by Alex; Ogg
In the absence of Riviera, Robinson had two general managers to fall back on; former agent and Kursaal Flyers’ manager Paul Conroy and Alan Cowderoy, previously a musician with Gracious, and the ex-product manager for Graham Parker at Phonogram. Conroy looked after UK marketing, while Cowderoy concentrated on International Exploitation – expanding Stiff’s impressive list of licensees, which at one point topped 36 separate agreements. It was the advances Cowderoy secured for these, as much as the hits that Stiff had, that kept the label profitable – in the process creating the blueprint for many 90s labels. “Jake was still there when I joined,” remembers Cowderoy. “I was working at Vertigo Records, and that’s how I first met Dave Robinson. He managed Graham Parker and the Rumour, and they were signed to Vertigo. We were creating great marketing campaigns for Graham Parker. And Dave Robinson was bringing in Damned singles and Nick Lowe singles, and saying, ‘this is how you need to do it’. We were getting on really well. We came up with creative ideas to market Graham Parker to the extent where he eventually said – ‘come over and join me’. I was at the right age. It was worse money, no company car, and no pension. There was no security at all. But I thought, ‘this is really exciting,’ so I took the plunge. But when I arrived there, Paul Conroy had arrived ahead of me. He was a friend of Jake’s, but I didn’t really know Jake. Dave and Jake shared an office and they were planning world domination from there. But I don’t think they communicated to each other quite as well as they might have done. So when I got there, Paul had set his stall out so that he was looking after the English marketing situation. Which was really what I wanted to do! So I ended up looking after the international situation, doing the licensing deals. Basically what I used to do is generate the income that allowed the label to carry on. Because really and truly, Robbo could spend every penny that was generated in the UK on marketing and being creative, but it was all for nothing unless I managed to get money in from overseas. So fortunately I managed to coax the French and the Germans and Scandinavians and Japanese and Australians, and get a great network of licensees for Stiff.”
Both Cowderoy and Conroy also helped out with A&R, while Cowderoy was additionally in charge of mastering. But the days immediately following Riviera’s departure were dark ones. “There was a guy Jake had appointed to be the bookkeeper at Stiff,” Robinson recalls. “When I looked at this guy’s desk and filing system, I found a lot of invoices that hadn’t even been opened. There was a huge amount. At that time, Jake was very keen to run very big ads on pretty much everything. I wasn’t against that, but at the same time, when he left, we owed about 150 grand, I think. That was very hard to overcome, because Elvis had gone and Nick had gone, and it was difficult. But we had a few quid in the bank. I started work on Dury. I think Jake, at the time, said that it would just die. I think his idea was that it would be better off me going back to management. That was one of the lines he gave me when he left. Which was guaranteed to make me want to carry on. I thought, fuck it, at the end of the day, if Jake hasn’t the bollocks or the bottle to continue, then fine. I don’t hold it against him. I wouldn’t say we’re close friends but we’re friendly, and it’s all water under the bridge. But at the time it was a bit of a fucking big blow.”
Jake’s departure was also “a bit of a shock” for Cowderoy. “I have to say I was enjoying the working relationship, sitting in on meetings. And I felt with my major label experience that I had an idea of what may or may not have been successful on radio. And I was trying to help them as best I could with, say, choosing the right Nick Lowe single. Then suddenly one day Dave said Jake was going to leave and he was going to take Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello with him. And that was a shock. That was everything we’d been working towards. We had started to work a little bit on Ian Dury & The Blockheads, and fortunately very quickly they filled the gap. I could have got another job, but I don’t remember thinking like that. My overheads were fairly minimal. Dave was a very inspiring person back then. Well, he still is. With hindsight, you can say they weren’t communicating as well as they might, even though they were sharing an office. I think they were in their own little worlds, really. Which I suppose is why Jake left. At the point Jake decided to go, I don’t remember if that was a shock for Dave at all. I don’t remember ever asking him that question. But it was certainly a shock to us, because we had no warning. On the ground floor, the troops didn’t have any warning. I think Jake was probably a fairly impulsive person, so it wouldn’t surprise me if it all came about over the weekend and was announced to everybody on the Monday.”
