our depth,” and that’s what went wrong, and they made a lot of fatal errors. And then they all ran away and left me holding the baby to try and deal with it along with these horrendous administrators from the City, which was awful.’

Of all the creditors, Mute was owed the greatest amount and Daniel Miller, Dyer and their head of finance, Duncan Cameron, entered into prolonged negotiations with the auditors on behalf of the emergency committee. ‘Rough Trade Distribution was hugely successful,’ says Miller. ‘The KLF were massive, we’d just had Violator, one of our biggest albums ever, Erasure was huge. In theory things should have been going well. And it all went wrong at that point, endless things, classic NHS things. They spent a fortune on a computer system that didn’t work, everything just went wrong. There were a lot of people who felt very strongly about RTD. And we had to try and fucking rescue the company, partly because of the ethos and partly because loads of labels were owed a fortune by Rough Trade.’

‘We were in for the most money,’ says Dyer. ‘I think it was around a couple of million plus. This was all revealing itself among the panic stations stuff. KLF were in for a million and the guy who worked for KPMG could try and tell everyone what to do. But it’s a very fluid situation, a company in administration rather than liquidation – they were reliant upon our co-operation, they needed all of our co-operation to keep trading through.’

While the tortuous audit of Rough Trade continued to try to differentiate between the companies’ assets and its liabilities, one of its chief creditors, KLF Communications, which had only one artist with a release, The KLF, were attempting to finish recording their next single. In a remarkable demonstration of multitasking, Bill Drummond was dividing his time between attending the emergency committee and finalising plans for ‘Justified and Ancient’. Jimmy Cauty remained in the studio collaborating with Drummond via the phone. ‘Bill And Sally would be there working out how much money we were owed and I’d be in the studio trying to finish the track,’ says Cauty, ‘and trying not to think about the studio bill.’

‘We were all having to put our records out still,’ says Dyer, ‘so in the middle of a meeting we’d say, “You agree to that Bill? KLF represents 13 per cent of the debt, don’t you?” And he’d say, “Yeah, just a minute,” and then he’s on the end of the phone going, “Yeah, bit more bombastic Jimmy, bit more bombastic,” so he’s having to do a mix-down with Jimmy Cauty who’s in the studio at the other end on the phone. Then he’d ring up Pinewood and would spend a hundred grand on the video. He was hiring the sound stages saying, “No, we don’t need the submarine stage today.” Incredible, visionary behaviour.’

As well as Mute and KLF, the Beggars Group, particularly 4AD, were also owed substantial monies. Halfway through negotiations Big Life and Rhythm King cut their losses and withdrew from the discussion, leaving a core of stalwarts of the independent sector who had started almost simultaneously with Rough Trade. Ivo Watts-Russell had attended a few meetings, but his natural reticence made him uncommunicative. ‘I sat there,’ he says, ‘and didn’t say very much. In fact I don’t think I said anything at all, so Martin Mills went along instead and was incredibly helpful – he was a rock, really.’

‘It was a very painful period, obviously,’ says Mills. ‘We got caught pretty badly in it. I think a Cocteau Twins album had just come out and we hadn’t been paid. Also, the first Charlatans album, which was on Situation Two and was a no. 1 album, was also in a position of having just come out and not been paid for. It was a pretty big surprise to us. It hadn’t really occurred to us that it could happen. To be honest, if we’d been closer to the inside we might have realised where the seeds had been sown.’

While Mute, 4AD, The KLF and a few smaller labels like Fire were in a position to negotiate with KPMG, the remaining smaller labels, the kind that had thrived and been created under Rough Trade’s off-the-street production and manufacture deals, were forced into closure along with Rough Trade. Many of them were bedroom operations with few overheads and several hundred copies of their singles piled up on the shelves in the overspill warehouse in Camley Street, but the dream of starting a label for no other reason than releasing some music that might turn the heads of John Peel and his audience was over.

‘Mute’s existence wasn’t threatened by it, because we didn’t have a big release out and also we were doing extremely well overseas,’ says Miller. ‘But it was nevertheless a big thing, and it did threaten the existence of a lot of labels. Duncan Cameron did an incredible job fighting for all the labels’ survival. Some people had some kind of insurance, some people didn’t, so in the end a number of labels did go under or just decided to stop.’

Andy Childs had spent an uncomfortable few weeks when he started at Rough Trade. The phone was constantly ringing as smaller labels with no representation at the emergency committee and a never-ending stream of shops, suppliers, courier companies, repro houses – the whole supply chain of Rough Trade’s extended networks – were trying to get an answer about developments at Seven Sisters Road. Their only access to the situation was the weekly music press stories which ran a commentary on the number of job losses and published whatever reassuring but meaningless statements it could produce out of whoever was left in the offices and had the strength to answer the phone.

‘Rough Trade Distribution was incredibly important to a lot of labels and a lot of them went bust,’ says Childs. ‘A lot of people lost money and only the big ones really survived properly, Beggars and Mute and those people. There was a general flow of people all the time, going back and forth. People would leave without you realising – you’d come in one day and there’d be a different set of people, usually wearing suits shaking their heads and looking at figures.’

*

Once the due diligence had been done by KPMG Peat Marwick (whose fees were over £10,000 a week), the one agreed asset that Rough Trade had for sale was The Smiths back catalogue. Travis had little say in what could happen to the jewel in his label’s crown. The Smiths’ recordings were owned not by Rough Trade Records but by Rough Trade Distribution; as the first band to be signed to Rough Trade on a long-term deal, Travis had had to ask Distribution for the resources to make the band a serious offer. ‘The Smiths were signed to Rough Trade Distribution,’ says Childs, ‘which was one of the reasons why the label was in trouble, because they didn’t own The Smiths. When he wanted to sign The Smiths, Geoff probably didn’t have the money to sign them with the label account so he went to Distribution and got them to sign them, and Distribution needed that money from The Smiths income to try and prop up all the other disasters that were going on. So in the end they sold The Smiths to Warners. It’s hard to say why it did go wrong. You can’t have a big band like that and lose money easily: you’ve got to be doing something really badly wrong.’

Warners, who via Seymour Stein and Sire, had The Smiths licence for the States, were best placed to realise the long-term value of The Smiths and put in a serious bid for their rights. Although the Rough Trade label’s catalogue was seriously diminished without The Smiths, in a moment of great dignity, Travis added the rest of the Rough Trade masters to the asset pile, many of which were later auctioned off by KPMG. In the case of a handful of Rough Trade artists, notably Galaxie 500, the tapes were bought back by the bands themselves. ‘When it all went wrong Geoff was big enough to stand up and say, “I’ll take it on the chin,”’ says Mills, ‘and he threw Rough Trade Records into the pot, which he didn’t have to do. He’d absented himself quite substantially from the runnings of the distribution operation by then.’

Mute, Beggars and a handful of the other minor creditors then set about establishing a new distribution company, one which would replace Rough Trade on a much smaller, more streamlined scale. With a percentage of the revenue from the distribution fees, they would begin the long process of compensation for their Rough Trade debts. ‘What happened was, we got as many of the best people as we could from Rough Trade,’ says Miller, ‘and started a new company, called RTM. I still believe in the independent sector, that’s where the best stuff comes from, and you’ve got to have a way of servicing that sector as much as you can.’

The ignominy of its ending was an unsatisfying legacy for Rough Trade. In all its different configurations, however naive or successful, it had offered an open door through which people were encouraged to walk and join the experiment. What had started as an idealistic project had ended in the cold market realities of administration, insolvency and a visit from the auditors; it had also left many of the micro-organisations, bands, labels and projects it had unconditionally supported high and dry.

At the start of a new decade, over fifteen years after it had opened as a shop, there were plenty of people in both the majors and independents who saw Rough Trade’s closure as a definitive end to an era and to the experiment. ‘The collapse of Rough Trade felt like some form of rite of passage,’ says John Dyer. ‘You would never get a band to trust to sign to you unless you got paid. I remember Tony Wilson saying one day that the only people who’d ever ripped him off were indie distributors around the world. “So don’t just say that indies are good and majors are bad,” and I repeat that riff to this day; he said, “there are great people at major labels and there are wankers at indies,” and that’s true, it’s completely true.’

It would be some years before Travis resurfaced as a force in the music industry. Only a few of his contemporaries in Collier Street, and even fewer from Kensington Park Road, would stay the course with him. It is a mark of his passion for music and discovering new ideas – the sine qua non of a truly great A&R person – that he survived the brow-beating and blame-chasing of the collapse of Rough Trade to emerge once more as a highly revered maverick.

‘When it closed, it was a horrible day which I still remember,’ says Robin Hurley. ‘Geoff was in New York to see Dinosaur Jr on the day we found out the UK company was insolvent. We were limping along anyway. In the US there’s a law that says if your parent company is insolvent, then you have to cease to trade, so we had to shut up shop and everyone was let go.’

The next few years were not easy for Travis who, although determined to carry on, would have to regroup in a new set of conditions and in a music environment where the laissez-faire, artist-led ethos of Rough Trade was no longer tenable. ‘It was a horrible dark, dark, time,’ he says. ‘A really dark time and I think I almost had a nervous breakdown.’

Richard Scott, his former partner, conspirator, adversary, idealist and dreamer in the Rough Trade project made one last visit to the company as its winding-up notices were being processed and a skeleton caretaker staff was supervising the final closure. ‘When Rough Trade went belly up, I drove up to the Seven Sisters building, and parked my car in the warehouse. I got out and said, “I’ve come to take the speakers,” and nobody knew who I was. They were the same speakers, a pair of studio monitors. They’d come from the back room at Kensington Park Road. They were the ones that had driven the first sound system in the shop. I just put them into my car and drove off.’

* Such was the lack of interest in World of Echo, that Cerne Canning, who was on the Rough Trade staff at the time, remembers the record being used as a frisbee in the Rough Trade warehouse.

PART THREE

You Are the Latest Contender,

You Are the One to Remember

16 Turnaround

Dave Barker takes a walk on the Lower East Side, New York, 1990 (David E. Barker archive)

One of the smaller labels that suffered from the disintegration of Rough Trade was Fire Records, a guitar label with a strong release schedule, to which Dave Barker, who was now working there as A&R, had brought Spacemen 3 and the Pastels. ‘There was a drawing on the wall in the Fire office,’ says Barker, ‘saying “Everything’ll be all right, when the Spacemen album comes out”. It took so long coming out that Recurring was a brilliant title for the album.’

Barker had been busy establishing contacts in the American underground and had been given his own imprint, Paperhouse, by Fire’s owner, Clive Solomon. Paperhouse releases were often stylish or esoteric (or both) and included a series of wigged-out records by Half Japanese, many of which had been produced by one of the underground’s busiest men, Kramer, and featured a friend of Sonic Youth, Don Fleming, multitasking on guitar, bass or keyboards. ‘I became pals with Don Fleming because B.A.L.L., Kramer’s band, came over to the UK and were booked by Russell Warby,’ Barker recalls. ‘The first time I met Russell, I kipped on his floor in Nottingham with B.A.L.L. and the Walking Seeds, so this scene was opening up and it was suddenly this thing. Nirvana had stayed there the first time on his floor as well. Russell definitely opened some of that up.’

Russell Warby was one of the handful of promoters in the UK whom visiting American bands could call upon to arrange a tour; barely in his twenties, he had started booking concerts in his native Nottingham with mixed results. ‘I’d missed a college course by a year,’ he says. ‘Then by promoting shows I discovered I was a terrible promoter and all I did was lose money by backing horses that I really fancied and nobody else did. Then I got introduced to some Dutch people who handled the Sub Pop bands and I decided to start calling myself an agent.’

The bands that Warby promoted, recording for Sub Pop, K Records and Shimmy Disc along with countless other American labels, were the generation that had formed in the wake of Black Flag, Sonic Youth, Big Black and Butthole Surfers and had drawn inspiration from those bands’ networking and self-reliance. Many of them had been given a leg-up on to the first rung of the touring ladder by opening for Sonic Youth. The next stage of Sonic Youth’s career, which many were assuming would involve them leaving the independent system, was Paul Smith’s major preoccupation. Smith was also trying to establish an American base for Blast First and clarify his position with his flagship band. Consequently few of Sonic Youth’s support acts managed to make an impression on him. ‘I didn’t really have much to do with Russell,’ says Smith. ‘I remember him phoning up to say he was working with this band, Nirvana, and seeing them play somewhere in America with Sonic Youth, and all I can remember is, they wouldn’t get off the couch to do their sound check.’

Warby booked a series of Sub Pop tours into the UK and Europe featuring Mudhoney, Tad and Nirvana in riots of volume and exuberant unprofessionalism, and, in the case of Nirvana, a raucous pop noise. ‘The early shows were so exciting and the band was so fantastic. They really were so much better than anyone else,’ says Warby. ‘Then Nirvana came back to the UK and they did their second John Peel session, which was the covers one, which was tremendous, and you knew – you heard the demos around that time of Nevermind – that something pretty exciting was going on. When they came over on that trip they were completely skint. They’d been taken out to dinner by all these labels but they had no money.’

One of many bands from the American underground being courted by the majors, Nirvana were still, in their own heads, a band slowly building on their reputation for phenomenal live shows and a melodic sensibility that many of their peers lacked. The band’s contact with the record industry was little more than an informal relationship with their record label and two or three semi-professional friends like Warby who could book them a regular run of shows at home and abroad. ‘I tried to get them a manager here when they were in the UK,’ says Warby, ‘but they wanted to meet the Pixies’ manager, so we set up a meeting with Ken Goes. I rang him up and said, “Well, you’ve had the demos for Nevermind, and you’ve heard the Peel session, what do you think?” and he said to me something along the lines of, “I can’t see what sets this band apart from 100,000 other bands in America.”’

In America the Pixies were released on Elektra, a division of Warners, which was considered by those in the know to be in the running for Sonic Youth. ‘I was talking to the majors,’ says Paul Smith. ‘The band weren’t talking to the majors, I was talking to the majors for them. Around the time of Evol I said, “You will get signed by a major,” and them just laughing hysterically and saying, “Paul, you’re so great, you’re so fucked up, you actually believe that might turn out to be true.”’

Sonic Youth’s last album for Blast First had been Daydream Nation; the release was not without problems. The band’s American label SST had run into further cash-flow difficulties and the band had asked Smith to supervise Daydream’s American release. For Smith, handling Daydream Nation in the States was a crucial first step in building a structure for Blast First America. ‘With Daydream coming out on Blast First in America, we didn’t do an incredible job, but we were doing the job that needed to be done, and we were spending the advertising dollars – $60,000, I seem to remember, nothing crazy, but $60,000 to a penny more than SST would have spent. We were in there with radio stations, we were doing the thing. The day it came out the phone rang in my apartment and it was Ahmet Ertegun and he was, “I’ve always loved the band.”’

Daydream Nation had been part-distributed by Enigma, a company financed by the major MCA. While Sonic Youth had not fully signed to a major, they had left the underground for the halfway house of major-label distribution. Now in a holding pattern, the band realised their next move would almost inevitably involve signing to a major. Their relationship with Smith was one dear to all involved, but it remained a confused one that lacked any formal or legally binding management or record company agreement. As Blast First’s biggest-selling band, Sonic Youth were, after the critical and commercial success of Daydream Nation, in a stronger position than their record label. As Smith fielded calls from moguls like Ehtegun, communication between the band and Smith grew increasingly erratic and strained as both parties began weighing up options.

‘What I had wanted to do was have Blast First become something more of the model of Some Bizzare,’ says Smith, ‘in a way that we could engage with the big machine, and we’d protect the band. Obviously it didn’t work out that way, so there were things like us having dinner with Ahmet.’

Sonic Youth’s diary began to fill with a round of meetings and appointments with the major labels. Once word was out that the band were ready to sign they had no shortage of courtiers. Many of the majors had staff in A&R and media departments who were long-term fans of the band and realised that the value of signing the totemic Sonic Youth went beyond merely releasing the band’s music. If any band could survive the transition from the indie network, with all its unwritten moral codes and behavioural tics, it was Sonic Youth. The band’s measured career approach, its intelligence and, above all, its endless underground connections, if safely housed and ring-fenced by the right company, could act as a shining example of the way forward for their peer group. Any major label that could create a working relationship with America’s hottest underground guitar band would soon earn a coveted reputation.

In entering discussions with major labels, Sonic Youth had to endure the strained and ridiculous power politics of the corporate entertainment industry. The band were welcomed into the glasslined suites of Manhattan to witness boardroom dynamics to their full effect. Smith was still acting as the band’s semi-official representative and attended the meetings, as did, in a sign of the group’s sense of purpose, an entertainment lawyer. ‘CBS Black Tower is across the road from Grubman, Indursky & Schindler,’ says Smith, ‘who were then the second-largest media lawyers in America and Allen Grubman was in the meeting we had with CBS. It was the most ludicrous Spinal Tap meeting I’ve ever been to. The band were absolutely useless and had nothing to say to anybody. The whole fuss around Tommy Mottola … Tommy’s on the third floor … was just ridiculous. He had this black-and-white check jacket on, this mullet haircut, and he came in the room, sat behind the desk and did his little swing around and went, “There’s a button underneath this desk that I could press and make you superstars and I, Tommy Mottola, I’m pressing that button right now.”’

Tommy Mottola was the late Eighties corporate American music executive incarnate, a protégé of Walter Yetnikoff, the man who had overseen the success of Michael Jackson’s Thriller and helped the music industry threaten Hollywood as America’s most rampant and lucrative creative power base. Mottola had made his name by handling the career of Hall & Oates and exploiting such opportunities as producing the world’s first branded tour, a partnership with his charges and Beech Nut chewing gum. He was now attempting to talk turkey with Sonic Youth, a band who had just been on the road with a band called Rapeman. ‘Sonic Youth all sat on a couch, with their faces going, “What?”,’ says Smith. ‘I was sat in a chair looking at Mottola, who said, “Do we have any questions?” The fantastic dumb silence that only musicians can do followed and I said, “Well, for the band, I know it’s really important that they have artistic control.” I said, “I know Bill Nelson, a friend, an artist I respect, and he was on CBS and CBS remixed his album without his permission and put it out and that would be something that wouldn’t work for these guys.” It was like something out of The West Wing. Mottola went, “Er, er, that would have been before my time,” and the CBS executives all passed the buck on responding, and we shuffled out.’

Once the meeting had finished Grubman called his colleague Richard Grabel on his way back to his offices. Grabel, a former New York correspondent for NME turned entertainment lawyer, was starting to take clients based on his in-depth knowledge of independent labels and was set to handle Sonic Youth’s account at Grubman, Indursky & Schindler. According to Smith, at least, it was Sonic Youth’s decision to hire a professional legal team that saw his involvement in their career terminated. ‘Allen Grubman goes to Grabel, “Who the fuck was the English guy who embarrassed my friend in front of me,”’ says Smith. ‘“Get the fuck rid of him,” and within days of that I was gone.’

Sonic Youth declined Mottola’s advances but signed instead to Geffen, one of the smaller majors, in a deal brokered by Grabel which contained the much-coveted clause of ‘full creative control’.

‘Anybody who’s worked with bands will know that a band with no ambition isn’t really that much fucking use to you if you’re a record company,’ says Smith. ‘The ones that have no ambition – it doesn’t matter how fantastic they are, they’ll probably never make it, so you want the ambition and Sonic Youth always represented a level of ambition, and they saw their chance, and they took it.’

On the tour for Goo, Sonic Youth’s first album for Geffen, the band stuck firmly to their roots and hand-picked their support acts. For the UK leg a new band from Glasgow, Teenage Fanclub, was invited to open for Sonic Youth. Teenage Fanclub had just released their debut, A Catholic Education, on Paperhouse.

‘I was talking to Stephen Pastel,’ says Barker, ‘who said, “My mate Norman’s got a new band. They were gonna be called Superdrug, but now they’re called Teenage Fanclub and they’re really great, you know,” all this stuff. Stephen, bless him for ever, is really magnanimous. Most people in bands are like, “Oh, no one’s any fuckin’ good but me.” He’s never been like that ever, and he never will be.’

Teenage Fanclub members included Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley, who had been in the Boy Hairdressers and were veterans of Splash One. Blake had played briefly in both the Pastels and the Vaselines. Rather than drawing influence from My Bloody Valentine, like most of their contemporaries, Teenage Fanclub had a loose, melodic sound that wasn’t afraid to rock and, unlike the shoegazers, the band had an easy onstage charm and confidence.

‘I got a tape, then Norman rang to say they were playing a gig,’ says Barker. ‘But when I saw them, I mean, it was just magic. I really saw something. There were fifteen people there. They came onstage. Norman said, “Hello, we’re Teenage Fanclub, and we are Glasgow’s top singers by the way.” They’d spent £2,000 recording the first record and I said, “Well, we’ll give you that back for a fucking kick-off.” And Clive said, “What did you want to say that for?” Because it was a one-off deal, it wasn’t five albums, whatever, but that was his attitude.’

Barker’s A&R colleague at Fire was Dave Bedford, who was in the process of finalising the release of Separations by Pulp. The Sheffield band had already left Fire, only to re-sign to the label in a series of complicated legal actions which spoke volumes about the way Clive Solomon ran the company.

‘There are a lot of people that would say Clive’s a crook,’ says Bedford. ‘I’d have to say, he’s not, he’s just done what the contracts said but the contracts the bands signed were horrible.’

Fire was distributed by Pinnacle and had been earmarked by George Kimpton-Howe as a label that was going places. When Kimpton-Howe took up the position of MD at Rough Trade he was determined to take Fire with him. He made Solomon an offer of free office space in Seven Sisters Road with the added incentive of a large advance and use of the warehouse; within a matter of months, Rough Trade had been put into administration.

‘Clive liked it because it was a big offer with a warehouse and office thrown in rent-free,’ says Bedford. ‘As it happened it was the worst move he ever made. I saw no reason to move, but then it was money up front. It was a stupid deal through the new Rough Trade, and no wonder they went bankrupt.’

Much to Solomon’s annoyance, Teenage Fanclub had proved long in the tooth and decided to sign with Fire for one album, and for the UK and Europe only; any American label that was interested was welcome to make them an offer. At the suggestion of Thurston Moore, Geffen’s A&R, Gary Gersh, added his interest to the growing number of labels keen to secure the American rights to Teenage Fanclub.

‘They all came over’, says Barker. ‘Gary Gersh from Geffen flew in to see them playing in Windsor at the Old Trout. Once Clive knew that the majors were interested, he started ringing them up, trying to get some kind of percentage bullshit out of Geffen, which the band, of course, found out about. That fucked him right up the arse and quite right too.’

Teenage Fanclub were added to Gersh’s recent list of signings, which also included another one of Moore’s suggestions: Nirvana. Moore had also mentioned Nirvana to John Silva at Gold Mountain Entertainment, the company that now managed Sonic Youth. Gold Mountain’s MD was Danny Goldberg, an industry veteran who had been involved with Led Zeppelin’s American career and who, despite the music business’s successful use of Reaganomics, also retained an active interest in the Democrat Party.

To Paul Smith, who had been asked by Sonic Youth in an act of reconciliation to meet up before their next London show, the new team of American music industry professionals around the band were a sharp reminder of the difference between the heady days of the Malt & Hops and major-label careerism. ‘There was a lot of difficulty about the whole thing,’ he says. ‘I was invited to turn up and go with them to a show and as I came round the corner John Silva said, “Ah, Paul Smith, the man who did all the work so that I could make the money.”’

Smith’s divorce from Sonic Youth had been painful. It also coincided with the majority of the Blast First roster either splitting up or signing with other, larger labels. The five years he had spent building the bands’ careers in the music papers and on John Peel were being successfully consolidated by a separate, more corporate part of the music business.

‘When the shit went down, it was all in a very short period of time, about six weeks in all,’ says Smith. ‘Gibby Haynes is the one who actually got on a plane, turned up at my door, and he went, “We’re going to go out and get fucked,” and for a good two weeks we did get fucked. I have some fabulous memories – turning up at a Robert Williams opening in the East Village in a tiny room that Sonic Youth were at. We hadn’t spoken and Gibby, who’s not a small man in himself, powered over there and started yelling in their face, “Buy the man a fucking BMW” and I was yelling, “I don’t want a BMW, I can’t drive.” “Shut up, buy him …” and the Youth were just melting.’

After an unsuccessful release on Rough Trade that coincided with the company’s closure, the Butthole Surfers cashed in their never-ending ordeals on the road for a contract with Capitol. ‘They never made any secret that they would go to anybody who would offer them big money at any point,’ says Smith, who had offered the band a deal through Enigma, much to the band’s American label Touch & Go’s annoyance.

‘That was one of my first falling-outs with Steve Albini,’ says Smith, ‘’cause Steve thought he was in some sort of revolution, so he brought Cory Rusk of Touch & Go to meet me at Chicago and by the time I got to LA the phone was ringing in my room, and it was Steve screaming down the phone and that was the start. Cory never saw any problems for the Buttholes coming, but anybody who knew them realised they were just about a big bag of money. Again I was disappointed that I wasn’t involved but, around that time in particular, when the move came from the majors, it happened instantly.’

In order to market the new generation of bands they had signed, the majors created a new genre, ‘alternative rock’ or ‘alternative’. Following a year after Sonic Youth’s Goo, Geffen’s next alternative release was Nevermind by Nirvana.

‘Everybody’s hope was they might equal the success of Sonic Youth,’ says Warby. ‘It might be a dream to be as big as the Pixies, but that was all everyone hoped for.’

Upon its release, the worldwide success of Nevermind, which would eventually sell over thirty million copies, was unforeseen. Whatever their ambitions – and Nirvana certainly wanted to sell records beyond the capabilities of Sub Pop – the band were still psychologically linked to the world of club shows, 7-inch singles and tape-sharing that had been their environment to date. Goo had been a reasonably successful transfer to a major for Sonic Youth: the band’s reputation was intact, but the record’s sales figures suggested alternative would be a slowly building market for the majors to exploit. However excitable and celebratory the reaction to their shows had been, Nirvana still felt part of the extended Sub Pop family and were realistic in their expectations.

Demonstrating their interest in melody along with their geographical roots, Nirvana’s second Peel session had been a set of covers that revealed the influences that had gone into Nevermind: two tracks of nursery rhyme menace by the Vaselines, ‘Molly’s Lips’ and ‘Son of a Gun’, a Devo song, ‘Turnaround’, and a run through ‘D-7’ by the Wipers, one of the first punk bands of the Pacific Northwest. The inclusion of the Vaselines, whose album had barely received distribution within the UK, let alone in the States, was an indicator of the rigorous record collecting and serious music fan behaviour around the band.

‘Steve Turner from Mudhoney was the fan on the Sub Pop scene,’ says Warby. ‘He was the one who informed it. Kurt kind of got to the Vaselines from him.’ Eugene Kelly of the Vaselines joined Nirvana on stage for a version of ‘Molly’s Lips’ at the band’s breakthrough performance at Reading Festival in 1991.

‘It was a kind of chaotic show, but it was great,’ says Warby. ‘It was like three o’clock in the afternoon and it completely kicked off. Kurt managed to sprain his arm diving into the drum kit. The NME, rather late comers to the party, ran a review saying, “Next week you’ll be the biggest band in the world”, and it was one of the first times they’d said that, nowadays they say that rather a lot.’

Nevermind was released two weeks after Reading to glowing reviews; such was the demand that the initial print run was exhausted by the day after its release. ‘They pressed 30,000 copies,’ says Warby. ‘They just really underestimated demand then the record went crazy. Rough Trade shop was out of stock on it for over two weeks.’

For a band that had a constituency among the music press and its readers, the levels of Nevermind’s success were staggering. For the first time a music-press-sponsored band, with an unimpeachable reputation and well above the acceptable levels of integrity, was also among the world’s most bankable – a fact not lost on those music-press readers who were trying to start a band of their own.

‘It carried on being very, very exciting through that year,’ says Warby. ‘From there on the trials and tribulations started. It was a rush of adrenaline and excitement but it was so much to take in, especially for fragile people. They were playing a cover of “Baba O’Riley” but instead of singing “teenage wasteland”, they were changing the words to “major-label breakdown”.’

Paul Smith, who had almost single-handedly kick-started the interest in loud American guitar music five years earlier, could only watch as albums by bands he had once released were now debuting in the Top Twenty. By the release of Nevermind in 1991 he was no longer working with Sonic Youth, Big Black, Butthole Surfers or Dinosaur Jr.

‘The number of Sonic Youth gigs I saw from the side of the stage is still something that keeps me extremely, glowingly, warm,’ says Smith, who had to pause in order to decelerate the speeding car that had been Blast First at the end of the Eighties. ‘I took time to wonder whether or not it had really happened. For a while I actually felt damaged, because there were so many things that I didn’t want to get involved in that might have been nice earners or whatever.’

Smith successfully continued with Blast First, but wanted to mark the end of the label’s first – and possibly finest – hour. ‘I had a Blast First gravestone made and we put that on the cover of The Catalogue ’cause Richard Boon was the editor and I could get away with that kind of shit. At that point people would come up to me and go, “So that was the death of indie,” or whatever. Absolute fucking bullshit, I certainly didn’t have any pretensions towards that. I was trying to move Sonic Youth to a major. I thought they should’ve been on a major in the first place; the Grateful Dead were on a major. It didn’t kill them.’

While readjusting to the changed landscape Smith realised there was still fun to be had with the bands he had made successful. ‘I stupidly took Steve Albini to interview Hunter S. Thompson up in Aspen. I was there with Snub TV, paying for them to do Sonic Youth, but they ended up filming the Pixies. I’d met Hunter a couple of times and Steve was always going on about how he’d been to journalism school. I forgot that Steve, of course, is completely anti drugs and obviously Hunter’s not, so Steve’s opening question was, “So you’re obviously fucked up on drugs, Mr Thompson,” and Hunter just stopped and looked at him and went, “Fucked up on drugs? You want to see fucked up on drugs?” and walked out of his house and came back, twenty minutes later, and then he really was fucked up on drugs.’

A different press trip from the British media had visited Aspen a few months earlier, when the members of Dinosaur Jr were photographed on the ski slopes for a feature for their new single ‘The Wagon’. However, by the time the feature ran the band had broken up. To widespread confusion, a new Dinosaur Jr album, Green Mind, was announced for release on Geoff Travis’s Blanco y Negro label. ‘I found out the band broke up,’ says Smith, ‘not through any phone calls that J made, but as far as anyone was concerned they didn’t exist, so there wasn’t going to be any record, and then the next thing I know, Daniel Miller called me to say he’d had Geoff on the phone to say, “Did Daniel mind if he did the Dinosaur record?”’

*

The one band member of Dinosaur Jr who had most definitely left the band was Lou Barlow. Barlow was burnt out from the years of permanent friction in Dinosaur Jr and wary of the new accelerated career paths that most of his contemporaries were embarking on. In his spare time in Dinosaur, Barlow had recorded a set of confessional experiments straight to cassette, which he had released as an album, Weed Forestin’, under the name of Sebadoh. For the next Sebadoh release, Eric Gaffney, a friend who exhibited an even more free-form approach to recording, joined Barlow. A tape of Barlow’s next set of songs, which were more direct and poignant than the stoned and scrambled tracks Sebadoh had released to date, was passed on to Laurence Bell. A twenty-two-year-old with a background in the UK hardcore scene of the Stupids and Leatherface, Bell had joined Barker and Bedford in the Fire A&R department. ‘I put out a record when I was at Fire by Anastasia Screamed and their booking agent also handled Sebadoh,’ he recalls. ‘She said, “You’ve got to hear Lou’s new stuff, it’s unbelievable,” and she sent me a cassette which had five songs, including “Soul and Fire”.’

As the youngest in the A&R department, Bell was in his first job in the music industry and was evaluating what the label’s strengths and weaknesses were. ‘Fire felt pretty hot when I got there. There was the Spacemen, obviously, and then the Fanclub came in, and they were re-signing Pulp. There was a definite kind of rivalry with Creation which was ever present in the air, but you always knew the stories that, “Oh, McGee’s got the drugs and the bands love him,” and I think that was where Fire couldn’t compete … ’cause they didn’t have the drugs.’

Alan McGee’s A&R policy of hedonism at all costs accompanied by visions of world domination and classic records was still proving as seductive to bands as ever. ‘Creation could walk in and McGee would go, “Here you go, fifty-fifty, here’s a couple of lines, and some E,”’ says Bell, ‘and that’s a much easier way to do business with a young man.’

Both Fire and Creation were beginning to realise that Sonic Youth and Nirvana’s success at Geffen meant that a whole generation of American bands, many of whom they knew or had worked with, were being offered the kind of major-label deals that had previously been reserved for Whitesnake or Ratt. ‘There was so much money flying around,’ says Bell. ‘It was just insane, what was going on in America. The people who were getting signed – Danny Goldberg at Atlantic signing Daniel Johnson and the Melvins – it was just sort of happening really, really quickly so I was just trying to find something new and original.’*

With the tape of new Sebadoh material on his desk, Bell’s first thought was to sign the band to Fire. The nagging sense that the company was weighted unfairly in favour of the owner’s, rather than the band’s interests, had continued in the back of Bell’s mind. ‘People would start saying, “Oh, Laurence, you’re all right, I’d sign to you – but I’m not sure about that company. Everyone says that Fire’s a bit dodgy.” I was supposed to sign Sebadoh to Fire, and I realised that I could try this myself, so, just as that deal was about to start to be negotiated at Fire, I handed in my notice and set up Domino.’

Barker would soon depart as well; he had recently taken a call from Ed Ball at Creation. ‘Ed rings up, “How are you doing?”,’ says Barker. ‘“Alan wants to know, are you happy there?” I said, “What do you mean?” “Well, he’d like to talk to you about maybe doing something.” I’m like, “Yeah! Well, yeah, of course, I’d be interested.” And I get into the reception and McGee goes, “Dave Barker, I’m going to make you a millionaire.” That’s Alan for you. He didn’t but you know … he meant it.’

* As an example of the scale of the major labels’ willingness to invest in the underground at the time, Rick Rubin’s Def America offering a label deal to the tiny London indie Too Pure takes some beating.

17 Alcoholiday

Teenage Fanclub outside their Motherwell rehearsal room where they wrote Bandwagonesque, 1991 (photograph by Sharon Fitzgerald used by kind permission of the photographer)

Creation had avoided being affected by the collapse of Rough Trade by changing its distribution to Pinnacle. McGee had been waiting for an opportunity to leave Rough Trade since Upside Down. When Kimpton-Howe took over at Collier Street, McGee and Kyllo went to Kimpton-Howe’s former boss, Steve Mason at Pinnacle, to inform him that Creation would soon be in a position to move and would be willing to listen to what Pinnacle had to offer. Creation’s finances were in no better health than Rough Trade’s, as the auditors moved in on Seven Sisters Road in the spring of 1991; Creation was itself weeks away from bankruptcy. All McGee’s hopes were resting on two records on its autumn release schedule: the much delayed and as yet untitled My Bloody Valentine album and Screamadelica by Primal Scream.

Screamadelica’s genesis lay in the band’s encounters with the free-thinking experiments of acid house, as McGee and Jeff Barrett had continued to make connections with the scene’s leading evangelists and DJs. ‘It sort of seemed like shit was possible,’ says Barrett. ‘Seemingly different musical cultures coming together. It was really exciting for me as an indie guy going to acid house clubs, meeting new people and trading ideas. I remember there being so much optimism in the ether, as it were.’

Barrett had left Creation and gone into partnership with a friend, Martin Kelly, to form a new label, Heavenly. The label’s first three releases were testament to the sense of possibility abroad at the beginning of new decade: an acid house club track by Sly and Lovechild, a Neil Young cover by St Etienne and ‘Motown Junk’, a righteous song of Welsh Valleys indignation by Manic Street Preachers. ‘The Manics is the most flak that we’d ever had for any band that we’ve signed,’ says Kelly. ‘I really remember it being quite vehement but enjoying the fact. I used to get calls from McGee going, “Fucking Manics, man? What have you done? You’ve signed a fucking dodgy punk band. It’s all about acid house now.”’

