by Alex; Ogg
The end result was a hastily recorded session at Spaceward Studios in Cambridge – pressured not just because of recording budgets, but also the limited time they’d managed to negotiate for Donna’s ‘freedom’. The songs enjoyed excellent reviews in both incarnations. Which actually didn’t help at all, as the authorities became concerned at Boylon’s extra curricular activities. “There was this cat and mouse game with Donna turning up at Burleigh House. After an hour or so of either pure sweetness and joy or a raging slagging off, she would disappear into the night and we were then treated to a visit from the police or other government heavy, demanding to know where Donna was. This was most unwelcome.”
Undoubtedly the group who had the greatest commercial promise, however – and were not coincidentally the furthest away from rote punk – were Robert Smith’s Cure. It seemed Stennet was in no doubt about what they represented, either, as Nick Dwyer of Brighton’s Molesters, another Small Wonder band, can confirm. “Pete really didn’t like me at all. When we first met, he played us the Cure record, which was on the label, and said we could be a bit like them if we tried hard. He then said, ‘Nick, some people go far, some people dream of going far’ and fixed me with a gimlet stare. He was right about both of us as it happened.”
The Cure’s origins can be traced to Notre Dame Middle School in Crawley, a Catholic institution with liberal leanings, and later St Wilfrid’s Comprehensive. By early 1976 they’d taken the name Malice, deciding, with punk beginning to flower, that they should pursue music rather than go on to university. Robert Smith got his hair cut off after hearing ‘White Riot’ on the John Peel show. In January 1977 they changed their name to Easy Cure, after one of the first original compositions they’d written. They responded to an advert placed in the music press by German independent label Hansa (“Wanna Be A Recording Star”), and sent off a demo tape. Auditions were subsequently held at Morgan Studios in London in May and they were instantly signed – ostensibly because they looked right (Smith was not, at this stage, the singer). The Hansa deal provided an advance of £1,000, which was used to buy equipment and pay for their first studio sessions at SAV in London on 11 October and 15 November. These resulted in a mixture of originals, notably including ‘Killing An Arab’, a Smith song based on Albert Camus’s L’Etranger.
Hansa weren’t impressed however, and started advocating alternative cover versions, but the band declined. Eventually they returned to the studio in January 1978. “They made us do things like ‘Rebel Rebel’,” Smith later opined to Record Collector. “We’d learnt standards for when we were playing places like Orpington Town Hall and someone would inevitably say, ‘Play something we fucking know, you bastards!’” Hansa was still determined that they should cover rock ‘n’ roll classics and paired them with producer Trevor Vallis. And it still didn’t work out. In March the group officially severed links with Hansa after they refused to release ‘Killing An Arab’. Hence its eventual release on Small Wonder, in a one-off deal negotiated by the band’s new manager, Chris Parry. After it was greeted with ecstatic reviews, and sales in excess of 15,000 copies, Parry would reissue it in February 1979 on his newly founded Polydor-backed imprint, Fiction.
The Cravats, Redditch’s first-generation avant-garde punks, released four of the last half-dozen records on the label. The relationship began when Stennet was the lone enthusiast for their self-financed debut record ‘Gordon’, as singer Shend recalls. “We made ‘Gordon’ ourselves [using the auspices of Lyntone pressing plant], and then we sent it out to lots of people. We sent one to Rough Trade, who didn’t respond, just a load of people who didn’t respond. We probably got a nasty letter from Rough Trade. Pete rang us up and just said, ‘this is fantastic, come and visit us’. So we went down to the shop in Walthamstow. He asked, how many have you got left of the single? We’d pressed a thousand, which me mam paid £400 for. We said 500. He said, ‘We’ll take ‘em all of them off you.’ They took 500, stamped Small Wonder on them and sold them in the shop. A lot of the stamps didn’t come out properly, so it says something like ‘Small Wo… then fades. The very first time we met them, you just sat in their upstairs lounge, and they fed you and they were just so into the music. They were the people who had ‘Bela Lugosi’ and the Cure, so it was really great to join them.”
