by Alex; Ogg
The misery ended, if stockpiled grievances against the music industry ever could truly evaporate for Morrissey, when Smiths manager Matthew Sztumpf engineered a way out of the deal in July 1986. Had he not been able to do so, we can only imagine the venomous Smiths songs in which Travis might have been immortalised subsequently. The split was roundly greeted with dismay, coming in the same month that Stiff was forced to declare bankruptcy. “Though Rough Trade have been expecting to lose The Smiths for some time,” ran a Sounds editorial, “it will still come as a body blow on the indie scene, as it would seem to confirm that the indies cannot compete with major labels once a band passes a certain level of success.”
In the event a new contract was negotiated in which The Smiths would deliver one further album to Rough Trade before departing for EMI. The band recorded Strangeways Here We Come in Bath, wrapping the sessions in April 1987. Marr announced his intention to quit the following month, and the news was made official in August. After a superhuman tug of war, EMI had been sold a pup. Quizzed by Richard Boon in a post-break-up interview for The Catalogue in 1988, specifically about the symbolic break from independent to major, Morrissey was both taciturn and evasive. “Richard, I believe Rough Trade Japan is a lift in a small building. Is this true? Walk into any Japanese restaurant and you’ll find whale penis on the menu. They call it Takeri. And you wonder why The Smiths never went to Japan! The last situation I expected to find myself in was… a solo artist on HMV!” But then times change. A recent advert for Morrissey’s Years Of Refusal album announced: “CD, vinyl, download, strictly limited edition deluxe CD, DVD, limited edition features exclusive filmed interview …” Eyebrow raised, one fires up ‘Paint A Vulgar Picture’ on I-Tunes and sighs.
Where did The Smiths’ departure leave Rough Trade? Easterhouse [whose Ivor Perry had temporarily replaced Marr in Morrissey’s frantic attempts to keep the Smiths afloat] were probably the most avowedly political band to record for any label in the 80s, such was the intensity of their disgust at recent developments in the Labour movement. The Woodentops were briefly a compulsive live act. But no-one on the roster would have a similar impact; at least not for a decade or so.
In 1987 Travis was joined at the head of Rough Trade Records by Jeanette Lee. Formerly an adjunct member of John Lydon’s Public Image Limited, though never a musician, Lee had strong working class roots and was a seasoned veteran of the punk wars, alongside her then boyfriend Don Letts. Later she would marry Gareth Sager of The Pop Group, meaning she was well acquainted with the counter culture cologne that permeated Rough Trade. The invitation to join Travis had come, with absolutely no prior warning, through mutual friend Roger Trilling, while Lee was pregnant with her first child. She declined and concentrated on motherhood, until they met again at a friend’s birthday party and Travis repeated his offer. Eventually it was accepted, leading to a 50-50 split in the label’s ownership and A&R function that has continued successfully for over 20 years. It was immediately cemented by the successful signing of The Sundays. It should have proved another boom period for Rough Trade; but developments elsewhere precluded that when Rough Trade distribution collapsed in 1991 [see chapter 12].
Travis was devastated. Keen to do all he could to repay what he considered friends rather than business acquaintances, Travis threw the Rough Trade label into the pot. As a now separate business, he was under no compunction to do so. “In a way, I was very generous by saying, OK, I’ve moved to the label now, and now I’m on the board, and you do distribution, I won’t interfere. And I don’t expect to be interfered with. And I also invested loads of my own money in doing projects. The thing is, we were making money. We always made money. Right up until the point where the whole thing collapsed, we had the Sundays in the Top Ten, Carter [USM] in the Top Ten. We were selling records. It was a terrible, horrible two years for me, where all these characters that caused the demise of Rough Trade just ran away and disappeared. And I picked up the pieces. Fortunately people like Daniel [Miller] and the rest of the independent world were just absolutely incredible in rallying round and doing all they could to help. That’s something I’ll always be grateful for. On the other hand, I lost the catalogue of my label, and was left with absolutely nothing.” He pauses before concluding with a thoughtful, but no doubt painfully accurate summary, “Which was a bit of a shame!” At least one artist he worked with recalls that Travis retrieved his masters and handed them over directly for fear the tapes would be unfairly treated as collateral. But he couldn’t do that for everyone. He was one man, albeit with some sympathetic allies, and he was forced to endure the slow death of everything he had built in front of his eyes.
