Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  Irrelevant Wombat is a great name for a label, but not quite as good as Mole Embalming Records, a Leicester independent initially founded by Graham Summers, Mick Bunnage, Sherree Lawrence and Alan Jenkins of The Deep Freeze Mice to facilitate their first four albums. The name was changed to Cordelia (“after my cat,” Jenkins admits) in 1984, and has since released material by American maverick R. Stevie Moore, Dolly Mixture and Jody & The Creams. It is still active as part of a shop cum studio enterprise more than two decades later, the label principally serving as an outlet for Jenkins’ own projects and “whatever else comes along”. Other candidates for best label names include The Tufty Club (Crosstalk A/V), Thin Sliced (King Kurt, Helen & The Horns), Snotty Snail (Notsensibles) and Groucho Marxist (Defiant Pose).

  Another artist-founded label was agit-folker Robb Johnson’s Irregular Records. At the start of the 80s he’d been a member of Grubstreet on the London pub circuit. “That was sometimes a bit dispiriting, but not nearly as depressing or insulting as having some latest-haircut A&R desk-Johnny sniff dismissively at your work. A friend called Lynne Mitchell decided I needed to make appointments with record companies. It was a haircut called Wally Brill at A&M Records who was a wally too far as far as I was concerned.” His sound engineer friend, Bruce ‘Moose’ Thompson, persuaded Johnson to go it alone. “I thought up the name Irregular because I didn’t expect we’d be doing anything on a regular basis. The first album came out in 1985 and it was all very DIY and punk rock in ethos, if not in sound, funded by donations from friends and family, completely oblivious to any zeitgeist, and selling fuck all. It wasn’t till a good few years later we thought about attempting to get distribution.” From there the label would eventually provide a home to The Astronauts, Maggie Holland, Barb Jungr, Carol Grimes and others, and it remains active – kind of. “I patiently explain to artists that actually being on Irrregular, a one-person fabrication with not a lot of enthusiasm and absolutely no budget whatsoever, is not in itself a guarantee of huge sales and cult status. But people tend to hear what they want to hear and substitute a lot of wishful thinking for what they don’t. Irregular has an interesting song-orientated catalogue; it doesn’t really fit pigeonholes or suit zeitgeists or the latest haircuts. People find their way onto Irregular by accident or by recommendation, usually.”

  The overlord of the artist-label sub-genre (with an acknowledgement to Cleaners From Venus/Martin Newell’s Man At The Off Licence imprint, its wares memorably traded in exchange for vegetables and other produce) was indisputably Razz. It documented the footfalls of indomitable Mancunian Beatles’ devotee Chris Sievey and his band The Freshies across a bewildering array of cassette and vinyl. As far back as 1971 Sievey had plagued record labels, staging a sit-in at Apple which led to him recording (an unreleased) session. So persistent was he that at one stage he was able to publish a book of record company rejection slips. A sequel consisted entirely of rejections from Virgin Records alone. There is limited mileage in extolling the virtues of an ‘independent’ artist quite so desperate for a major to come knocking on his door. But Sievey’s resilience and love of the unrepentant, usually convoluted expression of affection was a winning formula. ‘I’m In Love With A Girl On The Manchester Virgin Megastore Checkout Desk’ provided a long overdue, but ultimately fleeting, brush with fame and fortune. “In the biz, you get to meet all the top people,” the opening lines can. “Trouble is, they never seem to be the sort we pull”. What could have been a slightly creepy stalker anthem was rendered an utterly sincere missive of love unrequited. Billy Bragg, one can surmise, might well have been listening.

  Licensed to MCA from Razz, ‘Megastore’ was the closest Sievey came to stardom (and what a fantastic celebrity he would have made) until he was swallowed whole by papier-mâché homunculus Frank Sidebottom. The MCA-Freshies tie-up led to the only anti-nuke anthem ever to parody ELO (‘Wrap Up The Rockets’) and the ultimate record collector’s song ‘(I Can’t Get) Bouncing Babies By The Teardrop Explodes’. It is not unknown for audience members at Sidebottom’s shows to demand encores of ‘The Men And Women From Banana Island Whose Stupid Ideas Never Caught On In The Western World As We Know It’ to general bemusement. Oh, and The Freshies’ ‘No Money’ may well be the most painfully accurate song ever written about the independent music industry.