“Jake had a much higher visibility than Dave,” notes Nigel Dick, who had joined the label as a motorcycle messenger. “Jake had done all the interviews whereas Dave was the man behind the curtain – the bad-tempered, Irish, charming, crazy, wily man behind the curtain. He was a brilliant, insightful, difficult man, and I hated and loved him. He was the reason Stiff lasted so long and also the reason the label crashed and burned so brightly. When I joined it seemed every week as if the company was going to implode. There was never any money to pay bills. Soon I reached the conclusion that my £14 a week wasn’t enough money to make me lose sleep about whether the company would survive. I figured that was Dave’s problem and started sleeping much better.”
Dick had come to Stiff as “a rabid music fan with a degree in architecture, who couldn’t find a job. I’d spent the summer in Paris sleeping on someone’s floor playing my guitar in the subway for dinner money when I saw a Melody Maker in the gutter with the announcement of the Live Stiffs tour. My immediate thought was, ‘What the fuck am I doing in Paris? That’s where I need to be!’ I cashed in my chips, caught the ferry back to England and got a job as the Stiff motorcycle messenger. The pay was £14 a week and I had to provide my own motorcycle, which cost me £7 a week on the never-never. It was brutal but enormous fun. I’d already bought a number of the Stiff singles and Elvis’s album in the months before I went to Paris so I was well into the vibe of Stiff, though my flared jeans and moustache didn’t last more than a few days. The company was in huge disarray. Jake left the week I arrived and it was all doom and gloom because Elvis, our only true hope, was leaving with Jake, and the VAT man was after the company for unpaid tax. Luckily Dury’s album took off shortly afterwards and the leaking boat managed to continue floating.”
Dick’s brutal initiation involved “just jumping in and paddling as hard as I could. ‘Take this here. Take that there. Now! Faster! Go!’ As I said, the company was frankly a mess on an organisational level. I had to take boxes of mail down to the post office every evening and I stunned everybody by saying, ‘let’s buy a weighing scale and give me a hundred quid so I can buy stamps and we’ll do the stamping at the office.’ They thought I was some kind of nutcase for suggesting something so organised. Of course, within days I’d lost the weighing scales – one of the roadies was using it for measuring out the drugs! Then I ordered a franking machine and that was the last straw – they pulled me off the bike and parked me next to [Paul] Conroy and promoted me to office boy.”
He remembers vividly the chaotic scenes at Stiff, especially when artists were allowed to man the telephones. “When I rang in from the road (this was an era before cell phones and pagers) to ask for my next assignment, Captain [Sensible] would answer the phone and say, “Dick? Fuck off, cunt!” and slam the phone down. This led me to think that maybe he was taking the punk attitude a little far as I was spending half my time working on his career. Dave Vanian was very stand-offish and when I had to drive him somewhere once was mortally offended that I was picking him up in the office Golf and not a limo. He sat gloomily in the back while I debated with myself whether punks should be seen dead in limos.”
Larger premises had been acquired further down Alexander Street, with operations shifting from number 32 to number 28 [above John Curd’s Straight Music operation, though 32 was retained for merchandising]. But that move had been conceived on the basis of the Robinson/Riviera roster of artists, which had now
dwindled in both size and quality. And that wasn’t all. The Damned, the label’s resident punk rock sensations, were splitting into factions following Brian James’s introduction of second guitarist Lu Edmonds. The result would be a poorly received second album Music For Pleasure, almost inconceivably produced by Nick Mason of Pink Floyd. Drummer Rat Scabies walked, while the album’s sales of 20,000 were less than half of their debut. In critical terms, the Damned were “over”. Riviera, it seemed, was the only one capable of keeping the straining chemistry between the band members in place. Robinson lacked the patience.
