Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  Thence came Blackpool’s Skrewdriver, a boots and braces punk rock band whose later move to the far right after changes in the line-up was anticipated by neither Armstrong or Carroll. The group’s album for Chiswick is the most notable punk era album never to have been legally reissued – evidence of the label founders’ aversion to the politics that band’s lead singer would later embrace.

  “Not on my watch,” states Armstrong, asked whether the album will ever see the light of day. “I think, if there was any totally unconscious thing that we did or were part of, was when they did the skinhead thing. It was really an attempt to get them away from punk, and it was an image thing. Let’s have a skinhead image, it’ll be amazing! And it was quite aggressive. Then when Ian had the skinhead crop, he started hanging out with these Crombie skinheads. I remember the Vortex one night, can’t remember the band, the Vortex was the funny club with the steps that was almost like a lecture theatre. People were sitting on sort of bench seats there, and it was really crammed and the aisles were crowded. Ian and two of his twerp skinhead mates were coming up – the record had just come out and we were promoting it – and he was coming up and pushing people out of the way, really nasty. I waited till he came up to me and I said, ‘If you want to be on my fucking record label, you don’t fucking do that.’ ‘Oh sorry, Roger, sorry.’ He was a bully. That’s what those guys are. In a sense, he could have been a football hooligan, he could have taken his aggression anywhere – he took it into fascism and the National Front. That’s my view. He was a bully and massively ambitious, and when the ambition wasn’t satisfied, he went that route. And it’s a shame. I feel really sorry for the other guys in the band, and I feel sorry for me – I think the record should be out. But it’s a just a can of worms I’m really not interested in opening. We had the British Movement write a very aggressive, albeit incoherent letter to us, saying they owned the album, on behalf of Ian Stuart. This was before Ian died. It was brilliant – Trevor, who is a very well educated Englishman, and very polite and formal, just sent a completely legal letter back to them – how we retained and owned all and every right under this contract since blah blah blah. And they went away.”

  The label’s roster, like that of Stiff, betrayed the influence of disparate traditions, as well as an attempt to harness some of the energy of punk. Releases by the Rings (featuring former Pink Fairy Twink, who would also record solo for the label), Matchbox, the Stukas, Motörhead and the Jook rubbed shoulders with the first single by Johnny & The Self-Abusers. Featuring the core of the band that would become Simple Minds, they broke up on the day that ‘Saints & Sinners’ was released, just as had the 101ers. “Something like Johnny & The Self-Abusers,” Carroll observes, “was very simple. They brought us the record, I liked it, Roger liked it. We said we’d put it out. They did the artwork. We never met the band, it was all done by someone at Bruce’s shop in Scotland. By this stage there was a guy called Dave Hill who used to come into the Soho stall, and he was working at Anchor Records. That was an English subsidiary of ABC, which was run by Ian Ralfini. He was appointed as the guy to find the ‘youth trends’. Punk hadn’t really started, or was just starting. So he was very interested in the label. Through Dave we went to see Ralfini and arranged a distribution deal with Anchor. And we got out of the deal with President– I think that was just a record by record thing. So we went to Anchor and I remember going to their monthly sales meeting and presenting them with Johnny & the Self-Abusers, and the reps just rolled around the floor laughing. They just loved the name, and they liked the record too. And they went out and sold about 1,800 advance copies just on the name. They were like, ‘We’ve gotta have this!’ Two weeks before the record was due, I got a call saying, ‘We’re not sure about the name, is it too late to change it?’ ‘Yes, it is, the labels are all printed. What name were you thinking of?’ ‘Simple Minds.’ ‘Oh, forget it. Mickey Mouse name! Next!’” The label, too, gave significant early opportunities to some of the finest writers set to emerge over the next two decades. Kirsty MacColl’s first vinyl outing came as part of Drug Addix, while her future collaborator Shane MacGowan would also debut on the label as part of the Nipple Erectors. Billy Bragg, too, released his first vinyl on Chiswick as part of Romford punk band Riff Raff.

