Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  Additionally, the company played a pivotal role, via its Beat Goes Public imprint, in the subsequent Acid Jazz boom. “I don’t care what people think about world music and acid jazz at the end of the day,” says Armstrong, “they sold records, people made some money, and they were good records. We sold a million records on Acid Jazz. Giles Peterson walked in and said, ‘There’s an acid house thing that’s going round, what if we called ours Acid Jazz?’ And again, that’s where an indie comes into play. A major would have to have 15 committee meetings before deciding it’s too off the wall to do. Whereas I said, yeah, why not. We got someone to design a psychedelic cover. Giles came up with things like ‘Psychedelic Sally’ and appropriate titles. We stuck it out and it sold 20,000 copies. That’s where the indie thing is useful, to be able to move quite fast on your feet and get something moving. In some ways, we’re almost more commercial whores than the majors at times. At the time of Acid Jazz, Ady used to do a Friday night at the 100 Club, where he’d play the jazzier side of soul music; organ and Hammond-based stuff. An instrumental version of ‘In The Midnight Hour’ and stuff like that. I would go down with a friend of mine and dance the night away. After one of those gigs, I said to him, we’ve got to make a CD of this. Just off the top of my head, I said why don’t we call it Mod Jazz? And now we’re up to about volume seven, and people now talk about Mod Jazz as a genre.”

  As all these tributary interests attest, while Ace is synonymous with specific genres, it hasn’t been afraid to test new ground. “People think they know what Ace is about,” confirms Armstrong, “but there’s so many different threads. Never mind inventing Mod Jazz and New Breed (a development of Northern Soul) and all these things – we did a lot of Cajun reissues for a long time. And then was a strong streak of early country stuff. So to an extent we do respond to the people who are working for us and what they know.”

  While Chiswick never became a cause célèbre in the music press ala Stiff, nor enjoyed the same level of chart success, its Ace outgrowth survives to this day. That longevity is due almost entirely to the accumulated knowledge and expertise of its staff – the sort of dedicated market insight that only comes from a lifetime of devotion. No major label could ever hope to match that time investment for what remains a niche market. Significantly, it took a UK specialist independent label to realise the value in the vaults of the pre-eminent American independents, turning the story full circle. “We get letters from America saying it’s a disgrace that American companies don’t do this,” says Armstrong. “But it’s faraway grass and faraway hills. To a large extent what we do now – growing up in the 50s, it was hard to hear this music. You can’t imagine what it was like hearing a Little Richard record in the 50s – it could have been from Mars, it was so ‘other’. And even soul music, it was brilliant to us, cos it was over ‘there’.”

  “A label like Ace,” adds Carroll, “it would be more difficult for us to exist in America. Ace exists because of the European market, and of course that’s decreasing as the old collectors drop off the perch. We still manage to sell records, but a lot of the things we do now are more accessible, a lot of the things like the Producers series, the Spector sound-a-likes which sells really well, the Golden Age of Rock ‘n’ Roll, some of those things. Those support the more obscure releases by lesser-known blues artists and so on. We need the sales we get in America and the European sales and the English sales to make it work. I don’t think you’d get the same level of European and English sales if you were based in America. You might get a tiny bit more American sales, but not enough to make the difference. We’re kind of number one in a field of one, in that we fall in the middle between say Bear Family Records and Rhino. Rhino have a slightly more commercial spin, and Bear Family are even more obscure and obtuse than us. But what all three of us have in common is that we all produce very high-quality reissues, and we’re in the middle, mining a little of the super-specialist area that Bear Family does, and we’re appealing also to the sort of people who buy Rhino reissues.”

  With a glut of 30th anniversaries in the offing around the publication of this book, Ace has long since celebrated its own, intact, and independent. “I’m not one of those people that says we’re better than the majors morally or whatever,” says Armstrong. “We’re different, but why? But in my case, it’s the whole idea of dedicating yourself to a big act or two year in and year out. I think people working in the indie world like lots of music. We’re maybe more fans, and that fan aspect dominates more than the business side. If you’re an independent record company, and you have a desire for power, it’s not the place to go. Trevor, our third partner, is the one who is most like someone at a major in a sense. He started at EMI and Polydor and various big record companies. He ended up joining two crazy Irishmen, Ted and me, because he couldn’t handle the politics. The politics at majors – a friend of mine went to EMI to set up a world music label and got the job. He came out of the meeting and he was talking to a couple of people. And one of the guys turned to him and said, ‘Never forget, in this building there are at least ten people who want your job, and are prepared to do anything to get it.’ What a way to come into work in the morning!”

