by Alex; Ogg
Christie’s defection from a major to a scratch independent, starting in 1981, offered a degree of culture shock. “You come down with a thump. The first thing you realise is that you’re financing everything. Every £100 is a lot of money when you’re trying to put a record together. The first record was a band from Edinburgh, FK9 [‘Our Condition’]. We sold about 200 copies and I lost about £1,500. That was my savings, redundancy money and bits and pieces. Expense counts when you’re doing it on your own. If it doesn’t work, you’re in trouble. Suddenly I was having to talk to people at Sounds and Melody Maker and NME, and trying to get hold of John Peel, who was never in my orbit before. It was a total re-education and quite terrifying. Later, when John Peel gave us some support, my wife would say, ‘Why have you got the radio on at midnight in the bedroom?’ ‘I’m listening to see if John Peel is going to play The Three Johns.’ With a major company, I wasn’t that bothered – Abba was going to get played [regardless]. But with your own record, every little thing counts. You’re excited at getting a review or even a press release published. It was absolutely personal. At times you’d get angry when people slagged off the record or the label.”
A “big saviour” came when Christie packaged Punk And Disorderly, a 16-track 1981 compilation of emerging new punk bands, which reached number three in the independent charts. But Abstract’s catalogue never really settled on a specific genre, its earliest realistic hopes for a breakthrough revolving around all-female punk trio The Gymslips. “The Gymslips I have bittersweet memories of,” reflects Christie. “We put a lot of effort into them, and they were just starting to break through when they got a new manager. The new manager put ideas into their heads, and they wouldn’t do the next album with me. I decided to back off. I was going to put everything into doing it.” Instead, Christie continued on his course, releasing material by The UK Subs (whom he’d first signed to Gem after catching them at The Roxy) and 1919 before alighting on the two bands that, more than any others, would define the label’s image, New Model Army and The Three Johns. The former were belligerent, antediluvian moralists, the latter just as politicised but wont to throw in a cover of Madonna’s ‘Like A Virgin’ for diversion. It led to the perception that Abstract was a northern label, when in reality, it was based in Kempe Road in north west London.
“There are some A&R people on some labels where they’ve just loved music and they’ve had a whole style and a way of doing it – things like Mute and 4AD,” Christie surmises. “My musical interest was quite varied. I put all sorts of things out; heavy rock, indie-rock, dancey stuff. There’s no question when you sign something, you’re looking at potential sales. It wasn’t a hobby or luxury where you could put out something that you loved but it flopped. I needed to sell records, to get promotion, to get some success at some level so I could do the next record. Every record counted. The Three Johns was one of my proudest moments. Three fantastic blokes, and they delivered fantastic records. We had some bad luck when one of the singles, ‘Death Of A European’, got a lot of daytime airplay. And then of course, we had the Heysel football disaster. I think they wrote some brilliant stuff and it was commercial; we should have been able to cross that over.”
The Three Johns also brought Christie into the orbit of Alan McGee. “I remember Alan ringing me up, asking me to bring the Three Johns to play at the Three Johns pub in Islington. It was kind of a joke. We’d go down, and Jesus and Mary Chain were supporting them. Alan said, do you want to do anything together? Probably one of the biggest mistakes I made was to turn him down, but his costings were completely out of my league.”
The label’s biggest selling album was New Model Army’s Vengeance. “There were a number of punk poets around, and I’d heard about Joolz [singer Justin Sullivan’s romantic partner, who painted New Model Army’s artwork and would also record for Abstract]. I found out Joolz was managed by a guy called Nigel Morton, who’d managed the VIPs, whom we’d had a hit with on Gem. I rang Nigel and asked if he had a contract. And he was also co-managing New Model Army. He said, ‘I’ve got this other band, do you want to come see them?’ I saw them in Brixton with Nico and signed them. They were very successful and a great bunch of guys. OK, Justin was quite strong-willed and the rest of it, but I like that in an artist. We put the album out and it went to number 48 in the national chart. It was number one in the indie chart, and stayed in the indie charts for 70 weeks. I was very proud of doing that.”
