Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  While Branson’s ambitions to take over EMI never came to fruition, it is remarkable that an independent label founded only just over a decade previously was able to contemplate such a take-over. Moreover, however, Branson’s reasoning displays a mind focused on the balance sheet. Music is ranked alongside shop premises and bricks and mortar in these exchanges. And that was surely always the nature of the beast, meaning that, while the company’s founding principles were certainly rooted in ‘independence’, music merely served as a product line with the end goal of being the biggest lion in the jungle. But Branson has never denied his indifference to music. “I’m more cynical than 99 per cent of the people who work for Virgin,” he told Paul Rampali of The Face in 1984. “Simon [Draper] loves records and his whole involvement is through that. With me it’s different. It’s not a love of music. I enjoy people, I enjoy working with friends, I like finding out about new things, new areas I know nothing about.”

  Were labels like Virgin truly independent? For many they were not. As Fredric Dannen would write in Hit Men, “For nearly a decade, the notion of the independent label had been largely a myth. By the eighties, a better term for record companies such as Chrysalis, A&M, Island, Virgin and the like would have been ‘dependent’ labels – dependent on one of the six majors for their distribution and, in a number of cases, manufacturing”.

  “Island and Virgin were originally independent, depending on your definition,” reflects Branson’s one-time assistant, David Marlow. “They were privately owned, medium-sized record labels, but very iconic. They ceased to be perceived as independent only because they were successful. I was thinking about Paul Conroy at Stiff Records and people like that, who ended up working for the majors, who were from the small labels ethos, and essentially they were record fans. You could certainly say that of Simon Draper and Chris Blackwell. While some of the acts that Simon signed were commercial and pragmatic, that wasn’t always the case. I was always a Henry Cow fan. Who else would have signed them? I suppose they thought they were plugging into the hippy market, but I think Simon was a genuine Henry Cow fan. And his personal tastes extended to ECM Records and all that sort of stuff, which he licensed at one point.”

  One of the important ‘linking’ labels to the subsequent late 70s boom was Oval, founded by Gillett in 1972, though it didn’t release its first record until two years later. It used Virgin’s infrastructure initially, though that “felt different from if you’d been with EMI or Decca or whatever,” Gillett states. “Although Virgin were substantial, they themselves at that point were distributed through Island. We were basically piggy-backing on other companies. We put out an album of Louisiana music called Another Saturday Night which had a track called ‘Promised Land’ by Johnny Allen. It got played a lot on Capital and was quite inspirational to people like Nick Lowe, who just loved its rock ‘n’ roll innocence – it had a bit of accordion in the middle of it which made it sound quite unusual.”

  The origins of Oval say much about how little anyone knew about the process of starting a record label in the mid-70s. “I was on the radio at that point, just starting to do Honky Tonk on Radio London, playing a lot of American music, mostly on independent labels. And a friend of mine asked how do you start an independent label? At the time, it seemed a bit of an unfair question. ‘Well, I don’t know exactly.’ ‘Well, if you did start one, what would you put on it?’ And at the time there wasn’t any British group I was particularly interested in, or British groups that were looking for a home. My instinct immediately went to American music, and although most of it was available in this country, Louisiana music wasn’t. We actually went across a lot of America, looking at all sorts of doo-wop labels and different stuff, but when we came home and listened to everything, this definitely stood out as being the best idea, and it hung together as a compilation. It did pick up some interest. Eventually we probably met everyone who bought the album – it did sell 10,000 in the end, but in the early days it sold about 2,000 or 3,000. We ourselves felt it was so good that it was very frustrating never to be able to work out how to sell more. I knew hardly anybody in the industry and I didn’t know what to do. There wasn’t an independent distributor, or not that I knew of. So it didn’t really seem possible just manufacturing a record and putting it out – how the hell were you going to get it into any shops? So having tried one or two labels that I knew, they shrugged their shoulders and said we don’t know what to do with it, we got side-tracked by seeing Kilburn & The High Roads and becoming very impressed with them and becoming their managers, and finding a record deal for them.”