  A healthy but convivial rivalry continued between Stiff and Chiswick in these years. Several artists swapped camps. When Stiff declined to release Motörhead’s debut single, Chiswick took the opportunity to put out their album (before losing them to Bronze, again due to financial restrictions and not being able to match the £15,000 offered). “We built from the 101ers and all that,” Armstrong elaborates, “and did the Bishops’ first album and then did Motörhead’s first album. Lemmy had been touting around the Dave Edmunds album that Andrew [Lauder] didn’t want to put out. He took it to me at Soho, and I said ‘Lemmy, the reason Andrew didn’t want to put it out is because it isn’t very good.’ When it finally came out it was there for all to hear – it wasn’t very good. So we were going to make a farewell live album at the Marquee with them. Then Ted and I chickened out of that – bit risky, what if they have a bad night? OK, let’s do a single instead. They went down to Escape Studios to do ‘Motörhead’ by Motörhead. Two days later, Ted gets a phone call from Lemmy. Nearly finished the album, Ted, can we go on? Ted shoots down there. And they nearly had. They’d been awake for 72 hours! That’s a book in itself.”

  “Stiff did a record with Motörhead, and didn’t want to put it out,” says Carroll “They probably had a row with Lemmy. The only reason we did Motörhead was cos the band was breaking up, and Lemmy said we’ve had enough, we’re going to chuck in the towel. He wanted us to put some money in. He said [manager] Doug Smith is putting £100 in, would you be interested in helping us hire the Rolling Stones mobile to record the last gig, and it went from there. The gig was about two weeks later, and I said, OK, it’s a lot of money, £300 or something for the day. Why don’t we see if we can get another gig at the Marquee in about six weeks’ time? We’ll have two gigs, and be sure of getting a really good live album out of it. The idea was to do an afternoon gig ‘by invite only’ for hard-core fans, then a public gig in the evening. We were going to get The Rolling Stones’ mobile in, cos they charge the same to hire it for one day, and we’ll only have to pay for an extra few reels of tape. Then, to bridge the gap, we decided to do a single, and the single became an album and took on a life of its own.”

  But soon Motörhead would move on. “Record companies were still wary of Motörhead even though the album had charted,” notes Carroll, “and their career was boosted. And they were great live. But the record companies were still afraid of them. Doug Smith was managing them, and he said, ‘Look, we need to do another album, and we need ten grand plus recording costs. Can you come up with that?’ We just felt at that moment in time, ten grand with probably another 15 grand for recording costs was probably more than we could afford. So they went off to Bronze and had a lot of success there.”

  Stiff and Chiswick would collaborate to run the Stiff Test/Chiswick Challenge, scouring the country for new talent in late 1977, and also jointly issued a benefit single for MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer, who had been imprisoned on drug dealing charges. “Both Stiff and us saw the Stiff Test/Chiswick Challenge as an opportunity to steal a bit of limelight from the majors,” says Carroll, “anything to garner a bit of publicity. I’d known Dave [Robinson] since about 1964, cos he’s from Dublin as well. He’d got involved with the whole Famepushers thing, where they’d tried to hype Brinsley Schwarz [See Stiff Chapter]. Dave was always a devil may care character, with total disrespect for any establishment kind of thinking. And he would bite the hand that fed him. Back in Ireland I played in a band called the Caravells, and I was also in the bank. I had to give up playing in the band because having too many outside activities was frowned upon by the bank. A friend of the Caravells’ keyboard player called Kevin Dunn was apprenticed to a well-known Dublin fashion photographer. And a year later he took
on a second apprentice, and that was Dave Robinson. Dave took to the camera like a duck to water. There were various Irish showband magazines, and Dave had a deal with them where he would go off and do photographs, and while he was doing it, he would take photos of the band for publicity shots. He’d arrange to have 5,000 postcard handouts done. He was always a wheeler dealer and a very charming sort of guy. Did well with the women and life was never a problem for him. So I knew Dave when he was managing Brinsleys, scuttling round trying to make a living. We were friendly rivals, and whenever we could do anything together to push the independent ball along, we would. The Stiff Test/Chiswick Challenge was one thing, and the Wayne Kramer record to get some money together for him when he came out of jail was another. Dave and Rosemary, when they had the office in Camden, they’d come over to my flat over the shop, and I’d be playing them old records when they were looking for stuff for Tracy Ullman. The good thing about it is that in the initial days of Stiff and Chiswick, people got really involved in the independent thing. They were collecting everything on Stiff, everything on Chiswick, and all the other little labels like Rabid. And suddenly they were having to buy a dozen records every week, without buying anything they really wanted! So then suddenly people started having to be a bit more objective. And suddenly you lost those automatic sales. But at one stage we were selling 3,000 or 4,000 of almost everything we put out.”

