Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  By this time, Smith had taken Bad Moon Rising to “everyone I knew”, precipitating the founding of Blast First when his entreaties were spurned; the name taken from Wyndham Lewis’s poetic ‘manifestos’ as part of the Vorticist art movement. Smith envisaged a label run along the lines of Harvest, and would sign a series of bands, including Dinosaur Jr, the Butthole Surfers and Steve Albini’s Big Black, ostensibly rooted in punk, that helped define the alt-rock generation (as risible as that term sounded then and now). “After we’d finished [Depeche Mode’s fifth studio album] Black Celebration, at the end of ‘85,” Miller remembers, “I felt it was getting quite tough keeping the label running and everything else, because Erasure were starting to go. It became quite difficult to do all the roles. Plus I’d done five albums with the band, and it was enough – we needed fresh blood and fresh input. I came out of my Depeche world, in a way. I started to think, fuck, I haven’t signed anyone for five years, I’d love to know what’s going on. I’d heard a couple of tracks, one by a band called Big Stick, and another by a band called Head Of David, both on John Peel.” Both had been Smith’s immediate post-Sonic Youth signings.

  Head Of David, indeed much beloved of Peel, were harbingers of the UK post-hardcore scene, having grown out of his long-time favourites Napalm Death. “My best night ever was when I went to see Nana Mouskouri and The Head Of David on the same night,” he told this writer in 1991. “Not on the same bill! The venues were about a couple of hundred yards apart. I actually got a headache in the Nana Mouskouri thing because I hate perfume. I hate artificial smells like that and I was sitting in an absolute cloud of cheap perfume, which to me is worse than being in a room full of cigarette smoke.

  As I say I got a blinding headache. I tried to persuade the three women sitting in front of me to come to the Head Of David gig afterwards because I’d like to get their opinion. They all shuffled away without a word, but it would have been interesting, because obviously they would have thought they’d arrived at the gates of hell, really.” Big Stick’s ‘Drag Racing’ EP, an unlikely update on the lost tradition of hot rod-themed repertoire by Jan & Dean and the Beach Boys, was among Peel’s favourite records of all time, occupying a berth in his fabled time capsule box of treasured vinyl.

  “I thought they were both [Head of David and Big Stick] amazing,” Miller continues, “and I phoned up Rough Trade and asked who put them out. They said it was Paul Smith. I’d vaguely known Paul before, because he’d done stuff for Cabaret Voltaire. I met him and said, ‘These are fantastic records, what are your plans?’ He said, ‘I really want to put these albums out by these guys, and I’m also trying to work with Sonic Youth, and I just don’t have the resources.’ So I said, ‘Why don’t we go into partnership and do it together?’ And he said yes. It was an area of music I loved, but I wasn’t as close to it in terms of my understanding as I was with electronic music. Obviously Paul was very deep into that thing, so it seemed a good way of moving forward.”

  Mute also inaugurated its own dance imprint. “A very similar thing happened with Rhythm King at almost the exact same time,” says Miller. “I’d come out of the studio and really wanted to do stuff. And I knew James Horrocks very well. He was one of the partners of Rhythm King – he used to work in the same building as me. He worked for Cherry Red, which was upstairs from Mute at the time in Kensington Garden Square. I just bumped into him on the stairs, and he was carrying a bunch of records. ‘Where are you off to?’ ‘We’re thinking of starting a label with Polydor or something.’ I said, ‘What sort of label?’ ‘It’s all this new house music coming out of Chicago.’ I said, ‘Why don’t we have a chat about it? I’d love to work with you.’ He introduced me to his partner [Martin Heath] and I just said, ‘OK, let’s go.’ So we formed Rhythm King, and both those labels, in different ways, had a lot of success early on.”

  The basis of both deals was a 50-50 partnership where Blast First and Rhythm King brought in the acts, Mute funded the venture and they jointly handled the marketing. Miller: “Rhythm King was more needy just because they were working in a very fast way, and it was a scene that was just exploding and they were right in the middle of it. And they were releasing a lot of singles and there was a lot to do. They always wanted to do so many things and I had to hold them back a bit, because we didn’t have the capacity to do that many things. Paul, I wouldn’t say he was more experienced, but he had more of an overview. And most of Paul’s bands were based in America and he spent quite a lot of time over there with them. But they both took up a lot of time, not so much necessarily from me, but certainly from everyone else in the company, from a marketing, promotion and distribution point of view.”

