Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  “That period of three days a week only lasted a few months,” Armstrong continues, “so after that it was really happening. We were the first oldies location in the West End. These guys came in their suits; they would be record collectors that you’d see elsewhere at gigs in jeans. They came in during their lunch hour. The number of people I had to give false receipts to – ‘Look darling, I only spent £3 today!’ These guys were addicts and we were supplying their addiction in the middle of the West End of London where they worked. But the thing about Rock On was that it wasn’t just a collector’s shop, we were stocking certain current records as well. We were selling soul records, Dyke & The Blazers, Fatback Band, Kool & The Gang and so on as they came out.”

  The Rock On hub forged friendships that eventually developed into international alliances. Greg Shaw had been editing garage rock bible Who Put The Bomp! since 1969 in San Francisco (there had been a precursor three years earlier, Mojo Navigator), before relocating to Los Angeles in 1972. Rock On stocked copies from 1973. Shaw also managed the Flamin’ Groovies, whom Lauder would sign to UA after spells with Epic and Karma Sutra. Marc Zermati, meanwhile, ran the Open Market record stall in Paris. The Groovies enjoyed cult popularity throughout France. Via Shaw, Zermati signed the band for two live EPs and a re-release of their 1968 10-inch mini-album Sneakers on his label Skydog. These did good business, and although the band failed to take off on UA, they were able to support themselves through heavy touring, much of it in France. Through the auspices of Rock On and his friendship with Zermati (the boyfriend of later Sex shop assistant Chrissie Hynde, who spent time with him in Paris and joined biker band The Frenchies), Malcolm McLaren had followed the New York Dolls from London to Paris in 1973. An axis was thereby formed between Rock On in London, Open in Paris and Bomp! in California, who would release the Groovies’ ‘You Tore Me Down’. Each component helped cultivate the nameless aesthetic that would eventually take form as punk.

  This putative international alliance was based on a swap meet mentality. “Marc and Larry [Debais/Debay] were bringing in a lot of American indie stuff, Ork Records and all that,” notes Armstrong. “There was ‘Big Black Truck’ by Peter Holsapple. Chris Bell [formerly of Big Star] came over with that personally. People would bring us a box of records and we’d buy it off them. Talk about distribution, it didn’t exist! Some Americans would come over and bring copies of their record to help fund the trip. Cut-out deletions were huge in those days. Some companies would bring in containers full of records on the way back – a ship would have gone to America to offload stuff, not had enough freight on the way back and they’d put record boxes in there as ballast. Stop the thing from falling over! And these guys would buy these containers of records – 20,000 LPs or whatever you got.”

  As the stalls grew, they adapted to the musical climate. “We were doing any hip new releases that were coming out,” says Armstrong, “stocking those, and then Ted tapped into the fact that Decca kept an awful lot of old stuff in catalogue. Ted couldn’t believe it. We had accounts with Decca and EMI. We would buy whole boxes of the first two Them LPs, brand new, this is like ‘73. ‘74, and all the Stones EPs, the John Mayall/Paul Butterfield EP, the single with ‘Sister Morphine’ by Marianne Faithfull and things like ‘Caroline’ by the Fortunes, which was the Radio Caroline theme tune. We were selling that at over the odds because it was collectable, people really wanted that record, and we simply found out it was still available. Sold loads of that. So in the same shop you could buy ‘Caroline’ by the Fortunes or Funhouse by Iggy and the Stooges. But it was always driven by our tastes. We had all the Beatles 45s and EPs from EMI, which no one else bothered to stock.”

  Carroll had a natural instinct for sniffing out a good deal, and his time with Thin Lizzy again proved useful. “There was a company called Solomon and Peres,” recalls Carroll, “which was a record distribution company. They had a place in Belfast, and a place in Dublin. When the first Thin Lizzy album came out, I went in to see them when we over there on tour, to see how the record was selling and to press the flesh, basically. They weren’t that interested. Just by a sheer chance remark I discovered they had loads of old London 45s stashed upstairs – it was kind of a mews place, with a garage on the first floor, and up some stairs were some offices, then more stairs going up. It was one of those old fashioned rickety places that existed in those days. The guy who owned Solomon & Peres was in there – he was Louis Solomon, father of Phil Solomon [who discovered the Bachelors & Them]. He was grouchy, and there was a grouchy woman there too, but I said, ‘Would you be interested in getting rid of that stock?’ ‘Possibly.’ I went and had a look. Came down half an hour later. ‘Yeah, I’d definitely be interested in buying a thousand or so.’ They said – 3p. That was it. I went in there every morning for a week and spent two or three hours before going off to whatever Thin Lizzy gig was happening. And at the end of the week I had about 1,700 or 1,800 45s, many of them the rarest things. I remember getting two boxes of Bo Diddley’s ‘Say Man’, boxes and boxes of Phil Spector produced stuff like the Ronettes and Crystals, including a thing I didn’t realise was rare, a single by the Crystals. It had ‘Uptown’ on one side and ‘Little Boy’ on the other side, which was never released in England. It was pressed up but withdrawn. And it was really rare and I’d sold them all before I discovered how rare it was!”

