*
By the middle of the Nineties, Laurence Bell had established Domino as a label with a distinct identity, that of a company that released inexpensively but elegantly recorded albums, made mainly by American artists. The names on the Domino release schedule – Royal Trux, Palace and Smog – gave the impression that the label was defiantly representing outsiders. The impression was concentrated by the fact that the label had been started at almost the exact moment when the media, after years of covering American grunge and alternative, threw its weight firmly behind Britpop. A turning point was at the Reading festival in 1994 when, following Kurt Cobain’s suicide a few months earlier, sets by Hole and the Lemonheads disintegrated into cathartic and incoherent displays of public grief. A few hours later, Sebadoh’s performance collapsed into fits of screaming and instrument smashing. ‘Courtney Love was trying to invade the stage when Sebadoh was playing,’ says Bell, ‘and there was a lot of tears and blood and madness in the air, Evan staggering around. But that madness was obviously more exciting than everybody just obsessed with their careers saying, “We’ve got a fan base.” No one in America would know about the term fan base, or give a fuck about it anyway, and that was inspiring. That kind of careerism that was starting to happen in the UK just eggs on careerism.’
The chaotic scenes at Reading were followed by ‘Yanks Go Home’ editorials in the music weeklies. All eyes turned towards London where the major-label music industry and the media were aligned in their celebration of guitar bands, and according to their narrative, the capital started to swing again. ‘They moved into Britpop very fast, and the whole media just became obsessed about that just on the back of Kurt dying,’ says Bell. ‘That was maybe a year into Domino, and there wasn’t much room at all. There was just a few people who’d be supportive of us.’
Mark Mitchell had left RTM to work alongside Bell at Domino as the label entered a hand-to-mouth existence, releasing considered and reflective records into a market full of brash, three-chord social observation. As well as the label operating at the margins of the wider musical culture, Domino’s artists all lacked the kind of career mechanisms that were now considered essential.
‘Nobody had managers,’ says Mitchell. ‘It wasn’t about business, it was love of music. You’d be scared if the drummer phoned up, quite literally. Oh God, we must really be in trouble.’
Domino’s releases were personal and impressionistic and recorded on the kind of budget that would have absorbed a Britpop band’s weekly cab fare. Whatever Bell’s ambitions for the label, the market realities were stacked against a company like Domino succeeding. ‘What held me back was not having the money,’ he says. ‘It was just so competitive at that time. A band like Moose would come and play and you’d think, oh they’re pretty good, I like that, and then they’re signed to Virgin the following Tuesday for quarter of a million and people are writing four-page features on them, and they’d barely got out of the rehearsal room. You’re just like, “This is nuts.”’
Despite Bell’s natural bonhomie and willingness to try and communicate his belief in his releases, Domino found itself in a position of almost exile from the mainstream industry. Other independents like Warp and XL operated in a separate culture to Britpop and benefited from the dance music press where titles like MixMag provided an alternative media. Domino was reliant on coverage in the music weeklies, where it was forced to compete with the midweek Top Twenty culture of the day, and the label was perceived as being wilful, earning a frustrating reputation for wanting to deny itself success in the process.
‘It was not a good time at all,’ says Bell. ‘It was all about putting the ball in the back of the net. Friends in the industry would say to me, “We know people that just think you’re mad,” you know. But I certainly was very serious about it being a label and surviving as a label, and growing as a label. You can read all the books you like about Atlantic in the Fifties and Sixties but it was Putney in the Nineties, and it was really making it up as you went along.’
At times the sense of insularity at Domino became tangible. Mitchell was an ad hoc tour manager for several of the artists. Given that they very rarely toured, the experience proved challenging. It also illustrated how detached the label was from the mainstream. As a new generation of corporate festivals like V and T in the Park were launched to capitalise on guitar music, Mitchell was navigating his way through strange psyches and rural back roads in southern Europe.
‘I went to Spain with Will Oldham and Bill Callahan,’ he says. ‘I spent three or four days with them on this acoustic tour together. My two worst on-the-road experiences both happened at Domino, one with Will and Bill, one with Flying Saucer Attack. Spending days in close quarters with people who didn’t speak and didn’t communicate … You didn’t know where you were at any point, it was like some ridiculously hardcore type of Edwardian therapy.’
In 1996 Bell had been joined by his partner Jacqui Rice and, in a move that signalled the label’s ambitions, Domino signed Pavement. The band came back with one of their most coherent and immediate records, Brighten the Corners. Pavement had been absent for two years and upon their return found themselves becoming the toast of London and something of an exit strategy for bands stuck in the prolix deflation of Britpop.
‘They came back with Brighten the Corners,’ says Bell. ‘Everyone was like, “All right, this is what a band should really be about.” They had a lot of stuff that people were jealous of. They had tunes and this nonchalant glamour, they had the songs, and people could see that this band were just making it up as they went along with this outrageous amount of talent. I think they all wished they were a bit more like them, ’cause they’d all been playing pretty serious career games in the West End of London.’
Blur’s self-titled fifth album was released on the same day as Brighten the Corners and along with dressing in faded baseball T-shirts rather than Fred Perry, the band name-checked Pavement in interviews.
