Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry

by Gareth Murphy

  The first American company to yield to pressure from CD demonstrators was CBS, who since 1968 were in a joint agreement with Sony to sell their records in Japan. In Europe, it was easy to understand PolyGram’s enthusiasm for the CD; the company was owned by Philips. Crawling out of the disco wreckage, PolyGram had hired a new president from the Philips talent pool, Jan Timmer, a former accountant with a flair for spotting opportunities. Like Ohga, Timmer was convinced the CD was the most important invention of the times.

  Realizing PolyGram lacked the music catalog to go it alone, Timmer began prospecting for a big American partner. He offered Warner Communications a merger, finding an ally in David Horowitz and a receptive ear in Steve Ross, who, having bought out Atari, was far better acquainted with new technology than his record moguls. Throughout the early eighties, Ross had even commissioned internal reports investigating whether video games were partly responsible for the waning demands for records. Walter Yetnikoff, however, lobbied Washington and kicked off a public debate in the press. Eventually, the Federal Trade Commission intervened and put an end to the Warner-PolyGram merger on concerns of antitrust.

  Despite a few raised eyebrows in the predominantly Jewish record business because compact discs were a Germanic and Japanese collaboration, the figures coming out of Japan were mouthwatering. After just four months in Japanese shops, Sony was already at maximum capacity, selling 10,000 machines and 300,000 discs per month. Sales projections for 1984 were anticipating 10 million discs for Japan alone. The other key detail was price. Japanese consumers were lining up to pay the equivalent of $17, almost twice the price of vinyl, for records they already owned.

  Creeping slowly throughout 1983, the volume of American CD trade rose to $103.3 million. Although record labels couldn’t have guessed what lay around the corner, the compact disc was poised to become the biggest boom in the record business’s century-long history. Like the radio giants of the twenties and thirties, the world’s media and hardware conglomerates of the eighties were gazing down from their towers, salivating over this truly global, multibillion-dollar gold mine.

  As the most powerful record executive in the world, Walter Yetnikoff, described the sudden sea change from bust to boom, “In a few years, just as cocaine contributed to the decline of what was left of my moral character, Michael Jackson, who never touched a drug, soared into the stratosphere, creating a buying frenzy that consolidated my power base even further. MTV, compact discs—the decade would see a series of innovations that fattened profits and led to excess on my part. Soon the eighties would make the hedonistic seventies appear altruistic.”

  27. LEGENDS

  In the autumn of 1983, Dave Robinson got an unexpected phone call. It was Chris Blackwell fishing for a new managing director. Although flattered, Robinson at first politely declined, citing his commitment to Stiff, then a seven-year-old indie employing twenty-six.

  Still, Robinson didn’t flatly close the door. After Chris Blackwell helped Stiff Records weather the storm of Jake Riviera’s sudden departure in 1977, “we became pretty close,” admitted Robinson. “About three times a year we’d have dinner. When he’d come to town, I’d be high up on his list of people to meet and talk about things.” Now aged thirty-nine and awaiting his second child, Robinson was feeling the pressure to provide security. As for the prestige, “Island was the model.”

  Eventually, Blackwell came up with an offer too good to refuse. “He said, ‘I’ll buy half of Stiff, you run Island, I’ll give you a share of Island’s profits.’” The two men met for dinner in a Chinese restaurant in Mayfair, where Blackwell wrote a two-clause contract on a sheet of facsimile paper—one clause for 50 percent of Stiff’s shares, valued at £2 million, and the other clause for the 20 percent profit-share system. They signed their names on the page, shook hands, and ordered their desserts.

  Unfortunately, things didn’t turn out so simple. “It never occurred to me that Island would not have money,” sighed Robinson. “When I got into the company and started looking through the accounts, they had no money; they were broke, and in actual fact, they were probably insolvent.” Confronting Blackwell, the legendarily blunt Irishman said, “Look, I should really pull out of this because it’s not happening. Number two, how are you gonna pay me for the Stiff shares?”