  There were other unconventional means to acquire stock, as Armstrong remembers. “In those days, they sold records in painters and decorators shops. There would be a rack of LPs. Ted found this guy who was bringing them in and said, ‘Look I’ll give you more money than you can get off these shops if I can cherry pick.’ The guy didn’t want to do it. So Ted had a motor scooter. The guy had a fleet of little vans, with these women driving, and they went round the circuit racking these records. And he followed them! Took a load of addresses one day, and went out the next in his car and bought all the great records. Just cleaned them out. They were suddenly racking their places more intensely, and the more intensely they racked them, the more Ted would go round and buy all the good stuff. It was a real hand to mouth thing in those days, but it was great fun, and the market stall really thrived. We had one unit, a lock-up garage-sized unit, then two then three. On a Saturday there were people outside waiting for someone to clear out to get in. It was really rammed. And again, because we stocked it all, on a Saturday afternoon you’d have Jamaican guys buying R&B, you’d have Teddy boys buying rock ‘n’ roll and the soon to be punks buying garage bands.”

  During this period, the thought of starting their own label, based loosely on the premise of the 50s R&B American indies, began to take shape. At the end of 1975 they struck on the name Chiswick – a modest nod to their devotion to London Records’ output, a ‘branch of the tree’ allusion. The idea was to release records that would attract collectors, packaged in picture sleeves that they knew had special appeal to that market. “Ted and I started talking about it,” says Armstrong, “because we lived in each other’s pocket a little bit. He’d be round the market stall each night to cash up, then most nights we’d get something to eat or go to gigs. And we’d talk a lot, Ted and I. It was essentially inspiration from Chess and Modern and Sun and all those kind of labels, independent record guys. The fact that it’s called Chiswick is a strange, arcane story that has many versions. It was pretty quick after starting the market stall. What took time was finding a band. Even though we were inspired by the Chess brothers, and Sun and so on, we couldn’t go outside our front door and find Elvis Presley or Muddy Waters or Etta James or BB King. Obviously we were doing what they were doing, in the sense that we were recording what was on our doorstep. And that was pub bands in those days. Punk was only vaguely in the air. We wandered round looking for bands. The Feelgoods were big, so that was the sort of band we were looking for.”

  “I think it was easier in a way to start an American independent label,” Carroll reflects, “because there was a heritage there of independent labels. There were qui
te a few independent labels in England, but they were quite low-level and insignificant compared to the five or six majors. There was a sense that you couldn’t do an independent label, it just wasn’t a possibility. Charlie Gillett was one of the first people in the 70s to set up an independent label, and I’ m not sure if that was an influence or inspiration to us, I imagine it might have been.” Gillett isn’t entirely sure, either. “When Chiswick started, I never knew whether that was a joke in response to us calling our label after one little district of London – the difference being that we imagined that DJs would say ‘this is an oval record’ and make a joke of it. So there was a double edge to the name. And Chiswick was just the most unromantic name you could think of to call a record label; it would be typical of an independent frame of mind to think of that. Then Stiff called themselves Stiff – that was another alternative. Oval had a soft, almost feminine feel to it, whereas Stiff was about as blunt as you can get. We never talked to anyone about it, it was our little Oval pigeonhole. We were amused to see these other labels that sprang up whose names seemed to connect to us, without us ever knowing if that was the truth.”