A year later Domino released Either/Or by the Portland singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, an acute and wistful collection of observational songwriting. It quickly connected with an audience, occupying the space that had been opened by Nirvana’s bruised and broken Unplugged in New York.
Nirvana’s former agent, Russell Warby, had been approached from the States to book Smith his first European tour, and slowly developed a relationship with the singer. ‘He used to like staying at the Russell Hotel in London, because the staff were so rubbish that they would never get his messages to him or put his calls through. I went to visit him in the studio and we had a little chat and he was like, “I’ve really got this idea, I’ve got to get it done,” and you could see him burning – something he needed to put down and he went off and he was recording immediately. He had a terrible temper, I never really saw it in effect but he used to talk about it and you’d have conversations about him getting into fights.’
After Either/Or Domino released the rest of Smith’s catalogue, which received plaudits and allowed the label to position itself a little nearer to the centre ground. ‘After years of real struggle it just seemed so painful, this going to the media saying, “You’ve got to listen to these people, Will and Bill. These are the best writers around, these songs are going to last for decades,” and try really hard to get a picture with a review and then after Elliot, Will came back as Bonnie Prince Billy, and suddenly everyone was just like, “These are masterpieces.”’
The renewed interest in contemplative singer-songwriting was not without its drawbacks. Domino was deluged with tapes from a succession of earnest young men who had poured their life experience into newly purchased Martin-copy acoustic guitars. Several of them were signed by the majors and launched to critical acclaim.
‘That all fed into everybody walking around saying, “Quiet is the new loud,” or something ridiculous,’ says Bell, ‘because then you got lots of rubbish English people playing acoustic music.’
The glow of Either/Or was short-lived for the label
as the music it had represented started to fragment. ‘I just felt that this amazing generation of Americans that we’d been involved with was kind of ending in some way,’ says Bell. ‘Pavement broke up in November ’99, The Trux broke up about six months later, Sebadoh disintegrated around the same time and Elliott was off with DreamWorks.’
Domino saw turn-of-the-millennium success with Four Tet and a move away from acoustic music. It also opened a small office in New York where many of its releases found a larger audience than in the UK. Despite taking such steps towards growth, Bell, a positive and optimistic person by nature, was finding his frustration with the industry starting to harden. ‘I got very disillusioned,’ he says. ‘It got very harsh in the early 2000s, it became so painful financially, just constantly up against it finding the money to pay the rent and being able to do anything. We were definitely planning to stop the whole thing and give the tapes back to the artists and burn it down in some sort of KLF-type stunt and move on. There were definitely some pretty blue moments but maybe there’s always the glint that there’s something round the corner. But there was this long period of nothingness, just like, “Holy fuck, where are we going to find anything?”’
* One of the tour’s most celebrated concerts was at Newport TJs. A recording of the banter between the audience members and bands was eventually released on vinyl. One memorable heckle aimed at Huggy Bear includes the repeated phrase ‘less structure, less structure’.
20 Is This It?
Jeannette Lee and Geoff Travis in the offices of Rough Trade (photograph by Rob Murray used by kind permission of the photographer)
‘Champagne Supernova’, the final song on Oasis’s second album What’s The Story (Morning Glory)? contained the lyric, ‘Where were you when we were getting high?’ It could have been directed to Alan McGee, who had been almost entirely absent from the band’s tumultuous ascendancy. After a year-long period of recovery and convalescence McGee reacquainted himself with the label, which had moved to newly acquired offices, a converted school building in the salubrious Primrose Hill, a location that suited Creation’s rising profile as Britain’s most successful record company.
To long-term employees, it seemed that McGee had weathered his problems with alcohol and drugs reasonably well. In his sobriety he had a new-found relish in the more mundane and technical aspects of the company; the drug-fuelled talk of a band on Creation selling a million was now, thanks to Oasis, stone-cold sober fact. ‘I think, in some ways Alan returned and enjoyed himself with more satisfaction,’ says James Kyllo. ‘It was a very, very dynamic time, so much had to be dealt with and our release schedule got very heavy, especially after Oasis.’
McGee also found he was the head of a company that had shifted its emphasis. Creation’s principal marketing device had consisted of providing vicarious rock ’n’ roll thrills and guest-list places for journalists, record-store buyers and distribution companies. Tim Abbott had harnessed such devil-may-care amateurism into an aspirational and inclusive USP for Oasis; the rest of Creation’s roster would now benefit from the cold and exact science of competitive, target-led, High Street marketing. Creation released three singles from Teenage Fanclub’s Grand Prix. Each one was accorded a budget of £100,000 to enable a guaranteed Top Twenty chart position. Before the additional costs of promoting and marketing the album were considered, Creation were spending more on each of Grand Prix’s singles than the band had spent on recording their last two albums.
