by Alex; Ogg
Blenheim Crescent became a magnet for displaced souls, notably Kick (Claude Bessy) of LA’s Slash magazine, who had fled America following Reagan’s election victory. Having once started the first American reggae fanzine, Angeleno Dread in LA, he fitted perfectly with Rough Trade’s spirit and heritage. At almost the same time Rough Trade opened its first US office, in Grant Street, San Francisco in 1980, and also set up a German label and distribution operation.
Under Allan Sturdy’s supervision, later joined by Steve Montgomery, Sue Johnson and Pete Walmsley, Rough Trade’s San Francisco operation was originally just a shop and distribution headquarters. Later, in the mid-80s it began to make its own signings (relocating to New York in 1989, after Robin Hurley had taken over in 1987). Prior to the alt-rock boom that hallmarked the catalogues of 4AD and Blast First in the late 80s, Rough Trade America provided a conduit for the Paisley Underground revival and acts such as The Rain Parade and Dream Syndicate. They also signed post-hardcore band Soul Asylum prior to their less appealing MTV/grunge incarnation, and art-pop mavericks such as Beat Happening and Camper Van Beethoven. There was also, over a sustained period, attempts to sign a quality hip hop artist, but both Run-DMC and De La Soul escaped their grasp (as had Prince, incidentally, much earlier). “They also got a demo tape from REM, which was really poor, apparently,” notes Richard Scott.
The new premises in West London, meanwhile, allowed Rough Trade to expand. Anne Clarke set up Rough Trade Music (which would be taken on by Cathi Gibson from 1981) to handle publishing and copyrights, and alongside Sue Johnson helped set up tours for Rough Trade’s expanding roster of bands. Resources were minimal, but generously shared, as Richard Williams of The Passions, notes. “We occasionally used to use the Rough Trade van to get to gigs and I remember coming down the M1 looking straight down onto the tyre and the tarmac through a huge rusty hole in the front wheel arch.” One of the first joint touring ventures featured Kleenex, The Raincoats (managed by O’Loughlin) and Spizz Energi. Hilariously, the latter band was recruited at short notice when Cabaret Voltaire’s girlfriends became unhappy at the prospect of their menfolk spending several weeks in a van with two female groups.
It’s worth dwelling on the number of women who were involved at Rough Trade, either on the shop floor or as artists. Many of the 70s indie record labels were powered by the male record collector dynamic, long before High Fidelity underscored the geek gene as being seemingly wholly male. “Feminism was just part of my growing up, and a natural thing for me,” suggests Travis. But when pressed, he will also differentiate between his own persona and that of the collector caricature. “I’m not really like that. I don’t know where my records are. Which is not a good first step for a record collector. They’re scattered, I couldn’t necessarily lay my hands on certain records. I’m not your classic anorak record collector. I don’t have that mentality. I buy records every week to keep up to date. I’d love to have some old records, but I’d never pay over the odds to own something. My job is all about listening to new things. If I get a free moment I enjoy listening to old music that I love. But I don’t collect anything. I could have – I should have kept an archive. But I haven’t really got any of my original Sex Pistols records, for instance. It would have been wise to collect them. Everyone says Mick Jones has a garage of amazing artefacts, which is quite a wise thing to do, but I don’t – I don’t have a garage! And I wouldn’t ever keep bad records.”
The balance of staffing made the environs of the shop, and partially as a result the label, more open to women. “Yes, Rough Trade encouraged women,” confirms Kate Korus of the Mo-Dettes. “I would even suspect that Geoff was one of those male women’s libbers (among whom I have several friends – Strummer was one too). We went to them because [manager] Bob Black knew him and they were flexible in their deals, willing to give us distribution without hogging all the credit or giving orders. They did put a lot of women on their books as I recall. I have to confess that we considered them very old-fashioned ‘up-the-rebels’ hippies at the time. We tried to distance ourselves from their ‘worthy’, serious image. We were all about injecting some humour and fun back into the business, at least our little corner of it, and getting away from preaching and politics. Rough Trade was all about pushing the envelope socially, often with very sombre results. With hindsight, and even at the time, it was great that they stood up for all us otherwise outsiders. ‘White Mice’ was our most successful record partly because they let us get on with it and despite our silly contempt didn’t meddle with us the way ‘real’ record companies would (and did).” As Richard Scott points out, “The best days at Rough Trade were when it was largely women – the final days at Kensington Park Road, where there were seven women and five men. On the wholesale side, there were three women and me. And those were the best times.”