He and Jeanette Lee would soon resurrect the imprint, and continued to release music by artists including Tom Verlaine, Robert Wyatt, Ultramarine and Shelleyan Orphan. One Little Indian acquired the label and invited Travis and Lee to run it in 1993, but the relationship never gelled. The same could be said for a further incarnation of the label, Trade 2, through Island Records, which lasted just two years, working principally with Ashley Wales’ Spring Heel Jack project and Tiger. “It didn’t work out,” Travis concludes, “and they were just kind of interim things, whilst we were trying to get our focus back.” In the meantime, however, Travis and Lee had formed their own management company, clients including Pulp, Spiritualized and Bernard Butler. In 1999 they were able to buy back the Rough Trade name from One Little Indian, who had allowed the label to fall into a state of neglect under their watch.
Almost immediately, as though the very act of reclaiming its birthright was of itself rejuvenating, Travis’s A&R sensibilities proved themselves to be in rude health. With financial assistance from Sanctuary, they were able to sign New Yorkers The Strokes and saw them feted by the UK press as spearheads of the ‘new garage threat’. Within a further six months the home-grown rock ‘n’ roll scandal-engine (though it also possessed, admittedly, a stellar songwriting base) that was The Libertines had also committed to Rough Trade.
The label has grown in strength ever since, with a roster now encompassing Arcade Fire, Sufjan Stevens, Belle & Sebastian, British Sea Power and Anthony & The Johnsons. There was one further twist in the tale when Sanctuary itself collapsed. It probably came as a relief. There were awful similarities to Rough Trade Distribution in the way Sanctuary had rapidly expanded and, on the hyperbole of ‘market prospects’ as a fully floated company, had bitten off way more than it could chew. Sanctuary’s slow, inevitable decline had begun in 2000. Travis and Lee, working extremely successfully by anyone’s standards, were dragged down by the uncertainty. “We need a white knight to ride in and rescue us,” Travis would tell Dave Sinclair of The Independent in September 2006. It would take just ten months for one to gallop into view.
Since July 2007 the label has become a joint venture with old friends Beggars Banquet. It’s proved a natural fit – the mutual respect in which Martin Mills and Geoff Travis hold each other is self-evident – allowing Rough Trade to become as stable as it has been for at least two decades. “Martin has really rescued Rough Trade,” says Travis. “I think we’d have always been doing our thing. But certainly we needed a partner. And it’s great to finally find one who understands what we do. He’s a very important part of what we do now. Rough Trade is me and Jeanette. But he’s become the third part of that partnership. And Martin is more business orientated than I am, because that’s his responsibility – but he loves music. But he’s not in the least interfering. He says if you believe in it, then that’s all I need to know. It’s a bit like Arsene Wenger – my chairman believes in me! It’s nice to have that! We’ve proved we know what we’re doing. The interesting thing is, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done, it’s always what you do next. That old cliché is really true.”
Travis’s enthusiasm for what he is engaged in right now suggests he is enjoying himself as much as he was prior to the first of the ructions that hit Rough Trade in 1982. He remains, while graciously tolerant of discussing his past, f
ixated on the future. He is not shy of expressing that forward-facing mantra in words. As I am about to leave his Golborne Road premises, immediately handshakes are completed, he has logged back on to his computer. Gladly, at least behind the scenes, this is not an age-defined industry. “I don’t think so, not unless you go deaf,” he says. “Or they won’t let you in the gig any more because you’re liable to pee on the floor from infirmity.”
