by Alex; Ogg
Armstrong was deflated when follow-up single ‘Smash It Up’ failed to deliver the chart returns it should have done. “Because of stupid newspaper stories that surfaced, I don’t know where they came from. We weren’t trying to cause controversy with the band at that point. Some newspaper story appeared saying some punk kids had gone into a party in Ipswich and smashed it up, singing The Damned’s ‘Smash It Up’. And the BBC dropped us. It would have been a Top 10 record, no two ways about it.” However, The Damned’s winning streaks were never more than episodic, and after that they once again lost momentum. None of the singles from fourth studio collection The Black Album, as excellent as it was, impressed on the charts. Chiswick lost patience at the end of 1980. The Damned were simply costing them too much money.
Some of that fallout has been attributed to the band’s penchant for running up damages claims that would have frightened a multinational. Carroll isn’t entirely convinced by the self-mythologising. “It’s a bit like The Who – it’s great publicity. It was never that bad. Sure there was damage, but never that massive. They spent a fair amount of money on recording. At one stage they did owe us a lot of money, but it got recouped fast. With The Damned, that was down to Roger’s working relationship with the band breaking down. Not in an awful way, but… The Damned was always very full on, with lots of internal conflict between the Captain and Rat and Dave – whoever was playing bass was almost coincidental. My memory was, after The Black Album, which everyone was very pleased with and got very good reviews and was a very good album – it was a question of where do you go next? They went to Doug Smith for management for a while and Doug couldn’t handle them, it was just too much of a pain in the arse. Then they got involved with a character that had a recording studio in Denmark Street, where they did that ‘Friday the 13th’ EP. They were still signed to us at that stage. We ended up buying the tapes for that – it came out on NEMS or something and they went bankrupt. The next thing they got a deal with MCA and managed to blag some money. I think it reached a stage where they were so far in the hole that we really couldn’t afford to advance them any more money. We would have done more recording, but that would have involved advancing them more money anyway, and we couldn’t afford it. I think they were still under contract, but we had to say thanks but no thanks, and let them out of their contract if they could get another deal. And that’s what happened.”
Chiswick was holding its own, but struggling to compete with the majors in terms of chart success. There was an obvious reason for that. Unlike Stiff, Chiswick never managed to produce a band that defined the label at a specific time (think Dury, Madness, the Pogues et al). There was intermittent success but no one artist who could be relied upon to sell consistently. “Chiswick was never as big in terms of strings of hit singles as Stiff was later,” admits Armstrong. “We never had the one big act, though funnily enough we did have the big hit in America, and we did better in Europe than some of the others, Rocky Sharpe did very well in Germany and in Spain. And Sniff ‘n’ The Tears was a big record all over Europe. And in a certain sense our success was based on that relative failure, because we never washed up with that one big act. Your problem there is twofold. One, there’s a lot of money swilling around, but not a lot of it is yours is the reality, and it’s hard to keep a grip on that. The other thing about having a huge act is that every act that signs with you expects you to spend a fortune on them. So we had a much more under control scenario. Looking back at some of the things we did, we probably should have tried to get them deals with majors, we should have entrenched ourselves. But because we had licensing deals in Germany or with people around the world, and they were doing well with these acts, you couldn’t turn round and say, ‘We’ve sold the act to EMI, sorry about that,’ because we’d been advanced by these people. So we were in that situation. In those days it wasn’t too bad, we could get hits.”
Those hits had dried up by the early 80s though. “EMI dropped us after three years,” recalls Armstrong. “We tried to move into the 80s, but the reason we eventually quit really was, again, Ted and I, underneath it all, are rock ‘n’ roll guys. Records were being hits by men with funny haircuts and strange trousers playing ironing boards – this is not rock ‘n’ roll. We had a bash at it ourselves, but it was hard work – we had a guy called Jakko Jakowski – fantastic guitar player. And the ‘other’ Dave Stewart, we did a whole album that only came out in Germany. And the year before Wham!, we had a duo from Hampshire, two nice polite middle class boys, called Two Two. We did an album on them, and three really great singles. The first one was ‘Insufficient Data’, which was kind of a Hal the computer type deal. But it was a total disco beat, like Wham! did a year later. But the two guys weren’t as pretty, our marketing skills were nowhere near up there and ultimately the songs weren’t as catchy. We had a group called Albania, very quirky indie-pop type thing, an excellent group again, but the hit wasn’t there. And Dave Robinson picked up on them and did records with them. Two Two disappeared, then Dave picked up Jakko as well. We kept Chiswick going. We had distribution through various indie companies for two years, and we had the last hit with Rocky Sharpe and ‘Shout Shout’.”
