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 t
here 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.’
How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 Page 3