That the band moved to a larger label seemed inevitable, though Christie remains philosophical. “Hugh Stanley-Clarke, who worked for me at Gem Records as a junior scout, was at EMI and wanted to sign New Model Army. It just made sense. I got some money from it when they bought out the rest of my contract. In many ways it was beneficial. EMI, to give them their due, put a lot of money into them. If they had an album out, you knew about it, there were posters and flyers everywhere. It just kept Vengeance selling all the time. So rather than having a hit and going away, I had a steady trickle of business and income, and so did the band. There was disappointment, but also there was benefit from it.”
Other bands on the label included the jangly indie-pop of The Janitors and 1,000 Mexicans, a one-off LP by the Moodists, and an album by former Swell Map Nikki Sudden. Christie then came across a band that took him away from preconceptions about an indie label. “I signed a little pop-reggae band called The Cool Notes. They came to me with this track, ‘You’re Never Too Young’, and I thought it was fantastic. Loose Ends and Jaki Graham were happening in the soul market. We tried to hawk the record around, but no-one would do it, so I said I would. We paid £300 and went into a studio, recorded it, and it was hammered on the pirate stations.” Unfortunately, the rewards were not immediately forthcoming. “We were distributed by the first incarnation of Pinnacle. We were doing good business with them. In those days, singles really sold. We did about 40,000 of ‘Never Too Young’, which stalled just outside the top 40. The following week, Pinnacle went into liquidation. I’d paid for all the pressing and promotion, and there was going to be no money coming back. COPS were manufacturing most independent records at that time. And they were the people you owed most money to. All the labels sat down and agreed a long-term repayment of the debts. The meeting was very amicable. Everyone looked at each other and said, if we don’t do this, we’ll all lose. It was a very worrying time, but only for a short period. Then Steve Mason bought Pinnacle, and we all re-signed to Steve because we’d had dealings with [his former company] Windsong, and they were brilliant payers. That’s what we needed to be reassured about. I knew that I’d be able to pay COPS back because of the New Model Army and Three Johns catalogue. The other big saviour was that compact discs came in. Suddenly we could re-sell our catalogue again. It completely re-opened the market again. Not just for the indies but the majors. It was dark, but didn’t last too long, so we just got on with it.”
With that resolved, Christie tried to engineer a deal for The Cool Notes. “But like today with hip hop, British soul was not really wanted by the major record companies. So we ended up doing the second record, ‘Spend The Night’.” His faith was rewarded when it became the band, and label’s, biggest hit, reaching number eleven in the national charts. In a similar vein, after enjoying significant success marketing extreme metal acts, Abstract is currently in the process of trying to break a roster of new UK hip hop artists, including Blak Twang and Klashnekoff. “You take that gamble,” reflects Christie, “you have to move on.”
As post-punk uncoiled into various stylistic satellites, like-minded independent labels evolved to service them. So it was with the emergent Goth culture. Prior to a one-off single with CNT, the pre-eminent group to emerge from the dry ice, The Sisters Of Mercy, formed their own record label, Merciful Release, to issue debut single ‘The Damage Done’. “The story which has passed into Sisters folklore,” Gary Marx recalls, “that I stole a sizeable sum of money from my employer of the time to finance the recordings which became the ‘Damage Done’ single, i
s pretty much the truth (if you view creative accounting as theft). It’s fair to say that more thought went into the non-musical aspects than anything contained within the grooves. That should be immediately obvious to anyone who’s actually heard it. The songs didn’t really go on to feature much in the live sets. We only ever played ‘Damage Done’ live once to my knowledge. The single, really, was just a wild, hurried scribble on a map we hadn’t even fully unfolded, rather than a direction for the band – which was only me and Andrew [Eldritch] at the time. The music lacks many of the hallmarks of later releases, not least because Andrew only sings on one of the songs, but the sleeve set the template for pretty much everything that’s followed for the band in its various incarnations. The head and star logo, which was conceived firstly as the label for the 7-inch vinyl (because we enjoyed the mild nausea induced by watching the head rotate on the turntable) has long outlived the tunes. For those who believe in self-fulfilling prophecies, the first thing we did to promote the single, before it was ever released, was to place ads in the ‘records wanted’ section of the music press, offering £25 for a copy. Clearly it’s gone on to outstrip that figure several times over.” The March Violets, Salvation and James Ray & The Performance were among the other acts to call Merciful Release home, which, by 1984, was distributed by Warner Brothers.
