Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  In the end, the group moved to Epic. “It took ages to make a record. During which time, punk happened. Chiswick happened, Stiff happened. Records could be made, singles, for a few hundred pounds. The industry was so slow, a bit like they were when Napster and downloads happened – it was the same thing then, they were caught on the hop, the majors. And that inspired me. That’s why I started Zoom. I was buying the records, driving down to London. I met with Jake Riviera, bought the Damned single – great. Lenny Love and I were pals, and Lenny was talking about starting a record label. He said, ‘I’m thinking of signing The Rezillos.’ I said, ‘Great, Lenny, The Rezillos are fantastic.’ ‘But,’ he said, ‘I don’t have the money. I want to sign them and make the record.’ I said, ‘for fuck’s sake Lenny, I’ll guarantee to buy 500 copies of the single even before you’ve cut it – cos they’re so hot, they’re cold! That way you’ll have the money.’ I called a meeting at my house – which Lenny didn’t turn up at to begin with! The Rezillos said, ‘Who’s going to pay for this, if we make a record with Lenny?’ I said, ‘Well, Lenny will pay for it, but if he doesn’t have the money, I’ll put the money up.’ They said, ‘What’s in it for you?’ I said, ‘I’ll sell your record! I’ll make profits. I know you’re going to sell records.’ So I helped Lenny get that off the ground, and at the same time went for my own signings and found a band called Sale – which was a dreadful name. They changed it to The Valves. I signed them and produced it myself, effectively, with an engineer. I’m not a musician, but I just sat there encouraging them. Go for it, guys! And it was brilliant. We sold thousands and thousands of the first single.”

  Findlay was also partially behind one further landmark Scottish independent single. “The week after I released The Valves, The Skids came in to see me – Ricky Jobson and Stuart Adamson, in my shop in Edinburgh. They had a brilliant demo of ‘Charles’. It was fucking great. ‘What about you doing it with Zoom?’ I said, ‘I’ve just released my first single, give me a chance!’ I wanted to get up and running. But my philosophy is every single town in the country should have a record label. ‘You’re from Dunfermline – I know the guy in the local record shop Sandy Muir. Why don’t you go in and see if he’ll make it with you?’ ‘Do you think that’s an idea?’ ‘It’s a GREAT idea – do it! Get him to phone me if he has any doubts.’ Funnily enough, he did. Sandy phoned and asked why I wouldn’t do it. I said, because I’ve just done it, I’m new to the game, I don’t know what I’m doing yet. I’m not ready to do my second record!’”

  Muir liked The Skids well enough, but didn’t have a clue as to how to make a record. “I said, it’s easy, the record is made, they’ve done it – they don’t need to go into fancy studios. I gave him some contacts. I said, if you have any doubts about this, Sandy, I’ll order 500 in advance, I’ll give you a written order. I’ll pay you when I get the records, but I guarantee it. ‘Why would you do that? What’s in it for you?’ I said, ‘Sandy, I’ll make tuppence profit off every record, or whatever it was in those days, when records sold for about 50p or 60p, I’ll make my profit. Also, I want to be part of this. I want my shops to be part of it. Sandy, that’s why I’ve never owned a record shop in Dunfermline, cos you’re there, and you’ve got a good record shop. I’m not that kind of capitalist, like Richard Branson.’ So he did, and started a record label called No Bad Records. And The Skids came out with that single and then signed to Virgin!”

  Neither No Bad nor Sensible went any further, however. Sire jumped in to sign The Rezillos and that was, effectively, job done for Love (the label’s only other release was Neon’s ‘Bottles’). Rezillos singer Eugene Reynolds did try desperately hard to convince Love to sign The Cramps after he’d seen them playing in New York, but without success. For Reynolds, ‘moving on’ meant moving from an independent to a major – almost more so, given their geographical location and the lack of resources any of the Scottish independents could muster. “Everybody at that time was putting out their independent single,” he recalls, “and we certainly wanted to do that. And our second single, which came out on Sire, ‘(My Baby Does) Good Sculptures’, was meant to be a Sensible release anyway. That got taken over by Sire Records after we’d recorded it. Even while we were in the studio, it changed from being a Sensible record to being a Sire release. So we did go very quickly from an independent to a major. I think as much as everyone was singing the praises of independents, nearly every band went over to a major – it’s just the way it was.”

