by Alex; Ogg
In December 1979 the label moved premises again to 9-11 Woodfield Road, just off Harrow Road, above a taxi firm. It had previously been home to Virgin’s Front Line reggae imprint. While Madness reinvigorated the label, some of its stars from yesteryear began to fall away, including Mickey Jupp, Lene Lovich (after a last chart hurrah for second album Flex) and Wreckless Eric, whose prophetic titling of his third album Big Smash!, despite the quality of the contents, backfired. Rachel Sweet, too, had gone by the end of the year, after a second album Protect The Innocent, produced by Stiff’s new in-house producer Alan Winstanley, alongside Martin Rushent, flopped badly.
The move also coincided with Murray’s departure in January 1980. “Felt like a long year and a half! But I felt like I’d worked for the best independent, and I wanted to work for the best major, which was CBS at the time. So I went off to be a product manager at CBS [later working again with Paul Conroy, who became marketing director for Warner UK in 1983 and managing director between 1986 and 1989]. What was interesting was that it was instructive. People would go into Dave and say, ‘Well, I don’t like this mix’. And Dave would say, ‘Well, that’s the way it’s going to be.’ ‘Well, I’m just not going to have this! I’m going to…’ And you could see it going through their minds – ‘I’m going… to speak… to…’ And there wasn’t anyone to speak to, because Dave owned the label and he got his own way. And in a lot of ways, even though hardly any of the artists overtly liked it, they actually really did appreciate it. When artists dealt with, subsequently, the committees that record labels became, when nothing is ever decided, or worse, the artist could be allowed to entertain their genius in all sorts of expensive ways, absolutely not always successfully.”
While gripes were not uncommon, other artists respected Robinson’s ability to get things done, accepting the fact, though often in hindsight, that his belligerence may have enhanced their careers. “Well, we had a need to have a high percentage of what we did work at the end of the day,” Robinson reflects now. “Somebody has to have a vision. There’s no place for committees in a small record company that is constantly reinvesting in the music of that label. You have to have somebody who says yes or no and sticks to it, and that’s pretty much me, really.” And Robinson’s focus on the bottom line was one set by example. His decision to direct many of Stiff’s videos was an act born of both parsimony and pragmatism. “Well, the other people would listen to you, and then go and try to make their entrance into Hollywood. On your money. Fuck that.” The fact that this stoical refusal to throw away money actually resulted in some of the finest and funniest video clips of the decade, most notably with Madness, pinpoints Robinson’s dual strengths as a manager and a creative.
“I used to master all the records,” recalls Cowderoy. “Once the records were finished in the studio, I would take them to the mastering studio, where we would tweak them to suit Dave. And then I’d bring them back. At that stage you’d be inscribing the little slogans into the run-out grooves. That was one of my tasks. I remember going back to Dave with records and saying, ‘I’ve tweaked this, and I think you’re going to like it.’ And he’d listen and go, ‘No, no, no, I don’t like that.’ And in the end he got a graphic equaliser in his office. He always liked a lot of top-end, because he thought that would cut through the medium wave, which was the radio transmission medium at the time. And sometimes you’d think it was too much, but radio would add it and it would cut through. He invariably wasn’t wrong. And he had a good eye for art. The sleeves were always good. We had a great art department. There was a guy called Chris Morton, who was the first artist there. He designed the first logo and did some of the early sleeves and early compilations. Then Barney became the in-house art guy. And it was very important, that visual style, as much as the audible style – and the sense of humour. They were doing their thing, but at the end of the day, it would have to get past Robbo. And if he didn’t approve it, or had a better idea, that was it. You’d try to steer the ship, and Dave was the captain. Occasionally you’d try to sneak up behind him and try to distract him, and turn the rudder whichever way you wanted it to go. But essentially he steered the ship.”
