by Alex; Ogg
“I remember Jilted John coming in with his demo tape, I was there that morning,” confirms Ed Garrity. “Tosh said, have a listen to this. He played it and I said, ‘that’s just rubbish’. He couldn’t play the guitar, so he’d tuned the guitar to one chord and he was playing it with one finger, and he’d recorded it in his bedroom. But Tosh said, ‘Do you want to record that with him?’ Cos I had my band, and he offered it to me, and I turned it down – like a prat! And so it was my backing band on Top Of The Pops – the bass player, drummer and guitarist, they all agreed to do it.”
The single eventually reached the top five. “It actually reached number four,” Mooney grimaces, “I plotted chart history in green envy at the time.” Although Ryan did hook Mooney up with Martin Hannett, in the end his single never did come out on the label. “When Jilted John charted, EMI were sniffing around and people like myself who had been part of that chaotic scene were nudged out a little bit as they smelt the big bucks,” Mooney continues. “The next thing was they were trying to market [follow-up single] ‘Gordon The Moron’ and all that sort of stuff. I was walking down this road and Graham Fellows was on a moped, dressed in his Parker coat – we’d kept in touch cos he’s a nice lad – but he was going, ‘Eddie, you won’t believe it, that song I did is in the charts!’ And I didn’t believe him.” Garrity: “Eventually, he wouldn’t do gigs, Jilted John, cos he wanted to be an actor, and there are all these calls coming in the office offering him thousands of pounds to do gigs. I said I’d do it with a backing band – nobody will know! Tosh was half coming round to the idea but then he said, ‘Nah, we’ll get sued.’ I said, it’ll be too late then!”
There was a further near miss link with the majors in the shape of The Out’s remarkable ‘Who Is Innocent’ single. “Martin Hannett wanted to produce it at one stage,” recalls guitarist George Borowski (oft falsely cited as ‘Guitar George’ of ‘Sultans Of Swing’ fame). “Then it wasn’t going to be released because the other two members of Rabid, Hannett and Beadle, were resistant to us as a band. Tosh was convinced it was going to be a hit. And he forced it through. Off it went, and it was on radio and everything. It’s kind of a lost classic. Tosh never forgave himself that it wasn’t a hit. He said to me much later that that’s the one he regrets most not doing as well as it could have done.” It was later re-released on Virgin. “Chas Banks, the manager, and Tosh went to meet Virgin, and themselves and Chrysalis were interested in putting the single out. Because Rabid was celebrating a big hit single with ‘Jilted John’, they dug their heels in and said if you want the single, take the album, and Virgin said no.”
Evidently, then, though Ryan’s rhetorical suspicions of the majors were cast in stone at the outset, when opportunities arose, as they did with at least four of the label’s artists, they were grasped. This contrasts starkly with Factory’s more puritanical approach. Rabid was always a more pragmatic beast – staying true in that sense to Music Force’s original mission statement about offering the local music community exposure and support. Some still see Ryan as an opportunist. Others might conclude that lofty idealism is OK for those who can afford it.
The Rabid story had a diverting endnote in the shape of Absurd Records, a spin-off label involving Lawrence Beadle, as well as Ryan. “There were a lot of divisions in Rabid between myself, Lawrence Beadle and Martin Hannett,” Ryan admits. “We were on one side of the fence and Martin was going in another direction altogether. Martin wanted big money to produce BIG music. He was one of those people that helped push the music business into the stratosphere financially. He wanted to spend money on tricks in the studio. Consequently, he needed to get those deals to get the money to do it. I wasn’t that interested at all. I wasn’t even interested in the stuff we were putting out. I was more interested in a label we had called Absurd. Which was, at it sounds, ridiculous. Initially I thought Rabid Records was about that, producing unusual material that was pointing two fingers at the record industry.”