  Zoom stuck around for slightly longer, following The Valves with PVC2’s ‘Put You In The Picture’, in reality a halfway house for the former members of chart act Slik, featuring Midge Ure. “Having made my own record, you had to discover proper distribution,” says Findlay. “I phoned a couple of people that did distribution, but effectively I did my own. I jumped in my car, drove to London, went to Rough Trade Records, who didn’t have a record label at the time. I talked to Geoff Travis and played the record to him. ‘Great, I’ll take 100 copies’, or something. ‘I’m thinking of starting a record label too.’ You should, I told him. Everywhere I went, places like King’s Lynn, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Newcastle – I found independent shops everywhere. They took my records. When I went round a second time, people were starting their own labels. They’d say, ‘I’ve got a record as well.’ Everyone had that attitude. All the indies had little picture sleeves, and they were brilliant. There was an attitude to do them that the majors just couldn’t manage, that they were slow to latch on to. There was a movement, albeit a loose movement. There was no formal association of independent music shops or anything – fuck that – there was a loose friendship between the shops up and down the country. And we all knew we were part of a revolution.”

  When PVC2 faltered and re-emerged as The Zones, minus Ure, Findlay hooked his label up to a marketing deal with Arista to access finances. Releases from Mike Heron, The Questions and Simple Minds followed, but from 1978 onwards he would concentrate on managing the latter band and would close Zoom in 1980. Simple Minds’ evolution lay in the ‘Stiff/Chiswick challenge’ auditions hosted at Edinburgh’s Clouds venue. Johnny And The Self-Abusers (featuring a young Jim Kerr) and The Subs (with future Simple Minds member Derek Forbes) would end up with deals with Chiswick and Stiff respectively (on the latter’s presciently titled One-Off subsidiary). In the fall-out from the Self-Abusers’ split, one half of the band, led by John Milarky, became the Cuban Heels, recording for their own Housewife’s Choice imprint. The other, Simple Minds, led by Kerr, were signed to Findlay’s Zoom-Arista tie-up in December 1978. “I finally took on Simple Minds’ management and gave up Zoom Records a few years later, so it closed again,” says Findlay. “I had to become business-like. The record label was going to become a struggle for me. Simple Minds were signed to Zoom under a separate licence through Arista. Arista were crap, and we couldn’t wait to get off.” Arista’s ‘crapness’ manifested itself in wholesale panic at the lack of success Simple Minds’ first two albums achieved, and an attempt to convince them to become a 2-Tone band.

  With The Skids signing to Virgin, The Rezillos to Sire and Wishaw’s The Jolt moving to Polydor, the cream of Scotland’s initial punk crop had been co-opted by major labels in a manner that reflected the nation-wide picture. All three would have cause to regret those decisions. “We should have stopped making records, or at least should never have signed to a major label,” Skids’ singer Richard Jobson later recalled to Brain Hogg. “We had a ridiculous contract – eight albums cross-collateralised with a publishing deal and a £5,000 advance.” The Rezillos soon run aground with Sire, Fay Fife famously pushing cake into the face of Seymour Stein’s wife at a record label reception. The Jolt ended up deeply resenting Polydor’s attempts to remould them as a “Tartan Jam”, despite the huge £90,000 advance they were offered. “It was only when we signed to Polydor, and in particular with The Jam’s producer Chris Parry, that we were talked into the whole Mod thing,” maintains the band’s Iain Shedden. “Consi
dering the label already had a three-piece Mod outfit on the books, it was an incredibly dumb move. But we were young and, of course, in the music business, you learn by your mistakes.”