  And they’ve never lost their enthusiasm for turning up a good record. “Well, a few weeks ago the three of us were having a meeting at my house,” Armstrong recalls. “Ted was down for some PPL (the music rights organisation) House of Commons thing with his wife. Ted and I ended up at my house for the afternoon, because Trevor had gone off and Ted had time to kill. I thought, I’m not going in to work. So I opened up my record collection. I brought out about four boxes of 45s and set Ted up with a record player. And we just had the best afternoon. The four boxes were random stuff, unfiled, stuff I’d acquired left right and centre. I didn’t know if they were good or bad records. Ted just had the nose for it. He was just playing great records, stuff he didn’t even know. Only once did he skip a record, and took the needle off, but the whole afternoon he spent doing a crossword and dropping the needle on one good record after another.”

  Chapter Three

  So It Goes

  Stiff Records

  The year 1976 has become a uniquely mythologised one in British musical culture. It is not that the punk generation was the first to celebrate its youth a quarter century along its timeline, more that, in the new millennium, that same generation enjoys unprecedented levels of media access. While the much discussed tenets of the punk era hold true – a reaction against a stilted music scene, a government in crisis, a peeling back of post-war austerity etc, the crucial enabling event was the piecemeal arrival of a series of labels able to operate outside conventional music industry structures. That is one good reason why the terms ‘punk’ and ‘independent’ have become so synonymous. Did punk spawn independent music as we now know it, or vice versa? It is a defining chicken and egg question for any historian of the era.

  The historical fudge is, however, appropriate. The stories of the labels and artists who were involved in sowing the seeds of that particular revolution can be individually attributed to either theory of chronological hierarchy – that punk begat the modern concept of independent records or the reverse. Collectively, the evidence is contradictory.

  Stiff Records, one of the most colourful stories of this or any musical era, and headed by two of its most abrupt but intriguing characters, was not coincidentally founded in London in 1976 by Dave Robinson and Andrew Jakeman (later to take the name Jake Riviera). The ethos of the label combined self-deprecating and provocative humour, embodied in their defining slogan, “If it ain’t Stiff, it ain’t worth a fuck”, a highly individualistic A&R policy and a can-do work ethic. Another of the label’s mottos also proved highly pertinent – “When you kill time, you murder success”. It underscored their blunt realism and unabashed concern with the bottom line. Riviera, in particular, cultivated a brusque press image that helpfully intimidated promoters and distributors into paying in full and on time, while many artists were openly i
n thrall to his domineering persona. And Dave “nor shall my baseball bat sleep by my side” Robinson was no pussycat either.

  Stiff was most remarkable, however, in terms of innovation. They were an independent who held major labels in complete disdain, yet exhibited globe-conquering ambition. Certainly their package tours in the late 70s, which featured almost their entire artist roster on a shared platform, were huge logistical exercises that defied the homespun, DIY ethic that grew out of punk. There was none of the timorous hiding behind fringes or aesthetic pretension that characterised some later independent labels, or any shame in hyping records in what was then an otherwise uneven playing field. Their A&R policy, from Nick Lowe to Elvis Costello to Ian Dury, and onwards through Madness and The Pogues, revealed an instinct for discerning creative longevity rather than the pot-shot 45s that so eloquently announce punk’s esprit de corps.

  There was good reason for that. Many Stiff acts had roots in the pub rock scene that immediately presaged punk, and it seems certain that Riviera and Robinson, the latter Riviera’s flatmate’s boyfriend, would have sustained some foothold or niche in the music industry regardless of the generational upheaval going on around them. But they were smart enough to realise that punk was opening up doors – or forcing entry – quicker and more effectively than they could have managed otherwise.

  Both founders had long pedigrees. Robinson had briefly worked for Jimi Hendrix in the 60s, before going on to manage pub rockers Brinsley Schwarz and, intermittently, Ian Dury’s first band, Kilburn & The High Roads, as well as Graham Parker. Similarly, Riviera was a former tour manager for Doctor Feelgood and manager of Chilli Willi & The Red Hot Peppers. He had previously been involved in a failed independent label venture, Revelation, which housed the Chilli Willis’ debut album Kings Of The Robot Rhythm (1972). Robinson too had experienced his share of setbacks – he was behind the famously disastrous ‘hype of the century’ attempt to launch Brinsley Schwarz by flying a plane-load of journalists, DJs, competition winners and hangers-on to America for a show at the Fillmore East in New York.

  It was the Feelgoods’ Lee Brilleaux who loaned the duo the initial £400 to establish the label. Or at least, that became the cover story. “We never cashed that!” confirms Robinson. “The cheque was on the wall for years. It was very nice of him to do it. We gave him shares, actually. At some point we gave everyone a few shares in Stiff – not very valuable in the final analysis, but there you are!” In fact, the initial funding for Stiff came from the duo’s management activities. “I was a manager and Jake managed the Chilli Willis. I had a management company, so when we decided we might do the label I gave him half of it. And essentially the finance that made the label work was the income from the management company. We were managing Graham Parker at that point and Ian Dury for a while, and obviously eventually Elvis Costello.”