Kelly had gone to work at Creation for a few months and acted as a bridge between Barrett, McGee and Primal Scream as Screamadelica was gradually being made. ‘We were seen as being at the epicentre of something,’ says Barrett. ‘We were the guys who’d worked for Factory and Creation who also took pills with the Boy’s Own lot. We were the crossover guys. We were the blah blah. Everybody said, “Why the fuck have they signed a fucking punk rock group?”’ After a second single for Heavenly the Manics signed with CBS imprint Columbia and, in an act of almost unheard-of generosity, reimbursed Heavenly for the expenses they had incurred. ‘They said, “Right, the deal’s done and we’re going to give you the money back,”’ says Barrett, ‘“and we’re going to give you a point on the record.” I hadn’t got a clue what that meant and a cheque arrived for ten grand, which had never been discussed or anything. James Bradfield’s a very generous person and it was a moving and touching thing, and I’d been surrounded by Alan, for one, calling everyone and everything in the industry a cunt, so when something uncunty like that happened, it was very nice.’

The biggest, if not the only, fan of the Manics within the wider Creation circle was Andrew Weatherall, whom Barrett had met DJing in the upstairs room at Shoom and at Future, where Weatherall had played a filters-off mix of anything he thought would suit the mood. ‘Me and Andrew pretty much hit it off straight away,’ says Barrett. ‘We just hung out a lot and one thing led to another. I took the Scream guys out down to Future … Future was a good club. Andrew Innes liked it there and they all met Weatherall, and boom, boom.’

One evening in late 1990 Barrett, Kelly, McGee and Bobby Gillespie went to see St Etienne and Manic Street Preachers play in Birmingham. Backstage the entourage were introduced to the concert’s promoter, Tim Abbott. A quick-witted and gregarious raconteur, Abbott reminded St Etienne’s Bob Stanley of David Essex, and the Creation/Heavenly party accepted an invitation to repair back to Abbott’s house for an extended aftershow.

‘I had Martin Kelly and Jeff round at our house in Birmingham,’ says Abbott. ‘Did my bond with Bobby Gillespie, “Let’s drink some goat’s blood,” and Alan and Bobby went through my record collection. Me and Alan got on to this big, deep chat about black and white music, linear dance grooves versus structured verse chorus verse, and he said, “Well, what do you do?” and I said, “I’m a marketing consultant. I work for blue-chip companies. I promote a house club. I’m a bon viveur,” and he says, “Great, man, what’s consultancy?” And I said, “Oh, you know, I’m a fucking hired gun, you know, I’ll come into a company …” like, necking Es, and he said, “Well, come down.”’

Whatever his levels of intoxication or stimulation, McGee was also becoming immersed in the role of rock ’n’ roll mogul. Creation was totally reliant on his ability to fast-talk the American major labels into giving him advances on the US rights for future releases; while his Glaswegian burr was rendered occasionally incomprehensible by the jetlag and the drugs, his arm-waving body language meant McGee was starting to be taken seriously by the American labels, who recognised one of their own in his hunger for success and reward. While hustling and negotiating in America, McGee had also learnt to talk the language of the industry. ‘I remember that night in Birmingham,’ says Barrett, ‘sitting there, pilled out of my mind, and he’d be like, “Barrett, market share’s fucking better than it was a week ago.”’

To Tim Abbott, who was well versed in the manager-class language of market share, presentational skills and targets, the identity of the effusive red-haired companion of Bobby Gillespie rifling through his records was a mystery. ‘I hadn’t got a clue who he was,’ he says. ‘I knew who Bob was, ’cause of Psychocandy. I said, “What do you do, then?” He went, “I’ve got a record company,” and I said, “Well – what do you turn over?” and he said, “Just under a million pounds,” and I said, “Well, that’s not bad. It’s great you’re doing what you love. How many do you employ?” and he said, “Well, fifteen sometimes,” and I went, “That’s far too high, but anyway, great, I’ll come down,” and I put on my day-wear and went down to Westgate Street. The big Turkish dude Oz was there on the door, thinking I’d come to buy some gear.’

Stepping into what he assumed might be a record company run along the lines of a service-sector small business, Abbott was astonished to see the warren of offices staffed by an indeterminate group of employees and hangers-on. Abbott was escorted down into the bunker, where he found Green and McGee ensconced in their own nerve centre, a space where Green’s nerves in particular had been tested by My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and its protracted recording and release. ‘I got in there,’ says Abbott, ‘and Alan’s there – like, “Alreet man, alreet.” It was like … fucking hell!’

The gestation of Loveless had been a long, painfully drawn-out process of aborted sessions, a never-ending series of mid-range studios and worsening relations between the band and label, particularly Shields and McGee. It had been a morale-draining period at Westgate Street, especially for a company that had grown used, in its penury, to running on the cheerleading euphoria of McGee. Green and James Kyllo had monitored the recording’s spiralling budget as a trail of invoices from abandoned recording sessions passed across their desks. ‘Week after week we’d be having to find a new studio somewhere that they hadn’t rejected, or [where they’d] found an inaudible frequency or something,’ says Kyllo. ‘They’d stay in a new studio for a while and nothing would happen.’

The myths associated with Loveless, that Shields had had a Brian Wilson-style breakdown, that the record’s recording costs were over a quarter of a million pounds, and that they all but rendered Creation insolvent, made great copy. Upon its release the record was rightly heralded as an extraordinary and ground-breaking achievement, and the sense of the against-the-odds perfectionism of Shields added to the drama. The reality was more straightforward. While the studio bills for Loveless certainly added to Creation’s problems, the label was already bordering on insolvency, but nevertheless the sales of Loveless were healthy. ‘If you look at the amount spent over what it actually sold, we probably made a profit in the end,’ says Kyllo, ‘but in terms of what we had and what we were able to do, it was very draining for everybody.’

Aside from the constant anxiety about the scale of the record’s costs and the interminable delays, a significant factor counted in Shields’s favour. However much bad blood there would be after its release, and whatever the intemperate language used to describe Loveless later, nevertheless, when the tapes were finally delivered, they were treated with reverence at Westgate Street. ‘We kept going with what they wanted,’ says Kyllo. ‘What else could we do? We knew we needed that record and we did think at the time, and Alan certainly did, that Kevin was a genius.’

As well as Ride, there were other bands signed to Creation who shared the view that Shields was the innovative and visionary auteur of his generation. Both Slowdive and the Telescopes had released records on the label that had partially filled the demand for My Bloody Valentine in their absence. ‘I don’t know if any of those groups broke even,’ says Kyllo, ‘but they were a very worthwhile second string, and we felt that we were surfing the zeitgeist and we were putting out the best records of the time.’

However much Creation felt it was at the heart of the culture its finances remained desperate. In the hangdog environs of Hackney, and in the middle of a recession, McGee at least felt at home. ‘The bank on Mare Street got robbed so many times,’ says McGee. ‘I’d come off a tour and needed to put some cash in and taken the Abbott with me for protection. These guys in a car rolled down the window and went, “Don’t fucking bank there, we’re robbing it Monday!” and they weren’t taking the fucking piss – every week that bank got robbed. They had to shut it down.’

It was a miracle that Creation continued to escape the same fate. An endless stream of creditors were ringing the offices for settlement on long overdue invoices or sending written confirmation that matters were now in the hands of their solicitors. ‘We were trying to keep some accounts going just by paying the very bare minimum of what we owed,’ says Kyllo. Tim Abbott had carried out an evaluation of Creation in his own inimitable style, which had included a hands-on audit of the various drug dealers that visited Westgate Street for comparison and appraisal. As Abbott and McGee became deeper and druggier friends, Abbott was impressed by McGee’s day-to-day ability to focus on keeping the company afloat but he had yet to uncover a long-term strategy. ‘Alan’s commitment to work rate was quite amazing,’ says Abbott, ‘but as for the future it was just, chuck enough in the air and assume it would always be OK. There was no planning whatsoever.’

In an attempt to reposition Creation in a more inclusive context within the rest of the industry, Abbott concentrated on developing a relationship with Creation’s distribution company, Pinnacle. ‘On my first consultancy with Alan I said, “Tell me about your sales team,” and he went, “They’re cunts,” and I said, “Oh, that’s empowering, then.”’

Creation had high hopes for Giant Steps the forthcoming album by the Boo Radleys. The record, a deliberate mix of studio-as-instrument experimentation and pop-song craft, was trailed by a hook-laden single, ‘Lazarus’, which Creation had thought would breach the Top Forty. Abbott devised a campaign for Giant Steps, including Creation’s first marketing plan, which saw the band scrubbed up in suits and a lengthy series of advertising that ran long past the record’s release date. Pinnacle were informed that Giant Steps was the label’s priority and they were to be given all the necessary tools, including a re-release of ‘Lazarus’, to ensure that Giant Steps was a crossover success.

‘I said to Alan, “I’m taking you down to Pinnacle,”’ says Abbott. ‘“I’m going to brush you off right, and you’re going to shake everybody’s hands and I’m going to say, ‘This is the great god, Alan McGee of indie records,’ and they’re going to meet you and realise that you’re human.” He said, “D’you think that will work?” and it’s like, if it was fucking hairbrushes we were selling, and you were the king of the bristles … so all of a sudden, it changed his whole perception.’

There was another significant change at the Creation offices: the more hard-edged peaks of cocaine had replaced the euphoric highs of Ecstasy. While the drug provided a backed-into-a-corner focus for McGee, it also meant his mood swings, already amplified by the relentless stress of perpetual near bankruptcy, were becoming more volatile. ‘Coming out of the house scene, everybody switched to cocaine,’ says Abbott. ‘Alan, as he was on E, became very much an obsessive on it. I think he got a bit blurred on it. It became a way for him to deal with his impatience.’

In a sign that Creation had at least decided to become a little more professional, Dave Barker had taken over what had been the Ecstasy party room and set up an office. His A&R brief was to be himself, which often largely consisted of him playing excellent records while fielding calls from whichever of his many Glaswegian friends had started a band that week.

‘There was a few parties went on,’ says Barker, ‘but people weren’t off their nut all day long. They fuckin’ worked hard. Occasionally the tannoy would crank up, “Everybody get down the old bunker, we’re gonna have a party.” And you’d go down there and Alan’s got all these bottles of champagne, there’s lines of Charlie chopped out and fuckin’ Es and stuff, and everyone’s getting into it.’

Barker’s links with Teenage Fanclub and Eugenius ensured Creation had high cultural capital in the States, where few British bands were considered part of the prevailing musical trends. In turn McGee had signed Sugar, Bob Mould’s perfectly timed return to power-trio dynamics, which gave Creation a great cachet – and healthy sales – in the post-Nevermind landscape. ‘The Fanclub/Nirvana link with Sub Pop and everything meant we were deemed as extremely cool in the States,’ says Abbott. ‘The likes of Slowdive and all that were gone, dead.’

McGee and Abbott were spending as much time as possible in LA, where they became a two-man party crew, regularly holding all-night sessions in their hotel suites before emerging into the sunlight at lunchtime. Once the day’s business meetings had been attended to, they would move on to the Viper Room on Sunset and start all over again. For one such West Coast visit, McGee planned a trip with Green, who was seldom seen anywhere other than at his desk, where, day in, day out, he bravely tried to manage the realities of Creation’s cash flow.

‘The Fanclub are playing in Los Angeles, this thing at Fairfax High School,’ says Barker. ‘Alan’s going over, and I said, “Well, Dick should fuckin’ come as well.” Dick never used to go anywhere much. I said, “Dick, come on, fuckin, let’s have a party, you know.” So, anyway, we go for the weekend. Swervedriver were playing the next night. So this was like a mad weekend – we’re staying at this Chateau Marmont. Alan slept on the floor, ’cause he was off his nut on a fuckin’ E or something. But we went to see the Fanclub and Kurt and Courtney were there and they come on the tour bus. The next night we go to see Swervedriver and they’re playing with Soundgarden and someone had said Slash from Guns N’ Roses was in the Soundgarden room. I was pissed, so I went up to Soundgarden’s manager, who I knew, and said, “Is that right, Slash is in?” She says, “Yeah yeah.” I said, “Listen, I’m with McGee and all that, it’s gonna be a crack …. can I just go in and say hi to Slash? I won’t be an arsehole.”’

Walking into the Soundgarden dressing room, where he found a leather-trousered and top-hatted Slash tuning up for the encore, Barker introduced himself with a quick ‘Slash – Barker’ and shot the breeze with the accommodating guitarist who was taken with Barker’s avuncular manner.

‘I go back out and I say to McGee, “Oh, I just met Slash,”’ says Barker. ‘McGee’s all, “No fuckin’ way!”, all this business. We get back to London – somehow he was with me when I met Slash! “Me and Barker, hanging out with Slash in Hollywood.” This is Alan for you, you know. It’s so Alan, but at the same time it’s good. It’s so funny, “Yeah, me and Barker hanging out with Slash, yeah, he was stripped to the waist.” He’s doing the whole story.’

Teenage Fanclub were in Hollywood promoting Bandwagonesque, their second album, that had been released by Geffen in the States and, following Nevermind, had exceeded all sales expectations. ‘I had no idea about Bandwagonesque,’ says McGee ‘not a fucking clue. I think I signed them for twenty grand or something, and I think I was half in the money with Gary Gersh. It was forty grand to record it with Don Fleming. I honestly thought I was putting out a 15 to 20,000-selling indie album.’

The commercial success in America of Bandwagonesque, following on quickly from the reception of Screamadelica and Loveless, enhanced McGee and his label’s reputation. The American industry, all too aware of the state of Creation’s finances, was starting to take a serious interest in whatever McGee might next have to offer. The lunchtime LA meetings were being reciprocated in the more workaday surroundings of Hackney.

‘Danny Goldberg and somebody else came over for this meeting,’ says Abbott. ‘They were stopping at the Dorchester and they didn’t take a car for some reason. Danny had been in the Wall Street Journal literally a few days before with this “Nirvana shipped 100 million dollars’ worth – rock ’n’ roll’s back”. They get on the Tube then walk up through Bethnal Green which was like the Bronx then – crack smokers out in daylight – they turn up. “Fuck … man … where is this place? We’ve been accosted four times.” We’re in the bunker and this lad, Tony, our carpenter-cum-odd-job man, fucking started this bandsaw up while we were having this meeting … lchhhhhhhhhhhhhh and McGee’s going, “Fucking Tony, we’re having a fucking meeting, man.” Of course, these guys are used to sitting in gilded-cage boardrooms which you can’t see the end of the table of, and loving it, going, “This is indie music – they’re putting shelves up.”’

While McGee was, for the moment, loath to enter into negotiation with any British labels, he delighted at being wined and dined on the West Coast and took a series of exploratory meetings with the great and the good of Los Angeles. Geffen, by then and remarkably for a major, was perceived as one of the hottest record companies and its owner David Geffen assumed he and Alan McGee would be a natural, maverick fit.

‘At the beginning of ’92 I was at the Ivy restaurant in LA,’ says McGee, ‘and David Geffen goes, “How much?” My lawyer John Kennedy had always said, “Just think of a figure and double it,” and I went, “Six million,” and he went, “Dollars or pounds?” and I went, “Pounds,” and Geffen started fucking convulsing, I thought, people choke on their food and die – fuck, I’m actually going to kill him! He kind of half spat it out. I nearly fucking cancelled David Geffen, that would’ve been one of my only real punk rock moments!’

However much McGee enjoyed the playful theatre of power lunches in LA, his diet of cocaine and Jack Daniel’s meant that any negotiations often disintegrated into blurred hostility. ‘I couldn’t give a fuck,’ says McGee. ‘I was like, “Stick your millions up your arse, either give me them or don’t give me them, fuck you.” The disrespect level was quite high with Creation. I’m not proud of that, ’cause some really nice people get told to fuck off sometimes, but that was just the nature of the beast at the time.’

Back in the offices Green and Kyllo were holding a more subdued but equally necessary series of conversations about how best to manage Creation’s future. ‘The financial pressures got bigger and we knew some kind of big step was going to have to take place,’ says Kyllo, ‘but we never knew what it was going to be.’ One idea that came up was a joining of forces between Creation, Mute and the Beggars Group, whose combined market share might give them a competitive advantage. Sire were also considering a long-term licensing deal.

‘Seymour was one of those people, like Bill Drummond, who would come in every now and then,’ says Kyllo, ‘but the meeting always became very social.’*

McGee had had a minor falling-out with Stein around the Jesus and Mary Chain when Stein had introduced McGee to Lou Reed in a manner that had made McGee flinch. As Stein started enquiring about the availability of the American rights to My Bloody Valentine, McGee had failed to return his calls. In a display that speaks volumes about his staying power, Stein rang McGee over fifty times. McGee would take the calls only to inform Stein that he was turning his offers down. In the end McGee finally accepted a generous offer from Stein, both parties having revealed an understanding of the power play that defines a real hustler, and subsequently impressing one another.

For Green and Kyllo, who were running Creation’s back room and permanently reliant on McGee’s ability to return from the States with a major-label cash injection, The President’s passive-aggressive working methods would often yield results. ‘Alan had that ability of making those kind of moguls feel good about what they’re doing, in ways that other people hadn’t figured out,’ says Kyllo. ‘It’s partly by playing games and partly it’s a lot of psychology and, I don’t know how conscious Alan was of the psychology he was using, but it worked.’

There was also an element of reverse psychology to McGee’s behaviour as his ongoing love of fuck-the-majors rock ’n’ roll meant that any band that signed to Creation did so in the spirit of an ‘us against the world’ evangelism. ‘We never really used it to our own advantage with the bands and the deals we did,’ says Kyllo. ‘Alan was so impatient. He’d say, “Let’s just get them,” and so we ended up being very generous with the bands.’

Whatever his state or the state of Creation’s finances, McGee realised he was at the peak of a moment that was fulfilling his dreams, of running a label that would equal the late Sixties output of Elektra and Atlantic. Within the space of two months Creation had released Loveless, Screamadelica and Bandwagonesque: as high a watermark of albums as any British independent had achieved, and the afterglow was carrying him and Creation through.

‘I knew, as much drugs as I was on at the time, I knew, in October 1991, I was never going to get any better,’ says McGee. ‘I’d just put out Screamadelica, I’d just put out Bandwagonesque and Loveless and I knew that these were three classic records … and I knew that it was never going to get any better than that … If you’re talking about a moment in time … I knew that that was a moment … and it was really unspoiled.’

While the strength of Creation’s releases was irrefutable, the label’s inability to achieve the sales that McGee felt his bands warranted was continuing to be a concern. The international sales of Bandwagonesque would be stand out in stark relief compared to what Geffen had achieved for the record in America. ‘The chart positions on Teenage Fanclub and the Scream, and the structure we had with indie companies, was rubbish,’ says McGee. ‘We needed a major at that point. I was beginning to realise that, at that time in the music business, you needed major distribution. We were releasing these records that kids are now calling classics and they weren’t selling.’

*

To the artists not included directly in McGee’s day-to-day thinking, Creation was becoming a more and more remote place, which operated with something resembling a siege mentality as the creditors would ring constantly and the inner circle of bon viveurs and rock ’n’ roll animals made merry in the bunker.

Nick Currie had released four Momus albums on Creation and had grown used to managing his own affairs, with only a cursory A&R relationship with the label. His sixth LP, Voyager, was also one of his most immediate. ‘Alan summoned me down to the bunker once. He liked Voyager but he liked it way too late – I mean, like literally months after it had come out, he brought me into the office to play me my own record. He called me in and he said, “Nick this is really great.” He sat me down and he just dropped the needle on to the record and played the whole of side one, and I just sat there thinking, what is he doing? I know this record, I made this record like a year ago. But he’d just discovered it. His enthusiasm could be rekindled, possibly depending on his chemical state at the time.’

Amid the chaos and permanent fragility of Creation’s finances, the label had always somehow managed to pay its artists their royalties, something that bred a huge amount of loyalty between the bands and the label. For the bands high in the Creation pecking order it enhanced the feeling of us vs them on which McGee thrived; for artists like Currie, it had allowed him to release records and enjoy an uninterrupted, if rather frugal, career.

Currie had long grown used to dealing directly with Dick Green for discussing the nuts-and-bolts administrative side of his record deal and noticed that the long-suffering junior partner was looking a little more chipper than usual. ‘Dick would have what looked like several copies of the bible on his desk, and it would be the Creation Sony deal, and he would say, “This is going to be good for you, Nick. It’s going to be good for everybody on the label.” I had a sort of sinking feeling at that point that it wasn’t going to be good for me and it certainly would bring all sorts of conditions to bear that wouldn’t help what I do, because I deal with transgression and difficulty and all the rest of it, and at that point things were just horrifically bureaucratic but at the same time completely scatty and Alan was going AWOL.’

As McGee was about to enter negotiations with Sony, the years of hedonism were starting to take their toll. As well as becoming increasingly absent from the office, he had made a few uncharacteristic signings. ‘It was a funny phase going there,’ says Barker. ‘They had this band, Medalark Eleven, from Manchester. I don’t know why he signed them. Baggy was dead. He said it himself, “I’ve signed a fuckin’ baggy group, I don’t fuckin’ know.”’

Six months or so after McGee had been depressed by the sales figures of Screamadelica and Bandwagonesque, Sony bought a 49 per cent stake in Creation for £2.5 million. In exchange Sony acquired half a near-bankrupt record label and the rights to some of its artists internationally. In the mind of the Sony executives, the prize asset they had secured was the A&R skills of Alan McGee.

Nick Currie’s views on the Sony deal would prove prescient, but not in the manner he had originally thought. His ties with the label were severed because of an incident involving his Bangladeshi partner, Shazna, whom he had extricated from a forced marriage. ‘I did this thing which was a little bit too rock ’n’ roll for Creation at the time. When we eloped together, the ex-fiancé of Shazna appeared with her brothers at Creation demanding my address so they could reclaim Shazna, who didn’t want to be reclaimed at all. Alan phoned me up, it was the last time Alan phoned me up, he said, “Listen, we had these extremely scary people coming into the office demanding your address and we didn’t give it to them, but this just can’t happen and we were seriously thinking of getting in the very heavy drug people that Primal Scream deal with to protect the office and the staff. So sorry, but we’re not going to work with you any more.”’

Tim Abbott was one of the members of staff involved in placating what was threatening to be something of an international incident. ‘These dudes came looking for Momus with machetes,’ says Abbott, ‘saying, “He sleeps here.” “No,” I said, “no he doesn’t.”’

Although an unwanted visit from irate sword-bearing strangers was enough to make everyone sit up and take notice, the behaviour at the Creation offices remained far from the industry standard. Despite the cash injection from Sony, the label was still operating in almost permanent chaos. ‘Things were getting crazy by then,’ says Kyllo. ‘Alan was struggling to keep it together, things were degenerating.’

McGee’s next move, whatever his mental and physical state, proved to be his most far-reaching and lucrative, and the one with which he is for ever fixed in the public imagination.

While out one night with his sister in Glasgow, McGee offered a record deal on the spot to the band they by chance had just seen play – Oasis. During the glory years of Britpop – Downing Street, the Met Bar, Knebworth – the Oasis and Creation story was a key media narrative for the buoyancy of the times. Away from the PR, industry insiders quietly whispered that all may not have been as it seemed.

‘There’s so many urban myths about them,’ says Abbott. ‘What is true is that McGee did see them in King Tuts. McGee phoned us up at 5 a.m., to rant about them full-on down the phone.’ Much to the delight of Sony, McGee had come through with the kind of act that would benefit from their system. Oasis and Creation bonded on the band’s first visit to the bunker, while the band’s manager, Marcus Russell, had decided to evaluate the situation at his own pace. In a deal that still has different interpretations from its various signatories, Oasis signed with Creation in the UK and with Sony for the rest of the world.

‘Sony signed the Creation deal for Primal Scream, not Oasis,’ says Abbott. ‘What Sony wanted was Screamadelica 2 – they struck gold.’

‘Sony were all over Oasis,’ says McGee. ‘Apparently, if you’d walked past them in the street, you’d signed Oasis. I must have met twenty-five people who’ve signed that band. This guy worked for me in 1987 for three months, then he fucked off to Sony, and then two or three years ago, at the height of X-Factor, he’s one of the judges, a huge star in Australia. He’s the guy behind Oasis. I don’t think he’s ever met Liam.’

As the word of mouth began to build around Creation’s latest signing, an air of invincibility in the band was palpable. Unlike Ride, the House of Love or many of the label’s previous non-Glaswegian signings, Oasis were from a similar background to McGee and Abbott. Noel Gallagher in particular had also been through the shared experience of Ecstasy and the club epiphanies through which McGee and Abbott had first become close. Abbott too was convinced Oasis were going to be the band that re-educated the dance music audience about rock ’n’ roll.

‘It was a fluke, it was a complete fluke,’ says McGee. ‘Oasis summed it up to me when we first met. It was, “Let’s fucking have it,” big time, that was the vibe of them and that was the vibe of me and in the middle of it all I went into drug rehabilitation.’

As the momentum around Oasis gathered at a pace no one at Creation, or in the rest of the music industry, had experienced for a generation, McGee’s exhaustion, brought on by years of partying, finally caught up with him. On a trip to LA he was hospitalised and a long painful, process of recovery began.

While McGee withdrew from the office, Creation was left in the hands of Abbott and Green. To their relief they realised that Marcus Russell was a manager with an equilibrium that avoided the growing circus around his charges and he was thinking in the long term.

‘With Oasis the press and radio took it all,’ says Kyllo, ‘and the band’s management were very professional. It made us realise we had to raise our game and be professional ourselves.’ Another factor ensured that the workload around Oasis remained high and of a sufficient quality. ‘There was a guy called Mark Taylor,’ says Kyllo. ‘He’d been working for Sony and he was put in on Sony’s payroll to protect their asset.’

Aware that he had signed the biggest band of his career McGee, despite his mental fragility, was still calling the office. ‘He would phone up when he wanted to try and run the business,’ says Abbott. ‘I just said, quite categorically, “Alan, look, you’re not very well, mate. Don’t worry about it, when you’re ready just come back.”’

Abbott had managed to ostracise himself from some of his colleagues at Westgate Street but he was firmly part of the Oasis and Primal Scream camps. However much he divided the office, he was given credit by Oasis for running the campaign of Definitely Maybe and was sufficiently embedded in the eye of the storm surrounding their ascendency to have written a book about his experiences and appear on the sleeve of the single ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’.

To James Kyllo, who was less involved in Oasis and has a naturally stoical countenance, it was harder to quantify what contribution Abbott had made. ‘The only marketing activity I was ever aware of Tim Abbott doing,’ he says, ‘was taking some store buyers to a strip club.’

Whatever the claims and counter-claims to the authorship of Oasis’s success, a phenomenon that was almost uncontrollable, McGee and Abbott’s relationship came to an abrupt and unhappy end. During negotiations over the Sony deal, Abbott was given the impression that he would be accredited shares in Creation. The rapidity of Oasis’s success and McGee’s simultaneous withdrawal meant the matter was left unresolved.

Abbott brought the subject of shares up in a phone call with McGee that highlighted the different pace at which the two of them were now operating. ‘He rang up in the middle of it all and I said, “Dude, I’m trying to fucking MD your company,”’ says Abbott. ‘“We’ve got this band going through the ceiling, everything’s hunky-dory, you get yourself well, and by the way have you transferred those shares we were talking about yet?” … End of … phone down … next day, came into work and Dick went, “You’re in trouble. Alan told me that he can no longer work with you.”’

Abbott was retained by Oasis as a consultant and was responsible for shepherding Noel Gallagher back into the fold having quit the group during the first of one its many fracas in the States. ‘It was fucking fantastic, those two couple of years,’ says Abbott. ‘It was quite difficult as well, delivering all that and then getting ripped off.’

Mark Bowen was an old friend of the Boo Radleys’ Martin Carr, who would shortly be joining the Creation staff. He and Carr, along with, it seemed, the rest of the music industry, had crammed into the Water Rats in King’s Cross to see Oasis’s first official London engagement.

‘I went to the Water Rats with Martin and it was really busy and I thought, can I even be bothered to go into the front room? And I was like, “Oh, come on, let’s just go and sit out the front and drink some more.” Suddenly, by the time I started working there six months later, they’d had the biggest-selling debut and it was starting to go crazy. Alan was there that night, I bought him a Jack and coke when he came back in from the Oasis bus but that was the last time I saw him before he was off for a bit.’

* Tim Abbott remembers being at a techno night at the time, run by his brother Chris in East London, and being asked by a bouncer whether Stein, whom the bouncer had assumed was a member of the drug squad impersonating an American tourist, was to be granted admission.

18 Medicine Bottle

Red House Painters, Down Colorful Hill, CAD 2014 (Vaughan Oliver/4AD)

Alan McGee wasn’t the only label head absent from the office. By 1993 Ivo Watts-Russell was dividing his time between America and Britain, a result of his continuing and increasing frustration with the manner in which 4AD was now expected to be run. Having succeeded on its own terms with the Pixies, the label was under pressure to deliver similar results for the rest of its artists. ‘I am disappointed that I didn’t fight or resist it when the managers would say, “Where’s the hit?”,’ he says. ‘I mean, why the fuck have they signed with us then?’

The international growth of the label required a further enlargement of the workforce and a move towards a structure beyond Watts-Russell’s preferred methods of releasing bands whose music he loved and letting the records do the work. Much to his chagrin, 4AD now had a dedicated meeting room, where Watts-Russell tried to spend as little time as possible. ‘There was more of a feeling of feeding the machine,’ he says, ‘and not feeling happy about the way that machine was being fed and the fact it had become a machine.’

Despite his lingering sense of discontent, Watts-Russell made several attempts to bypass the machine. When in the office, he still made a habit of going through the demo tapes from which he had, over the years, regularly found new signings. Sifting through the cassettes now also provided a distraction from the tension of office politics. A song title that had been handwritten on one of the demos, ‘I Had Sex with God’, caught his eye. The track was credited to His Name Is Alive, an American band based on the four-track tapes of its songwriter Warren Defever. The music was primitively recorded but had a beguiling otherness. ‘I started getting more tapes from him,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘They were the same songs but he was deconstructing them, just leaving a skeleton. I liked it, but said, “Can I mix it?” I went in the studio with John Fryer and we mixed Lavonia, and I feel closer to that than to any other record we did, other than This Mortal Coil, for the obvious reasons.’ Watts-Russell once again found comfort in Blackwing, reworking a set of tapes, absorbed in the creation of another record of reflective and personal music. The resulting album, Lavonia, had an abstraction and fragility that spoke heavily of Watts-Russell’s state of mind; it also drew comparisons to This Mortal Coil. Although the songs featured the choral vocals of Karin Oliver they retained the rough edge of demos and had a harsh, fractured quality. One of the songs was entitled ‘How Ghosts Affect Relationships’– it might have been describing how Watts-Russell felt about 4AD. He had moved into a new home in London. In his increasingly solitary moments, he shared his new surroundings with Lavonia and little else.

‘I’d just moved into this flat in Clapham,’ he says, ‘the first place I ever lived in with tall ceilings. So I was just in there with a sofa that was too big to go anywhere else and suddenly I felt insecure about how could I fill this room with just me. I mixed the tapes and listened to them really quietly in this high-ceilinged room, so quietly that my alarm, which was a ticker, was louder than the music.’

For someone who as a child had taken solace in the music coming from his small bedroom transistor late at night, Watts-Russell had come full circle. Quietly absorbed in the Lavonia masters he cut himself further adrift from the comings and goings in Alma Road. As well as struggling to maintain his emphasis on creativity and A&R, he was having difficulties in some of his relationships. He had split with his partner Deborah Edgely and was, for the first time, starting to have increasingly fractious conversations with some of his artists.

‘I probably sequenced about 80 per cent of the records we put out,’ he says. ‘On the last day in the studio, on the last Pixies record, I’d done a running order for it. We were going to go out for supper, and Charles went, “No, I’m going to do a running order; it’s going to be alphabetical.” I ended up falling out badly with Charles and Robin Guthrie, the only two people I’ve ever fallen out with long term.’

Lavonia had shown that Watts-Russell’s affection for music hadn’t diminished but the passion with which he was able to apply himself was wavering. As a way of circumventing the expectations and pressures of launching a new band on 4AD, he started a sub-label, Guernica, with the sole motive of releasing records he liked. In the States he had discovered a new generation of bands, including Unrest and That Dog, who had self-released material which he felt could benefit from wider distribution; Watts-Russell also heard in these bands the sound of younger artists making music on their terms, away from the strictures of the industry; a sound he had almost forgotten. ‘I was driving up to Big Sur,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘listening to Unrest and feeling really connected to something. Guernica was significant in that I just thought, fuck it. I just want to put a record out that I think is good. The budget would be 5k and that’s it; we won’t release singles, and we’ll never release albums by the same artist.’

The idea of Guernica was straightforward, but within the 4AD system it lacked coherence. The fact that Watts-Russell had all but moved to the States also meant there was no one in the London office to drive the project forward. He had conceived Guernica as a way of rekindling his love of releasing records without the pressures of career building and long-term planning, but had instead created another pressure in an ongoing series of communication problems at 4AD.

‘Guernica didn’t fucking work because Ivo, the bloke who ran the company, had fucked off to the USA’, says Watts-Russell, ‘and dumped this stuff back on the label and wasn’t there to guide it through. It didn’t seem to work for the artists or the people back there.’ Simon Harper was acting as a de facto label manager in Watts-Russell’s absence and was one of the few members of staff included in his confidence. As Watts-Russell considered emigrating to live full-time to America, he and Harper started to make some contingencies for how the label would be run while he was away. The reality was that 4AD, without the singular vision and authorial voice of its founder, would be a difficult company to steer.

‘I was aware of the fact that he didn’t want to live in England for a myriad of reasons,’ says Harper. ‘He wasn’t having a great time with the industry and so it came as no surprise to me that he was moving to the States. When he moved there, things obviously started to become slightly more complicated primarily on the A&R front. We had a very capable A&R guy in London called Lewis Jameson, but it was obviously going to be an issue as to how practical it would all be in terms of Ivo’s involvement.’

Away from his unease in the industry and his despondency over 4AD, Watts-Russell was beginning to realise that his personal problems were also starting to become difficult to manage. In search of sunlight, he took himself away over the Christmas and New Year break of 1992–3 to Thailand, where, rather than escaping his problems, he was confronted with their magnitude. ‘I’d gone to Thailand on my own,’ he says. ‘In Thailand, like lots of places, you can buy prescription drugs at the chemist. I came back with enough drugs to shuffle off this mortal coil. My depression, it was becoming apparent, was something I really had to deal with.’

Robin Hurley had got to know Watts-Russell through Rough Trade America where Hurley had handled the Pixies and a number of 4AD acts. As Rough Trade began disintegrating, Watts-Russell suggested to Hurley that he would be welcome to join 4AD. Hurley moved the fledgling 4AD office from New York out to the West Coast where, in an example of how seriously the industry regarded 4AD’s chances of increased success, Warner Brothers were in the process of offering the label, rather than just a selection of its acts, a long-term deal.

‘Robin could tell I was down,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘I’d just got back from Thailand, and he said, “Why don’t you come out here for a month?”, as we’d opened the office. I thought, can I do that? I felt the old feeling when I’d come to America for the first time, years ago, that things are possible. I felt I could do this. I rented an apartment in LA and I tried to live in both places and go back and forth. It took me a while to settle in LA and work out what the fuck I was doing and then when I was back in the UK I felt cheated that I was back because I didn’t want to be there. I was exhausted and it contributed to me going off the rails.’

To Vaughan Oliver, Watts-Russell’s emigration had come as a shock. While their relationship had always fluctuated with their moods, Oliver had been a constant presence since 4AD’s infancy and the designer was horrified that he would now be answering to an ad hoc selection of 4AD label managers rather than directly to Watts-Russell. ‘I didn’t see that coming,’ he says. ‘He said, “That’s where I’m going, that’s what I’m doing. I’m going back to LA.” “Right, oh, I’m sorry about that …” It’s not as if we even had dinner together and discussed it. It just happened and I had to accept it – these divvies coming in and running the company, with him in the background.’