The aforementioned Spizz had, in his own inimitable way and under innumerable guises, become one of Rough Trade’s bedrock artists. Engaging and boundless of energy, a veritable post-punk Tigger, he amused most everyone under the billing Spizzenergi with two Rough Trade singles, ‘Soldier Soldier’ and ‘Where’s Captain Kirk?’. “Back in 1979, after rehearsals, me and Jim [Solar; bass] would have a few beers and we had been running through one of Mark [Coalfield’s] tunes which had a very obscure lyric, except for the line ‘Oh, but it’s true – you are a nobody’s who’. So on the bus home this metamorphosed into the first two verses and choruses. I had no pen or paper, so for the entire journey I repeated those in my head until I walked in the house, wrote them down, and within a few minutes the third verse came to me. Next rehearsal, I said I had written some new words. We went through it and we thought it was so funny we played it over and over. That’s when I added the Star Trek theme tune because Jim had a Wem Copycat echo unit. We knew then that this was more catchy than ‘Soldier Soldier’.” ‘Kirk’ topped the first published Independent Chart in 1980 and didn’t budge for seven weeks. For a brief period, said chart was almost colonised by Spizz (who had five separate chart entries for his Rough Trade output under three separate names at one point). But thereafter, under his latest nom de plume, Athletico Spizz ’80, he took A&M’s shilling.
The relocation meanwhile hadn’t, on its own account, ended ongoing frictions. Travis remained primarily concerned with A&R. Richard Scott was building the group’s distribution network and wanted more professionalism. Travis’s perspective remained the long-term development of artists, while those working in distribution were plugged into a network that demanded more responsive and time-sensitive decision making. It didn’t help, either, that there the dividing lines were sometimes fudged. Travis would sign labels to Rough Trade (notably Postcard) rather than to the distribution arm. “I was away when he did it,” notes Scott, “and I was really pissed off when I got back. Postcard would have been a really good regional example. I thought it would have been much more interesting if we’d tried to keep it in Glasgow. I didn’t understand, until I twigged that Geoff saw stars there – especially Roddy Frame [of Aztec Camera].”
The situation became far more critical in 1982, when distributor Pinnacle went bankrupt (though it was re-financed three months later). Dozens of labels were affected and many went under. Rough Trade found themselves inundated with new work when they were already stretched. Scott’s solution to this was to set up the Cartel (see chapter Twelve). Travis was advised by his accountants to close the shop (and thereby keep the label afloat). But his long-term staff, Nigel House, Pete Donne and Jude Crighton, managed to avert looming redundancy by offering to buy out the shop, to the value of the stock. They did so and the doors – which at one point famously conveyed a note to the public asking them to keep faith – stayed open. Another hurdle was overcome when the shop’s Kensington Park landlords decided not to renew the shop’s lease, leading to the move to Talbot Road in July 1983.
Richard Powell came aboard after working for the GLC helping companies refinance and reorganise. “He had an MBA, and the main company he’d been
working for was a telescope company, and he’d done a good job helping them rebuild,” Scott notes. He and Will Keene, who had joined Rough Trade as an accountant after becoming disillusioned with Virgin Records and Richard Branson, made the appointment. Published character portrayals of Powell as a kind of Thatcherite bootboy are, according to Scott, far from the mark. “He used to joke about being a Stalinist,” Scott notes, “where we were a bunch of Trotskyists.”
Powell instigated root and branch reforms, redressing what Green Gartside famously ridiculed as Rough Trade’s “tyranny of structurelessness”. Rough Trade would ultimately become a Workers Trust (The Tim Niblett Trust, named in memory of the Cartel’s Nine Mile employee, who had died in a car crash). Out went the equal pay structure (£8,000 per annum for everyone, regardless of responsibilities) and in came, initially, a six-monthly profit share. 85% of the shares were given to employees; the remaining 15% split three ways between Scott, Travis and Travis’s father. There was also a committee structure set in place. “What was going on inside the company was that we were trying to split it into separate companies,” says Scott. “The sales of the record company at that time were so poor that we couldn’t.”
