Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  While Miller considered these options, the label’s luck changed. “Just as things got to their worst moment, the Moby album Play broke, a year after being out.” Indeed, Play became the ‘coffee table album’ of 2000, and would sell, internationally, over nine million copies. “That changed everything. People’s perception of Mute, especially in the UK, was – ‘Oh, Mute’s over, basically. Hasn’t done anything interesting for a few years.’ There were a few articles that weren’t very pleasant. And then Moby broke massively and became our biggest album ever. That paid off a lot of the things we needed to pay for, and I thought, this is my moment to sell the company on my own terms, from a position of strength. So I talked to Play It Again Sam and Virgin France, who had been our licensees since the early 80s. I had a very good relationship with the people there. Emmanuel De Buretel, who had run Virgin France, had become the head of continental Europe for EMI. I’d known him since the beginning. I got very close to a deal with Play It Again Sam, but in the end, I did it with him. He was in a good position to do it, he completely understood Mute. Though he was at a major, he knew how Mute operated, he knew where the skeletons were buried, how the financial dynamics worked. I thought, I’m in a really strong position, my luck has played out, and if I can get the kind of control I want? I made a list of things that I thought were deal-breakers essentially, in terms of control and autonomy, and they agreed to all of them. It wasn’t quite as simple as that, but basically they agreed to everything, and I thought OK, this sounds like a good way forward for everybody. It stabilises things. I’ve got creative freedom, obviously I have to work within budgets like you always do, but basically we were our own label still. Obviously we ended up going through all the EMI territories, which was fine.”

  On 10 May 2002, EMI acquired Mute. Miller became executive chairman. “I was trying to secure the future. The artists were all very cool about it. Everyone was amazing and really supportive. I was very nervous at the time about how the artists and staff would respond. But I think they all felt I’d made the decision based on the right criteria. I didn’t really have any backlash about it, which was amazing, and a great credit to them. Obviously, that situation has changed a lot, because the industry has changed a lot. But we still have the autonomy we need creatively, and although it’s been a very rough two years to be honest, the air is clearing now, and the new people at EMI are very supportive of Mute. And fingers crossed, I feel fairly confident about the future.” Mike Heneghan, having moved on from Platinum Promotions through 3mv to becoming the general manger of Go! Discs, became the group’s new managing director. “Daniel and I had kept in touch and been friends, and always said we’d try to work together. It was a good thing for both of us. I loved him and respected him, and respected what he’d done for the label. I understood a lot about the DNA of the company and the people – a lot of it is Daniel’s taste in music that is very particular, something that connects all of the bands, but is very different.”

  Eventually, in 2006, Mute relocated to EMI’s offices. “We were still in Harrow Road until about a year and a half ago, and then sadly the lease on that building ran out. They basically knocked it down. It was worth a lot of money then, the land, not the building, so they sold it and it’s been converted to flats and offices or whatever. We planned on having our own office after that. But EMI, how do I put it politely? They had restructured so drastically, they said in the current climate we don’t think we can justify having an external office when we have so much space in our own building. And I said, OK, fine. I wasn’t over the moon about it, but in the end it’s not about the office you work in, as long as it works as an office, it’s about the records you make. And that was still the priority. So we moved in and it’s been fine. A bit posh for us!”

  Surveying Mute’s catalogue now, it occurs that one of its strengths is that it didn’t, like others, over-commit. There is no obvious occasion when Miller used his leverage to scoop up a clutch of similar, or perhaps even complementary artists. Depeche Mode and Erasure soundalikes existed, but did so on other labels. In essence, Miller’s approach was methodical in spending time on long-term artist development – a seemingly lost tenet of A&R. “It was a function of several things,” he says. “One of those is that while I’m a music fan, obviously, I have a very small collection at home. There’s very little that I love. Even as a kid, there were only ever a few things that I liked. I think that was a lucky stroke. It was partly that, it was partly because I was very hands-on in the development of Depeche especially in the early days, in terms of recording and every other aspect. I wasn’t handing it off to anyone else. It felt like it was something I wanted to do. It wasn’t really a pro-active decision, I just simply didn’t have the time or energy to do it and there wasn’t stuff that I loved enough that I heard. I’m sure there was stuff out there, but I was at the studio and didn’t have a chance to hear it.”