Watts-Russell’s relocation had a further implication for Oliver. For a long time the designer had felt that his input into the label had never been fully recognised. In an awkward moment some years earlier, he had brought up the subject of becoming a shareholder or partner in 4AD, a suggestion that surprised Watts-Russell. ‘In 1984 I suggested that I should be a partner,’ recalls Oliver. ‘Ivo said something to the effect of “fuck off”, which nearly had me in tears. He said, “Well, what money are you going to put in?” It was just an idea. It lasted about three minutes and I scuttled back into my box.’

Other members of staff were under the impression that Oliver still bore a grudge that, combined with his temperament, made his relationship with Watts-Russell increasingly choleric. Oliver, whose work will be for ever associated with 4AD, still maintains that his contributions are underappreciated. ‘Looking in, folks would have thought I’m a partner,’ he says. ‘When Ivo sold the company, I should’ve had some fucking money out of it. You put twenty years of your life into something …’

Throughout his period at the label Oliver was also engaged in freelance commissions, but it is the unique use of typography, colour and photography he applied to 4AD’s record sleeves for which he is most recognised. Whatever the difficulties of the relationship between them as label owner and graphic designer, the partnership between Oliver and Watts-Russell was one of the most creatively successful to have survived the ups and downs of the music business. Oliver’s designs are instantly identifiable and synonymous with 4AD; his bold strokes and willingness to experiment, a suitably individual and vivid representation of the label’s music.

‘A few years ago someone said to me, “You’ve created a brand, v23’s a brand, 4AD’s a brand,”’ says Oliver, ‘that’s not what you aspire to, you’re just trying to make something that’s true … it’s about truth isn’t it, and that’s all we were trying to do.’

Through the turbulence of emigrating and the problems of how he would be replaced, Watts-Russell managed to sustain his interest in music. While the label may have employed an A&R man, Watts-Russell continued to listen to the demos and tapes that came his way and maintained a close working relationship with the new generation of acts he had signed, almost all of whom were solo performers. One of his later signings especially saw him work with an artist in the manner in which he had enjoyed his most successful partnerships. ‘Ultra Vivid Scene, His Name, Heidi Berry, Lisa Germano, I love those records,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘and Red House Painters in particular.’

Red House Painters were a Bay Area band formed by Mark Kozelek, whose lugubrious singing and atmospheric chord changes gave his songwriting a hushed intensity. A fellow San Franciscan, Mark Eitzel, had passed a whole C90 cassette’s worth of Kozelek’s songs to the journalist Martin Aston, one of 4AD’s few long-term supports in the media, who sent the tape to Watts-Russell.

‘The first time I listened to it all the way through, I rang Mark Kozelek,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘He was in the bath and heard my voice on the answering machine. That was a fantastic collaboration between us. There was that hour and a half, quickly followed by tons of tapes, long songs. So I said to him, similar to Come On Pilgrim, “Let’s pick six songs put them out as it is, and let’s do another record and re-record some of it.”’

Watts-Russell and Kozelek picked the six tracks that would comprise Down Colorful Hill and Watts-Russell decamped with John Fryer to the studio where, for one last recording session as the head of 4AD, he shadowed the Red House Painters songs in a light haze of reverb. The Red House Painters’ material that was released had an echo of 4AD before the label’s multiplatinum success and its unhappy evolution into a machine.

Red House Painters’ music also corresponded closely to Watts-Russell’s frame of mind. Down Colorful Hill had a vulnerability and directness to which the increasingly fragile Watts-Russell could relate. Working closely with Kosolek had offered him an opportunity to do what he most enjoyed: producing and compiling a record with an artist in a mutually rewarding process. ‘It was very bleak,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘This very melancholy sound.’ Although a welcome distraction from his problems, Red House Painters offered only temporary respite for him. ‘I suppose by the third or fourth record we put out’, he says, ‘I started to lose the thread.’

In America the Warners 4AD deal that Hurley had supervised had been slow to yield results. Unrest’s Perfect Teeth had been a priority release and been given a significant push, to little effect. All was not lost however, by the time Dead Can Dance released Into the Labyrinth, Warners finally had a release that could justify the deal.

‘Warners were putting out as many records in a month as we were doing in a year,’ says Hurley. ‘Into the Labyrinth came out into the chart at no. 75 or something and went on to do half a million sales. So we thought, “Ah, light at the end of the tunnel. We’ve turned a corner,” and at the same time Belly did really well – they were part of the Warner group – Ivo had been very involved in the recording and it reflected well on us that the A&R was working.’

Dead Can Dance, an Australian duo, Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry, had relocated to London where they had been treated sniffily by the UK press and been dismissed as Cocteau Twins copyists or world music Goths. Outside the UK they were one of 4AD’s most commercial propositions.

‘I remember Lisa saying she didn’t know what 4AD was or who the Cocteau Twins were,’ says Ivo. ‘When they played, it was opera houses. They were by far the most respected band that had been on 4AD outside of UK.’ Hurley was sensing that within Warners feelings had improved and the perception was that 4AD were only ever one release away from striking gold. With the right single an act could cross over into the frontline alternative market, where, post-Nevermind, bands like Belly were being lined up for multiplatinum sales and regulars in MTV’s Buzz Bin.

‘We were on the cusp of breaking beyond critical acclaim and playing the Roxy to something much bigger,’ says Hurley. ‘When Lush got offered Lollapalooza, we thought that would be the breakthrough. The LP did 125k and was in the days when modern rock radio really did sell records, and we were so close at that point.’

Neither Lush nor Belly managed to connect to a wider audience in the hoped-for manner. ‘Luck is always what you need,’ says Hurley. ‘If someone at MTV had suddenly loved Lush – who knows?’

In Watts-Russell’s absence Martin Mills had gradually become more involved in the behind-the-scenes running of 4AD and was included in the negotiations with Warners. Mills had dealt with Warners himself on various licensing deals with Beggars, and knew that the company was a music-led label and that the Burbank offices took their West Coast heritage of critical and commercial artist-led success seriously. There remained, however, a vague sense of incongruity about how a UK independent as distinctive as 4AD could be embedded within the Warners system.

‘You could get untold riches through licensing artists in America’, says Mills, ‘but those deals put pressure on you and made you spend money to give them the tools that they needed – and 4AD got badly caught in that trap with Warners.’

For Watts-Russell, who was by now starting to lose whatever interest he had in the Warners deal altogether, the reality of having to interact with what he viewed as the corporate mind-set, however sympathetic to his artists, was one he had encountered before. The frustrations of having to, as he saw it, play the game, merely accelerated his feelings about quitting. ‘One of the first big Warner Brothers meetings I walked into was to discuss the Wolfgang Press,’ he says. ‘The track “A Girl Like You” was at that point of transition to whatever they called it, modern rock radio or whatever. And they turned me down. Here I am with the same goddam people making the same stupid decisions. Terrible.’

On his return visits to London, Watts-Russell was feeling equally frustrated. He had assumed a transatlantic arrangement with the London office would allow him to retain an overview of the label, while letting him to remain at first remove. Instead he was finding the quality control that he had made his benchmark was slipping. He began to gain a reputation for being quick-tempered and uncommunicative when in the office, his natural reticence exacerbated by the fact that he was almost always jet-lagged. On one visit he listened through to some new Lush recordings and found the results unimpressive. ‘I remember having a rare blazing row with Miki [Berenyi],’ says Watts-Russell. ‘Mike Hedges had produced it in France, in another one of those studios that’s got the desk that did Sergeant Pepper, I mean how many of them are there? And it was absolutely awful. Somebody had said, “Don’t just point out the negatives.” Miki said, “Fuck off, it’s not your fucking record, it’s ours.” My point was, “Yes, it’s your record and it’s my label and I’m as proud about my label as you are about your records.”’

Of all his relationships with his artists, the one between Watts-Russell and the Cocteau Twins had always been the most intense, and initially, the most rewarding. Things had soured after Victorialand, a record the Cocteau Twins had made as a duo. A combination of the shyness of all involved, and the way in which drugs had replaced the shyness with a passive-aggressive power struggle, had led to an ongoing and volatile dialogue between the band and Watts-Russell.

‘I wasn’t as closely involved beyond Victorialand,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘Whether he was or he wasn’t taking a whole bunch of drugs, Robin became impossible. This chap called Raymond Coffer started to manage them on Blue Bell Knoll and he was really useless. We’d make plans on what should and could be done and Raymond would go away and then nothing would happen. One didn’t really even want to talk to Robin, because he was being so unpleasant. It just got worse and worse.’

Watts-Russell had grown so disillusioned with the situation that he felt he had no choice but to make a decision that would have once seemed incomprehensible – he let the Cocteau Twins go. ‘I wasn’t prepared to be the bad record-company guy that they hate,’ he says, ‘and to be bad-mouthed all the time. We met at the lawyers. We got Raymond over there early one morning and I told him the Cocteau Twins were free to find another label; and Raymond couldn’t stop the smile from appearing on his face.’

For Colin Wallace, who had left Grangemouth with Fraser and Guthrie and had remained their confidant throughout their career, Watts-Russell’s decision hadn’t come as a surprise. ‘It just broke down so badly,’ he says. ‘I remember Elizabeth having a shouting match with Ivo on the phone because Robin had broken down in tears after a conversation they’d had together, and I remember her launching at Ivo and I thought, fucking hell, Elizabeth never did this kind of thing.’

The timing of the end of their relationship was loaded with significance for the Cocteau Twins and Watts-Russell; despite their grievances, and Guthrie’s perceived lack of commercial success, the band had just released their strongest-selling album, Heaven or Las Vegas. It was also one of their finest records. The songs featured tender, decipherable lyrics from Fraser that celebrated the birth of her and Guthrie’s first child. Fraser’s voice soared over some of their most melodic and rapturous arrangements, although they had been recorded in a mood of vitriol and blame.

Despite the fact he was no longer welcome or involved in the recording process, or any other aspect of their career, Heaven or Las Vegas holds a dear place in Watts-Russell’s heart. ‘I think it’s the best record we ever put out,’ he says. ‘For all those people who love to think I manipulate and stick my finger in and control, it’s a record I had absolutely nothing to do with, zero, and I love that record.’

The full extent of the upheaval he and the band had undergone finally caught up with Watts-Russell on his way to see the band play the album live. ‘They were playing at the Town & Country,’ he says, ‘and a couple of their fans – you can imagine what hardcore original Cocteau twins fans were like – spotted me and ran over and started asking me all these questions about Robin and Liz all this personal stuff. I realised I had no idea what had happened since I’d last seen these people. I just burst into tears and had to leave before they even came on. It all felt like a lie.’

Along with the toxic rancour of Watts-Russell’s and the Cocteau Twins’ relationship, Wallace was also aware that, in the absence of its founder, changes were taking place at the company that were going to alter the nature of 4AD permanently.

‘First of all this guy Richard Hermitage, who had been involved with the Pale Saints, was brought in,’ says Wallace. ‘He gave us all this stuff about cutting costs and the next day he turns up in a seventeen-grand car. That was the beginning of the end. Ivo was like, “This is a big mistake, big, big mistake.” Then Robin Hurley was brought in, and Robin had a very, very tough job. Martin Mills said that 4AD is being run like a Rolls-Royce on the budget of Lada and people started being fired left, right and centre.’

*

Throughout the label’s history Watts-Russell had always remained a loyal listener to the John Peel show. One evening the visceral sound of a strong female voice on the programme left him smitten and energised in a way he hadn’t been for several years. Instead of hearing something he’d found in the lonely pile of demo tapes in the office, Watts-Russell had been seduced by the debut single ‘Dress’ by PJ Harvey, an act already at the start of a momentous run of activity that would result in their debut entering the charts at no. 11 six months later. Both the album and single were released on a tiny London start-up label, Too Pure, at whose Sausage Machine club PJ Harvey had made their London debut.

‘The single was out and had been played by Peel, who had started the buzz,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘That trio was so exciting and I really wanted to work with them. I realised that she was on Too Pure, and that this album was recorded and was going to come out on Too Pure, but that she was maybe going to respond to all the interest around her.’

For one of the few times in his career Watts-Russell was attempting to sign a band that had generated significant interest from other, more mainstream, parts of the industry and knew he would soon find himself in a bidding war. ‘There was a period of a week or two where she played three shows, and by the third one the entire world was there, and I was right there with them. It was my suggestion that she put the demos out with the album because I just thought they were fantastic. It was really through Too Pure that my approaches happened. And I effectively ended up buying half of the company in the hope that Polly would stay with them.’

Watts-Russell paid for an equal shareholding in Too Pure in the hope that, by bringing the label into the 4AD/Beggars system PJ Harvey would remain with the label that had discovered her. Instead the band signed with a major, Island, where they enjoyed healthy sales and continual critical recognition. It was only the second time that Watts-Russell had been turned down by an artist. ‘My first experience of trying to sign something where there was interest from somewhere else – and there was huge interest – was the Sundays,’ he says. ‘There had been some glowing Falcon review and at the next gig everybody was there. This was a new world to me, not one I was familiar with at all, having to think about other people’s opinions or to care what anyone else thought. The Sundays could have easily been on 4AD. They made the decision to go with The Smiths’ label, knowing they’d be a priority there.’

In both cases the sense of rejection added to Watts-Russell’s low self-esteem. ‘I was astonished at what I felt like when we were turned down by Polly Harvey,’ he says, ‘like a jilted lover or something. I was feeling something complex, with relationships deteriorating.’

The most complex of all the relationships that were deteriorating was Watts-Russell’s relationship with his own record label. His decision to move to America had allowed him to escape the bureaucracy and pressures of running a more business-focused company, but it hadn’t altered the fact that he ultimately carried the responsibilities of 4AD. The intensity with which he had created and run the label was being replaced by an equally strong sense of disillusionment. ‘Things were still being run and passed through and by me,’ he says, ‘but I didn’t have the strength to direct things in the way we should have done. I just thought, what the fuck are we doing that’s any different to what any major is doing? We were having more of an injection of money than we’d ever had from the guaranteed advances from Warner Brothers, but what had we got to offset that? A whole office of people in America, an office of people in England – a double record company – and I soon realised that those advances were all the money we were ever going to see. None of those records were selling enough to ever recoup.’

Over in the LA sunshine Hurley was trying to keep Warners interested. At Burbank the Warners executives were starting to grow concerned that their key asset at 4AD – Watts-Russell’s world-class A&R instincts – was no longer as prominent a component of the deal. ‘Ivo tried with Guernica,’ says Hurley. ‘It didn’t really work that well. The people he gave A&R duties to in London signed things like Sheer and GusGus – both things Ivo would not have signed. But to his great credit Ivo would come up to Warners with me and we’d play them Sheer and say, “If such and such can do well, why can’t this do just as well?.” And the Warners people were scratching their heads by this point.’

For someone with such refined and individual taste as Watts-Russell, allowing other members of staff to sign bands to his label was a magnanimous gesture. It was also suggestive of how little real interest he was sustaining in the company. The staff in the London office did not really know what the situation was, whether Watts-Russell was still in overall charge or whether they were to take their lead from whoever had been appointed as subordinate label manager.

‘When he first moved to the States, it was unclear to a lot of people in the office how involved he was going to be and that obviously caused some problems and confusion,’ says Harper. ‘I think the writing was on the wall as to how long Ivo would have anything to do with the label.’

While the staff of 4AD were aware that Watts-Russell’s emigration was a result of his desire for a change of location, very few people realised the extent of his unhappiness and disillusion. Apart from Hurley and Harper, only Martin Mills, the person who had suggested he start a label over fifteen years earlier, was aware of the decision Watts-Russell was considering – how to bring an end his involvement with 4AD. His eventual choice was to sell to Mills, but it was one he would spend more than a year dwelling on before making.

‘We had a contractual arrangement that, if one of us wanted to leave, we had to offer the other half to each other first,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘I had to look at different options. I could just stop it as a label but remain a co-owner and run it as a catalogue thing. I could have said, “Fuck it, it’s not working without me. I’m going back to England,” and I wanted to be in America.’

‘It was a very gradual process,’ says Mills ‘it had largely happened a long time before anyone realised it had happened. Gradually it had become inevitable. During the period in which he handed over control of the company – no one was meant to know – I think the company grew further and further away from him. It just got trapped in a circle of making expensive videos and making records to get played on the radio, which is not really what a label like 4AD should ever be about.’

By 1997, when the relevant papers were signed at last, Watts-Russell’s prediction of 4AD turning into a run-of-the-mill label that, at the cost of its identity, serviced the need of the market, had come true. The stress, exhaustion and anxiety that he had managed to fight off finally overwhelmed him and he entered a period in the wilderness. ‘I completely and utterly lost the plot and went off the rails,’ he says, ‘and no matter how hard I tried, between ’94 and ’97 I couldn’t get back on those rails’

Before making his final decision to leave, he had asked Hurley and Harper to join him in the desert. In 29 Palms, near Joshua Tree National Park, in the unique atmosphere of the desert air, the three of them discussed the situation at the label: its problems, its future and, as was becoming clear through their conversation, how the 4AD they had worked tirelessly to create might now be coming to an end. ‘We’d had conversations about how to do it,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘I made the decision when we went out to Joshua Tree for the weekend me, Robin and Simon. And my heart just wasn’t in it any more.’

Under the palm trees in the dry heat, Watts-Russell talked through his feelings and agreed that the American office would close and that he would begin the process of selling the label to Mills.

‘He was really really disillusioned,’ says Harper. ‘In many ways it was very, very cathartic, like a breath of fresh air. I remember sitting out by the pool and it was a relief to hear him say it.’

‘It needed to be said and it got said,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘I let down all sorts of people. I’d just vanished really. I remember Martin was in LA visiting Robin and I, meeting us somewhere at lunch – at that point I wasn’t even going into the office – and they started talking to me about something and I just remember tears welling up and just saying, “I just wish I could care.” I’d just lost it.’

19 Cold Blooded Old Times

Smog, Cold Blooded Old Times, an American record in the post-Britpop malaise (Matthew Cooper archive)

By the midpoint of the 1990s the momentum of the independent sector had stalled almost to a halt. Rough Trade and Factory had both ceased trading, Creation and 4AD were in the hands of a support staff as McGee and Watts-Russell, exhausted and broken, had removed themselves from the day-to-day running of their companies. Daniel Miller was finding himself in the difficult position of firing and rehiring staff as Mute’s finances became increasingly volatile. With the end of Rough Trade Distribution came the end of the most sympathetic route to market for independently released music – a market that was now beginning to harden into a professional era of double-format CD singles, high-end advertising campaigns and overpriced albums. The music often associated with independence or indie – four-piece guitar bands referencing the Sixties – had become mainstream and rebranded Britpop. Almost none of the bands associated with it were signed to independent labels.

The most creatively successful independent label of the era had nothing in common with the perky ordinariness of Britpop. Warp Records, or Warp, as it instantly became known, had started casually in the back room of a Sheffield record shop and financed its first release with an Enterprise Allowance Grant. ‘At the time we didn’t think we were setting up a label necessarily,’ says Steve Beckett, one of the Warp’s three founders. ‘It was more about “Let’s do this 12-inch and see if it can have an effect”, like we were seeing in guys like 808 State and Unique 3. It was all more orientated to the dance floor rather than the label side of things.’

Beckett and his friend Rob Mitchell were in their early twenties but already veterans of the Sheffield underground, whose focal point was FON studios and record shop. FON had been a bridge between the dystopian futurism of the Sheffield of Cabaret Voltaire and Human League and the city’s next generation of bands like Hula and Chakk. It was with Chakk’s major-label advance that FON had been built as a state-of-the-art studio. The project had been successful; FON’s clients included David Bowie and Yazz. Chakk’s material was recorded by Robert Gordon, a local producer and FON regular who had credits on mixes for Top Forty singles by Erasure, Ten City and Joyce Sims to his name, and a reputation for serious technical dexterity behind the mixing desk.

An aficionado of the north’s club scene, Gordon had started to record music that suited the atmosphere of the hardcore techno raves that were now a feature of Sheffield’s nightlife. Gordon recorded a track under the name of Forgemasters, a trio in which he was joined by two friends and fellow FON luminaries, Winston Hazel and Sean Maher. The name was taken from a local heavy engineering works and suited the music on their tape perfectly: a ghostly melody, floating over finely wrought beats, programmed with a crisp industrial precision. The track was driven by an eerie pulse, a sound which would soon be called a ‘bleep’ and become the distinctive signature of hardcore northern techno and, for its first two years, the sound of Warp.

Pressed up as a white label, ‘Track With No Name’ by Forgemasters was the debut release on Warp, an evocation of the nocturnal energy of an industrial city in decline, whose empty, industrial spaces were being turned into illegal and autonomous party zones. ‘The whole thing was crime from the start,’ says Beckett. ‘It was an illegal place, selling illegal drugs, with the gangs on the door taking the illegal money. But people were having this amazing time and I can’t ever remember fights going on.’

Warp was initially a partnership between Beckett, Mitchell and Gordon. The first decision taken by the trio was to refit the FON shop into a new record store, also called Warp. The cash flow for the refurbishment came from an unlikely source and was testament to the trio’s working knowledge of the grey-market economics of hardcore. Warp sold tickets for events at Sheffield University, then one of the indie circuit’s most successful venues. ‘We sold thousands of pounds of students’ union tickets and then used that as cash flow,’ says Beckett. ‘They’d say, “We need the invoice paying.” We’d just keep fobbing them off until we’d got the money, but obviously, because it was students who had no business sense, they just think everything works like it’s supposed to work. “You’re supposed to pay us now.” … “Yeah, but we can’t.” “Oh – what happens now?” “Come back next week.” … “Oh, OK.” … “Chill, chill.”’

Warp specialised in imports from Chicago and Detroit, steel cities producing sleek precise techno that was in as much demand from local DJs as from the record-buying cognoscenti. ‘On a Saturday they were literally queuing down the street to wait for the doors to open,’ says Beckett. ‘All the Transmat releases, or whatever the two or three big tunes were that week, would be gone in an hour. The importer had brought in what he could and there was obviously no digital access to it then, so it was a real supply-and-demand thing.’

The influence of the music released by Transmat, Metroplex, Trax and Underground Resistance could be heard on the next set of Warp releases. A series of 12-inch singles by Tricky Disco, LFO and Sweet Exorcist, the latter an intergenerational collaboration between Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk and DJ Parrot, combined the minimalism of American techno with a northern intensity. In typical fashion, John Peel’s antennae noticed the energy coming from a new, non-metropolitan label and he began playing Warp releases as a matter of course. ‘We got a call from Peel about Sweet Exorcist at the shop,’ says Beckett. ‘He’s like, “I love this record, I’m playing it tonight.” One of the guys serving in the shop was walking up the stairs going, “This is the coolest fucking shop in the world.” He was like, “John Peel!” His life was made.’

Warp had quickly found that its releases had an unexpectedly large market. ‘Tricky Disco’ by Tricky Disco reached no. 14 in the Top Twenty in November 1990 and ‘LFO’ by LFO had already been in the charts that July. The raw self-titled anonymity of the releases was an overt emphasis on the functionality of the music.

Both LFO and Tricky Disco were bedroom producers with access to recording equipment that could produce the minimal and hard-edged sounds that worked in a club, without the need to visit a studio. Once a track was finished it was mixed down straight on to a metal cassette and tested through the rave PA. ‘It wasn’t even demo-led at the time,’ say Beckett. ‘People were literally walking into the DJ booth and going, “What is this record?” LFO were playing cassettes in the club. We were going up to them and persuading them that we had a label and wanted to put a record out.’

In the absence of either party knowing or caring about the legal or technical details of a record deal, LFO and Warp decided that, rather than bother with a contract, they should place their signatures on the LFO demo inlay card. As well as being the medium on which their music was played in clubs, the cassette was also their binding agreement with Warp. ‘We didn’t know what you’re supposed to do, but they said, “Oh, you’re supposed to sign them.” So we said, “What will we do? Let’s just sign it then, sign the tape.” So that was our first deal.’

Despite bringing the sound of hardcore into the Top Twenty, Warp was encountering some severe teething problems; Robert Gordon left the company and the partnership on bad terms. More significantly, Warp had made a decision they were now starting to regret. After its appearance as a white label, ‘Track With No Name’ had been re-pressed and given an official release. The record was housed in the distinct purple sleeve that would become a Warp trademark, but on the vinyl label there were two record company logos, the smallest of which said Warp, the bigger Outer Rhythm.

‘We almost straight away started going into the relationship with Rhythm King,’ says Beckett. ‘We got our sleeve back and we were like, “What the fuck! What the fuck’s Outer Rhythm? Where’s our thing?” That was our introduction to the music business. We just thought, oh my God, what have we done?’

Rhythm King had been a highly successful label in the years immediately preceding Warp’s formation. It was a partnership between three friends from the late Eighties London club scene, Martin Heath, James Horrocks and Jay Strongman, all of whom had been regulars at the Wag club and noticed the arrival and the effect of the first import-house releases on the dance floor. Rhythm King’s releases were a successful attempt at turning the dynamics of club music into more commercial, chart-ready formats. For six months in 1988 the label regularly had its releases in the Top Ten. The Beatmasters’ ‘Rock Da House’ made it to no. 5 in February and it was joined later that month by ‘Beat Dis’ by Bomb the Bass at no. 2.

‘Rhythm King was actually quite short-lived,’ says Horrocks. ‘By the time we got to doing “Rock Da House” and “Beat Dis” we had everything worked out: how to work a record, make it successful, etc., and it kind of went hand-in-hand with the proliferation of Ecstasy and clubbing.’ Three months later the label had its first no. 1, ‘Theme From S’Express’ by S’Express, a record that had been financed along with the rest of Rhythm King’s catalogue by Daniel Miller at Mute.

Rhythm King’s success was not without its problems for Miller. The culture of dance music relied on a fast turnover of artists. Despite top-of-the-range studios and expensive videos, many of its successes did not last. In contrast, Miller had always run Mute at its own pace, one that was dictated by when his artists had finished recording an album.

‘I think I took on too much financially,’ says Miller. ‘Even though it was successful in the beginning, it was quite a strain. Also Rhythm King and Blast First didn’t like each other at all. I was trying to control these renegade people, and I think the artists found them quite difficult to deal with as well.’ The hedonism of the dance floor had been amplified by Rhythm King’s chart success and the company was determined to enjoy the high life. The partying duly took over. ‘I often got the artists coming to me saying, “What can we do?”,’ says Miller, ‘because they couldn’t really deal with the culture of that company.’

A scout for Rhythm King had picked up on ‘Track With No Name’ as a white label, and Beckett and Mitchell were asked if Warp would be interested in working with the London company. ‘They made an approach to do a label deal and we thought we’d done the deal of the century,’ says Beckett. ‘We signed away everything for £10,000 and just walked out of Rhythm King going, “Yes, we’ve done it.”’

Warp signed to Rhythm King’s experimental subsidiary, Outer Rhythm, and looked on in horror as LFO and Tricky Disco climbed the charts. ‘It’s the classic story,’ says Beckett. ‘You’re in your little mind-set going, “Fucking some idiot’s given us 10,000 quid to release our records,” and then not realising that after a while you’re selling 100,000 records and you’re not seeing a penny and going, “Hold on … my God, what have we done?”’

Miller was more experienced and at one remove from the still-evolving and frenetic culture of dance music. As he surveyed the fly-by-night deals and fractious relationships between the parties involved, he began to understand that the relationships between Mute, Rhythm King and Warp were no longer practicable. ‘We did very well for an eighteen-month period. We had no. 1 singles, but it was very pressured,’ he says. ‘One of the parts that got unravelled was Warp, and I regret that massively, of course.’

Beckett and Mitchell asked Miller to intervene and help them extricate Warp from the Rhythm King deal. Miller, displaying his ability to retain perspective amid the chaos and recrimination of fast money and chart success, agreed to facilitate Warp’s departure. ‘We were having secret conversations with Daniel, trying to get out,’ says Beckett. ‘We’d meet in the cafe nearby and he just said, “Oh God, not another one.” I’ve got so much respect for him. He was the one drilling it into our heads to get the international side together, saying, “Look, every label’s hot for a while, then they go cool in a year or two. Don’t just rely on the hacks in the UK, get all your international things set up.”’

Rhythm King proved a salutary experience for the partners in Warp. They had registered incredible sales through word of mouth and some night-time plays on John Peel alone, but none of the profits had made it back to Sheffield. Once Beckett and Mitchell recovered control of the label, they resisted any further offers from interested parties and insisted on remaining independent.

On Miller’s advice they started to develop a catalogue distinct from the hot-for-a-week turnover of hardcore singles. In a display of their A&R instinct that would become one of the label’s hallmarks, Warp released the first album by a British techno artist, Frequencies by LFO, in 1991. ‘Frequencies was the first album we did,’ says Beckett. ‘It pulled us out of the trough, where we were just completely skint with no royalties, and it was the point where we turned ourselves into a record label. We really started clocking that that was the way to have a bit of longevity and build artists.’

Frequencies had the added significance of being one of the first Warp releases to feature artwork by the studio The Designers Republic, the company that had devised the label’s distinctive retro-futurist logo and developed Warp’s relationship with the colour purple. The Designers Republic was run by Ian Anderson, who had met Beckett and Mitchell before Warp had started, a fellow veteran of the FON era. The Designers Republic, or tDR as it became known, specialised in playful appropriations of signifiers from the world of conglomerates and multinationals. The graphic language of branding was subverted to provide a commentary on lifestyle consumerism. It was a technique The Designers Republic used to great effect for Warp, one which saw the two Sheffield creative companies project the image of management-class global reach. ‘We had a massive corporate logo that made us look like we were a twenty-storey company,’ says Beckett, ‘whereas we were actually just operating out of a bedroom, trying to use our artwork and our imagery to make us look way bigger than we actually were.’

The Designers Republic was a reference to Sheffield’s nickname as The People’s Republic of South Yorkshire, which in a typical gesture of regional pride and adept branding, tDR renamed SoYo. The wit and energy of the design studio met the rhythms and textures released on the disc.

Warp dealt in predominantly instrumental music, or as its detractors in the weekly music press called it, ‘faceless techno bollocks’. It was the very facelessness of its artists that allowed tDR to develop a relationship with the label as rich as that of Oliver and Watts-Russell’s at 4AD or Saville and Wilson’s at Factory. Beckett’s description of tDR’s work for Warp could equally apply to the two other labels. ‘You’re not quite sure what is going on inside the sleeve,’ he says, ‘but the artwork’s so confident that it doesn’t need to market what’s going in there.’

Warp’s next release was as much a product of their environment as their first run of singles had been – capturing the experience of the post-rave afterhours early morning slowdown, rather than the hardcore rush and pumped energy of its dance floor. Beckett and Mitchell decided to compile the more obtuse and languorous tracks that were often found on techno artists’ 12-inch B-sides or experimental releases and present them as a contemplative listening experience.

‘We were hearing those tracks when we were going back to people’s houses,’ says Beckett. ‘People were picking out these weird B-sides and you’re there off your head either on acid or E and just hearing them and going, “This is fucking incredible, this music,” and then realising that that stuff wasn’t selling. There’d be a few people interested but most people would go, “I can’t play this out.” So it was realising that there was nothing wrong with the music. It was just the format that it was being put on.’

The format Warp developed was a series called Artificial Intelligence. The first AI release was a compilation of the tracks that had caught Beckett and Mitchell’s attention. The following year artists on the compilation released stand-alone albums in the series, Black Dog Production’s Bytes and Fuse’s Dimension Intrusion being two of the highlights. The label was now moving into more established record company practice. The AI series, with its signature Designers Republic artwork and considered track listing, set Warp apart from their dance and rave contemporaries, placing the label in a more curatorial context. For a label that placed great emphasis on the future, Artificial Intelligence made surprisingly overt references to the past. The gatefold sleeve of Artificial Intelligence volume 1 featured a reclining android blowing blue smoke rings; around his feet were tried and tested classics for the psychedelic armchair traveller: Kraftwerk’s Autobahn and Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother. The idea was rejected by the hardcore community which saw the move as a backwards step into prog rock, headphone-obsessive behaviour.

‘People were like, “You can’t do a fucking album of this,” but once it was out people just started raving about it. I realised that was a real changing point for the label because it was a point where your records and your sales were being governed more about what the media were saying, and making that step into the public knowing about it via the media, whereas before it had been very direct: it was nothing to do with the media, it was just like people in the clubs heard it and they went out and tried to buy what they’d heard the next week.’

Warp was building an international reputation and releasing music by artists from outside the UK. The company was still defined by Sheffield. It was run out of a city-centre shop during office hours and released records that soundtracked the city’s nightlife and its early morning reveries. It was an experience of the city shared by Pulp, one of Sheffield’s longest-running bands, who had been signed to Fire, only to see their releases stall. While their relationship with their record company floundered, the band had enjoyed the renaissance of Sheffield as a music city. Jarvis Cocker had directed a video for Sweet Exorcist’s ‘Testone’ and the band rehearsed and recorded in the FON complex where Cocker had also once lived.

‘We’d all been knocking around for years before the label,’ says Beckett, who, with Mitchell, was approached about releasing some Pulp music, while the band were renegotiating with Fire.

At Fire Dave Bedford had been attempting to rekindle the relationship between Pulp and the label but to little avail. The hidden complexities of the band’s contract had meant Pulp had left on bad terms, only to return with a new album that bore the influence of Sheffield after dark. ‘It’s a moment that I still can’t get my head round,’ says Bedford. ‘Clive let them go. We’d put an album out. We’d recorded another album. Pulp had discovered drum machines and dance music and Clive was scratching his head. I was trying to get the record out and Clive let them go. And then two years later they came trotting back, nothing had happened and Clive said, “Yeah, we’ll re-sign you.” So we re-signed them.’ The resulting album, Separations, had been recorded in 1989 at the height of Sheffield hardcore but wasn’t released until 1991.

‘At the time we were really frustrated,’ says Bedford. ‘It was just before they were able to get on to radio. We were at that stage, radio were just looking at us like we’re mad. We’d get press and nothing else.’

Pulp were now in the invidious and momentum-sapping position of having had two releases hamstrung by Fire. Through a variety of legal contortions they signed to Island Records in a deal that, by Fire’s standards, was healthily remunerative; there was a hidden cost, however. Clive Solomon had negotiated himself a percentage of their future earnings in exchange for releasing them from their contract. ‘They went storming off and did the deal, and it cost them,’ says Bedford. ‘Clive got an override on all the big records – for doing nothing. Pulp leaving was probably the final straw for me. We’d lost the Lemonheads, the Blue Aeroplanes, Teenage Fanclub, Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized.’

In between the negotiations Pulp released two singles and some of the most innovative music of their career on Gift, an imprint which Beckett and Mitchell set up within Warp for the purpose of helping Pulp. ‘Now we could just do it on the same label,’ says Beckett ‘but at the time there was no way we could, ’cause it was so different musically that people would just go, “What the hell are you doing?” I mean, they still do in a way, but at that time you couldn’t even comprehend doing it on the same label.’

The Gift material that Pulp recorded was among their strongest. The track ‘Sheffield Sex City’, an erotic travelogue that was richly evocative of the dole-bohemia of their home town, was a stand-out. With its fusion of sequencers, Sheffield place names and disorientation, the song is a daylight companion to Warp’s early releases –a bus ride across the city, soundtracked by the pulse and bleeps of the warehouse dance floor still ringing in the ears from the night before.

Pulp were not the only veterans of the independent sector to be included in Britpop. The Auteurs were led by Luke Haines whose previous band, the Servants, had also been on Fire, where they had been handled by Dave Barker. ‘The drummer in the Servants was the guy who was in the Housemartins – the one who got done for axing his neighbour,’ says Barker. ‘He was a bit eccentric. I’m not kidding. He had fifteen toothbrushes, like in the room, you know … in the room, all the toothbrushes. “What’ve you got all them for?” … “Well, I like to choose …”’

The Auteurs were one of the first signings to Hut Recordings, a new imprint of Virgin, a company that was by 1992 a wholly owned subsidiary of EMI. At the turn of the decade several imprints were launched by the majors, either as boutique labels within the company, equipped with a small staff and a budget to sign new talent, or, as a front-of-house for a newly signed band to retain their sense of individuality. All were, initially at least, distributed independently, usually by RTM – Rough Trade Marketing, the new company started from the ashes of Rough Trade. RTM was a far more efficient and market-attuned organisation than the one from which it derived its name. RTM distributed the major labels’ releases and in doing so gave the acts the protective veneer of integrity and, more importantly, a presence in the higher reaches of the indie charts. In return the majors provided RTM with a much-needed income stream. ‘It was very modern. It was much more of a business,’ says Mark Mitchell, one of the new intake of staff at RTM. ‘I heard about the old Rough Trade and it was a completely different company. There were very clear lines of division. Of all the Rough Trade old guard, there was barely a handful in sight.’