New head of press Nigel Dick even found himself playing bass for the Top Of The Pops recording of Jona Lewie’s ‘You’ll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties’, which reached number 16 in April 1980 (and would later be followed by a much bigger hit, ‘Stop The Cavalry’). But the A&R policy remained esoteric. Joe King Carrasco rubbed shoulders with New York splatter-punks the Plasmatics (“not very engaging folk,” remembers Dick). There was reggae from Desmond Dekker and the Equators alongside medieval-themed folk-punk from Tenpole Tudor. Art lout John Otway and 70s glam leftover Alvin Stardust found themselves unlikely peers of American power poppers Dirty Looks and Any Trouble, whose singer Clive Gregson was deliberately modelled as a replacement for Elvis Costello. “I don’t think Stiff had a lot of respect for artistic … identity,” Lene Lovich would later tell Jason Gross, when informed that The Feelies were issued with a dictum to try to repeat the success of her ‘Lucky Number’. “They just wanted to be successful.” Several of those signings (though not the Plasmatics, whose GLC-aborted gig would hit Robinson in the pocket to the region of £20,000) were part of the 1980 Son Of Stiff package tour, the last and least successful of such enterprises.
Everyone, seemingly, was welcome to put forward their A&R suggestions, rather than it being a rigidly discrete department at the label. Nigel Dick remembers Robinson asking his opinion on whether to release Dury’s ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’. “I didn’t like it too much, and of course, it went to number one. I also discovered this young metal band from Sheffield who were fucking brilliant and had a single on their own label. I rang their manager who got a lift on the back of a motorcycle from Sheffield down to London to see me and give me a copy of the record. Robbo hated it and told me, somewhat archly, that we needed to sign bands that made money. The band was Def Leppard. 60 million albums later…”
“We all tried to do what we could,” recalls Cowderoy. “Dave had a list of people that he said major labels had overlooked. And then the list was added to with people like Wreckless Eric and The Damned. There were people on the list like Larry Wallis, and Ian Dury, and a few other people. Mickey Jupp was on the list, people who had been around a while. Dave was convinced, because they were on the list, they were people we should definitely sign. ‘The list’ had assumed some sort of magical, mystical property. A few of those that we’d worked with proved successful, so why wouldn’t the others? It was almost a religious thing. Paul and I and the others could sit round and say, ‘I’m not sure that we’re going to be able to sell a Larry Wallis record.’ The ‘Police Car’ single we put out was a great single, but we weren’t convinced Larry was somebody that I could sell overseas, and Paul could sell to the Brits. So we had reservations. So we tried to temper Dave’s enthusiasm in that way. And if something caught our eye, we’d try to encourage him too.”
But the idiosyncratic command structure could cause problems too. Andy Murray: “With Stiff, it was difficult for me personally, because the artists, funnily enough, were a bit snooty. They were used to dealing with Dave. Dave would say, ‘We’ll do this, and whatever you want, that’s fine.’ He was very generous to the artists in terms of accommodation or helping them out, or giving them extra money, or listening to them. The artists were a little bit stand-off-ish with me, funnily enough. But with major labels, as I say, they’re stand-off-ish with everybody, because they feel it’s an ‘us and them’ situation, which I would reasonably say was not the case at Stiff. They felt that if they were signed to Stiff – bear in mind that, very often they had been rejected by everyone else in the business – they were quite correctly grateful. Notwithstanding that, Dave could be very charming. Paul and Alan were certainly very helpful. If somebody wanted something silly, they would try to get it for them. There was never any talking down to the artists and telling them they shouldn’t want somethin
g. They might say it wasn’t possible, but they might still give it a go. Far more likely, with someone like Lew Lewis, you’d take him in and say, ‘Lew, we’re launching your album with a harmonica extravaganza at the Hope ‘n’ Anchor,’ and he’d go, ‘Fine, good, let’s go.’ There were positive suggestions about all sorts of things. Then in the 80s it became the era of the big manager, where the big manager would come in and bully the record company.”
Murray’s replacement would discover similar problems. Nigel Dick: “I was always more into the more jokey and cheeky side of things than Andy. In truth, if you’re ever working for Robbo, you will always have to be reactive – he wants things done NOW! Back then, when lead times for some magazines was anything up to six weeks, that was very, very difficult to achieve. Frankly, I didn’t much enjoy being a press officer and hated trying to blag articles out of cynical journalists who had seen it all and wanted lots of free drink. I didn’t drink.”
