by Alex; Ogg
The original intention had been for Devo to headline before their defection to Virgin. Ironically the tour proceeded under the title Be Stiff, borrowed from their final Stiff single. Additionally, each member of the tour recorded versions of that track for a promotional 12-inch. Each of the five artists released albums on the same day, 6 October 1978, in three formats (black vinyl, picture disc, coloured vinyl). It was a huge logistical exercise and massive financial commitment. And all five of the albums bombed commercially, at least initially. There was also disquiet between the artists on the tour.
“The idea for the new tour was to travel by specially-chartered train,” Murray recalls, “and they needed an organiser – which was me. I joined as the man running the tour, so I had to book the trains through British Rail, have the meetings, and also present it to the trade press. So I did my whole presentation to them, talked it up, then I did all the regional press. I got a train ticket from British Rail so I could go every day. Every morning I’d get up at seven, get on a train with my free ticket, get off at the station wherever the tour was going by. I’d go round the town, speak to the retailers, go back to the station, meet them off the train, and meet them at the soundcheck, which tour manager Kellogs [John Kalinowski] would get them to. I’d whip up a bit of interest, talk to local dealers, give them some free records, see the show, go to bed, get up the next day, do it all over again.” This was all Robinson’s idea, Nigel Dick recalls. “Then it was all hands to the pump. It was just the idea of survival. Any big plans always got swallowed up by day to day realities.”
“I’d see the artists occasionally,” Murray recalls, “and they’d say, ‘Why are you here?’ ‘I’m here every day!’ But usually we’d never see them because I was off doing business type stuff. But when the tour ended, they wanted somewhere for Rachel Sweet to stay. I said, ‘my flatmate’s got a spare room,’ so Rachel Sweet ended up being my flatmate, with her sister as a sort of chaperone. That was quite entertaining. I have to say that, apart from incessantly playing my copy of Bat Out Of Hell and scratching it in the process, they were model flatmates. After the tour ended I officially became the head of press, because we didn’t have a press office at the time. Pete Frame had been the previous head of press and I knew him slightly, plus, of course, I was an avid Zig Zag reader. So I tried to copy Pete’s approach by being iconoclastic and amusing, and trying to do special things. So we did various anarchic photo sessions and quizzes instead of formal press releases, all sorts of bumph”
Murray worked the aforementioned quintet of releases by Mickey Jupp, Lene Lovich, Rachel Sweet, Jona Lewie and Wreckless Eric’s second album. “There would have been a lot of trying to get reviews, plus they almost all had a single. Of course, I knew very little about press apart from having been on the other end of it. I had to teach myself the job, and there was nobody really to learn from. There was me in the basement, and Sonnie Rae, who had worked at Sonet Records. She was our regular plugger, and was far more experienced and far more of a secret weapon than I was, because if she could get something on the radio, on the playlist, you might have some chance of having a hit. Which we did, with Lene Lovich [whose ‘Lucky Number’ eventually reached number three in the charts after being re-released when its popularity on the Be Stiff tour became apparent]. We didn’t have very much success at all during the tour radio-wise, apart from Rachel Sweet’s ‘B.A.B.Y’, which was playlisted by Radio 1, which was a source of much aggravation to Dave. But he hadn’t really planned it that way. Stiff Mark One wasn’t really about having hits – it was about being an American-style indie, like one of those local Louisiana indies that had someone like Professor Longhair on. It was about putting singles out that your majors wouldn’t touch. The second part of that was having picture sleeves, which you would only get in France and Holland at that time. But your British standard ‘hit’ was only ever a 7-inch, never a 12-inch. No picture sleeve, no video, nothing. It just came out, and if you got it on the Radio 1 playlist, it was a big hit. But even then you wouldn’t necessarily sell any albums. People didn’t relate singles to albums selling until much later, really the early 80s.” Robinson, too, didn’t make the connection between singles driving album sales that became so prevalent later. “Singles then sold in vast quantities. If you got a big single to go, you might sell more singles in value than you do in albums. After the first year and half, we had worked on a basic audience that bought Stiff stuff, no matter what it was – about 40,000 people. Which was comfortable, but not creasing up the majors. We were in a good, comfortable state, because we were a small record company with a vision.”
