Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  The relationships quickly became reciprocal. “People forget that in the wake of the whole kind of Chiswick thing,” notes Carroll, “we started stocking all the other independent labels. Certainly at Camden, through ’77 to ‘79, we sold an incredible amount of punk and indie records. Lightning Records, a one stop distributor in West London, were handling all that stuff, so you’d just go along there and buy five of this, ten of that, whatever. Things started to happen – someone from Buzzcocks rang up and asked how you made a record – we gave them some advice on the telephone, and they put ‘Spiral Scratch’ together. The guy from the Desperate Bicycles came in to do his record, and we put him in touch with Lyntone and it went from there. Gradually it took off and the next thing, it was burgeoning.”

  Observing all this was Rock On regular Malcolm McLaren. “Malcolm didn’t know much about records,” states Armstrong. “Ted would bring in lots of oldies and 45s from America, and sell them to Malcolm. Malcolm would sell them on for 30 bob. Ted had bought them for 10p.” McLaren would subsequently offer payback for his musical tutelage by inviting the Rock On Disco to open for the Sex Pistols at early London gigs. Prior to that, however, McLaren nearly derailed their record label by attempting to pinch Bishops’ singer Mike Spenser. “Yeah, it was upstairs at Ronnie’s,” Armstrong recalls. “It must have been before we made ‘Speedball’, because Lydon had joined the Pistols by the time the record came out. Malcolm was in my ear all night – ‘Is this the guy I need for my new band?’ ‘Fuck off, Malcolm. Stop trying to nick our singer.’ I’ve always said Malcolm was very lucky to get John Lydon instead of Mike Spenser – he got the one was that relatively tame!” However, The Count Bishops story ended prematurely. “The Bishops more or less broke up,” recalls Carroll, “and then they dragged themselves together and went off to Holland to do a tour and recorded an album for Pieter Meulenbroeks [Dynamite Records]. He was doing a similar thing to what we were, bringing in Skydog stuff and distributing it in Holland. The time was right to be doing this sort of thing. He put that out, the single ‘Train Train’, and a few copies came over here. John Peel got a copy and started playing it. We were selling imports, then we licensed it and put it out here, so that became our fifth release on Chiswick.”

  The other core member of the Chiswick team was Trevor Churchill, a vinyl aficionado who had worked as an EMI management trainee before stints with Bell, Tamla Motown and Polydor. It was his contacts that allowed the label to licence forgotten classics, starting with ‘black leather rebel’ Vince Taylor’s ‘Brand New Cadillac’, Chiswick’s second release in March 1976. Taylor, whose career was brutally curtailed by drug and personal problems, had claims to being rock ‘n’ roll’s very own James Dean, which appealed to most everyone. “Ted knew Trevor because he used to buy records off him,” recalls Armstrong, “and Trevor worked behind the counter at Rock On in Camden on a Saturday afternoon. Trevor was a proper record company guy. He knew how a contract and a royalty statement worked. Ted and I were, well, not fly by nights, but on the company end of things, we didn’t have too much of a clue abut the mechanism. And Trevor was off to Polydor in Germany, to be a co-ordinator in Europe, looking after the whole continent. But he was having a farewell party at his flat. Ted and I went to see him in the afternoon and said, ‘We’re starting a record company, we’d like you to join us.’ He said, ‘OK, I’ll take 10% as an advisor.’ We said, ‘No, no, we’ll give you a third.’ The basic theory was that if nothing happened, he’d have a third of nothing. If it did, we’d need a guy like him. We really did. It’s always been the secret of our success, in as much as that there’s three of us but we all have very different roles in the company. And one of them was someone who from day one knew the mechanisms of the money and the royalties and the contracts. And really understood it, like few people do. There’s very few people in the business in this day and age who get it to the level he gets it. So we had a strong team. Ted was always the big personality, the front man. I was always the guy, in the early days, sitting at recording desks for too long making records. Or later on, with the reissue thing, spending months in America digging out tapes and things. I was that form of engine in the thing – and Ted did a lot of that too, but Ted didn’t produce records. Ted ran the front end of the company. Trevor was the ultimate backroom boy. But I’d say that he was also better than any of us at spotting a hit. Coming from that end of it, he had impeccable musical taste. He was a pop and rock ‘n’ roll guy, Trevor. Hated punk. Didn’t like that at all. He liked soul music very much, and pop – big Ricky Nelson fan, Dion, the Impressions, all that stuff.”