  That single-minded, life in a bubble existence is one that Ivo Watts-Russell at 4AD can sympathise with. “There had to be an element of ‘everything else is shite’, he reflects. “You had to have that. There were certain people you really liked, and if they had some success you were happy for them. Daniel didn’t need the likes of me being happy for him, he had huge commercial success. There’s been less music on Mute that I personally enjoy than many of the considered ‘key’ independent labels, and yet I have more respect for Daniel and therefore Mute than I do for probably any of them – because of Daniel as a man and what he believed in.”

  “I did see other labels who had early success do the opposite of what we did, and there’s kind of a logic to say that isn’t a good idea,” Miller reflects. “Because you do get the feeling, ‘Oh, we’ve had a hit, now we know how to do it, we can have lots of hits.’ And even I felt like that at one stage. So you feel you know how to do it – but it doesn’t work like that.” Nevertheless, Mute proved that an independent record label could enjoy sustained success in the charts. Partially, one suspects, as a product of Miller’s own stubborn response to being told such a scenario was impossible. That Mute was able to have those hits while being simultaneously responsible for some of the most ambitious, challenging and commercially repellent art was the neatest trick of all.

  Chapter Eight

  The Graveyard & The Ballroom

  Rabid, Factory & Zoo

  “The area is so neglected, so economically deprived and full of massive housing complexes, that the mood of the place was right and ready for a new movement in music with a markedly different criteria of success. What has developed is peculiar to Manchester and I can only hope that instead of going to London for future deals, the agents and record companies will come here.”

  (Tosh Ryan, writing for Melody Maker on 14 May 1977, in an article entitled “New Wave Devolution: Manchester Waits For The World To Listen”)

  Manchester music and ‘independence’ have come to be synonymous with the illustrious tragi-comic adventures of Factory Records. But after New Hormones’ ‘Spiral Scratch’, the next Mancunian label to establish itself in the punk era was Tosh Ryan’s Rabid Records, later unflatteringly referenced as “the Stiff-styled funny farm of the north” in the music inkies. As Vinni Faal, manager of the label’s second act Ed Banger And The Nosebleeds would recall: “[Rabid] taught Factory everything they ever knew. They managed the top five single, the marketing scams, the situationist enigma, the unplayable records, they even managed the ignominious bankruptcy!”

  Rabid announced itself in May 1977 with Slaughter And The Dogs’ ‘Cranked Up Really High’. This was base camp for a number of personalities who would become closely associated with the city’s later artistic triumphs – notably the photographer Kevin Cummins and producer Martin ‘Zero’ Hannett. “It was a wonderful time for Slaughter,” remembers Mick Rossi. “Rabid were truly the first independent label in the north of England. It gave us the platform in which to release our first single. I liked Tosh Ryan a lot, he’s a colourful character, the only issue we had as a band wa
s that we didn’t receive a single penny from the sales of our live album or any of our releases on Rabid. We were young and naive. You live and learn, eh?”

  Ryan himself is far from happy with the way recent histories have recorded the period. “I’m fed up of seeing Malcolm McLaren wheeled out and talking about how he invented this so called phenomenon. In my experience, this thing’s happening everywhere. It was a kind of gestalt thing, happening across the country. There was a similar condition. People were organising their own gigs in back rooms of pubs, because there weren’t any venues to play at. And universities weren’t booking local bands. It really annoys me when Malcolm McLaren stands up and says I invented this. His attitude was very much that middle-class attitude. It’s happened to the arts over the centuries. Interesting things happen, and he was interesting and he did use interesting reference points in the way he plagiarised things – he might call it homage, I don’t know. But it doesn’t pay a lot of respect to what was happening right across the country. There were a lot of people who came from a boom in the 1960s, just in Manchester alone if you think about what happened with Kennedy Street Enterprises, Herman’s Hermits, Freddie & the Dreamers, hundreds of bands that were filling the top 10 worldwide in the late 50s and early 60s. All of those people were consigned to the rubbish bin when the collapse happened at the start of the 70s. It was those people who kept something going for another generation.”