That said, some mistakes were made. “When we put out our albums,” notes Murray, “they all had top-opening sleeves, and some of them didn’t even have a list of the tracks on the back. If I’d known what I know now, I’d have said to Dave and Paul – this is madness. So there were various things like that, which the industry taught themselves at the time. Stiff was really artistically orientated in the sense that they weren’t ever trying to be cool. The label was actually very uncool in many ways, and would sign people that no-one else wanted. But Stiff was quite guilty of being snobby in one sense. We liked songs over posturing. But we weren’t snobby in the modern sense of everybody desperately trying to be cool and looking over their shoulders to see what everyone else thinks. The fact that it was called Stiff in the first place showed that there was a large element of self-mockery as well as iconography.”
Finding it hard to break these new artists, at least temporarily, Dury steadied the ship with the label’s first number one single, ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’, in January 1979, which sold nearly a million copies in the UK. It established Dury as a major star – at least until the release of his singles-free second album, Do It Yourself. There was a licensing deal with Arista for American distribution, but that soured when Kosmo Vinyl, who had moved on to become Dury’s press officer, threw Clive Davis out of a dressing room. They did open an outlet in the States, Stiff Inc, though it was largely unsuccessful and quickly became a drain on the UK operation. Of course, the label would maintain its maverick reputation (see the release of ‘The Wit And Wisdom Of Ronald Reagan’, which sold 30,000 copies despite, or rather because, it contained absolutely no audio). There were also promotional doormats, roadmaps and jigsaws.
“In January 1979 I presented the Be Stiff tour as Marketing Campaign of the year for the Music Week Awards,” Murray recalls, “and won – against all major company opposition. The judges were impressed by the strong tour branding, the planning, the merchandising, all the press we got, the different formats, including coloured vinyl and picture discs on every album, etc. But they felt that since we’d only sold 10,000 of each album, it couldn’t actually be given the award for ‘Best Marketing’. So they invented a new category, ‘Top Promotion of the Year’, for us specially (they still spelt my name wrong on the award). Paul Conroy made the acceptance speech, for which he, Alan and myself were dressed as undertakers. We were each meant to say a line; ‘Thanks for the award / We couldn’t have won / If you hadn’t lost’. Paul changed it to: ‘We won this award because we’re the best fucking record company with the best fucking acts,’ which shook up the room a bit. Remember, this was all black-tie and very formal.”
The internal culture of Stiff at that time reflected the personalities of those involved.. “Paul Conroy can be a big teenager in a lot of ways, which can be one of his strengths,” says Murray. “But Dave Robinson was very anti-establishment, and wasn’t trying to prove anything so much as wanting to do things his way. And he was very amusing. He was a real Dubliner at a time when to be Irish was really rather denigrated. So Dave was a total outsider having been a roadie for Jimi Hendrix and a photographer, and I didn’t appreciate him as much then as I do now. And it’s really very sad that the, shall we say, more fairground showman side of his nature has come out subsequently, rather than actually his really aggressive creativity, which was what Stiff was mostly about. Doing different t
hings, not just for the sake of it, but doing different things to make ourselves have success. We were pretty keen to have success on any level. We’d put out a record like ‘Toe Knee Black Burn’. It was then, and is now, rubbish, but it came out with as much the thought it might have been a hit as anything else. It wasn’t to be nice or horrible to Tony Blackburn. A track came along, and somebody, out of Paul, Alan or Dave, said, ‘we can have a hit here’.” The last-named oddity, recorded by Binky Baker And The Pit Orchestra, consisted of the DJ’s name being repeated, mantra-like, in a broad northern accent by Anne Nightingale’s husband. Binky had taken umbrage at Blackburn after an incident at a Mallory Park fun day where Blackburn had chastised him for interrupting his conversation.