  Producing another carrot on the table, “Blackwell said, ‘Look, I’ll buy half of Stiff, and three or four years down the road, we’ll sell the whole shooting match. I’ll do very well and you’ll do great.’ So I agreed—foolishly—that the money for the Stiff shares was to be paid quarterly, in installments of £250,000, to help them with cash flow.”

  Walking in from Stiff, where he made his employees work hard, “I found Island a little baffling to begin with,” explained Robinson. “I listened to all the albums lined up for release, and I thought, ‘What’s going on here? This is terminal. This can’t work. We haven’t got the money, we haven’t got the release schedule. Who’s been doing all this?’” There was also the bizarre office politics. “I’d be having these very enthusiastic meetings with the guys and then I’m getting no reaction. And I’m very people conscious, I see when people don’t meet your eye. So I’m thinking, ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ It took me a while to suss it out. Then I got a tipoff from one of the staff. Basically Blackwell would get up late in Jamaica, he’d have a few spliffs, and he’d call people in London and ask, ‘What happened today?’

  “In those days the fax machine was very new and there was only one in the whole company, so I asked my secretary to copy everything coming in and out. And I read every fax because it was the only way I could find out what was really happening. I was amazed by the faxes. Of course Blackwell was on the end of most of them. Everything was being sent to him—acetates, cuts, artwork. But it wasn’t like he ever got back to anything the following day. He’d have a few spliffs, he’d go to Miami, wander around. No decision would be made. So there was an awful lot of apathy inside the company where staff would send something off knowing they wouldn’t hear anything back for two or three weeks.”

  Convinced Blackwell’s absentee control was the source of the company’s dysfunction, Robinson put him on the spot. “What do you think you’re doing? What the fuck? You’ve got no money. You’ve sold me a pup.” Although Blackwell didn’t like getting his nose shoved into the rug stain, in choosing a tough nut like Dave Robinson, he may have been subconsciously asking for a reality check. So, with Blackwell’s mixed blessings, Robinson began a series of unpopular but necessary reforms.

  Years of rust had eaten into every nook and cranny of Island. Robinson felt it could only be wiped away by a brief but decisive reign of terror. “I put intercoms on all the desks so that I could listen in to their phone conversations. It drove them potty, but they were all talking to fucking girlfriends, or their mother, or their granny, or booking their American holidays. I had several meetings and I said this isn’t how it’s going to be.”

  One staffer in the sales division, Ray Cooper, recalled the unforgettable dawn of the Dave Robinson era. “Island was the only company in the U.K. with open-space offices. It was like a charming big war room with gold discs on the walls. There was a massive board on one side where everything was written down—chart positions, live, artist info. But when Dave got in, he threw out all the potted palm trees and plants. He wanted to make it a little more sterile. Then he put a tannoy [intercom] system in, so you’d press a button and he’d tell you what he wanted you to do. When it was installed, his first command was to a guy called Ken Hallett who did things for Chris. The tannoy suddenly spoke in that voice of Dave’s. ‘Ken Hallett, get me some cheese … now!’ Everyone just turned and looked at each other.”

  To Robinson’s single-sensitive ears, the one obvious contender in Island’s otherwise “crap” release schedule was “Relax” by an unknown group from Liverpool called Frankie Goes to Hollywood. It had been produced by “Video Killed the Radio Star” creator Trevor Horn, whose Island affiliated subla
bel, ZTT, had just been set up in the old Basing Street studio. Throughout the autumn of 1983, “Relax” was languishing around No. 70, failing to break through.

  Robinson ordered from America 5,000 copies of a seven-minute remix called the “Sex Mix,” which he’d heard visiting Island’s New York office. Sensing that Christmas was an ideal time to make noise while other record companies were on vacation, Robinson ordered twelve salesmen to tour the strategic retailers, greasing the palms of assistants who played “Relax” on the store’s public address system. The 5,000 copies sold out so that after Christmas, the record sneaked inside the Top 40. That week, a big act pulled out of Top of the Pops and, grinning in ominous leather suits, Frankie Goes to Hollywood got their first TV appearance. “Relax” shot up to No. 6 in the second week of January.