  Essentially, Rabid Records was borne out of Music Force, an organisation Ryan, a then performing musician, was a part of. “In a loose political sense, it was a co-operative for musicians. It didn’t have hard-line co-operative rules, so it was more like a collective.” I asked him if there were similarities to the local Manchester Musicians Collective. “Not at all,” he sneers. “This was run by musicians, not half-wits! The Manchester Music Collective was very much a middle class organisation which was more concerned with the ethics of the arts rather than what we were trying to do. Music Force was convened initially as a political organisation. It had the intention of breaking monopolies. It was there to promote self-management and self-interests, and cut back on the monopoly of the major music industries and also music promoters. It ran as an agency and a self-managing organisation and supplied PA systems and transport and set up gigs. It functioned at every level on what was essentially needed at that time.”

  “At the risk of getting papered into a cavity in Tosh Ryan’s house,” points out City Fun editor Cath Carroll, “I have to disagree that the Musicians’ Collective was run by half-wits – they just had a different philosophy to Rabid.” The MMC, a kind of musical outreach project for the North West Arts Association, had been convened by Dick Witts, later of the Passage, and Trevor Wishart. Further assistance came from Tony Friel (The Fall; whose first gig came at the MMC’s behest), Frank Ewart (The Manchester Mekon) and ‘press officer’ Louise Alderman (also a Mekon and member of Property Of… alongside Carroll). “Despite all the new ‘new wave’ kids who got on board,” Carroll continues, “the Collective was still a bit jazz-hippyish. They were certainly not as businesslike as the Rabid crew and perhaps their openness to any expression of a creative idea was a little generous. But they opened doors for a lot of young musicians who may not have been booked in a more traditional setting. You didn’t have to be on [associated label] Object Music to be part of the MMC. And in putting out Grow Up’s The Best Thing, Object was responsible for one of the best records to come out of Manchester, ever. Frank Ewart and the Manchester Mekon were very generous with their flat and their gear; they allowed so many bands to rehearse there, and set up the gigs, week after week. Of course, they didn’t make any cash out of this. The half-wits!” In the liners to his MMC retrospective [Messthetics #106], Chuck Warner would note another connection between these founding fathers of the Manchester independent/post-punk scene and Factory’s later success. Ian Curtis had adapted the bass melody from The Manchester Mekon’s song ‘The Cake Shop Device’ for ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart (with the Mekon’s full blessing). Frank Ewart would also produce demos for The Stockholm Monsters and James

  Object was extant from 1978 to 1981 and run by Hulme-based musician and DJ Steve Solamar (aka Steve Scrivener), originally as an outlet for his band the Spherical Objects, whose “existentialist psychedelia” was celebrated in print by early advocate Paul Morley. Object Music premiered with the Spherical Objects’ debut album, followed a couple of months later with their two non-LP 45s, a Steve Miro single and an EP by the Passage. After the compilation A Manchester Collection came further records by the Passage, Grow Up, IQ Zero, Contact and others. All were drawn from the MMC’s membership except for several Steve Miro projects (who had worked with Solamar since the mid-70s) and an LP by New York no wave band Tirez Tirez. Object maintained a strong commitment to the LP format despite prevailing expectations, releasing 16 full-length albums and a dozen singles and EPs.