  It wasn’t just post-punk and experimental labels who benefited from the independent surge. Other youth ‘cults’ got a look in, too. Though obviously not the focus of this book, the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal was driven to an extent by the rejuvenating energy of punk, but its adherents were not ready to ditch, or mask, their affection for rock ‘n’ roll. And the NWOBHM (that fantastically cumbersome acronym) was driven, at least initially, by indies. Primary among these, by some margin, was Neat Records, founded by David Wood of Impulse Studios in Newcastle in 1979 (though its ownership would later transfer to Tygers Of Pan Tang vocalist Jess Cox). The subsequent development of the ‘black metal’ and to a slightly lesser extent ‘thrash metal’ aesthetics can be squarely laid at the feet of Neat’s leading lights, local stars Venom – routinely cited as an influence on Metallica, Anthrax, Megadeth et al. Other staple Neat acts included Jaguar, Blitzkrieg, White Spirit and Raven. The label’s main competitors at the turn of the decade included Heavy Metal Records and Ebony. The former had been founded by Paul Birch with the singular intention of providing an outlet for The Handsome Beasts, but it became best known for Witchfinder General and its compilation series, Heavy Metal Heroes. Ebony, under the stewardship of Darryl Johnston, began with a series of compilations of unsigned artists (its better remembered graduates including Mercyful Fate) while their biggest success came with Grim Reaper, who would eventually transfer to RCA. Later the indie-metal baton passed to Martin Hooker’s Music For Nations/Under One Flag [see chapter eleven].

  The Mod Revival was largely the province of major labels. The Lambrettas signed to Elton John’s Rocket, Secret Affair’s I-Spy imprint went through Arista, while The Chords, like reluctant scene-leaders The Jam, were on Polydor. However, the movement did throw up a handful of independents. Hi-Lo started out in 1980 to accommodate the output of Squire. But any attempt to build the brand was handicapped by the necessity to bunny-hopping distributors. “We were distributed first by Stage One, then I.D.S., then Backs and the Cartel, then EMI,” remembers owner Anthony Meynell. He recently revived the label after it was ‘mothballed’ in 1987 (it re-emerged briefly as Antenna Records in the late 90s). The Killermeters’ first single was released on pressing plant imprint Psycho (a lesser known variant of the Ellie Jay model; used frequently by impoverished bands as an ‘off the peg’ alternative to the logistics of manufacturing a record oneself). It’s also worth pointing out that the 60s-loving Whaam!/Artpop! imprints were also considered by many to be allied to traditional Mod values, not least through The Direct Hits, while songs such as ‘I Helped Patrick McGoohan Escape’ (Teenage Filmstars and The Times) and ‘Biff Bang Pow’ (The Times) are frequently to be found on genre compilations.

  One other label of note associated with the Mod Revival was Tortch Records, based in Hinchley Wood, Surrey. Inspired by what proprietor Steve Budd had seen Rough Trade and Mute achieve, it was set up initially to support The Directions, whom he managed (and would subsequently evolve into Big Sound Authority). “The label had no musical ethos,” he would tell Bored Teenagers, “other than to release records that I liked and its main purpose was for me to have a method of enticing bands to work with me as their manager.” The ‘Three Bands Tonite’ EP was pressed in a denomination of 2,000 copies at a cost of £129.50 and sold through Rough Trade. But other releases, unaligned to the Mod Revival, were probably more noteworthy. Tortch would issue the first EPs by both The Sound (‘Physical World’) and The Cardiacs (as Cardiac Arrest; ‘A Bus For A Bus On A Bus’ EP), the leaders of both, Adrian Borland and Tim Smith, graduating from ’77 Surrey band Gazunda. Tortch also released the second Scissor Fits EP (featuring later Cherry Red A&R head Mike Alway)
and the ‘Flesh As Property’ EP, which contained the original version of ‘Courts Or Wars’ (scheduled to be reissued as Cherry Red’s 21st single but pulled) by Sound side project Second Layer. Budd would go on to a management career representing The Sound as well as Lloyd Cole, Heaven 17 and producers such as Tony Visconti and Arthur Baker.

  While Ace’s Big Beat subsidiary kick-started the garage/rockabilly revival movement, other independents such as Roy Williams’ Nervous Records, Alligator (whom Nervous eventually acquired) and Soho provided significant background noise and impetus. Soho issued the first recordings by The Passions, Shane MacGowan’s Nips/Nipple Erectors, The Jets and The Inmates. Inevitably there was a strong link back to Ted Carroll and Roger Armstrong at Ace. Stan Brennan and Phil Gaston had, like Armstrong, completed their studies in Belfast, and wound up inheriting their Soho market stall (re-titled Rocks Off, rather than Rock On, to provide thematic continuity). Later, they would establish the Vinyl Solution chain with the assistance of Yves Guillemot. “Unfortunately,” recalls Brennan, “personality differences meant Phil and I left Yves in West London and we relocated to Hanway Street.” Said cramped premises, off Tottenham Court Road, were affectionately dubbed ‘The Microstore’ in deference to the vastly more spacious Virgin Megastore nearby.