Chapter Six
Echoes In A Shallow Bay
Beggars Banquet and 4AD Records
The origins of Beggars Banquet can be traced to the late 60s mobile disco scene, when Martin Mills was running Giant Elf with a friend, before merging it with a competitor. “Giant Elf was a disastrous name for a mobile disco that my then partner and I started off,” admits Mills. “It was fun going around and playing at parties and so on. But it was a very unfortunate name. And some friends who were running a similar mobile disco to ours in Oxford called Beggars Banquet [from the 1968 Rolling Stones album] wanted a London base. So we kind of merged and adopted their name – because it was a lot better than our name! It was just fun. It was being involved with music at a time when I was doing work that was nothing involved with music.”
At the time Mills, a graduate in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oriel College in Oxford, was working at the Office of Population, Census and Surveys. His vigil was on reforms to abortion law. “For a long time [music] was just a hobby. When I left university I wrote to every record company asking if I could sweep the floor – and no-one answered. So I would have loved to have been involved in music, and doing a mobile disco was a way of doing something that made a bit of money and was fun.”
Eventually, he joined the staff of the Shepherd’s Bush branch of Record & Tape Exchange. “My work on the Abortion Law had finished. I wrote a government white paper, basically. I was one of the people behind the scenes. So I asked myself what I wanted to do, and I thought, let’s get a job at the Record & Tape Exchange; that sounds like fun. They paid a lot of money for four days a week.” He had the musical knowledge, but found them also very ‘picky’ about the ‘the kind of degree you had’. “And you used to have a chronometer so that you could time yourself to the split second in terms of pricing up second hand records. You needed a broad musical knowledge, but then they didn’t price according to what the record was – they priced only on quantity and condition. Every two weeks, you marked the price down, so the price dropped automatically.”
By 1974, together with partner Nick Austin, he’d set up his own record store, retaining the disco’s name, expanding on the R&T Exchange model. “The idea was to offer people a choice of new records versus second hand records at different prices. It was a great idea.” The first branch was opened at 8 Hogarth Road in Earl’s Court. “We had six stores at one point, over a period of about five years. It was funded by the success of the first one. The first three were Earl’s Court, Fulham and Ealing.”
By 1975 they’d begun promoting ‘off the wall’ concerts. Initially they managed a major coup by hosting Tangerine Dream at the Royal Albert Hall, followed by acts such as The Crusaders, Southside Johnny and Dory Previn – facilitating, they felt, a market that was being otherwise ignored on the London scene. “They had huge audiences out there that no-one was catering for,” says Mills. “It sounds incredibly middle of the road now looking back – but it wasn’t then. They were quite left field artists then.” Mike Stone, meanwhile, had now joined the Beggars retail team. “I remember the Southside Johnny & The Astbury Dukes gig,” he recalls. “Ronnie Spector actually appeared on stage, doing ‘Be My Baby’ with the Dukes. That was great. The Crusaders was also a bit of a coup – it upset a few promoters, because we weren’t known for that – and they couldn’t understand where we came from to get a band like that. I also remember the Tangerine Dream show at the Royal Albert Hall, and carrying these massive computer things in from Artic lorries, and they did this extended improvisation on the night. We got a pretty big house for that.”
Stone had joined the group after moving down to London from Leeds aged 16. “I bluffed my way into the whole business. I remember sleeping under Cleopatra’s Needle on the first night with my mate; we couldn’t find anywhere to live. I was born in Folkestone and my father was in the army, and we traveled a lot, typical army kid. Didn’t settle down, so the education suffered. I moved to London and worked for the Evening Standard doing copy chasing in the adverts department. Eventually I thought, this isn’t for me – I looked at the people in the office and didn’t want to end up with a gold watch after 40 years. I was always interested in music so I started working as a DJ with a mobile disco. When I left the Evening Standard, the manager thought I was mad. I did all kinds of things, I had a transit van and a company called Quick Van. The first day I got the van, I got it taxed at the Embankment, and coming out I smashed it straight into the railings. The whole front wing concertina’d. That was before our first job! I had to pay for the railing too! So I got into DJing and we did quite well at weddings and pubs, like the Chelsea Drugstore down the King’s Road. I did odd jobs in supermarkets, you name it. Then I was living in Hogarth Road in Earl’s Court. Walking down the road, I saw these people building a shop. It looked like it was going to be a record shop. I just walked in and said, ‘Do you need any staff?’ Martin was there, and he asked me what I did. I said I DJ, and I know a bit about music. He said he could do with someone who knew about disco music. And that’s how I wangled my way in. I think I was actually the second person that Beggars employed, after their friend Steve Webbon. I started work at Earl’s Court. Then I went over to Fulham, to North End Road, with Steve. He managed that shop. He then left that shop and I ended up managing it. We opened up a rehearsal room there, and that’s how it all started.”