Absurd’s roster featured releases by Eddie Fiction (Garrity under a pseudonym), Cairo (Chris Gill of Gyro), 48 Chairs (John Scott), the Mothmen (members of John Cooper Clarke’s band, various Durutti Column alumni), Bet Lynch’s Legs (CP Lee of the Albertos and Scott again). The latter pair were also involved in the label’s most famous release, Gerry & The Holograms’ ‘The Emperor’s New Music’ single. The record came glued into the sleeve, some of which arrived with a Rough Trade sticker warning unwary punters not to play the disc. The ruse was based on the fact that there were lots of unsold Slaughter And The Dogs singles and other Rabid over-presses they had access to, and it was as good a way as any to disperse them to the populace. Ryan clearly enjoyed the esoteric nature of these releases, but others were less convinced. “Chris Sievey was on it, everyone,” says Garrity, “Gordon the Moron, Gyro, pretty much anyone who was on Rabid did a daft song for that. Tosh just said, if I give you £500, just do a song. So people would just go in and do any old rubbish. Everyone just took the money and did it all under different names. And I think that’s what took the company down.”
Unsurprisingly enough, Rick Goldstraw has an alternative theory about Rabid/Absurd’s demise, which goes back to the real money-spinner behind both, the flyposting business. “A friend of mine, Gwyn Roberts, came in. He was called the Pieman, cos he had a finger in every pie. I brought Gwyn in to the Russell Club to take over from Alan Wise. He tried to sack me! He said that if he couldn’t stay on the door taking the money, he couldn’t keep track of what was happening in the club. He wanted to stay on the door and stuff his pockets with loads of fivers! So he ended up at Rabid as a sort of junior accountant. And what Gwyn did was sit and watch, to see where the weaknesses were. And he saw the flyposting making all that money, and the kids from Wythenshawe were really, really tough – Vinni and Mike Faal. Vinni was the Nosebleeds’ manager. They ran Birmingham’s flyposting, just like Terry The Pill ran it in London. But Gwyn recognised them as vicious operators. So he went to them and said – all this arguing with Tosh about PAYE and the price of posters, it’s not necessary. It’s not a legal business. If someone was to say to him, ‘Fuck off or I’ll punch you’ – he couldn’t phone the police. So that’s what they did. The Faal brothers took over – ‘We’re taking the business, Tosh. Now fuck off.’”
The other ‘underdog’ Manchester independent was TJM Records, run by Tony Davidson, proprietor of rehearsal studios on Little Peter Street. The common perception was that Davidson was a rich boy and the label a plaything in comparison to his family’s jewellery and scrap businesses. Their first signing, V2, would top the alternative charts in November 1978 with ‘Man In A Box’, selling 8,000 copies (a figure the label claimed to have shifted on ‘pre-sale’). Further releases came from Slaughter & The Dogs, Skrewdriver, the Pathetix, Eddie Mooney, Victim and most notably, the Frantic Elevators, featuring a young Mick Hucknall. But TJM suffered an image problem. To all intents and purposes it was considered an even cornier label than Rabid. While the latter had conceptual ideas and political aspirations, the flyers which announced TJM’s arrival (“The label for the discerning record buyer” and “The sound of tomorrow made for today”) were laughably anachronistic, the nomenclature a leftover not even of the sixties but the fifties.
“I can always remember Mick Hucknall, this little ginger-haired guy, scrounging beer,” recalls Eddie Mooney. “He was always hanging around, completely skint. You’d go see Tony Davidson to pester him to get some money, or find out when the record was coming out. He was hardly ever in, but there would be the forlorn figure of Mick Hucknall, with his short-cropped ginger hair and tank top. And he’d always say, ‘one day we’re going to be famous’. I used to laugh at him – I thought, no chance. We did a lot of gigs with the Frantic Elevators, and we did one at the Russell Club, which became The Factory, with V2. I remember me and Mark Standley [of V2] killing ourselves laughing at this ginger bloke doing these tracks where he’d just shout his head off in a Hawaiian t-shirt, and we thought he was hilariou
s. But after the punk era I met Mick again, and I said, ‘What are you going to do, now punk’s over? Are you going to get a job?’ He said no, I’m going to do some soul music. I said, Mick, no way do you have a voice for soul!”