Within the industry, imprints like Hut – major-funded labels created in the image and vernacular of Creation or Fire – were given the rather clumsy nick name ‘mandies’. By the early Nineties their marketing-led approach was starting to gain traction, filling the gap in the market left by the closure of Rough Trade. Telling the difference between an independent release and the new signing on Hut was of little interest to the average reader of the music press; it was also increasingly difficult, as labels like Hut and Dedicated signed bands that would have previously gravitated to Rough Trade or Creation.

To veterans of independence like Barker there was one crucial factor which separated the mandies from the indies: money. ‘There were some labels that were all funded up,’ he says. ‘The first few releases by Hut had like half-page ads in the NME and no little label can do that. This was like the first release by Revolver or one of these bands, and it’s like a half-page advert. You could put it down to when Rough Trade went: really, that was a big moment.’

Hut was run by Dave Boyd, a former label manager at Rough Trade who successfully replicated the outward appearance of an indie within the context of a major. ‘It started out to give the illusion of an indie,’ says Barker. ‘Let’s put it in some funky area, down the old Portobello Road, rent some office space, but we’ll get the most expensive people in the West End to do the fuckin’ radio, this other guy’s gonna do the press, and all this caper.’

Hut was soon taken in-house within the Virgin complex, but a sticker bearing the legend ‘Corporate Rock Sucks’ was displayed on its door. It was indicative of the growing meaninglessness of the word ‘indie’. Corporate rock sucked, even within the corporation.

‘I genuinely don’t think that many majors who set up those mandies knew why,’ says Mitchell. ‘They just knew that the A&R and the bands wanted it that way, so they did the deal and they tried it out. I think your average boss of those majors was sitting there going, “How come, when we sign a new act, no one takes it seriously, but all those fucking indies with no marketing budgets – they just fucking walk on to the NME? If you’re a major what have you got to lose? None of these records are going to sell an amount that makes any difference and, even if they did, most of them had deals where, after any hint of sales, they went in-house anyway.’

Pulp signed to Island, a label that had known about the difficult realities of remaining independent more than any other. After thirty years of trying to keep his head above water, while assembling a peerless catalogue of music, Chris Blackwell finally sold Island to the Polygram Group in 1989. Cally Calloman was on the staff at Island, where he encountered a different culture to any he had experienced while working at the other majors. ‘Meeting and working with Chris Blackwell, I realised how Island had gone right up to about the mid-Eighties with a huge amount of difficulty,’ he says. ‘I don’t think Chris ever enjoyed it, because they were always on the point of bankruptcy and collapse. He would be seeing at the same time a no. 1 single all over the world with Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and then the bank manager phoning up and saying, “Unless you pay off this x-million debt by the end of the week, we’re going to wind you up.”’

Island was no longer in a perpetual fire-fight with its creditors, but the market realities of being part of a multinational meant that the year to year profit-and-loss sheets were not driving the company’s finances any more. Island was part of the Polygram Group and consequently beholden to the stock market. ‘It’s a shareholder thing,’ says Calloman. ‘Once you get shareholders involved that are demanding an extra 10 per cent every year on their profit returns, the pressure is handed down through the executives, who are all on bonus schemes. This is very boring for people who like music, but it is one of the reasons why a lot of record companies have foundered by the wayside. Because music is not cars, it’s not widgets, it’s an ethereal magical thing. Discovering Pulp, a band that had been going for fourteen years and just happened to be reaching that point where it would really work, it’s really ethereal. You can’t then just go out and do it.’

When Pulp were at no. 2 in the charts with ‘Common People’ in 1995, the shift the mandies had started, towards the majors signing and marketing guitar music, had turned into the short-lived but runaway commercial success of Britpop. Bands that might have been expected to sell 30,000 copies were suddenly, via the relentless process of finely tuned marketing, outselling The Smiths. The careers of Depeche Mode, New Order and The Smiths were part of the ecology of their record companies. The relationships between Sleeper, the Bluetones and Cast and their respective labels were altogether less refined. As far as their product mangers were concerned, they were that quarter’s product, a new release before the fourth quarter’s schedule of Greatest Hits compilations. ‘The problem with the majors is no one makes a decision,’ says Mitchell. ‘The guy who makes the decision is so far up the food chain that it’s impossible to get a yes or no out of most people, and they don’t even know why a decision’s made. Most of the people who run indies have got their heads screwed on – they’re quite logical people – whereas the majors are full of egos, and Britpop was completely untouched by the indies. It was all on majors.’

Oasis and Blur, the two bands most associated with Britpop, had the benefit of working with record companies populated with small teams of staff, and the first-hand experience of independent labels. Blur were signed to Food, an imprint started by Bill Drummond’s former partner in Zoo, Dave Balfe. Zoo, whose motto was ‘Let Us Prey’ had been funded by EMI since 1988. By the time of the release of Parklife, and the first of the endless Britpop summers, Balfe had left Zoo. The company was run by his former co-director Andy Ross and owned outright by EMI.

Mike Smith was a contemporary of Blur in age and had signed the band to a publishing deal while at MCA Music. He remained part of the band’s inner sanctum throughout their career, a sounding-board for their ideas and part of the hands-on team that helped differentiate the band from its contemporaries. ‘I think it was always a great bugbear of Andy Ross that he was never seen as being independent, because he was tied into EMI records,’ he says. ‘Unlike so many A&R men, who just sit there and nod and agree with bands, Food would go in and really roll their sleeves up and try and shape and influence what the band did. That doesn’t happen that much. I think there’s a very real possibility that if Blur had signed to another label they might not have succeeded like they did.’

As well as bigger recording budgets, multiformatted releases, radio play and blanket media coverage, there was another factor that separated the class of Britpop ’95 from the class of C86. ‘For one thing,’ says Smith, ‘you had bands that wanted to sell a million records and I don’t know that that mentality was ever there in the Eighties.’ Whatever its ideas about celebrating the British way of life, or investigating a national identity via the tropes of dog racing and suburbia, Britpop was intensely parochial.

Many of the bands with which Britpop artists liked to think they had an affinity – The Smiths, New Order, the Bunnymen – had all sold healthily and made a significant cultural impact in America. Sony prioritised Oasis in America, where the band achieved sales in the millions and Blur, on their fifth album, a deliberately American-sounding record, went gold. Elastica, who were signed to Geffen, also achieved reasonable sales in America. In contrast to their successes at home, no other Britpop bands achieved meaningful sales outside the UK.

Few things ring as hollow as empty triumphalism, but Britpop, in its cocaine-fuelled self-confidence, was certain of its world-dominating prospects. To seasoned observers who had experienced the reality of how British bands fared abroad, what played well at home in the music weeklies was often a fallacy once the international sales figures had been accounted. Dave Harper, a veteran of music-press junkets to the US, had accompanied a succession of British bands and he looked on with interest as a new generation of bands attempted to re-educate the colonies in the former glories of the standard flag-and-music-hall irony.

‘Tom Sheehan used to be the main man photographer of Melody Maker,’ says Harper. ‘The number of times he’d flown to New York, to take a picture, usually of the Charlatans, and he’d take out of his bag a Union Jack and say, “Right, we’ll go to the Staten Island ferry, you stand there, so we’ve got the New York skyline in the background, hold the fucking Union Jack up and the headline will be … (Fill in name of band here) … take America” … The same story, time and time again. None of them ever took America. How far have you got? New York City? You haven’t taken over America at all, have you?’

Despite the major labels’ best efforts, Britpop failed to find a significant audience outside the UK. As a result the domestic market became a hothouse, as ultracompetitive bands jockeyed to outbid one another for a higher chart placing and a band’s midweek sales figures began to determine their fate at the hands of the music weeklies. ‘NME in particular really did get obsessed with the midweeks,’ says Harper. ‘They suddenly discovered there was such a thing as the midweek charts. “What’s your midweek?” Top Ten gets you a cover, Top Twenty not on the cover, lead album review, not lead album review. They got obsessed with sales figures.’

For two years Britpop became the orthodoxy and bands that would have once been the preserve of early evening radio were celebrated in the mainstream media and backed with the kind of major-label campaigns usually reserved for George Michael. Such a heavily marketed and sales-driven genre needed success in more than one territory to justify its expenditure. Britpop’s cycle of midweek Top Tens was a false economy and proved, inevitably, short-lived.

‘Record companies had these financial targets and projections and quarter-yearly things to achieve,’ says Harper. ‘They always go, “Album one sold x, so in the third quarter, album two came to double x and album three will do triple y in quarter four.” You sit there with more of a zeitgeist-frame on, and want to say, “There’s absolutely no reason in the world why album two will sell double album one, let alone album three. More pertinently, album two was shit, so the mugs who bought it are not going to buy album three in a million years.” Sleeper are the classic example … massive hoo-ha, big budgets, bigger videos, more expensive production … you might as well just hold a gun to your head … this is not going to work … it’s absurd … full-page ads, blah, blah, blah … it comes out, sells two copies, band gets dropped and decide, “The music industry’s unfair”?’

The music press continued to champion Britpop and its second-and third-division bands were rotated as cover stars while their releases were marketed into the Top Twenty. ‘It’s quite a simple sort of relationship,’ says Harper. ‘They’re selling records so we can sell more newspapers on the back of them selling records; in fact, we can make them sell more records. It became self-fulfilling madness which then sort of blew up in everybody’s face.’

‘In 1996 I walked into work every week and I’d have a band in the Top Twenty,’ says Smith. ‘I began to appreciate what it feels like to be in a band. It just feels, whatever I do, I can’t stop being successful. It was a really weird, dangerous time. In that rush, an awful lot of mediocrity gets signed up, and there’s nothing wrong with mediocrity getting signed, that inevitably happens. What’s scary is when mediocrity gets half a million pounds of marketing money behind it – gets rammed down everyone’s throat – and by ’97 people were getting really sick of having rubbish marketed at them very aggressively.’

What had started as a revision of the Kinks and the Small Faces and the kind of British music that had seemed forgotten in 1992 had degenerated into the Benny Hill parody of the Country House video and the mannered and unconvincing virility of the New Lad.

‘Everybody was really fucked up,’ says Smith, ‘because everyone had had way too much success, way too young, loads of disposable cash. None of us had any real responsibilities. Everyone had just gone out and bought paintings and armchairs. I woke up one morning and just went, “Oh God, this is all shit. I may have an Eames lampshade but my life is completely meaningless. I felt completely aimless at that time and it was a horrible time, everyone was really not very nice.’

*

Away from Britpop’s mockneyisms and fry-ups, the independent sector had become a small marginal facet of the music industry. Hundreds of thousands of units were being sold and distributed independently, nearly all of which were on dance labels. The most financially successful was Ministry of Sound, which operated as a conglomerate selling a lifestyle brand for the weekend clubber, a PWL for the rave nation.

Any guitar music other than the major chord vignettes in the charts was a minority concern. At the start of the decade, the Rough Trade shop had once again become an under-the-radar locus for bands wanting to self-release angular and noisy experiments. ‘It kind of evolved in exactly the same way that the first Rough Trade label had,’ says Pete Donne, one of the shop’s three partners. ‘People were coming into the shop asking to leave sale-or-return 7-inches. On the verge of that Camden scene, there was a rebirth of that DIY ethic to an extent: instead of just sending these people John Peel’s address, it was “Why don’t we try making one ourselves?”’

The Rough Trade shop once again became a record label, taking its name from compressing the store’s post code W11 IJA, into Wiiija (pronounced Ouija), where the Rough Trade ethos of self-expression and investigation was rekindled on a much smaller scale. Wiiija was run by Gary Walker, a sales assistant in the shop who, at twenty-two, was already a veteran of the Blast First and Camden Lurch scenes and was putting all his efforts into two of Wiiija’s newest signings, Huggy Bear and Cornershop.

Huggy Bear were aligned with the Pacific Northwest’s Riot Grrrl movement. A constantly evolving network of fanzines, promoters and bands, Riot Grrrl is often defined as feminist punk rock. It was a much more nuanced – and much more exciting – force than such a reductionist interpretation implies. It was a movement that made the most sense in the States, where restrictive licensing laws, the inaccessibility of mainstream media and an existing underground infrastructure all allowed a new self-determined network to function. The independent American punk scene had a residual blue-collar machismo, a context in which the confrontational energy of Riot Grrrl flourished.

‘Part of what the Riot Grrrl impetus was didn’t really exist here,’ says Walker. ‘If you looked vaguely eighteen you could get into a gig. Here, there were girls playing in bands. Whereas, in America, mainstream culture is so oppressive, here mainstream culture absorbs new ideas so quickly.’

Mainstream culture tried to absorb Huggy Bear in the form of an appearance on The Word TV show, which included the band intervening during what they considered a sexist feature on the show. A small-scale media furore followed, including a Melody Maker cover feature, but the band resisted being co-opted by music-press hype.

Huggy Bear functioned better in the autonomous environment of the Peel show, and their record releases, one of which, the single ‘Her Jazz’, was as powerful and immediate as some of the slogans they wrote on their arms. Such was the scrutiny of the band and their motives that Walker eventually stopped going out in Camden. He was constantly asked why he had signed a band that ‘couldn’t play’, and the band themselves were often accosted and provoked. In the overheated theatre of the music weeklies, any kind of movement needs to be simplified down into its basic tenets. Features were run asking, ‘Are You a Riot Grrrl?’, a question often answered with the unlikeliest of answers. Huggy Bear’s refusal to participate in the process led them to be dismissed as Polyannas with hair slides, or dilettanteish theorists who hadn’t thought things through.

‘Huggy Bear supported Blur,’ says Walker, ‘and Cornershop supported Blur a bunch of times. There were a couple of gigs where they were Sieg Heiled by idiots in the audience and I was coming to the realisation just how small the audience actually was for what Wiiija was doing.’

Huggy Bear came to the attention of Liz Naylor, who after years of disinterest in music had started a label, Cat Call, in order to release records associated with Riot Grrrl. Its first release was Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah/Our Troubled Youth, a split album between Huggy Bear and Olympia’s Bikini Kill. ‘Bikini Kill came and stayed in my flat,’ she says. ‘They stayed there for a month or so, just hanging out, being American. They didn’t quite understand England very well – they were a bit like, “Why can’t we do all-ladies shows in people’s basements?” It was like, “Nobody has a fucking basement in England, we all live in tiny spaces that we can’t afford. It’s not full of rich kids that go, ‘Heh! Ladies-only show.’” They were a bit kind of like punk rock, but my punk rock was the Nightingales in a pub.’

The co-headline tour Bikini Kill and Huggy Bear undertook was a cathartic and often fractious set of dates. Many in the audience had experienced Riot Grrrl only as a music-press phenomenon and were unsure how to react to the bands’ performances. In a sympathetic city like Glasgow, the concert was an empowering night of thrilling rock ’n’ roll. In less ’zine-literate towns the shows often disintegrated into mêlées of thrown beer and accusations of ignorance from the stage.* ‘Those shows were amazing,’ says Naylor. ‘I’m quite proud of the chaos. There were riots, it was fantastic. I was in the middle of a fight thinking, this is fantastic, this is what I wanted all along. Steve Albini would never get stuck in, he’d be worried about the cost of the microphone.’ The tour was the last mainstream flickering of Riot Grrrl in the UK but its impact reverberated and continues to reverberate and grow, particularly in the digital age.

In a mark of its impact and cultural value, Kathleen Hanna donated her archive of ’zines and other Riot Grrrl material to the New York University Special Collection Library. ‘It all ended really really bad,’ says Naylor, ‘and I’m not really bothered about it ending badly. These things should. They really understood something about indie, though, Huggy Bear. Kathleen’s a kind of diva for a generation. What’s great about her is, she stops things. She has a good instinct for ending things.’

For Walker, the experience of representing Huggy Bear had been exhausting but enlightening. ‘When it ended Niki, Chris and Jo didn’t form other bands’, he says. ‘They went off and did childcare work. Niki works in Holloway women’s prison and so in that sense they did talk the talk. It was all very all or nothing. And then a commercial version of it came along, what I’d call the upper-middle-class version of it, bands like Sleeper and Echobelly.’

*

Walker and Huggy Bear generated sufficient media interest for Wiiija, still a fledgling label run from the back of a record shop, to be courted by other record companies. Martin Mills gave Walker a deal within the Beggars Group where Wiiija joined the next generation of labels, the most successful of which, XL, via its band, The Prodigy, was superseding 4AD as the Beggars Group’s most valued imprint.

‘I never particularly liked Britpop to be honest,’ says Mills. ‘It felt like the next kind of major label, homogenised and normalised music, and it just wasn’t particularly interesting. Cornershop and Prodigy were operating in much more exciting territory.’ The Prodigy’s single ‘Firestarter’ became a worldwide hit, taking the group and its label away from its breakbeat roots and into the mainstream.

XL had originally started as an offshoot of City Beat in the late Eighties, a label that was run out of Groove Records in Soho. Groove was as totemic a destination for London’s B Boys and B Girls, searching for import Def Jam releases, as Rough Trade had been for DIY singles in the late Seventies. City Beat was run by Tim Palmer, whose mother owned Groove and who started XL to cover the rave scene.

‘XL had strings and strings of Top Twenty singles by artists that came and went,’ says Mills, ‘but then there was also Prodigy, which bucked the trend and which kind of rewrote the rulebook on how genres converge.’ The Prodigy started to regularly infiltrate the charts; their debut single ‘Charly’ made it to no. 3, by which time XL was run by Richard Russell. As a DJ and as an artist Russell had graduated from being a regular Groove customer to an A&R at XL, before becoming the company’s MD in 1994. ‘We were a scene label,’ he says, ‘with all the things that go with that. We were very deep in a scene; I was a DJ, I was an artist, I was a producer, and we were in that scene, so it was very flowing, it had a lot of momentum. There was no thought, there was no analysis, it was all very quick-fire and very exciting.’

The scene XL was part of was the wider rave culture that was captured perfectly in the artwork of Prodigy’s Music for the Jilted Generation album. The inner gatefold picture featured a righteous – if a little crusty-looking – raver, cutting off police access to an illegal rave by taking a knife to a rope bridge.

‘The records we released were not on the radio. They were not written about by the music press, but they sold a lot,’ says Russell. ‘We used to be able to sell a couple of hundred thousand, all vinyl. If it worked when you played it that was it, the simplest thing in the world really, and Prodigy was a cassette through the post. We were the obvious place to send the cassette to and, at that point, we listened to everything, ’cause we didn’t get sent much, so it was easy.’

Mills and Beggars were educated in the rave scene as mini-buses would arrive at the Alma Road offices to ferry the staff to the furthest corners of Essex to experience the XL music and culture in its working environment. By the release of The Fat of the Land it was an experience that was understood and enjoyed worldwide. ‘First we were a rave label, and then we were Prodigy’s record label,’ says Russell. ‘Our destiny was to fulfil the potential of that, and that happened over the course of three albums up to ’97 when The Fat of the Land became this tremendous phenomenon.’

The Prodigy’s audience had grown to the point where the band had a no. 1 album in over twenty territories, including America. For Russell and XL it was a remarkable achievement, one that put Mills’s years of experience to vigorous use. ‘It was no. 1 in twenty-seven countries,’ says Mills. ‘I think they sold far more records than Oasis ever did … it sold seven and a half million all round the world … I don’t think Oasis ever got near that … it was a huge record by anyone’s standards and I would say it was a huge international record. Whereas many huge English records don’t travel, this one did.’

‘A lot of people go mad trying to run an independent,’ says Russell. ‘I’ve always just leaned on Martin very heavily so that I could try and stay as creative as possible, so that’s just always been a big help. I know lots of people that do things 100 per cent on their own and that’s very tough, ’cause you get into this as a music fan, so when it becomes a business you’ve got all that stuff to deal with.’

After the worldwide success of The Fat of The Land, Russell found himself hollowed out. All his energies had been spent on the momentum of one band rather than on the label. ‘For the rest of the Nineties everything just bottomed out a bit,’ he says. ‘We went to the MTV awards one year, in Milan. We went to a party at Donatella Versace’s house and Madonna was there, and George Michael. It was that kind of thing. I got back from there and I went to a party in London where all my friends were, and I was talking about it and I remember someone saying to me, “You just sound like such a prick,” and they were right. But it was very hard to not get confused by all this stuff, very difficult, very difficult.’

The perception of XL was that it was the Prodigy’s label and little else. When Russell ended the campaign for The Fat of the Land he realised that he had received a top-to-bottom education in the music industry and was now in a position where he could change the dynamic of the company. ‘I felt I was a bit born again at the turn of the decade, really, where I was like, I just thought, this isn’t good enough, we’ve got to do more interesting things, and I had a bit of an awakening, I think, personally and with what we were doing, which was like, “We can do anything now.” and I really reconnected to music.’

A year later Wiiija and Walker also contributed to the impetus of Beggars Group. Cornershop’s third album, When I Was Born for the Seventh Time, became an international success and in the UK the band were at no. 1 in the singles charts with the Fatboy Slim remix of ‘Brimful of Asha’. ‘What really broke Cornershop in the UK’, says Walker, ‘was the fact that, all through that Britpop period, the majors were sending every fucking journalist out to America to do a feature: Longpigs break America, Supergrass break America – of course they didn’t, but these journalists would come back and go, “Bloody hell, Gary, everyone over there wants to talk about Cornershop.”’

*

By the middle of the Nineties, Laurence Bell had established Domino as a label with a distinct identity, that of a company that released inexpensively but elegantly recorded albums, made mainly by American artists. The names on the Domino release schedule – Royal Trux, Palace and Smog – gave the impression that the label was defiantly representing outsiders. The impression was concentrated by the fact that the label had been started at almost the exact moment when the media, after years of covering American grunge and alternative, threw its weight firmly behind Britpop. A turning point was at the Reading festival in 1994 when, following Kurt Cobain’s suicide a few months earlier, sets by Hole and the Lemonheads disintegrated into cathartic and incoherent displays of public grief. A few hours later, Sebadoh’s performance collapsed into fits of screaming and instrument smashing. ‘Courtney Love was trying to invade the stage when Sebadoh was playing,’ says Bell, ‘and there was a lot of tears and blood and madness in the air, Evan staggering around. But that madness was obviously more exciting than everybody just obsessed with their careers saying, “We’ve got a fan base.” No one in America would know about the term fan base, or give a fuck about it anyway, and that was inspiring. That kind of careerism that was starting to happen in the UK just eggs on careerism.’

The chaotic scenes at Reading were followed by ‘Yanks Go Home’ editorials in the music weeklies. All eyes turned towards London where the major-label music industry and the media were aligned in their celebration of guitar bands, and according to their narrative, the capital started to swing again. ‘They moved into Britpop very fast, and the whole media just became obsessed about that just on the back of Kurt dying,’ says Bell. ‘That was maybe a year into Domino, and there wasn’t much room at all. There was just a few people who’d be supportive of us.’

Mark Mitchell had left RTM to work alongside Bell at Domino as the label entered a hand-to-mouth existence, releasing considered and reflective records into a market full of brash, three-chord social observation. As well as the label operating at the margins of the wider musical culture, Domino’s artists all lacked the kind of career mechanisms that were now considered essential.

‘Nobody had managers,’ says Mitchell. ‘It wasn’t about business, it was love of music. You’d be scared if the drummer phoned up, quite literally. Oh God, we must really be in trouble.’

Domino’s releases were personal and impressionistic and recorded on the kind of budget that would have absorbed a Britpop band’s weekly cab fare. Whatever Bell’s ambitions for the label, the market realities were stacked against a company like Domino succeeding. ‘What held me back was not having the money,’ he says. ‘It was just so competitive at that time. A band like Moose would come and play and you’d think, oh they’re pretty good, I like that, and then they’re signed to Virgin the following Tuesday for quarter of a million and people are writing four-page features on them, and they’d barely got out of the rehearsal room. You’re just like, “This is nuts.”’

Despite Bell’s natural bonhomie and willingness to try and communicate his belief in his releases, Domino found itself in a position of almost exile from the mainstream industry. Other independents like Warp and XL operated in a separate culture to Britpop and benefited from the dance music press where titles like MixMag provided an alternative media. Domino was reliant on coverage in the music weeklies, where it was forced to compete with the midweek Top Twenty culture of the day, and the label was perceived as being wilful, earning a frustrating reputation for wanting to deny itself success in the process.

‘It was not a good time at all,’ says Bell. ‘It was all about putting the ball in the back of the net. Friends in the industry would say to me, “We know people that just think you’re mad,” you know. But I certainly was very serious about it being a label and surviving as a label, and growing as a label. You can read all the books you like about Atlantic in the Fifties and Sixties but it was Putney in the Nineties, and it was really making it up as you went along.’

At times the sense of insularity at Domino became tangible. Mitchell was an ad hoc tour manager for several of the artists. Given that they very rarely toured, the experience proved challenging. It also illustrated how detached the label was from the mainstream. As a new generation of corporate festivals like V and T in the Park were launched to capitalise on guitar music, Mitchell was navigating his way through strange psyches and rural back roads in southern Europe.

‘I went to Spain with Will Oldham and Bill Callahan,’ he says. ‘I spent three or four days with them on this acoustic tour together. My two worst on-the-road experiences both happened at Domino, one with Will and Bill, one with Flying Saucer Attack. Spending days in close quarters with people who didn’t speak and didn’t communicate … You didn’t know where you were at any point, it was like some ridiculously hardcore type of Edwardian therapy.’

In 1996 Bell had been joined by his partner Jacqui Rice and, in a move that signalled the label’s ambitions, Domino signed Pavement. The band came back with one of their most coherent and immediate records, Brighten the Corners. Pavement had been absent for two years and upon their return found themselves becoming the toast of London and something of an exit strategy for bands stuck in the prolix deflation of Britpop.

‘They came back with Brighten the Corners,’ says Bell. ‘Everyone was like, “All right, this is what a band should really be about.” They had a lot of stuff that people were jealous of. They had tunes and this nonchalant glamour, they had the songs, and people could see that this band were just making it up as they went along with this outrageous amount of talent. I think they all wished they were a bit more like them, ’cause they’d all been playing pretty serious career games in the West End of London.’

Blur’s self-titled fifth album was released on the same day as Brighten the Corners and along with dressing in faded baseball T-shirts rather than Fred Perry, the band name-checked Pavement in interviews.

A year later Domino released Either/Or by the Portland singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, an acute and wistful collection of observational songwriting. It quickly connected with an audience, occupying the space that had been opened by Nirvana’s bruised and broken Unplugged in New York.

Nirvana’s former agent, Russell Warby, had been approached from the States to book Smith his first European tour, and slowly developed a relationship with the singer. ‘He used to like staying at the Russell Hotel in London, because the staff were so rubbish that they would never get his messages to him or put his calls through. I went to visit him in the studio and we had a little chat and he was like, “I’ve really got this idea, I’ve got to get it done,” and you could see him burning – something he needed to put down and he went off and he was recording immediately. He had a terrible temper, I never really saw it in effect but he used to talk about it and you’d have conversations about him getting into fights.’

After Either/Or Domino released the rest of Smith’s catalogue, which received plaudits and allowed the label to position itself a little nearer to the centre ground. ‘After years of real struggle it just seemed so painful, this going to the media saying, “You’ve got to listen to these people, Will and Bill. These are the best writers around, these songs are going to last for decades,” and try really hard to get a picture with a review and then after Elliot, Will came back as Bonnie Prince Billy, and suddenly everyone was just like, “These are masterpieces.”’

The renewed interest in contemplative singer-songwriting was not without its drawbacks. Domino was deluged with tapes from a succession of earnest young men who had poured their life experience into newly purchased Martin-copy acoustic guitars. Several of them were signed by the majors and launched to critical acclaim.

‘That all fed into everybody walking around saying, “Quiet is the new loud,” or something ridiculous,’ says Bell, ‘because then you got lots of rubbish English people playing acoustic music.’

The glow of Either/Or was short-lived for the label as the music it had represented started to fragment. ‘I just felt that this amazing generation of Americans that we’d been involved with was kind of ending in some way,’ says Bell. ‘Pavement broke up in November ’99, The Trux broke up about six months later, Sebadoh disintegrated around the same time and Elliott was off with DreamWorks.’

Domino saw turn-of-the-millennium success with Four Tet and a move away from acoustic music. It also opened a small office in New York where many of its releases found a larger audience than in the UK. Despite taking such steps towards growth, Bell, a positive and optimistic person by nature, was finding his frustration with the industry starting to harden. ‘I got very disillusioned,’ he says. ‘It got very harsh in the early 2000s, it became so painful financially, just constantly up against it finding the money to pay the rent and being able to do anything. We were definitely planning to stop the whole thing and give the tapes back to the artists and burn it down in some sort of KLF-type stunt and move on. There were definitely some pretty blue moments but maybe there’s always the glint that there’s something round the corner. But there was this long period of nothingness, just like, “Holy fuck, where are we going to find anything?”’

* One of the tour’s most celebrated concerts was at Newport TJs. A recording of the banter between the audience members and bands was eventually released on vinyl. One memorable heckle aimed at Huggy Bear includes the repeated phrase ‘less structure, less structure’.

20 Is This It?

Jeannette Lee and Geoff Travis in the offices of Rough Trade (photograph by Rob Murray used by kind permission of the photographer)

‘Champagne Supernova’, the final song on Oasis’s second album What’s The Story (Morning Glory)? contained the lyric, ‘Where were you when we were getting high?’ It could have been directed to Alan McGee, who had been almost entirely absent from the band’s tumultuous ascendancy. After a year-long period of recovery and convalescence McGee reacquainted himself with the label, which had moved to newly acquired offices, a converted school building in the salubrious Primrose Hill, a location that suited Creation’s rising profile as Britain’s most successful record company.

To long-term employees, it seemed that McGee had weathered his problems with alcohol and drugs reasonably well. In his sobriety he had a new-found relish in the more mundane and technical aspects of the company; the drug-fuelled talk of a band on Creation selling a million was now, thanks to Oasis, stone-cold sober fact. ‘I think, in some ways Alan returned and enjoyed himself with more satisfaction,’ says James Kyllo. ‘It was a very, very dynamic time, so much had to be dealt with and our release schedule got very heavy, especially after Oasis.’

McGee also found he was the head of a company that had shifted its emphasis. Creation’s principal marketing device had consisted of providing vicarious rock ’n’ roll thrills and guest-list places for journalists, record-store buyers and distribution companies. Tim Abbott had harnessed such devil-may-care amateurism into an aspirational and inclusive USP for Oasis; the rest of Creation’s roster would now benefit from the cold and exact science of competitive, target-led, High Street marketing. Creation released three singles from Teenage Fanclub’s Grand Prix. Each one was accorded a budget of £100,000 to enable a guaranteed Top Twenty chart position. Before the additional costs of promoting and marketing the album were considered, Creation were spending more on each of Grand Prix’s singles than the band had spent on recording their last two albums.

Upon his return McGee embraced something of a portfolio career. As well as being MD of Creation he was now advising New Labour on its Creative Industries strategy and the party’s rather vague ideas about engagement with young people. While in recovery, McGee had rediscovered his childhood love of Rangers. As football became a key signifier of the period, McGee’s renewed interest in the game was focused on Chelsea, where he and Ed Ball took up their positions in a box every Saturday.* As a man now in demand in the broadsheets and business press – where he was usually profiled as Mr Oasis – his opinion was regularly sought and he became something of a celebrity. Behind the smartened-up high-flyer executive image, flashes of the former, quixotic, McGee still surfaced. In 1997 he and Ed Ball made a drum-and-bass LP.

The Creation tradition of hangers-on was maintained, along with the ritual of finding jobs for the boys and the girls. The new, user-friendly Creation drew its support staff from a different set of characters from those with which it had once partied hard. Rather than drug dealers and club promoters, Creation now offered short-term employment to associates of the era’s rising celebrity class. ‘Ed Ball gave up Chelsea when they sacked Vialli,’ says Kyllo, ‘but we had Chelsea footballers come to the Primrose Hill office and Alan would take them round the warehouse and hand out CDs to them. We even had a Chelsea footballer’s girlfriend join the staff at one point.’

Whatever his own lifestyle regime, McGee was aware that some of the rock ’n’ roll behaviour that had made Westgate Street’s reputation had survived the move to Creation’s new offices. ‘They had orgies in Primrose Hill apparently,’ he says, ‘but they were all too scared of me and I was never invited.’

A consequence of Oasis’s unprecedented success was that Creation became heavy with bands beholden to their sound and image, most notably Heavy Stereo and Hurricane #1. For a label that was now marketing-led and experiencing era-defining volumes of sales, such bands were duly expected to succeed. While no one at Creation was anticipating Heavy Stereo or Hurricane #1 to reach the sales heights of Oasis, the bands were duly processed through the marketing machine at Primrose Hill, all to very little effect.

Mark Bowen had been brought up in the hand-to-mouth culture of pre-Sony Creation and was now the label’s A&R. The change in the label’s climate provoked the odd moment of culture shock. Creation was now a highly staffed operation and one that had adjusted to the requirements of the Top Ten market. ‘There was probably a point in about ’98,’ he says, ‘where for the first time I’d go and see a band and think, this is amazing, I love it, but obviously it’s not so good for Creation.’

The rest of the industry was equally well positioned to sell guitar bands, as the second or third wave of Britpop saw major-label A&Rs stick rigidly to the formula and sign up anyone playing Camden who exhibited the necessary hallmarks of braggadocio and a retro guitar. ‘Suddenly you’d go to the Falcon or the Dublin Castle,’ says Bowen, ‘and there’s basically a load of blokes with their metaphorical chequebooks out. You’re watching the same band and thinking, whether good or bad, these are bands that would’ve signed to indies, and made records, and suddenly, before they’d made a demo or done three shows, they were signed to major labels and off you go.’

Bowen ignored the Camden hopefuls and signed a group that was in the experimental-melodic tradition of Creation’s early Nineties vintage: Super Furry Animals, a Welsh band based in Cardiff. ‘It was pretty old-school Creation in how it all happened,’ he says. ‘The demos were amazing and Alan didn’t care that they’d sing in Welsh. He was very supportive. Later on it was Alan who insisted that we put out “The Man Don’t Give a Fuck” as an A-side.’

Bowen’s experience of the Welsh language punk scene of the late Eighties, when bands like Datblygu and Y Cruff mixed nationalist politics with a ferocious, angry, noise, was a cultural heritage he shared with the band. ‘These were people my age with my background,’ he says. ‘Slightly different, given that they were north Wales and Welsh-speaking and I was from Cardiff, but they had been Mary Chain tribute bands singing in Welsh, growing up they had been as obsessed with Creation, as I was.’

Behind the monolith of brand Oasis, Creation’s release schedule started to reveal hints that McGee had refamiliarised himself with some of his impetuous and mischievous tendencies. Along with encouraging and financing Super Furry Animals’ purchase of a tank, he had used Oasis’s money to finance releases by Nick Heyward and offered the Sex Pistols’ bassist Glen Matlock a deal. Some of the Creation old guard were also encouraged to enjoy themselves. At any given point Ed Ball had at least two records in production; he even reconvened his pre-Television Personalities band, the Teenage Filmstars, for an album. Joe Foster returned from the wilderness and a mooted Slaughter Joe LP was pencilled in for release. Most improbably of all, Pat Fish, the Jazz Butcher, started a new project, Sumosonic, that explored keyboards and techno rhythms. Sumosonic’s line-up consisted of Fish and three female models.†

McGee was no longer as close as he had been to Primal Scream; the differences in their lifestyle made it all but impossible for him to spend any kind of time in their company. The band had been through similar highs and lows of the kind that had damaged McGee, and had developed a bunker mentality from which they regrouped to release the album Vanishing Point in 1997. A dense and brooding record, it punctured the death throes of Britpop with a sense of anger and dread. In true Primal Scream fashion a rather heavy-handed and curatorial referencing accompanied its release. The album artwork was designed to the exact specification of the house style of the reggae label Blood and Fire, and the album’s second single, ‘Star’, featured a photograph of a Black Panther on its cover. If a little incongruous, it provided light relief from the succession of cagoule-wearing likely lads filling up the racks in HMV.