  “It’s easy in retrospect to look at the punk era and say it was all about ideals and independence and revolution and breaking down barriers,” Shedden continues. “For some it was about all of those things. For others it was a fashion, but for many of the aspiring musicians opportunity and escape were just as important as belonging to any so-called punk movement. After supporting the likes of The Jam, XTC and The Saints in Glasgow every major label and a similar number of independents were after our signatures. There was a growing belief back then that bands who came from outside of London no longer had to move there in order to have a career. This was deemed another breakthrough in the do-it-yourself atmosphere of the era. Where the idealism started to blur, however, was in the melding of business to art. Any art form is open to commercial exploitation and I’m not using the word in a derogatory sense. Punk had many bands pressing up 500 singles and sending them off to NME and Sounds. A review could add significant numbers to your next gig. This was another good example of punk being able to survive without the help, initially at least, of fat-arsed record company executives. Such idealism was only suited to the short-term, however. You could still be independent, it’s true, but if you were any good as a band you still had to get your work out there. Stuck in the heart of Lanarkshire’s bleak industrial landscape (our first Polydor press release used that term) it wasn’t so attractive to continue doing it all by ourselves, for ourselves, or to stay in that part of the world. Like Scottish footballers, boxers and soldiers before us, part of the attraction of suddenly being accepted was the prospect of getting the hell out of there. Not because Scotland isn’t beautiful, because it is, or because we didn’t love our families and friends, which we did, but because we had sniffed adventure on the end of Polydor’s oily rag and we wanted more of it. Bruce Findlay had vision and he talked a very good case for the independent route and for staying in Scotland while travelling it. We decided against it. That may have been a mistake on our part, but we’ll never know for sure.”

  There were other notable Scottish one-shot independents. Edward Bell’s New Pleasures housed Another Pretty Face’s ‘All The Boys Love Carrie’ single (featuring a young Mike Scott) before Virgin came in for the band, whose demos had been financed by Findlay. And while the Associates founded their own label, Double Hip, they were similarly indebted to Bruce’s Records for making the next step possible. “I was working in Bruce’s Records when Billy Mackenzie and Alan Rankine came in with their ‘Boys Keep Swinging’ 7-inch,” recalls Sandy McLean. “We bought twenty-five, but they asked if we could keep the other 300 copies in the shop and come back and get them. No problem. About two weeks later the phone rang, and it was this American guy called Hal Shaper, from Sparta Florida Music. ‘I understand there’s a Scottish band who does one of our songs – we publish David Bowie.’ I said, ‘Yessss.’ ‘Do you know them?’ ‘I know of them.’ ‘Look, they haven’t done anything wrong, I really love the record, I’d like to contact them.’ So I got Alan and Billy to ring the guy up. They went to London and recorded demos and the rest is history.”

  But the first independent Scottish record label of real stature – one in which McLean would also play a role – was Fast Product, run by Bob Last, an Englishman who had dropped out of university in Edinburgh. Fast would become synonymous with three groundbreaking post-punk acts – The Mekons, Gang Of Four and Human League – as well as a sophisticated, and often playful, grasp of graphic design and presentation.

  Last met Jo Callis of The Rezillos while working as tour manager for Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre. Soon he and colleague Tim Pearce had jumped ship to assist the band, eventually becoming their manager. “I dropped out of an architecture course at university, and was working at the Traverse,” recalls Last, “and designed a few shows there. I got to know Jo, and got involved building the Dalek for their stage show. I was kind of roadying for them. We were going round the country and it was a very small scene, and you very rapidly got to encounter all sorts of people. That led to a lot of things.”

  Fast’s identity was immediately and defiantly intellectual, implicitly challenging theories of consumption. In fact, it wasn’t a label per se – merely an outlet for whatever ideas Last hatched. “It was actually started in 1976, as a ‘brand’,” he states, “which I suppose was an act of provocation at that time. I hadn’t decided what I was going to do with it though. I was a fan of movies and interested in the visual side of things, but I was looking for the right thing. I was looking for some kind of communication. My partner at the time, Hillary [Morrison], bought me a copy of ‘Spiral Scratch’, and that was absolutely what crystallised it. OK, this is what we are going to do. It was very specifically that. You were already hearing The Clash and so on, but it was very much ‘Spiral Scratch’.”

  The Mekons, though not native to Leeds, were domiciled there on arts courses. “We opened for The Rezillos at the Ace Of Clubs on Woodhouse Street in October 1977,” Jon Langford recalls, “just a few days after my 20th birthday. We had no intention of making a record. Bob saw us play and asked us to make a single – I don’t think he had a label at the time. I don’t think we knew much about his background, but it was pretty obvious that we were all a bunch of wanky art students.” ‘Never Been In A Riot’ was the result. “Tim [Pearce] found a cottage in the Borders,” says Last. “I can’t even remember who owned it. He borrowed some microphones and a Revox and it was recorded in the living room. It wasn’t a studio at all.”