The good auspices were cemented later in 1979 when Robinson signed arguably the best English pop band of their generation, Madness. “They were a good band,” he recalls, “and I could really see the sense of humour they had. I saw them as London folk music; songwriters who have a social lyric that covers their situation in life, that’s the ideal group. But that’s pretty much what we signed throughout. We were always looking for that kind of songwriter. We signed songwriters rather than good front people. Obviously, if you look at some of our front people! Chrysalis were keen to sign them, but Chrysalis were very slow.” In fact, Madness would release their debut single, ‘The Prince’, through Chrysalis subsidiary 2-Tone, but didn’t commit to them. “Someone told me Chrysalis had seen them eight times,” Robinson remembers. “I felt, well, if we’re going to sign them, we’d better hurry up! It takes a major about twelve gigs before they sign anyone, so we’ve only got a few more gigs and they’ll get signed. That’s the reason I auditioned them at my wedding.”
Indeed, the deal was thrashed out following Robinson’s nuptials, at the Clarendon Ballrooms in Hammersmith on 17 August 1979; an impressive feat even by his multi-tasking standards. Robinson booked them because, alerted to their popularity in London, he’d not been able to find a date to catch them live. As he would later relate, “I was getting married and I thought that’s my chance to see them. Why don’t we ask them if they’d play the wedding? And they said they would. They came and played at the wedding and my wife gave me hell afterwards saying you haven’t spoken to me all night, you’re up there watching the band. They were very good. It was ideal. It was a big record biz kind of party and they were great. I decided there and then that they were likely and signed them up as soon after as I could. Well, in hindsight one shouldn’t have done it but I suppose one was in a state of euphoric chaos so it seemed like a good idea. It could have been terrible”. There was certainly competition for their signatures. “I actually had Madness for the world,” remembers Seymour Stein, “but they performed for Robbo’s wedding. And he made such a fuss, that we had to do a split deal, but I think it worked out well for the band, I must say.”
“It was a great moment,” says Cowderoy. “Madness were all doing the nutty train-dancing around with the guests. Scary but fun! It was an extraordinary thing. Dave was very confident that he was going to get the act, and he developed a relationship with Madness, and they came round and played football with everyone. But they were skinheads, and they had a posse of people who were a little bit scary. But Dave was getting married in a registry office and he decided to get Madness to play at his wedding, and he invited them and they agreed! Everyone was going mad and getting a little bit merry. He continued to woo them after that point. Once you got to know them, they were fine, but I can remember when they played at the Electric Ballroom, and I invited a bunch of foreign journalists over. They didn’t speak much English, and the place was full of skinheads and it was very menacing. They’d ask you for 50p, etc. But the journalists didn’t know what they were saying. Suddenly I could see a journalist being surrounded by about a dozen skinheads, and they were about to kick seven shades of shit out of him, and little old me had to go in and rescue him! Your heart was in your mouth. It was scary but a lot of fun.”
Madness’s monumental success meant that the somewhat Machiavellian defection of Dury to Polydor in the summer of 1981 was a much lesser blow than it might otherwise have been. Notable also is the fact that Madness arrived after Stiff had renegotiated their distribution from Island/EMI (then on the point of being bought out by Thorn) to CBS. That new deal was viewed to be the major factor in Madness signing with Stiff, alongside the fact that its roster then still featured their hero, Ian Dury. Indeed, the band’s debut album, One Step Beyond, rush-released in October within weeks of the contract being signed, featured knowing references to Kilburn & The High Road’s ‘bus queue’ promo photographs, remoulded in their own distinctive style as ‘the nutty train’ pose. The inner sleeve fan shots, meanwhile, invoked the ‘ugly mugshot’ ruse piloted as a means for fans to enter the Blockheads ’77 Christmas party. The album rose quickly to number two in the charts and Madness were away.
