Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  The negotiating committee voted to accept Pinnacle’s offer. It was a principled stand in the circumstances, meaning less guaranteed money in the pot, but one that had pragmatic elements – the new company would remain independent, and its output would not lose priority, as many suspected would happen, to PolyGram’s core releases. Also, Mason, though widely derided for his open advocacy of Thatcherism, had established a reputation for paying invoices on the nail. That was something everyone in the independent sector would welcome. The fact that Pinnacle had helped make Pete Waterman’s PWL the most successful UK independent label of them all via the chart fluff of Kylie and Jason and other monstrosities was less roundly applauded.

  On 31 May 1991 Rough Trade Distribution ceased trading, and RTM took the reins the following week. But it was to be a false dawn, any salvage operation becoming a non-starter once Rough Trade America collapsed. “We stayed afloat while we tried to find buyers for the company,” recalls Hurley. “We were very close to Warners in America, through Seymour Stein, but they wanted 51% of the company. Rather stupidly at that point we dug our heels in and offered them 49%. That was the deal-breaker. With the benefit of hindsight, it was a crazy point of principle given what we ended up with.”

  By September Pinnacle had acquired Rough Trade’s German operation and had, definitively, triumphed over its one-time distribution adversary. The publishing arm was purchased by Iain McNay’s Complete Music after an abortive attempt by Cathi Gibson and Pete Walmsley to retain it. Some of the vernacular of business foreclosure was adapted, almost inevitably given the nature of the suffering parties, into the title of an album to raise funds, released by Beechwood. A Historical Debt featured royalty-free contributions from Erasure and Depeche Mode (Mute), The Shamen (One Little Indian), Charlatans (Beggars), M/A/R/R/S (4AD) in addition to Rough Trade staples such as Scritti Politti, Television Personalities and Robert Wyatt.

  One of the medium-sized labels to bear the brunt of the RTD collapse wished only to speak off record. He remembers the day when Kimpton-Howe first took office. “He reckoned he saw the Grim Reaper walk past the window as soon as he sat behind the desk.” The same source later met, completely by chance, a member of KPMG at an unrelated party during the negotiations. He doesn’t retain a favourable impression after said accountant drunkenly boasted that he ‘controlled the future of independent music in the UK’ as if it were some prize truffle. As he further concludes, for all the good intentions behind the negotiating committee, the commitment to historical debt and sundry well-intentioned efforts such as compilation albums, “the whole ‘you get such and such per cent of what’s left over’ is crap. You’ve got to pay lawyers, jump through hoops and do a ton of paperwork before you get anywhere near it. In the end, there’s sod all left and it’s just not worth bothering with.” The effect on independent music’s infrastructure was calamitous. Many labels disappeared. Some, like Cooking Vinyl, just about survived, though it took Martin Goldschmidt five years to regain the label’s equilibrium, and in the process he lost his partner Pete Lawrence and for a short time the label was a ‘paper’ bankrupt.

  One of those labels in a particularly invidious position was Bill Drummond’s KLF Foundation. “Jimmy Cauty and myself were down £300,000,” he says. “Because the label was owned by us, and we were the only act on the label, we had nothing else. We’d just had a major hit single, and we’d no idea if we’d have another. Bang. And we’d incurred a ton of costs. All the recording costs, having PR, all of that. And they’ve gone down and we’re owed £300,000. If that single hadn’t taken off in other territories we’d have been completely and utterly fucked. Everybody was anxious, but we had nothing else in the pipeline. Daniel Miller could go off and knows he’s still got Depeche Mode and Erasure or whatever. At the end of the day, there was nothing to be had back. Even now, when I hear the name KPMG on the news representing huge clients, a shiver goes up my spine. If a company goes down a company goes down. They’d be smooth-talking but, actually, there was nothing left.”

  Richard Scott fiercely counters claims that it was distribution that pulled the company down. “It’s a total misconception. I remember meeting the auditor a few years after Rough Trade had gone down, and he said what KPMG found was that Rough Trade Group needed about £2 million to survive. And that was, incidentally, KPMG’s bill! (LAUGHS). What broke down was the fact that there was no management. As I’ve said, Richard Powell is a seriously misunderstood character in this story, but he’d gone. Simon Edwards had gone and so forth. And Geoff and Will Keene just didn’t get on. It was just too big. It had been overtaken by the marketplace; CDs started to come in and the writing was on the wall. Rough Trade Distribution did not cause the collapse. I have the accounts here. It’s just untrue. Even at the end, the distribution side had enough labels and enough business to be wholly healthy.”

