For one of the few times in his career Watts-Russell was attempting to sign a band that had generated significant interest from other, more mainstream, parts of the industry and knew he would soon find himself in a bidding war. ‘There was a period of a week or two where she played three shows, and by the third one the entire world was there, and I was right there with them. It was my suggestion that she put the demos out with the album because I just thought they were fantastic. It was really through Too Pure that my approaches happened. And I effectively ended up buying half of the company in the hope that Polly would stay with them.’
Watts-Russell paid for an equal shareholding in Too Pure in the hope that, by bringing the label into the 4AD/Beggars system PJ Harvey would remain with the label that had discovered her. Instead the band signed with a major, Island, where they enjoyed healthy sales and continual critical recognition. It was only the second time that Watts-Russell had been turned down by an artist. ‘My first experience of trying to sign something where there was interest from somewhere else – and there was huge interest – was the Sundays,’ he says. ‘There had been some glowing Falcon review and at the next gig everybody was there. This was a new world to me, not one I was familiar with at all, having to think about other people’s opinions or to care what anyone else thought. The Sundays could have easily been on 4AD. They made the decision to go with The Smiths’ label, knowing they’d be a priority there.’
In both cases the sense of rejection added to Watts-Russell’s low self-esteem. ‘I was astonished at what I felt like when we were turned down by Polly Harvey,’ he says, ‘like a jilted lover or something. I was feeling something complex, with relationships deteriorating.’
The most complex of all the relationships that were deteriorating was Watts-Russell’s relationship with his own record label. His decision to move to America had allowed him to escape the bureaucracy and pressures of running a more business-focused company, but it hadn’t altered the fact that he ultimately carried the responsibilities of 4AD. The intensity with which he had created and run the label was being replaced by an equally strong sense of disillusionment. ‘Things were still being run and passed through and by me,’ he says, ‘but I didn’t have the strength to direct things in the way we should have done. I just thought, what the fuck are we doing that’s any different to what any major is doing? We were having more of an injection of money than we’d ever had from the guaranteed advances from Warner Brothers, but what had we got to offset that? A whole office of people in America, an office of people in England – a double record company – and I soon realised that those advances were all the money we were ever going to see. None of those records were selling enough to ever recoup.’
Over in the LA sunshine Hurley was trying to keep Warners interested. At Burbank the Warners executives were starting to grow concerned that their key asset at 4AD – Watts-Russell’s world-class A&R instincts – was no longer as prominent a component of the deal. ‘Ivo tried with Guernica,’ says Hurley. ‘It didn’t really work that well. The people he gave A&R duties to in London signed things like Sheer and GusGus – both things Ivo would not have signed. But to his great credit Ivo would come up to Warners with me and we’d play them Sheer and say, “If such and such can do well, why can’t this do just as well?.” And the Warners people were scratching their heads by this point.’
For someone with such refined and individual taste as Watts-Russell, allowing other members of staff to sign bands to his label was a magnanimous gesture. It was also suggestive of how little real interest he was sustaining in the company. The staff in the London office did not really know what the situation was, whether Watts-Russell was still in overall charge or whether they were to take their lead from whoever had been appointed as subordinate label manager.
‘When he first moved to the States, it was unclear to a lot of people in the office how involved he was going to be and that obviously caused some problems and confusion,’ says Harper. ‘I think the writing was on the wall as to how long Ivo would have anything to do with the label.’
While the staff of 4AD were aware that Watts-Russell’s emigration was a result of his desire for a change of location, very few people realised the extent of his unhappiness and disillusion. Apart from Hurley and Harper, only Martin Mills, the person who had suggested he start a label over fifteen years earlier, was aware of the decision Watts-Russell was considering – how to bring an end his involvement with 4AD. His eventual choice was to sell to Mills, but it was one he would spend more than a year dwelling on before making.