  Rhythm King and Blast First both started in 1986. “At that time we moved from Kensington Garden Square, which was a very small office, to 429 Harrow Road, where we were for some 20 years. Which was much, much bigger, and we re-housed Rhythm King and Blast First within that building. We also built two studios in there, and later had a warehouse. It was quite an ambitious thing. We took on a lot of space, more than we really needed. But it was very cheap at the time, in a rough area, and it wasn’t a particularly good quality building, so we just got it cheap and made it our own.” Rhythm King enjoyed spectacular success from 1988 onwards, when they hit number one with S-Express’s ‘Theme From S-Express’ and a roster that included Baby Ford, Bomb The Bass and Betty Boo, as well as the ‘rave’ subsidiary Outer Rhythm which launched the career of Leftfield (and also Moby). But thereafter the label moved to Epic. Miller: “James and Martin parted company, and James left Rhythm King after a couple of years. Martin and I decided to call it a day – we were going in slightly different directions, really. He wanted it to be a pure pop label and I wasn’t really interested in that. He was very ambitious, so I just said, why don’t we call it a day.”

  Blast First faced its own problems, especially after the opening of a US office backfired and Geffen came along to scoop up Sonic Youth. The latter told Smith in a meeting at his apartment in New York that his services – which effectively extended to that of manager as well as UK record label head – were no longer required. Smith cited tensions with, in particular, Kim Gordon. The band countered that the decision was a long time coming and Smith hadn’t been taking numerous hints. Talking to Alec Foege for his book Confusion Is Next, Smith reflected that “When the bottom line came down to it in terms of the major label thing, Kim had two things to say about it. One, I could never truly understand because I wasn’t American; and two, she felt that they were looking to get in with a major label and they wanted to have people around them who would reduce the friction. Whereas I was far more of the attitude that the major labels were there to ‘use’.”

  Unfortunately, that was only the beginning of Smith’s problems. Big Black walked over a ‘bootleg’ of Sound Of Impact that allegedly (according to Smith) originated from within the company. And the Butthole Surfers have fallen out with every label they have ever worked with. While Smith was dismayed, others considered the repercussions of the bands’ growth highly predictable. Their immediate forerunners had all taken similar options. The Replacements signed with Sire in 1985, while Husker Du also joined the Warners network a year later and R.E.M. had abandoned IRS for Warners in 1988. The precedents for successful American bands staying faithful to independents were even scarcer than for those in the UK.

  In a terse interview with former employee Liz Naylor for The Catalogue in October 1989, its cover adorned with a memorial tombstone, Smith lamented the label’s decline. “We’re kept afloat by the wonderful chimings of Erasure and Depeche Mode”. He was nothing if not open about the scale of problems, which amounted to, according to one report, falling £240,000 into the red (information he himself volunteered). “Labels like Blast First are not likely to make money,” he stated. “That’s why the whole Sonic Youth situation has become so crucial; if you invest that kind of time and effort in a band, money is the pay-off – if you don’t get the pay-off then who’s to s
ay. In the end it’s a frail existence.” Smith’s confrontational nature had earned him enemies in the press. Yet there was something disarming about his honesty. In this case, it manifested itself in open recognition of the infrequently aired suggestion that many independent labels were actually run by Thatcher’s children, entrepreneurs a little less distinct from the armies of Burton-suited yuppies than many, including they themselves, might like to think.

