Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  That year Chumbawamba joined One Little Indian. They had atypical Crass pedigrees, mixing theatrical elements with a diffuse take on music that eschewed the abrasive three-chord logarithms favoured by most of those influenced by Crass. Yet that connection certainly played a part in persuading Chumbawamba to throw their hand in with the label, as Boff recalls. “Yes, it was because of Derek Birkett, ex-Flux. He was (and is) a lovely bloke. He still wanted to do radical stuff despite being in a successful business. Yes, we liked his success outside ‘punk’ – with Björk etc – but really we just trusted his integrity. I think the problem with Derek was, he was an idealist who found himself in a world full of realists. His financial advisors constantly were telling him, no, don’t do that, you’ll go bankrupt, etc. But basically he had this successful independent label which was exciting and interesting and which we felt proud to be part of, for a while. And we thought it connected us, umbilically, to that Crass/Flux anarcho-punk world, but without the grime and cider and punks pissing in their own pants while they lay on the floor at gigs. We thought, this is where the anarchist music thing can go – it can spread and diversify. We’d toured with Björk and Sugarcubes (as K.U.K.L.) and saw where they were taking their musical ideas. We loved dance music. And we thought, let’s get involved with Derek and One Little Indian and see what happens.”

  Other signings during the 90s included Skunk Anansie, led by shaven headed lead singer Skin (Deborah Dyer), who initially scared Birkett half to death, Kitchens Of Distinction, the Sneaker Pimps, Alabama 3 and Rocket From The Crypt. However, it is Björk who remains the label’s crown jewel, channelling Icelandic traditional music, dance rhythms and effervescent pop through one of the late 20th century’s most distinctive vocal prisms. Debut, released in 1993, sold five million copies worldwide (its original break-even budget had been estimated at 25,000 sales). “The extraordinary thing about Björk,” Birkett would confirm to Music Week, “is that she does everything herself. She deals with people directly and she puts 150% of what she has into what she does. And people give a lot more back.” Björk can legitimately be seen as representing the commercial high watermark of the anarcho-punk generation – yet she is an artist of such raw promise, she would doubtless have outgrown whatever musical and social framework originally sustained her. Either way several of her values; notably an ambivalent view of fame and a distrust of music business interlopers, link directly to her past. “When The Sugarcubes insanity took off,” she would tell Valur Gunnarrsson, “I had a one-year-old boy. I decided that if he didn’t like riding on buses, I would abandon music and head for the fish factory. He liked riding on buses.” One Little Indian, similarly, retained much of the original vision of anarcho punk despite scoring enormous chart success. Exactly how much of that vision has been retained has been a subject long debated in puritanical anarcho circles. Though distributed by Virgin/EMI from 1998 (following an earlier deal with London, and a subsequent placing with Pinnacle until its 2008 collapse), One Little Indian has otherwise maintained its independence.

  Away from the anarcho sector, a series of labels of late 70s/early 80s vintage kept an unapologetic flag flying for punk, despite being told at every turn that the zeitgeist had long since decamped and their rosters were artistically meaningless, if not actually remedial. In some cases these oft-overlooked catalogues were guilty as charged; propagating a moribund, intellectually shrivelled version of the punk promise. But the snobbery around the period overlooks both great individual records and also historically important ones.

  One of the many independents to grow out of the retail/collecting fraternity was Alex Howe and Alan Hauser’s Fresh. Hauser was a keen record collector, former mobile DJ and promoter, as well as sometime hippie activist. “One of the things coming out of that scene was that we all tried to become self-sufficient,” he remembers. “So I left my boring accounts clerk job in around 1970. I saved up and travelled. We then tried baking candles and selling joss sticks and electric yo-yo’s and collector’s records and magazines at festivals. I ended up doing mail order records, scraping a living out of that for a few years.” Hauser, still long-haired but indignant at the way hippy culture had sold out its counter-cultural credentials, had the classic Road to Damascus moment when he saw the Sex Pistols play live. “And a few weeks later my hair had been cut off. I met some young guys performing in a punk band, and they were quite alienated from society, as I thought I was, and I thought they were a suitable band to foist on the public. I first heard them rehearsing on a bus. They took great pleasure in being obnoxious, and they went under the name Raped. Incredible characters.”

