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

by King, Richard

  Rough Trade managed to release a second Libertines album along with a Babyshambles LP before relations between the band, their hangers-on, their drug dealers and everyone around them acting as an on-call support structure, permanently disintegrated.

  ‘It all ended up with everybody arguing and everybody behind the scenes blaming each other,’ says Endeacott. ‘What we should have all been doing was making sure that Pete wasn’t descending into hell, but Pete was descending into hell, and whatever we wanted to do, nobody could stop it anyway, because he had a wish. Geoff and Jeannette loved them to bits, but Geoff didn’t know how to deal with it, he really didn’t, bless his heart. We were at one NME awards ceremony when they won best band and Pete was so obviously out of his mind on smack, collecting the award, that Geoff just got up before he’d finished the speech and walked out. He just found the whole thing disgusting.’

  Lee and Travis bounced back from the unravelling of the Libertines to concentrate on cementing Rough Trade’s reputation as one of the most enduring and respected labels in the world. Rough Trade is well into its third decade and Lee and Travis’s partnership has now lasted for more than two-thirds of the company’s history. Despite this they still encounter some of the narrow-mindedness against which Rough Trade was originally founded. ‘A lot of people think we’re a couple, a lot of people think I’m his assistant, a lot of people think I’m his wife’, says Lee. ‘It’s so subconscious, that’s the really difficult thing about it. If you walk into a room, people will be really nice to both of you, but there’ll be a little extra bit of respect to the guy standing next to you ’cause they just assume that he’s the boss – that’s so ingrained.’

  * Such was Creation’s infatuation with Chelsea that the label’s website was bedecked in the colour blue and used the visual metaphor of football scarves throughout. Keeping up the theme, the site’s categories included ‘Team Talk’, ‘From the Bench’ and ‘The Dressing Room’.

  † As well as the tank purchase, perhaps McGee’s most radical and enjoyable moment of post-Oasis largesse was to record and release The John McGee Orchestra presents Slinky. The album consisted entirely of McGee’s father conducting orchestral arrangements of Ed Ball songs.

  ‡ In 2010 Miller regained control of Mute from EMI and the label is once more an independent. EMI, however, suffered a more moribund fate. Mute’s former parent company was sold at a loss in a fire sale by its final owners, the private equity group Terra Firma.

  § Endeacott, along with his band mates, is featured on the cover of Loop’s Heaven’s End, first on the left.

  21 Fake Tales of San Francisco

  Flyer for Franz Ferdinand’s tour to promote their debut single ‘Darts of Pleasure’ (Matthew Cooper archive)

  The re-emergence of Rough Trade in the early 2000s coincided with a renewed interest in guitar music, nearly all of which was released by independent record companies. At the start of the twenty-first century, indie music was once again the province of indie labels. The previously moribund live sector became a buoyant market again as, after years of dance music’s dominance, bands started touring to significant audiences again.

  Russell Warby was witnessing the impact of the Strokes, as dozens of bands that had been inspired by the New Yorkers started a first run at the indie gig circuit. The NME took a renewed interest in guitar bands and began branding tours and acting as an agency for companies that wanted to be associated with the new indie cool. Warby noticed that the majors were slow to respond, something that was becoming a feature of their behaviour as the new century brought a new set of complexities. The most significant of these, the Internet, was still being underestimated by the corporate entertainment industry. ‘I thought the majors should’ve really invested in the live music scene,’ he says. ‘I was like, “Get in, buy the venues,” but they catastrophically missed the boat, ’cause, whether it was the Mackenzie Group or O2, those people then did it.’ Companies like O2 had been happy to brand tours via NME before deciding their money was better spent cutting out the middlemen and acquiring the venues outright.

  One band quickly followed the Strokes into becoming a phenomenon, the White Stripes. Warby had been interested in booking the duo a tour before they had a record deal in place in the UK. ‘Sleater Kinney took them out on support and they told me about them,’ he says. ‘I started to ask people in America, “What do you know about this band?”, ’cause there was really no way to contact them. And if Jack White walks into the room you don’t need to think twice about it.’

