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

by King, Richard

  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.’