  The Kilburns connection would establish the link to Dave Robinson, Paul Conroy (who booked the band through the Charisma agency) and Stiff. “Of course, the whole thing was, you need an artist to play live to sell records,” says Gillett. “I was quite naive in those days and didn’t quite appreciate it wasn’t enough to put out a good record – you didn’t need a campaign exactly, but you definitely needed an artist to work on your behalf, or on behalf of the record they’ve made. We didn’t run across anyone who quite met that brief until Lene Lovich came to us. We were very impressed by her and put together a group, which included her playing saxophone originally, in a band led by Jimmy O’Neill. Eventually we persuaded her to sing and took a demo to Stiff, who had been going for a year or two by then.”

  Another important link to Stiff came through Gillett’s early advocacy of Elvis Costello. “Elvis just posted me a tape that I played on the radio. And I really, really liked it a lot. But I didn’t get much feedback from listeners. For Elvis, this was by far the most positive reaction he’d had so far. If we’d had musicians to hand, we’d have got together and made a record with him. But we didn’t. So we then ran off to Stiff and they put Nick Lowe and an American band together and put them into Pathway [Studios]. That was what made us think, fuck, we really do need our own set of musicians, so if that happened again, we’d be ready. Jimmy O’Neill was writing terrific songs, but we weren’t quite convinced about him as a singer at the time, although he did eventually form the Silencers, after Fingerprintz, who did quite well.”

  “We had a lot of tapes we’d take to Dave Robinson,” Gillett continues, “and he’d turn them down flat, except for Lene. But those tapes we’d then take to A&M, and Derek Reid said, ‘Well, I don’t know about your tapes, and I definitely don’t like that girl singer, but I like you guys, let’s do a deal.’ So we had a label production deal with A&M for exactly a year, parallel to having Lene at Stiff. At the end of that we just decided we wanted to be a proper indie on our own, and we put out a couple of records. One was a group called Local Heroes SW9, whose guitarist Kevin Armstrong remains one of the greatest talents I’ve ever known.” Oval also worked with Harry Kakoulli, Squeeze’s bass player, while running a Monday night residency at the jokingly titled 101 Club in Clapham Junction, which resulted in the submission of demo tapes and eventual releases by Holly & The Italians and the Reluctant Stereotypes. These records were now distributed by Rough Trade and Spartan. “We actually launched the newly, properly independent Oval with an album called The Honky Tonk Demos, literally demos sent into my show on BBC London, which I’d done right up till the end of 1978. Most famously, I played the demo of ‘Sultans Of Swing’ by Dire Straits, and they let me have the original demo for that – which hadn’t otherwise come out.”

  Although Oval’s output was limited, thematically it provided a link to the next generation of punk-era independents that is more instructive than any comparison with Island or Virgin Records. Not least because Gillett’s diligent first-hand research into the American R&B independents briefly discussed here would prove to have an enormous impact on the foundation of the first true punk-era UK independent, Chiswick Records.

  Chapter Two

  Gatecrashers

  Chiswick and Ace Records

  Ex-bank teller Ted Carroll first established a Saturday record stall in 1971. Rock On, sited on Golborne Road, off Ladbroke Grove market in West L
ondon, sold vintage vinyl from labels such as Top Rank, London and Sue. Its proprietor had picked up a copy of Charlie Gillett’s The Sound Of The City while in America, using it as a road map to classic early rock ‘n’ roll and doo-wop records. With the rock ‘n’ roll revival in full swing in the mid-70s, he found himself able to run a brisk business alongside his management duties with Thin Lizzy, shortly to enjoy huge success with ‘Whiskey In The Jar’. Indeed, Lizzy, whom Carroll had first brought to London in 1971, would usually close their sets with ‘The Rocker’. It was a eulogy to customers at Carroll’s stall (“I love to rock and roll / I get my records from the Rock On stall / Sweet rock and roll / Teddy boy, he’s got them all”). Among other notable regular clients of ‘The Rocker’ were Malcolm McLaren and United Artists’ Andrew Lauder, who would buy up old psych records and trade them for imports with Greg Shaw of Bomp! Records in the States. Carroll also imported French editions of singles, which were notable for having picture sleeves, then a rarity in Britain.