  For Scott, the demise is related to the decision to take the label in what he views as a mainstream, chart-focused direction. “For me, it peaked in terms of interest and excitement in the early 80s. Rough Trade was at its height from 1978 to 1983 or 1984. It sold more and more from that point, but it moved more into the mainstream. Therefore its status as a DIY access structure had changed, but then the music industry had changed. It lost its aspiration. Geoff became too involved in trying to emulate others in terms of chart success. If you think of all the early Rough Trade bands, they didn’t sell in the quantities that someone like Joy Division or Depeche Mode or Cocteau Twins did. But we were excitingly varied. When the Smiths came along that was it. I never liked the Smiths. I didn’t find them musically interesting.”

  “I can’t say I was standing there rubbing my hands with glee when [the collapse] happened,” reflects former Cartel employee Sean Mayo, “but equally, I can’t say I was surprised. A lot of people were rubbing their hands with glee. No-one wants to see people lose their job, but what had happened was the antithesis of what Rough Trade and the Cartel started out as and what we wanted it to be.”

  And if the knock-on effect on artists, labels, manufacturers and everyone else involved in the micro-economy of independent music was chilling, the pain was shared closer to home. “I didn’t have a job any more!” notes Boon. “There were some people who wanted to try to keep The Catalogue going. Bill Gilliam from Alternative Tentacles tried financing something called The Independent Catalogue, which was edited by Jenny Lewis, which didn’t last very long. It didn’t get very much support from labels or distributors, because it was all reeling.”

  It might be a stretch, but it’s hard not to parallel the Cartel revolution and collapse with the failure of the left in the 80s. “Yes, the end of Old Labour!” laughs Richard Scott. “That would be an interesting thesis! And one I would personally subscribe to. But I can hear a lot of people laughing at it, too In the end it was all a bit more complex than a left-right thing. There were huge changes going on in society, and in the music industry and media. The Cartel sales structure – if you add in all the labels and all the people in the regions and all the bands, it touched thousands and thousands of people.”

  But did it feel like the end of the dream? “Yes,” admits Richard Boon, “I think it did.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  For How Much Longer?

  They Also Served

  Birmingham’s foremost independent label of the era was Dave Virr’s Graduate Records, almost singularly notable for the monumental chart success it achieved with local reggae act UB40. Graduate started in 1969 as a record shop in Dudley, with Virr expanding the franchise around the Midlands until it eventually encompassed six outlets. He would also work as a manager and disc jockey, under which guise he first encountered UB40. Yet another retailer to decide, on listening to the outpouring of new records on John Peel, that there was no reason why he shouldn’t start a sideline to his principal business, he did so in 1979. His initial five releases – including such forgotten names as Eazie Ryder, Venigmas, Last Gang, Circles and Mean Street Dealers – flopped miserably. Bu
t in January 1980 he signed UB40 and released their debut double a-side single, ‘King’ c/w ‘Food For Thought’, which peaked at number four in the national charts. Two further Top Ten hits followed, while the attendant album, Signing Off, which followed in August, would achieve platinum sales.

  This was unprecedented success for an independent label of the time. However, to an extent, Graduate was isolated from the ‘indie’ discourse due to the nature of UB40’s music, and the (mostly stupid) accusations that it amounted to a watering down of Jamaican reggae and was therefore ‘inauthentic’. UB40 would quickly move on to Virgin (via their DEP International subsidiary), but Virr had made his money back, and then some. More importantly, the realisation that an independent record could be such a consistent seller (Signing Off stayed in the charts for a year) was an important psychological boost acknowledged by several ‘cooler’ independents.

  Nothing else on the Graduate imprint would come close to emulating that level of success (The Sussed’s ‘I’ve Got My Parka’, the immediate follow-up to UB40’s debut single, being a particular embarrassment). Their next best bet was Brighton’s Chefs, whom they courted in two separate incarnations. “We signed to Graduate for a ridiculously small advance,” remembers singer Helen McCookerybook, “and they didn’t know what to do with us. At one stage one of their guys helpfully suggested that I should wear make-up all the time.” Virr had come to see them play in a church hall in his new BMW to conclude the deal (nearly accidentally totalled by the group’s van), which resulted in the wonderful ‘24 Hours’, licensed from The Chefs’ original Brighton label Attrix. Renamed Skat (“a stupid idea”) the band also released a version of ‘Femme Fatale’, which wasn’t quite so good. An entire album remains unreleased after the group ran out of steam. Virr would have some success, however, with a subsidiary imprint. The Maisonettes’ ‘Heartache Avenue’ emerged on Ready, Steady, Go!, providing Virr with one further Top Ten hit. Thereafter he worked as a consultant to the music industry, as well as artist manager (clients including original Beatles drummer, Pete Best). He passed away in December 2006, with the business continuing under the stewardship of wife Tina.