  After getting them a few gigs as ad hoc manager he eventually formed his own imprint, Parole, with which to promote his discoveries, who caused a deal of controversy beyond their name after releasing an EP indelicately titled ‘Pretty Paedophiles’. “Sean [Purcell; vocalist] and I had been jokily throwing around silly band names,” Hauser says. “One I came out with was Peter And The Paedophiles. A couple of weeks later, Sean on his own decided on the name. I grimaced and tried to say no, but he very, very much insisted on it, and he had all the band backing him up. So I might inadvertently have suggested it to him, but no, the EP title wasn’t my idea.” Hauser put a good deal of his own money into Raped and Parole, which also released singles by The Four Kings and Disturbed, but struggled both with the financial insecurity and the workload. He tried to pitch The Cuddly Toys, as Raped had more prosaically become, to the majors, with little success. With an album in the can, he approached Iain McNay about the possibility of releasing it on Cherry Red, but eventually decided the more natural collaboration was with old friend Alex Howe.

  Howe had been running a stall opposite Ted Carroll’s Rock On in Soho Market since 1978, and had announced he was starting a proper record store, or a glorified pre-fab shed as others disparagingly referred to it. Under the name Wretched, inspired by exactly such derogatory descriptions of the premises, he also started a distribution business with assistance from Rough Trade. “I knew Alex through dealing in ‘collector’s records’,” says Hauser, euphemistically. “He started distribution in early 1979, and we were very aware of Marc Zermati’s Skydog as one of the first indie labels – things like the Flamin’ Groovies’ Grease in 1973, Iggy’s Metallic KO in 1976, even Jimi Hendrix’s Sky High in ’72. Wretched bought a bunch of records from Bizarre Distribution, co-owned by Marc Zermati of Skydog, including imports and hard to find stuff. When ‘Spiral Scratch’ was reissued in ‘79, it was all over the papers, but many shops couldn’t get it. I remember going to Alex’s uncle’s, and he had thousands of copies of ‘Spiral Scratch’ in his front room.” Howe, for his part, had been fielding a number of enquiries from aspirant musicians about the possibility of releasing their material through Wretched. As a consequence the two parties talked about starting a label jointly, Hauser folding his Parole roster (which by now included Family Fodder and The Wall) into a new project, to be titled Fresh.

  Fresh was an umbrella for several roles; that of distribution agent, retail outlet, mail order supplier and eventually a record label, which began in June 1979 with Family Fodder’s ‘Playing Golf (With My Flesh Crawling)’, like many of the first dozen releases, jointly credited to Fresh and Parole. Subsequent releases featured The Dark, The Art Attacks, Second Layer, Bernie Tormé, Cuddly Toys, Wasted Youth and UK Decay. The latter was arguably the most momentous release – helping bridge-build between punk and what would subsequently be termed Goth, via the brief, media-christened ‘positive punk’ movement (they would eventually affiliate with John Loder’s Corpus Christi label). Chron Gen, meanwhile, were at the forefront, alongside the Exploited and Anti-Pasti, of the UK’s third wave of punk – critically derided but collectively a massive seller in the early 80s. It helped the label become an established presence in the independent charts. “It was a time when singles would sell and people weren’t interested in albums,” notes Hauser, “and the industry was in shock because people only wanted to buy one or
two tracks. We didn’t have a team of marketing people, or take out huge adverts. Our expenses were low.”

  Hauser headed the label’s A&R as label manager, with Howe, who owned the company, also putting forward suggestions (among them Manufactured Romance). Day to day operations were conducted in an atmosphere that was “completely chaotic and often hilarious”, with many of the musicians on the roster doubling up as staff. Thus Menace bass player Charlie Casey, Howe’s right-hand man since Soho Market days, oversaw distribution, while Phil Langham of The Dark did telephone sales. “The Dark modelled themselves on Menace,” Hauser recalls, “and Charlie got Phil the job at Fresh [he would later run Anagram Records for Cherry Red].” Graham Combi would join the hub too, responsible for the physical distribution of product to shops. There was a similar level of excitement to that experienced across the board among the independent community at this time. “Suddenly bands were able to make a record and have an outlet,” Hauser acknowledges. “And they were grateful for that. A lot of the artists we’ve dealt with have been interesting characters. Very few have been careerist. We’ve always steered clear of that type of personality. We didn’t have a sound for the label, but we had an attitude.”