  Miller, too, was disappointed with Blast First’s retreat. “Yes, I was. The thing is that I think for a lot of the bands that were on Blast First – Butthole Surfers, Dinosaur Jnr, Big Black – Sonic Youth were a bit of a beacon for them. They were a bit older, I guess. I think that benefited us, definitely. Sonic Youth were the first of those American bands we worked with, and when those other bands came along, I think it was helpful that Sonic Youth were with us. I think it got to a point when Sonic Youth decided they needed to go to a bigger label in America, and that label, Geffen, weren’t prepared to do a split deal with us for the rest of the world. Big Black never went to a major but they kind of broke up, and Dinosaur Jnr went to Warners and the Buttholes went to EMI. Blast First didn’t stop there, it continued, but it was quite traumatic for Paul, I think, that it all happened so quickly. So the first phase of Blast First, unfortunately, ended there, and then nothing much happened for a while after that. But Paul’s still around, and in the end he found The Liars, who we’re still working with, and Suicide and things like that. So Blast First continued, but Paul went into semi-retirement for a while.”

  Mute, meanwhile, did indeed continue to prosper on the back of the ‘wonderful chimings’ of Depeche Mode and Erasure. In 1986 Miller had recruited Mike Heneghan of Platinum Promotions to help orchestrate the label’s greater profile. “I started working with Daniel on Depeche Mode’s ‘A Question Of Time’,” Heneghan recalls. “I worked with all sorts of independent companies, as well as majors. But a lot was with Daniel at Mute, Tony Wilson at Factory, Geoff Travis at Rough Trade, Derek Birkett at One Little Indian, Bill Drummond at KLF, a little bit with Martin Mills at Beggars Banquet, Martin Heath at Rhythm King through Daniel.” Heneghan had originally been part of the London Records strike force team brought in by Travis to help with The Smiths before going independent himself. “Most weeks I’d be at the independent labels’ marketing and planning meetings, strategising their campaigns. And I did a lot of work with major labels. So it was quite a good vantage point to see what everybody was doing. Part of it at the beginning was taking some of the learning from the major record labels, and giving some of that learning to the independent community.”

  Much of that ‘learning’ was, essentially, knowing how to plan things. “You’d say, here’s what’s happening,” says Heneghan, “and I’d talk them through week by week what would happen with releasing a record. And I’d work closely with the plugger. Scott Piering, in terms of planning when he would get the video shown, when it was on TV and radio. We’d plan all that together. Then we’d get some logic into the structure of the whole thing. Scott and Neil Ferris, who did a lot of stuff with indie companies, and Depeche and Erasure, were brilliant. Neil would just come and say, ‘we’ll go to radio here, get record of the week here, get a playlist here.’ It was more planning and clear communication. I think the contribution in structuring it was a small part. The big part was individuals who were working great music with a lot of energy and still had a great post-punk DIY ethic to the whole thing. All we were doing was really to harness that and put it into some kind of structure so they could get the best out of that. Just making sure the records were manufactured and were in the right shops at the right time. Trying to get a bit of cohesion between promotional elements like radio, TV, live and club stuff.”

  Heneghan also saw first-hand the difference in philosophy of a Mute or Rough Trade as opposed to the major labels. “In most of those visionary independent companies, oftentimes it was just one person, and that person is really obsessed with something,” he notes. “And they’ve got a really clear vision for that obsession, and they find likeminded people in bands, and the relationship is different – by the nature of them being obsessive, they want the best for the bands and artists they’re working with. So they become competitive as a result of their obsession. In a major record company the set up is completely different. Because of the structures of the organisation at a major, which is much bigger, somewhere along the line there has to be an interest in the share price. If not, then there’s a bigger company providing the funding, and the dynamic is different. And the competitiveness is more being driven by market share. With independent companies, the competitiveness was driven by the obsession of the vision.”

  He also observes that the model was more one of partnership rather than business. “If you take Daniel for example, a lot of the things he did right at the beginning, the whole industry’s coming round to thinking more in those terms now. With Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, it was a 50-50 split and no contract. And there’s still no contract – it’s been like that for more than 20 years. With Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, they don’t have a manager as such. Rachel Willis, who used to work at Mute, runs their office and takes care of organisation and works with founder member Mick Harvey to take care of the business decisions. The relationship between the label and musicians is much closer, it isn’t being filtered through management. And often the labels would do part of the job a manager would do. It’s very different from a structured organisation inside a major. Often if they’re on tour, you’ll find the visionary behind the label is out with the bands on a lot of dates. Daniel is very much like that.”