  Most significantly, Chiswick also followed Stiff’s lead by signing a distribution deal with EMI in 1978. Again, this came through Churchill’s contacts. “We were quite happy with Anchor,” says Carroll, “but then ABC in America was bought by MCA, which then became Universal. They closed down the English operation so we had to find someone else. We went to EMI and they signed a licensing deal which guaranteed us an annual advance. We were already doing a lot of licensing to different European people. At that stage we were really focused on building the company and finding talent.”

  “It was a distribution licence for three years,” Armstrong expands, “if we hadn’t got the advance we’d have gone bankrupt, we were seriously on the edge. The record shops were a separate business. Ted owned the shops, we didn’t. And he owned a third of Chiswick. If the record label had gone under, Ted would still have had the shops, and I would have been back behind the counter or whatever. We were really not in great financial shape at that time. We had an arrangement through Metronome in Germany, Trevor knew them – all those licence deals were through Trevor’s contacts because he’d been in the real business in a way that Ted and I hadn’t. You got your advance in from your licensing deals, and you tried to get hits and try not to spend too much of the advance.” Despite the assistance from EMI however, it had no impact on the label’s A&R policy. “Whatever came along and whatever came through the door, bands we saw, friends’ recommendations. Our A&R wasn’t that clear. Oh, there’s a record, we like that.”

  That hand to mouth existence continued for some time. “We were doing all right,” says Armstrong, “keeping our head above water just about. I was probably spending too much money making records by people like Johnny Moped.” Croydon’s finest were, though hugely amusing, at best a loose fit for punk, led as they were by a kitchen porter with a gruff voice and a harridan wife. “I still stand by that group to this day, fantastic group, but they were never going to have a hit in a million years. And we were advertising them heavily, full page ads in the music press. [Legendary Stiff graphic artist] Barney Bubbles designed it. So we kind of had the punky side going. The second Radiators album we did, after we signed with EMI, was with Tony Visconti. As we came up to the EMI deal in ‘78, we had Sniff ‘n’ The Tears ‘Driver’s Seat’ and Rocky Sharpe & The Replays ‘Ramalama-ding-dong’ in the can. They were both issued with NS catalogue numbers [Chiswick’s original catalogue prefix]. We’d done the first Radio Stars record, and actually had to pay quite a lot of money to pick up on the second. Which in retrospect we shouldn’t have done. Our fear was that if we went to EMI, who were showing interest, and said, we’ve just dropped the biggest act we’ve got… which the Radio Stars were by far at this point.”

  “By this time I’d arranged an agent for The Radio Stars,” says Carroll, “who became their manager, who then tried to take them away to Chrysalis. As far as I was concerned, I wasn’t that bothered. There was a contract so we’d have had to work out something, maybe write off the recording costs, and let them walk away. Whatever. Some friends, namely Chris Morrison, my ex-partner in managing Thin Lizzy and Chris O’Donnell, said you can’t let them go to Chrysalis. ‘You’ll never be able to hold on to a band if you let them go.’ So in order to stop them going to Chrysalis, we had to do a deal that I wasn’t happy with that involved shelling out quite a lot of money. I think the Chris’s lent us some of that money and took some equity in the company, that we later bought back from them. But that was the first sign of commercial pressures coming into play.” Armstrong still rues that decision. “I remember sharing a bottle of whisky with the EMI rep late one night, and we were smashed as we used to get after hours at EMI, ‘Why did you sign us?’ He said ‘I knew Sniff ‘n’ the Tears and Rocky Sharpe were hits.’ ‘What about Radio Stars?’ ‘Nah. Can’t see it.’ Shit, we could have let them go and saved a lot of money! All a learning curve.”

