by Alex; Ogg
Between the trickle and the flood of independent releases, Travis found that “If you had something good, you could really sell a lot of records quickly. There was initially a sense of anticipation and excitement in the early days. Because there weren’t so many records, a remarkable number of records were sold that weren’t actually that good. But you were kind of caught up in this wave of wanting to hear everything. I don’t want to be unkind, but things like Chelsea’s ‘Right To Work’, and things that obviously weren’t in the same league as ‘Spiral Scratch’. But it was interesting, there was a moment, I don’t know how long it lasted, when everyone wanted to hear everything and have everything.”
The shop also became a focus for related activities, selling fanzines and periodicals following Rock On’s example. The reading stock included Adrian Thrills’ 48 Thrills, Jon Savage’s London’s Outrage, Scotland’s Ripped And Torn and Shane MacGowan’s one-off Bondage, as well as the better established Sniffin’ Glue. From its sixth edition onwards, until it moved to Miles Copeland’s Dryden Chambers base, Rough Trade provided the latter with ‘office space’. ‘Glue photographer Harry Murlowski had negotiated a deal with Stuart Joseph, another in a long line of Rough Trade ‘staff’, to use the back store room as its editorial base.
Rough Trade eventually moved from simply being a vendor of records to playing the pivotal role in bringing them into existence. Yet it happened largely without forethought. “It wasn’t in our minds,” insists Travis. “It wasn’t like, OK, we’ll do this distribution thing and see how it goes. Honestly, we were so busy every day. Packing boxes, selling records, having fun, playing music really loud, meeting loads of people, just really fantastic to be alive. It wasn’t like I was hatching a master plan.” In fact, it was Richard Scott who was behind the ‘first’ Rough Trade vinyl release. “The first record actually put out by Rough Trade was Tappa Zukie’s Man Ah Warrior on the Mer label, through Lenny Kaye and Patti Smith.” he states. “I put that one out.” However, the first record to be given a Rough Trade catalogue number would come from French proto-punks Metal Urbain.
Formed in Paris in 1977 in response to what was happening in London, Metal Urbain married elements of Krautrock and primal Stooges with screamed vocals and overdriven, effects-heavy guitar, plus Eric Debris’s synthesized percussion. ‘Paris Maquis’ sounded unlike anything else ever released at that time or arguably since. “Peel started playing the first Metal Urbain single, ‘Lady Coca-Cola’ and ‘Panic’,” remembers Travis, “and we really liked it. So we tracked them down and bought some copies. We ordered about fifty, sold them, and then ordered another hundred. Then they came over and came into the shop. ‘Hello, we’re Metal Urbain.’ ‘Nice to meet you, we love your record.’ They said, ‘Listen, we’ve recorded two tracks, we don’t know what to do, could you help?’ ‘You know what, we probably can help.’ So as they say, necessity is the mother of invention.” How much had he learned about the mechanics of releasing a record? “I think I was already learning about it. It was kind of in the air. And the fact that Chiswick had done it and that Stiff were doing it was a factor. They’re doing it, we know them, they’re just human beings, why can’t we do it? It definitely gave us confidence.” Metal Urbain would never appear on Rough Trade again, however, after a staff meeting at the label blanked their choice of pornographic cover for a follow-up single.
Rough Trade issued exactly twelve singles through the course of 1978. Following the distribution model, artists were allowed a 50-50 profit split, after manufacture, distribution and promotion had taken place. Importantly, artists would, in general terms, retain the rights to their masters rather than the label owning them in posterity. This was not only a revolution in terms of a standard music industry contract, but also rare in terms of the way most of the larger independents operated. “I drafted the 50-50 contract,” says Richard Scott. “It’s actually just two sentences, and I still think it holds together.”