Reception Records, another artist-owned imprint from Leeds, was founded by David Gedge primarily as a vehicle for The Wedding Present, who made their debut in 1985 with ‘Go Out And Get ‘Em Boy’. Later it would house releases by This Poison and Cud. An archetypal story of a start-up overcoming initially limited resources, each band member chipped in £5 a week from their dole to fund that first release. Gedge, who legendarily subsisted on a diet of mashed potato, travelled to London on a coach to pick up the pressings in a further effort to economise on transport costs. In the event the single was picked up for distribution by Peter Thompson at Red Rhino, who had nevertheless declined a request to fund the recording. As soon as John Peel started championing it, however, Red Rhino provided them with £400 for a follow-up single, ‘Once More’. By the advent of George Best, the group’s debut album, Red Rhino were prepared to commit £30,000 to recording and £20,000 for promotion. It sold 18,000 copies within a fortnight, knocking The Smiths’ Strangeways Here We Come from the top of the independent charts. Yet Red Rhino was rapidly running into financial problems (see Chapter 12). Unlike some others, The Wedding Present remained on excellent terms with their distributor up to the point of its collapse, by which time they’d already accepted an offer to join RCA while Reception was mothballed.
Chapter 22, founded in 1984 by Balaam & The Angel manager Craig Jennings in Warwickshire, was originally intended merely to be a showcase for his charges’ first two singles, with the specific intent of landing a major label contract. But, with the assistance of Nine Mile, it gradually evolved to include a roster featuring The Wild Flowers, Mighty Mighty and, for a brief time, The Mission. But the reputation it acquired as a Goth label was somewhat misleading. Signing American no wave heroes Suicide was a significant coup, and the label had claim to fostering their nearest contemporary UK equivalent in the form of Loop’s insistent, narcotic psychedelia. Pop Will Eat Itself, meanwhile, will forever be associated with the much maligned ‘grebo’ movement that shot to popularity in the Midlands, though their principal success came with RCA.
Nearby in Nottingham, Digby Pearson had been writing for Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll, American’s punk bible. He started Earache Records in his bedroom on the back of a Enterprise Allowance grant to indulge his passion for extreme American hardcore bands like DRI. His first release was a joint effort with Tim Bennett of Children Of The Revolution, licensing an album from Seattle’s Accused, before a split LP featuring Concrete Sox and Heresy. But it was the merciless, synapse-snapping hardcore shooters of Napalm Death that entranced John Peel, drawing on anarcho-punk spirit, Discharge and the primal extreme metal work of bands like Celtic Frost. Soon Pearson had a roster of gore/horror/speed merchants on his books including Morbid Angel, Godflesh, Carcass and Bolt Thrower. Earache continues to this day and has reinvented itself as a musical genre as much as a label.
One of the most lovably idiosyncratic independents of the mid-80s also had roots in Nottinghamshire. Ron Johnson Records became synonymous with a cadre of bands who were as politicised as they were off kilter; Big Flame, Stump, Shrubs, Mackenzies, Jackdaw With Crowbar, A Witness. Several were in thrall to The Fall to varying degrees, though Big Flame’s inspiration was resolutely the Gang Of Four. Characterised by the fine art of the sonic squall, and deviance from 4/4 rhythms (whether desired or unintentional), Peel seemed to love just about everything on the roster. Ron Johnson would be saluted as label of the year by The Catalogue’s readers in 1986, its annus spectaculus, with The Ex’s elaborately packaged ‘1936’ double single voted best single. But it was a ‘Blue Monday’ moment. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, it emerged that the packaging of ‘1936’ was so elaborate it lost Ron Johnson money on every copy, meaning a net deficit of £15,000.
Established by Dave Parsons away from his shifts as a biscuit packer, Ron Johnson was never the most business-savvy of propositions. Its final release was 1988’s ‘Who Works The Weather’ by The Great Leap Forward (the band formed in the wake of Big Flame’s collapse), Peel mourning its loss on air. But its output is still recalled with great fondness, and for good reason; Big Flame’s ‘Why Popstars Can’t Dance’, much touted as an influence by the likes of the Manic Street Preachers, being one of the all-time great independent singles. And, in a narrative where exploitation of bands by record labels was routine, it demonstrated that the reverse could also hold true. Parsons would be bankrupted and lose his house as reward for his seven-year commitment to the project.
