by Alex; Ogg
Jamie Hill remembers the Revolver warehouse, despite the turbulence that it would endure during his time there in the late 80s, as a convivial place to work. “We had a lot of fun working alongside the Cartel boys who had an office next to us, and we were always arguing about what went on the stereo. I remember once I had a massive order to get out of the way, so I got in there really early, about six o’clock. Mike Chadwick was a massive hi-fi buff. He’d just buy the latest stuff. He’d bought this amp and it was like a concrete box. I’d never had it above about two, but that morning, I cranked it up to nine. And within minutes I had the police knocking on the warehouse door.”
The Revolver shop, meanwhile, would become one of the many victims of the redevelopment of Bristol’s city centre in the new millennium, joining a glut of independent retailers to bite the dust as real estate was leased to chains and franchises. It is still widely mourned within the Avon music community, though, as Doughty points out, it wasn’t just creeping mono but also micro-capitalism that did for Revolver. “One of the final nails in my coffin was when one of the Revolver distribution guys bought Tony’s Records [run by Tony Dodd, who initially helped start Heartbeat Records with Simon Edwards]. He’d tried to buy my shop, but went for Tony’s instead and renamed it Imperial. He did OK but it stole the fire from my business. Prior to that Ralph Cumbers [aka electronica artist Bass Clef] had come down from London and set up Replay [the last Bristol independent record shop to close in 2006]. One of my ex-guys went to work for him. Although Bristol’s a big city, it’s only got a limited number of record buyers. I was at the top of a steep hill with no window space. When there was no competition it was fine, when other shops opened, it fell off. I clung on and put more and more money into it, ignoring advice from my accountant, and lost a lot of money. In the end it was the landlord who put the boot in, under the illusion he could re-let easily. About eight years on, it’s still empty! I left behind Banksy’s artwork on the door as well – which I’ll forever regret!” [The Bristolian graffiti artist’s stencil and screen-print work has sold for upwards of £100,000 per item at auction]. I also had John Peel and Cure signatures in the shop from when they visited, but you can’t keep everything.”
Based in the shop founded in York, Red Rhino Records provided the base for The Cartel’s north-east network, and like most of the other constituent members, was a successful label in its own right. Formed by Tony Kostrzewa and Adrian Collins, the label’s first release, under original title Double R Records, was an unremarkable power pop effort by The Odds. The second, by the Akrylykz, featured later Fine Young Cannibals singer Roland Gift. Thereafter the roster varied between experimental post-punk (Mekons, Zoviet France, Hula), punk (Xpozez) and Goth (Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, Skeletal Family, 1919). These were predominantly bands drawn from the label’s immediate Yorkshire vicinity, partially explaining the predisposition towards the latter genre, whose undisputed heartland was Leeds. Red Rhino later issued Pulp’s first recordings while subsidiary imprints included Ediesta and Red Rhino Europe (based in Belgium and distributed by Play It Again Sam Records), which saw releases by Front 242 and The Butthole Surfers.
Kostrzewa, an ex-Mod, was twenty seven when he started the shop, having spent time in London in shipping and accounts, concurrently helping later Throbbing Gristle member Chris Carter run the Orpheus Lites psychedelic light show. He moved to Norwich in 1973, where girlfriend and later wife Gerri had embarked on studies at the University of East Anglia. While there he befriended Robin Watson, proprietor of local independent record shop Robin’s Records. That in turn inspired the idea of Red Rhino, established in York’s Gillygate in June 1977.
Robert Worby became involved with Red Rhino via his band, The Distributors. “We’d released our first single on our own label,” he recalls, “and we needed to get it distributed. Red Rhino had just started their distribution system, and it was Adrian Collins who did that. He had the idea of buying a van, putting shelves in it, and driving around the north east, as far as Durham, Newcastle, Hull, Selby etc, distributing DIY punk singles. We took in a box of our single and Red Rhino sold a few for us. They were interested in us, and we were having some success; Peel sessions, lots of gigs etc. We recorded our second single at Easy Street Studios, in East London, ‘Lean On Me’ (RED 5). I had the idea that instead of pressing it ourselves, we’d try to get a record deal. I took the tape into Red Rhino and Adrian and Tony Kostrzewa listened to it and ended up releasing it.”