‘We had a contractual arrangement that, if one of us wanted to leave, we had to offer the other half to each other first,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘I had to look at different options. I could just stop it as a label but remain a co-owner and run it as a catalogue thing. I could have said, “Fuck it, it’s not working without me. I’m going back to England,” and I wanted to be in America.’
‘It was a very gradual process,’ says Mills ‘it had largely happened a long time before anyone realised it had happened. Gradually it had become inevitable. During the period in which he handed over control of the company – no one was meant to know – I think the company grew further and further away from him. It just got trapped in a circle of making expensive videos and making records to get played on the radio, which is not really what a label like 4AD should ever be about.’
By 1997, when the relevant papers were signed at last, Watts-Russell’s prediction of 4AD turning into a run-of-the-mill label that, at the cost of its identity, serviced the need of the market, had come true. The stress, exhaustion and anxiety that he had managed to fight off finally overwhelmed him and he entered a period in the wilderness. ‘I completely and utterly lost the plot and went off the rails,’ he says, ‘and no matter how hard I tried, between ’94 and ’97 I couldn’t get back on those rails’
Before making his final decision to leave, he had asked Hurley and Harper to join him in the desert. In 29 Palms, near Joshua Tree National Park, in the unique atmosphere of the desert air, the three of them discussed the situation at the label: its problems, its future and, as was becoming clear through their conversation, how the 4AD they had worked tirelessly to create might now be coming to an end. ‘We’d had conversations about how to do it,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘I made the decision when we went out to Joshua Tree for the weekend me, Robin and Simon. And my heart just wasn’t in it any more.’
Under the palm trees in the dry heat, Watts-Russell talked through his feelings and agreed that the American office would close and that he would begin the process of selling the label to Mills.
‘He was really really disillusioned,’ says Harper. ‘In many ways it was very, very cathartic, like a breath of fresh air. I remember sitting out by the pool and it was a relief to hear him say it.’
‘It needed to be said and it got said,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘I let down all sorts of people. I’d just vanished really. I remember Martin was in LA visiting Robin and I, meeting us somewhere at lunch – at that point I wasn’t even going into the office – and they started talking to me about something and I just remember tears welling up and just saying, “I just wish I could care.” I’d just lost it.’
19 Cold Blooded Old Times
Smog, Cold Blooded Old Times, an American record in the post-Britpop malaise (Matthew Cooper archive)
By the midpoint of the 1990s the momentum of the independent sector had stalled almost to a halt. Rough Trade and Factory had both ceased trading, Creation and 4AD were in the hands of a support staff as McGee and Watts-Russell, exhausted and broken, had removed themselves from the day-to-day running of their companies. Daniel Miller was finding himself in the difficult position of firing and rehiring staff as Mute’s finances became increasingly volatile. With the end of Rough Trade Distribution came the end of the most sympathetic route to market for independently released music – a market that was now beginning to harden into a professional era of double-format CD singles, hig
h-end advertising campaigns and overpriced albums. The music often associated with independence or indie – four-piece guitar bands referencing the Sixties – had become mainstream and rebranded Britpop. Almost none of the bands associated with it were signed to independent labels.
The most creatively successful independent label of the era had nothing in common with the perky ordinariness of Britpop. Warp Records, or Warp, as it instantly became known, had started casually in the back room of a Sheffield record shop and financed its first release with an Enterprise Allowance Grant. ‘At the time we didn’t think we were setting up a label necessarily,’ says Steve Beckett, one of the Warp’s three founders. ‘It was more about “Let’s do this 12-inch and see if it can have an effect”, like we were seeing in guys like 808 State and Unique 3. It was all more orientated to the dance floor rather than the label side of things.’
Beckett and his friend Rob Mitchell were in their early twenties but already veterans of the Sheffield underground, whose focal point was FON studios and record shop. FON had been a bridge between the dystopian futurism of the Sheffield of Cabaret Voltaire and Human League and the city’s next generation of bands like Hula and Chakk. It was with Chakk’s major-label advance that FON had been built as a state-of-the-art studio. The project had been successful; FON’s clients included David Bowie and Yazz. Chakk’s material was recorded by Robert Gordon, a local producer and FON regular who had credits on mixes for Top Forty singles by Erasure, Ten City and Joyce Sims to his name, and a reputation for serious technical dexterity behind the mixing desk.