  Towards the end of Fresh’s reign, having had to pass on Southern Death Cult because of lack of finances, Hauser was keen to sign Johnny Thunders. “I’d vaguely known [Thunders’ manager] Leee Black Childers, because the Cuddly Toys would gatecrash Jane County’s parties a few years earlier, before he came into Fresh with a Levi Dexter single. Johnny hadn’t been heard of for a couple of years by then, he’d gone back to Detroit and done nothing since So Alone. Punk was history, and the New York Dolls was even further back in history. So it was, ‘I’ve got some tapes, don’t know if anyone’s interested?’ He was talking to Marc Zermati who’d known him since the early days. But Bizarre had gone bust and Skydog was dormant. So we did the deal with Leee in December 1981, but didn’t get to release anything immediately because Marc had the tapes.”

  Meanwhile, Fresh was in its death throes. “Alex had succumbed to all the pressure and excitement and fun that was happening with the label and distribution. There was a bit of a recession on around ’81 and ’82, and a few businesses had gone bust and the sales weren’t what they were. Alex took some time out and came back, and realised he didn’t want to continue any more. It was too stressful and there wasn’t any money there. It was going bust and he didn’t see a way out. That was a difficult time, obviously. John Knight, my school friend old mobile disco partner, had come to stay in my kitchen after his marriage had broken up. He then met Alex, who hired him to run his distribution for a while till they fell out. So when Alex said he was going to give up, myself, John Knight, Graham Combi and Steve Brown [of Red Records and Fresh’s export manager] got together and said, we have to do something with what we’ve got and what we know. And we formed Jungle Records, starting with buying the label off Alex, and talking to various distribution customers.”

  After releasing the Thunders tapes, which initiated both Jungle’s single and album catalogue, the roster rebuilt itself around a clutch of former Fresh artists, such as Play Dead and Family Fodder. Noting the sales potential of the ‘new punk’ phenomenon, now in full flow, bands such as The Adicts, Action Pact and The Enemy were housed on a specialist subsidiary, Fall Out, co-A&R’d by Steve Brown. “It seemed to be a self-defining genre,” says Hauser, “and very much people saying ‘punk’s alive’. We did a great Urban Dogs album too, featuring Knox of The Vibrators and Charlie Harper of the UK Subs [the latter band would also enjoy a long spell with Fall Out]. We were releasing a lot of stuff on Jungle too, but there was a bit of a rush on Fall Out because of the demand. And there were some punk bands on Jungle as well, like Rubella Ballet and Newtown Neurotics and Peter And The Test Tube Babies.”

  Some of the staples of the main Jungle roster included the barely quantifiable Creaming Jesus and A Popular History Of Signs. It was also home to releases by Goth drama junkies Fields Of The Nephilim and American darkwave exponents Christian Death. “I remember Phil Langham dragging me down to see Alien Sex Fiend at the first night of the Bat Cave,” remembers Hauser. “We spent half an hour in the queue, because there was a lift, and it would only take two or three people at a time, and the place was half empty. But gradually it filled up. It grew and grew and was a fantastic club. Many a night I spent there. And the whole Goth scene grew out of that. One of the partners, Steve [Brown], ended up managing Fields Of The Nephilim after we did their first record.”

  Hauser and Combi would also work with artists’ own boutique labels. “Part of the Cartel thing was the evolution of ‘pressing and distribution’ deals,” says Hauser. “Bands would go, ‘Great!’ And so we’d have to do the same for our bands. It was never a very satisfactory arrangement. Things would sell in good quantities back then, so it sometimes worked, but bands really needed the backing of a label.” Vanity publishing? “Oh, yes, it’s a bit of that. It was partly because we came out of being a distributor, because sometimes people brought us records and we’d distribute them.” Industrial conceptualists Test Department had their own dedicated imprint, Ministry Of Power, alongside Conflict’s Mortarhate.