Travis was very aware of the history of independent music from his travels in America. “I knew that really, every great label was at one time independent. Pretty much so. I also knew the flip of that. Actually, independent labels have got a pretty bad reputation in terms of having mavericks who didn’t pay their royalties and treated their artists with disdain. All those kinds of things. So we were trying to take the best of what independents did without the bad parts.” It was an immediately successful template for both parties. Bands were allowed to release material at their own pace rather than under the auspices of a major label with a schedule. It succeeded, initially, because the market for independent singles was at an all-time high – with sales of over 10,000 commonplace for the more successful releases.
The immediate follow-up to Metal Urbain saw Richard Scott turn to his beloved reggae via Augustus Pablo (offered to them when his friend walked in off the street with a tape that was taken straight to a cutting room), preceding the Burroughs’ inspired experimental cut-ups of Sheffield’s Cabaret Voltaire. The most conventional punk band ever to settle on Rough Trade’s roster, Belfast’s Stiff Little Fingers, saw huge success with both the self-released ‘Alternative Ulster’ and ‘Suspect Device’, as they were embraced – with hindsight perhaps naively – as the authentic soundtrack to the UK’s fraught ongoing relationship with the province. The Monochrome Set could hardly have provided much more in the way of contrast to Jake Burns’ impassioned growl, with singer Bid’s perverse, arch lyricism gliding nonchalantly over hook-laden, 60s-infused art rock, one eyebrow seemingly permanently raised.
Vic Godard’s Subway Sect were veterans of the first wave of punk. Their lack of careerism (the title of their definitive single ‘Ambition’, containing the world-weary lines ‘I hope no-one notices the sleep on me’, was marvellously disingenuous) and suspicion of the invitation to be beholden to a musical straitjacket made them perfect candidates for Rough Trade. Others in that first batch of 7-inch singles included the pioneering (and then defunct) Cleveland hell-raisers the Electric Eels, Swiss art-punks Kleenex and Swell Maps – whose debut single on their own label from December 1977 was eventually re-housed in Rough Trade attire. File Under Pop featured Simon Leonard dicing field recordings taken from Heathrow Airport. Rough Trade’s first dozen releases, ultimately, could hardly be said to have any defining characteristic beyond the budgetary constraints their productions revealed.
The hand in glove marriage of shop and label, as Travis intimates, worked perfectly to this juncture. The retail side benefited from the renown the label afforded it, though knuckles were firmly rapped by industry watchdogs over bootleg sales. “The record company was upstairs from the store,” remembers Barbara Gogan, “and I remember for a couple of days there was this car sat across the street with two men sitting in it. We were joking about how it was probably spies from major labels listening in to our conversations. Turns out, that wasn’t far from the truth. One evening, after the record company employees had left for the day, the store got raided by these music business cops (BMR, or BMRB in those days). They busted Travis and co for bootlegging, and the men had actually been listening to conversations within the office with this highly sensitive microphone trained on us from inside the car.” Richard Scott also recalls a minor incident over pre-release Stranglers’ records. “We had real problems with them. The Stranglers management had given us promos to sell prior to release; kind of for kudos. That was another very common practice then. But there were problems when it came to light.”
In 1979 Rough Trade was featured on The South Bank Show, presented by Melvyn Bragg and narrated by Simon Frith. Footage included The Raincoats recording ‘Fairytale In A Supermarket’ in Spaceward’s cramped studio. Mayo Thompson was at the controls. A Texan born in 1944, he would make a crucial impact on the Rough Trade ‘sound’ by, to an extent, not shaping, perfecting or normalising such musicians (the trebly guitar sound on ‘Fairytale’, it has to be said, remains bracing at even two decades’ distance). A former studio assistant to Robert Rauschenberg at the Art
& Language collective in America and a founder member of Red Crayola, he came to the UK and fell in with Jake Riviera’s Radar Records. Radar released a single, ‘Wives In Orbit’, in 1978, as well as reissuing two of the band’s LPs. After reading about Rough Trade in the NME he made a pilgrimage there to try to offload surplus copies of Corrected Slogans (a collaboration with the Art & Language collective originally issued in 1976). Travis took twenty-five and a bond was formed – Thompson’s counter-cultural credentials and instincts providing a perfect foil.