Crucial respite was derived from the slow-build success of New Boots & Panties. Robinson: “Dury’s album hadn’t really been promoted. Jake was biased towards Elvis quite a bit, I don’t think Dury got a fair crack of the whip. He’d sold a few records, but then the album had pretty much stalled, and I thought it had more mileage. So we put the budget that we had left into that, and did a whole series of ads. The major theme was ‘give up smoking and give us your money’, if I remember correctly. That got going, and then Dury and Chas Jankel produced those great singles, ‘What A Waste’, ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful’ and ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’. So things moved on.”
50,000 copies of the album had been sold by the end of the year, boosted by Dury’s popularity on the Live Stiffs tour [a live document of which would also breach the Top 30]. It would go on to remain in the charts for 90 weeks – an almost unthinkable attainment for an independent label. Those returns, allied to those for ‘What A Waste’, the label’s only significant hit single in the early months of 1978, as well as the overseas licences, effectively bankrolled Stiff through the storm immediately following Riviera’s departure.
Pete Frame was another brought in by Robinson on Riviera’s departure to handle press – ironically, he’d been one of the journalists to burst Robinson’s bubble on the Brinsley Schwarz ‘hype’ by writing a less than glowing review for Zig Zag. “The Fillmore thing was in April ‘70,” Frame recalls, “and you’re right, I was critical of the way the band had been launched on a flying carpet of hype. At that time, integrity was all-important, and true underground bands didn’t resort to that kind of thing. Most of the journalists on the plane wouldn’t have known Brinsley Schwarz from Delmore Schwartz but I had actually seen them at the Country Club some weeks before and knew they were a cool band. I was also the only journalist on the trip who stayed to watch both their sets at the Fillmore. So even though they were unhappy with what I wrote, I think they respected me for it. After all, they knew it was true.”
In fact, Brinsley Schwarz would even play a benefit gig for Frame’s ailing Zig Zag at one point. “I used to hang around with Dave [Robinson] and Nick [Lowe] a bit, after the band split up,” Frame continues. “We would bump into each other, here and there. When I was A&R man at Charisma, I would use Dave’s studio at the Hope & Anchor to record demos, and Nick played on one or two of them. When punk came along, I knew it was all-change, clean-out time – I’d seen it happen 20 years earlier, with skiffle and the first primitive rock ‘n’ rollers [documented in Frame’s book The Restless Generation] and I felt decidedly old and in the way. I always hated old creeps who pretended to be part of something they patently had nothing to do with. So I handed Zig Zag over to Kris Needs and went to work for a local building firm, drawing plans for extensions, etc. Stuff I’d been trained to do before I dropped out, man. It was fucking horrible, so in late ‘77, when Dave phoned and asked if I’d like to be press officer at Stiff, I said yes! What else was I going to say? So I was back in the thick of it, wahooing with Wreckless, Larry, Devo, Jona, etc.”
“I always liked and respected Dave,” Frame continues. “I still do – even though I haven’t seen him since 1989. He had a piece of advice for every occasion – and one I remember particularly was ‘never expect someone to give you 100% if you’re only prepared to give them 80’. I always kept to that one. He also said that whenever he got a contract, he struck out several clauses as a matter of course – but I’ve never managed to pull that one off. Anyway, I did OK at Stiff, got tons of good press, even though I wasn’t there long. I was never a hustler kind of person and therefore not really suited to PR, and I went back to scratching for a living. Dave and I were always mates, and I knew Paul Conroy very well too. Great bunch of people, everyone who worked there, everyone on the label.”
Another to help fill Riviera’s shoes was Andy Murray. “I used to book bands off Paul Conroy, who by 1978 was the general manager. He’d previously been at Charisma agency. So I kept up in touch with him and when I left Leeds Poly in 1975, I came down to London and I was an agent. I decided I was a rotten agent, so I quit my job and went to work for Virgin Retail. I edited Circuit magazine for a year, from ‘77 to ‘78, and I got a call from Paul in the process, cos I was hyping up Stiff acts. I’d sold the first, Buy 1 [‘So It Goes’] at Marble Arch when Jake came in with a little flyer, and said ‘pin this up on the wall’. I knew Jake briefly from the Naughty Rhythms tour, and Paul Conroy was the agent. So it was all very much that little scene, what came out of pub rock, in essence. I put up displays for Elvis Costello’s first album in Virgin Croydon and the display team for Stiff at the time was Paul Conroy’s dad Dennis, who was a retired policeman. Anyway, I get a call from Paul one day, saying we’ve got a tour going by train. Elvis and Nick left to go with Jake to their Radar label. So then you’re into the second generation of Stiff, which was just Dave Robinson running it. When I started working there, it was 28 Alexander Street. They were going through a slight expansion, and they added a couple of people to the art department, and Nigel Dick, having been the bike messenger, was then the production co-ordinator. He was getting the records pressed, and they had a new deal with Island. So they were getting much more commercially orientated, shall we say.”