Certainly the dismantling of parity in terms of the all-for-one pay scheme caused some upset. “By that stage though,” reasons Scott, “the scale of the operation had reached a point where meetings weren’t four or five people sitting around the big table at the back of Kensington Park Road – it just all got more complicated. We had to move to a more structured and organised basis, it was the only way to go. The wage differential was a source of endless discussion, but in the end it was accepted.” As he further points out, in the early days, he’d proposed that the equal pay scheme was extended to artists, so that any revenue earned after costs and the 50-50 split would go back into the communal pot. “That didn’t go down very well!” he concedes.
Conventional business concepts such as upward reporting were established. Powell talked about ‘The Model’ (the means of conveying information up, down and sideways within a business) and introduced the American concept of ‘The Critical Path’. The Critical Path turned out to be a project management technique invented in the 50s for the effective deployment and arming of nuclear submarines. Rough Trade’s cherished counter-culture ethics had just slammed up against new age shite-speak mingled with clinical business logic. Rough Trade employees, to a man and woman, took the piss out of it remorselessly.
Or at least, that’s how Powell has been represented. Yet Scott maintains that “The critical path thing was just a joke! It was never meant seriously at all. But I guess if people read about it, and take it literally… Richard Powell is a seriously misunderstood and misrepresented character in this story”. To that end, Scott forwarded the following quote from Richard Buckminster Fuller ‘explaining’ the critical path model. “Conventional critical-path conceptioning is linear and self-under-informative. Only spherically expanding and contracting, spinning, polarly involuting and evoluting orbital-system feedbacks are both comprehensively and incisively informative. Spherical-orbital critical-feedback circuits are pulsative, tidal, importing and exporting. Critical-path elements are not overlapping linear modules in a plane; they are systematically interspiraling complexes of omni-interrelevant regenerative feedback circuits.”
“There,” notes Richard Scott, “I think that describes what was going on pretty well.”
Travis found developments unappealing. The antagonism between he and Richard Scott grew. Increasingly, the distribution arm of Rough Trade was starting to prove more profitable than the label. With huge hits from dance imprints Big Life (Yazz, Coldcut) and Rhythm King (S’Express and Bomb The Bass) as well as Mute (Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure), Rough Trade Distribution (RTD) was now a serious business. Travis took this opportunity to reassess and play his part in making the label’s prospects stronger too. To that end he decided to break with the company’s legacy by trying to find an artist of potential longevity who would be tied in with the company’s fortunes going forward. Had Mark E Smith not proved so implacably truculent, The Fall might have fit the bill. But then, when did they ever fit any bill.
The two likeliest candidates for a breakthrough success were Scritti Politti, who had recently adopted a post-modern contemporary soul sheen that was more appealing to the readership of Smash Hits rather than Marxism Now, and Aztec Camera, who’d thrown in their lot with Rough Trade following their move from Postcard. So desperate was Travis to have a hit with Scritti that meetings were held at Blenheim Crescent prior to the band’s August 1982 appearance on Top Of The Pops about whether it was a good idea to buy Green Gartside a new jacket for the occasion. When Scritti moved on to Virgin, Travis was right to be concerned that the vultures might be circling for Aztec Camera, too. To that end Independent Distribution Services, or IDS, to all intents and purposes a Rough Trade Distribution competitor, and a company lacking any of Travis’s egalitarian principles, was hired to try to get a decent chart return for ‘Oblivious’. It should have worked – it is doubtful if Rough Trade has ever released a more commercially ‘ripe’ single. But it stalled at number 47 and almost inevitably, the Aztecs moved on to WEA. Questioned on the switch by Alternatives To Valium fanzine, Roddy Frame was succinct. “Well, they can’t put records in the charts. They can’t do much abroad. The one good thing about them was Geoff Travis, he’s one of the best people in the music business. Apart from that they haven’t really got much going for them. I don’t see what they’ve got at Rough Trade that I haven’t got now at WEA.”