  Then the media outrage erupted. BBC Radio 1 deejay Mike Read lifted the needle midbroadcast, branding the song “obscene.” Then BBC Radio 1 producer Ted Beston telephoned Robinson personally. “We’re banning ‘Relax’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood,” he announced. “I don’t understand, why would you ban it?” Robinson asked.

  “It’s all about ejaculation.”

  “Well, how can you say that?” Robinson asked with an air of beguiling innocence. “If you were to ban records that might be about something like that, you’d be banning an awful lot of them. The other thing,” continued Robinson, “is that I’ve met Holly Johnson’s mother last week, and this is the first job that Holly’s ever had. He’s been on the dole all his life and suddenly he’s in a band that’s happening. His mother was very pleased—very Irish she was. I can give you her number. You can tell her you’re banning her son’s first record.”

  “I’m not talking to her!” blasted Beston with increasing irritation.

  “Well, the least you could do is talk to the press and explain why you’re banning it,” responded Robinson with equal force.

  To Robinson’s utter amazement, Beston agreed. “Okay, I will. If you set up a press reception, I’ll talk to them.”

  That afternoon, 175 media operatives were cordially convened to hear a spokesman for BBC Radio 1 explain, as Robinson put it, that “‘Relax’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood is a song about ejaculation.”

  Bingo! Adding to the song’s rebellious cache, Top of the Pops was sucked into the affair and banned “Relax” for the five embarrassing weeks it stayed No. 1. In total, the record sold 2 million copies, the third-biggest single of the year in Britain. “I’m happy to accept that ‘Relax’ wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been there.” said Robinson. “The records wouldn’t have arrived on time. They wouldn’t have got out to the sales force. We wouldn’t have seized the Top of the Pops opportunity, and we wouldn’t have had the press conference. They were all Stiff techniques.”

  With Island still unable to pay its bills, Robinson had no qualms about canceling titles and cutting off bands who, he felt, “used to smoke dope with Chris but weren’t up to anything.” With the ax falling in every direction, managers stormed Robinson’s office, pleading, “You can’t cancel my record, I’ve got a tour.” Robinson would have to explain to them, “This is not a hit. There’s no point in us putting this record out. We haven’t got the money to support it, and the record is not a hit.”

  “Well, how do you know that?” the stunned managers would ask.

  “That’s what I’m here for—to know.”

  “I’m sure I was quite bolshie and a pain in the ass,” acknowledged Robinson, “but we were on a roll and all the Island staff was starting to function properly.” Ray Cooper, for example, although initially wary, quickly warmed to Robinson’s unorthodox style. On a sales trip together in the North of England, said Cooper, “Dave was pacing around my room, talking in his animated way, then he walks over to the corner and pisses in the sink.” Cooper described Robinson’s effect on the company as a type of electroshock therapy. “Island in the early eighties was definitely on the slide creatively and financially, and I could see why Chris would have picked Dave … Dave was hotheaded, he was clever, he was rude, he was careless, and to me, he was a brilliant marketing man. Everything that came out of his mouth was different and challenging—he gave me a real education. He was alive when Island was not.”

  There were plenty of long faces in the war room as Island’s pecking order got reshuffled. Island’s old guard had what Cooper described as a “cerebral” attitude to music, whereas Dave Robinson was “a man of the street,” whose “naked honesty” created some peculiar culture clashes. In one incident, Robinson confessed he knew nothing about R&B and requested a tutorial from the company authority, Ashley Newton. Although, the snobs tutted to each other behind Robinson’s back, the irony was, as Ray Cooper also pointed out, “Dave couldn’t suffer fools.”

  A case in point was Paul Morley, media pundit and ZTT’s communications director, who described Robinson as “a particularly aggressive version of the record man,” expounding that, “if there was previously a certain form of institutional delicacy, almost modesty, at Island that might have interfered with its indeterminate yet somehow incisive plans to achieve a deluxe form of entertainment world domination, and even meant the label’s existence might be threatened by the cutthroat commercial fury of the 1980s, Robinson tore that apart.”