An aficionado of the north’s club scene, Gordon had started to record music that suited the atmosphere of the hardcore techno raves that were now a feature of Sheffield’s nightlife. Gordon recorded a track under the name of Forgemasters, a trio in which he was joined by two friends and fellow FON luminaries, Winston Hazel and Sean Maher. The name was taken from a local heavy engineering works and suited the music on their tape perfectly: a ghostly melody, floating over finely wrought beats, programmed with a crisp industrial precision. The track was driven by an eerie pulse, a sound which would soon be called a ‘bleep’ and become the distinctive signature of hardcore northern techno and, for its first two years, the sound of Warp.
Pressed up as a white label, ‘Track With No Name’ by Forgemasters was the debut release on Warp, an evocation of the nocturnal energy of an industrial city in decline, whose empty, industrial spaces were being turned into illegal and autonomous party zones. ‘The whole thing was crime from the start,’ says Beckett. ‘It was an illegal place, selling illegal drugs, with the gangs on the door taking the illegal money. But people were having this amazing time and I can’t ever remember fights going on.’
Warp was initially a partnership between Beckett, Mitchell and Gordon. The first decision taken by the trio was to refit the FON shop into a new record store, also called Warp. The cash flow for the refurbishment came from an unlikely source and was testament to the trio’s working knowledge of the grey-market economics of hardcore. Warp sold tickets for events at Sheffield University, then one of the indie circuit’s most successful venues. ‘We sold thousands of pounds of students’ union tickets and then used that as cash flow,’ says Beckett. ‘They’d say, “We need the invoice paying.” We’d just keep fobbing them off until we’d got the money, but obviously, because it was students who had no business sense, they just think everything works like it’s supposed to work. “You’re supposed to pay us now.” … “Yeah, but we can’t.” “Oh – what happens now?” “Come back next week.” … “Oh, OK.” … “Chill, chill.”’
Warp specialised in imports from Chicago and Detroit, steel cities producing sleek precise techno that was in as much demand from local DJs as from the record-buying cognoscenti. ‘On a Saturday they were literally queuing down the street to wait for the doors to open,’ says Beckett. ‘All the Transmat releases, or whatever the two or three big tunes were that week, would be gone in an hour. The importer had brought in what he could and there was obviously no digital access to it then, so it was a real supply-and-demand thing.’
The influence of the music released by Transmat, Metroplex, Trax and Underground Resistance could be heard on the next set of Warp releases. A series of 12-inch singles by Tricky Disco, LFO and Sweet Exorcist, the latter an intergenerational collaboration between Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk and DJ Parrot, combined the minimalism of American techno with a northern intensity. In typical fashion, John Peel’s antennae noticed the energy coming from a new, non-metropolitan label and he began playing Warp releases as a matter of course. ‘We got a call from Peel about Sweet Exorcist at the shop,’ says Beckett. ‘He’s like, “I love this record, I’m playing it tonight.” One of the guys serving in the shop was walking up the stairs going, “This is the coolest fucking shop in the world.” He was like, “John Peel!” His life was made.’
Warp had quickly found that its releases had an unexpectedly large market. ‘Tricky Disco’ by Tricky Disco reached no. 14 in the Top Twenty in November 1990 and ‘LFO’ by LFO had already been in the charts that July. The raw self-titled anonymity of the releases was an overt emphasis on the functionality of the music.
Both LFO and Tricky Disco were bedroom producers with access to recording equipment that could produce the minimal and hard-edged sounds that worked in a club, without the need to visit a studio. Once a track was finished it was mixed down straight on to a metal cassette and tested through the rave PA. ‘It wasn’t even demo-led at the time,’ say Beckett. ‘People were literally walking into the DJ booth and going, “What is this record?” LFO were playing cassettes in the club. We were going up to them and persuading them that we had a label and wanted to put a record out.’