As Dallaway reflected in a 1980 interview for Sounds, “Pete’s shown great faith in us. He financed the album and everything and we’ve only got a verbal agreement with him. He knows we’d never write a blatantly commercial song, and he’d never want us to.” It did seem, indeed, that in the wayward, confusing, Dada-loving Cravats he’d found the perfect band for Small Wonder (although psychedelic art-punk confrontationalists Punishment Of Luxury probably ran them close). But then it wasn’t just Stennet, especially towards the end, as vocalist The Shend recalls. “It certainly was equal, her and him. It was very much a joint team. They just loved the music and were instantly saying, let’s sort out an album and do some more singles. There was no messing about, or we’ll send you a contract, it was just ‘let’s do it’. I can’t remember signing any contract. We’d hitch-hike down to the shop in Redditch, and Pete would tell us we had to listen to this and that, and we were ransacking his shelves, and he’d give us all this stuff, and we’d hitch-hike back and play all the latest sounds. They had such weird, eclectic singles – things from California that no way could you hear at Rough Trade or anywhere else. I personally would say that their selection of records was better at that time. And it was never ‘here’s a couple of singles, you owe us a quid’. It was that joy in sharing music. At the time Rough Trade was getting bigger and they were both dead against it – they just said, ‘Look, why do we want to be bigger? It’s perfect as it is.’ They weren’t interested in the business side. Obviously they made a living, but it was never a case of let’s grow the company and get bigger premises. I seem to remember Mari carried on, on her own. I don’t know what happened at the end, because by then we’d moved on to Crass and Glass Records.” Penny Rimbaud of Crass agrees. “I think that’s right, he didn’t want to get bigger. He just didn’t want the hassle. Pete was very laid back. I don’t think he ever wanted to expand. It was Mari who used to do most of the hard work of getting stuff out.”
For all the perceived rivalry, Geoff Travis at Rough Trade has nothing but fond memories of Stennet and Small Wonder. “Lovely Pete. He was great, he was holding down East London. Pete was fantastic. To have long hair in that time was to make a big statement about individuality! He did some great records, Pete, and it was absolutely an important shop.” So how did a label that unearthed such a remarkable number of important and adventurous bands stall? Business sense? Perhaps. As intimated above, Stennet never signed artists to long-term deals. Or at least initially: Dick Lucas of The Subhumans remembers being approached by the label in its later stages. “We really liked Small Wonder, but couldn’t afford the ‘pay no more than’ thing, due to overheads. And they had a vast, scary contract, something very alien to us.”
Certainly the label’s strong output between 1978 and 1979 had slowed to a trickle by 1981. Eventually the shop closed and was relocated as a mail order operation in Sudbury, Suffolk. Pete and Mari divorced and are no longer in contact. Mari no longer wishes to discuss her past, which is her prerogative. Stennet seems to have disappeared off the radar completely. Travis thinks he retired to “grow carrots in the country”. Penny Rimbaud of Crass believes he is a wood carver. “He called by [to Dial House] once. He brought some of his carvings along, and they were absolutely beautiful.”
Three months before Puncture appeared on Small Wonder, another London-based label released its first single, the Cortinas’ ‘Fascist Dictator’, but the contrast between the two proprietors’ backgrounds, and aspirations, could hardly have been starker. Miles Copeland III’s father was a former musician, but also one of the founding members of the CIA. He was instrumental in American post-war foreign policy in the Middle East, helping to topple the democratic prime minister of
Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, in 1953, opposing British policy over the Suez Canal crisis and aiding the rise of Saddam Hussein. His offspring, including eldest son Miles, attended the American School while he was stationed in Beirut, before enrolling at Millfield Public School after the family relocated to London.
By the 60s, his head turned by rock ‘n’ roll, Copeland Jnr had started to become involved with the music business. He went on to produce albums by Wishbone Ash and other ‘progressive’ acts, and partnered with Dick Jordan in BTM (British Talent Management), a publishing and management concern working in broadly the same genre. Their acts included Renaissance (whom Copeland produced), Climax Blues Band, Caravan and Curved Air – for whom he would locate a drumming berth for his brother, Stewart. His other brother, Ian, also started to work as a booking agent in London. “BTM was a label I did through RCA,” says Copeland. “It was their system. We were not really that independent. They gave us the money, it went through their system. We could call ourselves an independent label, but it really wasn’t. I signed what I wanted, but they had to approve it.”