  Newcastle’s indie lynchpins were Kitchenware Records, though their various entanglements with majors disqualify them from being viewed as a ‘true’ independent. The label was established in 1982 as the ‘recording wing’ of The Soul Kitchen, a club night that had successfully booked gigs by The Fire Engines, Aztec Camera and New Order – with film shows or photo exhibitions in place of a conventional support act. Founded by Keith Armstrong, manager of the city’s HMV store, alongside Paul Ludford and Phil Mitchell, Kitchenware’s first release was the compilation video cassette, A One Way Ticket To Palookaville. More conventional vinyl offerings followed in 1983 from Hurrah! and the Daintees, before they reissued Prefab Sprout’s ‘Lions In My Own Garden, Exit Someone’ in April, originally released on the band’s own Candle label a year previously.

  Announcing the talents of songwriter Paddy McAloon, Prefab Sprout dominated the subsequent release schedule as Kitchenware licensed the recordings to CBS, alongside records by the Daintees (this time with Martin Stephenson given lead billing), Kane Gang (licensed to London) and Hurrah! By 1988 the roster had swelled to encompass Cathal Coughlan’s Fatima Mansions. “Kitchenware worked with many majors then, and also with what was then Red Rhino as an indie distributor,” Coughlan recalls. “Their formal affiliation with Sony is a much more recent thing. They literally tried all angles from when they took me on in ‘88. The best period was when the Mansions records were just coming out through the indie network, and we were playing to people with a persistence which [his former band] Microdisney never quite managed.” More recently, the label has secured great success with The Editors.

  Pre-eminent in Brighton were Attrix Records, formed out of Rick Blair’s shop of the same name in Sydney Street. Its first release, ‘Hard Times’ c/w ‘Lost Lenore’, boasted a possibly unique brand synergy (Attrix the shop, the label, the group). As well as introducing the aforementioned Chefs and Piranhas (latterly the most successful band on the Brighton scene) and the sadly overlooked Birds With Ears and Dodgems, Attrix would add an inch or two to the growing pile of inspiring regional compilations in circulation around the turn of the decade. In this case it ran to a series of three volumes, documenting a fertile local punk scene based around The Vault rehearsal rooms and Alhambra pub in the form of Vaultage ’78, ’79 and ’80. At least two of which were wonderful. Blair passed away in May 1999.

  Y Records was founded in Bristol in 1980 by former Stranglers and then current Slits and Pop Group manager Dick O’Dell. The label’s name was retrieved from the latter’s debut album for Andrew Lauder and Jake Riviera’s Radar, with whom they’d severed ties by the end of 1979 after learning of parent company Warners’ links with arms manufacturer Kinney Corporation. In terms of eating capitalism from the inside, they did manage to leave Radar £40,000 in the red on their investment, according to some accounts effectively killing the enterprise. Y was established with backing from Rough Trade, its releases jointly catalogued. The ‘Where There’s A Will There’s A Way’/ ‘In The Beginning There Was Rhythm’ split-single, shared between The Pop Group and The Slits, announced its investiture. Thereafter it remained squarely focused on spin-offs from the same musical gene pool, including Pigbag, Rip Rig And Panic, Maximum Joy, Glaxo Babies and Scream And Dance. As Phil Johnson noted in his book Straight Outta Bristol, these all “tended to call on the same revolving troupe of personnel. Where Pigbag were into Afro-funk and James Brown horn riffs, Rip Rig and Panic were named after a Roland Kirk album and flirted with free jazz and avant-garde sloganeering. Rip Rig and Panic also featured the young Neneh Cherry (and at one point her step-dad Don Cherry, the former Ornette Coleman Quartet trumpeter), who had also recorded with Mark Stewart and Ari Up of the Slits as the New Age Steppers on Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound label.”