In the absence of either party knowing or caring about the legal or technical details of a record deal, LFO and Warp decided that, rather than bother with a contract, they should place their signatures on the LFO demo inlay card. As well as being the medium on which their music was played in clubs, the cassette was also their binding agreement with Warp. ‘We didn’t know what you’re supposed to do, but they said, “Oh, you’re supposed to sign them.” So we said, “What will we do? Let’s just sign it then, sign the tape.” So that was our first deal.’
Despite bringing the sound of hardcore into the Top Twenty, Warp was encountering some severe teething problems; Robert Gordon left the company and the partnership on bad terms. More significantly, Warp had made a decision they were now starting to regret. After its appearance as a white label, ‘Track With No Name’ had been re-pressed and given an official release. The record was housed in the distinct purple sleeve that would become a Warp trademark, but on the vinyl label there were two record company logos, the smallest of which said Warp, the bigger Outer Rhythm.
‘We almost straight away started going into the relationship with Rhythm King,’ says Beckett. ‘We got our sleeve back and we were like, “What the fuck! What the fuck’s Outer Rhythm? Where’s our thing?” That was our introduction to the music business. We just thought, oh my God, what have we done?’
Rhythm King had been a highly successful label in the years immediately preceding Warp’s formation. It was a partnership between three friends from the late Eighties London club scene, Martin Heath, James Horrocks and Jay Strongman, all of whom had been regulars at the Wag club and noticed the arrival and the effect of the first import-house releases on the dance floor. Rhythm King’s releases were a successful attempt at turning the dynamics of club music into more commercial, chart-ready formats. For six months in 1988 the label regularly had its releases in the Top Ten. The Beatmasters’ ‘Rock Da House’ made it to no. 5 in February and it was joined later that month by ‘Beat Dis’ by Bomb the Bass at no. 2.
‘Rhythm King was actually quite short-lived,’ says Horrocks. ‘By the time we got to doing “Rock Da House” and “Beat Dis” we had everything worked out: how to work a record, make it successful, etc., and it kind of went hand-in-hand with the
proliferation of Ecstasy and clubbing.’ Three months later the label had its first no. 1, ‘Theme From S’Express’ by S’Express, a record that had been financed along with the rest of Rhythm King’s catalogue by Daniel Miller at Mute.
Rhythm King’s success was not without its problems for Miller. The culture of dance music relied on a fast turnover of artists. Despite top-of-the-range studios and expensive videos, many of its successes did not last. In contrast, Miller had always run Mute at its own pace, one that was dictated by when his artists had finished recording an album.
‘I think I took on too much financially,’ says Miller. ‘Even though it was successful in the beginning, it was quite a strain. Also Rhythm King and Blast First didn’t like each other at all. I was trying to control these renegade people, and I think the artists found them quite difficult to deal with as well.’ The hedonism of the dance floor had been amplified by Rhythm King’s chart success and the company was determined to enjoy the high life. The partying duly took over. ‘I often got the artists coming to me saying, “What can we do?”,’ says Miller, ‘because they couldn’t really deal with the culture of that company.’
A scout for Rhythm King had picked up on ‘Track With No Name’ as a white label, and Beckett and Mitchell were asked if Warp would be interested in working with the London company. ‘They made an approach to do a label deal and we thought we’d done the deal of the century,’ says Beckett. ‘We signed away everything for £10,000 and just walked out of Rhythm King going, “Yes, we’ve done it.”’
Warp signed to Rhythm King’s experimental subsidiary, Outer Rhythm, and looked on in horror as LFO and Tricky Disco climbed the charts. ‘It’s the classic story,’ says Beckett. ‘You’re in your little mind-set going, “Fucking some idiot’s given us 10,000 quid to release our records,” and then not realising that after a while you’re selling 100,000 records and you’re not seeing a penny and going, “Hold on … my God, what have we done?”’
How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 Page 45