  The Rocky Sharpe connection derived from Carroll’s reluctant days as a mobile DJ. “People would come into the shop and say, can you do a disco? I wasn’t really into doing that, but I got talked into it. The first one was in a college down in Shepherd’s Bush, in Goldhawk Road or somewhere, in 1972. And one of the bands playing was Rocky Sharpe and the Razors, and I think it was their first London gig. They were a New York street hoodlum kind of thing, greased hair and t-shirts and jeans, Sharks versus Jets. They were mostly art students up from Brighton. I remember being taken by them, and saying to Chris Morrison we should sign them up, they’d be great for colleges, but we were concentrating on Thin Lizzy at the time so we didn’t.” By the time Chiswick released Rocky Sharpe and the Razors’ debut EP they’d broken up, with some of the personnel going on to form Darts. Carroll: “A friend of ours who was a fan had recorded some tracks with them and he had a tape, and we did a deal to put that out.”

  “Sniff ‘n’ the Tears should have been a hit,” laments Armstrong, “internal EMI politics killed that. They had a great set up at EMI. LRD, their Licensed Record Division – Island and Motown went through there and they had a lot of smaller labels. And it had its own sales force. Coming up to Sniff ‘n’ The Tears, it went into the charts and got Top Of The Pops, the whole deal. And suddenly they announced a last-minute reorganisation. GRD, General Record Division, had had two flops in a row – it was Rolling Stones or Queen or Kate Bush, and that was embarrassing when they didn’t do as well as they should have. They scrapped the sales force and stole the LRD sales force under the guise of rationalising. The guy that was running the new combined sales force – we were something like 42 in the charts and Ted and I went in and said, ‘Look guys, we need one more week on this from your reps. Your guys need to be out there.’ We had the picture disc out and everything. ‘We just need to hammer this for one more week then fine, it will go or it won’t.’ ‘No, it’s fine, it’ll be OK.’ Number 66 the following week. The guy couldn’t face us for days. He used to hide when Ted and I came in!”

  Were they, as the above implies, a little more intemperate in their youth? “Yeah, absolutely,” admits Armstrong. “I was definitely the more aggressive one. Ted could have his moments getting annoyed. To be honest, in those days, because of the situation in Northern Ireland, shouting at people in a Northern Irish accent could be very threatening to people over here! So there we were at EMI, the Rocky Sharpe thing took off, it got through the change in sales reps, so there we were with one and a half hits. We tried ‘I Want Candy’ by the Bishops, which got so close, they even got on Top Of The Pops. Bow Wow Wow had a hit with it later. We kind of had a phase of that, the Radiators we had three singles off the Ghost Town album.
One we’d get radio play on but somehow it didn’t sell, one we didn’t get radio play but the sales looked quite good. We were one of those labels, whether it was because of the records we were making, but we never got that run of hits.”

  Then, in April 1979, the label was belatedly able to bring The Damned on board. Armstrong had been asked to see a new version of the band (then considered dead in the water) at the Lyceum, long after Stiff had lost interest in their one-time charges. Their Chiswick debut ‘Love Story’ gave the label a Top 20 hit, thanks to innovative marketing (four picture sleeves, each featuring a different group member). Taking up their option for an album, Armstrong produced Machine Gun Etiquette, very much a return to form after they’d stalled on its predecessor, Music For Pleasure. “I do think Machine Gun Etiquette stands up as a hell of a good record to this day,” says Armstrong. “And it’s only recently recognised for it. Because The Damned still suffer that hangover from the Anarchy In The UK tour where they allegedly ‘broke ranks’ and played a gig. The media really hated them for that for years. I remember a breakthrough moment in about ’80 or ‘81, sitting in a pub with Phil [Chevron; Radiators and then Pogues], and there was an NME journalist, of all people. They were the ones that detested The Damned and had written all sorts of stuff about them for years. He said, ‘Did you produce Machine Gun Etiquette?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘That’s a fantastic record!’ I said, ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this from the mouth of an NME journalist!’ That’s the first time that had all changed, and they started to get that sort of reputation. Unlike the other bands, The Damned could actually play. Captain is one of the finest guitar players this country has ever produced.”