  In May 1981 Y enjoyed one of the biggest independent hits of the era with the release of Pigbag’s ‘Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag’, an infectious tribute to James Brown’s similarly titled rump-shaker. It would stay in the independent charts for some 70 weeks. Us Corporation, as Pigbag were originally titled, had landed their first gig supporting The Slits at Romeo And Juliet’s in Bristol, playing a 20-minute version of the song, written by Simon Underwood, whom the band had persuaded to join after his exit from The Pop Group. The following day O’Dell had them record it for Y, prompting them to adopt the name Pigbag as a tribute to clarinettist and percussionist Chris Hamlin’s dog-eared cloth bag, which featured a silk-screened warthog. The breakthrough led to a licensing deal with Stiff America and hectic touring. However, the group would decline an initial offer of a Top Of The Pops appearance due to the BBC’s proviso that the song be edited down (they did relent on their stance when it was re-released in April 1982 and sped to number three in the national charts). Hamlin left the group immediately after the song’s initial success, however, citing ‘too many egos’ in the band, leading to legal disputes over authorship and royalties. Even in principled independent circles, where there’s a hit, there’s a writ.

  O’Dell would use the breakthrough to sponsor several new and ostensibly left field acts, notably Greek-born opera singer/”scat valkyrie” Diamanda Galas’s extraordinary debut Litanies Of Satan. It comprised just two tracks; the title-song and the impressively titled ‘Wild Women With Steak Knives (The Homicidal Love Song For Solo Scream)’. “‘Wild Women With Steak Knives’ is the nightmare of the killer who has murdered her husband and is escaping from the police,” Galas explains, “running through red lights on crystal meth, hearing the cop cars chase her into the brick wall which looms unseen, but assuredly, ahead.”

  Neither this, however, nor other releases by acts including The Promenaders (featuring avant garde musicians such as David Toop and Steve Beresford), the all-female, nine-member Pulsallama, nor the hip hop of Fearless Four and a rightfully revered Sun Ra 12-inch, managed to secure th
e label’s future. Shriekback probably came the closest to repeating Pigbag’s success, though they would leave Y for Arista in 1984 after disagreements with O’Dell. The label eventually collapsed, its catalogue acquired by Kaz Records (part of Castle Communications). Later O’Dell would found the progressive house label Guerilla in the 90s, home to artists including Leftfield and Spooky. He currently manages Bat For Lashes.

  Two other Bristol labels of the period deserve mention; Fried Egg and Wavelength. The former may be unique among British independent labels of the era in that its origins were essentially theatrical. Andy Leighton, music publisher of The Rocky Horror Show and formerly guitarist and administrator of the Crystal Theatre, founded the imprint in 1979. The label initially served as an outlet for Shoes For Industry, who featured four Crystal Theatre musicians (one of whom, Tim Norfolk, would subsequently form Startled Insects; whose production credits span Goldfrapp, Massive Attack and Madonna, as well as numerous BBC soundtracks). Vocalist and saxophonist Paul Bassett Davies, meanwhile, writes regularly for TV and radio, and in 2005, with Leighton as his co-producer, scripted the animated feature film revival of The Magic Roundabout.

  The Fried Egg roster included several gems but defied ready classification; resembling a smaller scale, and more vaudeville Stiff. They even organised a Be Limp tour (a fairly obvious play on that label’s branding). “Stiff were a huge influence,” admits Leighton. “Once McLaren had exposed the major record companies for the perennial ignorant buffoons they are most of the time, Riviera and Robinson wrote the book for aspiring indie labels. A good friend of mine at the time, Joly [MacFie] of Better Badges, purveyor of fine badges and fanzines, was always close to the epicentre of the Stiff/Rough Trade axis, so I had a fairly good insight into the workings of the indie scene at the time. The Be Limp tour came out of the Bristol University Students Union’s president and social secretary’s initiative involving mainly Fried Egg and Wavelength Records-signed Bristol bands. Ex-president Martin Elbourne is now booker for Glastonbury Festival and the ex-secretary Dave Cohen writes for Have I Got News For You.” Others on the roster included The Stingrays, who had graduated from Heartbeat and whose drummer Sean McLusky would later become an infamous London music promoter Various Artists scored a cult hit with ‘Original Mixed Up Kid’ while Southampton art students The Exploding Seagulls became Peel favourites. The Art Objects (who effectively became The Blue Aeroplanes), meanwhile, billed themselves as ‘the world’s only poetry dance band’. Fried Egg’s ‘most likely to’ candidates, Electric Guitars, would, ironically, transfer to Stiff. The 1981 compilation album Egg-Clectic amply highlighted the bizarre nature of the label’s wares.