Of all the bands on TJM, few had as much right to complain as Victim, the Anglo-Irish band who managed to live up to their name spectacularly. After being enticed from Northern Ireland by a modest contract, they had their equipment stolen during their first week in Manchester, and immediately fell out over the format of their first release for the label, with Davidson trying to strong-arm them into putting out a four-track EP of previous demos. Forced to sleep in a derelict shop in Oldham Street while decrying the fact that their label owner was spending all his time in casinos, they came to hate Davidson with a passion. The song they finally gave him for release, ‘Why Are Fire Engines Red’, they’d agreed was the worst in their repertoire. And while they dithered over the use of a cover designed by Linder, TJM put it out anyway in a very unflattering sleeve featuring… a fire engine. In a final humiliation visited on them after they decamped to Illuminated Records, the proposed release of their next single (as part of the deal behind their package tour) was delayed when TJM mislaid the master tapes. They had to rely on the return of a copy they’d sent to John Peel.
Mooney, meanwhile, had become the label’s next and final artist. “After Rabid, somebody mentioned this other label called TJM,” he remembers. “I found this phone number, and I thought if Graham Fellows can do a daft record, I can do one. And I recruited a couple of young local lads, a drummer and a guitar player who’d hardly ever played, and I thought – what’s the most ridiculous song I could possibly write? Hence ‘I Bought Three Eggs’. We did it for a laugh really, and we recorded a rough demo of it in the cellar of the house I lived in. So I rang TJM from the phone box while I played a cassette on their answering machine. Mark Standley heard this and said to Tony Davidson he should put it out. At the time Tony had a Kevin Keegan hairstyle – he wasn’t an alternative character. He’s like someone you’d see on The Apprentice today – open-necked shirt, flares, and a mullet – Billy the Fish hairstyle and medallions, Mark Standley heard the message and said to Tony, ‘This is bizarre, you’ve got to listen to this.’ So I got a phone call back. They said, come down to the record company, which turned out to be a room in a warehouse. It was on Little Peter Street. It’s all posh flats now, but at the time it was an old warehouse. When we went in there, it was a shock. I imagined someone with spiky hair or something, but he was a bit older than us, about 30. And he said, ‘I like this, let’s do a record!’ We’ve never even done a proper gig or rehearsal. So I said OK, and within a week he had us in this studio in Manchester called Smile, where a lot of the TJM stuff was recorded. And the initial demo was kinda punky, but we got this so-called producer, Steve, a lovely bloke, but he didn’t have a clue – we sounded more like Gerry & The Pacemakers. I was horrified when I heard the mix!”
‘I Bought Three Eggs’, TJM16, was the last record to be released on the label. “The label was starting to do OK,” says Mooney, “but he was awful with money – he didn’t pay any of his staff, and I never got a penny out of those records. A couple of the acts got lump sums, like Slaughter & The Dogs – but they were the Rossi brothers and you didn’t mess with them. But he tried a couple of tours, which weren’t properly organised, and I think he lost interest. I don’t think it went under because of money, I think he just couldn’t be bothered. He just stopped turning up. The label was very chaotic. Even the rubber plant in his office was never watered from the day he bought it. And as the rubber plant dwindled, so did his business. It was like a measuring stick. And in the end all that was left of the rubber plant was a lot of dry earth and a stick – which is when the label collapsed.”
Davidson started another record label in the 80s, specialising in oldies, but this too was doomed. Afterwards, it’s thought he returned to the family business. “He was pretending to be a svengali,” says Mooney, “’You should go into showbusiness, my boy!’ But as a person he was very charming, comical, funny, witty. But he wasn’t the most intelligent – you just thought, this guy would be great selling double-glazing. He wasn’t even remotely artistic – he was clueless on that level. It was bizarre he should be involved in this.”