  “I think Greg Shaw’s Bomp! label and the French Skydog label were the two main inspirations for Chiswick,” ponders Carroll. “We found that by the time we had Soho we were starting to buy quantities of records that we knew we could sell. So when the guys from Skydog came along to Soho, we bought maybe ten or 15 or 20 copies of things, and very quickly it was up to 25 or more – because we knew we could sell them. With Camden we had a third store in ’75 [which became the headquarters for Chiswick], and nobody else was selling this stuff at the time; very, very few, because it hadn’t even got into places like Virgin at that stage. So we were really the first people selling that stuff. Rough Trade came along a little while later. After the store, the distribution came quickly afterwards and Geoff Travis saw the opportunity [for distribution]. It was obvious, I suppose, that there was an opportunity. But I was more interested in starting a label, because that had been on the cards since about 1972.”

  “We found this band called Chrome playing a pub in the Holloway Road,” says Armstrong. “They were pretty good. Then this guy, Mike Spenser, came into the record store fresh off the plane from New York. He was playing harmonica and he was looking for bands. We told him where all the clubs were. He ended up joining Chrome, and they changed their name to the Count Bishops. They brought Johnny Guitar in from America. To go back a bit, the first thing we recorded was with Jesse Hector of the Hammersmith Gorillas. He’d done a record for Larry Page, a cover of ‘You Really Got Me’, and we were selling that. Jesse hung around Ted’s market stall in Golborne Road, and that was a whole ‘nother hub – mainly the Notting Hill Gate folk. Jesse was hanging around. Davey Robinson had a studio above the Hope And Anchor. We went in there. There was no way in a million years Dave and I were going to make a record with me as producer, the two egos in a room was way out of control. We kind of made a record, we spruced it up years later and put it out. It needed post-production work. Which I didn’t know much about in those days. But Jesse didn’t like the record, and we didn’t like how it sounded, so it didn’t come out.” Carroll picks up the story. “It was all bedroom stuff and Jesse wasn’t doing many gigs. When we signed him, I got John Salter, an agent, to get involved as manager, and Paul Charles as an agent, and started to get him gigs. Just as it looked like he was going to take off, we had the front page of Sounds and stuff like that, Jesse bottled it and decided it was all too much for him. We hadn’t invested huge amounts of money or anything. I respected the fact that the choice was his, we didn’t try to browbeat him into doing something he didn’t want to do. That’s a waste of time.”

  “Then we recorded Chrome,” recalls Armstrong, “with a different bass player, who couldn’t even get ‘Walking The Dog’ right. They did ‘Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White’. That session didn’t work. Finally, Jake Riviera had been working with Clover, and he told Ted about this great studio down the road called Pathway, which they’d been working in. It was where Elvis Costello cut his first record and so too The Damned. Don’t forget at this stage Stiff hadn’t started, so we were the first in. Pathway became the Sun studio or the Phillips studio of London. It was a very hot August night in ‘75, and the band just hit a groove. We recorded those 12 numbers with no overdubs, then a week later it was mixed and we’d got the ‘Speedball’ EP out of it.”

  Chiswick’s investiture was thus marked with the November 1975 release of the ‘Speedball’ EP, credited to The Count Bishops, an intense 7-inch document of the pub rock generation. Carroll would take his barely roadworthy Peugeot round the shops to foist it on alarmed proprietors. “We’d finally cracked it,” reflects Armstrong, “we’d made a record that was more than releasable. It actually sold really well – it was a good start. I think that record stands up and it’s one of the records from that era that says, look, Malcolm didn’t invent punk over night. ‘I invented punk.’ No, you didn’t, Malcolm! People in the punk bands were going to see bands like The Count Bishops and Feelgoods. Because what they copped from that was the attitude. The attitude was quite tough and heavy, quite punky in approach. The other thing was, they were playing 50s/60s styles of music, but at twice the speed. People used to describe the Bishops first EP as the Rolling Stones played at 45rpm, or even 78rpm! It was totally revved up 60s R&B.”

  The physical logistics were worked out in piecemeal fashion, utilising various contacts. “The design was done by an old friend called Frank Inzani,” confirms Armstrong. “Mike Beale took the photograph. Out of the session, only two images survive, one we used for the poster, which was in focus, and we chose this totally out of focus picture for the cover. Frank designed the little pink logo. Frank was the late lamented [journalist] Giovanni Dadamo’s cousin. I don’t know how Ted found them, but on Holloway Road was an independent pressing plant called Lyntone. All the Beatles flexidiscs were made at Lyntone.” Run by Paul Lynton and his wife Leah, known ubiquitously as ‘Mrs Lyntone’, the pressing plant became synonymous with cheap flexidisc production, but would later also press huge numbers of important independent releases, including Joy Division’s ‘An Ideal For Living’. “Mrs Lyntone, oh, she was a laugh!” continues Armstrong. “So Ted went up there and organised the pressing. And the first pressing run, two-thirds of them were warped. We sat by a deck one day and rejected the warped ones. They were warped to the point of unplayability. So we eventually wrestled a flat set of pressings to the ground and sold them.”