The first record that Andy Murray ‘worked’ was the Akron compilation, a regional sampler that featured the likes of Jane Aire, the Waitresses and The Rubber City Rebels, encased in a ‘scratch ‘n’ sniff’ sleeve’ that supposedly smelt of rubber as a nod to the city’s tyre industry. The album concept was inspired by a trip to the US at the end of 1977 by Conroy and Cowderoy, whereupon they first encountered Devo. The latter would enjoy chart success in April 1978 with their deconstruction of ‘(I Can’t Get Me No) Satisfaction’, following debut ‘Mongoloid’. Despite singing their label’s praises with a third single, ‘Be Stiff’, Virgin nipped in to sign the rights to their debut album. Virgin would also attain the signatures of bright new hopes The Members after they released a one-off single ‘Solitary Confinement’ for Stiff. But at least Devo led Stiff to the overlooked talent that existed in Akron. Via local svengali Liam Sternberg, they licensed sufficient tracks for a compilation, though plans for individual album releases by the featured artists were either dropped or hastily amended. For example, an emergency recording session with members of The Rumour was convened to bolster the contents of Rachel Sweet’s release with the addition of four cover versions.
The compilation was promoted in typical Stiff fashion. “The first thing Paul Conroy had me do was to call up every airline and ask if they’d sponsor us,” remembers Murray, “they’d done a competition to win a trip to Akron. But of course, they hadn’t arranged anything. This would have been classic Stiff. They’d made the arrangement, so it was, ‘we need a free flight now.’ I wasn’t able to get one. Everyone said, ‘Stiff who? What? Operator? Hello?’ We paid for the ticket, if indeed we ever let the person go. We probably forgot all about it.”
Murray was specifically delegated the task of organising a follow-up Stiff package tour in July 1978. Sweet, Jona Lewie, Wreckless Eric, Mickey Jupp and Lene Lovich, who had been recruited via a recommendation from Charlie Gillett, the original link to Elvis Costello, comprised the line-up. “She was incredibly charismatic but very resistant to invitations for her to sing,” Gillett recalls, “but we prevailed eventually and made a demo of ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’, and took a demo tape of the who
le project to Stiff. The only one that Dave liked at all was ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’, which he wanted to immediately put out. Overnight Lene and Les Chappell, her songwriting and life partner, wrote ‘Lucky Number’ to be the b-side. Dave said, ‘Right, let’s have an album’. Within a matter of about a week, they wrote most of the album – we put a couple of Jimmy O’Neill songs on the album as well, and one song by Nick Lowe – and they re-recorded ‘Lucky Number’. And then Lene went out on that second Stiff tour with Wreckless Eric and Mickey Jupp. This was truly an independent spirit in every meaning of the term. They were conceiving a totally new way – well, it was recreating the R&B package tours that went out in the 50s. Long before even Stax or Motown. In the 50s you’d have a headline act – I saw Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers and The Platters – then a few kind of relatively unknown British acts, and very often a comedian or two. It was a package, all-round entertainment. The greatest thing about those shows was that nobody outstayed their welcome. Everybody did their hits. If they had one or two hits, that’s what they did. The band at the top of the bill had five or six songs you knew and they did all of those. And that was the principle behind the Stiff tour, which was parallel to punk – the songs were generally not very long, and it suited every aspect of music at the time to have a 30 or 40 minute set, that was perfect.”