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

by King, Richard

  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 s
hit 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.’