by Alex; Ogg
“There was a hardcore at the head of Music Force that were dedicated and interested in politics,” Ryan continues. “That included myself, Victor Brocks, a guy called Bruce Mitchell – a number of people who had all played in the same bands for years and years, and quite a lot of them had grown up together as well. One of the things that Music Force had in its manifesto was to have its best endeavours to produce material, or records. One of the people on the committee, that was co-opted on to the committee – someone I actually opposed being co-opted on cos he was a bit of a hippy! – was producer Martin Hannett.” A chemical engineering graduate and former bass player in Mancunian hippy band Greasy Bear, Hannett would come to be regarded as the finest producer of the post-punk era. Not that it looked likely at this stage. “Martin’s interest was in soundcraft and sound engineering and recording., he was avidly interested in new technology. He was co-opted on to the committee and it turned out to be really worthwhile. It ended up with myself and Martin and Bruce and a few other people more or less running Music Force, because the musicians involved were losing interest. It wasn’t pandering to their egos enough. Musicians are an egotistical bunch. We were trying to create a fair industry where all bands got a crack at playing and got some recognition. There were cults of personality developing, and some bands thought they were far superior to other bands. There wasn’t the same kind of democratic attitude we tried to establish in the first place. So a lot of musicians drifted off and went in search of their own promotion and fame, which had nothing to do with what we were trying to establish. Music Force had a few activities that were carved up between the people involved when it eventually collapsed. One of them was flyposting. Bruce and myself took over, I did most of that, and it became a very lucrative business, flyposting throughout the country.”
Indeed, several musicians would become involved in the business as a sideline, such as Ed Garrity, then of Wild Ram, later Ed Banger of the Nosebleeds. “I used to work for Tosh’s flyposting company. And we already had the band, so recording on Rabid Records was a natural progression. I can’t actually remember whether or not we had the connection with the band first through Music Force or we started doing the flyposting, but it was all inter-connected. It was very lucrative – cos we had practically the whole of England – we would travel down as far as Coventry, Nottingham, Birmingham, up to Newcastle. It was very good money then.”
“Another thing was trucking,” notes Ryan. “We had a fleet of vehicles that we could call on that would rescue people for transport for gigs. The other thing was this side of things which wanted us to be able to allow bands to find out, and demystify, the whole process of getting a record out. And Martin kind of carved that off. All this activity went through my house and happened at my house. So we had flyposting going on from the house, we had bands coming through wanting to put records out. The whole thing was centred in my kitchen.” Garrity: “Yeah, we’d go there for breakfast before we went out to work – but sometimes we’d never get to work. We’d have a joint and it could just turn into one long session.”
Rick Goldstraw, member of the Ferrets and John Cooper Clarke’s manager cum co-conspirator, was another of Ryan’s flyposters. “The whole thing was tax deductible for the record companies, you see, cos it was advertising, so they did as many as they could. But they’d send far too many. Cos Ryan was a working class kid and insecure – any middle class kid would have just gone, ‘fuck ‘em’! – but Ryan’s a grammar school boy, so he goes, ‘You’ve got to put this many up.’ So we get the posters, and say he’s got 2,000, he’d give you 1,000, he’d put 20 in his poster collection, and he’d send the rest to be mashed up at the paper plant with his ‘secret boy’ and a transit van full of posters to be destroyed. And we’d put 50 up and go home. You couldn’t do out else – where would you put ‘em?”
Such was the bravado of the various crews, that this wasn’t even an after hours job. “We were nine while five lads!” laughs Goldstraw. “But there were all these things of Ryan having fits about them being seen. What you’d have to do on the night of the gigs is get back from the motorway, and put loads of posters up around the gig, so the band’s manager would see them. Then you’d cover ‘em up the next day if there were any left – if a kid saw them wet they’d disappear to student flats. It was insane. The statistics were just crazy, and they just kept giving Tosh loads of money. And the more money they gave him, the guiltier he would get. I raised my children on that money. He made a fortune. You couldn’t not make money. They would send up 10,000 double-quad Paul McCartney posters – you couldn’t put 100 up! I know houses in Didsbury where the cavities are full of fucking posters! And Tosh was getting so much fucking money, he went, this is too much. And he got in touch with the tax people. Then it was, if you want paying, you’ve got to sign. We were like, fuck off, we’re on the dole. So anyway Ryan had all this money so he said, right, I’m going legit, I’m opening a record company. But flyposting’s an illegal profession! If the police come, you run. And he tried to put everyone on PAYE!”