  “Full of shit” was how Factory cofounder Rob Gretton summed up Paul Morley—a description Dave Robinson did not contest. “Paul Morley couldn’t stand me. Still can’t,” said Robinson, “because he had all this artistic highfalutin crap which he thought was going to make a difference. I used to trot out all these Irish proverbs to irritate him, like ‘Let the dog see the rabbit’ and ‘You can’t go without the horse.’ You needed a good record, you needed some good attitude, and you needed videos you could use. He made some really gay video for ‘Relax.’ All his friends were patting him on the back telling him what an artistic genius he was, but he couldn’t get it on television because it was far too over the top.”

  In the pseudo-intellectual dialectics of Britain’s postpunk scene, ol’ Robbo may have come across like a savage chieftain from the bogs of Ireland, but unbeknownst to employees and affiliated producers alike, Stiff had just lent Island £1 million to help pay its bills. There was a reason for Robinson’s admirable confidence.

  Since their dinner in the Chinese restaurant, Blackwell and Robinson had been discussing a Bob Marley greatest hits disc. What Blackwell hadn’t told Robinson was that immediately after Marley’s death, he released the Lyceum concerts as a commemorative live album. It had flopped miserably.

  Acquainting himself with his new project, “when I found out that sales for [Marley’s most popular album] Exodus were 189,000 in the U.K., I thought that was a terribly low figure,” explains Robinson. “I thought Marley would be closer to a million. I mean, Madness had done seven hundred thousand. Even in America, Marley had been selling around six or seven hundred thousand copies for his best records. So I began wondering—maybe he doesn’t sell to white people?”

  Robinson called in a market researcher, Gary Truman, with whom he profiled a mainly white, mainstream target audience. Truman conducted eight groups. “He’s a funny little geezer who blends into the background,” said Robinson. “He gets them on the case but he lets them do their own talking. He’s a big fan, as I am, of the spontaneous things people say having listened to four or five tracks [and] looked at some photos or album titles we made up for the sake of conversation. During these sessions, it came out that a lot of people were saying ‘legendary’ or ‘he’s a legend.’ The public picked the title, Legend. They also came up with the rather interesting clue they were worried Bob Marley might be slightly antiwhite. People felt that maybe Bob Marley didn’t like them.

  “Island had great photographs of Bob Marley, but the problem was there was nothing smiley about him. There was no friendliness. It was always a bit tough, a bit aggressive. And also quite political.” Truman’s observations suggested mainstream record buyers wanted to cut through the whole
Rastafarian agenda and get to the universal heart—the love songs, the uplifting whistlers. Having pinned down the handsome portrait that pushed all the right buttons, “the running order on Legend took me a month at least,” Robinson remembered. “I agonized over it.”

  Released in May 1984 with a campaign of television commercials, Legend bolted out of the stable and entered the U.K. album charts at No. 1—Bob Marley’s first ever. Just a week later, Dave Robinson turned forty on May 14. Island picked up the bill for a birthday party Robinson’s pregnant wife organized at their new family home in Hammersmith. In retrospect, that night celebrated the beginning of a dream harvest.

  Bob Marley stayed at No. 1 in the U.K. for fourteen weeks, all summer long, while on the singles charts Frankie Goes to Hollywood detonated their second smash hit, “Two Tribes”—No. 1 in Britain for nine weeks, selling 1.5 million copies. With Britain gripped by a second wave of Frankie fever, even “Relax” climbed back to No. 2. As it was happening, the year belonged to Frankie, but in time, the true monster would be Legend: 25 million copies to date and God knows how many million more counterfeits in Africa, where Marley has become a giant symbol of freedom and progress—arguably their biggest-ever music icon.

  Fired up by Island’s spectacular renaissance in England, Chris Blackwell was rethinking his American operations. In need of new blood, he recruited a whole crop of marketing staffers, then appointed a former A&M promotions man, Charly Prevost, as president.

  Just before Prevost started the job, he was invited to a small party at Blackwell’s New York apartment attended by Malcolm McLaren. Among the group of faces was Blackwell’s local sweetheart, a beautiful black lady he affectionately called Chocolate Cake. During the party, she took Prevost to one side and asked, “Are you gonna work for Chris?”