By 1976 BTM had collapsed. “When I went through huge turmoil, financially or whatever, I stopped the label and stopped everything,” recalls Copeland. “BTM had no relevance whatsoever to what I did after that, it was over, finished. End of story, gone.” Tipped off by Patti Smith’s manager Jane Friedman about London’s emerging punk scene, he engaged Nick Jones, BTM’s former press officer, to investigate. He’d already befriended Malcolm McLaren, and tried to help the Pistols find venues post-Grundy. It was his suggestion that they secure gigs abroad, leading to their Dutch tour of December 1977. “I was going down to the Roxy regularly,” says Copeland. “I had an office at a place called Dryden Chambers. Above me was Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols [The Glitterbest offices]. I would read in the newspaper that they couldn’t get a gig. So I’d go upstairs and say, ‘I think I can book you.’ And Malcolm would say, sure. Then I’d go up there a couple of days later, and I’d booked the Marquee Club and I’d booked some other places. And he’d tell me basically to fuck off. Malcolm had no interest in them doing shows. For as much as he protested, saying no-one would book them, that’s exactly what he wanted. I kept going up there with bookings, and finally he started yelling at me, saying, ‘Don’t you get it? I get more publicity saying they can’t work, and you’re screwing up my whole publicity campaign, get the fuck out of my office!’ The Sex Pistols were basically Malcolm McLaren’s plaything, and it was a big publicity thing, and he didn’t even want anyone to play in the fucking band. And they got rid of the one musician and brought in a nutcase, who was committed to destroying everything in sight. It was a publicity thing, he was having fun with the media and it worked, he was brilliant. But the band used to call me up and thank me for gigs, then they couldn’t do them because Malcolm wouldn’t let it happen.”
Copeland also befriended Mark P, aka Mark Perry, the editor of punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue. “I had a girlfriend called Jill Furmanovsky. She was filming some of these gigs, and we’d go see them together. I had very little money at the time because I had gone through lots of changes in my own personal set-up. The punk rockers were all interested in anybody who cared about them, whereas the traditional bands, all they cared about were people who had a lot of money. Cos that’s what they needed! (LAUGHS). So I saw The Clash, I saw Generation X, I went to the Roxy every night to see these bands. Basically, I started acting as an agent. I booked Generation X, I booked The Sex Pistols and took them into Europe. I was one of the only people in the business who was paying attention to punk rock. Then I would make the records on the bands that we were booking, because they needed to have records out, so one thing led to another.”
“For me, I had to think of something new,” Copeland continues, “because I was no longer sitting there with tons of money and major labels backing me. It was now the fact that I could sign a group and make a record for £80, that meant I could be in the game. Where with a major act, you’re talking £100,000. The business very much divided at that point, so you could get down and dirty. Because we were a very small operation, it could work. The big companies, it made no sense to them, putting out a record that sold 4,000 copies. When I came into the business in the first place, I was not at the ground floor, I came in mid-stream, with the progressive rock movement. But the beginning of that was three or four or five years before I got to England. With Wishbone Ash, it was already the Floyd, Jethro Tull and the Doors; they were already happening bands. So that world had already matured. I was coming in, in a sense, at the tail-end of it. Whereas the punk rock thing, I was right at the beginning. I was right there, day one. I guess it started six months before I really got interested in it, at least press-wise. But nothing was really happening in terms of real shows or anyone taking it seriously other than the press having fun with it. And that was fun, it’s fun to be in at the beginning of a movement.”
Brother Stewart was similarly alive to the possibilities thrown up by the emergent punk scene, and quickly put together a trio featuring guitarist Henry Padovani, whom he’d met at The Roxy, and bass player Gordon Sumner, aka Sting, whom he remembered from a Curved Air show in Newcastle. Sting was happy to leave his under-performing jazz band Last Exit, who had refused to move to London with him. The Police were the epitome of craven punk rock opportunism; and everyone in London seemed well appraised of the fact. Stewart Copeland has subsequently talked about riding the bandwagon for all it was worth, and his credibility wasn’t helped by the existence of a February 1977 letter to the Melody Maker in which he slammed punk and pledged allegiance to Pink Floyd.