Dick would also discover the downside of Robinson’s perfunctory approach to human resources. “I left for exactly the same reason that everyone left. I was fired! Robbo grew tired of me. I knew it was coming and tried to leave but Robbo asked me to stay. Then one bright and breezy day I was summoned to his chamber and given 15 minutes to get out. After five years of working round the clock and phone calls in the middle of the night, it was all over. Behind his back one of the staff showed me how to fill in the forms to take him to the industrial tribunal for unfair dismissal. Robbo got wind of it pretty quickly and he paid me off.” Murray was never fired, however. “Oh, he tried. About three times. But Alan wouldn’t let him!”
Nigel Dick: “Then I got a phone call from Lene Lovich to go and work on her current tour in the US and I was off. Everyone on that tour, from the sound guy to the tour manager to the publicist, and even Lene herself, had been fired by Robbo. It was a badge of honour. Six months later, when I was working at Phonogram, I had Robbo on the phone begging for information on something (during my time there I had taken it upon myself to be a sort of archivist – I was always too much of a fan). I found it very difficult because deep down I wanted to help. But I told him that I no longer worked for the company and put the phone down on him. 25 years later, after the release of the Stiff film on the BBC, I sent him an e-mail. I explained that I am still, to this day, enormously hurt by his sudden dismissal, but I am also enormously grateful for five years of amazing times and for everything I learnt there – and I certainly learned a lot.”
Towards the end of 1983, Island Records purchased 50% of the label. Robinson was now in charge of both Stiff and Island. He enjoyed immediate and spectacular success with Island, through Frankie Goes To Hollywood and U2, while Bob Marley’s Legend became one of the all-time sure-fire catalogue sellers under his stewardship. And yet, he now reflects, it was a “mistake”. “I didn’t want to do it, quite honestly. You look back at things, and you think, what made you make a decision of that nature. I was so happy. Stiff had a new building in Bayham Street [Camden; in September 1982] that I was really happy with. It was a bigger building. It had a recording studio and a big warehouse. So we had everything under our own roof at that time, and I was very happy with the things we were doing. Musically we were good, we had plenty of money in the bank, and we were ahead of the game. We were in a very good position.”
“It was around that time when Blackwell called me,” Robinson continues. “I think it was November 1983. ‘Why don’t we work out some deal where he bought some shares in Stiff, and I ran Island as well as Stiff, blah blah.’ Quite honestly I turned him down. I thought about it, but, nah, I’m quite happy with the way things are. But he came back, and he’s a very charming bloke. And I’d known him for a number of years and I counted him as a close friend, actually. We to’d and fro’d, and Island was the model of the ideal record company in my mind anyway. So it seemed like something could be done. U2 was there. And Blackwell and I came up with a strategy – he wanted to be in the song business, really – so the company was being built up for a sale, and I had a share in Island, as well as them buying half of Stiff. The whole thing was an interesting step up. Nowadays I’d like to think I would have turned him down a second time and that would have been the end of it, but I took it on. What I didn’t do was I didn’t do any due diligence. Cos Island was a bigger record label than Stiff, on the cards anyway. And it turned out they were totally broke. And I didn’t know that. And I didn’t think to investigate that, because I wasn’t buying into Island, it was just a job with a profit-share.”