In essence, Rabid Records wasn’t a separate entity at all. “Yeah,” admits Ryan, “apart from the fact that it forgot its political intentions and drifted into making money. That was acceptable to everyone because we’d been skint for so long, it was acceptable to earn some money, and we earned quite a lot. The flyposting business made a hell of a lot of money and employed a lot of people. A lot of musicians out of work ended up flyposting all over the country. And we employed a lot of session musicians on some of the recordings we did.” The whole Rabid operation was staffed by “pissheads and junkies,” Garrity recalls. “Wonderful! You could walk into the Rabid office completely sober and walk out stoned within no time at all. All you had to do was inhale the atmosphere of the reception room.”
“Ryan brought in these two people, Lawrence Beadle and Martin Hannett,” Goldstraw explains. “A couple of nastier bastards you couldn’t find. Lawrence screwed my mate’s girl. And my mate was a drinker. He was a young lad, and he went round every Friday night when he was pissed and threw a stone through Lawrence’s window. It went on for months. The first thing that they did after they made [John Cooper Clarke’s debut EP] ‘Innocents’ was to sign Clarkey to CBS. As soon as he’d signed the contract, what they did was bootleg him [the infamous Ou Est La Maison De Fromage album]. There were boxes of them in the office stacked six foot high. And John would never have thought to have said, ‘What’s that record with me looking like a cunt on the front of it, asleep on a train with my mouth open?’ They never said owt. And they sold 20,000 mail order. £60,000. Clarkey could have bought the fucking avenue he lived in with that. And of course, this was meant to be going into the joint account. But Ryan was in the bank one day, stood behind Lawrence, watching him – and he saw Lawrence put the money in his own account. Ha ha!”
Goldstraw had a relationship with Ryan that went back many years. “I was always staying round there [Ryan’s house]. I was kind of abandoned at a very early age – from ten I kind of brought myself up. I had the family house, but not the family! I was so scared of the dark, I’d go out on the road and get strangers – any fucker – to come back to our house, and stay until dawn. I’d tell anyone, come back for a brew. I hated the dark as a kid and I still do. So when I met Ryan, their house was like a hippy gaffe. Well, it wasn’t hippy – they were anti-hippy, anti all of that, even though we dropped acid all the time, because we thought hippy was too soppy. Tosh was like my dream dad – sax-playing, dope-smoking liberal. But then he had a nervous breakdown on account of his wife. And I moved in properly then, to be with him during his bad times. In a way, I think he kind of resented the fact that I’d seen him in such a bad way. And he never trusted me musically. Me and him, we used to go and get jobs in the country in the summer, spud-picking, market gardening, any crap. And I’d take my guitar, electric with a tiny radio amp, and he’d take his sax, and we’d just jam all dinnertime. And if we’d been having a good time we’d just carry on playing in th
e afternoon and tell ‘em to fuck off. He wasn’t a good sax player in a technical sense, but he was like a Beefheart type player, and I wasn’t a guitar player but I was a crackpot. But then he turned against me and he didn’t trust me. So when we made Clarke’s record, ‘Innocents’, there was another kid waiting there in the studio.”
That kid was John Scott, and the record was Rabid’s third release. The resentment still crackles down the years. “Clarkey was in these folk clubs. And you know Clarkey, he’d probably still be there! I carried a reel to reel tape machine two miles on my back to record him, and took the tape over to Ryan’s to play him it. And he was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m interested.’ Then I took John over and I said, ‘I trust this guy Tosh, more than anybody. If he wants to manage you, he’s honest. He’s got principles. He’ll be straight with you. But John’s very secretive. And the first thing they did was they sacked me! They didn’t want any of John’s deadweight mates! Not just me, but Stevie McGuire who did the drawings [on the cover]. Stevie was a great kid, but John was all for getting rid of him! And he chinned Ryan! Ryan said, ‘How much do you want for the cover?’ Stevie says £200. Ryan says, ‘I’ve got a guy up the road who’ll do one for £17.’ So Stevie went and punched him. John was all for leaving everyone behind – he didn’t want us mixing with his new friends, whoever they might be.”