After discussions with Miles, Stewart and Sting played a series of shows as backing musicians for American ex-pat Cherry Vanilla (with The Police on the undercard). Vanilla was in the country, as was Wayne County, at the prompting of Miles, as he moved into the London club scene under the auspices of his New Orders agency – arranged through Heartbreakers manager Leee Black Childers. “Cherry was using Miles Copeland as a booking agent and Miles told her to use his brothers band’s rhythm section to save money bringing American musicians over to the UK,” remembers Howard Finkel of the Cherry Vanilla Band. “Miles put a package tour together where The Police opened the show, then Sting and Stewart backed Cherry. The Police wanted to concentrate on their career and Cherry on hers, so they parted company. Sting and Stewart really liked Louie’s (Lepore; Vanilla band guitarist) playing and asked him to leave Cherry and join the Police. Louie being Cherry’s boyfriend and musical director, he politely declined. The Police then asked Andy Summers to join, gave Padovani his papers (he was supposedly a great guy but a real basic guitarist and they had bigger fish to fry) and the rest is history.”
The Police recorded their first single in February 1977, exactly a month after their first rehearsal in January in Stewart’s squatted Mayfair flat. They may have been opportunists, but like Miles, they were quick-moving opportunists. ‘Fallout’ and ‘Nothing Achieving’, both songs written by Stewart with assistance on the latter from brother Ian, were recorded at Pathway via a loan of £150 from BTM’s Dick Jordan rather than Miles, who was reluctant to put his hand in his own pocket. The label incorporated for the task of releasing the songs, a deliberate attempt to secure a commitment from a major, was Illegal Records.
“Well, look,” explains Copeland, “my father was pretty notorious, or at least well known. When Stewart had come up with The Police, I figured, well, if he’s going to call it The Police, I should follow suit. Then we called the agency in America FBI, so we had fun with it like that. It was using the establishment as anti-establishment. That’s what we were really up to. We would call ourselves something very establishment, but it’s always the double-entendre. It’s like when your house is being broken into and you’re being attacked, boy, you sure want the police there. Other times, they’re the pigs, the things you rebel against. So we’ve always had a double standard, depending on what your predicament happens to be at any given momen
t. It’s the yin and yang of life. The CIA is really there to warn off the dangers to the country, same as MI5. But then they get up to some skulduggery that they shouldn’t, or whatever. The other thing, of course, is that it caused notice. I just started my label in America now, and I finally decided after many years of avoiding it, that I would call the label Copeland International Arts – or CIA. And the funny thing is, everyone loves it, just because of that. They think it’s amusing. Illegal was a pure independent set-up where I literally got the tapes, went to the factory, got the master made, took that to the factory, got the records pressed, got the labels to the factory, got the sleeves to the factory. If I didn’t get the sleeves there in time, I’d bag the records myself, and then I’d drive to the record store myself and sell the records. So that was literally as independent as you get.”
His management interests grew to include Squeeze, a Deptford band whom RCA had dropped at the start of 1976 without releasing any material. Though Glenn Tilbrook would reiterate to the NME that Squeeze ‘never wanted to be associated with punk’, to many it seemed otherwise, and in Copeland’s case he thought he’d ‘found the Beatles’. Copeland scooped both the band and their unreleased recordings, but his initial plan was to interest a major label. When the search proved fruitless, he scheduled ‘Take Me I’m Yours’ as a release on BTM in January 1977. But then he reflected that neither the recording nor the imprint were suitable in the current punk climate. When the majors again failed to respond to the mail-out of two separate cassettes, featuring no less than 28 songs, it led to the foundation of Deptford Fun City. The label name masked his involvement in the release and gave it the appearance of being one of the new breed of cottage industry independent singles. The ‘Packet Of Three’ EP was released in July 1977, the selections drawn from a five-song session produced by John Cale at Pathway a month previously. Cale was an old associate of Copeland, having sought his help in attempting to get the Velvet Underground demo tapes released more than a decade previously (Copeland would also help him book his April ’77 tour). Later, Jools Holland would scribble ‘I Am A Cunt’ in marker pen on the inebriated Cale’s forehead after Copeland brought him in to ‘punk up’ Squeeze’s debut album. The EP attracted vociferously supportive reviews, including two single of the week accolades. The success was such that Copeland began to rethink his original plan – of using the singles simply as a platform to secure his charges a berth on a major. Which is exactly what happened when A&M stepped in to sign Squeeze and quickly turned them into chart regulars.