Their initial joint production was of the Monochrome Set’s debut single, though it was not all that it could be, according to the band’s main songwriter, Bid. For a start, ‘He’s Frank’ was listed as the a-side on the label, while the sleeve gave ‘Alphaville’ that status. “’Alphaville’ was meant to be the b-side,” admits Bid. “They just cocked it up.” Travis’s co-production credit was, at this stage “like an Andy Warhol thing,” thinks Bid. “I hated that single. I really hated the production. It was pretty much the way we were playing, but I didn’t like Mayo’s arrangement of it. A very nice bloke, but not easy to work with.” Thompson would later invoke a new incarnation of Red Krayola featuring a Rough Trade house band – including Gina Birch of the Raincoats, Lora Logic of Essential Logic and shop worker Epic Soundtracks.
Rough Trade were “completely incompetent but huge fun,” Bid continues. “Everyone was really nice, apart from one person. [Memories were] the traffic of bands between New York and London. The incredible help you got from Rough Trade when you were playing live. The amount of work they used to put into it – and yet it was incredibly inefficient. It was like a whole bunch of students working on something and nobody knew what they were doing. And the 50-50 contracts they signed with bands that lost them an enormous amount of money [an assertion that Richard Scott disputes]. It was just great, but you had the feeling that this was a launching pad only, sadly. And Geoff may well deny this, but I remember it wasn’t certain that they could afford to pay for us to record an album.” Travis concedes that this may well have been the case.
Mayo Thompson’s second major production for Rough Trade was entirely more successful. He was at the helm of Stiff Little Fingers’ debut album Inflammable Material, the jewel in the crown of orthodox punk’s second wave. A Clash-inspired punk band with more than a hint of classic old time rock ‘n’ roll if you scratched the surface, SLF ended up on Rough Trade when they were first courted, then spurned, by Island Records, via the direct intervention of Chris Blackwell. Following the success of ‘Suspect Device’, their debut, they’d given up their jobs and moved to England in the expectation of a deal, and recorded demos in London with Ed Hollis of the Hot Rods. In crisis, it would be to Rough Trade SLF turned, penning a song of the same name on the album, chiding Island for their negligence. “We’re gonna do it our way,” ran Jake Burns’ lyric, “We’re gonna make it on our own/Because we’ve found people to trust/People who put music first”. There’s no more acute, or at least literal, example of an artist drawing comparisons between the old and new orders. Inflammable Material would reach number 14 in the UK album charts in 1979. On the day of release a fleet of three taxis pulled up outside Rough Trade, from the NME, Sounds and Melody Maker respectively, to buy the record – Rough Trade simply didn’t believe in the concept of ‘promo’ copies.
Both The Monochrome and Stiff Little Fingers were ultimately lured away to major deals – The Monochrome Set to Virgin subsidiary DinDisc, Stiff Little Fingers to Chrysalis. “Dave Fudger was a friend,” Bid explains, “a journalist at the time, and he was the A&R man at Virgin. I think we may well have ended up recording an album for Rough Trade, but I do think it was inevitable that we would have left at some point.” This would prove a recurring situation not only for Rough Trade but for several independents, as bands chose to ‘graduate’ by signing with previously mistrusted majors. In most cases, of course, it ended in disaster. In Rough Trade’s case, what ‘their’ bands did beyond agreed projects was up to them. Indeed, some, such as Seymour Stein, openly acknowledge that Rough Trade were “like an A&R team working for me in the UK. They were so brilliant. They still are, they’re still the same kind of fans that they were back then.”
Travis views the departures quite differently. “The Monochrome Set were great in those days. The credo in those days was, we don’t make a Rough Trade record unless we love them. It doesn’t come out. If we’d have made it, and we didn’t like them, it wouldn’t come out. Those three singles are excellent.” Did the departures hurt? “Not The Monochrome Set,” he says. “To be really honest, I don’t know how much we believed in them. Maybe we thought we’d got the best of them. It wasn’t an emotional upset when they left. It was with Stiff Little Fingers, because that seemed stupid.” Richard Scott is able to throw some light on their departure. “I still remember that meeting. They asked to meet us, and Jake Burns is a nice man, but what they wanted was for us to put a series of ads in the music press. And we said if we did that, it would destroy their market. But we were right, I think. That was what the argument was about.”