  One Rock On regular was journalist Richard Williams. “I knew Richard well because he was the editor of Melody Maker for a while,” remembers Carroll, “then he got head-hunted by Chris Blackwell, and went to work at Island as an A&R guy. It was around that time he was coming into the stall and buying records, doing a bit of lurking like everyone else. He became interested in Thin Lizzy, which I found a bit odd. I believed in them and all, but they didn’t seem to be an Island band really. And there was a guy called David Betteridge, Blackwell’s partner, he was more or less running Island at that stage because Chris was doing other things. They wanted to sign Thin Lizzy and in the end they didn’t because other people at Island thought Thin Lizzy weren’t right for them. David took myself and [co-manager of Thin Lizzy] Chris Morrison out for lunch at an Italian restaurant in Notting Hill, to tell us that they’d decided they weren’t going to sign Thin Lizzy after this flurry of interest. And this at a stage where we’d been turned down by every record company in town, and we were hanging on for a deal with Decca, who we didn’t really want to re-sign with.”

  Betteridge had an ulterior motive, or at least some sugar for the pill. “He took us out and asked us if we’d be interested in managing any of the Island acts, because we seemed good or honest or whatever, or maybe good management was hard to find. We said maybe. We went down and met a singer-songwriter who did a couple of albums for Island. Nice guy, but we didn’t hit it off and we weren’t that impressed with his music. That was the end of that. So David went off and started a new label, and later signed Haysi Fantayzee. Chris Morrison remained good friends with him, though they didn’t do any business. Just as I quit managing Thin Lizzy and got out of the partnership with Chris Morrison, Dave brought us John Cale. So Chris Morrison and Chris O’Donnell managed John Cale for about two years. That was very hard work! I used to hear wonderful stories. I remember going to the office one day. Soho Market stall was just around the corner from our old office at 55 Dean Street, and they were there for quite a few years. They’d just had a phone call from some irate landlord, who had a small prestige development of half a dozen flats in West London, where John was living with his wife. Anyway John had had some disagreement with Tony Secunda over a proposed management deal or something and Secunda had someone go round to this block of flats and spray-paint in six-feet letters, ‘OWN UP, CUNT!’ So they had to get someone to go round and clean it off, pronto, to stop John getting kicked out. That was just one little incident of many.”

  Thereafter Carroll dedicated himself to the world of retail, deciding that the path of rock ‘n’ roll management really wasn’t for him. By the summer of 1974 he had opened up his second premises in Soho Market in Newport Court. He briefly employed Thin Lizzy tour manager Frank Murray to look after the stall, before hiring old friend Roger Armstrong, himself an ex-manager of Horslips, and former social secretary at Belfast’s Queen’s University.

  “I met Ted through Gaye and Terry Woods, after they had left Steeleye Span,” Armstrong recalls. “I’d booked the Woods Band while I was social secretary at Queen’s from ’69 through to ’72. We got on really well. They said, ‘When you’re in London, look us up.’ I rang Gaye and Terry from the phone box outside the Kensington, which was one of the big pub rock places. ‘You said give you a ring!’ Normally people say, well, we’re busy at the moment. But instead they said, ‘Oh, we’d love to see you, come over!’ So I wandered over one day. It was one of those big five or six storey houses in Belsize Avenue, where everyone had a room. There was Frank Murray, who went on to manage The Pogues, there was Gary Moore and Eric Bell. And Ted was there, and he managed Thin Lizzy at the time. Neither Ted nor I can remember if we met, but I think Ted came up when I booked Thin Lizzy in Belfast. And we got on really well. He had this kind of spare sofa bed at the end of his long, thin room, and I slept on this construction he had above the kitchenette. I was slumming around staying on sofas.”