However much he enjoyed the limelight and Creation’s worldwide reputation, McGee was growing listless. When Oasis played to the multitude at Knebworth for two nights, in his heart of hearts he registered that the moment had peaked. ‘I love rock ’n’ roll,’ he says, ‘but there’s a point, even with me, when Oasis were getting into helicopters at Knebworth and it was a 125,000-crowd giggle. That was the point that I thought, exit, and I didn’t have the balls to do it; and I should’ve done it then. It would have been a better statement to end it at Knebworth, and let them just start their own record company after that.’

Instead one of his next signings would prove to be one of Creation’s most controversial. Kevin Rowland had endured some painful moments and wilderness years after the million-selling career of Dexys Midnight Runners. Having been in and out of recovery, he was ready to make a new record and McGee had no hesitation in wanting to work with one of his heroes. Rowland recorded an LP of cover versions, whose lyrics he altered to make them more autobiographical and reflect the experiences he had undergone. Entitled My Beauty, the record featured some soaring performances from Rowland that were equal to the best of his Dexys work. My Beauty should have found a willing audience, one that wanted to welcome a returning hero who had found salvation in a set of poignant life-affirming songs. Along with finding meaning in material that he had first heard as a teenager, Rowland had also taken to wearing a ‘man-dress’, a costume to which he occasionally added jewellery and make-up, something he did for the album’s sleeve, which featured the singer in a purple frock.

In more enlightened times, the gesture might have been considered a further example of Rowland’s eccentricities. The singer had often changed his appearance – Dexys Midnight Runners had variously dressed as dockers, gypsies and Wall Street preppies, but at the height of the Loaded era, the majority of his original fans found his new wardrobe shocking.

The video for the album’s single, ‘Concrete and Clay’, was also far from straightforward. In between close-ups of Rowland’s stockinged thighs, it featured the singer gyrating provocatively with exotic dancers, as backing singers, dressed as angels, cooed approvingly.

Creation’s marketing expertise and budgets ensured that the image of a cross-dressing Rowland was fly-posted across the country, something that, rather than promoting the album, guaranteed it almost certain death. ‘If it hadn’t been for the cover with Kevin in a sarong then the bottom line is it would’ve hit the Radio 2 audiences,’ says McGee. ‘It’s an amazing record. But you know what, Kevin was Kevin and there’s nobody can tell Kevin what to do. People thought I’d put him up to it!’

Another factor was playing on McGee’s mind. Without any common purpose or enemy to fight for or against, he had, in its smooth-running success, grown increasingly bored of the label and had mentally begun to wind Creation down. ‘I was left with two choices with My Beauty’, he says. ‘Put it out like that or don’t. It was the end of Creation anyway. I was really at the end of it, phoning up Dick and saying, “Fucking hell, I’ve just got so fed up with this label,” and I think it was like a breath of fresh air for him to actually tell the truth finally: “I’ve been fed up for years, Alan, and I’ve been waiting for you to tell me that you couldn’t be bothered any more.”’

As McGee started examining the paperwork of the Sony/Creation deal to assess the ramifications of closing the company down, it also became apparent that the label might end on a high. Primal Scream had recorded a new album, XTRMNTR, that not only matched the creative peak of Screamadelica, it was its menacing, nihilistic animus.

Jeff Barrett had always been involved with Primal Scream, either formally or informally, or usually both. He was significantly involved in XTRMNTR as he helped supervise the release in the absence of Creation’s MDs, who were distracted by the winding-down process, as Sony, McGee, Green and their lawyers negotiated a settlement. ‘Bobby [Gillespie]’s really upset that we weren’t around for XTRMNTR, which is fair enough,’ says McGee, ‘but I couldn’t stand Sony. Sony realised that on our overhead they could actually save half a million by letting us go six months early and at that point I was like fucking off the roof, man, “Come on!”’

XTRMNTR was Creation’s last album and its last masterpiece. After a long succession of half-baked, marketing-heavy records, the label had returned to its roots and released a record of energised, mercurial rock ’n’ roll. As well as featuring one of Kevin Shields’s finest guitar lines, the closing track, ‘Shoot Speed/Kill Light’ reintroduced the word ‘speed’ into the Creation lexicon. During its early, folded-sleeve years, speed had been Creation’s key signifier and featured in many of its song titles. On its final release the label was once more celebrating velocity.

McGee encountered no little degree of rancour at his decision to close Creation. Primal Scream especially, the band whose members he had known since their teens and been the label’s hallmark, felt abandoned. ‘I never said it was for life. I never said I was going to be Primal Scream’s dad,’ he says, ‘and you know what, I’m not perfect and maybe I did leave at a really rotten time for them in particular, and, you know what, I apologise. I fucked off, and people got pissed off. But this is where people don’t understand me, I don’t care about indie music, and it’s not because I think I’m better than indie music, it was a means to an end.’

Away from the fall-out of the label’s demise Dick Green had quietly approached Bowen about the possibility of doing something together. They had developed a close working relationship separate from the Oasis engine room, one in which they had maintained the label’s rapport with bands that had been signed before the move to Primrose Hill, notably the Boo Radleys and Teenage Fanclub. Green suggested to Bowen that if they were to work together, then the pre-gold-record era of Creation, for which Green held the most affection, should be their inspiration. ‘Dick was sat there and said, “Look, I’d really like to do another label,”’ says Bowen, ‘“but it’d be really totally different to what we’re doing: no staff, no office, just real back to basics, start again, start right at the beginning, get away from all this,” and I didn’t even have to think twice.’

A year after Creation was laid to rest McGee started a new label, Poptones, with the financial backing of the founders of Richer Sounds. Poptones was short-lived and achieved worldwide success with The Hives, something that further convinced McGee that he had grown bored not only of Creation, but of the music business as a whole. Green and Bowen launched their new company Wichita with minimum fanfare and little reference to their previous lives and slowly grew into the artist-led label they had imagined. ‘Dick’s a magnificent individual,’ says McGee. ‘To be honest, he did what I failed to do, which was have two successful record companies in a row.’

*

Creation ceased trading in 1999. Three years later Daniel Miller sold Mute to EMI. Miller had taken the momentous decision once he realised that he had fallen into a business cycle that was becoming as stressful as it was repetitive. ‘At various times during Mute’s histories, we’ve made redundancies and rehired,’ he says. ‘You have to over-hire to manage the situation, but then you have to say, “Well, look, we can’t afford it any more.” And it was very painful. The whole Britpop thing fucked it up for me, added to which it was a terrible time for music – it felt like we had fallen into a loop. You couldn’t get any press or any radio. The media was very weak and very unimaginative, and it felt like this was the end of music.’

Miller’s frustrations were exemplified by the lack of coverage for the album Play by Moby. It was the artist’s fifth album in what had been a genre-hopping and sporadic career, one that had started with a no. 1 single and the worldwide hit ‘Go’, followed by cover versions of Joy Division. It was the kind of career path that was no longer of interest to a success-driven media, one that now gauged an artist’s relevance by making comparisons with the exponential curve of million-selling guitar bands. Play was a collection of electronic torch songs that featured ethnographic gospel samples and crisp production. It was also one of the first albums to benefit from the new strategy of synchs, or synchronisations, the use of an artist’s material in an advert. Synchs had started in the mid-Eighties as ad land excavated Fifties and Sixties soul singles to sell Levi’s 501 denim. By the mid-Nineties the trend had developed to include songs by contemporary artists, offering a reputationally risky but instant return in a manner which the Top Forty charts could no longer guarantee. By the release of Play, Moby issued a press release indicating that the ubiquity of synching had reached a new level – according to the PR every track on the album was being used in an advert.

‘It wasn’t every track,’ says Miller. ‘That’s a myth perpetuated by Moby, which backfired on him I think. I had people coming up to me saying, “How come that isn’t doing better?” and I couldn’t explain it. Radio was its usual bollocks, some excuse – too old, too young, too slow, too fast, too electronic, not electronic enough, whatever – and so when we got the opportunities we decided to take them and Moby’s always been open to that. “If the radio’s not going to fucking play it, let them hear it like this.”’

Play had coincided with Miller’s first serious experience of business difficulties. Mute hadn’t released a Depeche Mode album for several years and the band were at a hiatus. The acts that had sold healthily through Mute’s history, like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, had reached a sales plateau, one which some of the label’s newer signings would struggle to reach. ‘I’d been through this low point mid to late Nineties when actually we were in real financial trouble for the first time ever … We were managing OK but … and we were still selling lots of records overseas and getting nice advances to cover that, but the underlying business was bad and I was in a position where I was starting to have to talk to people about possibly working together.’

Mute was the last of the labels that had started in the post-punk vanguard to remain independent. If Miller was going to sell the company he was keen not to repeat the mistakes he had seen some of his contemporaries make. McGee had sold Sony 49 per cent of Creation for a tidy sum, one that was significantly increased by the success of Oasis. However, as Oasis had become a bigger entity than their record company, Creation had become the junior partner in the three-way relationship between Sony, Oasis and themselves. Although Sony technically owned the smaller half of the label, in reality they owned a great deal more.

‘I was advised by my lawyer’, says Miller, ‘that the trouble with those deals is that you’re constantly ending up negotiating for your whole life and jockeying for position. They populated Creation with people from Sony and stuff like that. I don’t know who knows what the right thing is, but any of the pros and cons of doing the deal with EMI had nothing to do with the fact that it was 49, 51 or 100 per cent – that wouldn’t have made any difference. I thought, you’re either in there or you’re not.’

Miller’s timing was propitious as he started negotiation, a process that took well over a year to complete. Mute’s luck returned and Play went on to be a blockbuster. ‘I was coming off the back of a couple of huge records, so I felt that that was probably the highest value I was going to get for the label and I was right … and then, of course, the industry then went down the tubes.’

The scale of Mute’s achievements are best illustrated by the number of artists Miller has worked with who have remained on the label. Long-term high-profile careers between artists and labels are often associated with relationships like those between Pink Floyd and the Beatles at EMI. Depeche Mode and Nick Cave have both enjoyed longer careers with Miller and Mute, a tribute to both his loyalty and his ability to recognise the shifts in the business long before his rivals. ‘The first contract I did with Depeche was well into their career,’ Miller says. ‘We still ended up being a fifty-fifty profit share, but they had to do a contract for some other legal reasons. The way the industry’s going is more going back to that in a way, not no contracts, but more partnership. What chance has a record company got these days without being open to other things?’‡

A year before Miller and McGee sold up, they were once again joined in the market place by one of their contemporaries, one who had been a quiet background presence for most of the decade. In 1999 Geoff Travis and Jeannette Lee relaunched Rough Trade and almost instantly achieved the kind of self-contained success with which the name was associated.

Jeannette Lee had been working with Travis since Rough Trade had begun to fracture at the Seven Sisters Road office where Andy Childs had joined them as a label manager. After the dissolution of the Rough Trade group of companies in 1991, the remnants of Rough Trade Records – Travis, Lee, Andy Childs and a handful of staff – moved to a small office on Golborne Road. The premises, a ground floor and basement, were ten minutes’ walk from the original Rough Trade shop and reconnected Travis to his Ladbroke Grove roots. ‘I think Jeannette’s incredibly important to the whole thing,’ says Childs. ‘Geoff’s always relied on Jeannette’s musical knowledge and taste as well. As an A&R Geoff always talks in terms of, “We like this,” and, “We like that.” Jeannette understands the way artists think and work and can relate to them. I can’t imagine Geoff not having Jeannette there to rely on.’

As a teenager in the late Seventies Lee had worked with Don Letts in the King’s Road punk boutique, Acme Attractions, a job that placed her at the heart of the Clash’s extended west London family. During Rough Trade’s early years, she had only been familiar with Travis by sight. ‘I can remember seeing him on the Tube, I was on the Tube with Don,’ she says. ‘We got off at Marble Arch and he was in front of us with his big Afro and a big raincoat and we were like, Oh look, there’s Geoff Travis … hippie.”’

As a member of Public Image Limited, Lee had been the band’s de facto manager and had learned to negotiate and argue the band’s corner with a record company – skills which had enabled her to develop a detailed understanding of the industry and which had led her to having to liaise with some of its senior figures. ‘I was PiL’s ambassador with the record company,’ she says. ‘I always got on quite well with the individuals involved, but as far as we were concerned they were always on the other side. I met Richard Branson and people like that a lot.’

During the closure of Rough Trade, Lee and Travis had started managing bands and had their greatest success with Pulp. Lee’s experience of the business outside the Rough Trade milieu and her enthusiasm and energy revived Travis as he started to emerge from the fall-out of the label. By the mid-Nineties Lee and Travis were business partners and the idea of relaunching Rough Trade as a record company was fermenting in their minds. Once the wounds of the original company’s collapse had healed, Travis had tried a number of ways to once more use the name. One Little Indian had bought some of the catalogue and the Rough Trade name in the company’s fire sale. A mooted partnership between Travis, Lee and One Little Indian barely got off the ground and Trade 2, an imprint with Island, was equally unsuccessful.

‘I don’t think it ever went away really, the label,’ says Lee. ‘It was always rearing its head and we were trying to do it whilst doing other things full-on. It takes a few years to set something up with a new bunch of people and for it to fail … We’d probably gone through the setting-up and failing at One Little Indian and then we went through a setting-up and failing at Island, so that whole nine years was pretty much used up.’

Once the ownership had reverted to Travis and Lee they were joined by James Endeacott as the label’s head of A&R. Endeacott had had a colourful past, rooted firmly in the world of independence, and which suited his natural exuberance and his distinctive strawberry-blond curls. He had been a member of Loop, after which he had been offered a job (but no salary) at Creation during the Clerkenwell era before he eventually managed the Tindersticks.§ At Rough Trade he was given the brief to sign new talent for a new phase of the label, one that coincided with the start of a new millennium.

‘I wasn’t a spring chicken. I was in my early thirties,’ he says, ‘but this door opened: this whole possibility of the hours between six and ten when the band goes on, when I was normally travelling, now were just spent in the pub. My whole life became an endless succession of bars and gigs. Falling over and just having the best time of my life … it was brilliant.’

Rough Trade had yet to develop a fresh roster and Endeacott had licence to investigate whatever the London indie club circuit had to offer. The first handful of releases was something of a mixed bag, neither Terris, Birthday or Cadallaca would go on to releases albums. Another signing raised eyebrows as to where, exactly, the new Rough Trade’s antennae were focused. ‘We had a band called Queen Adreena,’ says Endeacott. ‘It was some kind of crazy, gothy, metal thing and the girl singer used to take her clothes off and shout.’

The signing that was to reconfirm Rough Trade as a pre-eminent independent label came from a tape that had been sent to Travis by one of his contacts, Matt Hickey, who booked the Mercury Lounge club in New York. The cassette was by the Strokes, a New York band that had recorded three songs of vintage Manhattan, street hassle rock ’n’ roll. Upon hearing the tape, Travis and Lee’s reaction was of instant air-punching excitement. ‘Geoff and Jeannette were just going crazy about it and I was just jumping up and down,’ says Endeacott. ‘They flew over to New York. Two days later, saw them in upstate New York somewhere, got back and said they’d seen the second coming! Jeannette said, “We’ve just seen this band with five of the most beautiful men you’ve ever seen.” Geoff signed them for a one-single deal and then, of course, every A&R man in New York just went mental.’

Rough Trade released the tape as a single, ‘The Modern Age’, and the Strokes flew over to London where their arrival started a music-industry bush fire. Rough Trade had taken a gamble by not trying to sign the band to a long-term deal, but the energies and hype surrounding the band left no one in any doubt that Rough Trade was at the centre of what was about to become a phenomenon. ‘It all really kicked off ’cause there was a photograph of the band sat around in this bar, and it was the first time anybody apart from Geoff and Jeannette had seen them,’ says Endeacott. ‘We got this photograph and it went in the NME, and on the Tuesday afternoon that the NME came out, the phone was just off the hook. All these people that we all knew in the business were going, “What the fuck … This band … Oh my God” … Every guy was just going, “I wanna be in that band” … Every girl was going, “I wanna shag all of them at once.”’

At the band’s first London concert in the Monarch pub in Camden, the air of anticipation was unlike anything that had been witnessed since Oasis had made their debut at the Water Rats six years earlier, as the assembled crowd witnessed the return of sharply dressed three-minute rock ’n’ roll. ‘At the end of the set Jeff Barrett from Heavenly was walking round shouting … “It’s year zero … It’s year zero … It’s year zero.”’ says Endeacott. ‘We all thought, this is something happening, this band is really going to be enormous.’

Geoff Travis had witnessed the highs and lows of hype many times in his career. While the rest of the industry and the media started to become obsessive about the potential of the Strokes, he took a more guarded view as he began to negotiate a long-term relationship for Rough Trade and the band. ‘It actually makes me really anxious when people say, “This is going to be huge,” he says. ‘It heralded the end of our Blanco y Negro relationship. When Rob Dickins left Warners he was replaced by a guy called John Reid, who couldn’t cope with the fact that bands might want to go elsewhere.’

Under Travis’s arrangement with Warners, any band he wanted to sign to Rough Trade was asked to consider signing to Blanco y Negro as an option as well. It was a situation that the new generation of Warners executives were uneasy with. ‘John Reid, because he didn’t know what he was doing basically, couldn’t handle it. So when we wanted to sign the Strokes, John Reid said, “I’ll come and see them.” That was the last thing any of us wanted. We went through this whole song and dance where he sent his American people to go and see them and talk to them. And they were all crap, just stupid absolutely bog-standard major-label A&R people, no vision, no ideas, no interest in anything other than their careers.’

Rough Trade had provoked worldwide interest in the Strokes and, with perfect timing, re-established itself as a label that was once more synonymous with a cutting edge. As the negotiations continued it looked unlikely that Rough Trade would reap the benefits of their A&R instincts, as the opportunity of working with the Strokes internationally started to recede. The band signed to Rough Trade for the UK only, where the label was at least able to profit from the breakneck success they helped generate. For Travis it was an insidious reminder that, despite Rough Trade’s peerless A&R instincts, the industry remained a flawed and intransigent environment. ‘The White Stripes was exactly the same,’ he says. ‘We wanted to sign the Whites Stripes. Jack [White] said, “We’d love to be on Rough Trade,” but we had to go through this process again, lawyers, Warners, nonsense. Basically we’d lost the two best bands of that decade because of this ridiculous Warners structure. Up until that point it hadn’t been a problem but we needed to walk away. It pulled all our energies together.’

Whatever the disappointment of failing to secure an international deal for the Strokes, Rough Trade was enjoying one of its most successful-ever periods. It was once more a label that bands wanted to work with and Endeacott was a much in demand A&R man, as a succession of managers and lawyers beat a hopeful path to his door. The presence of entertainment lawyers was symbolic of the changes that the music business had undergone in the Nineties, as corporate governance and top-heavy deals had superseded the age of the independent maverick. ‘Bands had done half a gig and suddenly got a lawyer,’ says Endeacott. ‘When I was in a band, I didn’t know what a lawyer was and I certainly didn’t care. The amount of demos we were getting was going crazy. I got a phone call from a woman called Bani, a lawyer at East West Records and she said, “Look, I’ve got this band I really want you to see. They’re called the Libertines … I’ll come round and pick you up and we’ll go over to this rehearsal space in Old Street. It’s like Mick and Keith or John and Paul, they’re as important as that.” … I was going, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, whatever, heard it all a million times.” But I agreed to go, so I wait for her to turn up, and it’s a Lincoln car with a driver with a fucking hat on in the front.’

Even by his not-easily-shocked standards, Endeacott was taken aback by the scene that awaited him as he took his seat in the back of the car. Having been told he was off to see the future of rock ’n’ roll he found himself in a rather unusual environment. ‘Bani has two plastic bags,’ he says, ‘and pulls out an assortment of nuts, crisps, Coca-Cola, Fanta, beer – just in case – lots of nibbles and soft drinks. This is how rock ’n’ roll it was. Then she starts telling me how I’m just about to meet Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, how these two people are going to change the face of music, but there’s a problem. “There are four of them but the bass player hasn’t turned up, so it’s just going to be Pete and Carl at the front on bass and guitar. And the thing is, they haven’t got a drummer, but this guy Gary, my PA’s boyfriend, he plays in Eddie Grant’s touring band, he’ll stand in.” I’m thinking, what the fuck am I going into? The whole thing’s a shambles and you’re just feeding me with nuts and crisps. It can’t get any weirder than this, but, of course, it does get weirder.’

In the two years of concentrated, and at times very ugly, chaos that followed, it was the Libertines’ and particularly Peter Doherty’s behaviour, rather than their music that received the coverage – coverage that reached the unenviable position of being a mainstay in the tabloids. When Rough Trade signed the band, no one could have predicted the vortex of drug abuse, criminality and acrimony that was to follow. Once he had negotiated his first improbable encounter with the band in a rehearsal studio, Endeacott went to see the band in their natural habitat, the Rhythm Factory in Bethnal Green, a dive venue in a part of town then rarely visited by the music industry. ‘I walked in to the Rhythm Factory,’ he says. ‘It was like a freak show. Everybody was in their late teens or early twenties. It was full of middle-class dropouts having a year out of doing whatever. It was full of artists, full of poets, film-makers and actors, all people with big hats and all people snorting and cavorting and everything else. The Libertines were part of this scene and they came on at about two in the morning and it was absolutely electrifying.’

Endeacott had encountered a gap-year trust-fund version of Paris-in-the-Thirties bohemia, in which the Libertines occupied the role of dissolute musicians, playing scratchy songs to a self-consciously roué crowd. ‘They were, like, the centre of this whole scene and what it took – it took someone like me or whoever it would’ve been, but it would’ve happened eventually – to take them out of that scene, to make them realise what they were. The first few gigs they did, that scene followed them everywhere, then slowly but surely that scene drifted away and carried on without them and then they became the Libertines.’

The Libertines recorded their debut with Mick Jones, a friend of Lee’s since Acme Attractions, who had been suggested as a producer as much for his experience of wayward behaviour in the studio as for his technical ability behind the mixing desk. Jones’s first encounter with the band was enough to convince him that he was starting a colourful working relationship. ‘Mick was talking to Carl,’ says Lee, ‘then Peter comes into the studio on a moped with a six-pack, that was his first introduction, and everything was like that with them. They’d play at people’s houses as an easy way to make pocket money. They used to charge people ten quid a head to get into those things and made quite a lot of money – enough for a good night out.’

The music press, who perceived the band as an English riff on the Strokes, broadly welcomed the Libertines album. Where the New Yorkers had a louche, whip-crack attitude to playing their instruments that suggested they had digested the ennui of The Andy Warhol Diaries, the Libertines played with more of a busking shuffle that was redolent of the clatter of Steptoe’s yard. Once stories started to emerge from Bethnal Green, of the band playing hastily arranged gigs in their own flat and sharing demos online with fans, media interest started to grow. ‘All around the first album there was no tabloids not at all,’ says Endeacott. ‘It was only after the first album all that started to happen – the album had been out but the reception was pretty lukewarm.’

The idea of hosting gigs in their own front room and posting their music on the Internet for free connected the band to their fast-growing audience instantly. It also allowed the Libertines to become a sensation without recourse to the traditional press. In an age of what was starting to be called peer-to-peer media, the Libertines were becoming a peer-to-peer band, a position they used to project an image of devil-may-care lawlessness. Doherty in particular had no interest in the protocols of the music business and he would soon display a similar attitude towards the law.

Part of the inspiration for the ad hoc Libertines concerts came from their agent, Russell Warby. The band had initially smarted from accusations that they couldn’t play, so had asked him to book them a run of concerts which they would play anonymously to sharpen up their act. ‘Early on, when they allegedly couldn’t play,’ says Warby, ‘they needed to do some gigs and I booked them out at weekends and they went out as Lombard, Lombard and Spaniel, which had been the names on their neighbours’ doorbells, and that was how they were billed. I told the promoters, “Look, it’s going to be the next big thing,” and people were like, “Oh, he’s just done the Strokes,” so we booked them out at weekends and they supported Guns N’ Roses tribute bands in Harlow and all this sort of stuff, four days a week for three or four weeks.’

By the end of the tour the Lombard, Lombard and Spaniel shows were being labelled ‘guerrilla gigs’ and had become part of the band’s myth; a profile was developing of a London band that was rejecting all the industry conventions and doing whatever it liked. To a young audience growing up with the Internet, this was one of the most invigorating things to happen to guitar music; to the press, it was a story that was turning into a saga, one that would keep their news pages lively with gossip for a year. Though still largely a music-press phenomenon, the Libertines were starting to draw the attention of famous faces and the band became a beacon for decadent, elegantly wasted behaviour and, where celebrity and drugs led, the tabloids and furore followed. ‘I knew it was going to go quite far down a road but I wasn’t sure how far,’ says Lee. ‘Pretty soon I realised that it was going to go all the way, but in the beginning it’s very exciting to meet somebody that’s got a full picture of what they want to do, but absolutely no barriers either. I realised Peter was going to go down any road he wanted, and to go as far as he can.’

The extent of Peter Doherty’s problems started to reveal themselves at Rough Trade when the singer would arrive at the Golborne Road offices in varying states of consciousness and disarray. ‘There were knocks on the door from Pete turning up at quarter past ten in the morning,’ says Endeacott. ‘Pete walking in with just a pair of jeans on and his body all cut, saying, “I want £180, can you lend me £180?” and me going outside to talk to him and going to my own bank and getting money out to just give to him and never getting it back.’

As a member of PiL and as an initiate of the paranoid goings on at John Lydon’s Gunter Grove house in the early Eighties, Lee had witnessed more extreme behaviour than either Travis or Endeacott. She had also experienced the effects and fall-out of hard drugs on some of her friends, but was nevertheless astonished by the escalation of chaos round Doherty, once crack consumption became a feature of his behaviour. ‘It was probably one of the hardest situations ever’, she says. ‘It was very exciting for a while, for a long time really, but it did get to a point where it was a completely unmanageable situation on every level. You couldn’t deal with the manager, you couldn’t deal with anyone, and it was sad to watch them throwing it all away.’

As Doherty became a one-man cause célèbre, in and out of courts and the newspapers, the Libertines’ career was suspended. His side project, Babyshambles, became his main focus, although the group was little more than a vehicle for his erratic behaviour. ‘He was careering round London in a stolen car with someone else’s money,’ says Warby, ‘ringing me up saying, “Can you book a Babyshambles tour? I’ve got this mate, he’s got an Evening Standard van,” and I’m thinking, that guy’s a drug dealer … so you’re going to tour in that … so I say, “Come to the office Peter, come to the office and we’ll talk about it,” and I’d try and talk him into handing the car keys back to this geezer who’s going to kill him. It wasn’t long after that he entered his first stint of rehabilitation.’

Lee, Endeacott and Travis decided to intervene and attempted to place Doherty in a drug recovery programme. As an indication of how out of control the situation was, the only way in which they could manage to get him to enter the clinic was to kidnap him. ‘We kidnapped him one day and drove him to a rehab clinic,’ says Lee, ‘but he wasn’t ready. It was emotionally exhausting and you realise that all that potential is just going to fizzle away … that’s very hard, that’s hard to deal with and it’s hard on so many levels.’

Endeacott was as entangled in Doherty’s self-destructive conduct as Lee, but had also experienced life on the road with the band in the States. There, he had been thrown into the uncontrollable chaos of their behaviour at all hours of the day. As someone whose A&R working methods involved becoming a surrogate member of the band, he had become submerged in their recklessness. Once Doherty was placed in rehab, Endeacott took him some clothes for his stay, a moment in which the extent of the turmoil finally hit home. ‘I went, “You need help.” He said, “I know, but I don’t want to be here,”’ says Endeacott. ‘I was holding all these clothes I’d bought from Primark and I remember getting in my car and crying halfway up the road. It was awful but I was just so emotionally involved with them.’

The stint in rehab was a failure and Rough Trade reached a point where they felt unable to continue working with Doherty. By releasing his music and trying to maintain a dialogue with whoever, on any given day, he had decided to call his manager, the label was in effect contributing to his problems. ‘We’d written him a letter saying “We’re not going to finance your drug habit, don’t come and ask us for any more money. We’re not going to make a record with you until you get some kind of help,”’ says Lee. ‘“We’ve taken you to rehab that didn’t work, we don’t know what else to do,” and the three of us signed it and we took it round. We had a meeting with him and we gave him this letter, and I think at that point he realised that everyone was shutting down. Until that point he was able to get people to do what he wanted, pretty much, with charm alone.’

Throughout the period of Doherty’s waywardness, Rough Trade managed to sustain the reputation it had regained as a label since its relaunch. A run of critical and commercial releases by Arcade Fire, Antony and the Johnsons, Sufjan Stevens and the Hidden Cameras, to name a few, saw Rough Trade operating at a creative peak and one to rival its Ladbroke Grove heyday. The fact remained that the Libertines had become a constant drain on their resources, and Lee and Endeacott in particular were suffering from exhaustion. ‘Collectively, we’d done whatever we can,’ says Lee. ‘It’s taking up every minute, trying to sort out dodgy deals, every day for whatever reason, taking up everybody’s time and we’re not able to function.’

A new figure entered the Libertines saga, someone whom Doherty hoped had had enough experience of drugs and the industry to piece the band back together. ‘I think everyone at Rough Trade was being knackered,’ says Warby. ‘Then, at some point, you’ve got Alan McGee getting involved as the manager. He rang me up and said, “I want to manage the Libertines.” and I was like, “Are you fucking crazy?” and he was like, “We’re going to do two Brixton Academies and prove to the radio programmes they’re a really big band,” and I’m like, “OK.” Anyway, he worked out subsequently that I wasn’t lying.’

McGee’s episode as the Libertines manager was brief and miserable. While he had seen all manner of bad behaviour and debauchery done in the name of spindly rock ’n’ roll, the true extent of the suffering caused by the various addictions, in around the band, especially Doherty’s, dissuaded him from getting involved in the long term. ‘It was an incredibly unhappy experience,’ says McGee. ‘I’d been through my own drug wars. I’m not being judgemental, it’s just hard for me personally, to watch that, and I eventually couldn’t really be around him, because it was really difficult watching.’ McGee had ambitions for the Libertines in which he saw them turning into a big-selling people’s band. If the attention around them could be harnessed into a narrative that would work to their favour in the tabloids, then there was every chance that, with the right song, the band could connect with a wider audience. A few weeks into working with them he realised they would be lucky to spend even a few hours in a recording studio together. ‘A whole team of people helped make them big, James Endeacott, Jeannette and Russell Warby,’ he says. ‘I don’t think I was any more important than anybody else or anything but it was just that it was a very hard time.’

It became inevitable that whatever support structure had been put in place, Doherty’s behaviour, the endless brushes with the law and the constant tabloid intrusion made the situation unmanageable. As Doherty began spending more time in prison, so his behaviour became determined by his experiences inside. During a spell in Pentonville he had befriended a man known as ‘the General’, whom Doherty, upon his release, appointed as his manager.

‘When he got out he told the General that the General could be on his record,’ says Lee, ‘so there was that going on. Then the General was hoping that he would get a deal, so he was coming to the office looking for his own deal. Peter had a whole collection of Jaguars, cheap ones that he was buying for, like, 600 quid. He’d drive them and then leave them places, and the General was always coming in, speaking in a really broad Jamaican accent, saying, “You have to give us money, Peter’s Jaguar’s broken down on the M11 and it’s gone to a garage.” It was like that every day. Every day it was something, this has happened, that’s happened.’

Rough Trade managed to release a second Libertines album along with a Babyshambles LP before relations between the band, their hangers-on, their drug dealers and everyone around them acting as an on-call support structure, permanently disintegrated.

‘It all ended up with everybody arguing and everybody behind the scenes blaming each other,’ says Endeacott. ‘What we should have all been doing was making sure that Pete wasn’t descending into hell, but Pete was descending into hell, and whatever we wanted to do, nobody could stop it anyway, because he had a wish. Geoff and Jeannette loved them to bits, but Geoff didn’t know how to deal with it, he really didn’t, bless his heart. We were at one NME awards ceremony when they won best band and Pete was so obviously out of his mind on smack, collecting the award, that Geoff just got up before he’d finished the speech and walked out. He just found the whole thing disgusting.’

Lee and Travis bounced back from the unravelling of the Libertines to concentrate on cementing Rough Trade’s reputation as one of the most enduring and respected labels in the world. Rough Trade is well into its third decade and Lee and Travis’s partnership has now lasted for more than two-thirds of the company’s history. Despite this they still encounter some of the narrow-mindedness against which Rough Trade was originally founded. ‘A lot of people think we’re a couple, a lot of people think I’m his assistant, a lot of people think I’m his wife’, says Lee. ‘It’s so subconscious, that’s the really difficult thing about it. If you walk into a room, people will be really nice to both of you, but there’ll be a little extra bit of respect to the guy standing next to you ’cause they just assume that he’s the boss – that’s so ingrained.’

* Such was Creation’s infatuation with Chelsea that the label’s website was bedecked in the colour blue and used the visual metaphor of football scarves throughout. Keeping up the theme, the site’s categories included ‘Team Talk’, ‘From the Bench’ and ‘The Dressing Room’.

† As well as the tank purchase, perhaps McGee’s most radical and enjoyable moment of post-Oasis largesse was to record and release The John McGee Orchestra presents Slinky. The album consisted entirely of McGee’s father conducting orchestral arrangements of Ed Ball songs.

‡  In 2010 Miller regained control of Mute from EMI and the label is once more an independent. EMI, however, suffered a more moribund fate. Mute’s former parent company was sold at a loss in a fire sale by its final owners, the private equity group Terra Firma.

§ Endeacott, along with his band mates, is featured on the cover of Loop’s Heaven’s End, first on the left.

21 Fake Tales of San Francisco

Flyer for Franz Ferdinand’s tour to promote their debut single ‘Darts of Pleasure’ (Matthew Cooper archive)

The re-emergence of Rough Trade in the early 2000s coincided with a renewed interest in guitar music, nearly all of which was released by independent record companies. At the start of the twenty-first century, indie music was once again the province of indie labels. The previously moribund live sector became a buoyant market again as, after years of dance music’s dominance, bands started touring to significant audiences again.

Russell Warby was witnessing the impact of the Strokes, as dozens of bands that had been inspired by the New Yorkers started a first run at the indie gig circuit. The NME took a renewed interest in guitar bands and began branding tours and acting as an agency for companies that wanted to be associated with the new indie cool. Warby noticed that the majors were slow to respond, something that was becoming a feature of their behaviour as the new century brought a new set of complexities. The most significant of these, the Internet, was still being underestimated by the corporate entertainment industry. ‘I thought the majors should’ve really invested in the live music scene,’ he says. ‘I was like, “Get in, buy the venues,” but they catastrophically missed the boat, ’cause, whether it was the Mackenzie Group or O2, those people then did it.’ Companies like O2 had been happy to brand tours via NME before deciding their money was better spent cutting out the middlemen and acquiring the venues outright.

One band quickly followed the Strokes into becoming a phenomenon, the White Stripes. Warby had been interested in booking the duo a tour before they had a record deal in place in the UK. ‘Sleater Kinney took them out on support and they told me about them,’ he says. ‘I started to ask people in America, “What do you know about this band?”, ’cause there was really no way to contact them. And if Jack White walks into the room you don’t need to think twice about it.’

The White Stripes had released two albums on Sympathy for the Record Industry, an American independent run with little regard for the mainstream. Unlike any of the label’s previous acts, the duo were already becoming a word-of-mouth sensation in America, where they operated as a self-sufficient, permanently working red-and-white spectacle.