Even so, Travis concedes that at that time, things were still conducted on a project by project, if not day by day, basis. “You know what? It took us quite a long time to think about the future. We weren’t at all concerned about, or worrying about, when the Subway Sect album was coming. Perhaps we just weren’t being ambitious enough. We should have said to Augustus Pablo, this is great, why don’t we do an album? Maybe he would have said yes. [Richard Scott contends that the Pablo trail went cold when his ‘fixer’ returned to New York and died] But we weren’t thinking like that. We were just living in the frenzy of each day. It was so busy. We weren’t thinking ahead at all – thinking about building an empire, or thinking about building a catalogue. We didn’t have any knowledge of that kind of thing. We were very much living in the moment. We weren’t thinking about the future at all, or missed opportunities. We were thinking – it’s really exciting to do this now. We didn’t even think about tomorrow. With the Buzzcocks EP, it didn’t occur to me. Perhaps it should have done. We probably should have gone up to Richard [Boon] and said, ‘Know what, we can probably raise ten grand, let’s do an album with Buzzcocks’, and that would have done it. I suppose it wasn’t really until Rob Gretton said to Tony Wilson, ‘No, let’s not sign to EMI, let’s make this Joy Division album ourselves.’ That was an amazing moment that sparked the possibility of carrying on and going forward and being more – not more serious – but responsible for a band’s life than just doing a record. Those were the important moments. And obviously doing our first album was part of that, with Stiff Little Fingers. I find it quite hard to think about the future even now.”
The themes on Rough Trade’s 1979 output and beyond shared several concepts. Many were concerned with the politics of the personal, particularly compromise. ‘We Are All Prostitutes’ by The Pop Group, which Melody Maker’s Chris Bohn accurately described as ‘intense and disturbing’, was one example. ‘Nobody’s Scared’ by Subway Sect used specifically the same angst-driven vernacular in an altogether different musical setting. Body space and physical geography were frequently referenced (The Delta Five’s deceptively clever ‘Mind Your Own Business’ and Kleenex’s ‘You’). It was as if the tenets of political struggle were a ‘given’. As though the dialogue had moved on. Beyond Stiff Little Fingers, slogans were disavowed at Rough Trade as simplistic and inflexible. The hinterland of the independent boom comprised a husk of punk bands who stayed welded to both a sonic (speeded up R&B) and philosophical (statements about immediate desires and impulses alongside blanket denunciations of authority) template. Others would suggest, though it’s possible to consider their arguments wishful thinking, that the bands under discussion were core to punk, and a hiving off of the more progressive elements within the movement into something separate unfairly ignores the historical connections at play. There’s also the small point that bands who attempted to make the most progressive, intelli
gent and searching music didn’t necessarily make the best records.
Subway Sect are a prime example of the creative confusion. They would not have existed without punk, and their appearance on the White Riot tour was, for some, arguably more transforming than that of The Clash. Certainly Vic Godard became a figurehead to bands such as Orange Juice, Josef K and The Fire Engines, as well as the soon to emerge Cherry Red roster almost en masse. While Godard has stated he felt ‘out of step’ with punk, he would extend that to being out of step with ‘everything’. His statement, ‘We oppose all rock ‘n’ roll’ (as expressed on the rear cover of ‘Ambition’), would become a credo for many who followed in his wake. But denying the connection is tantamount to disowning one’s parents. They may embarrass you, but you remain the fruit of their loins. ‘We Oppose All Rock ‘n’ Roll’ was actually a complete song written in 1976 at the height of punk, though never released at the time due to manager Bernie Rhodes’ self-serving, erratic behaviour. As Pete Silverton wrote in his review for Sounds, the statement offered “a plain lack of gratitude. Their mothers should have taught them better manners.” He still made ‘Ambition’ his single of the week, though.