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

by King, Richard

  ‘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 e
xpensive 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.