  In many ways, Mute served as an interesting paradox – the first independent label in the UK to prosper with ostensibly ‘straight’ (although that description is fantastically misleading on many a level) pop music – the preserve of the majors since time immemorial. It is probably Miller’s greatest quantifiable achievement – but one that could only, seemingly, be realised by being essentially disregarding of such trappings.

  There were also significant records released by Nitzer Ebb, Laibach and Einsturzende Neubaten, as well as the establishment of Novamute Records in 1992 as a channel for experimental electronic music and The Grey Area for reissues. They were, in further demonstration of the forward-thinking nature of Miller, also the first UK record label to establish an internet presence.

  Novamute was borne out of a wish to build on the Rhythm King experiment and maintain an interest in “that underground dance music area,” notes Miller. “There were quite a few people at Mute who were very into that scene. I was getting very excited by techno, especially the stuff coming out of Germany in the late 80s. It was just very exciting. So we decided to start Novamute, and that was all done internally by people at Mute.” The Grey Area grew out of an approach made to the label by Throbbing Gristle. “They had given up Industrial Records basically, and licensed their catalogue to a company called Fetish Records. I can’t quite remember why that deal ended, but we were quite friendly with them, and they asked us if we wanted to licence the catalogue and we said yes. And that was really our first reissue project. We started to think, this isn’t a bad thing, if anything comes up that’s interesting, we should go for it. It wasn’t a standalone label, it was part of Mute, and it didn’t have to sustain an overhead or anything, so we could just pick and choose as things came along. The Cabaret Voltaire catalogue became available and they licensed it to us. And then of course the Can catalogue, which was a big thing for Mute and me personally. Throbbing Gristle and Cabs were ultimately my generation. Whereas Can were the generation before, and were a huge influence on me. And that was an incredible opportunity and huge honour for me.”

  Like so many, Mute’s ascent had been dealt a huge blow by the Rough Trade Distribution crisis of 1991. There was also a comparatively fallow period in the mid-90s. “It was not a good time,” admits Miller. “Obviously we had Depeche Mode going strong and doing well in Europe, and Erasure were going strong and s
o was Nick Cave. It was a tough time because of Britpop, basically. I didn’t really like Britpop, and I wasn’t really interested in signing Britpop bands. We did have the Inspiral Carpets, who were kind of a precursor to Britpop, but there was something about them that was different.” The signing of the Inspirals, then the subject of intense press interest, seemed at odds with the Mute dynamic. Especially when the press trumpeted the apparent size of the deal. “It was a very competitive deal, actually,” says Miller, “and a lot of other people were after it. But it wasn’t that expensive. Most of the press around that time was about how many t-shirts they sold, the ‘Cool As Fuck’ t-shirts. In the end, they kind of fell apart. One of the interesting things about them was the fact that there was quite a big age range in the band, and musical experience and taste. The drummer was 17, and Clint the keyboard player was already in his early 30s. That’s one of the reasons I thought it worked, but it was also one of the reasons I think it fell apart. It was quite a natural parting of the ways.”

  If the Inspiral Carpets never delivered the hits some had forecast, Miller had other problems. “At that time, the whole media was dominated by Britpop and fucking Tony Blair, and it seemed like a terrible time to me. And some of our artists like Moby were struggling in the UK. And I wasn’t inspired to sign stuff. Because I didn’t hear much that I liked, and if we did sign stuff, what the fuck could we do with it? To side-track slightly, one thing we did at the time was licence The Prodigy for America. That ended up being huge for us over there, and kept us going for a bit. But it got to a point where we were in financial difficulty. It wasn’t terminal, but it was very unhealthy. And I was in a position where I was going to have to do a deal with somebody for something, like a worldwide distribution deal, so I could raise some money. I had a lot of friends in the industry who were in a position to be helpful, which they were. Like the Play It Again Sam people, who were our licensees in Benelux. They’d just sold their company, got a lot of money, and were interested in doing something with Mute. But I wasn’t feeling very comfortable with it. I’d always done things on my own terms, really. I’d been very lucky to be able to do that, but nevertheless that’s the way it was. I just felt while everybody was being helpful and very respectful, it felt like going cap in hand, and I didn’t really like that.”