Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  The Smiths signed with Rough Trade in July 1983, telling the press the decision “represents a conscious decision of preference” against the majors, one of whom had reportedly offered a six-figure cash advance. Later, Morrissey would confirm the reasons for their choice in interviews with his rapidly gathering press entourage. He told Dave McCullough of Sounds “what we want to achieve CAN be achieved on Rough Trade” and Frank Worrall of Melody Maker that “In the world of indies, Rough Trade are a major. We like Rough Trade and the people and they like us – that has to be the most important thing. And if people want to buy the records, Rough Trade will supply them.” He elaborated on that prosaic description of their relationship in Deadbeat fanzine, back in the days when he still answered fanzine postal interviews: “We will stay with Rough Trade as long as things work. My overall loyalty is to myself, to The Smiths, and I protect Smith-interests regardless of cost or consequence.”

  But if The Smiths marked a new dawn for Rough Trade Records commercially, it also deepened the fissures that had opened up within the company. From this point Richard Scott’s views become progressively more jaundiced. “Rough Trade, if it had been a better label, then things might have turned out differently. In the end it tried to emulate bits of Factory and 4AD and never quite succeeded. I think that there is an imbalance in people’s view about what happened at Rough Trade. If you talk to people at Rough Trade, there is a strong view that Geoff used people. And that the Marxist backbone disappeared quite quickly when Geoff tried to move the label into central ground, with first Scritti Politti then The Smiths. Then the politics all became slightly confused. There were a lot of people doing a lot of things [at Rough Trade; which by 1982 had expanded from eight to 40 staff covering a booking agency, distribution, licensing and promotion] and I slightly resent the fact that Geoff puts himself forward as being the sole mover. There were an awful lot of people there. My only interest in trying to put the record straight is to try to recognise that fact. I have the view that Geoff built his position on the back of an awful lot of people.”

  The Smiths stumbled over their first album (the initial tracks recorded with Troy Tate, formerly of Teardrop Explodes, were considered too rudimentary and were ditched in favour of new sessions with John Porter, who had produced their Kid Jensen session). But their breakthrough was not long delayed. Travis, meanwhile, helped them broker a deal in the US with Seymour Stein at Sire Records.

  Boon, who had been the link to Rough Trade initially, had by now arrived there to work as production manager. “The guy tied in with production was Bob Scotland, who was going to college to do botany.” Boon recalls. “He’s an academic now. I’d sent Geoff some Dislocation Dance demos, cos I couldn’t do anything with them. Several months later, he got back to me, and said could he meet them? So they went to meet Geoff, and while they had their meeting, I hung out using the phones upstairs in the booking office. Afterwards Geoff came up and said, ‘I think we’re going to do something.’

  I said, ‘Why did it take you so long? He went, ‘Oh, my office is chaos, blah blah, I could do with some help.’ ‘Well, I might be interested.’ He was about to go to America for a couple of months. He asked if I would be interested in covering his office. I said yes. Only he didn’t go in the end, and Bob was going to leave, so I moved sideways into production – organising the pressings, artwork, sleeves, labels. Juggling everything around and hoping they all arrived at the same time. It was fine for small things like Robert Wyatt, you knew what the market was. It was easy to deal with. When The Smiths began to chart it was completely a different thing – very stressful, in fact. Also, my future wife was in London, and we were getting very tired of this alternate weekend relationship commuting between Manchester and London. So it worked for me.”

  The success of The Smiths, alongside other Rough Trade distributed companies, forced another move, this time to Collier Street near King’s Cross, some distance from the group’s historical homeland. But Travis sensed ill omens in the giddy expansion plans. “When we moved to King’s Cross, distribution was downstairs, we were on the floor upstairs. The tension and split between label and distribution came when lots of people came in to be middle managers and upper managers, and they hadn’t been a part of any of those first few years. I just think they had a bad attitude. It got worse and worse, and I think there were a couple of individuals who poisoned it all and just were either jealous of the record company or didn’t treat the record company with respect, or just thought we were being irresponsible, and that ruined it all.”