  The White Stripes had released two albums on Sympathy for the Record Industry, an American independent run with little regard for the mainstream. Unlike any of the label’s previous acts, the duo were already becoming a word-of-mouth sensation in America, where they operated as a self-sufficient, permanently working red-and-white spectacle.

  ‘It was interesting, ’cause they hadn’t engaged a manager when I first spoke to them,’ says Warby. ‘The guy they hired was their lawyer, who became their manager, and I did a couple of those record company meetings.’ The White Stripes prompted a major-label gold rush, but the band decided to work with Richard Russell and XL, a decision that was regarded as counter-intuitive by much of the industry. To close observers of the label, Russell’s decision to match the majors’ offers made perfect A&R sense; it was also a much-remarked-upon piece of music-business body language. A few years earlier Russell had signed Badly Drawn Boy, a move that confirmed his and XL’s shift from being the Prodigy’s label into becoming a free-thinking record company that placed little or no emphasis on genre. ‘In a way, Richard Russell was a lot more corporate than these major people,’ says Warby. ‘He was, “Yeah, I like that, they’re not pretending. These people want to sell records.”’

  As well as signing with a label that had the experience of worldwide sales through the independent system, part of the band’s decision was based on the fact that, by signing to XL, they managed to retain the impression of remaining one step ahead. ‘There’s a thread between all these things that we do,’ says Russell. ‘It doesn’t have to be evident, but it’s there: quality, originality, and that’s it. I think the White Stripes chose us partly because we were just a bit unlikely. The dangerous thing was the hype there – the media got very excited, but at the point it happened to Jack and Meg, they were on their third record. They’d played a lot of shows, and when the media showed an interest in them, they’d already got used to the media not being interested in them, so they were able to be very gracious about it in one sense, but maintain a lot of mystique.’

  *

  Mark Bowen and Dick Green had been slowly turning Wichita into a label in their own image. Wichita largely released music by bands with roots in the American underground. My Morning Jacket and Bright Eyes were as far away from Creation’s final few years as could be imagined. Their next signing, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, would see the label briefly join in the explosion of hype around new raucous rock ’n’ roll.

  ‘We found a demo online,’ says Bowen, ‘went out there, and saw them play and thought, she is incredible, I love this band … sat there. I was as involved as I’d ever been with any band. They went straight to the Top Forty. I went down to Brighton for the first show and there was a queue of 500 people outside the building. I thought, well, this is how it’s going to be for ever and ever, I can do this, I’ll sign bands it’ll always be like this – and it wasn’t. It was a really special moment, like the Strokes, people were excited again. We did a second single, charted that and thought, this is all good.’

  The Strokes and the White Stripes had set a template: a hyper-confident, visually arresting American band arrives in the UK and plays under-capacity venues and becomes cover material before their first record is out. In the case of the Strokes and the White Stripes this was followed by a residency at, or near, the top of the album charts. Bowen and Green realised that, regardless of what they thought, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs looked set to follow the same trajectory. Their arrangem
ents with the band had been conducted over a handshake. As the world became smitten with the band and particularly Karen O’s iconic fashion sense and stage presence, Wichita began the process of signing the deal off with all the necessary legal formalities.

  ‘We kept saying to the manager, “We’d like to have some paperwork, ’cause everybody’s starting to think they’re going to do a big deal,”’ says Bowen. ‘He was like, “No, no need, we’re not going to sign with anyone else.” I’d got to the point where I’d ring him up and it was, “What … no, no, no … bad line … call you later …” Total, total shit, and then finally it was, “Man, I really don’t know how to tell you this, it’s not good news,” “What, you’ve signed to a fucking major label? I told you, I’m not stupid.” We’d done nothing wrong. We’d sold 60,000 EPs and, in our heads, if we’ve done 60,000 EPs we’re going to do 200,000 albums. This is fucking unbelievable.’