  The label was based at 32 Alexander Street, with Blackhill Enterprises, another management concern helmed by Pete Jenner and Andrew King, former Pink Floyd managers, located upstairs (in the mid-60s, the top floor flat had been home to Roger Waters). Robinson had already convinced Blackhill to invest in Ian Dury’s publishing, and that eventually led to them taking over Dury’s management in February 1976. When the concept of a record label was formalised over a pub conversation between Riviera and Robinson, knowing that Blackhill had some spare floorspace, they decided to site their operation there. Robinson would initially sleep under his desk.

  The duo’s background in the business proved crucial to Stiff’s approach and development. Indeed, the label was named after the industry term for a ‘flop’, tacitly acknowledging the duo’s previous misadventures. The impetus for the label had grown out of their frustration at working with major labels. “It was essentially a situation where we were managers, and had a band called Clover, who were signed to major record labels, Phonogram mainly,” Robinson continues. “And the essence was that their marketing was not what Jake and I both thought marketing should be. In those days the groups just went on tour, and you struggled for a bit of tour support possibly, but that was all you got. A quarter page ad in Sounds was the extent of their marketing. They didn’t have any ideas about how to place the ad and how to make something out of the ad, really, apart from occasionally using a few reviews, if you had them. The great slogan the record industry was run on, and still is, was ‘out now’. That was their only way to attract any attention to a record that would obviously have some quality or you wouldn’t be putting it out. But they had no slogans, or attitude; they didn’t think the public was interested in marketing ideas other than live touring and the odd ‘out now’. As a manager you’re trying to get some movement forward, and you’ve got ideas for your artists, but you couldn’t get the majors to cough up and take an interest. So we used all those ideas at Stiff.” The initial influence for Robinson was Chris Blackwell’s Island Records – which would ultimately provide its own horrible irony. “Island was the great model, and I certainly had that in my mind for the record label – a kind of family label that took care of its artists in general, and were able to do quite a lot of the chores of management. Cos a lot of our groups obviously didn’t have managers.”

  Just as importantly, both Robinson and Riviera were aware of a pool of unexposed talent that the majors were effectively ignoring. Robinson: “When I ran the pub thing in 1972, there were an awful lot of bands and musicians – we’re speaking pre-computer or digital music – and everyone had to play. And I had a predictably close feel for live music. Although I’d made some efforts to get A&R people from major record labels down, and although the pubs were heaving with people, they would just say ‘it’s a pub thing’ and weren’t interested. So there was a lot of very good stuff at that time drawing big crowds, with A&R people ignoring it – the majors having decided that theatrical rock and platform shoes were where it was at. So we were diametrically opposed to what was happening musically and stylistically in the major record labels. We were anti-major as a result. We resented them. And laughed at them generally.”

  The first release came from Nick Lowe. His ‘So It Goes’ has long been considered part of the fabric of the punk story, but in truth is a much more restrained endeavour than its upstart peers, indebted to the artist’s long established credentials as a songwriter on the pub rock scene with Brinsley Schwarz. Yet is served as the perfect bridge between the backgrounds of all those involved with Stiff and the new dawn musically. It was accompanied by a mocking press release, advocating sound over technique, and songs of less than three minutes’ length and a similar number of chords. The author was Vinyl Mogul, a pseudonym for Riviera. That ‘punk’ manifesto was also reflected in Lowe’s dextrous referencing of the coming era. The song title was derived from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 catch phrase and also used as the title of Tony Wilson’s Granada TV music show, which would first screen the Pistols. The b-side, ‘Heart Of The City’, meanwhile, featured a closing reference to the (pre-Clash) 101ers’ ‘Keys To Your Heart’, freshly released on Chiswick. The recording costs of just £45 were comfortably recouped after sales in excess of 10,000 copies. To that point penniless and dispirited by the music industry, Lowe’s days kipping on Riviera’s couch were drawing to a close.

  The early Stiff discography thereafter ranged from the pub rock of Roogalator, Tyla Gang and Lew Lewis to underground garage rockers The Pink Fairies (who had recently been augmented by ex-Chilli Willis guitarist Martin Stone). Indeed, original plans (ventured in an early press release) were to issue unreleased recordings by prior management concerns Brinsley Schwarz and Chilli Willi. Each of these releases boasted a ‘gimmick’. The Pink Fairies (BUY 2) single ‘Between The Lines’ was the first Stiff release to feature a picture sleeve, while Roogalator’s effort played at 33 1/3RPM, with a sleeve that parodied With The Beatles (and was withdrawn after complaints from EMI). The Tyla Gang release, led by former Ducks Deluxe guitarist Sean Tyla, was promoted as ‘the world’s first double b-side single’. If the pub rock connection
s weren’t explicit enough, the follow-up came from Lew Lewis, the former Hot Rods’ harmonica player, backed by pseudonymous Feelgood members. A projected concept trio featuring Larry Wallis, Sean Tyla and Dave Edmunds recording themed songs such as ‘Food’, credited to the Takeaways, was confined to an appearance on the later odds and sods compilation album, A Bunch Of Stiffs.