The game was up, at least in terms of competing in a changed marketplace with new artists. “Ted and Trevor and I realised, by now it’s the early 80s, and you need a video, and to give away a lot of records. It was expensive. In the early days you could float a record for some money, if it was a hit, fine, if it wasn’t you didn’t lose an awful lot. By the 80s, in order to cover what were going to be losses breaking a band in the UK, you had either to have huge European success or preferably American to get your money back. We were indie again by then. There was no way it was going to happen. The three of us pretty much had a meeting one day and said let’s get out while we can. Let’s stop pouring money into this stuff. cos we haven’t got the money. It’s not EMI’s money any more, it’s ours. We made a deal with this company Metronome where we let them sell through to help to recoup advances, a decent thing to do because they’d been decent to us. I pretty much phoned the bands up, the few we had left, and told them. Some of them got deals, some of them didn’t. And we were now an oldies company.”
“We said, look, we’re making money with the reissues,” adds Carroll, “and we’re spending it recording these guys and we’re not getting any return on it. If there were overseas deals that we were servicing where there were obligations and more money coming in – but it just so happened those deals were coming to an end and there wasn’t really anything exciting coming through so they weren’t getting renewed. It just made sense. We all agreed. We just couldn’t continue. So we basically stopped recording new stuff and concentrated on the old. So Roger went from recording stuff like Two Two and Jakko to helping out on the reissue side. I’d just started Kent Records with Ady Croasdell so I gave that to Roger to work on with Ady. I was also just at the stage of starting Boplicity, a jazz reissue label with Honest John as a consultant – John had record stores in Camden and Portobello Road, a jazz retailer. He acted as a consultant for a year or two with Boplicity, which Roger basically ran. And he was also helping with the Kent and Ace stuff. We just all mucked in together.”
While continuing to focus on the company’s pure oldies concept at Ace, there were other diversions, the first of which was a venture into the emerging garage scene. In 1981 Carroll was approached by Nick Garrard, a Rock On punter and graphic artist who also produced album artwork for Ace. Garrard was managing one of the new breed of ‘psychobilly’ bands, The Meteors, who were to be featured in an upcoming short movie Meteor Madness, and needed to secure a release for the four tracks they had recorded for the soundtrack. This resulted in the ‘Meteor Madness’ EP, which quickly became the best seller to date on Ace’s Big Beat subsidiary. “Ted sorted out the Meteors deal,” says Armstrong. “They sold well. We didn’t do the album, we did the singles, and then Nigel [Lewis] split and formed Escalators and Tall Boys. The Stingrays were around, we did s
ome Milkshakes stuff and the Prisoners came in through that Medway connection. In the middle of that we released the cherry on the garage cake Rockabilly Psychosis. Which became the record that everyone into that music had to have. That sold enormous amounts. We were the kings of garage at that point, in terms of having most of the decent bands. Then all of a sudden I got the offer of The Cramps. You couldn’t turn that one away. To get The Cramps was such a feather in the cap. They came to us from a friend called Steve Pross at Enigma. He was an old mate of mine going way back. He said, ‘Look, we’re signing The Cramps, you’re set up doing Europe, do you want to do Europe?’ ‘Yes!’ Smell of Female came out and we became firm friends. And we did a number of records over the years. And that did well.”
Big Beat was well positioned to allow them to pick the cream of the garage crop, whereas there were obvious limitations, primarily financial, for Chiswick in the punk years. But, as Armstrong concedes, there was zero possibility of hit records. “You had a healthy enough scene where you could get The Cramps on The Tube. Contrary to rumour, The Tube used backing tracks mostly, apart from the lead singer. So I went up there and the guy put his hand out for the tape – ‘Have you got the tape?’ ‘What tape?’ The look of shock on his face when I told him The Cramps don’t do tape, they do live!” Big Beat also helped develop the UK franchise of wild rock ‘n’ roll that was Billy Childish. Armstrong: “Billy Childish had sent me a copy of the first Milkshakes album. He said, ‘Do you want to put this out?” I wrote back to him and said, ‘Well, you seem to have done that! And very well, it sounds great and looks great. But if you want to make another record, we’d be really interested.’ Later, someone says Billy paints. So I said Billy, ‘Do me a painting.’ ‘I don’t do portraits of people’. ‘No, just do me a painting, I’ll buy a painting off you.’ So he did a self-portrait. And that led me into buying Billy Childish paintings, which I still do. And the boy seems to be finally breaking through on that front. He’s starting to be big bucks stuff now. I’m glad to see it, he’s worked for it. Billy used to have a very flippant attitude, like all those Medway guys, they were very offhand. Rough and ready guys. And Tracey Emin just seemed like Billy’s girl, a tall girl in miniskirts. She hid her artistic abilities very well, and Billy too. Underneath, a very sophisticated guy.”