  It was a blow that hit Green and particularly Bowen very hard. Their sense of disillusionment was enough for Bowen to seriously consider winding the label down. ‘I thought if we find a band that no one’s ever heard of, and have hit singles and still they fuck off, there is absolutely no point in having a record company, ’cause if we can’t compete, we should just stop.’

  In an attempt to summon up his energies for Wichita, and feeling that the label’s future was certainly in the balance, Bowen forced himself out over the Christmas party season to see an unsigned band. ‘I remember dragging myself out to the Rough Trade party at the ICA and nobody was there. We didn’t have anything on the release schedule. A friend had said, “You’d like this band.” It was ten days before Christmas.’

  As he watched the band, Bowen was starting to feel smitten. The group, Bloc Party, had a melancholy singer and a flamboyant guitarist, which reminded Bowen of The Smiths. ‘I sat outside getting drunk for about two hours after they played,’ he says ‘I finally grabbed Kele [Okereke] and said, “Doing this label, really thought you were brilliant,” and ended up sitting down with him and the others.’

  Bowen had been impressed by Bloc Party and had immediately wanted to sign them. In a moment of reverse psychology, rather than making overtures to the band, and still smarting from recent events, the conversation turned into a one-way rant about the music industry. ‘The whole thing was utterly fuelled by the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs,’ he says. ‘I said, “Right, I’m sick of this. I’ve had really good friends in bands who thought they’d be better on a major label, none of them are. They sell less records, they’re not happy, fucking sick of it. You should sign to us. You shouldn’t fucking sign to any of those stupid labels who are going to fuck this up.” At that point, drunk, bitter and the whole thing being almost the last throw of the dice, I just went, “Fucking hell, bands, you’re all stupid, why do you sign to major labels? You’re stupid, you’ll always, always, get fucked over.”’

  As he left the ICA, Bowen realised that if nothing else, he had certainly got the Yeahs, Yeah, Yeahs debacle off his chest. He was unsure what effect his holding forth might have had on Bloc Party and a few weeks into the New Year, with his words ringing in their ears, the band became the subject of a bidding war. Within days, Bowen’s prediction of the band having to choose between a major and an independent came true. ‘They probably just sat and listened to me and thought, “My God, this man is crazy,”’ he says, ‘just ranting and ranting and ranting, and suddenly there was all this major-label nonsense going on. Again.’

  Wichita were in the running to sign Bloc Party, but the band’s management company still had reservations about the label’s ability to fulfil the band’s commercial potential. The argument ran that indies were a nice enough and interesting niche corner of the market, but their niche position meant that, without serious assistance, they still did not know how to engage in its commercial realities. It was an argument that was wearing thin, given the success of the White Stripes and the Strokes, but events would soon make such an argument redundant.

  ‘In the middle of it all, when we were arguing, “You don’t need to be on a major label,”’ says Bowen, ‘Laurence puts “Take Me Out” at no. 2, and I cannot even begin to explain what it was like, a 9.5 Richter-scale earthquake, an indie label, not just an indie label, Domino bloody Records was blowing all these people out the water. So for me to be able to turn around to a band and management and go, “See, I told you, we’re about selling records. We’ve always been about selling records. We’ve got the history, look at what Laurence has done, if they can have a no. 2 we can do that, come on!” Without Franz coming along and doing what they did then and reactivating the idea of an independent label competing, we would’ve lost that band and it probably would’ve been the end of Wichita.’

  *

  Alexis Taylor had started working at Domino in 2003. His main job was to try to organise the label’s nascent attempts at selling its releases on the Internet. Space was at a premium in the company’s cramped Wandsworth office and Taylor took the sole remaining desk space – a corner in Laurence Bell’s room. While he was processing orders, pushing CDs into cardboard mailers, the songs on a demo that Bell was constantly playing started to stick in his head.