Robinson soon discovered that he’d have to lend Island £1 million from Stiff’s coffers to cover the deal. “At that time I really should have said, ‘Look, you’ve sold me a bit of a pup,’ and that’s the end of it. But I stayed with it, and they had their most successful year ever. They had Frankie Goes To Hollywood, which I kind of clawed off the floor because it was falling backwards big time [this might be disputed by journalist Paul Morley, who masterminded the project, and marketeer Garry Farrow], and the Legend album, which was something I really wanted to do. That was part of the reason I went there, I’m a big Bob Marley fan. And U2. An Irish band whom I originally sent to Island in the first place. There was an opportunity. The thing about Island at the time is, they didn’t follow up. They didn’t have the money and they didn’t have the attitude. They were kind of like a flaccid major, and they didn’t promote anything. They had a big staff. They had a lot of potted plants in the place, that I got rid of pretty damned quick. So that year, we did £56 million. They’d never seen that type of money. They paid all their debts off. But in order to do that, I had to concentrate on that label big time. There was a lot of to’ing and fro’ing. It turned out Blackwell hadn’t told me lots of things. America, for example, ran entirely off the UK label. They didn’t make any money. And they didn’t pay any royalties to the UK label. Now, I had a profit-share, so as part of the profit-share, I’m looking at the financial way the company is set up, and Blackwell and his mother were all on the American deal, and no money was coming through to England. Therefore, as a sharer of the profits, I was losing quite a lot of money, cos there’s an awful lot going out to America, and no royalties being sent to the UK.” But was it also a case of someone who had been used to acting wholly off his own instincts failing to acclimatise to a completely different culture? “You’re right to a degree, I found it to be a bitter pill to swallow. Blackwell essentially doubled-crossed me. At the end of the day, it’s one of those learning curves you can do without.”
By the time Madness departed the scene to sign with Virgin, under something of a cloud, they had scored 18 Top 20 hits as well as six Top Ten albums. Stiff was left with Tracey Ulman and Kirsty MacColl (who would soon depart to Polydor) and little else. “Having had a run of singles in the Top 40, there was a time when we weren’t notching up the same success rate,” recalls Cowderoy. “Things didn’t get on playlists, things weren’t going as well, and clearly you’re not generating the kind of income that you want. And if the bad times go on too long you get into a bit of a pickle. And at that point it had been going on longer and longer, and he decided to sell half the company to Chris Blackwell. I don’t think Dave’s eye was on the ball at that point. He was very much focused on maximising the potential there.”
Robinson would re-establish full control of Stiff in 1985, piloting its return to independent status. At which time he signed the last of the ‘great’ Stiff acts, The Pogues. “Oh, Shane is phenomenal,” he recounts. “There’s no doubt that he was fantastic. But, unfortunately, I led him to Frank Murray to be his manager, which was really a bad decision. Frank was out of work and I knew his wife, and he needed something to do. And he did add musically to the band, I think getting [former Steeleye Span multi-instrumentalist] Terry Woods in was a very inspired idea. But Frank, generally, I don’t think was the right kind of person. I’d kind of forgotten he was Phil Lynott’s tour manager – and that should have spoken volumes to me. But with Shane being such a delicate little
flower – early on we were kind of controlling his drinking. He wasn’t NOT drinking, but he was doing it in a controlled way. We had a grip on it. But as soon as Frank took over, he wanted to get between the record company and the artist, like a true idiot manager. And taking Shane down to the pub was now in some way a managerial duty, and that was really fatal. That was a shame. Although ‘Fairytale Of New York’ was the height of what we did, perhaps, in the public area, there was incredible music there. Possibly it hasn’t been realised just how good he was.”
Despite significant success with The Pogues over the next 18 months, and a breakthrough with Furniture’s ‘Brilliant Mind’ that they were unable to capitalise on, the Mint Juleps’ ‘Girl To The Power Of 6’ (BUY 263) closed an illustrious era. Stiff collapsed in 1987 with debts of £1.4 million (less than the headline figure of £3.5 million that was quoted at the time according to Robinson, though others suggest the final figure was indeed close to the larger sum). The label’s masters were purchased by ZTT, one of the labels Robinson had helped establish at Island, for approximately £300,000. “It was unfortunate,” laments Cowderoy.” We tried to make things happen in a different way. But it did survive and we carried on and we had The Pogues. The ship kept sailing but in the end it sank. It ended up in the arms of Trevor Horn and Jill Sinclair. Jill was at ZTT, and obviously Dave had a relationship with them through Island, because ZTT was signed to Island. I wasn’t there at the time, but he continued to spend money. And at a certain point of time Jill just said, ‘I don’t want to spend any more money’ and they took over the company and Dave was gone.”