Upon his return McGee embraced something of a portfolio career. As well as being MD of Creation he was now advising New Labour on its Creative Industries strategy and the party’s rather vague ideas about engagement with young people. While in recovery, McGee had rediscovered his childhood love of Rangers. As football became a key signifier of the period, McGee’s renewed interest in the game was focused on Chelsea, where he and Ed Ball took up their positions in a box every Saturday.* As a man now in demand in the broadsheets and business press – where he was usually profiled as Mr Oasis – his opinion was regularly sought and he became something of a celebrity. Behind the smartened-up high-flyer executive image, flashes of the former, quixotic, McGee still surfaced. In 1997 he and Ed Ball made a drum-and-bass LP.
The Creation tradition of hangers-on was maintained, along with the ritual of finding jobs for the boys and the girls. The new, user-friendly Creation drew its support staff from a different set of characters from those with which it had once partied hard. Rather than drug dealers and club promoters, Creation now offered short-term employment to associates of the era’s rising celebrity class. ‘Ed Ball gave up Chelsea when they sacked Vialli,’ says Kyllo, ‘but we had Chelsea footballers come to the Primrose Hill office and Alan would take them round the warehouse and hand out CDs to them. We even had a Chelsea footballer’s girlfriend join the staff at one point.’
Whatever his own lifestyle regime, McGee was aware that some of the rock ’n’ roll behaviour that had made Westgate Street’s reputation had survived the move to Creation’s new offices. ‘They had orgies in Primrose Hill apparently,’ he says, ‘but they were all too scared of me and I was never invited.’
A consequence of Oasis’s unprecedented success was that Creation became heavy with bands beholden to their sound and image, most notably Heavy Stereo and Hurricane #1. For a label that was now marketing-led and experiencing era-defining volumes of sales, such bands were duly expected to succeed. While no one at Creation was anticipating Heavy Stereo or Hurricane #1 to reach the sales heights of Oasis, the bands were duly processed through the marketing machine at Primrose Hill, all to very little effect.
Mark Bowen had been brought up in the hand-to-mouth culture of pre-Sony Creation and was now the label’s A&R. The change in the label’s climate provoked the odd moment of culture shock. Creation was now a highly staffed operation and one that had adjusted to the requirements of the Top Ten market. ‘There was probably a point in about ’98,’ he says, ‘where for the first time I’d go and see a band and think, this is amazing, I love it, but obviously it’s not so good for Creation.’
The rest of the industry was equally well positioned to sell guitar bands, as the second or third wave of Britpop saw major-label A&Rs stick rigidly to the formula and sign up anyone playing Camden who exhibited the necessary hallmarks of braggadocio and a retro guitar. ‘Suddenly you’d go to the Falcon or the Dublin Castle,’ says Bowen, ‘and there’s basically a load of blokes with their metaphorical chequebooks out. You’re watching the same band and thinking, whether good or bad, these are bands that would’ve signed to indies, and made records, and suddenly, before they’d made a demo or done three shows, they were signed to major labels and off you go.’
Bowen ignored the Camden hopefuls and signed a group that was in the experimental-melodic tradition of Creation’s early Nineties vintage: Super Furry Animals, a Welsh band based in Cardiff. ‘It was pretty old-school Creation in how it all happened,’ he says. ‘The demos were amazing and Alan didn’t care that they’d sing in Welsh. He was very supportive. Later on it was Alan who insisted that we put out “The Man Don’t Give a Fuck” as an A-side.’
Bowen’s experience of the Welsh language punk scene of the late Eighties, when bands like Datblygu and Y Cruff mixed nationalist politics with a ferocious, angry, noise, was a cultural heritage he shared with the band. ‘These were people my age with my background,’ he says. ‘Slightly different, given that they were north Wales and Welsh-speaking and I was from Cardiff, but they had been Mary Chain tribute bands singing in Welsh, growing up they had been as obsessed with Creation, as I was.’
Behind the monolith of brand Oasis, Creation’s release schedule started to reveal hints that McGee had refamiliarised himself with some of his impetuous and mischievous tendencies. Along with encouraging and financing Super Furry Animals’ purchase of a tank, he had used Oasis’s money to finance releases by Nick Heyward and offered the Sex Pistols’ bassist Glen Matlock a deal. Some of the Creation old guard were also e
ncouraged to enjoy themselves. At any given point Ed Ball had at least two records in production; he even reconvened his pre-Television Personalities band, the Teenage Filmstars, for an album. Joe Foster returned from the wilderness and a mooted Slaughter Joe LP was pencilled in for release. Most improbably of all, Pat Fish, the Jazz Butcher, started a new project, Sumosonic, that explored keyboards and techno rhythms. Sumosonic’s line-up consisted of Fish and three female models.†
McGee was no longer as close as he had been to Primal Scream; the differences in their lifestyle made it all but impossible for him to spend any kind of time in their company. The band had been through similar highs and lows of the kind that had damaged McGee, and had developed a bunker mentality from which they regrouped to release the album Vanishing Point in 1997. A dense and brooding record, it punctured the death throes of Britpop with a sense of anger and dread. In true Primal Scream fashion a rather heavy-handed and curatorial referencing accompanied its release. The album artwork was designed to the exact specification of the house style of the reggae label Blood and Fire, and the album’s second single, ‘Star’, featured a photograph of a Black Panther on its cover. If a little incongruous, it provided light relief from the succession of cagoule-wearing likely lads filling up the racks in HMV.
How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 Page 48