Worby had an interest in production, having worked with local Wakefield act Strangeways. “They were signed to Real Records, which was Dave Hill, who was managing The Pretenders. I produced some demos and they liked what I did, so I ended up working with [Strangeways singer] Ada Wilson. I’d composed electronic music before; I knew about musique concrète, where to put microphones, editing, how compressors and EQ worked. I had ideas about modifying instruments. I made a single with Ada, ‘In The Quiet Of My Room’. I put drawing pins in the piano hammers on that. I’d taken 25 copies of Ada’s single to Rough Trade and met Geoff Travis – it had been single of the week in Sounds and the records were all in a box under Ada’s bed in Wakefield! Rough Trade didn’t know where to get them. So I took down twenty-five and they said, ‘We want two hundred!’ We didn’t know how you did things. We were just making it up.” Because of his production skills, Kostrzewa invited Worby into the Red Rhino fold. “Tony asked me to help out at Red Rhino. I became the in-house producer, working with all kinds of bands. I spent weeks in a studio in a village called Pity Me, near Durham, where ‘Nellie The Elephant’ was recorded [which became Red Rhino Distribution’s biggest success when it sold half a million copies in 1984]. I became interested in how the label worked too – and I thought, they’re not selling enough records. But while all this was going on, Tony and Adrian had a big bust up and fell out. Adrian left Rhino, but I stayed, because there were opportunities there.”
Worby saw Kostrzewa at close quarters. “He trained as an accountant. He was a second generation Polish immigrant [his father was Polish, his mother from Yorkshire], and his parents put a lot of pressure on him to do well; to be a doctor or a solicitor or an accountant. And he hated the name Kostrzewa; he hated that Polish connection. He always called himself Tony K. His name is actually Julian Anthony Kostrzewa. In those days, if you were a sole trader, it was a legal requirement that you needed your name on your headed notepaper. So it would say, ‘Red Rhino Records’, then at the bottom, ‘Sole Proprietor JA Kostrzewa’, in the smallest font you’ve ever seen. He hated having to do that.”
“Tony was basically a shopkeeper,” Worby continues, “he had a shopkeeper mentality. Adrian didn’t come from that background and was much more adventurous. But the label was funded by the distribution business, and that was doing extraordinarily well. And the retail business was doing well too; it was a very good record shop. People would travel from places like Leeds to go there. The so-called warehouse was in the back room, racked out with loads of records. It was tiny. I used to do promotion and plug their records – they didn’t know how to do that. ‘You simply go down to Radio One and give one to John Peel.’ Tony just expected things to sell by word of mouth. He was: ‘Sell the record, get the money.’ Give records away? He wasn’t keen on that, or PR work at all. I gradually built that up. I knew we had to get the records played in Europe. Bands like Hula were touring in Holland and Germany, and we had to find distribution companies abroad. So we hooked up with [exporters] Cargo.”
Working from home, due to the lack of space at the shop, Worby would check in each Monday. “After close of business I’d go upstairs to their flat, talk to Tony and his wife Gerri, and we’d make plans. They’d cook a meal then we’d go down the boozer. And bands would come over, like Hula or Red Lorry Yellow Lorry. The other thing I did was say to Tony, ‘You need a publishing company. There’s money to be made on publishing.’ He came up with the name Screaming Red Music.” In the immediate aftermath of Collins’ departure, Kostrzewa’s A&R skills
were shaky. “Tony signed a load of really crap bands,” says Worby. “He signed a Newcastle poet called Nod who made a record called ‘Dad’ – awful. There was another guy called Steve Dixon, a journalist for ID magazine who lived in York; a bit of a ducker and diver. And he persuaded Tony to put a record out [‘Candy Blues’]. Tony was easily persuaded – he was a nice guy. Steve said, ‘I work at ID, I know everyone at NME, blah blah.’ Tony said, ‘You’ve got to work with Robert, he’ll produce it.’ Steve couldn’t play, couldn’t sing, nothing!”
After his departure from Red Rhino Adrian Collins became a rep for a major record company. “Then Adrian wanted to start a record label; he’d got some money from somewhere,” remembers Worby. “He asked me if I’d join him and become a partner. But he’d had this huge bust up with Tony Kostrzewa, so I knew if I went with Adrian, Tony would throw me out. Adrian also wanted to get Jon Langford involved, because The Mekons had taken their second album, Devils, Rats and Piggies to Red Rhino, after they’d been kicked off Virgin.”