But the garage boom was a temporary diversion from the company’s core activities. Ace was by now a highly regarded reissue imprint, harnessing its three partners’ ingrained knowledge of classic American blues and R&B repertoire (and that of consultant Ray Topping). That story took on its own momentum with their exploitation of the neglected catalogue of 40s/50s US independent Modern, founded by the Bihari brothers, whose artists included BB King, Howling Wolf, Elmore James and John Lee Hooker. “We’d always had the reissue thing,” says Armstrong. “We did the 10-inch albums originally. That was Ted and Ray Topping, between them. We only put out three or four albums a year of that type, we were mainly running the Chiswick label – the early ones were on Chiswick. Then in 1978, when we went to EMI, they said at the last minute we’ve got enough old crap of our own – we don’t want your old crap.”
“We weren’t about to dump the blues and rock ‘n’ roll,” says Carroll, “it was selling too well and we needed the money. So, as we had a license with the American label Ace Records, which was based in Jackson, Mississippi, we decided to move all the old stuff off Chiswick and on to a new label, Ace. It was Trevor’s suggestion. I called Johnny Vincent, who owned US Ace, and asked him if we could use the name in the UK and he said OK. He never really thought it through. Some years later, when he started to release some new material on his label, he regretted it, as he found that our Ace label was better known than his one.”
“Ted and Ray ran the reissues and catalogue,” says Armstrong. “Which was always really good, cos that was a very low-risk business to have. It turned money. Back in the days when you could put a 10-inch album out of someone fairly obscure and sell 6,000 copies. It was enormous compared to what you can sell of that stuff nowadays, just because ultimately there was so much less of it around. There was Charly and there was us and a couple of other people that were much lower key. So bit by bit we had built that. We got Ace of Mississippi, we did a deal with Modern Records that we finally bought, we picked up the Glad Music catalogue, which was rockabilly and country with George Jones things. Then we worked with MCA with their Duke and Peacock labels, so we built little catalogue things, just licensing in the early days. That’s how we really built the Ace name. I had little to do with that until we left EMI. I stopped producing and hopping into EMI every day. When you run an independent company, you have to be a jack of all trades. You’re dealing with the PR people, the pressing people, this, that and the other, and sometimes you’re making the record. Suddenly that wasn’t happening any more, so I got involved in the catalogue side of things. Then the garage thing came along, so I was distracted by that, I was more involved in that scene than Ted was. And through the 80s Ted and Ray built a fantastic catalogue, and that was where the beginnings of what we do now started – album releases with nice sleevenotes that told you stuff about the music.”
Ace became a haven for classic reissues across the rock, soul, blues and blues spectra, growing to encompass labels such as Kent, Cadence and Specialty. “Ted brought Ady Croasdell in to run Kent [its first release was in 1982]. The northern soul thing – what we were doing compiling blues and R&B, we thought we could do with soul. So Ady started Kent with us, and he’s run that ever since. But maybe only about a seventh of the records are actually northern soul. The rest are deep soul, more poppy 60s soul, etc.” A deal with Fantasy in 1987 also brought a catalogue of vintage jazz recordings from Contemporary, Prestige and Riverside. The label remains by nature acquisitive, to use the singularly inappropriate hard-nosed commercial vernacular. “Modern was a classic example,” says Armstrong. “I understand that Charly Records had been offered it, just decided it wasn’t for them. Whoever took their decisions obviously thought, there’s a bit of BB King, a bit of Ike and Tina Turner – we don’t want it. Whereas Ray Topping told Ted that the catalogue is fantastic, we’ve got to get it. And he was the one who persuaded us. So Ted went and did the deal with the original owners, the Bihari brothers. And Ray was right. Like any of these catalogues, what your reasonably tuned in collector knows about is the top end stuff. Someone like Ray, who had been eating, breathing and sleeping this stuff, knew there were all sorts of things in there, like Pee Wee Crayton, Johnny Guitar Watson, Etta James and so on. So there were great records none of us had actually even heard. Ted was the one who really ran that, and Ted knows records too. In a way it’s almost the defining thing between majors and indies. I’m not saying people at major labels have no knowledge. I think their commercial imperative is stronger, and I think they’re working in a narrower area.”