‘It was interesting, ’cause they hadn’t engaged a manager when I first spoke to them,’ says Warby. ‘The guy they hired was their lawyer, who became their manager, and I did a couple of those record company meetings.’ The White Stripes prompted a major-label gold rush, but the band decided to work with Richard Russell and XL, a decision that was regarded as counter-intuitive by much of the industry. To close observers of the label, Russell’s decision to match the majors’ offers made perfect A&R sense; it was also a much-remarked-upon piece of music-business body language. A few years earlier Russell had signed Badly Drawn Boy, a move that confirmed his and XL’s shift from being the Prodigy’s label into becoming a free-thinking record company that placed little or no emphasis on genre. ‘In a way, Richard Russell was a lot more corporate than these major people,’ says Warby. ‘He was, “Yeah, I like that, they’re not pretending. These people want to sell records.”’

As well as signing with a label that had the experience of worldwide sales through the independent system, part of the band’s decision was based on the fact that, by signing to XL, they managed to retain the impression of remaining one step ahead. ‘There’s a thread between all these things that we do,’ says Russell. ‘It doesn’t have to be evident, but it’s there: quality, originality, and that’s it. I think the White Stripes chose us partly because we were just a bit unlikely. The dangerous thing was the hype there – the media got very excited, but at the point it happened to Jack and Meg, they were on their third record. They’d played a lot of shows, and when the media showed an interest in them, they’d already got used to the media not being interested in them, so they were able to be very gracious about it in one sense, but maintain a lot of mystique.’

*

Mark Bowen and Dick Green had been slowly turning Wichita into a label in their own image. Wichita largely released music by bands with roots in the American underground. My Morning Jacket and Bright Eyes were as far away from Creation’s final few years as could be imagined. Their next signing, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, would see the label briefly join in the explosion of hype around new raucous rock ’n’ roll.

‘We found a demo online,’ says Bowen, ‘went out there, and saw them play and thought, she is incredible, I love this band … sat there. I was as involved as I’d ever been with any band. They went straight to the Top Forty. I went down to Brighton for the first show and there was a queue of 500 people outside the building. I thought, well, this is how it’s going to be for ever and ever, I can do this, I’ll sign bands it’ll always be like this – and it wasn’t. It was a really special moment, like the Strokes, people were excited again. We did a second single, charted that and thought, this is all good.’

The Strokes and the White Stripes had set a template: a hyper-confident, visually arresting American band arrives in the UK and plays under-capacity venues and becomes cover material before their first record is out. In the case of the Strokes and the White Stripes this was followed by a residency at, or near, the top of the album charts. Bowen and Green realised that, regardless of what they thought, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs looked set to follow the same trajectory. Their arrangements with the band had been conducted over a handshake. As the world became smitten with the band and particularly Karen O’s iconic fashion sense and stage presence, Wichita began the process of signing the deal off with all the necessary legal formalities.

‘We kept saying to the manager, “We’d like to have some paperwork, ’cause everybody’s starting to think they’re going to do a big deal,”’ says Bowen. ‘He was like, “No, no need, we’re not going to sign with anyone else.” I’d got to the point where I’d ring him up and it was, “What … no, no, no … bad line … call you later …” Total, total shit, and then finally it was, “Man, I really don’t know how to tell you this, it’s not good news,” “What, you’ve signed to a fucking major label? I told you, I’m not stupid.” We’d done nothing wrong. We’d sold 60,000 EPs and, in our heads, if we’ve done 60,000 EPs we’re going to do 200,000 albums. This is fucking unbelievable.’

It was a blow that hit Green and particularly Bowen very hard. Their sense of disillusionment was enough for Bowen to seriously consider winding the label down. ‘I thought if we find a band that no one’s ever heard of, and have hit singles and still they fuck off, there is absolutely no point in having a record company, ’cause if we can’t compete, we should just stop.’

In an attempt to summon up his energies for Wichita, and feeling that the label’s future was certainly in the balance, Bowen forced himself out over the Christmas party season to see an unsigned band. ‘I remember dragging myself out to the Rough Trade party at the ICA and nobody was there. We didn’t have anything on the release schedule. A friend had said, “You’d like this band.” It was ten days before Christmas.’

As he watched the band, Bowen was starting to feel smitten. The group, Bloc Party, had a melancholy singer and a flamboyant guitarist, which reminded Bowen of The Smiths. ‘I sat outside getting drunk for about two hours after they played,’ he says ‘I finally grabbed Kele [Okereke] and said, “Doing this label, really thought you were brilliant,” and ended up sitting down with him and the others.’

Bowen had been impressed by Bloc Party and had immediately wanted to sign them. In a moment of reverse psychology, rather than making overtures to the band, and still smarting from recent events, the conversation turned into a one-way rant about the music industry. ‘The whole thing was utterly fuelled by the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs,’ he says. ‘I said, “Right, I’m sick of this. I’ve had really good friends in bands who thought they’d be better on a major label, none of them are. They sell less records, they’re not happy, fucking sick of it. You should sign to us. You shouldn’t fucking sign to any of those stupid labels who are going to fuck this up.” At that point, drunk, bitter and the whole thing being almost the last throw of the dice, I just went, “Fucking hell, bands, you’re all stupid, why do you sign to major labels? You’re stupid, you’ll always, always, get fucked over.”’

As he left the ICA, Bowen realised that if nothing else, he had certainly got the Yeahs, Yeah, Yeahs debacle off his chest. He was unsure what effect his holding forth might have had on Bloc Party and a few weeks into the New Year, with his words ringing in their ears, the band became the subject of a bidding war. Within days, Bowen’s prediction of the band having to choose between a major and an independent came true. ‘They probably just sat and listened to me and thought, “My God, this man is crazy,”’ he says, ‘just ranting and ranting and ranting, and suddenly there was all this major-label nonsense going on. Again.’

Wichita were in the running to sign Bloc Party, but the band’s management company still had reservations about the label’s ability to fulfil the band’s commercial potential. The argument ran that indies were a nice enough and interesting niche corner of the market, but their niche position meant that, without serious assistance, they still did not know how to engage in its commercial realities. It was an argument that was wearing thin, given the success of the White Stripes and the Strokes, but events would soon make such an argument redundant.

‘In the middle of it all, when we were arguing, “You don’t need to be on a major label,”’ says Bowen, ‘Laurence puts “Take Me Out” at no. 2, and I cannot even begin to explain what it was like, a 9.5 Richter-scale earthquake, an indie label, not just an indie label, Domino bloody Records was blowing all these people out the water. So for me to be able to turn around to a band and management and go, “See, I told you, we’re about selling records. We’ve always been about selling records. We’ve got the history, look at what Laurence has done, if they can have a no. 2 we can do that, come on!” Without Franz coming along and doing what they did then and reactivating the idea of an independent label competing, we would’ve lost that band and it probably would’ve been the end of Wichita.’

*

Alexis Taylor had started working at Domino in 2003. His main job was to try to organise the label’s nascent attempts at selling its releases on the Internet. Space was at a premium in the company’s cramped Wandsworth office and Taylor took the sole remaining desk space – a corner in Laurence Bell’s room. While he was processing orders, pushing CDs into cardboard mailers, the songs on a demo that Bell was constantly playing started to stick in his head.

‘Before I worked there someone had told me things had been pretty tough for the label for a while,’ says Taylor. ‘Laurence was playing the Franz Ferdinand demos pretty much the week that I started. I didn’t know who they were. They sounded like a poppy Devo. They were pretty raw demos, so they were very exciting. Then Domino put loads of money into signing them and then there was a period when no bills could be paid.’

Franz Ferdinand were managed by Cerne Canning who, as a veteran of Rough Trade, had sensed that momentum was turning away from the majors, but whose decision to sign Franz Ferdinand with Bell was regarded by many in the industry as a mistake. ‘There was absolutely disbelief that, a), we were signing to Domino and, b), that they were going to be successful.’ says Canning. ‘A very good friend of mine who was a fairly successful A&R man at a major actually said to me, “I’m glad that you’re going to Domino, ’cause it confirms that the band don’t have much ambition – now I understand why you didn’t sign to a major, that clears it up.” I said, “No, that’s actually not the case, it’s the opposite. Domino will be the ones who will put the most effort into it and will understand us best.”’

Bell had had no doubts about the group’s potential. To prove he was serious about the band, he matched their highest major-label offer; it was a colossal gamble and one that required Domino to increase its debt burdens. In so doing, Bell had effectively bet the whole label on the band’s chances of success, a risk he was sure that was worth taking. ‘There were just these embarrassing British bands,’ he says, ‘probably the people that Alex Turner ended up singing about in “Fake Tales of San Francisco” dressing up like the Jesus and Mary Chain used to. The Strokes were a miracle and the White Stripes were a phenomenon, but you don’t need all these terrible bands. I just thought, here we go again, the pioneers come in and then it’s just all these second- and third-division groups that are the ones that get played on the radio. And I just knew that Franz were better than any of them.’

When Franz Ferdinand’s debut single, ‘Darts of Pleasure’, reached no. 44 on the strength of sales alone, Bell’s instinct that the band might cross over was confirmed. Their next single entered the chart at no. 2 and a week later their self-titled debut entered the album charts at no. 3. The whole campaign was run from the glorified cubbyhole of the Domino offices, without any major external assistance. While it represented a triumph of the underdog, it also confirmed, irrefutably, that the independents were as capable as any major at achieving seven-figure sales, especially when the music came from within a culture that was inherently theirs.

‘You felt the warmth coming in from around town and from people having not believed that we could help make it happen,’ says Bell, ‘that was definitely the prevailing word in the music industry when Franz signed to Domino – that Domino’s a great label, cool records, but they don’t know how to sell records. People were so pleased and it was such a shot in the arm for them it really was, it helped to reignite the whole independent world.’

The worldwide success of Franz Ferdinand allowed Domino to move into larger offices and use the momentum to develop the label. It was growth that was facilitated by record sales alone, a business model that had long been considered redundant in the music business and been consigned to wistful reveries about its glorious heyday. ‘Everybody in the music industry wants to believe that anything can happen in the music industry,’ says Bell, ‘and it so rarely does, because it’s so tied up and it’s such a closed shop and it’s so bloody corrupt and it’s hard to get in. So when something does happen that’s not meant to happen, everyone’s excited. That guy who’s just been sitting in his room just putting out records for years and now they’re number one or something – how did that happen? I think that really excites people and it still does whenever it happens, it’s such an exciting idea, pop terrorism.’

*

Steve Beckett and Rob Mitchell had nurtured Warp from its Sheffield roots into a label with a cutting-edge reputation and an ultramodern release schedule. Warp’s records were pieces of largely instrumental music contained in beautifully designed sleeves; the label had the feel of a virtual contemporary art space, releasing conceptual listening music and sophisticated and experimental party tunes. For the first time in the label’s history Beckett and Mitchell were beginning to feel like the label was in something of a holding pattern. A glance through the racks of metropolitan record stores or the highbrow music press showed that the Warp formula was being copied across the plethora of idm* labels that had started in its wake.

‘I remember sitting at the top of the stairs in my house speaking to Rob and he was going, “This sound, if we just keep doing it over and over again, it’s just going to dilute what we’re doing. We’ve got to move on,”’ says Beckett. ‘All the demos we were getting at that time – it was just watered-down versions of Aphex and Autechre. We wanted to definitely look further afield and Broadcast were just one of those unusual bands.’

To the braindance masses, Warp signing Broadcast was not only a departure for the label, but a move that represented something of a betrayal of its purist electronic roots. For Beckett and Mitchell, any need to justify signing a real-life, instrument-playing, five-piece band, was symbolic of how much the label had to change. It would also be a change that would initially prove expensive. ‘We’d come out of a history of people like Aphex Twin just walking in going, “Here’s your DAT,”’ says Beckett, ‘a DAT that, once it’s mastered, is going to sell 200,000 copies with no recording costs. Whereas someone like Broadcast, you’re putting them in studios working with producers, and so from a financial perspective, it got a lot tougher, but in terms of long-term growth it was obvious.’

Another, more fundamental change was Warp’s relocation from Sheffield to London. ‘We were just up and down, either on the motorway driving or constantly taking trains,’ says Beckett. ‘We were just starting to get aspirations for setting up the film company, and all the film funding and Channel 4 and all that was down in London –it was just starting to feel like it was not a definite thing but a possibility, so we moved.’

In 1998 Warp released Music Has the Right to Children by its latest signings, Boards of Canada. The album was an immersive listening experience; it echoed the headphone contemplation of the Artificial Intelligence series and added a disorientating layer of hazy nostalgia. Music Has the Right to Children’s sleeve was a fading, semi-perceptible family photograph. It perfectly captured the record’s atmosphere of haunted reflection. To Warp’s delight the album became one its strongest sellers, via the medium of word of mouth alone. Part of the album’s strength and cohesion lay in the band’s long gestation period, a trait they shared with other Warp artists like Squarepusher and Aphex Twin. ‘You meet people that have been doing all their work for years and years,’ says Beckett. ‘Boards had got this massive catalogue of stuff before they actually released anything. That’s why the stuff seems of a certain standard, ’cause I think a lot of artists just make something, then five minutes later they’ve put it out.’

The timing of Boards of Canada’s release was also significant. Their album was released into a wider cultural landscape, one in which the Internet and information technology were starting to prevail. Warp’s releases became the daily soundtrack for a techie, Wired-reading audience of programmers and web designers as they set about building the digital future.

Warp became one of the first record companies to engage with the Internet, having been exposed to it via the popularity of its artists among the early-adapting digerati. ‘The Black Dog were on newsgroups before there were websites,’ says Beckett. ‘They were the ones that started pointing us towards it. I definitely at that time put all my eggs in the technology basket. I was absolutely convinced that guitar music would just become extinct and that the only thing that people would be interested in was music made by electronics.’

Warp launched its website, Warpnet, in 1997. As a consequence of the label’s popularity with the digitally literate, Beckett and Mitchell gradually became aware of the risks inherent in the new technology. ‘I had a meeting in Sheffield and had the Internet explained to me,’ says Beckett, ‘so I got the computer, bought the modem and did all this logging in and expected to be surfing the Internet and having virtual sex and everything within five minutes. We started realising, “Oh my God, this is the future,” but we didn’t at that time realise it was also a real threat as well. When somebody first sent me an MP3 I thought, “Hold on, why couldn’t I just send this to somebody else?” “You could.” “But why couldn’t I send it to 10,000 people?” and it really hit me.’

Another more serious factor emerged that was likely to affect Warp’s future: Beckett’s founding partner, Rob Mitchell, had been taken ill. ‘He was ill and he was getting more and more ill but we didn’t know what it was,’ says Beckett. ‘He had tumours all over his liver and pancreas and was told that he’d got anything from four to six months to live. It was just more numbing than anything. You’re just sitting there going, “What the fuck is going … This doesn’t happen … happens to other people …’

When Mitchell sadly passed away in 1999, Beckett went on retreat to try to come to terms with the loss, parts of which involved his relationship with the label and how it was going to survive the end of their partnership. ‘After he’d died there was a whole time of personal upheaval and soul-searching. Then on the business side, at the time I thought I was totally handling it, but looking back I realise I was just scrabbling around, not really knowing what I was doing. We always did pretty much everything together, so we’d master a record together, we’d travel down to London together – so we were just constantly bashing ideas off and then suddenly that element was gone. He was probably a lot more confident verbally and socially and the main thing that slipped was the connection to a lot of the artists. We split the roster between us so I was having to get those deep connections back with people – that was the hardest thing.’

Warp had lost Mitchell and the process of recovery began with the company consolidating many of the ideas he and Beckett had been developing. One of the most significant was the establishment of Warp Films in 2000.

Beckett also saw that his peers in independence at Domino and XL were operating with a renewed confidence and vigour. ‘I went for a meal with Laurence,’ he says. ‘It was before Franz broke. We both had the penny drop that, actually, we’re both quite good at selling records by really difficult artists, really difficult music – what could we do if we actually went for some of these bands that are ambitious and have got potential hits?’

Maximo Park, a band from Newcastle, had caught Beckett’s attention. Despite having offers on the table from several majors, the band’s management was happy to consider whatever offer Warp was prepared to make. For the first time in his career, Beckett found himself in the environs of pub back-room gigs in the midst of a major-label feeding frenzy. ‘I didn’t know if I could do that,’ he says, ‘turning up to these gigs where all the fucking A&R men are there and people whispering that so and so had signed it already. We were suddenly operating outside our comfort zone, especially once we’d signed them it’s like, “Shit, we’ve got to do it now.” That’s even harder.’

*

By 2005 Domino had sold over four million Franz Ferdinand records worldwide, the White Stripes and the Strokes were multiplatinum artists and independence, in contrast to the ailing major-label business, was thriving. It was a situation that would be put into sharp relief by the sector’s next breakaway success, Arctic Monkeys.

By the middle of the decade Mike Smith had risen to the position of MD at EMI Music Publishing, a division of the company that had remained profitable compared with the ailing EMI record label. Along with other colleagues at the heart of the industry, Smith had heard rumours of a young Sheffield quartet who were attracting unprecedented record-label attention, including that of the wizened music biz old guard.

‘The Arctic Monkeys were interesting, because, I remember, there was a serious A&R scrum in the spring of 2005. You were getting old-school A&R guys like Gordon Chartman, who’d signed Bros, saying, “I’ve seen this band, they’re really amazing.” And then Louis Bloom, who’d signed Busted, was going, “Arctic Monkeys are really fucking great,” and I went up to check it out in Stoke and I was just blown away. You had somebody out front who was really sharp and witty and flirting with everyone, all the boys and girls in the crowd, and you had these amazing songs, incredibly infectious, hook-laden, punk rock.’

Arctic Monkeys were content to play around their native Sheffield and its neighbouring towns. The band had no desire to play to a showcase audience in London, a decision that had instantly made their signatures on a recording contract even more covetable. The band had the same effect on everyone who travelled north to see them and Smith put word through that he was interested in signing the band to a publishing deal. By the time Smith had managed to start a dialogue with the band’s management, he realised that he was in a fast-developing situation. Several record companies believed they were close to acquiring the band and a lawyer had been instructed to draw up contracts. ‘Obviously I wanted to work with them, and in the blink of an eye everybody wanted to work with them in the world, because they were just so undeniably fucking good – I think in my whole career, no band’s been more obviously destined to be successful – and then they made the decision to go with Domino, and the irony is, Laurence wasn’t leading the charge.’

The band’s decision to sign with Bell caught the industry, and particularly the pack that been in the hunt for the band’s signatures, completely off-guard. Domino had not been early to register any interest in Arctic Monkeys. There was a lingering impression that Bell had somehow managed to spirit the band away from underneath the competition’s feet.

As a publisher Mike Smith was in a position that put him at first remove from the hothouse of record company A&R departments. To him the band’s decision made perfect sense. ‘Every single A&R man in England wanted to sign the band,’ he says. ‘By working with Domino, I think they knew that they had somebody who would let them pursue their own artistic vision.’

Bell had been aware of the growing commotion attaching itself to the Sheffield band, but his instincts had told him that any band commanding such an intense focus was probably destined to become major-label hype. ‘I’d just been hearing the name a bit,’ he says. ‘We didn’t have an A&R department or anything, so whatever’s going on uptown, so to speak, was never really that alluring to me.’

Once colleagues and contacts from within his own circle started mentioning the band’s name, Bell felt duty bound to explore further. ‘Trusted friends started to say, “You’d really like this band, you should really hear them,”’ he says. ‘I went round to see this guy who had the tape and he played it and burnt me off a CD, and my jaw fell on the floor when I heard it, and I took it home and I just couldn’t stop playing it and, “Oh my God, this is it.”’

As Bell registered his interest with the band’s management company, he was politely informed that to have his name added to the lengthening list of suitors would be of little consequence. With his confidence at a post-Franz high, and with a natural affinity for musicians that is rare in A&R, Bell was determined to at least become part of the conversation. ‘The manager had told me, “Oh, there’s about twenty-five labels and they’ve seen more than they ever wanted to. They’re not really that interested anyway, it’s just a bit too late.” So it was just a process of trying to undo that and get a chance to meet with them.’

John Dyer, an industry veteran who had previously worked at Mute, had been asked to join the Domino staff following the success of Franz Ferdinand; he had a rolling brief, one that included ensuring the company made best use of its newly secured fiscal position. If the label could sign an act with a similar commercial potential to the Glaswegian band, Domino could maintain its momentum as a cornerstone of independence. ‘Laurence was told by the Arctics’ manager that they’re about to sign with someone,’ he says. ‘“You’re allowed to see them but you’re not allowed to go backstage and talk to them and mess with their heads, all right?” He goes and sees them and he rings them back. I get a text from him saying, “Went well, they’ve invited me back.” Next thing, they have to ring up their lawyer who’s been holding back the whole industry, it’s probably reached a couple of million quid or something so the lawyer is in a tight spot now, he’s kind of vaguely promised it to someone, then suddenly, hang on, there’s a hold-up.’

‘I snagged a meeting with the manager the following Tuesday,’ says Bell, ‘and one thing led to another and the conversations were good. Then, I was invited up to Sheffield, then I was invited back again, and that was how it happened.’

Even by the standards of the accelerated pace and heightened sense of anticipation that starts to surround a hyper-hot, unsigned band, the Arctic Monkeys’ signing to Domino left the industry breathless. ‘It all happened in about ten days,’ says Bell. ‘From hearing them to signing them, it was all done in about ten days. We were genuinely independent, they were genuinely independent-minded, and we had Franz Ferdinand under our belt, we had the hottest band in the world at that moment, and we’d just sold four million records for them.’

Once Arctic Monkeys were signed, the impetus around the band continued. Such was the demand for their sold-out London debut that the venue was upgraded to the 1,400-capacity Astoria. ‘The whole strategy after that was to keep them outside of London media,’ says Dyer. ‘This is so hot that media hasn’t spotted it.’

What the mainstream media had also failed to spot was the fact that the band were being much discussed and shared on the Internet. Although the band had released only one 7-inch single, many of the crowd in the Astoria were already singing along to the words of every song. In a search for a narrative, the press labelled Arctic Monkeys ‘The first MySpace band’.

‘It wasn’t MySpace,’ says Bell. ‘It was file sharing and it was word of mouth. It was on the first level of Internet insanity. The kids were swapping it, and that was just going on independently – it wasn’t a MySpace thing. The band had given away demos of these songs, they’d made ten CDRs of their songs, taken them to sell at gigs and had a couple of beers and given them away. It was on The Others’ forum that the Monkeys were blowing up, it was in that post-Libertines moment. It was also something up in the north as well; the ownership was there for the fans, because they kept out of London and the media hadn’t introduced them and it was outside of all that.’

The Others were one of the handful of bands that had landed a record deal by using the Libertines’ tactics of guerrilla gigs and posting their music online. Although their career was short, they were representative of the new energies and expectations surrounding young bands: to interact with the public away from the established media and to communicate directly with their fans and peers via the Internet, where such activity could be formalised on a band’s official MySpace site. The Arctic Monkeys, however, had ignored MySpace until after their debut album was released.

‘It’s a complete myth, because that’s media trying to explain it after the fact,’ says Dyer. ‘It’s like a journalist trying to intellectualise house music … “House music’s moved on.” “Why, what do you mean, what’s it done?” “It’s progressed, it’s progressive house.” So media thought, “Oh, hang on, MySpace has come into the public consciousness, people are communicating via MySpace – oh, hang on, MySpace must have created the Arctic Monkeys.” It became a hoover-vacuum-type phrase to describe the arrival of music being spread around the net.’

The forthcoming Arctic Monkeys album had generated sufficient interest for HMV to take the unusual step of issuing a press release. The retailer announced that it was anticipating record sales, enough to make Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not the fastest-selling debut album on record. As an example of the light-speed with which new music was now being consumed in an instant fix, the statement and the record caught the public imagination.

‘I was halfway down the touchline watching my son play football,’ says Dyer. ‘There was a guy down the touchline from me who runs Reuters news, media division, and he’d got the vibe. He’d heard about it, and he came up to me three times, and says, “I’d like to do a news spike on the Arctic Monkeys, can you get me access?” The Sky News ticker was running it as a story. It was a moment in time that acknowledged the end of a marketing age and the arrival of a consumer-driven age. You couldn’t plan for it, you couldn’t market for it, it was entirely of its own momentum.’

Whatever Arctic Monkeys’ relationship with the Internet or MySpace, one thing was becoming increasingly evident; the days of a record like Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not succeeding on such a large scale were drawing to an end. Illegal downloading and file sharing were becoming ubiquitous and, for a younger audience, the most popular way of consuming music. Record sales became decimated by the advance in new technologies and the music industry entered into a period of terminal decline.

To the independents, who had always been forced to operate on tight margins and be sensitive to the headwinds of the market, the major labels’ response seemed both ignorant and, possibly, fatal. Rather than move into partnership with tech companies to adjust to the digital age, the majors resorted to lobbying and litigation.

‘They had all that time and all that money, and they just couldn’t put their egos aside and get together and find a solution to just cook up digital distribution,’ says Bell. ‘They could’ve owned Napster and have the brand name that everybody could go to, and do what iTunes did. Instead, they lost the means of distribution to iTunes and they just sat there and let it all roll out and then they just lost everything.’

From his vantage point at EMI Publishing, Mike Smith was well placed to see the industry’s response and, like Bell, realised that the decisions being taken by the major record companies were short-termist and ill considered. ‘As a publisher you’re sort of sat on the sidelines, screaming about the opportunity that was being missed by the major labels. They couldn’t work out a proper direction and had to be led by the nose by iTunes to do it. When BMG [Bertelsmann Music Group] bought Napster, that was an opportunity for the whole of the music industry to buy into it all and have a very legitimate online service. Instead, the whole music industry banded together and shut it down. So many opportunities were lost.’

Another factor apart from the Internet would start to work against the independent sector; the major labels had surrendered valuable sales in a shrinking business to a sector they had not long ago dismissed. If ‘indie’ was once again popular and profitable then they needed a share in its market.

Pete Thompson ran the distribution company Vital that handled the majority of accounts for the independents. Thompson had been at the frontline of independent distribution since his teens, having started at Red Rhino, the northern component in The Cartel. From the optimism and decentralisation of The Cartel to its chaotic bankruptcy, through to the indie-manqué of Britpop and the resurgence of guitar music in the 2000s, Thompson had witnessed the independent sector’s varying fortunes. ‘Whether it was the Strokes, the White Stripes, Bloc Party, Maximo Park, Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys,’ he says, ‘they were all on independent labels. It was genuinely coming from the indies and the majors weren’t going to fucking take that lying down were they? They were going to react in exactly the way you’d expect the majors to react which is, “Don’t let the indies sign anybody.”’

As the majors stared to sign second- and third-division guitar bands – many of whom were bedecked in either Strokes skinny jeans and ties or polo shirts with upturned collars in the style of Arctic Monkeys – a surplus of tired, functional guitar-music-by-numbers was relentlessly released and marketed as the next big thing. The results were dismissed as ‘landfill indie’, one of the most ignominious phrases to ever contain the troubled word. It was a description that accurately and wittily captured the meaningless attempts at style over content with which an endless procession of four-piece bands embarked on their often very short-term careers.

‘You’ve got no independent labels signing bands,’ says Thompson. ‘You’ve got majors signing a load of bands that they don’t really fucking want anyway. You’re left with an independent sector that has XL, Domino, Wichita, Rough Trade, Beggars and Warp doing their stuff, and very little else, nothing coming up.’

By 2006 Martin Mills had celebrated nearly thirty years at the head of Beggars Banquet. His Beggars Group had a string of international offices and now counted 4AD, XL, Rough Trade and the Rough Trade East record shop in London among its concerns. Mills also chaired AIM, the Association of Independent Music, a trade body set up to defend the sector’s interests, making him something of a father figure and counsel for independence. Having weathered all the highs and lows of remaining outside the major-label music business, Mills had always maintained a pragmatic optimism about the independent sector’s future. ‘The majors are fundamentally about control,’ he says. ‘There was a period when they let enough control slip through their fingers for us to flourish, and a lot of that goes down to the control of the distribution. God bless Geoff for having been around there in the beginning and having taken control out of the hands of the majors. But you can see the majors trying to claw it back and I fear a world in which they have managed to get back into control of distribution.’

There is also a home truth about the independent music business that is inescapable.

‘It’s always down to money isn’t it?’ says Mills. ‘If you’re doing this and you haven’t got money problems, then you’re doing something wrong.’

In the concert halls and bars of the East End of London, or Williamsburg, or Berlin or any metropolitan city centre, it is hard to understand that the music business is undergoing a difficult and prolonged period of fundamental readjustment as it comes to terms with the realities of a digital future. The venues are full of bands, artists, DJs and audiences, many with a passion for and knowledge of music as strong and deep as any of their predecessors. The diminishing costs of recording and distributing music, together with an international framework and media for music of every genre, mean that, in many ways, there has never been a better time to be working in music. However, to turn these opportunities into the kind of careers (or anti-careers) enjoyed by many of the subjects of this book is becoming harder.

‘All bands want is to look good and be cool, and have some nice people around them whilst making as much money as possible,’ says Mark Bowen. Having worked at Creation during the years of Oasis mania, he left to start a label in his bedroom, and has the broadest possible perspective. ‘It’s a really hard thing to do. You have to choose: you can be on some kind of really small indie, or you can be on Polydor. One of them’s going to sell you tons of records and the other one’s going to be your mate, but it’s a really, really hard line to walk, one that’s almost impossible to get right. That’s why we still talk about the only ten or so labels able to do it – the Factories, the Rough Trades and a handful of others.’

* idm stands for intelligent dance music and, possibly in tribute to its newsgroup origins, is always written in lower case.

Select References

Michael Bracewell, England Is Mine: Pop Life in Albion from Wilde to Goldie, HarperCollins (1997)

Liz Farrelly, Brain-aided Design: The Designers Republic, Laurence King Publishing (2006)

Dave Haslam, Manchester, England, Fourth Estate (2010 edition)

Heike Munder (ed.), text by Sean Snyder, Wolfgang Tilmans, Sarah Morris and Michael Bracewell Peter Saville: Estate 1–127, JRP/Ringier (2007)

Rick Poyner, Vaughan Oliver: Visceral Pleasures, Booth-Clibborn Editions (2000)

Cynthia Rose, Design After Dark: The Story of Dancefloor Style, Thames & Hudson (1991)

Jon Wozencroft, The Graphic Language of Neville Brody, vol. 1, Thames & Hudson (1988)

Rob Young, Rough Trade: Labels Unlimited Black Dog Publishing Ltd (2006)

Index

A Certain Ratio (ACR), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

‘Flight’, 1

A Witness and the Shrubs, 1

A&M Records, 1;

see also Arista

Abbey Road Studios, 1, 2

Abbott, Tim, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Absolute Beginners (film), 1

Accident (film), 1

acid, see LSD

acid house, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

acid jazz, 1

Acklam Hall, Ladbroke Grove, 1

Acme Attractions, 1, 2

ACR, 1, 2, 3, 4

Adelphi Hotel, 1

Adventure Babies, 1

Afrika Bambaataa, 1

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (film), 1

AIDS, 1, 2

Aitken, Matt, 1;

see also Stock Aitken Waterman

Albini, Steve, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Alive at The Living Room (Creation compilation), 1

Alma Road (4AD), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Almond, Marc, 1

Altered Images, 1, 2

alternative radio, US, 1

alternative rock, 1

Alway, Mike: and Blanco y Negro/Travis, 1, 2;

and Cherry Red, 1;

and él Records, 1;

musical taste, 1, 2;

resigns from Blanco y Negro, 1

Amazulu, 1

Ames, Roger, 1, 2, 3

Amon Düül II, 1

amphetamines, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Anastasia Screamed, 1

Anderson, Emma, 1

Anderson, Ian, 1

Anderson, Laurie, 1

‘O Superman’, 1

Andy Warhol Diaries, 1

Anton, Robert, 1, 2

Antony and the Johnsons, 1

Aphex Twin, 1

AR Kane, 1

Lolita EP, 1

‘When You’re Sad’, 1

Arbus, Diane, 1

Arctic Monkeys, 1, 2;

and MySpace/Internet, 1;

sign to Domino, 1

Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, 1;

‘Fake Tales of San Francisco’, 1

Ardent Records, 1

Arista Records, 1, 2

Artificial Intelligence (Warp series), 1, 2

Ashley, Laura, 1

Association of Independent Music (AIM), 1

Astley, Rick, 1

Aston, Martin, (journalist), 1

Astor, Pete, 1

Atencio, Tom, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Atlantic Records, 1

Au Pairs, 1

Augustus Pablo, 1

Aunt Twacky’s, 1, 2, 3, 4

Austin, Mo, 1, 2

Austin, Nick, 1

Auteurs, 1

Axelrod, David, 1

Axis Records, 1

Ayuli, 1

Aztec Camera, 1, 2, 3

‘Just Like Gold’, 1;

‘Mattress of Wire’, 1

B.A.L.L., 1

Babyshambles, 1, 2

Back Door to Babylon, The (Camden), 1, 2

Backs (Norwich distributor), 1

Bad Dream Fancy Dress, 1

Choirboy Gas, 1

‘Leigh–Sea’, 1;

‘The Supremes’, 1;

Badly Drawn Boy, 1

Baker, Anita, 1

Rapture, 1

Baker, Arthur, 1

Balearic, 1, 2

Balfe, Dave, 1, 2, 3, 4

Balham, Ed, 1

Ball, David, 1

Ball, Ed, 1, 2, 3, 4

Bam Caruso Records, 1

Bananarama, 1

Barker, Dave (Fire/Glass), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Barlow, Lou, 1

Barney Bubbles, 1

Barrett, Jeff (Heavenly), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Bataan, Joe, 1

Bates, Dave, 1

Bauhaus, 1, 2, 3, 4

‘Dark Entries’, 1

‘Telegram Sam’, 1

Bay 63, Ladbroke Grove, 1, 2, 3

Bearsden Academy, 1, 2

Beatles, 1, 2, 3, 4

Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1

‘Strawberry Fields Forever’/‘Penny Lane’, 1;

Beatmasters, 1

‘Rock Da House’, 1

Beck Road, Hackney, 1

Beckett, Larry, 1

Beckett, Steve (Warp), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Bedford, Dave, 1, 2

Beggars Banquet Records, 1, 2, 3, 4;

formation, 1;

and 4AD, 1

Beggars Group, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Bell, Laurence, 1, 2, 3, 4;

and Arctic Monkeys, 1;

founds Domino, 1

Belly, 1

Benitez, Jellybean, 1, 2

Bennett, Alan, 1

Benny Hill, 1

Berlin, 1, 2, 3

Berry, Andrew, 1

Berry, Heidi, 1

Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG), 1

Bessy, Claude, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

moves to Factory, 1

Bethnal Green, 1, 2

Bickers, Terry, 1

Biff Bang Pow, 1, 2, 3

The Acid House Album, 1

Big Black, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Atomizer, 1;

Headache EP, 1;

Songs about Fucking, 1;

The Sound of Impact, 1

Big Chill, The (film), 1

Big Flame, 1, 2

Big in Japan, 1, 2

Big Life (record label), 1, 2

Big Star, 1, 2, 3, 4

‘September Gurls’, 1

Bikini Kill

Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah/Our Troubled Youth, 1

Billboard, 1, 2, 3

Birkett, Derek, 1

Birmingham, 1

Birthday Party, 1, 2, 3, 4;

in Berlin, 1

‘The Friend Catcher’, 1

Black Dog Productions, 1, 2

Bytes, 1

Black Flag, 1

Black Francis (Pixies), 1, 2, 3

Black Grape, 1

It’s Great When You’re Straight, Yeah, 1

Black Horse, Camden, 1

Black Uhuru, 1

Blackwing Studios, 1, 2, 3

Blake, Norman, 1

Blancmange, 1

Blanco y Negro Records, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11;

formation, 1

Blast First, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;

formation, 1;

Nothing Short of Total War (compilation), 1;

and Rough Trade, 1, 2;

work ethic, 1, 2;

see also Big Black; Butthole Surfers; Dinosaur Jr; Mekons; Sonic Youth

Blenheim Crescent (Rough Trade), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Bloc Party, 1, 2

Blood and Fire, 1

Bloom, Louis, 1

Blue Aeroplanes, 1

Blue Guitar (Chrysalis sublabel), 1

Bluebells, 1, 2

Bluetones, 1

Blur, 1, 2, 3

Blur, 1

Parklife, 1

BMG, 1

BMX Bandits, 1

Boards of Canada

Music Has the Right to Children, 1

Bodines, 1

Bogshed, 1, 2, 3, 4

Bolshy (fanzine), 1

Bolton, Institute of Technology, 1, 2

Bomb the Bass, ‘Beat Dis’, 1

Bon Jovi, 1

Bonzo Dog Doo–Dah Band, 1, 2

Boo Radleys, 1, 2, 3, 4

Giant Steps, 1

‘Lazarus’, 1

Boon, Richard, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;

and Bolshy (fanzine), 1;

and Rough Trade, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

and Saville, 1;

and The Smiths, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

and Spiral Scratch EP, 1;

and Wilson, 1

Booth, Stanley, 1

Boulton, Rebecca, 1, 2, 3

Bourdain, Guy, 1

Bourgie Bourgie, 1

‘Careless’, 1

Bovell, Dennis, 1

Bowen, Mark (Wichita), 1, 2, 3, 4

Bowie, Angie, 1

Bowie, David, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;

Diamond Dogs (US tour), 1;

‘Berlin trilogy’ with Eno, 1

‘Heroes’, 1

Boy Hairdressers, 1

Boy’s Own, 1

Boyd, Dave (Hut), 1

BPI, 1

Bradfield, James, 1

Bragg, Melvyn, 1

Branca, Glenn, 1

Branson, Richard, 1, 2, 3

Braun, Eva, 1

Brautigan, Richard, 1

Brave New World, 1

Breeders, 1

Brel, Jacques, 1

Brideshead Revisited, 1

Bridget St John, 1

Bright Eyes, 1

Brill Building (NY), 1, 2, 3

Brilliant, 1

Brilleaux, Lee, 1

Brit Awards, KLF at, 1

Britannia Hotel (Manchester), 1

British Electric Foundation, 1

Music of Quality and Distinction, 1

Britpop, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Brit Awards, 1

Brixton Academy, 1, 2

Brixton Ace, 1

Broadcast, 1

Brody, Neville, 1, 2

Broken Glass, 1, 2

Bronski Beat, 1

Broudie, Ian, 1

Buckley, Tim, 1, 2

Budgie (Peter Clarke), 1

Burn, Russell, 1

Burns, Pete, 1

Burns, Robert, 1

Burroughs, William, 1

Bush Tetras, 1

Butcher, Bilinda, 1;

see also My Bloody Valentine

Butt, Bill, 1

Butthole Surfers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

Capitol contract, 1;

on tour 1

Hairway to Steven, 1

Locust Abortion Technician, 1

Buzz Bin (MTV), 1

Buzzcocks, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;

formation, 1;

sign to United Artists, 1

Spiral Scratch EP, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Byrds, 1, 2, 3

Byres Road, Glasgow, 1

Byrne, David, 1

C81 (NME compilation), 1

C86 (NME compilation), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

Cabaret Voltaire, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Cadallaca, 1

Cage, Nicolas, 1

Cale, John, 1, 2

Callahan, Bill, 1

Calloman, Cally, 1, 2, 3, 4

Camden, London, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

Camden Falcon, 1, 2;

Lurch scene, 1, 2

Cameo, 1

Cameron, Duncan, 1, 2

Camley Street, Islington (Rough Trade warehouse), 1, 2

Campbell, Ken, 1

Camper Van Beethoven, 1

Can, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

cannabis, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Canning, Cerne, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;

and ‘the Week of Wonders’, 1

Capote, Truman, 1

Captain Beefheart, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Cargo Studios, 1

Carpenter, John, 1

Carr, Martin, 1

Carroll, Cath, 1, 2, 3, 4;

see also Miaow!