This unhappy pattern changed – at least for a while – when Andy Rourke and Johnny Marr personally dropped by to hand over a copy of a demo featuring The Smiths’ ‘Hand In Glove’ on the advice of Richard Boon. “Initially I recommended they go to Simon Edwards in distribution.” Boon recalls, “By then, Rough Trade were doing M+D deals, so they would do the manufacturing and distribution. I was just sharing the little bits of knowledge I’d acquired. That was part of the operating principle. So they went down to see Simon, who referred them to Geoff.” It was the second trip by the deposition, and they had to wait until a busy Travis could free himself from other responsibilities. But by now he’d seen the band play at the Rock Garden and grasped their potential. On the Monday following that meeting he rang Marr to inform him he’d like to press the recording up as a single and offered them a one-off deal. “It was just thought that the label’s resources might be better equipped to handle them rather than just doing manufacture and distribution,” adds Boon. Though not immediately a hit single, ‘Hand In Glove’ helped make The Smiths highly newsworthy, especially when their leader’s ability to generate contentious press copy emerged, and the majors were quick to volunteer more lucrative deals.
“I suppose it wasn’t until the Smiths,” says Travis, “that I realised, OK, this group is so good, it would be stupid to do one record. But my lessons had been taught – the two acts that taught me to think more about the future were Aztec Camera and Scritti Politti. Both of whom, I think it’s fair to say, we got on fantastically well with. We had a brilliant relationship and had a great time making records with them. It was working. When Roddy [Frame] said, ‘I’ve got an offer to do this, I think I’m going to go,’ we said, ‘Yeah, I think you should do it, because we haven’t really got the resources to do it properly.’ Green? The same thing. Green would tell you that Rough Trade was going down a musical path that he felt alienated from. Because he had ‘discovered’ black music – which I find hilarious. I knew a lot more about black music than he does, even now. But I love Green, and of course we’re working together now, which I’m really pleased about. Also, he wanted to have a pop project, and that meant expensive production, expensive videos, etc, and we couldn’t afford that. I didn’t want to be in the position where a lack of finance meant that we would be holding someone back. But then when I saw what they went on to do, I realised probably we could have done that. And it wasn’t always the fact that when pe
ople left they were meteorically successful. I think The Smiths was the first one where I realised it would be pretty foolish not to try to make this more successful. Also, we set up this structure with The Smiths where I felt there weren’t any gaps in what we were doing. We employed London’s sales team to help up have a better chart placing – not cheating or doing anything illegal – but competing on the same terms as everybody else. We were really professional. I felt really confident. We had a great plugger, we had the complete package.”
“I ran the strike force for London Records,” recalls Mike Heneghan, “which at the time was like an underground part of PolyGram. Roger Ames introduced us to Geoff. Roger had a lot of foresight – London at that time had quite a lot of the culture that the independents had – it was in a lot of ways more like an independent than a major. They were in the basement of the building. They were the underdogs, they didn’t have big budgets. Even though it was inside a major, they had a bit of an ethos. And I think what Roger saw was that there was a lot of talent in the independent world, and there must have been some way that they could work together. And so Roger introduced me to Geoff and we started talking. We started helping them. The first record we worked on was The Smiths. Geoff and a lot of other independent label heads wanted the best for the bands. They didn’t want to be falling down anywhere, such that a band would have been better off on a major. At that point, the chart was very influential, and a lot of major media was driven by the chart, getting on TV was driven by the chart. An independent label could build up a strong fan base, and if they wanted to expand it, they needed to have a chart presence. In order to do that, they needed to have some structure in the organisation of the planning around the band’s availability to do the promotion, some planning around stock control. And, at the beginning, some of those elements at some labels were a bit unstructured. I’d go to Rough Trade and they’d send someone to the back room. ‘How many boxes of that 12-inch have we got left?’ And they’d send someone through and count them. It was helping with some of the organisation and planning.” The hiring of a ‘major label’ plugger caused some furrowed brows within Rough Trade, and played no small part in the formation of trade body Umbrella [see chapter 12].