  “When we started Chiswick, the original idea was just to do reissues,” adds Carroll, “but then we came across bands like The Count Bishops that we liked. We manufactured 2,500 copies of the Count Bishops EP, which was a huge amount for a totally unknown band on our own label. So I obviously had the confidence that we could sell it – I didn’t really think as far as 2,500, but I figured we could sell 1,000 or 1,500 pretty quick. In terms of the economics, it made sense to do 2,500, I can’t remember why. Perhaps it made sense in terms of the sleeve manufacturer, but it would have been because 1,000 would have cost maybe 12p or 13p for the physical pressing, and 2,000 would have been a bit less, so by going to 2,500 we would have got a lower price. And the same thing would apply to the label and the sleeves – it was all different manufacturers. There weren’t a lot of options. We could see from our experience with Rock On it would be a good idea to have picture sleeves, because that would make the item more collectable and it would be easier to sell. That was definitely the right move. Lyntones were the pressing plant that was nearest to us – maybe we found them in the Yellow Pages. I remember there was a problem. They had the Christmas rush. The record came out at the end of November ’75, and Lyntone were unable to deliver the 2,500, which didn’t bother me too much, because I didn’t actually need the 2,500 there and then – I was doing it for the rate. They delivered 1,500 but we discovered a lot of them were warped – they’d been sleeved up before they were properly set. So we ended up r
eturning 600 or 700 of the first 1,500. They repressed those. She said, ‘I can’t do it till after Christmas.’”

  Mrs Lyntone, however, wasn’t the sot of person you could negotiate a discount with, even though Carroll, with his jackdaw eye, did manage to liberate a few sets of the Beatles fan club flexidiscs from the premises with her permission. “We got on very well with her at the end. But herself and her husband were Jewish, and she was tough. She was the businesswoman. She would try to bully you until it got to the stage where you knew her well enough. We gave them a lot of work and brought a lot of work to them because we referred a lot of people to them. So we ended up pressing up the 2,500, but we probably didn’t get the rest of them till the end of January. We carried on. As always happens, the initial batch satisfied the initial demand. And we probably found we’d sold them all by the end of March or something, and we ordered some more. I guess we pressed up 10,000 or 11,000 copies of that EP over the years until we eventually deleted it.”

  The sleeve printer was Delga Press in South London. “We probably found something they’d printed, or it might have been the Yellow Pages or we asked somebody – and that was a lucky thing for them, because they subsequently manufactured for loads of people. Label printing was a separate thing, and we found a company called Hannibal in Leicester, and we worked with them for a long time. Eventually they got taken over by Robert Maxwell, probably for their pension fund! One of the reasons we liked Hannibal was that we used to get 90 days credit, and it helped your cash flow, when you don’t have any seed money. We started with money borrowed from the till in the shop, basically.”

  Distribution was relatively straightforward – or as straightforward as it could be without the assistance of any kind of network. “We pressed it up and vibed people up. Larry [Debais] and Marc [Zermati] probably took 150-200 copies to cart around some Parisian shops. Greg [Shaw] probably took 100-150. There was a lot of wheeling and dealing. He might have been exchanging for Bomp! magazines or what have you – it was that pure commerce of just mainly exchanging stuff. There weren’t invoices, but delivery notes to keep a record of it. There was a company called Bonaparte, export-import people. They probably took some. I had a few contacts, because I’d already published a book called The Phil Spector Story, with Rock On books about a year and a half earlier. There was Pacific Records, a distribution company who’d moved from Shepherd’s Bush to Kentish Town. They were owned by an American company called Gemm who were big importers. So they took about 200. And there weren’t many chances for airplay, I guess John Peel probably played it, and we got some reviews in the weekly music press, fairly good reviews. That generated interest, and we started getting mail order requests – half a dozen copies from odd shops here and there. There was one in Derby, they ordered ten copies. There was a chain of record shops in Scotland, Bruce’s, and they started doing distribution too.”