That new label, CNT, also based in York and run by Collins, Worby and Langford from November 1981 onwards, took its name from the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (an umbrella organisation of Spanish anarcho-syndicalist labour unions). It would release records by The Three Johns and Mekons, both featuring Langford, as well as The Sisters Of Mercy’s second single and the first recordings by The Redskins (originally formed as No Swastikas in York), whose unique hybrid of Motown and punk was filtered through a strident Socialist perspective. Singer Chris Dean employed the vernacular of class struggle and solidarity (‘Unionize’, ‘Lean On Me’) and the phrasing of a soul singer in an attempt to reconcile Lev Bronstein (birth name of Leon Trotsky and title of their debut single) with Levi Stubbs. Dean would later assume the identity of writer X. Moore, becoming, as characterised by Langford, “The NME’s SWP bogey man”.
Langford had already enjoyed a crash course in the music industry. The Mekons had made their debut on Bob Last’s Fast Product then, perplexingly, signed a contract with Virgin Records, recording an album at The Manor, with all the expense that entailed. It wasn’t ever going to be a lasting relationship, as Langford confirms. “I think it was a big low point for The Mekons. We floundered and flopped about uselessly on Virgin. The only thing that was any good was the ‘Teeth’ EP, which we recorded and produced ourselves up north. Then they dropped us.” Red Rhino was Langford’s next port of call. “They did the second album, mainly cos Adrian Collins worked there, and had really great ears, taste, vision, etc. Adrian introduced me to Robert [Worby] while he was still living in Wakefield. We formed CNT when Tony K fired Adrian from Red Rhino. I really loved working with both of them on CNT, and if it wasn’t for the hostile intentions of Red Rhino, CNT would have done a lot better.”
Harlow’s Newtown Neurotics were also politically minded, mining a deft punk-pop derivative in opposition to the prevailing glue-sniffing blues ethos of the third wave of punk. “It was 1981,” remembers vocalist Steve Drewett, “three years after Margaret Thatcher came to power and I had written ‘Kick Out The Tories’ very quickly to play on an imminent Right to Work march. Afterwards, I decided to demo it and the recording was later included on a cassette compilation. One day, Adrian at CNT asked me to send him a copy after reading a rave review of the track in the music press. CNT had an eclectic roster of acts but records by The Three Johns, The Redskins and ourselves seemed less like single releases in the traditional sense, and more like pieces of broken pavement levered up from the floor and hurled at the government. When I signed with them for ‘Kick Out The Tories’, the contract impressed me. This legally bound document had a banner design at the top depicting Spanish anarchist anti-fascists manning barricades. I realised that with Jon Langford’s fantastic graphic design and the attitude of the label this was exactly where I wanted our music to be, with CNT. I wear those three letters with pride, still emblazoned on my guitar to this day. CNT Hujos Del Pueblo A Las Barricadas en discos!”
Elsewhere on the label, Dutch squat anarchists The Ex were analogous to a lowlands Crass. Carlton B, Morgan, a civil servant who wrote for Leeds fanzine Attack On Bzag, edited by future NME editor and Loaded/laddism inventor in chief James Brown, was a strange hybrid of dub and Beefheart. His ‘Shave The Ayatollah’ was, however, outshone for pure weirdness by Vicky Talbot’s ‘Don’t Get Fooled Again’, which featured a young girl singing
The Who standard, badly, to Stylophone accompaniment. The comparisons between Fast and CNT are obvious; they both managed a similar amount of ‘catalogue’, were highly critically regarded and capable of wilful commercial sabotage (in the Vicky Talbot release there are distinct echoes of The Stupid Babies’ ‘Baby Sitters’ Earcom appearance). “I don’t think we thought about the Fast Product model much,” suggests Langford. “We just wanted to get good bands out on vinyl and Adrian really had his ears to the ground – great, long, dangling ears. Adrian was the leader and rightly so – I am useless at any form of label management and brought a lot of stuff that sold zero, although the Three Johns and Mekons did some of their best stuff for CNT, I think. I helped mix stuff, did artwork, worked with the bands, even joined the Sisters Of Mercy for a month or so in 1981.”