Steve McGuire should not be confused with cartoonist and illustrator Steve McGarry, responsible for much of the artwork on Rabid and Absurd releases. “I worked on JCC’s Fromage album, but that was a year or so later,” he confirms. “I think I did five or maybe six of the ten or twelve singles that Rabid released, two of the album sleeves and a lot of stuff for Absurd. I don’t recall that they ever had particularly big budgets! I only really made decent fees when the acts signed to majors (Jilted John to EMI, Slaughter to Decca) and I got to create bigger budget sleeves. In fact, on most of the Rabid releases I’d be surprised if the recording costs were £200. Mind you, having read what Rick says, I now realise that I was using entirely the wrong negotiating tactic with Tosh!” In a further demonstration of continuity between Rabid and Factory, McGarry would design the 12-inch ‘scaffold’ cover for Joy Division’s ‘An Ideal For Living’ in September 1978 at Rob Gretton’s suggestion.
That wasn’t Goldstraw’s final run-in with Rabid. “My elder brother. He was a very, very tough fella. They didn’t pay me at Rabid, no royalties, and they tried to credit the EP to themselves. They changed the first cover and put their names on it – charming. So my mum died, and there were four children, and they went, right, we’ll do a three-way split on the headstone. And I went, I want to pay my share. So they run me to this fucking record company, and I said, ‘Tosh, give me my royalties, my mum’s died, and I want to buy a headstone.’ And fucking Hannett and Beadle were like – you’re not getting any fucking money. And I thought that was rather bad form. So my brother came in and he said, ‘Hiya Tosh. What’s happening?’ And Tosh said, immediately, ‘I’m just sorting your kid’s money out!’ Then Martin Hannett said, ‘You’re not getting any money’. So our kid said to him, ‘Hello Curly, are you partial to fucking hospital food?’ So Tosh says, ‘Shut up Martin, here’s your money, Rick.’ And he handed over £200.”
The Cooper Clarke albums offer a classic case study of majors pushing money into what remained essentially an independent enterprise. In an interview with Jon Savage in the sleevenotes to And Here Is The Young Man, Hannett stated that the CBS link came about via his relationship with CBS stringer Jeremy Ensor [formerly of Principal Edwards Magic Theatre]. It led to a meeting in Manchester with Maurice Oberstein, where he agreed to licence a Cooper Clarke album over “a cheap kebab”. The deal was signed, he claimed, on the understanding that Hannett (and Steve Hopkins) would be in charge of the tracks.
“If you look at the John Cooper Clarke albums we produced for CBS,” says Ryan, “you’ll see such a number of musicians on there. Including people like Bill Nelson from Be Bop Deluxe, Pete Shelley – known musicians we used as session players. The production on those is remarkable. At the time they were being produced, I was really opposed to what Martin was doing. He was spending fortunes in the studio. By today’s standards it was a very small amount of money, but at that time it was a lot of money. We were spending between 15 and 30 grand on an album, which was a lot of money in 1979 or whenever. John Cooper Clarke never recouped. We never got any more money out of CBS, because we were still paying back the advances. A lot of the advances Martin spent on new technology, like digital delay lines and harmonisers, and the very first CD player that I ever saw. I was amazed. He bought a CD player and it cost us £800 – what the hell are we doing spending £800 on a weird piece of technology? It didn’t even record, it was only a player. I thought it was very interesting the way Martin produced those albums. He was a genius at producing, an amazing producer. He was without doubt way ahead of a lot of producers at that time. But he was also a pain in the arse.”
Rabid’s roster was always fairly lopsided. After the bootboy punk of Slaughter And The Dogs and Ed Banger & The Nosebleeds, it encompassed a punk poet in Cooper Clarke, a punk parody in Jilted John (later John Shuttleworth) and the baby-steps of underachieving pop evergreen Chris Sievey, later of the Freshies and Frank Sidebottom fame. Many were linked to majors. Slaughter were licensed to Decca, Cooper Clarke to CBS. Jilted John to EMI, and indeed, Sievey himself was taken up by MCA. Famously, Ryan once offered to ‘punch out’ an employee at the latter major for wearing flared Wranglers. “I think Chris is extremely talented,” Tosh concludes. “I managed Chris’s band for a long time. I lost a lot of money on the Freshies – a lot.”