  ‘Before I worked there someone had told me things had been pretty tough for the label for a while,’ says Taylor. ‘Laurence was playing the Franz Ferdinand demos pretty much the week that I started. I didn’t know who they were. They sounded like a poppy Devo. They were pretty raw demos, so they were very exciting. Then Domino put loads of money into signing them and then there was a period when no bills could be paid.’

  Franz Ferdinand were managed by Cerne Canning who, as a veteran of Rough Trade, had sensed that momentum was turning away from the majors, but whose decision to sign Franz Ferdinand with Bell was regarded by many in the industry as a mistake. ‘There was absolutely disbelief that, a), we were signing to Domino and, b), that they were going to be successful.’ says Canning. ‘A very good friend of mine who was a fairly successful A&R man at a major actually said to me, “I’m glad that you’re going to Domino, ’cause it confirms that the band don’t have much ambition – now I understand why you didn’t sign to a major, that clears it up.” I said, “No, that’s actually not the case, it’s the opposite. Domino will be the ones who will put the most effort into it and will understand us best.”’

  Bell had had no doubts about the group’s potential. To prove he was serious about the band, he matched their highest major-label offer; it was a colossal gamble and one that required Domino to increase its debt burdens. In so doing, Bell had effectively bet the whole label on the band’s chances of success, a risk he was sure that was worth taking. ‘There were just these embarrassing British bands,’ he says, ‘probably the people that Alex Turner ended up singing about in “Fake Tales of San Francisco” dressing up like the Jesus and Mary Chain used to. The Strokes were a miracle and the White Stripes were a phenomenon, but you don’t need all these terrible bands. I just thought, here we go again, the pioneers come in and then it’s just all these second- and third-division groups that are the ones that get played on the radio. And I just knew that Franz were better than any of them.’

  When Franz Ferdinand’s debut single, ‘Darts of Pleasure’, reached no. 44 on the strength of sales alone, Bell’s instinct that the band might cross over was confirmed. Their next single entered the chart at no. 2 and a week later their self-titled debut entered the album charts at no. 3. The whole campaign was run from the glorified cubbyhole of the Domino offices, without any major external assistance. While it represented a triumph of the underdog, it also confirmed, irrefutably, that the independents were as capable as any major at achieving seven-figure sales, especially when the music came from within a culture that was inherently theirs.

  ‘You felt the warmth coming in from around town and from people having not believed that we could help make it happen,’ says Bell, ‘that was definitely the prevailing word in the music industry when Franz signed to Domino – that Domino’s a great la
bel, cool records, but they don’t know how to sell records. People were so pleased and it was such a shot in the arm for them it really was, it helped to reignite the whole independent world.’

  The worldwide success of Franz Ferdinand allowed Domino to move into larger offices and use the momentum to develop the label. It was growth that was facilitated by record sales alone, a business model that had long been considered redundant in the music business and been consigned to wistful reveries about its glorious heyday. ‘Everybody in the music industry wants to believe that anything can happen in the music industry,’ says Bell, ‘and it so rarely does, because it’s so tied up and it’s such a closed shop and it’s so bloody corrupt and it’s hard to get in. So when something does happen that’s not meant to happen, everyone’s excited. That guy who’s just been sitting in his room just putting out records for years and now they’re number one or something – how did that happen? I think that really excites people and it still does whenever it happens, it’s such an exciting idea, pop terrorism.’

  *

  Steve Beckett and Rob Mitchell had nurtured Warp from its Sheffield roots into a label with a cutting-edge reputation and an ultramodern release schedule. Warp’s records were pieces of largely instrumental music contained in beautifully designed sleeves; the label had the feel of a virtual contemporary art space, releasing conceptual listening music and sophisticated and experimental party tunes. For the first time in the label’s history Beckett and Mitchell were beginning to feel like the label was in something of a holding pattern. A glance through the racks of metropolitan record stores or the highbrow music press showed that the Warp formula was being copied across the plethora of idm* labels that had started in its wake.