Carroll, Kay, 1

Carroll, Lewis, 1

Carroll, Pat, 1

Cartel, The, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

Carter, Chris, 1

Casey, Jayne, 1

Cast, 1

Cat Call (record label), 1

Catalogue, The, 1, 2, 3

Cauty, Jimmy: and the JAMs, 1;

and The KLF, 1;

at SAW studios, 1;

and The Timelords, 1;

on ‘What Time Is Love?’, 1;

see also KLF, The

Cave, Nick: in Birthday Party 1;

and the Bad Seeds, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Cavern Club, Liverpool, 1

CBS, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Central Station Design, 1

Chadwick, Guy, 1

Chakk, 1

Channel 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Charlatans, 1, 2, 3

Charles Street, Manchester, 1, 2, 3, 4;

see also Factory Records

Chartman, Gordon, 1

Chateau Marmont (California hotel), 1

Cheetham Hill gang, 1

Chelsea F.C., 1

Cherry Red (record label), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

Pillows and Prayers (compilation), 1

Chipping Norton, 1

Childs, Andy, 1, 2, 3

Chippington, Ted, 1

Chris & Cosey, 1

Christopherson, Pete, 1

‘Sleazy’, 1

Chrysalis (record label), 1

City Beat Records, 1

City Fun, 1, 2, 3

Clark, Anne, 1

Clark, Gene, 1

Clarke, John Cooper, 1, 2, 3, 4

Clash, 1, 2, 3, 4

‘White Riot’, 1;

tour, 1

Clerkenwell Road, Hatton Garden (Creation), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Climax Blues Band, 1

Clink Street, London (Shoom), 1

Clock DVA, 1

Close Lobsters, 1, 2

Club Med, 1

Cobain, Kurt, 1, 2;

see also Nirvana

cocaine, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Cocker, Jarvis, 1

Cocteau Twins, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

sleeve design, 1;

tour with OMD (’1), 2;

and Watts-Russell, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Blue Bell Knoll, 1

Garlands, 1, 2

Head Over Heels, 1, 2

Heaven or Las Vegas, 1

Lullabies EP, 1

Peppermint Pig EP, 1

Sunburst and Snowblind EP, 1

Treasure, 1

Victorialand, 1

Coffer, Raymond, 1

Cole, Lloyd, see Lloyd Cole and the Commotions

Coleman, Ornette, 1

Collier Street, Kings Cross (Rough Trade), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

Collins, Edwyn, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;

see also Orange Juice

Colourbox, 1, 2, 3

Colourbox, 1

The Moon Is Blue, 1

‘Breakdown’/‘Tarantula’, 1

Columbia Records, 1

Communication Blur (fanzine), 1

Communication Club, 1

Conroy, Ray, 1

Conway, Paul, 1

Coolidge, Martha, 1

Cope, Julian, 1, 2;

see also Teardrop Explodes, The

Copeland, Ian, 1

Cornershop, 1, 2, 3, 4

When I Was Born for the Seventh Time, 1

‘Brimful of Asha’, 1

Coronation Street, 1, 2

Cosey Fanni Tutti, 1

COUM Transmissions, 1

County, Jayne, 1

Covent Garden, 1, 2, 3

Coward, Noel, 1

Coyne, Kevin, 1

Crass, 1

Crazy Eddie, 1

Creation Records: and Abbott, 1, 2, 3;

Alive at The Living Room (compilation), 1;

and Bandwagonesque (Teenage Fanclub), 1, 2;

and Barrett, 1

and C86 (NME), 1;

and Chelsea F.C., 1;

confrontational ethos, 1;

drug scene, 1, 2, 3;

and Felt, 1, 2;

finances, 1, 2, 3;

formation, 1;

and The Haçienda, 1;

and House of Love, 1, 2;

and indie, 1;

and Isn’t Anything (MBV), 1;

and Loveless (MBV), 1;

and Momus (Currie), 1, 2, 3;

move to Clerkenwell Road, 1;

move to Primrose Hill, 1;

move to Westgate Street, 1;

and Pinnacle distributors, 1, 2;

and Screamadelica (Primal Scream), 1, 2, 3;

and Rowland/My Beauty, 1;

royalties and loyalty, 1;

sign Jesus and Mary Chain, 1;

sign Oasis, 1;

Sony deal, 1, 2; 3, 4;

website, 1;

see also McGee, Alan

Creative Industries strategy (Labour Party), 1

Creedence Clearwater Revival, 1

Crigton, Jude, 1

Crisp, Quentin, 1

Crockett, Davy, 1

Culture Club, 1

Cummins, Kevin, 1

Curran, Debbie, 1

Currie, Nick, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9;

leaves Creation, 1;

see also Momus

Cutler, Ivor, 1

Cyndi Lauper, 1

D.A.F, 1, 2, 3

Daily Mirror, 1

Daly, Steven, 1, 2, 3, 4;

and No Variety (fanzine), 1;

see also Orange Juice

Damned, The 1

Danceteria (NY club), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Darnell, August, 1

DAT, 1, 2

Datblygu, 1

Davies, Dai, 1, 2

Davis, Clive, 1, 2

De La Soul, 1

Dead Can Dance, 1

Into the Labyrinth, 1

Dead Kennedys, 1, 2, 3

Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, 1

Dead or Alive, 1

‘You Spin Me Round’, 1

Deal, Kim, 1

Death in June, 1

Decline of Western Civilisation, The (LA punk documentary), 1

Deebank, Maurice, 1

Deep Purple, 1

Def American (record label), 1

Def Jam Recordings (record label), 1

Def Leppard, 1, 2

Defever, Warren, 1

Del Amitri, 1

Demme, Jonathan, 1

Democrat Party, 1

Denmark Street, London, 1, 2

Depeche Mode, 1, 2; 3, 4, 5;

and Miller/Mute, 1, 2, 3, 4;

popularity in US, 1;

on TOTP, 1;

US tour, 1

Black Celebration, 1, 2;

tour, 1

Construction Time Again, 1

Some Great Reward, 1

Speak and Spell, 1

Violator, 1

‘Everything Counts’, 1

‘Master and Servant’, 1

‘Morning In America’, 1

‘Master and Servant’, 1

Derby County, 1

Designers Republic, The (tDR), 1

Deviants, 1

Devo, 1

‘Turnaround’, 1

Devoto, Howard, 1, 2

Dexys Midnight Runners, 1

Diamanda Galás, 1, 2

Dickins, Rob, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Die Kleinen und Die Bosen, 1

Die Kreuzen, 1

Die Neue Typographie, 1

Dif Juz, 1

Dimension Intrusion, 1

Dinosaur Jr, 1, 2, 3, 4

Bug, 1, 2

Green Mind, 1

‘Freak Scene’, 1

‘The Wagon’, 1

distributors, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

DJ Parrot, 1

Dock, Albert, 1

Doherty, Peter, 1, 2;

in prison, 1;

in rehab, 1;

see also Libertines

Domino Records, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

finances, 1, 2;

and Franz Ferdinand, 1;

sign Arctic Monkeys, 1;

sign Pavement, 1

Donne, Pete, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Donnelly, Tanya, 1

DoubleVision, 1

Dowie, John, 1

Dr. Feelgood, 1, 2, 3;

‘Naughty Boys’ tour, 1

Down by the Jetty, 1

Drags, The, 1

Drake, Nick, 1, 2

Dream Academy, 1

dream pop, 1

Dreaming of Babylon (book), 1

Driffield (studio), 1

drug dealers, 1, 2, 3

drugs: Cheetham Hill gang target Haçienda, 1;

at Creation, 1, 2, 3;

at 4AD, 1, 2;

at Hansa, 1;

and McGee, 1, 2, 3;

and need for managers, 1;

at Rough Trade, 1;

see also amphetamines, cannabis; cocaine; ecstasy; heroin; LSD

drum machines, 1, 2, 3, 4

Drummond, Bill, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;

and Big in Japan, 1;

early life, 1;

and the JAMs, 1, 2;

and The KLF, 1;

and McGee, 1;

and Rough Trade audit, 1;

and Stein, 1, 2, 3;

on success, 1;

and The Timelords, 1;

at Warners, 1, 2;

and Waterman, 1;

and The Zoo, 1

The Man, 1, 2, 3, 4

‘I Believe in Rock and Roll’, 1

‘I’m the King of Joy’, 1

‘Julian Cope Is Dead’, 1

Dry Bar (Oldham Street, Manchester), 1

Duffy, Martin, 1

Dunbar, Malcolm, 1

Durutti Column, 1, 2, 3, 4

Duval, Michel, 1, 2

Dyer, John, 1, 2, 3

Dylan, Bob, 1

Blonde on Blonde, 1

Eagle, Roger, 1, 2

Earcoms 2: Contradiction (Fast Product compilation), 1

Earls Court, 1

East West Records, 1

Echo & the Bunnymen, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;

sign to Korova, 1;

US tour with New Order, 1, 2

Heaven Up Here, 1

Ocean Rain, 1

Porcupine, 1

‘A Crystal Day’, 1

‘The Cutter’, 1

‘Pictures On My Wall’, 1

ecstasy (MDMA), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

Edgely, Deborah, 1, 2, 3

Edinburgh, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;

vs. Glasgow, 1

Edison, Richard, 1

Edwards, Simon, 1, 2, 3

Einstürzende Neubauten, Strategies Against Architecture, 1

Eitzel, Mark, 1

él Records, 1

Electric Circus, 1

Electric Prunes, 1

Mass in F Minor, 1

Electronic, 1

Elektra Records, 1, 2, 3, 4

Elevation Records, 1, 2, 3

Eleven, Medalark, 1

EMI Records, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

EMI Music Publishing, 1

E-mu emulator, 1

Endeacott, James, 1, 2;

at Rough Trade, 1;

and the Libertines, 1, 2, 3

Enigma Records, 1

Eno, Brian, 1, 2, 3;

Berlin trilogy with Bowie, 1

Ambient Series, 1

Enterprise Allowance Grant, 1

Epstein, Brian, 1

Erasmus, Alan, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

Erasure, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Wonderland, 1

‘Sometimes’, 1

Eric’s, Liverpool (club), 1, 2, 3

Ertegun, Ahmet, 1, 2

ESG, 1

Esplen, Simon, 1

Essex, David, 1, 2

Eurovision, Cyprus, 1

Evening Standard, 1

Everything but the Girl, 1, 2, 3

Eden, 1

Extreme Noise Terror, 1, 2, 3

Face, The, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Factory Benelux, 1

Factory Records: anti-promotion, 1;

‘board meetings’, 1;

and Catholicism, 1;

at Charles Street, 1, 2, 3;

and culture, 1;

design, 1;

drug scene, 1, 2;

ethos, 1, 2;

Fac number system, 1, 2, 3;

Fac 1 (Lofts Concept), 2;

‘The Factory Contract’, 1;

A Factory Sample, 1;

finances, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

overuse of definite article, 1;

and Pinnacle, 1;

sign Joy Division, 1;

‘Temporary Contemporary’, 1;

and Wilson, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Factory USA, 1

Factory, The (club), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Fad Gadget, 1

‘Back to Nature’, 1

Fairfax High School, 1

Falcon, 1, 2, 3, 4

Fall, The, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14

fanzines, 1, 2, 3

Fast Forward (Cartel distributor, Edinburgh), 1, 2

Fast Product (record label), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;

Earcom series, 1

Fatboy Slim, 1

Feelies, 1

Fellows, Sally, 1

Felt, 1, 2, 3;

in music press, 1

Forever Breathes the Lonely Word, 1, 2, 3

Ignite the Seven Cannons, 1

Let the Snakes Crinkle Their Heads to Death, 1

‘My Face Is on Fire’, 1

‘Primitive Painters’, 1

Festival of the Tenth Summer (GMEX), 1

festivals: European festivals (’80s), 1;

Festival of the Tenth Summer, 1;

Glastonbury ’94, 1, 2;

Knebworth, 1;

Lollapalooza, 1;

Pink Pop 1;

Pukkelpop, 1;

Reading, 1, 2, 3, 4

52nd Street, 1, 2

file sharing, 1, 2

Fire Engines, 1, 2, 3

Fire Escape in the Sky: The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker (Zoo compilation), 1

Fire Records, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

Fish, Pat, 1, 2

Fisher, Malcolm, 1

Flamin’ Groovies, 1

Fleetwood Mac, 1

Fleming, Don, 1, 2

Fleming, Grant, 1

Flock of Seagulls, 1

Florida, Richard, 1

Floyd, Keith, 1

Fluke, 1

Flying Saucer Attack, 1

FON Studios, Sheffield, 1

Fonda, Wayne, 1

Fontana Records, 1, 2, 3

Foreigner, 1

Cold As Ice, 1

Forgemasters, 1

‘Track With No Name’, 1, 2

Foster, Joe, 1, 2, 3, 4;

see also Creation Records; Television Personalities

4AD, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;

and Beggars Banquet, 1;

and Cocteau Twins, 1, 2;

and Colourbox, 1, 2;

drug scene, 1, 2;

formation, 1;

and Lavonia, 1;

and Modern English, 1;

negative press reaction, 1;

and Pixies/Throwing Muses, 1, 2;

and PJ Harvey/Too Pure, 1;

and ‘Pump Up The Volume’, 1;

and Red House Painters, 1;

sign Lush/Pale Saints, 1;

sleeve art, 1, 2, 3, 4;

staff, 1;

and This Mortal Coil, 1, 2;

Warner Brothers deal, 1, 2, 3;

US offices, 1, 2;

see also Watts-Russell, Ivo

Four Tet, 1

Fox, Sam, 1

Foxx, John, 1

Metamatic, 1

Frame, Roddy, 1, 2, 3

Frankie Goes to Hollywood, 1

Franz Ferdinand, 1, 2, 3, 4;

sign to Domino, 1

Franz Ferdinand: ‘Darts of Pleasure’, 1

‘Take Me Out’, 1

Fraser, Elizabeth, 1, 2, 3, 4;

see also Cocteau Twins

French Impressionists, The, 1

Friedman, Ken, 1

Fryer, John, 1, 2

Fuller, Buckminster, 1

Fun House (NY club), 1, 2

Fuse, 1

Dimension Intrusion, 1

Future (club), 1

Gabriel, Peter, 1, 2

Gaffney, Eric, 1

Gahan, Dave, 1

Gainwest (New Order company), 1

Galaxie 500 (car), 1, 2, 3, 4

Galaxie 500 (band), 1, 2

She Hangs Brightly, 1

Today, 1

Gallagher, Noel, 1, 2

Gang of Four, 1, 2, 3, 4

Garden (studio), 1

Gardening Club, 1

Garrett, Malcolm, 1

Garrett, Sheryl, 1

Gartside, Green, 1, 2, 3;

see also Scritti Politti

Geffen, David, 1, 2

Geiger, Marc, 1;

US touring, 1

Geldof, Bob, 1

General, the (Libertines manager), 1

Genesis, 1, 2, 3, 4

Germano, Lisa, 1

Germany, 1

Gerrard, Lisa, 1

Gersh, Gary (Geffen), 1, 2

Gibson Flying V, 1

Gil Scott–Heron, 1

Gilbert, Gillian, 1;

see also New Order

Gilbert, Lesley, 1, 2, 3, 4

Gillespie, Bobby, 1, 2, 3, 4;

see also Jesus and Mary Chain; Primal Scream

Glamour Club, Rayleigh, 1

Glasgow, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;

East Kilbride, 1, 2, 3;

’70s punk scene, 1, 2;

vs. Edinburgh, 1;

see also Postcard

Glass Records, 1, 2, 3

GLC Jobs for Change festival, 1

Glitter Band, 1

GMEX (Greater Manchester Exhibition Centre), 1

Go Betweens, 1, 2

Goddard, Vic, 1, 2

Goes, Ken, 1, 2, 3

Golborne Road, London (Rough Trade office), 1, 2

Gold Mountain Entertainment, 1

Goldberg, Danny, 1, 2, 3

Goldman, Viv, 1

‘Launderette’, 1

Googe, Debbie, 1;

see also My Bloody Valentine

Gordon, Robert, 1;

leaves Warp, 1

Gottehrer, Richard, 1

Grabel, Richard, 1

Graham, Bill, 1

Grahame, Lorita, 1

Granada, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five, 1

Grand Prix, 1

Grant, Eddie, 1

Grateful Dead, 1, 2

Grayson, Nigel, 1, 2

Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, The, 1

Green, Dick (Wichita), 1, 2, 3, 4;

see also Creation Records

Greenfield, Robert, 1

Gretton, Rob, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;

and The Haçienda, 1, 2;

ill-health and death, 1;

and New Order, 1, 2, 3, 4;

and Wilson, 1, 2, 3, 4;

and With Love from Manchester, 1

Grid, 1, 2

‘King Tubby’, 1

Griffin, Jessica, 1

Griffin, Rick, 1

Groove Records, 1

Groucho, Paul, 1

Groundhogs, 1, 2

Grubman, Allen, 1

Grubman, Indursky & Schindler, 1

Grundy, Bill, 1, 2

guerrilla gigs, 1, 2

Guns N’ Roses, 1, 2, 3

Gunter Grove, 1

Guru Josh, 1

‘Infinity’, 1

GusGus, 1

Guthrie, Robin, 1, 2, 3;

see also Cocteau Twins

H_2O, 1

Hackney, London, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

in late ’70s, 1, 2

Haçienda (club), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;

Acid Corner, 1;

and Creation, 1;

closure, 1;

and ecstacy, 1, 2;

formation, 1;

Gay Traitor bar, 1;

inclusivity, 1;

and licensing law, 1, 2;

NY club influence, 1;

and regeneration of Manchester, 1;

The Smiths at, 1, 2, 3;

Swing (salon), 1;

The Tube broadcast, 1;

Haig, Paul, 1;

see also Josef K

Haines, Luke (Auteurs), 1

Haircut 1, 2

Half Japanese, 1

Hall & Oates, 1

Hall 4, Rotterdam, 1

Hammersmith Clarendon Klub Foot, 1

Hammersmith Odeon, 1

Hammersmith Riverside, 1

Hanna-Barbera, 1

Hanna, Kathleen, 1

Hannett, Martin, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;

Martin Zero, 1

Hansa Mischraum (Berlin studios), 1, 2

Happy Family, 1, 2

Happy Mondays, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

in Barbados, 1, 2;

and ecstasy, 1, 2;

sleeve art, 1

Bummed, 1, 2, 3

Madchester Rave On EP, 1, 2

Pills ’n’ Thrills and Bellyaches, 1

Squirrel & G-Man, 1

‘Country Song’ (‘Some Cunt from Preston’), 1

‘Do It Better’, 1

‘Freaky Dancin’, 1

‘Step On’, 1

‘Wrote for Luck’, 1, 2

Harper, Dave, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

on Britpop, 1;

at Factory, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

leaves Rough Trade, 1, 2;

at RCA, 1;

at Real World Studios, 1;

at Rough Trade, 1, 2, 3;

and The Smiths, 1, 2, 3, 4;

visits Grundy, 1

Harper, Roy, 1

Harper, Simon (4AD), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;

and Watts-Russell, 1, 2, 3, 4

Harpers & Queen (magazine), 1, 2

Harrow Road (Mute office), 1, 2, 3

Harvest Records, 1

Haskins, Kevin, 1

Haslam, Dave, 1

Hatton, Derek, 1

Hawkwind, 1, 2

‘Silver Machine’, 1

Haynes, Gibby, 1, 2;

see also Butthole Surfers

Hazel, Winston, 1

Head of David, 1

Heath, Martin (Rhythm King), 1

Heavenly Records, 1, 2

Heavy Stereo, 1

Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, 1

Hebrides, Outer, 1

Hedges, Mike, 1

Heggie, Will, 1, 2

Helter Skelter (rave promoter), 1

Henderson, Davey, 1

Hendrix, Jimi, 1

Hendryx, Nona, 1

‘Busting Out’, 1

Hermitage, Richard, 1

heroin, 1, 2, 3, 4

Hersh, Kristin, 1

Herzog, Werner, 1

Heullo, Eugh, 1

Heyward, Nick, 1

Hickey, Matt, 1

Hidden Cameras, 1

Hillage, Steve, 1

Hinc, Mike, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Hipgnosis, 1

hippies, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

His Name Is Alive, 1, 2

Lavonia, 1

‘How Ghosts Affect Relationships’, 1

‘I Had Sex with God’, 1

History of British Rock (Sire compilation), 1

Hit Factory (SAW), 1, 2

Hives, The, 1

Hogarth Road, London (Beggars Banquet), 1, 2

Holden Caulfield International, 1

Hole, 1

Hole, Max, 1

Holly, Buddy, 1

Holywell Lane, Shoreditch, 1

Hook, Peter, 1, 2;

see also New Order

Horne, Alan, 1, 2, 3, 4;

and business, 1;

and Collins/Orange Juice, 1, 2;

and Josef K, 1, 2;

legacy, 1;

NME feature, 1;

and Postcard, 1, 2, 3, 4;

record collection, 1;

and Swamplands, 1;

and Swankers (zine), 1;

and Travis, 1, 2;

see also Orange Juice; Postcard Records

Horne, Paul Quinn, 1

Horrocks, James (Rhythm King), 1

Hot Nights, 1, 2

Houghton, Mick, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

on The KLF, 1, 2, 3, 4

House of Love, 1, 2, 3, 4

House, Nigel, 1

Housemartins, 1

Hucknall, Mick, 1

Hue and Cry, 1

Huggy Bear, 1;

on The Word, 1;

touring, 1

‘Her Jazz’, 1;

Our Troubled Youth/Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah, 1

Hughes, Glenn, 1

Hughes, John, 1

Hula, 1

Human League, 1, 2, 3;

Dare, 1

Hurley, Robin: at Rough Trade Inc., 1, 2, 3;

at 4AD, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Hurrah (NY club), 1

Hurricane #1, 1

Hut Recordings (Virgin sublabel), 1

Hypnotone, 1

‘Dream Beam’, 1

Hüsker Dü, 1

i-D (magazine), 1

Ibiza, 1, 2, 3, 4

ICA, London, 1, 2, 3, 4

Illuminatus! Trilogy, The, (Shea and Wilson), 1, 2, 3, 4

Immediate Records, 1

independent record labels:

compared with major labels, 1, 2, 3;

use of major label sales force, 1;

indie music: ‘landfill’ indie, 1;

origin of term, 1

Industrial Records, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Innes, Andrew, 1

Inspiral Carpets, 1

International Marine buildings (Manchester), 1

Internet, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Irvine Meadows, 1

Island Records, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;

sold to Polygram Group, 1

Italia ’90 World Cup, 1

J Mascis, 1

Jackson, Janet, 1

Control, 1

Jackson, Michael, 1, 2

Thriller, 1

Jagger, Mick, 1

Jah Jah, 1

Jah Wobble, 1

James White and the Blacks, 1

Jameson, Lewis (4AD), 1

JAMs, 1, 2, 3

1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On), 1

‘It’s Grim Up North’, 1

see also KLF, The

Jarman, Derek, 1, 2, 3

Jarvis, Gordon, 1

Jasmine Minks, 1, 2, 3, 4

‘Think!’, 1

Jazz Butcher, 1, 2

Jazz Defektors, 1

Jazz Summer, 1

Jazzateers, 1

Jencks, Charles, 1

Jensen, David, 1

Jesus and Mary Chain, The, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;

sign to Creation, 1;

sign to Blanco y Negro, 1

Psychocandy, 1

‘Upside Down’, 1

Joe Bataan and the Fania All–Stars, 1

John, Elton, 1, 2

Johnson, Daniel, 1

Johnson, Matt, Burning Blue Soul, 1

Jokes, The, 1

Jones, Brian, 1

Jones, Gareth, 1

Jones, Mick, 1

Jones, Peter, 1

Jones, Quincy, 1, 2

Josef K, 1, 2, 3

The Only Fun in Town, 1

Sorry For Laughing (scrapped), 1

‘Radio Drill Time’, 1

‘Sorry for Laughing’, 1

Joshua Tree, California, 1

Joy Division, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12;

sign to Factory, 1

Closer, 1, 2

Unknown Pleasures, 1

Judas Priest, 1

June Brides, The, 1, 2, 3

Jung, Carl, 1

Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, see JAMs

K Records, 1

Kalima, 1

Kamins, Mark, 1

Karen O, 1

Keen, Will, 1, 2

Keeping The Faith (compilation), 1

Kefalas, Nikki, 1

Kelly, Ben (designer), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Kelly, Eugene, 1

Kelly, Martin (Heavenly), 1, 2

Kennedy, John, 1

Kensington Park Road (Rough Trade shop), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Kent (record label), 1

Kent, Nick, 1

Kent, Peter, 1, 2;

see also 4AD

Kick Boy Face, 1

Kid Creole and the Coconuts, 1

Kilburn High Road, (Glass), 1

Killing Joke, 1, 2

Kimpton–Howe, George, 1, 2, 3

King Boy D, 1, 2;

see also Drummond, Bill

King of Luxembourg, The, 1

King Tuts, 1

King, James, 1

King, Jonathan, 1

King, Marcel

‘Reach for Love’, 1

King, Stephen, 1

Kings Cross, 1, 2, 3

Kingston Polytechnic, 1

Kinks, 1

Kinney, Sleater, 1

Kinski, Klaus, 1

Kirk, James, 1, 2, 3, 4;

see also Orange Juice

‘Memphis’, 1

Kirk, Richard H. (Cabaret Voltaire), 1, 2

Kiss FM, 1

Kleenex, 1

KLF, The: at Brit Awards (1992), 1;

demise, 1;

Jura media event, 1;

and Rough Trade, 1, 2, 3;

Stadium House Trilogy, 1;

on TOTP, 1;

touring/raves, 1;

see also Cauty,

Jimmy; Drummond, Bill; Orb, The;

Timelords, The

Black Room, 1

Chill Out, 1, 2

Space, 1

White Room, 1, 2

‘America: What Time Is Love?’, 1

‘I’m the King of Joy’, 1

‘Justified and Ancient’, 1, 2, 3

‘Kylie Said to Jason’, 1

‘Last Train to Transcentral’, 1, 2, 3

‘3 a.m. Eternal’, 1, 2, 3

‘What Time is Love?’, 1, 2, 3

Knebworth festival, 1

Korova (record label), 1, 2

Kozelek, Mark, 1

KPMG Peat Marwick (accountancy firm), 1

Kraftwerk, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Krasnow, Bob, 1

KROQ (California radio station), 1

Kyllo, James, 1, 2, 3, 4

La Dolce Vita (film), 1

Labour, New, 1

Ladbroke Grove, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Lancashire, 1

Lanois, Daniel, 1

Larty, Lori, 1

Last, Bob, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Later with Jools Holland, 1

Lauder, Andrew, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Laughing Apple, The, 1

Lawrence, 1, 2, 3;

see also Felt

Lazy Records, 1, 2

Leamington Spa, 1, 2, 3

Leary, Paul, 1

Leary, Timothy, 1

Leatherface, 1

Leblanc, Keith, 1

Led Zeppelin, 1

Lee, Alvin, ‘Green Fuz’, 1

Lee, Jeannette: on Doherty, 1, 2, 3;

and Travis, 1, 2

see also Rough Trade

Leeds, 1, 2, 3

Legend!, The, 1

‘Destroys the Blues’, 1

‘73 in ’83’, 1

Legendary Stardust Cowboy, 1

Legends (club), 1, 2, 3

Lemmy, 1

Les Disques du Crépuscule, 1

Lesser Free Trade Hall (Manchester), 1, 2, 3

Letts, Don, 1

Levan, Larry, 1

Levene, Keith, 1

Lewis, Wyndham, 1

LFO, 1, 2, 3;

‘contract’ with Warp, 1

Frequencies, 1

Libertines, 1, 2, 3;

as Lombard, Lombard and Spaniel, 1;

at Rhythm factory, 1;

sign to Rough Trade, 1

Lindsay, Arto, 1

Liquid Liquid, 1

Live Aid, 1

Liverpool, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11;

Eric’s (club), 1, 2, 3;

Toxteth, 1;

With Love From Manchester (LCC benefit), 1

Liverpool Daily Post, 1

Liverpool Echo, 1

Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun, Mathew Street, 1, 2, 3

Living Room, The (club), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, 1

Rattlesnakes, 1

Loaded (magazine), 1, 2, 3

Loder, John, 1

Loft, 1, 2

Loggins, Dan, 1, 2

Loggins, Kenny, 1

Lollapalooza (festival), 1

Lombard, Lombard and Spaniel, 1

London: Alma Road (4AD), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

Bay 1, 2, 3, 4;

Camley Street (Rough Trade), 1, 2;

Clink Street (Shoom), 1;

Clerkenwell Road (Creation), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

Golborne Road (Rough Trade), 1, 2;

Harrow Road (Mute office), 1, 2, 3;

Heaven (club), 1, 2, 3, 4;

ICA, 1, 2, 3, 4;

Living Room, The (club), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Mortimer Street (UA office), 1, 2;

North London Polytechnic, 1;

Rock Garden (club), 1, 2, 3;

Royal Albert Hall, 1, 2;

Russell Hotel, 1;

Seven Sisters Road (Rough Trade), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

Tottenham Court Road, 1, 2;

Water Rats, 1, 2;

Westgate Street (Creation), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

London Records, 1, 2, 3

Lone Wolves, 1

Long Eaton, Derbyshire (Ron Johnson), 1

Longpigs, 1

Loog Oldham, Andrew, 1, 2

Loop, 1

Lord Summerisle, 1

Lori and the Chameleons, 1, 2

‘Touch’, 1

Los Angeles, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17

Losely, Joseph, 1

Lots Road, Chelsea, 1

Love, Courtney, 1

Love Corporation, ‘Palatial’, 1

Lovin’ Spoonful, 1, 2

LSD, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Lunch, Lydia, 1, 2

In Limbo, 1

Lurkers, 1

Lush, 1, 2, 3

LWT, 1

Lydon, John, 1

M/A/R/R/S, 1, 2, 3

‘Pump Up the Volume’, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

court case, 1

McCarthy (band), 1

McClymont, David, 1, 2, 3;

see also Orange Juice

Mackenzie Group, 1

McGee, Alan: and Abbott, 1, 2, 3;

and The Acid House Album, 1;

and Barrett, 1, 2;

and Communication Blur, 1;

and Creation, 1, 2, 3, 4;

and drugs, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;

McGee, Alan continued: and Drummond, 1;

early life, 1;

and Foster, 1;

founds Creation, 1;

founds Elevation, 1;

founds Poptones, 1;

and House of Love, 1, 2;

in LA, 1;

in The Laughing Apple, 1;

manages The Jesus and Mary Chain, 1;

manages Libertines, 1;

and My Bloody Valentine, 1;

negotiates with US labels, 1, 2;

in rehab, 1, 2;

return to Creation, 1;

signs Oasis, 1;

and Sony deal, 1, 2; 3, 4;

and Spacemen 1, 2;

and Stein, 1;

and Wilson, 1, 2;

see also Creation Records

McGee, John, The John McGee Orchestra presents Slinky, 1

McGinley, Raymond, 1

MacGowan, Shane, 1

McGough, Nathan, 1

McGough, Roger, 1

Mach, David, 1

McLaren, Malcolm, 1, 2

McNay, Ian (Cherry Red), 1

McNeish, Peter, see Shelley, Pete

Madonna, 1, 2, 3, 4

‘Holiday’, 1

Maher, Sean, 1

Maida Vale Studios, 1

major record labels: Britpop campaign, 1;

compared with independent labels, 1, 2, 3;

and Internet, 1;

and live music, 1

Malaria, 1

Mallander, Stephen, 1

Malt & Hops, Caledonia Road (pub), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Man, 1

Manchester: Art Gallery, 1;

Festival of the Tenth Summer, 1;

Lesser Free Trade Hall, 1;

and Liverpool, 1;

Moss Side, 1;

Northern Quarter, 1;

Oldham Street, 1;

Palatine Road (Factory), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9;

Peveril of the Peak (pub), 1;

Polytechnic, 1;

property development, 1;

Russell Club, 1, 2;

Whitworth Street, 1, 2;

see also Haçienda

Manic Street Preachers, 1;

‘Motown Junk’, 1

Manson, Charles, 1

Mantronix, 1

The Album, 1

Manual, The, 1

Manuela, 1

Manyika, Zeke, 1

Marble Arch, 1

Mare Street, Hackney, 1, 2

Marley, Bob, 1, 2

Marr, Johnny, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;

and Moss, 1;

on Rough Trade, 1, 2, 3, 4;

see also Smiths, The

Marshall, Korda, 1

Martello Street, Hackney (COUM Transmissions), 1, 2

Mason, Steve, 1, 2

Mathew Street, Liverpool, 1, 2, 3, 4

Matlock, Glen, 1

Maximo Park, 1, 2

Maxwell, Grace, 1, 2

Mayking Records, 1

Mazzy Star, 1

MC5, 1

MCA Records, 1, 2, 3, 4

Meadows, Shane, 1

Medalark Eleven, 1

Meat Whiplash, 1

Mekons, 1, 2

‘Where Were You?’, 1

Melody Maker, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Membranes, 1, 2, 3