“I was probably instrumental in that [getting the Nosebleeds’ single released by Ryan],” recalls Vini Reilly, “because I could actually play, which Tosh could relate to. I don’t think he really related to the other members of the band because they weren’t virtuoso musicians – not that I was. At least I could string some chords together. I think it was all sheer force of personality and commitment. We were all insane, really. We were all out of order. We were arrested about four times for various things and held overnight. Got up to all sorts of misadventures. But we were quite a formidable team from Wythenshawe. So I think it was more being impressed with that, combined with the fact that I could play, that led to him giving it a shot. Tosh is great, a fantastic guy, still an amazing guy, and he’s from Wythenshawe originally. He’s very forthright! I’m still friends with all those lads. They haven’t quietened down a lot!”
Other releases include a forgotten outing by Gyro, whose existence is again testament to Rabid’s home-grown esprit de corps. “It was a guy called Chris Gill,” remembers Ryan. “He was an exceptional musician, a really good guitar player, a good writer. And very much part of that kind of Manchester attitude – didn’t give a fuck, would rather have a fight than a hit. That’s what attracted us to a lot of people; their ability musically and the fact that they weren’t people who would toe the line. They didn’t want to pander. Some people wanted to pander to the whole stupidity of the music industry. I used to hate the idea that journalists, people like Nick Kent, they would come and see us and piss me off with their stupid London attitudes. It just used to really get on my nerves.” Still, you did send us Paul Morley.
Rabid’s biggest seller was the fluke/flake punk hit by the aforementioned Jilted John, aka Graham Fellows, in April 1978. A Yorkshireman studying drama at Manchester Polytechnic, as Fellows recalled in the sleevenotes to the reissue of True Love Stories, “I’d written a couple of songs and I wanted to record them. So I went into a local record shop and asked if they knew any indie or punk labels. They said they knew of two; Stiff in London and Rabid just down the road. So I phoned Rabid up and they told me to send in a demo.” The song, an update on John Otway’s ‘Cor Baby, That’s Really Free’, was submitted in demo form and re-recorded, under the auspices of Martin Hannett, at Pennine Studios.
‘Going Steady’ was originally intended as the a-s
ide of the resultant single, until John Peel started playing ‘Jilted John’, which also became Fellows’ new sobriquet. “John Peel must take credit for being the one who played ‘Jilted John’ repeatedly,” notes Fellows. “And ‘Jilted John Thomas’ was a half-serious contender as a name for a while.” With Piccadilly Radio also playing the song heavily, and Barry Lazell, Tony Parsons and Paul Morley singing its praises in the music weeklies, Rabid had a hit they were evidently unprepared for. EMI stepped in with a licensing deal – Tony Wilson in a Granada Reports feature on independent labels decried that action as a betrayal of the independent ethos; Ryan accused him of living in the past. But Wilson’s research for that programme would, ultimately, trigger the subsequent formation of Factory.
No-one had expected the freak hit, not least Fellows’ new peer group, including local musician Eddie Mooney, then of the Accidents. “I was walking down near the university, and there was an office,” he recalls. “And then there was the John Cooper Clarke single called ‘Innocents’, and I looked on the back of it and the address was actually on the university campus. So I thought, what have I got to lose? I’ll walk in and see if they’ll sign up my little band. I went there and it was chaos, absolutely chaos in this room. At the time I was so naive, I just thought they were strange people – but of course I found out later they were all doped up to their eyeballs. But they were dead friendly, and the guy I spoke to was a guy called Mark. What he said was, get us a tape and bring it down to Anthony Ryan’s house in Withington. So I said, OK, I will do. At the time, still being naive, we did a tape off the mixing desk and I turned up at this guy’s house, Tosh, and there was another chap there who was a student at the Polytechnic, called Graham Fellows. He had this tape and I had my tape, and Tosh said I’ve only got enough money for one single at the moment – they were always skint. And he said, I’m interested in the Accidents, cos you’re such a strange band, but I’m also interested in this other song Graham had. So we played our tape, which technically wasn’t great. And he said, ‘I like that, but let me hear the other one.’ And of course the other one was ‘Jilted John’. I said, that’s dreadful, you’ll never get anywhere with that!”