  The licence for ‘Brand New Cadillac’ came with pre-conditions that hint at the way major labels were viewing the emerging independent scene with a measure of suspicion. “I remember once we sold 10,000 copies it reverted to EMI,” says Armstrong. “They were really frightened of us getting a hit with something we’d licensed off them.” They were absolutely confident of its success, however. “We knew there was an automatic market for that on the teddy boy/rock ‘n roll circuit,” says Carroll. “In fact, that was the record that really was the inspiration for the label – records like ‘Brand New Cadillac’ that were in demand but weren’t being made available by the majors. Because it was on Chiswick, people who had bought The Count Bishops EP listened to it and liked it and bought it and it crossed over. Apart from the rock ‘n’ roll circuit, just before we put ‘Brand New Cadillac’ out, there was another record we wanted to put out, purely coincidentally. But Charly Records secured the rights before we did. It was a record called ‘Jungle Rock’ by Hank Mizell, and that became a genuine bona fide hit record. It created demand for that kind of record. So almost on the heels of that, without realising the significance of the timing, we came along with ‘Brand New Cadillac’. We got approached by President Records, which was an independent distribution set-up tied in with a label, run by this character called Eddie Kassner, and they were distributing Charly at that stage. So they were able to give ‘Brand New Cadillac’ to their reps. I knew who Eddie Kassner was through my experience in the music industry with Thin Lizzy. I knew the Equals, and I knew the history of their relationship with him. And I knew to be careful with the way you dealt with him. So we thought, here’s a chance to expand, get more product out, so we did a deal. ‘Brand New Cadillac’ was taken to the shops by his reps on the heels of ‘Jungle Rock’ and punters bought it. So we got pretty good sales, we probably sold 4,000 records pretty quickly, which for a second record is pretty phenomenal given that there was no real independent record scene. I had experience of working with bands that were distributed by majors. At that time you were still in a situation where there was a chain of independent shops and not a huge amount of product – so shops generally ordered one of everything that came out. I remember something like the Thin Lizzy EP, their second release and first seven-inch record, probably sold 1,100 or 1,200 copies initially through Decca – who had four distribution depots. They had Glasgow/Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and London. And they shifted 1,200 copies with Thin Lizzy. And we came along and shifted 4,000 copies with ‘Brand New Cadillac’ real fast. You could see that was quite a shake-up.”

  ‘Brand New Cadillac’ was later covered on London Calling by the Clash – whose singer Joe Strummer would appear on Chiswick’s third release, the 101ers ‘Keys To Your Heart’, in June 1976. But by the time it came out, Strummer had left the band. “Oddly enough, there was a bit of a buzz, but they weren’t getting too much press,” reckons Armstrong. “They came out of that Notting Hill Gate scene, almost a hippy scene. I saw them – I was meeting a woman I knew at college in a pub in Ladbroke Grove, and there they were in the background. It was the early days with a trumpet player, bit of a shambles, but interesting. Not long later, Ted came into the market stall and said, ‘I went to Dingwalls last night, we’ve got to sign this band, the lead singer’s a complete star, he’s phenomenal.’ Ted and me went to another gig about three days later, and it was like, yep. And with a lot
of palaver they recorded with Vic Maille. And they got BBC sessions. I took them into the studio. They weren’t keen on that version of ‘Keys To Your Heart’ coming out. But we were the record company and I was the producer, so we had the final say. I don’t regret it, I still think it’s the better version.”