“For me,” says Parsons, “Ron Johnson was a great label for the first twelve releases or so. Big Flame were pretty much perfect. Personally I don’t think they ever surpassed the first thing they did for us, ‘Man Of Few Syllables’. Even though ‘Two Kan Guru’ and ‘The Cubist Pop Manifesto’ 12-inch were straying from the three-track EP path, I was proud that we never buckled to pressure to put out a Big Flame LP. I think that would have been absurd and close to unlistenable. I think Big Flame were a great band – and probably my favourite on Ron Johnson. A Witness too, performed pretty much consistently. Generally speaking, I liked most of their stuff and their lyrics were good. I found Vince from the band a little hard to get on with. It seemed like he always thought I was out to exploit them somehow, or was favouring others above them. Truth was I was just doing my best to put out some records, with the minimum of business advice from the distributors who funded the pressings.”
“If I knew then what I knew now,” a rueful Parsons continues, “maybe Ron Johnson would have become a Creation or a Factory. Unfortunately I wasn’t pushy enough, or knew enough, and was certainly far too naive and easily swayed. I made plenty of awful business decisions and wasted money – no doubt about that. But, especially in the early days, I think my A&R ear was as good as anyone’s. What Stump did for us I thought was excellent, musically: they weren’t happy with the recording, and I didn’t have the money to remaster it when the drummer (a pain in the arse) complained his cymbals were hissing. The MacKenzies I liked but I always felt they were Big Flame impersonators.”
He’s more rueful still on the subject of The Shrubs. “I wished I’d never signed them. Nick Hobbs had too much experience of the music business to pressure me with. I had none. To be perfectly frank, he railroaded me into making decisions that I knew were wrong at the time, and agreeing to them spending preposterous amounts of money. They spent, I think, £5,000 recording four tracks direct to master that were nothing special (whereas the whole A Witness LP cost £500). I was expected to pick up the tab. Nick had ‘professional’ ideas about his basically amateur band that was on a basically amateur label. I should have told him what was what, but he was God knows how many years older than me (remembe
r, I was 23 years old at the time) and one of the most manic people I’d ever met. I know his heart was in the right place, but I never found him at all easy to get along with. On top of that, I didn’t really like most of their stuff: again, a couple of corkers, but a lot of filler. And that was the beginning of the end really. All the others had some decent songs, but not anything worth shouting about. And at the end of the day, the ONLY band that made ANY money at all was A Witness: so they are the only ones who can have a beef about the business side of things with any real justification. Even then, I know Vince and Nick were 100% committed to their personal causes. The problem with small-scale labels is like having a large family, where everyone demands that they’re the centre of attention (at least in their own minds) and assumes that the ‘father figure’ has all the answers and all of the resources. Successes are never questioned, and, if not expected, hailed as just rewards; whereas failures are remembered as personal let-downs and breaches of trust somehow. Dealing with twelve bands, all of whom think, naturally enough, that they are the best, was a parental role that I was probably too immature to bear. Yes, the business was a shambles: but so were most of the bands!”
There was also the dizzying array of artist-generated one-off imprints. Paul Rosen, aka Paul Platypus, formed Irrelevant Wombat Records with his colleagues in Exhibit A in 1980. “We released two self-released singles, with help from Swell Maps, then set up Namedrop Records with Philip Johnson to release our experimental collaborative 10-inch under the name Doof. That was followed by a 10-inch by my next band, Twelve Cubic Feet, and then Philip’s first solo LP (Johnson was a prolific ‘cassette’ artist).” After a final single emerged, Rosen formed Cold War, also contributing to Mark Perry’s Reflections project, released on Cherry Red. “I used to pester [Cherry Red A&R head] Mike Alway about whatever I was doing at frequent intervals. I had ambitions for further entrepreneurship, too, at the same time as hanging around with the stars of the future – I was at Cherry Red’s offices with the Marine Girls when Mike showed Tracey Thorn the first Ben Watt single and told her to meet up with him in Hull.”