  “Richard Powell was brought in to tighten things up and bring some backbone into it, which he did,” says Scott. Certainly, judged by conventional business logic, he was eminently successful in ‘growing the business’. “And if the relationships at the top of the company had been maintained, he would have given the Cartel a structure where it could have competed very healthily,” Scott continues. “When I last spoke to Geoff, we shared the view that once Rough Trade had grown beyond twelve people, all the original attitudes fell apart by default – it can’t work. Political theories about middle management don’t really apply. If you’ve got 40, 50 or 60 people working for you, you need people as go-betweens. There had to be some sort of structure. I contend that criticism of Richard for doing that is seriously misplaced. It would have worked if the ‘old hands’ hadn’t stopped talking to each other. Geoff just became extremely difficult to deal with. He had an arrogance and a way with words that made him harder and harder to deal with. When it gets into that situation, people just become more extreme. Once you’ve started something, it becomes incredibly difficult to change the structure. The structure that we started out with wasn’t capable of dealing with the scale of what it became.”

  Travis wasn’t the only one who was unhappy. Often cited as one reason for The Fall’s departure was Mark E Smith’s growing displeasure at the attention lavished on a competing Mancunian band. Clearly one brusque, petulant Mancunian polymath is enough for any label at a time, though Travis maintains good relations with both to this day. “Morrissey, as we know, moans about everything,” Travis recalls. “He was always – ‘we were never on the radio’. They were on the radio. We actually won an award one year for best marketing campaign. It was very important that we did that properly. The Smiths obviously took Rough Trade to lots of new places, but we also took them there. I think it was a good relationship. Mark and I get on fine, too, I’ve got a great deal of respect for him. He’s actually been very restrained in the things he’s said about us. I think he knows we made a lot of good records together. Also, I produced Grotesque on my own, and that brings you close, when you do real work with someone.” (The latter album recently topped a Mojo interactive poll on Rough Trade’s greatest releases; The Smiths and Young Marble Giants filling out the podium)

  Other highlights of Rough Trade’s contemporaneous roster included The Go-Betweens, featuring Queensland songwriters Grant McLennan and Robert Forster. But they served as an example of how, even at the nation’s most highly respected indie, relations were not always cordial. So suggests the man who first nurtured them, Keith Glass, who was also responsible for bringing The Birthday Party to the UK. “A small advance for the first album went totally to the band, to get to the UK, and then no statements – no money. Had me thinking it had sold really poorly. I later found Rough Trade contracted with the band for a second album, protecting the deal by holding on to any further royalties from the first. And, of course, the snivelling shits went along with it. So in effect I paid for some of the production of album number two without sharing in rights or receiving any further payment for my considerable investment. To compound the problem, Rough Trade then sold many copies of the first Go-Betweens album back to another Aussie label. For a supposed co-op company, Rough Trade lived up to their name. Geoff Travis may be exonerated being the artistic director and above such dealings, but Pete Walmsley is in the Dick Cheney category as far as I am concerned.”

  But while disputes
– real or imagined – are inevitable in a franchise the size that Rough Trade had become, they are relatively rare. Asked to remember his time at Rough Trade, The Band Of Holy Joy’s Johny Brown, usually such an effervescent observer, is stuck for words. “I love Geoff – ultimate admiration for him. He was immense towards – with – The Band Of Holy Joy. He’s tireless, and still very much on the button. Sorry, I’ve nothing more perceptive to say – I’m unashamedly partisan.” Several other artists provided similar testimony. Others, notably within the distribution network and the Cartel, have a different take. Notably that he was invariably artist-focused at the expense of some of his colleagues.

  If Travis’s shifting of Rough Trade’s agenda to promote The Smiths to the mainstream caused ripples, his next move was more contentious still. In 1983 Travis was approached by Mike Alway, head of A&R at Cherry Red Records. Alway’s relationship with the label’s founder Iain McNay had begun to strain. “[Mike] came to see me one day,” Travis recalls. “He said, ‘Iain’s driving me mad, he’s not giving me any money, and I hate it. He’s not appreciating me.’ I said, ‘What’s the problem? What can I do to help, Mike?’ He said, ‘I want to start a label.’ ‘That sounds exciting. What do you want to do? I like what you do, let’s do it, we’re friends.’ He said, ‘OK, let’s go to a major and start a label.’ I was completely astounded, because I thought he meant starting an independent label. But then I thought, well, this is Mike’s thing really, so if he wants to do that, we’ll do that. So we went to see Rob Dickins, and five minutes later we had a label of our own.”