In fact, it’s quite hard to find anyone with a kind word to say about TJM or Davidson – with the exception of Mick Rossi of Slaughter & The Dogs – perhaps because, as Mooney points out, their single was paid for in advance. “Like Rabid, I think we were the first band on Tony’s label. I remember meeting him for the first time and he was always very smartly dressed, and he wore good shoes. He was a genuine soul and his word was his bond.” Good shoes or no, others would contest his probity – Andrew Nicholson of The Pathetix, among them. He calls their decision to sign with the label as “without doubt the worst thing we ever did. We thought it was going to change everything and sure enough it did – we never really recovered from the experience. We’d have been better looking after ourselves, what momentum we’d built up was lost over a period where Tony [Davidson] played at being Richard Branson with his dad’s money.”
Stuart Murray of Fast Cars can afford Mr Davidson few kind words either. “We met Tony through his ‘practice studios’ (an old dingy warehouse in the dilapidated part of Manchester City Centre). He saw us a few times and decided he would like to sign us. We had recorded a demo at Cargo Studios in Rochdale, which had four tracks on it. We let the Manchester Collective, which we were members of, have two for their forthcoming album A Manchester Collection; the deal being we would get a percentage of the profits but our music would not be tied up in the future should we get another deal. We verbally agreed with Tony that he could have the other tracks for his Identity Parade album, thinking it would be a similar arrangement. Tony went to test pressing with the album and then produced a contract for us to sign. When we read it he wanted the rights to our songs forever! We still thought we might get a major deal at the time and didn’t want to let him have, what we considered to be, two of our best songs, ‘Tameside Girls’ and ‘Images Of You’. We decided not to sign it, which resulted in him not being a ‘happy teddy’ and having to have the album re-pressed. He did send a letter to Sounds at the time about it!”
“It’s true the TJM label identity was disastrously unhip,” admits Cath Carroll, “but they put out a few fabulous records. The first Distractions EP, ‘You’re Not Going Out Dressed Like That.’ And that V2 record. You know with V2, in Manchester, we never really knew what we had. They played the Mayflower near Belle Vue a lot and were a rather hysterical pose, we thought, [Guitarist Ian] Nance especially. They had this super serious early 70s glam thing, just without the flares, it was pretty preposterous. TJM put them out without any irony, while we just couldn’t make enough Jobriath jokes. But the last laugh is on us; they were quite brazen and truly just put the rock and roll out there – very heroic. We always thought they had an attitude but I think they wore so much make up, it just made it hard to see their face muscles move.”
It’s not hard to see Rabid especially, not least for its inverted snobbery towards London, as a precursor to Factory, the label that would come to define Manchester music for a decade to come. That’s despite the fact that substantial antipathy continues to exist between various factions – witness the fallout to Michael Winterbottom’s impish cinematic re-imagining of events that was 24-Hour Party People. Similarities extend beyond intense regional pride and the city’s indefatigable swagger to include a specific political motivation at least at the outset – both labels were ‘socialist’, albeit Rabid’s was a singularly hedonistic, druggy strand of socialism and Factory’s mingled love of the common people with naked elitism. There was also a fast and loose embrace of conventional business models. Factory became famous for its avoidance of paper contracts, but that was always the case with Rabid anyway; which is why ultimately the artists were able to cut deals with later rights vultures like Colin New
man’s Receiver.
Most importantly, though, the nucleus of the creative milieu that formed around Factory and saw their apotheosis in Joy Division’s success (Cummins, Hannett, et al) undertook their apprenticeship with Rabid – Hannett long maintaining a foot in both camps. Tony Wilson himself was unequivocal about Rabid being key to the idea of forming his own label. Factory’s very first record (the ‘Ideal For Living’ EP) would be distributed by their then more established cousins. But as the 80s dawned, Factory would quickly overtake its ancestors as Manchester’s premier record label, providing a back beat to the city that some have, not wholly hysterically, described as ‘spiritual’.