  ‘Never Been In A Riot’ sounded so dramatically amateurish that when Hillary Morrison took a consignment down to Rough Trade Records, Geoff Travis turned them away. “That’s true,” says Last. “He refused to stock it, because it was so badly put together!” The a-side’s commentary on the punk explosion, in common with so many other totemic independent releases, signalled a rejection of the posturing of its originators. “I really liked The Clash,” Jon Langford would tell Crawdaddy, “but it was a bit… they were already on a major label and playing big shows and it was all a lot of bravado. Half of our songs were really about being in Leeds, not being in a riot. The Clash had the song called ‘White Riot’, which made perfect sense if you were kind of, you know, the cool, white, London punk who wanted to show solidarity with the black kids who were in the Notting Hill Riots, which is what the song is about. It became a ‘Born In The USA’ kind of situation, where it’s a good song, but by the time it made it up the M1 to Leeds, the kids in Leeds were thinking, ‘White riot?’ It sounded like some kind of fascist anthem. Which we thought was kind of a clumsy thing to do perhaps, with the best intentions. After that, we came up with a song called ‘Never Been In A Riot’, which was about us being art students.”

  One of the b-side tracks, ’32 Weeks’, documented the exact labour hours required as exchange for consumer items. The Mekons internal dialogues (demystification, separation) mirrored their label’s concerns; deftly flagged by the archness of its moniker. Product was a functional, non-descript, utilitarian term, especially when given a prefix ‘Fast’ that suggested the throwaway and worthless. Ironic self-reference and absurdity were tenets of post-modernism and Last, well versed in art theory, could hardly have chosen a more aptly duplicitous name for his franchise. Stiff had already shown that a good motto goes a long way in establishing a label’s culture and agenda. Fast opted for “difficult fun” and “mutant pop”.

  “Half the pleasure of a record was buying the marketing; the package,” Last told Brian Hogg, “but because entrepreneurs looked upon this as a necessary evil, all areas of the media were becoming bland. I saw no reason to do that. It was a part of the product, therefore we would get as excited and as interested in the presentation, and make sure that the whole thing relates and makes sense.” Conceptually, The Mekons’ output boasted obvious synergies with Last’s own convictions. “All the son
gs on the first single were performed at the Ace Of Clubs, I think,” notes Langford. “We didn’t have much material and John Keenan, who ran the club, insisted we couldn’t play any slow songs (which was our original plan). I’m sure Bob saw something in us that fitted in with his own plot for Fast Product – parallel thinking methinks.”

  “Obviously there was something smart behind what they were doing,” notes Last, “an uninhibited seizing of the tools of the trade to get their point across, without worrying about acquiring some conventional set of skills. I’ve always been interested in skills, and have respect for skills, but I’m not interested in cultural products that are defined by those skills. I’m only interested in the skill in the service of something interesting. I suppose The Mekons were the absolute extreme example of that, in that they were very smart, had interesting things to say, and almost zero skills (laughs). They were appealing from that point of view. Because we did have this brand, and even before we put anything out there was an image and attitude; we used it to reinforce certain things that I liked that other people were doing.”

  The second artists featured on the label were Sheffield’s 2.3, led by Paul Bower, who’d previously played in Musical Vomit, formed in the mid-70s as an outcrop of the local Meatwhistle youth drama project. Bower established the city’s first punk fanzine, Gun Rubber, co-edited with Adi Newton (later Clock DVA) while working on the bacon counter at Lipton’s. Bower’s attempts at putting 2.3 together were quaint, though somehow fitting for a Fast project – for a while he walked round with a t-shirt advertising ‘drummer wanted’. As well as ‘Fuck The Front’, which got them into hot water with the then resurgent National Front, unrecorded staples from their early sets included ‘I’m So Bored Being Bored About London’. The latter, like ‘Never Been In A Riot’ very much a play on the Clash’s repertoire (in this case ‘London’s Burning’ and ‘I’m So Bored With The USA’), featured the lyric “London’s Burning they all shout/But I wouldn’t even piss on it to put the fire out”.