  Travis’s connection to Dickins was well established. Back when he and Richard Scott had first mooted the idea of starting a publishing company, they’d consulted Dickins, then managing director of Warner Music Brothers Publishing House, for advice. Travis and Dickins had much in common – both huge Tim Buckley fans, Dickins was of a similar age, and had studied politics and sociology at university. Later, Travis had considered Dickins a safe pair of hands when he reluctantly let Aztec Camera go. By 1983 Dickins had become the head of WEA in the UK aged only 32. He made his intention to revive the flagging British arm of the major clear, and part of his strategy would be to ‘get Travis’. He did so, but not before Travis had cautiously studied his options in relation to other potential suitors, including A&M, London and MCA. In the final analysis, Dickins was prepared to go a little bit further – in terms of the bottom line – to secure the deal.

  Travis introduced the increasingly frustrated Alway to Dickins, who liked the idea of the label. The third party to be involved, at Alway’s insistence, was Michel Duval of Belgium’s Les Disques Du Crépuscule. Not least because Alway was desperate to commission Crépuscule art director Benoît Hennebert. The principals were christened ‘The Gang Of Three’ in the NME. Titled Blanco y Negro, the label enjoyed immediate success with Everything But The Girl’s Eden, poached from Cherry Red. A glorious future awaited. But for Alway at least, his dream grew weeds very quickly. The outcome of all this is discussed elsewhere (Chapter Ten), but for Travis’s purposes, it had the effect of alienating him from his own company. Former friends judged this an embrace too close with the enemy, and the perceived concomitant rewards offered were the subject of envy. “When I found out what Geoff asked to be paid when he started Blanco,” says Scott, “I was profoundly shocked. I could not believe I’d been so naive. It caused huge ructions at Rough Trade, because up till that point nobody had been allowed to do anything outside.”

  Blanco was undeniably a step down from the lofty idealism of old. But as Travis counters, “My attitude was it kept me sane and alive in a period when I might well have gone under.” Additionally, both Scritti Politti and Aztec Camera had told him that, had the option of a Blanco y Negro style interface been available, they wouldn’t have signed to their respective majors directly.

  Blanco, in theory, had plenty to recommend it. It would prevent any talent drain of artists who had achieved as much as they thought they could with an independent. It would also mean Rough Trade not having to bet the farm on a single act, while allowing Travis the opportunity to work alongside artists as they grew. Conversely, the concession that artists ‘needed’ to graduate to a major label was in many ways insidious, and could equally be said to have helped double-glaze the indie-major ‘glass ceiling’ – an implicit abandonment of the ‘anything is possible’ DIY dream. Mute had already proved (Yazoo’s You And Me Both sat atop the UK album charts as the Blanco plan formulated) that they could facilitate mainstream pop hits while maintaining a relationship with its artists. Yet Mute, via Daniel Miller, was an auteur label, Rough Trade a collective. To a large extent Travis’s decision was predicated on the fact that Blanco would allow him to develop repertoire in a well-resourced environment where his decisions were not subject to committee.

  “We sold millions of records with Everything But The Girl and Catatonia and Jesus & Mary Chain,” Travis says now of Blanco, which lasted for more than two decades. “It was a very successful label for Warners. Honestly, in terms of a label attached to a major, it was a big, big success. It was renewed about five times. You don’t get that unless you’re being successful.” Travis’s other subsequent flirtations with the majors, sometimes overlooked in comparison to Blanco, include the short-lived mid-80s Chrysalis subsidiaries Big Star (run with Pete Lawton) and Blue Guitar (with Mayo Thompson).