  Later, Mint Records (originally Mint Sauce, while confusingly, a different Mint suffix accompanied each subsequent release) would emerge as Jungle’s most distinctive subsidiary, via its initial brace of signings, Mercury Rev and Mutton Gun. Most of the Mint roster were loosely affiliated to the two core bands. A&R’d by Combi, in the early 90s it saw Jungle, once famously denigrated as a label specialising in ‘the fag end of punk’, come perilously close to being fashionable; Jungle has, to its credit, never been a label particularly troubled by image anxiety. Success on Mint came early with Mercury Rev’s Yerself Is Steam in 1991, which somehow dovetailed with the prevailing effects driven Thames Valley shoegazing culture but added enough combustible derangement, both personal and sonic, to stand apart. Mutton Gun member David Boyd, formerly of Rough Trade, would go on to found Hut Records at Virgin (one of the most successful ‘faux-indies’ of the period), but first introduced the label to Galaxie 500’s Dean Wareham, who was involved in various projects. Mercury Rev’s Jonathan Donohue, meanwhile, helped bring Radial Spangle to the imprint (issued in collaboration with Beggars Banquet), and also appeared with Cellophane, another band from upstate New York, which for a brief period seemed to be the most musically fertile territory on the continent. Later, Spacemen 3’s Sterling Roswell was a further addition to the imprint.

  Still active in the new millennium, Jungle releases thereafter became more sporadic, with a greater concentration on back catalogue; a reflection of both the mounting problems of launching new bands and the effects of a lengthy investment in a Fields Of The Nephilim comeback album. Hauser and Combi are still there, working out of an old school record label office in Chalk Farm, now with a buoyant new label Goldtop (together with the studio now resident in their old vinyl warehouse). New releases include Geraint Watkins as well as Nephilim offshoots NFD and The Eden House. And to bring things almost full circle, they have acquired rights to release the Skydog catalogue.

  There were a number of independent labels that, like Jungle, kept faith with punk, as it became more provincial and less self-referential, and definitively more working class. The first wave of punk bands had signed to CBS, to Virgin, to EMI. But the third wave of the early 80s, with the occasional exception, made such noises as they were capable of on their own labels or distinct independents. The most successful included No Future, Clay, Riot City, Criminal Damage, Razor, ID Records and the reissue specialist, Link.

  No Future was founded in 1981 by Chris Berry and Richard Jones, the latter having served time as Cherry Red’s first A&R scout. Berry, who lived in Malvern, was working for the Ministry of Defence where he met Jones, who initiated him to the punk phenomenon, and the idea of No Future was hatched over a lunchtime chat. An advert was placed in Sounds asking for punk and skinhead demos. “Unfortunately, I gav
e them my home telephone number,” recalls Berry. “So my mother would be fielding calls all day from weird groups before I got home from my day job.” In the first week the advert ran, they were in receipt of 300 cassettes. They found premises in Malvern following their debut with Blitz’s ‘All Out Attack’; which arrived in the post as a finished master. Initially they pressed 1,000 copies, and a local printer made the gatefold sleeve, with rubber-stamped labels. These were piled in the back of Berry’s car, and driven down to Rough Trade. They took the lot. “Simon Edwards rung me up a week later and said, I think you’d better press another 5,000,” recalls Berry. “A week later he said, we need 10,000. It went to number one in the independent charts. Also, at that time, Sounds would print Top 20 sales charts from different shops, so I made one up called Punky Norman’s in Worcester” Blitz topped that chart too, alongside another Malvern punk band No Future had signed, The Samples. The Partisans’ ‘Police Story’ was their second release; the band was so young, Berry and Jones had to arrange a chaperone for bass player Louise Wright at the insistence of her parents before they could commit to any gigs. Their next offering was a sampler drawn from the cassette influx, A Country Fit For Heroes. The cover photo was pinched without permission, based loosely on the Pillows & Prayers model of a cheap compilation and suggested by Jones, his rationale being that lots of the bands that had contacted them had at least one good song. The first pressing of 25,000 sold out almost immediately.