  Spherical Objects’ Past and Parcel debut had been recorded at Arrow, the same studio used for ‘Spiral Scratch’, with £800 invested on the recording and a run of 1,000 copies (a second issue was remastered to correct problems on the original pressing). These would then be driven by Solamar down to London in a hired van, a scenario repeated several times over the next few years (Object would release records in batches so as to minimise time spent away from his day job as a computer analyst). Taking the decision to use Object as a conduit for other artists (though the Spherical Objects, very much a solo Solamar project, remained central), the label was profiled in the NME in September 1979 as one of the nine leading independent labels. “What I plan is for there to be quite a lot of releases on Object this year,” Solamar commented. “We’re planning releases by three Manchester bands, who’ll get 50 per cent of profits after costs have been deducted. What will probably happen is that after a lot of activity on Object this year it will either be wound down to a large degree next year, or we’ll stop production to concentrate on wherever Spherical Objects have reached at that time. It may be possibly kept over to release things I find interesting.”

  The label closed in 1981 when Solamar committed himself to the gender reassignment hinted at in earlier releases. The cover of Past And Parcel had featured male and female dolls with their hands nailed together while the lyric to its opening track, ‘Born To Pay’, noted “Sometimes I think I should have been a woman/Sometimes it’d be a lot easier that way”. The label’s final release was the Spherical Objects’ No Man’s Land. The message ‘Special thanks to everyone who has supported us’ appeared on the sleeve. Unable to hand over the reigns to a successor, Solamar closed the imprint, though she did help Steve Miro to transfer to Glass Records and financed the second Grow Up album before returning to a life in computer programming.

  “Music Force grew out of the 60s,” Ryan continues, “but was far removed from hippy idealism. The majority of those involved weren’t remotely involved in hippy ethics. A lot of them were avid drug takers, but there was no sentimentality in terms of spirituality with the people who were involved. They were fairly strong socialists and interested in democratic politics. You’re talking about a bunch of musicians who knew nothing else apart from playing in pop groups and beat bands from leaving school. This was a generation of people who went into the music business in the late 50s and did nothing else apart from play music until the early 70s when that whole touring thing had finished, it kind of collapsed because of the economics. Promoters were more interested in promoting discotheques. One DJ at £30 a night was far less hassle than promoting a rock ‘n’ roll band at twice or even three times that much. It was economics that forced us to create a self-management scheme, to run our own venues and promote our own music and bands. It was in a time of fairly high unemployment and you’re talking about guys with families who’d done nothing other than play in rock ‘n’ roll bands.”

  Rabid was an obvious extension of those activities. “Music Force had a loose manifesto or constitution, which was to at all times break the unfair monopoly of the capitali
st music industry, and also to establish its own channels of output. It also had a commitment to promoting new ideas in music. There was a lot of people involved in Music Force that were rock ‘n’ roll players who’d come to rock ‘n’ roll because there wasn’t a jazz market as such. So there was good musicianship, and a lot of that musicianship was interested in promoting new ideas, and that was part of the manifesto. And part of that was to actually put product out as records. And we couldn’t trust the likes of Decca and EMI and Columbia and CBS – any of those people weren’t to be trusted.”

  An innate suspicion of the major labels was commonplace amongst independents, but in Rabid’s case, geographical resentment also played a role. “Part of what Music Force was about was a kind of anti-capital, anti-London attitude anyway,” Ryan continues. “We thought the business was concentrated far too much in the London area, and the press was as well. It did seem to us a total conspiracy to promote the south east and London activity and to not look elsewhere. When, to be quite honest, a lot of new ideas and creativity and talent was coming out of other parts of the country. It happened that a number of organisations around the country did spring up on a similar level, musicians’ collectives and co-operatives. That was a reflection of the political times and the period. There was quite an interest in anti-racist politics, right to work politics, fighting for more fair opportunity. A lot of us were involved in supporting organisations like the Workers Revolutionary Party. It was very much an anti-fascist kind of organisation.” But then he reflects. “When I say that, I personally feel that the majority of musicians involved in it hadn’t a fucking clue about what we were doing.”