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 f
or 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.’
How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 Page 14