Merchant Ivory indie, 1

Mercury Lounge (NY club), 1

Mercury Music Prize, 1

Merry Pranksters, 1

Met Bar, Knebworth, 1

Metro, 1

Metroplex (Detroit record label), 1

Miaow!, 1

England Made Me, 1

Michael, George, 1, 2

Mighty Lemon Drops, 1, 2, 3

Mighty Mighty, 1

Milk Bar, 1

Miller, Daniel, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;

deal with Stein (Sire), 1;

sells Mute to EMI, 1, 2;

working style, 1, 2, 3;

see also Mute Records

Mills, Martin (4AD), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;

takes over 4AD, 1

Ministry of Sound, 1

Mitchell, Mark, 1, 2

Mitchell, Rob (Warp), 1, 2;

ill-health and death, 1

MixMag, 1

Moby, 1

Play, 1

‘Go’, 1

Modern English, 1, 2, 3, 4

After The Snow, 1

‘16 Days’, 1

‘Gathering Dust’, 1

‘I Melt with You’, 1

Momus, 1, 2, 3;

at él Records, 1;

sign to Creation, 1

Circus Maximus, 1, 2

The Poison Boyfriend, 1

Upside Down, 1, 2, 3

Voyager, 1

Monarch, Camden (pub), 1

Monochrome Set, 1, 2

Monroe, Marilyn, 1

Montana, June, 1

Moodists, 1

Moody Blues, 1

Moonlight (club), 1, 2

Moore, Thurston, 1, 2

Morley, Paul, 1, 2

Moroder, Giorgio, 1

Morris, Stephen, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9;

see also New Order

Morris, Wayne, 1

Morrison, Jim, 1

Morrison, Sterling, 1

Morrissey, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;

and release of ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’, 1;

see also Smiths, The

Mortimer Street, London (United Artists office), 1, 2

Moss, Joe, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9;

at The Smiths rehearsals, 1;

distributes ‘Hand in Glove’, 1

Motörhead, 1

Motown Records, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Mottola, Tommy, 1

Mould, Bob, 1

MTV, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9;

Buzz Bin, 1

Mudd Club (NY), 1, 2

Music Force, 1

Music Machine, 1

Music Week, 1

Mute Records, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

and Depeche Mode, 1, 2, 3, 4;

EMI deal, 1, 2;

finances, 1, 2, 3;

foundation, 1, 2;

move to Harrow Road, 1;

and Rough Trade Distribution, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;

sublabels, 1, 2

My Bloody Valentine, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Isn’t Anything, 1

Loveless, 1, 2, 3

‘Feed Me With Your Kiss’, 1

‘You Made Me Realise’, 1

My Morning Jacket, 1

MySpace, 1

Napster, 1

National Theatre, 1

Naylor, Liz, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

Naylor, Pat, 1

Nazi Doug, 1

Neil, Fred, 1

Nelson, Bill, 1

Neu!, 1, 2

Neubarten, 1

Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW, New German Wave), 1

New Cross Venue (4AD), 1, 2

New Hormones (record label), 1, 2

New Order, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;

and Be Music, 1;

business model, 1;

and Factory, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

in Ibiza, 1;

image, 1;

politics, 1;

and Primal Scream, 1;

at Real World Studios, 1;

sign to London Records, 1;

sign to Qwest, 1;

sleeve design, 1;

on TOTP, 1, 2, 3;

UK festivals of’ 1, 2;

US tour with the Bunnymen, 1;

videos, 1

Brotherhood, 1

Low–Life, 1, 2;

‘The Perfect Kiss’, 1

Movement, 1

New Order Play at Home (film), 1

Power, Corruption & Lies, 1

Republic, 1

Substance, 1, 2, 3

Technique, 1, 2

‘Blue Monday’, 1, 2

‘Confusion’, 1

‘Fine Time’, 1

‘Thieves Like Us’, 1

‘World in Motion’, 1

New Socialist, 1

New Wave, 1, 2

New York: Danceteria (club), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

East Village, 1;

Fun House (club), 1, 2;

Hurrah (club), 1;

Lower East Side, 1, 2, 3;

and Manchester, 1;

Mudd Club, 1, 2

University Special Collection Library, 1

New York Dolls, 1

New Yorkers, 1, 2, 3

New Zealand, 1

Newspeak, 1

Newton, Helmut, 1

Nico, 1, 2

Nightingales, 1, 2, 3, 4

Nine Mile (Leamington Spa distributor), 1

91X (radio station), 1

99 Records, 1, 2, 3;

MacDougal Street, 1

Nirvana, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

Peel sessions, 1, 2;

at Reading Festival ’1, 2

Nevermind, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Unplugged in New York, 1

NME: C81 (compilation), 1;

C86 (compilation), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11;

and Creation, 1;

and Factory, 1;

Felt feature, 1;

Grundy interview, 1;

identity crisis (’1s), 2;

KLF advert, 1;

The Latin Kick, 1;

Leftist stance, 1;

on Nirvana, 1;

Postcard feature, 1;

renewed interest in guitar bands, 1;

Sex Pistols review, 1;

on Sonic Youth, 1;

Strokes, 1;

tapes/flexi discs, 1

No Variety (fanzine), 1

No Wave, 1, 2

Normal, The, 1, 2, 3

Warm Leatherette/‘TVOD’, 1, 2

Norris, Richard, 1, 2

Jack The Tab, 1

North London Polytechnic, 1

Northside, 1

Nothing Short of Total War (compilation), 1

Notion, Foggy, 1

Nottingham, 1

Now That’s What I Call Music, 1

Nu Sonics, 1

Nuggets (Elekra series), 1, 2, 3, 4

O2, 1

O’Halligan, 1

O’Jays, 1

‘Love Unlimited’, 1

Oakenfold, Paul, 1, 2;

Land of Oz, 1

Oasis, 1, 2, 3;

sign to Creation/Sony, 1;

at the Water Rats, 1

Definitely Maybe, 1

What’s The Story (Morning Glory)?, 1

Oberstein, Morris, 1

Ó’Ciosóig, Colm, 1;

see also My Bloody Valentine

Okereke, Kele, 1

Old Trout, Windsor, 1

Oldham Street, Manchester, 1

Oldham, Andrew, 1

Oldham, Will, 1

Oliver, Karin, 1

Oliver, Vaughan (graphic designer), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

sleeve design, 1, 2, 3, 4;

and Watts-Russell, 1, 2, 3;

see also 4AD

Olympia, 1

One Little Indian (Mayking sublabel), 1, 2

Opal, 1

Orange County, 1

Orange Juice, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;

dress/look, 1;

formation, 1;

influences/style, 1;

at Polydor, 1, 2;

and Postcard, 1, 2, 3;

on TOTP, 1;

TV advert, 1

The Orange Juice, 1

Rip It Up, 1;

‘Rip It Up’ video, 1

Texas Fever, 1

You Can ‘t Hide Your Love Forever, 1

‘Blue Boy’, 1

‘Falling and Laughing’, 1, 2, 3

‘Lean Period’, 1

‘What Presence’, 1

Orb, The, 1

Orkney Islands, 1

Ormond, Willy, 1

Orton, Joe, 1

Other Side of Midnight, The (TV music show), 1

Others, The, 1

Out Promotions, 1

Outer Rhythm, 1;

see also Rhythm King Records

P-Orridge, Genesis, 1, 2, 3, 4

Palace, 1

Paladin, Patti, 1

Palatine Road, Manchester (Factory), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Pale Saints, 1, 2

Palladium, LA, 1

Palm Springs, 1

Palmer, Tim, 1

Papadopoulos, Harry, 1

Paperhouse Records, 1, 2

Paradise Garage, 1, 2, 3

Park, Graeme, 1

Parsons, Gram, 1

Pastel, Stephen, 1

Pastels, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Truck, Train, Tractor, 1

Up For a Bit with the Pastels, 1

Patterson, Alex, 1

Pavement, 1, 2

Brighten the Corners, 1

Peacock, Annette, 1

Pebbles (compilation series), 1, 2, 3, 4

Peel, John, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11;

and Blast First, 1;

and Cocteau Twins, 1;

and House of Love, 1;

Nirvana sessions, 1, 2;

Perfumed Garden/Top Gear, 1;

and Piering, 1, 2;

and PJ Harvey, 1;

and Rhythm King, 1;

Smiths sessions, 1, 2;

and Spacemen 1, 2;

and Walters, 1;

and Warp, 1;

and Watts-Russell, 1, 2, 3

Percival, Lance, 1

Pere Ubu, 1, 2, 3, 4

Perfumed Garden, 1

Perry Boy (dress), 1

Perry, Brendan, 1

Pettibon, Raymond, 1

Peveril of the Peak (Manchester pub), 1

Phil Kaufman Club, The, 1

Phonogram Records, 1, 2, 3

Piccadilly Radio, 1

Pickering, Mike, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Piering, Scott, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;

and The KLF, 1, 2, 3;

leaves Rough Trade, 1;

refuses to quit/sacked from Rough Trade, 1, 2;

and The Smiths, 1, 2, 3, 4

PiL, 1, 2

Pilgrim, Billie, 1

Pillows and Prayers (Cherry Red compilation), 1, 2, 3

Pinewood Studios, 1

Pink Floyd, 1, 2, 3

Atom Heart Mother, 1

Piper at the Gates of Dawn, 1

Pink Pop Festival (Holland), 1

Pink Records, 1

Pinnacle, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Pixies, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Come on Pilgrim, 1

Doolittle, 1

The Purple Tape, 1

Surfer Rosa, 1;

‘Gigantic’, 1

PJ Harvey, 1, 2

‘Dress’, 1

Play at Home (TV series), 1

PMT machine, 1, 2, 3

Polsky, Ruth, 1, 2

Polydor, 1, 2, 3, 4

Polygram, 1, 2;

and film/TV, 1

Pop Aural (record label), 1

Pop Will Eat Itself, 1, 2

Poptones Records, 1

Porter, John, 1

Portobello Road, 1, 2, 3, 4

Postcard Records, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;

demise, 1;

formation, 1, 2;

legacy, 1;

and Orange Juice, 1, 2, 3;

sleeve art, 1;

‘Sound of Young Scotland’, 1, 2, 3

postmodernism, 1

Powell, Michael, 1

Powell, Richard, 1, 2, 3, 4

Primal Scream, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;

and Creation/McGee, 1, 2;

Sony deal with Creation, 1

Loaded, 1

Screamadelica, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Sonic Flower Groove, 1

Vanishing Point, 1; ‘Star’, 2

XTRMNTR, 1

‘Shoot Speed/Kill Light’, 1

‘Velocity Girl’ (C86), 1

Primrose Hill, 1, 2, 3

Prince and the Revolution, 1, 2

Parade, 1

Princes Street, Glasgow, 1

Pritchard, David, 1

Probe (Liverpool distributor), 1, 2

Prodigy, 1, 2

Music for the Jilted Generation, 1

The Fat of the Land, 1

‘Firestarter’, 1

Product Inc. (Mute sublabel), 1

promoters, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Psychedelic Furs, 1

‘Pretty in Pink’, 1

Public Image Limited (PiL), 1

Pukkelpop (Belgian festival), 1

Pulp, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

sign to Island, 1, 2

Intro – The Gift Recordings, 1

Parklife, 1

Separations, 1, 2

‘Common People’, 1

‘Sheffield Sex City’, 1

Punk Rock Hotel (film), 1

Pure Trance, 1

QQ Freestyle, 1

‘Nena De Ibiza’, 1

Quando Quango, 1

QueenAdreena, 1

Quinn, Paul, 1

‘Pale Blue Eyes’, 1

Qwest Records, 1, 2

Radcliffe, Sarah, 1

Railway Children, The, (film) 1

Raincoats, 1, 2, 3, 4

Moving, 1

Raisin’ Hell, 1

Ramones, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Rampling, Danny, 1, 2

Ranglin, Ernest, 1

Rank and File, 1

Rankine, Alan, 1

Rapeman, 1

Ratt, 1

raves, 1, 2, 3

Raymonde, Simon, 1

Razorcuts, 1

RCA, 1, 2, 3

Reading festival, 1, 2, 3, 4

Ready Steady Go!, 1

Real World Studios, Wiltshire, 1

Red Crayola, 1

‘Hurricane Fighter Plane’, 1

Red House Painters, 1

Down Colourful Hill, 1

Red Rhino Records, Leeds, 1, 2, 3

Red Wedge (musician collective), 1

Reed, Lou, 1, 2, 3, 4

reggae, 1, 2, 3, 4

Reich, Steve, 1

Reid, John, 1

Reid, Lindsey, 1

Reid, William, 1;

see also Jesus and Mary Chain

REM, 1

Rema Rema, 1

Reportage, 1

Residents, 1, 2

Revolver (Bristol distributor), 1, 2, 3

Revolving Paint Dream, 1

‘Flowers in the Sky’, 1

Rhythm King Records, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Rican, Puerto, 1

Rice, Jacqui, 1

Richards, Keith, 1, 2

Richer Sounds, 1

Richman, Jonathan, 1

Ride, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Nowhere, 1

Ride EP, 1

Riot Grrrl, 1

Riviera, Jake, 1

Robb, John, 1

Robinson, Dave, 1

Rochdale Canal, 1

Rock Against Racism, 1

Rock Garden (London club), 1, 2, 3

Rock Man Rock, 1, 2, 3;

see also Cauty, Jimmy

Roebuck, The (pub), 1, 2

Rogers, Nile, 1

Rolling Stones, 1, 2, 3

Roman Catholic, 1

Ron Johnson Records (Derbyshire), 1

Room at the Top (club), 1

Rose Bowl, Pasadena, 1

Rose, Cynthia, 1

Rosenblatt, Michael, 1

Roskilde (Denmark festival), 1

Ross, Andy, 1

Ross, Malcolm, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

see also Josef K

Rough Trade Records: Camley Street warehouse, 1;

as centre of independent music industry, 1;

computer system, 1;

demise, 1, 2;

employs London Records sales team, 1;

ethos, 1, 2, 3, 4;

finances, 1, 2, 3, 4;

fire staff, 1;

Kensington Park Road shop, 1, 2, 3, 4;

and Libertines, 1, 2, 3;

lunchtime at the Malt & Hops, 1;

move to Blenheim Crescent, 1;

move to Collier Street, 1;

move to Seven Sisters Road, 1;

promotion dept., 1, 2;

relaunch, 1;

and RT Distribution deal, 1;

and Scritti Politti, 1;

and The Smiths, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;

and Sonic Youth, 1;

sign the Strokes, 1;

and speed, 1

Rough Trade America, 1, 2, 3, 4

Rough Trade Deutschland, 1

Rough Trade Distribution, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;

and The Cartel, 1, 2;

demise, 1, 2;

finances, 1, 2, 3, 4

Rowland, Kevin: 1

My Beauty, 1

‘Concrete and Clay’, 1

Roxy Music, 1, 2

Royal Albert Hall, 1, 2

Royal Court, Liverpool, 1

Royal Family and the Poor, 1

Royal Festival Hall, 1

Royal Trux, 1

Rubin, Rick, 1

Run DMC, 1

Raisin’ Hell, 1

Running on Empty (film), 1

Rushent, Martin, 1

Rusk, Cory, 1

Russell Club, Manchester, 1, 2

Russell Hotel, London, 1

Russell, Arthur, 1

World of Echo, 1

Russell, Marcus (Oasis manager), 1, 2

Russell, Paul, 1

Russell, Richard (XL), 1, 2

Ruth Polskys, 1

Rutherford, Paul, 1

Rutkowski, Louise, 1;

see also This Mortal Coil

Ryder, Paul, 1

Ryder, Shaun, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

see also Happy Mondays

Rythm Oil (Booth), 1

St Etienne, 1

St Louis, 1

S’Express, 1

‘Theme From S’Express’, 1

sampling, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

San Francisco, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Santana, 1

Abraxas, 1

Santiago, Joey, 1

Sarah Records, 1

Sausage Machine (club), 1

Savage, Jon, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Saville, Peter (graphic designer), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Saxe, Phil, 1

Saxon, Sky, 1;

see also Seeds

Says, Stephanie, 1

Scars, 1, 2

Schoolly D, 1, 2

Science Fiction Theatre (Liverpool), 1

Scotland, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Scott, Mike, 1;

see also New Order

Scott, Richard, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

and The Cartel, 1, 2;

and move to Collier Street, 1;

refuses to quit Rough Trade, 1;

and Travis, 1, 2

Screaming Jay Hawkins, 1

Scritti Politti, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;

at Rough Trade, 1;

sign to Virgin, 1

Songs to Remember, 1

‘The “Sweetest” Girl’, 1

Sebadoh, 1, 2, 3;

at Reading ’92, 1

‘Soul and Fire’, 1

Weed Forestin, 1

Section 1, 2, 3, 4

Sedgwick, Edie, 1

Seeds, 1, 2

Sellers, Peter, 1

Servants, 1, 2

Seven Sisters Road, Finsbury Park (Rough Trade), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Sex Pistols, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

Anarchy tour, 1

Sham 1, 2

Shamberg, Michael, 1, 2, 3

Sharp, Gordon, 1

Shea, Robert, 1, 2

Sheehan, Tom, 1

Sheer Taft, 1, 2

Sheffield: FON Studios, 1;

‘The People’s Republic’, 1;

rave scene, 1;

University, 1;

see also Arctic Monkeys; Pulp; Warp

Shelley, Pete, 1, 2

Shelleyan Orphan, 1

Sherwood, Adrian, 1

‘The Enemy Within’, 1

Shields, Kevin, 1, 2;

see also My Bloody Valentine

Shimmy Disc (record label), 1

Shoom (club), 1, 2

Shop Assistants, 1, 2, 3, 4

Sick, 1, 2

Silicon Teens, 1

Music for Parties, 1

‘Memphis’, 1

‘You Really Got Me’, 1

Silva, John, 1

Silverfish, 1

Simmons, Russell, 1

Simmons, Tina, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

joins Factory, 1;

resigns from Factory, 1

Simple Minds, 1, 2

‘Don’t You Forget about Me’, 1

Sims, Joyce, 1

Siouxsie and the Banshees, 1

Sire Records, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14;

History of British Rock (Sire compilation), 1

Sisters of Mercy, 1

Situation Two (record label), 1

Sky News, 1

Slash (fanzine), 1, 2, 3

Slaughter Joe, 1

Slee, Jo, 1

Sleeper, 1, 2, 3

sleeve art/designs: Blast First, 1, 2;

Creation, 1, 2, 3;

él, 1;

Factory (Saville), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;

Factory (Central Station Design), 1;

4AD (23 Envelope), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

Industrial (COUM Transmissions), 1;

The KLF, 1;

Postcard, 1, 2;

Rough Trade, 1, 2;

Warp, 1, 2, 3, 4

Slits, The, 1

Slowdive, 1, 2

Sly and Lovechild, 1

Sly and Robbie, 1

Small Faces, 1

Smash Hits, 1, 2, 3, 4

Smith, Doug, 1

Smith, Elliott, 1

Either/Or, 1

Smith, Mark E., 1, 2

Smith, Mike (EMI), 1, 2, 3, 4

Smith, Patti, 1

Smith, Paul, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

and decline of British squat bands, 1;

lunchtime at the Malt & Hops, 1;

and Rough Trade, 1, 2;

signings to Blast First, 1;

and Sonic Youth, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

see also Blast First

Smiths, The: back catalogue sold to Warners, 1;

at Brixton Ace, 1;

at Danceteria (NY, ’93), 1;

at Festival of the Tenth Summer (GMEX, ’1), 2;

and flowers, 1, 2;

at Glastonbury (’94), 1, 2;

at Haçienda, 1, 2, 3;

impact on Rough Trade, 1;

at Kingston Poly, 1;

at ICA, 1;

meteoric rise, 1;

musical style, 1;

Peel sessions, 1, 2;

and politics, 1, 2;

rehearsals, 1;

at Rock garden, 1;

and Rough Trade, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9;

sign to Rough Trade, 1, 2, 3;

sign to Sire (Warners), 1;

and Stein, 1;

on TOTP, 1;

at ULU, 1;

US tour (’86), 1

Hatful of Hollow (compilation), 1

Meat Is Murder, 1, 2

The Smiths (debut), 1

Strangeways Here We Come, 1

The Queen Is Dead, 1, 2, 3, 4

‘Girl Afraid’, 1

‘Hand in Glove’, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;

distribution problems, 1

‘Handsome Devil’, 1

‘How Soon Is Now?’, 1

‘Panic’, 1

‘Shakespeare’s Sister’, 1

‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’, 1

‘There Is a Light and It Never Goes Out’, 1

‘This Charming Man’, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

‘Frankly Mr Shankly’, 1

‘The Queen Is Dead’, 1, 2

Smog, 1

Smykle, Paul Groucho, 1

Sniffin’ Glue (fanzine), 1

So It Goes (TV series), 1

Socialist Workers Party, 1

Soho, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Solomon, Clive (Fire), 1, 2, 3

Solti, Sir George, 1

Some Bizzare Records, 1, 2, 3

Sonic Boom (Spacemen 1), 2

Sonic Youth, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;

and Blast First, 1;

and CBS/Geffen, 1;

formation, 1;

and Smith, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Bad Moon Rising, 1, 2

Daydream Nation, 1, 2, 3

Evol, 1, 2, 3, 4

Goo, 1, 2

Halloween/Flower (12-inch), 1, 2, 3

‘Death Valley ’1’, 2

‘Ghost Bitch’, 1

Sony, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Soundgarden, 1

Sounds (magazine), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Soup Dragons, 1, 2, 3

South Yorkshire (SoYo), 1

Spacemen 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

The Perfect Prescription, 1

Recurring, 1

Sound of Confusion, 1

‘Ecstasy Symphony’, 1

‘O.D. Catastrophe’, 1

Spaceward Studios, 1

Spartan (distributor), 1

Specials, 1

Sperm Wails, 1

Spheeris, Penelope, 1

Spinal Tap (film), 1

Spirea X, 1

Spiritualized, 1

Spitfire Boys, 1

Splash One (club), 1, 2, 3

Spooky Tooth, 1

Spotted Pig (NY gastropub), 1

Springsteen, Bruce, 1

Squarepusher, 1

squats, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

London, 1, 2, 3

SST Records, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

sleeve art, 1

Stadium House Trilogy (New Order), 1, 2

Stalker (film), 1

Stanley, Bob, 1

Stax Records, 1

Stein, Seymour: and Aztec Camera, 1;

and Drummond, 1, 2, 3;

founds Korova, 1;

founds Sire, 1;

and Madonna, 1, 2;

and McGee, 1;

and Mighty Lemon Drops, 1;

and Miller, 1;

and New Order Qwest deal, 1;

and The Smiths, 1, 2;

visits Rough Trade shop, 1, 2;

and Throwing Muses, 1

Stent, Mark, 1

Stevens, Sufjan, 1

Stevo (Some Bizzare), 1

Stiff Little Fingers, 1

Inflammable Material, 1

Stiff Records, 1, 2, 3

Stock Aitken Waterman, 1, 2, 3

Stone Roses, 1, 2, 3

STP (Green), 1

Strange Things (fanzine), 1

Stranglers, 1

Strawberry Studios, Stockport, 1

Strawberry Switchblade, 1

Strokes, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

‘The Modern Age’, 1

Strongman, Jay (Rhythm Kings), 1

Stump, 1

Stupids, 1

Sub Pop (record label), 1, 2, 3

Subway Organisation (record label), 1

Subway Sect, 1, 2

Suck, Jane, and ‘TVOD’, 1

Suicide, 1

Suite Sixteen (Rochdale), 1

Summer, Donna, 1

‘I Feel Love’, 1

Sumner, Bernard, 1, 2, 3;

see also New Order

Sumosonic, 1

Sun, The, 1, 2

Sundays, 1, 2

Super Furry Animals, 1

‘The Man Don’t Give a Fuck’, 1

Superdrug, 1

Supergrass, 1

Swamplands (record label), 1

Swankers (fanzine), 1, 2

Sweet Exorcist, 1, 2

‘Testone’, 1

Swell Maps, 1, 2

Swervedriver, 1

Swinton, Tilda, 1

Symmons, Rob, 1

synchronisations, 1

Synclavier, 1

T in the Park, 1

Tad, 1

Talking Heads, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

‘Stop Making Sense’, 1

Talulah Gosh, 1

Tambala, Ayuli and Rudy, 1;

see also AR Kane

Tangerine Dream, 1

Tate, Troy, 1

Tati, Jacques, 1

Taylor, Alexis (Domino), 1

Taylor, Mark, 1

tDR see under Designers Republic

Team Talk, Chelsea F.C., 1

Teardrop Explodes, The, 1, 2, 3, 4

A Catholic Education, 1

Bandwagonesque, 1, 2, 3

Grand Prix, 1

‘Bill Drummond Said’, 1

‘Reward’, 1

‘Sleeping Gas’, 1

‘Teenage Depression’ by Eddy & the Hot Rods 1

Teenage Fanclub, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Teenage Filmstars, 1

Telescopes, 1

Television, 1, 2, 3

Marquee Moon, 1, 2, 3

Television Personalities, 1, 2, 3, 4

‘Part Time Punks’, 1

‘Picture of Dorian Gray’, 1

Teller, Jürgen, 1

Ten City, 1

Terra Firma, 1

Terrace, Blenheim, 1

Terris, 1

Tetras, Bush, 1

Thailand, 1

That Dog, 1

Thatcher, Margaret, 1

They Might Be Giants, 1

Thick Pigeon, 1

Thirteenth Floor Elevators, 1, 2

This Heat, 1, 2, 3

This Mortal Coil, 1, 2

Blood, 1, 2, 3

‘Song to the Siren’, 1, 2

Thomas, Richard ‘the Druid’, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Thompson, Daley, 1

Thompson, Hunter S., 1

Thompson, Mayo, 1, 2, 3

Corky’s Debt To His Father, 1

Thompson, Pete (Vital), 1

Thorn, Tracey, 1

Throbbing Gristle, 1, 2

The Second Annual Report, 1

Throwing Muses, 1

Timelords, The, 1, 2, 3;

on TOTP, 1;

see also KLF, The ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’, 1, 2, 3

Tindersticks, 1

Tolworth Recreation Centre, 1

Too Pure (record label), 1, 2

Top Gear, 1

Top of the Pops (TOTP), 1, 2, 3, 4;

Depeche Mode, 1, 2;

Donna Summer, 1;

and Hawkwind, 1;

Happy Mondays, 1, 2;

Hendrix, 1;

New Order, 1, 2, 3;

Orange Juice, 1;

The Smiths, 1;

The Teardrop Explodes, 1;

The Timelords/KLF, 1, 2

Tottenham Court Road: The Living Room, 1;

YMCA, 1, 2

Touch & Go Records, 1

Town & Country Club, 1, 2, 3

Trafford, Howard, see Devoto, Howard

Transamerica Corporation, 1

Transmat (record label), 1

Travis, Geoff, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

and Alway, 1, 2;

after Rough Trade, 1;

and Blanco y Negro deal, 1;

and demise of Rough Trade, 1, 2;

and Doherty, 1, 2;

ethos, 1, 2, 3;

and Horne, 1, 2;

and Lee, 1, 2;

and Morrissey, 1, 2;

musical taste, 1, 2;

opens Rough Trade shop, 1;

relaunches Rough Trade, 1;

and Scott, 1, 2, 3;

and The Smiths, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8;

and the Strokes, 1;

and ‘TVOD’, 1;

US signings, 1;

and Warners, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

see also Rough Trade Records

Trax Records (Chicago), 1

Treacy, Dan, 1, 2, 3, 4;

see also Television Personalities

Tricky Disco, 1, 2

Troggs, 1

True, Everett, 1;

see also Legend!, The

Trux, The, 1

Tschichold, Jan, 1

Tube, The (TV show), 1, 2, 3

Tubeway Army, 1

Turner, Alex, 1

Turner, Simon Fisher, 1

Turner, Steve, 1

Turner, Tina, 1

Tushingham, Rita, 1

Tuxedomoon, 1

23 Envelope (graphic design), 1, 2, 3;

see also Oliver, Vaughan

Twisted Wheel, 1

UK, 1, 2

UK Subs, 1

Ulmer, Jame, 1

‘Blood’, 1

Ultra Vivid Scene, 1

ULU (University of London Union), 1, 2, 3

Underground Resistance (Detroit record label), 1

United Artists, 1, 2, 3;

and Andrew Lauder/Hawkwind, 1;

’70s competitors, 1

Universal Amphitheatre, 1

Unrest, 1

Perfect Teeth, 1

USA, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9;

executives, compared with UK, 1;

radio stations, 1;

touring in, 1;

Eighties, 1;

West Coast, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

V (festival), 1

Valley Girl (film), 1

Van der Graaf Generator, 1

Vaselines, 1, 2

‘Molly’s Lips’, 1

‘Son of a Gun’, 1

Velvet Underground, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Loaded, 1

VU, 1

Venice Biennale, 1

Verlaine, Tom, 1, 2

Versace, Donatella, 1

Vig, Butch, 1

Vindaloo Records (Birmingham), 1

Violent Femmes, 1

Viper Room, 1

Virgin Prunes, 1

Virgin Records, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Vital (distributor), 1

Vogue, 1

Vomit, The, 1, 2

Vonnegut, Kurt, 1

Vox Continental (organ), 1

Wag club, 1, 2

Waits, Tom, 1

Wake, 1

Walker, Gary (Wiiija), 1, 2

Walking Seeds, 1

Wall Street, 1, 2;

Wall Street Journal, 1

Wall, Max, 1

Wallace, Colin, 1, 2, 3, 4

Walmsley, Peter, 1

Walters, John, 1

Warby, Russell, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Wardle, Ben, 1

Warhol, Andy, 1

Warner Brothers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9;

and Drummond, 1, 2, 3,

and McGee, 1;

and New Order, 1;

and The Smiths, 1, 2;

and Travis, 1, 2, 3, 4;

and Watts-Russell/1AD, 2, 3, 4;

see also Blanco y Negro; Electra; Elevation; Korova; Qwest; Sire

Warp (record label), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

AI series, 1;

and Boards of Canada, 1;

and Detroit scene, 1;

facelessness, 1;

and FON Studios, 1;

formation, 1;

and Peel, 1;

and Rhythm King, 1, 2;

sign Broadcast, 1;

and tDR, 1, 2;

‘Track With No Name’ (debut), 1

Warp Films, 1

Warpnet, 1

Warren, Tony, 1

Warwick University, 1

Water Rats, Kings Cross, 1, 2

Waterman, Pete, 1, 2, 3;

see also Stock Aitken Waterman

Watford Gap, 1

Watts-Russell, Ivo, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;

and AR Kane, 1;

and Cocteau Twins, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

and Colourbox, 1;

early life, 1;

emigration to LA, 1, 2, 3;

founds Guernica, 1;

and 4AD, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

and Lavonia, 1;

leaves 4AD, 1;

and Oliver, 1, 2, 3;

and Peel, 1, 2, 3;

personal life, 1, 2;

and Pixies/Throwing Muses, 1, 2;

and PJ Harvey/Too Pure, 1;

and ‘Pump Up the Volume’, 1;

and Red House Painters, 1;

‘steals’ AR Kane, 1;

and This Mortal Coil, 1, 2;

signs Lush/Pale Saints, 1, 2;

see also 4AD

WEA, see Warner Brothers

Weather Prophets, 1, 2

Mayflower, 1

Weatherall, Andrew, 1

Webster, John, 1

Wedding Present, 1, 2, 3, 4

Week of Wonders, The (Hammersmith Riverside, 1985), 1

Welwyn Garden, 1

Wembley Arena, 1, 2

Wendys, 1

West Ham, 1

West Princes Street (Postcard), 1, 2, 3

West Wing, 1

Western Baths Club, 1

Westgate Street, Hackney (Creation), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Wet Wet Wet, 1, 2, 3

Whaam! Records, 1

What’s On, 1

Whitaker, Hugh (Housemartins), 1

White, Jack, 1, 2

White, Jimmy, 1

White, Paul, 1

White Panther Movement, 1

White Room, The (film), 1

White Stripes, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

sign to XL, 1

White Swans (cricket club), 1

Whitehead, Dave, 1

Whitehead, Malcolm, 1

Whitesnake, 1

Whitworth Street, Manchester, 1, 2;

see also Haçienda, The

Wichita Recordings (record label), 1, 2, 3, 4;

attempt to sign Yeah Yeah Yeahs, 1;

sign Bloc Party, 1

Wiiija (record label), 1, 2, 3;

joins Beggars Group, 1

Wild Swans, 1, 2

Wilder, Alan, 1

Williams, Lucinda, 1

Williams, Robert, 1

Wilson, Brian, 1

Wilson, Greg, 1

Wilson, Tony, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11;

‘art of the playground’, 1;

closes Haçienda, 1;

and Drummond, 1;

and The Factory Club, 1;

and Factory, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;

and Granada, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;

and Gretton, 1;

and Happy Mondays, 1, 2, 3, 4;

and McGee, 1, 2;

and McGough, 1, 2, 3;

and New Order, 1, 2, 3;

resigns from Granada, 1;

and Savage, 1, 2;

and Sex Pistols, 1, 2;

see also Factory Records; Haçienda, The

Win, 1

Winwood, Muff, 1

Wipers, 1

‘D’, 1

Wire, 1, 2, 3

With Love from Manchester (festival), 1

WLIR, 1

Wogan, 1

Wolfgang Press, 1, 2, 3

‘A Girl Like You’, 1

Wonder Stuff, The, 1, 2

The Eight Legged Groove Machine, 1

Woodbine Street Studios (Leamington Spa), 1, 2

Woodentops, 1, 2, 3

Word, The (TV show), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Working Week, 1

Worst, The, 1

Would Be Goods, 1

‘The Camera Loves Me’, 1

Wyatt, Robert, 1

‘Shipbuilding’, 1

Wynette, Tammy, 1

X–Factor, 1

XL Recordings (record label), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

and rave scene, 1

Xmal Deutschland, 1

Y Cruff, 1

Yazoo, 1, 2

Upstairs At Eric’s, 1, 2

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, 1

Yes, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Yetnikoff, Walter, 1

YMCA, 1

YMG, 1

York, Peter, 1, 2

Young Marble Giants, 1, 2

Young, Martin, 1, 2, 3

Young, Neil, 1

Young, Steve, 1

Zoo, The (Zoo Records), 1, 2

To the Shores of Lake Placid (compilation), 1

About the Author

Richard King was born in Newport, Gwent. He has worked at the heart of the independent music industry for nearly twenty years. He is the co-editor of Loops, an occasional journal of long-form music writing published jointly by Faber and Domino Records. He has contributed to the Guardian, the Observer and many other publications. He lives with his family in Powys. This is his first book.

Copyright

First published in 20012

by Faber and Faber Ltd

Bloomsbury House

74–77 Great Russell Street

London WC1B 3DA

This ebook edition first published in 2012

All rights reserved

© Richard King, 2012

The right of Richard King to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

ISBN 978–0–571–27832–9

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Cast of Characters

PART ONE

I Hope to God You’re Not as Dumb as You Make Out

1 Time’s Up

2 All Night Party

3 What Presence?!

4 The Tinderbox (of a Heart)

5 Oblivious

6 You’ve Got Everything Now

7 Thieves Like Us

8 Primitive Painters

PART TWO

I Get This Feeling I’m in Motion, a Sudden Sense of Liberty

9 Everything Counts

10 Stereo Sanctity

11 Gigantic

12 We Love You

13 Getting Away With It

14 Trancentral Lost in My Mind

15 Leave The Planet

PART THREE

You Are the Latest Contender, You Are the One to Remember

16 Turnaround

17 Alcoholiday

18 Medicine Bottle

19 Cold Blooded Old Times

20 Is This It?

21 Fake Tales of San Francisco

Select References

Index

About the Author

Copyright