  One band who ended up on Rough Trade’s books as a result of the Blanco situation were Microdisney, whose gentle tuneage contrasted starkly with singer Cathal Coughlan’s caustic lyrics. They had come to the label through Garreth Ryan and also, more circuitously, Alway. “I first met Garreth in Dublin in 1981 or thereabouts,” notes Coughlan. “His then-intimidating appearance belied a refined and generous disposition, but did accurately indicate that here was someone who had no truck with any kind of orthodoxy in musical culture.” Ryan was one of so many lost souls who washed up at Rough Trade, in this case, staffing the distribution department. “Myself and Sean [O’Hagan] kept plugging away with various versions of Microdisney in Cork. Sean and Dave [Clifford; Vox magazine] used to take periodic trips to London, and would usually see Garreth, so when he decided to start Kabuki [Ryan’s own Rough Trade-distributed label], he asked us for a record, which we were more than happy to provide.” Both their singles became John Peel favourites, leading to their relocation to London in the middle of a July 1983 heat wave. “The idea at that time was that we’d either sign to Cherry Red or to Blanco y Negro. Mike Alway had become interested in working with us, after our hassling him postally for several years.”

  Microdisney recorded an album for Blanco “very fast, but under circumstances which were probably a bit too expansive for our capabilities and for the songs. Their parent company, Warners, didn’t want it. The to-ing and fro-ing took ten months or so. Somewhere in there, Geoff Travis said that if it couldn’t be released on Blanco, Rough Trade would do it. We took him up on this when things got impossible. The whole process was a bit of a mess. Rough Trade had to buy the first album from Blanco, or be in debt for it, not sure which. I don’t recall getting any cash advances at that time, maybe a few hundred quid for some equipment, but we signed a small publishing deal which at least kept real starvation away, after the first horrible half-year was over. Still wasn’t the penurious but fertile bohemia of popular perception, however, for us. When you’re skint, you can think about money way too much.”

  “Rough Trade was still in Blenheim Crescent as the first album was set to come out,” Coughlan continues. “The move to Collier St happened just as it was released. Blenheim Crescent was obviously far more colourful, in good and bad ways – the decayed grandeur of the building, the crazy people wandering off the Grove, and the many welcoming and interesting people who worked there. Sean and I did a few stints there packing Smiths 12-inches for Richard Boon, whom I revered as ‘the New Hormones man’ and quite a major wit, and whose job appeared to consist of managing the fallout from the whims of the fellow Mancunian
whom he called ‘Sod-Misery’. And we could console ourselves that we were, after all, on the same label as Robert Wyatt.”

  Frustrations, though, were growing. “A longer-term deal was mooted, but the fact that Geoff had merely inherited us made everything feel rather tenuous and second-hand. Most of our support at Rough Trade came from the warehouse floor, we thought. If you add too much alcohol and speed to this mix, it gets tediously combustible. We didn’t keep the best of company. We still kept appearing on Peel, got a rhythm section and played shows. My various dysfunctions, my greeds, grudges and anaesthetics, didn’t help anything. I was verbally unpleasant to a few people who had tried to help us. Eventually we began speaking to Geoff directly again, and figured out how to make The Clock Comes Down The Stairs. Flawed as it is, that was our coherent statement, and not many labels could have let us do it, given its gaucheness in the context of those times. In many ways, it seems stupid that we left Rough Trade after the album, but we had such debts and tax problems that we were really too scared to contemplate anything else. You can’t argue with the kind of freedom we were given at Rough Trade, as we subsequently learned at the other end of Ladbroke Grove [when they moved on to Virgin].”

  The Smiths were also displaying growing pains. By the advent of sessions for The Queen Is Dead at the end of 1985, there was little short of open warfare between the band members, while Morrissey’s sniping at his label had become an almost obligatory act in any dealings with the press. EMI, Virgin and Warners made themselves known as potential suitors. In the event, Travis was forced to serve an injunction on them to prevent them recording for another label. As stalemate ensued, bass player Andy Rourke was temporarily suspended from the band due to his growing heroin addiction. Johnny Marr went so far as to try to burgle the master tapes from Jacobs Studios. And when The Queen Is Dead finally emerged, it contained the caustic ‘Frankly Mr Shankly’, in which Morrissey lampooned Travis and made his ‘want away’ feelings clear. “I want to leave, you will not miss me, I want to go down in musical history’. It also savagely disparaged Travis’s ‘bloody awful poetry’ following a note he had the temerity to send the Moz in verse form.