  Regardless, Strummer’s defection to The Clash closed that chapter. “I was in the pub one night,” recalls Armstrong. “I was meeting someone, and Joe wanders in and there’s a tap on the shoulder while I was at the bar. Joe was one of those people who started his sentences in the middle, and then worked his way outwards. And you had to mentally reconstruct what he was saying in the correct order. The first thing he said was, ‘Have I done the right thing?’ Joe’s immediate response to everything, always, was the moral issue up front – then what he’d done, or the practical stuff came later. ‘Have I done the right thing? I’ve left the band!’ ‘Jeez, thanks Joe, what do you want me to say? We haven’t put the record out yet and you’ve left the band!’ He said, ‘I’ve started a band with this guy’. And I saw this skinny guy with long hair standing behind him [Mick Jones]. We were fairly sanguine about it. There’s another band around the corner in those days, so I wish you luck. Mick and Joe used to come in and out of our Camden store all the time. We used to get updates on the name. Heartdrops was the first one, then the Outsiders. Lasted five minutes. Then The Clash. Then Bernie [Rhodes] came in one day and invited us up to Rehearsal Rehearsals to see their debut. [Journalists] Caroline Coon and Jon Savage were there, etc. Ted and I arrived, and Bernie had pushed the boat out and bought two bottles of cheap Blue Nun white wine – undrinkable. Ted and I went out and bought a crate of beer and two half-decent bottles of plonk. Dear old Bernie, never knowingly overspent!”

  “The 101ers was kind of a precursor of punk,” suggests Carroll. “It got to the stage by four or five records in, people were buying everything we put out, and going back and buying the earlier ones. We were selling quite healthily. The 101ers sold quite well, not as well as the other two, but we sold 1,500 or a couple of thousand fairly quickly. Then there was the Gorillas. By that time the label had got a bit of momentum.” That despite the fact that most everyone they signed seemed to self-combust or disband immediately thereafter. Carroll considers that. “The thing is, we weren’t signing bands to contracts, we were signing one-off deals, so what they did after that didn’t really concern us. The idea of a one-off deal was that if they used that as a stepping stone to get signed by a major, with a bit of luck we’d continue to sell copies of the original record – that was my concept. That worked fine until we were a bit further down the line.”

  The Rock On distributed Bomp! magazine had given Mark Perry the idea of launching his own fanzine, exactly a month after the release of the 101ers single. Sniffin’ Glue quickly proved pivotal to the coming punk revolution. When the young bank clerk asked whether Carroll had any magazines covering the Ramones and UK pub rock, he was asked why he didn’t start one himself. When he did, with the first issue appearing in July 1976 (notably featuring a review of the Flamin’ Groovies supporting the Ramones at the Roundhouse) Rock On was the first outlet to stock it – taking all 50 of the first copies and even paying Perry an advance. “Yeah, we paid in advance,” confirms Armstrong. “He had a girlfriend and her dad had an office, and they were going in at night and using the office photocopier, and they got caught. Suddenly he couldn’t use the office photocopier, and he had to pay for his photocopies. So we said OK, we’ll take ‘x’ number of Sniffin’ Glue and here’s the money up front so he could go get it photocopied.”

  If Skydog had been an influence on the founding of Chiswick Records, Rock On would in turn inspire that label’s venture into UK retail. Skydog co-founder Larry Debais established Bizarre Records at 33 Praed Street, W2, in 1976. The store was briefly popular due to its location near Lisson Grove, where so many of punk’s prime movers signed on. Others visited from the suburbs while out-of-towners would make the pilgrimage – like Jon Roberts, founder of the first south-west punk band Adrenalin, who would come to track down copies of “Nuggets and 60s garage stuff” before soaking up the atmosphere in McLaren’s Sex shop. It also provided shelf space for a limited run of fanzines, following the Rock On! template. Crucially, it was through their patronage of the shop that The Damned ended up being invited to appear at the Mont De Marsan festival in France in August 1976, organised by Debais and Zermati, which led to their signing to Stiff.