  Soho Records ran for just over two years, the highlight of its catalogue The Nips’ ‘Gabrielle’ (in its death throes it also released their Only The End Of The Beginning album). Brennan kept the shop and Gaston the label after they parted company. The latter put together the Nips compilation Babes, Bops And Bovver through Ace, and recorded ‘Champion The Wonder Horse’ under the sobriquet The Mighty Clouds of Dust (Dead On Records). He also wrote and recorded ‘Tommy’s Blue Valentine’ with Cait O’Riordan and Pride Of The Cross (through Big Beat) and penned ‘Navigator’ for The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy and the Lash.

  Brennan stayed in retail until 1991. In that time he started the Media Burn, Absolutely Free! and PM labels, whose output encompassed albums and 12-inch releases by the Stingrays, Prisoners, Mighty Caesars, Surfadelics, X-Men, Milkshakes, Nigel Lewis, Golden Horde and the Locomotives, “before sadly going down in the Red Rhino bankruptcy”. Absolutely Free! also housed Buzzcocks’ Live At the Roxy (one of the few legitimate ‘Roxy’ LPs) and The Purple Things (Gary Bonniface’s band post the Vibes) while Pogue Mahone released ‘Dark Streets of London’, their Brennan-produced 1984 debut single, for PM. Brennan subsequently acted as the group’s manager and produced debut album Red Roses for Me. Thereafter he returned to professional psychology – the subject he’d previously studied at Queen’s.

  And, of course, there was 2-Tone, which spearheaded Britain’s indigenous ska craze of the early 80s – though following its first release, credited to The Special A.K.A. Vs The Selecter, it would be signed up by Chrysalis (The Beat’s Go Feet label also linking with a major; Arista). That single alone is noteworthy, however. It came out on 2-Tone after the band faced a series of rejections, and was recorded for £700 using a loan from a businessman known only as ‘Jimbo’. The b-side was an instrumental Noel Davis had recorded a couple of years previously, originally under the title ‘The Kingston Affair’, but both his contribution and the track were eventually credited as ‘The Selecter’. Rough Trade asked them to double the print run from its original 2,500 copies. Thereafter pressing of the single, which eventually graced the Top Ten, transferred to Chrysalis, at which time it also attained its distinctive, chequered sleeve. 2-Tone quickly became a definition of a style, its own radiant if compact genre. The history of UK accommodation of Jamaican art had a precedent for that. Melodisc subsidiary Blue Beat, the UK label which had imported the original rocksteady and ska sounds (Prince Buster among them) into Britain in the 60s, likewise lent its name to the music. And in one of those wonderful twists, Blue Beat’s name and rights were later acquired by Buster Bloodvessel of Bad Manners, one of the groups who came out of the 2-Tone boom but never signed to the flagship imprint.

  In attempting to crystallise the fundamental importance of the etymology of the term ‘independence’ as opposed to ‘indie’, it’s perhaps worthwhile looking at an example far away from world of Parka, leather jacket or trenchcoat. The term ‘independent’ remains a far clearer-cut concept in other forms of music. For example, to attempt to apply the ‘indie’ maxim to a classical recording artist would appear nonsensical. And yet, ‘indie classical labels’ have thrived for a substantial period in the UK and their development echoes several principles of the labels discussed in this book.

  “The main movers in the classical world are the independents,” states Martin Anderson of Toccata Classics. “The biggest of them, Naxos, releases far more CDs a year (and at budget price, too) than all the majors combined. Come further down the scale and you have a number of important independents like Hyperion, BIS and Chandos (all founded around the same time in the early 1980s, probably not by coincidence). Naxos has a catalogue that is close on 3,000 releases strong (built up over the twenty years since it was founded in 1987). BIS, Hyperion and Chandos probably have close on 2,000 issues each in their catalogues. There is also a huge range of small labels out there, each trying to carve out a distinctive niche. The interest in the independents is in the richness of the repertoire they are prepared to tackle. The majors almost never release any music that is not from the mainstream (the last major initiative of any scale was Decca’s mid-1990s Entartete Musik series of music banned by the Nazis), whereas the independents are continually bringing out recordings of interesting material, much of it new to the catalogues. Another important difference between the majors and the independents, and this is a major factor in the contrasting repertoire, is that the majors tend to have a few star artists who go chasing the same mainstream repertoire, backed up by expensive publicity campaigns. The world has changed enormously since the majors would indulge every pianist on their books who wanted to lay down his readings of the central standards, but the choice of music is still fiendishly conservative. The independents may have a handful of musicians they like working with, but it’s generally because they come with suggestions of interesting repertoire (or revisit familiar material with unusual playing styles, as the early-music did, and continues to do). The sales are then driven by reviews rather than advertising.”