  At this time, Armstrong had only come to London on vacation. “I was still at college. I was coming to London in those days to book bands. Don’t forget, the war had started in Belfast, so that wasn’t easy – persuading people to come over. And the reason a lot of people did come over was because we were paying much better money than they were getting in the pubs. We had a good reputation for paying out, and we put a circuit together. Between us we could pay for transport, for the boat over, and their petrol and hotel and money on top. A band like Brinsley Schwarz could come over and spend a weekend and play four gigs in Northern Ireland, and they’d go home with more money in their pocket than if they’d played four pubs in London. So Ted has this room and I kipped on his couch. We just got on really well and got to know each other. Ted was the one that really introduced me to the big record collection thing – as a kid I’d always had records and been a record freak, but I’d never seen anything like Ted’s record collection. Ted lived in a record collection, not a room. It was wall to wall. It blew me away totally. So then I left college and moved to Dublin. Thin Lizzy started to take off in Ireland after ‘Whiskey In The Jar’. I was working with the Chieftains and I got a sizeable flat in Dublin. I had a spare room at the back of the flat. So to return the favour to Ted, Phil Lynott would stay in my flat in Dublin. Cos his reputation as a womaniser, I assure you, was not a word of a lie, and there was no way an Irish hotel would put up with it in those days.”

  Eventually, Armstrong moved to London permanently. “I looked after a band called St James’s Gate who made a record that never got released. They had a drummer called Bob Siedenberg, who moved on to Supertramp. His brother-in-law was a guitar player, and Ted rang me one day cos he knew Ruan O’Lochlainn, who had been in Bees Make Honey. And I was staying at Ruan and Jackie’s place at the time when Ted rang and said, ‘Eric’s left the band – do you know any guitar players?’ ‘Yeah, we do, funnily enough, this guy Scott, Bob’s brother-in-law, a bit younger, has just come into town and he’s a great guitar player.’ So Scott auditioned, and they ended up with two guitarists, Brian Robertson and Scott Gorham. So again, there were all these connections with Ted. And we would all go to the same gigs. Eventually my band washed up and I’d had enough trying to be a manager, I wasn’t a manager. It wasn’t my forte. And that coincided with Ted having had enough of Thin Lizzy. He’d retired from management with the idea that his market stall, that he’d had from ’71 in Golborne Road, he was going to just trade records, go to America for three or four weeks at a time and buy records and bring them in. Then a mutual friend of ours, Sylvia, was dealing in clothes at Dingwalls and she found a stall in Soho. I was trying to get a studio gig at that stage as an engineer, I’d have taken a job as a tea boy – I knew I could do it, I just wanted to get in the door. And Ted said to me one day, ‘Sylvia’s got this stall. She only wants it three days a week, so I’ll take it three days a week and turn it into a record stall Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.’ So I said, ‘Yeah, I’m not doing anything.’ I was still trying to get a gig in a studio.” The proposition worked brilliantly
. “It was just heaven,” says Armstrong. “I’d been stressed cos I had no work and I was living in a squat, things were tough and I was getting pissed off. And it was just great, to go into this place every morning and it was just full of records, what more could you ask?”

  The two stalls’ catalogue expanded beyond beat, classic rock ‘n’ roll and psychedelia to encompass imports of a new wave of American bands like the Flamin’ Groovies, Iggy And The Stooges and the New York Dolls; groups stripping rock music back to its basics. These records had a fan base in England but no mainstream outlet serving it. Customers included Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, John Peel and Shane MacGowan. “Ted found out that the MC5’s Back in the USA was available in France,” says Armstrong, “and we found someone who could buy it for us and imported it. That was through Marc Zermati. Then we got deletions of the Iggy & The Stooges album. The Stooges are legends now but they didn’t sell records in those days. They pressed a lot, but they had lots of leftovers.” Even though almost every musician of the 76-79 era claims to have bought a copy? “I could probably tell you who they are, because I was selling them to them!”