  The summer of 1976 also saw Chiswick courting The Jam, the besuited Woking boys led by regular Rock On lurker Paul Weller. Rock On organised their fabled ‘Let It Be’ showcase in nearby Newport Court (which brought damning reviews from Caroline Coon in the Melody Maker and from Perry in Sniffin’ Glue). The shock of the new had dictated that the climate for bands that displayed ‘retro’ fixations was hostile. That said, the band’s maximum R&B aesthetic was perfectly suited to the tastes of Carroll and Armstrong, whose affection for rock’s history made them instinctively resistant to any year zero sermons. Nevertheless, The Jam and manager John Weller resisted the three-single deal they offered to sign with Chris Parry and Polydor for a £6,000 advance – a figure Chiswick, who had reportedly offered £500 and the free use of their PA, simply could not compete with. Chiswick were effectively outbid. “It was just a typical indie deal in those days,” Armstrong recalls. “We offered what we could afford.”

  “They were the next band in town,” Armstrong continues. “Bernie [Rhodes] had taken the Clash off and Malcolm was never going to sign to an indie, and neither was Bernie. Bernie had courted Chris Parry at Polydor. And Chris thought he was definitely getting The Clash. And Bernie suddenly flipped it into CBS one day.” Famously, Parry would burst into tears on receiving the news that Rhodes had reneged on what he took to be a done deal. “It all happened over a period of a couple of days,” Armstrong remembers. “John Weller had our contract. He and Paul were coming up to Ted’s flat in Camden over the shop. And the day before they were due up, Chris Parry rang John Weller and said they’d got a deal.”

  “We used to like The Jam,” Carroll confirms, “and we went to see them as punters. And also we had Rock On and Paul Weller was always coming in. They did the gig outside the stall when they took the electrical feed from us. They were definitely interested, but by this stage they’d got enough of a profile to attract interest from majors. Chris Parry at Polydor came in for them. At least they got a better deal with Polydor because we were hanging on their coat-tails – they had to offer a decent advance, whereas they’d have got them for nothing if we hadn’t been in the picture. I did say it would be a good idea to do a single with us to wind them up a bit more.” Armstrong remembers a subsequent meeting. “I was very drunk one night at some gig later, sitting with John Weller. John was really bitching about Polydor, he’d had enough of them. I said, ‘John, you’re always welcome back – we should have signed you in the first place.’ No chance whatsoever! But I would have to say we’d already picked ‘In The City’ as the first single.”

  There was also an effort to sign The Damned – Chiswick even paid for their first demos, but missed the boat when Armstrong went on holiday to his parents in Portugal in the summer of 1976 and Stiff nipped in. Instead Chiswick plugged away releasing records by those on the pub rock fraternity, such as the Gorillas and retro rockers Rocky Sharpe & The Razors, as well as France’s Little Bob Story. “That was through a guy called Rick Rodgers,” Carroll remembers, “who later managed The Specials. He was managing Little Bob Story, a French punk band, so we did them. The first band that approached us was The Radio Stars. They were the first people who came knocking on the door.” The latter’s ‘Dirty Pictures’ was the closest to a legitimate punk release (if we overlook the musicians’ lengthy musical hinterlands with bands such as Sparks and Jet). “It was a really good power-pop record and we really liked it,” says Carroll. “They’d done some demos for Island. And it was basically an Island demo they hadn’t got the deal for it, and they we
nt back to Island to get clearance to use the tapes. Island said OK. That was that.”

  The Radiators From Space, meanwhile, were an Irish import signed on the advice of Horslips’ drummer Eamon Carr. They’d yet to play live, but Carroll was convinced that all available talent of any worth had already been scooped up in England, as he confirmed to Music Week. “There are more major record company A&R men than punters in the Roxy Club these days, and the general vibe is, if it moves and has a guitar round its neck – sign it!” Regardless, the resultant ‘Television Screen’ single was far nearer the real thing (at a time when no-one had truly established what the ‘real thing’ constituted) and came as compensation, of sorts, for their failure to sign Dublin’s Boomtown Rats. “We got some things we didn’t do anything with,” admits Carroll. “We got a copy of ’30 Seconds Over Tokyo’ by Pere Ubu. I loved that record, but I thought, we can’t sell this – it’s too far out and too freaky for us to sell. It’s an eternal regret in a way that we never put it out, but it would have taken us in all sorts of different directions. There were a few of those over the years.”