  Beyond the established independents lay a vast hinterland of UK labels with ostensibly few pretensions towards growing any brand identity. Numbering thousands of releases, the DIY genre, save for a few select artists, had been largely forsaken until American Chuck Warner felt compelled to curate it. Just as Nuggets documented the psychedelic underground and the Killed By Death bootlegs made available worldwide buzz-saw punk obscurities, Warner’s Messthetics series, which grew out of his Hyped2Death website, attempts to preserve a rich stream of creativity that flourished in the post-punk era. One whose value was only sporadically recognised as it carried so little in the way of commercial possibility.

  A more lofty comparison would be the Folkways series, in so much as Messthetics is an effort to ensure that this seam of cultural capital is not lost, or tarnished further by some of the more vampiric catalogue farmers. In the process Warner has managed to bring the whole dissonant, disparate genre into some sort of focus. Messthetics takes its name from the onomatopoeic Scritti Politti track first announced to the world, fittingly, on a John Peel session. “I know what we’re doing/We know how this sounds” ‘sang’ Green Gartside. A thousand UK bedrooms reverberated to reciprocal invocations. Johan Kugelberg, noted collector and enthusiast, is one of those who was charmed. “The godlike glory of DIY records,” he fulminated in the introduction to his standard reading essay on DIY’s 100 greatest records. “The shoddy xerox sleeve; the rubber-stamped label, the cheapest pressing imaginable; the inside jokes in the label copy; the hiss of the overloaded two-track; the hum of magnetic tape deteriorating; and the sounds!”

  At number one with a bullet in said list was, unsurprisingly, the Desperate Bicycles, with whom a few informed music
fans and critics might have had a passing acquaintance. But Sir Alick & The Phraser, Scrotum Poles, Horrible Nurds and I Jog & The Tracksuits? Or labels like Wreckord Records, Half Wombat and Dead Hippy? Warner found himself enticed by these tiny mysteries. “I started acquiring this stuff in the late 70s and early 80s because I was running a mail order business in rare 60s and 70s psychedelic records,” he recalls, “and I would buy collections all the time. There would often be punk and post-punk stuff in there so I had an increasing quantity of stuff that no-one was asking for. I also bought one collection from a German guy who’d had a standing order for every independent single that was released at the time. I would try to interest people in the stuff we’re now calling DIY and post-punk, but couldn’t. Still, the more time I spent with it, the fonder I grew of it myself. Meanwhile, of the 15 people on the planet who were into it; all of us knew four or five of the others, but there was no ongoing scholarship.”

  “The seeds for Messthetics were probably laid for me when I heard the first British psych-pop compilation Chocolate Soup For Diabetics in 1981,” Warner continues. “Here was an entire compilation of amazing music that I’d never heard before; I knew The Creation and all that, but the idea that there were these legions of no-name bands that all had this sound was mind-blowing. With Messthetics I wanted people to hear this stuff – the DIY bands – and fall in love with it like I did.”

  The DIY bands that Warner collates existed within the broader framework of post-punk but outside of its conventional dialectics; a function of both aesthetics and economics. It can be hard work pinning down exactly why a record is delineated as DIY beyond the obvious act of self-creation, but Warner was able to identify certain aesthetic criteria. Spontaneity and primitivism, especially in the form of nasty keyboards and found sound, and ambivalence towards tuning and song convention were among the key signifiers of the ‘correct’ attitude. There were debts to Dada, to Brecht, to Situationism, to Vivian Stanshall and to both the music hall and art school traditions, in addition to conventional pop and punk’s empowering thrust. “British juvenile fiction and TV science fiction also deserve a mention somewhere,” adds Warner. “Punk was great and all, but no more formative for much of the DIY set than Boy’s Own, Fireball XL5 or The Prisoner or Doctor Who. 1977 also forced its year-long/year zero pall of silence over everything that anyone had loved and valued prior to ‘New Rose’, ‘Anarchy’ and ‘Spiral Scratch’. DIY made it possible for everyone to reconnect to all that again in whatever way they pleased. To a certain extent glam, alone, survived as an identifiable dimension of punk.”