But it’s not just knowledge, according to Armstrong. Good old-fashioned ‘taste’ is paramount. “Something that always stood Ted and I in really good stead is years working behind a record counter. You’d get a record in, maybe a new release that’s under the wire, and it’s not going to be a pop hit, or you find 25 copies of a really great old R&B record – you just know. The classic one that had come out a couple of years before and there were deletions around, was Link Wray’s ‘I’m So Glad, I’m So Proud’, on Virgin. Somebody came in from Virgin and offered Ted 600 copies, so he bought them like a shot for 5p each! That was a record that – across the board, people who came in who had bought rock ‘n’ roll, who bought garage, who bought soul – you dropped the needle on that record and you had a sale. Bang. And that experience, of being at the coal face where people bought records – you could see them come in the shop and play a record and know that they would walk out the door with it. The other thing with us, we may not have had huge hits over the years, but we’ve put out more records than most people. I don’t think I ever had the attention span, funnily enough, to make hit records and break them. It’s time-consumin
g. To work on one thing. To break an act, you’ve got to have this weird long-term dedication to that act. I don’t have that. I like too much music. I’ve got favourite acts and labels I really like, but I could never see myself spending ten years working with U2, I don’t have the attention span!”
Ace also added the GlobeStyle franchise, under the tutelage of Ben Mandelson (who had once recorded for Chiswick with punk era misfits Amazorblades). “I chaired all the meetings for the world music thing,” recalls Armstrong. “We were asking what shall we call it. Someone said world beat, someone said world music, we took a vote and world music won. World music was criticised – ‘Oh, we don’t want to be a world music act.’ But it started as a rack in a record shop. That’s why Ben and me called the meetings in the first place – we had no presence in record shops, we won’t survive without it. That was what I spent much of the later 80s and 90s doing, field trips to Mozambique, Madagascar, Zanzibar. World music is interesting from the point of view of how something developed through independent record companies. One of the reasons I’m not involved in world music any more, and Ace isn’t, is that because in a sense it’s become more mainstream. In terms of how you have to behave – you have to have the band come in and tour them. Back then in the 80s when we were doing it, Charlie Gillett and Andy Kershaw played your record, and John Peel might if it were Zimbabwean (LAUGHS).”
“We had this thing going with the 3 Mustaphas 3,” Armstrong continues, “and they toured heavily. But Ace is not really geared to new acts any more, and to be in the world music business, you’re talking about new acts. Which entails a different kind of perseverance. Obviously the Bob Dylan Theme Time Radio Hour [the recent CD release accompanying Dylan’s radio shows that has garnered huge acclaim] has done very well. But most of these things come out, get their month’s shot at it, and they’re gone. That’s a different world to keeping an act going for a period of time. And if you want to cross over, you have to cross over from somewhere. If you’re in the world music area, you can cross over. Youssou N’Dour did, Salif Keita did. Poor woman, if she’d lived, Ofra Haza would have – she’d have been much bigger. And in a way world music has grown up, and stuff has been chucked into that pot, things have been spat back into pop from it, Neneh Cherry or whatever. I think it’s broadened people’s outlook and made them more tolerant to an extent, they’re listening to stuff they wouldn’t have listened to 20 years ago. Maybe it’ll wear itself in time, but world music is a handy tag. And world music developed as a very indie thing – guys would pop a record out, sell a few copies, do well out of it, maybe the band would come in, or would be in through the auspices of a local indigenous group or whatever. It was all very localised, and now it’s a very much bigger thing. You’ve seen something like World Circuit go from being a small company and doing nice touring things and starting a record label to the way things developed around Buena Vista and Ali Farka Touré. That’s a little indie business that’s grown. OK, the majors are a bit more involved, but it’s still a very indie-centred business, world music. It’s been nice to see that over the last 20 years. We had a good run at the world music thing, and we put out a lot of seminal records. Ben Mandelson is a brilliant man when it comes to that. He’s as good at that as Ray Topping is with blues and R&B in terms of knowing his onions. The world music period came and went, but I’m still to this day quite proud of what we did.”