While many of the bands on CNT were avowedly socialist, they had to appeal to at least one of the partners musically. “We were all big lefties,” admits Langford, “and while Adrian was disillusioned SWP [Socialist Workers Party], I was fairly unaligned and Rob was a big old post-structuralist commie. Those were the bands we came across. The Sisters were pals and fairly non-political on most levels, Carlton B. Morgan was a Satanist.” Even so, he admits the gang of three “used to like going to the corner cafe in Chapeltown to plot the overthrow of the government and major labels and bitch about Tony K at Red Rhino.” For Worby, music and politics were related factors. “It was both.” Commercial considerations, however, weren’t that high on anyone’s agenda. “Adrian was really exceptional,” says Langford, “and me and Worby helped to foil many of his better ideas by refusing Prefab Sprout, New Model Army and others in favour of non-commercial projects that tickled us.” Worby well remembers Adrian Collins’ enthusiasm for Prefab Sprout being dashed. “Jon and I said, ‘Nah, it’s crap, sounds like the Beatles.’”
Worby’s engagement in the enterprise, however, had to be conducted under a cloak of secrecy. “It was, ‘I’ll work with you guys, but Tony must never find out!’ So I had the pseudonym Colin Stewart, who’s still a fictional character in the Mekons! I began to work with Adrian, and one of the first things I did was the Sisters of Mercy single, ‘Body Electric’, which we recorded at KGM Studios, an eight-track in Bridlington, round the back of the Conservative Club. It was immediately single of the week in Melody Maker. Andy [Andrew Eldridge] wasn’t pleased with the production, even though it was successful, and I didn’t work with them again. I did actually tell Tony that I’d produced that single, and he said ‘I don’t want to talk about it’. He was pissed off that it was single of the week. I think Tony suspected I was involved with Adrian, but he never really said anything. Then I formed Low Noise Music, the CNT publishing company. So I had a dual career, working with Tony and with Adrian. I also did the sound for the Mekons, and played with them.”
While Worby continued his association with Red Rhino, there were frustrations. “In 1984, a friend of mine moved to New York. I went to see him for the whole of that September. I realised my English accent opened doors. I went to see Ruth Polsky at Danceteria. She had booked the Mekons and Gang of Four for their new year’s party the previous year. And they’d got so drunk, they were basically sent home – they lost their passports, guitars, everything. But Ruth was interested in booking British bands, and she’d heard about Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, Mekons, Three Johns and Sisters of Mercy. She told me about a guy called Peter Wright who worked at Dutch East India. I went to his apartment and persuaded him to start plugging Red Rhino artists, with a view to touring them there. ‘What do you need to sell records t
o a small record shop in Indiana?’ I wrote it all down on a notebook – I’ve still got my notes. I went to see Tony one Monday night, and I talked him through what they needed. Tony was keen, but he was going to have to give away hundreds of records and he would have to pay Peter Wright to plug them. He came round to the idea eventually, So I’d send Peter the records, and he’d send them out to college radio stations. I even wrote little one-liners for the telephone sales people. I think Tony thought immediately we would sell 10,000 records rather than 3,000 – but those things take time. And he went very cool about it all. I found it frustrating, I’d done all this work, running up a huge transatlantic phone bill setting it up, but he was always holding back.”
Nevertheless, Red Rhino’s American invasion was at least a partial success. “The first band Ruth Polsky booked was the Sisters of Mercy,” Worby recalls. “They were very successful. We’d got the first CNT single out, which Andy used as PR material to sign a deal with Warners for Merciful Release. He’d insisted that, although the record was on CNT, it was also a ‘Merciful Release’ single. I said to Tony, ‘That’s how you do it!’ So in 1985, the following year, we went to New York’s New Music Seminar. I persuaded Ruth to book Red Lorry Yellow Lorry for two gigs, one in Boston, one in New York. I said to Tony, ‘We need to do massive PR on this, 500 records given away.’ Tony wasn’t going to do that. Red Lorry Yellow Lorry did a really good gig at the Seminar. Tony paid for me to go, and he had a stall there – that shopkeeper mentality again! But he wasn’t really doing what was necessary. What was really big in those days was mailing lists. I’d go to people like Scott Piering [famed Rough Trade plugger]. Scott very generously gave me a mailing list – they were like gold dust. Peter Wright made me a mailing list in America. And I copied those, and sent records out to radio shows all over the US and Australia. Tony would say, ‘Why are you sending records to Australia? We don’t sell any there.’ Well, you won’t if it’s not on the radio!”