Punk’s arrival was signaled to Beggars by the changing record-buying habits of their customers, so they started stocking more punk releases and promoting punk gigs. Specifically, their once album-orientated market disappeared as a younger demographic renewed interest in the 45rpm single. Beggars responded, Mills noting this period as both “a sea change” and “incredibly exciting”. “At that time, we didn’t even stock singles. Singles were Mud and Sweet, and stuff like that. And then probably around ’76, the Bizarre [aka Marc Zermati’s Skydog enterprise] van started calling on us. So we suddenly started stocking The Ramones and the first Talking Heads single, probably. And then Nick Lowe came out on Stiff. We started to apply that to our concert promoting. At the time we were promoting in places like the Albert Hall – when punk happened no-one wanted to go to those venues any more – it was completely antithetic to everything that was happening. So the fact that we were stocking the Nick Lowe and Damned singles meant we started looking at promoting shows. We did one with the Damned, Graham Parker – punk in the broader sense! We were asked if we could do a John Cale show as well. But what we were doing didn’t really work at a club level, it only worked on a theatre level – and theatres were just not what you did any more.”
The record label was founded principally at the nagging instigation of Stone. The Lurkers had been rehearsing in the Fulham shop’s basement, alongside other aspirants such as Generation X, the original Ultravox!, Dave Edmunds, Graham Parker, Nick Lowe and others. “That was the only shop with a basement,” adds Mills, “well, there was a basement in Earl’s Court, but we had a quadraphonic record centre in there for a while. No, it was all credit to Mike Stone. He convinced us to use the basement as a rehearsal room. He got involved with The Lurkers, and then he got us involved.”
Stone remembers “Ultravox! going down there with that big board with pegs in it. I asked what it was – it really was like a prehistoric synth. It was around the period that they brought out Systems Of Romance, which was the album that really influenced Gary Numan. News about the rehearsal rooms got out by word of mouth, and these people used to turn up. I remember Graham Parker rehearsing down there before a show, and he came up and asked me for a copy of ‘Hold Bac
k The Night’ by the Trammps, and they ended up covering that.”
His initial reaction to The Lurkers was lukewarm. “They turned up one day and I listened to it from outside the door. You couldn’t avoid it really! People were playing while we worked upstairs. I thought, what a bloody racket. I was brought up on early funk, Motown, The Who, Hendrix, Free. Going right back to Buddy Holly. So listening to The Lurkers – complete and utter racket. But the one thing I liked was the freshness and the energy. I thought, this is all right, actually. I just got talking to them. [Guitarist] Pete Stride was there. I asked him, ‘How are you getting on? How do you get gigs?’ He went, ‘Well, we could do with a manager, really.’ I said, ‘Can’t you find one?’ He turned round and pointed at me and said, ‘Why don’t you manage us?’ I went, ‘What? Oh, OK. I’ll have a go, I’ll ring round and get a few gigs.’ That’s how the collaboration with The Lurkers started, and also the beginning of Beggars Banquet.”
Lurkers drummer Manic Esso has a forthright view on where any credit should go: “Beggars owned a few shops and did the student record exchange thing. Having the rehearsal room downstairs at the Fulham shop brought them into contact with people wanting to play live music, but the owners Nick and Martin had no plans to get involved in any way to manage anybody, let alone start a record label. That whole thing was brought about by Mick Stone. He had his ear to the ground and knew what was going on. Remember, Mick was an old mod, having a love for fast three-minute songs, i.e. The Who etc, and the feel that goes with it, whilst Nick and Martin were from the boring brigade.”