“What was good about it was Dave’s confidence he was going to get the band,” says Cowderoy. “And once we had them, we had to motivate them. And he was great at that, Dave. He would say, ‘Look, there’s another Specials single coming out – you’ve got to step up to the plate.’ They were a bunch of lazy bastards and they wanted to do as little work as they possibly could. And he chivvied them brilliantly. As for the distribution, I’m not sure with distribution that our deal was as kind as it might have been. Certainly not as kind as it would have been if there had been independent distributors around then like there are now, that could have taken care of that kind of basic business. They [the majors] didn’t go out of their way to help you back then.” Nigel Dick: “Obviously you don’t sign an artist if you don’t expect them to break. So Madness’s success was certainly hoped for. The size of their success stunned everyone, though we soon got used to it and did a very good job for them, I think. As a press officer, marshalling their best years, was certainly my proudest achievement.”
Despite accelerated levels of success, close bonds between the artists and the label continued to be the norm at Stiff. “There was always a Stiff spirit, but of course everyone wanted a hit,” remembers Dick. “However, having worked at and with other labels, I would say that there was more friendship between the acts than any other place I’ve worked at. Dury was sometimes aloof and at others enormously friendly. He once bought me a huge bunch of flowers! Wreckless was, frankly, a drunk, and I never forgave him for ripping one of my shirts while I was still wearing it. His book [A Dysfunctional Success; published in 2003] was enormously entertaining, but I felt so sad that, to this day, he is convinced everyone wanted to rip him off and sabotage his career. Despite his whining and difficult behaviour we all worked tremendously hard to try to get him some hits. He wrote great songs and he really had something. But in the end the public didn’t want to know. If he wants to get angry he should get angry with his public. I made many great friends at Stiff and still keep in contact with many of them (artists included) which I think says a lot about the company and the spirit of the place. The ‘mavericks’ at Stiff were really no crazier than most of the other artists I’ve worked with over the years. The difference was we let their personality shine rather than trying to turn them into ‘stars’ … and if they didn’t have something idiosyncratic about them, we invented it!”
Crucial to that sense of camaraderie was the fact that everyone could contribute to the creative ‘pot’, rather than being delineated purely by a single job function. “Yeah, that was the theory of the whole thing,” agrees Robinson. “Everybody was involved. It’s my attitude to involve people. And yeah, the staff, all of them went on to do very well. Whatever we learnt, we all learnt it together. People used to come up to me and say, ‘What is it you taught these Stiff people? They’re just real workers and real grafters, and they all have ideas’. And that’s what you’d think the record business was going to be about – you’d think it was going to be an exciting industry and have some razzle dazzle to it – we are in the entertainment, and the illusion business, wi
th some good music. It’s much better than a job.”
Andy Murray remembers Dave Robinson’s favourite moan was about “the English disease”, where people would rather spend time and effort on perfecting an excuse rather than get the task at hand completed. “I’ve never understood it,” says Robinson now. “People will trot you out a good excuse. You just say, ‘Look, never mind the excuse, why haven’t we done the work?’ It’s an attitude. Nowadays, it’s all, ‘one can push the worker too hard’. But if the worker works hard, he learns something. That’s my belief. Andy Murray and I had a few run-ins on this subject early on.” Cowderoy: “I never remember thinking, ‘God, I’m really bored, what are we going to do?’ It was very full-on and Dave never stopped. Dave’s attitude was ‘a tired band is a happy band’. And I think he also thought that ‘tired workers are happy workers’ too.”
Of course, there was a downside to that, too. Some felt overworked or under-appreciated, and there was a pattern of casual sackings. But Murray remembers Robinson’s aversion to the ‘English Disease’ as ultimately refreshing. “It’s as true today as it was then. It’s not necessarily British, but it is a trait of people in business. ‘Oh, I couldn’t do it.’ But that’s no good if you’re an entrepreneur. If you want something done, you just want it done. But Stiff was very single-minded, put it that way. It suited me very well in terms of the dynamics of the label. It didn’t suit me in terms of the way it was communicated. The reason I left was because I never knew what was going on. I was just told – this record’s coming out next week, get some press on it. I would say, ‘The papers go to press on Thursday, and this is Friday. I keep telling you, you’ve got to give me the stuff on a Wednesday.’ ‘Oh, do your best, shut up.’ ‘I can’t do my best because you don’t plan anything!’ That was my essential frustration. I felt that the marketing people were in charge of stuff and I wasn’t. So I got a job in marketing.”