Drummond, thinking he and the Bunnymen were going to be signing to Sire, was trying to keep a handle on Stein’s manoeuvring. ‘Seymour set up a company with Rob Dickins, who was the head of Warner Music,’ he says, ‘this thing called Korova, so it was a British-based company for the world, which meant the American company, Warners on the West Coast – there wasn’t that much money in it for them. The Bunnymen weren’t bothered about that – they weren’t that bothered about the hard work like U2, they weren’t interested.’
The work ethic of relentless touring and meet-and-greets of every regional radio station and sales force was a world away from Aunt Twacky’s tearoom, and in terms of the Bunnymen’s frames of reference – wintry coastal skies, moonlit walks and Parisian absinthe bars – practically worthless.
‘They were far more into Europe,’ says Drummond, ‘far more into the idea of making European music, even though they were doing rock music. It aspired to something European, and so did I. We just thought, “Fuck America.” So we go over to the States for the fourth album, do a three-week tour and I lost interest. They knew I wasn’t gonna deliver for them.’
Whereas The Teardrop Explodes had burned out in the aftermath of their euphoric commercial success after two and half albums and a mess of drugs and diminishing returns, Drummond had guided the Bunnymen through four albums in as many years.
Each record was sleeved in an elemental landscape: earth for the debut Crocodiles, sky for Heaven Up Here, the whiteness of the tundra for Porcupine and a richly shimmering aquamarine blue for Ocean Rain.†
‘Once Ocean Rain was made I thought that was it, actually,’ says Drummond. ‘You’ve made your great record. It took you four albums to get there, there’s no point in doing any more. You should never make any more records, you should just now tour, and that’s it, don’t do records. You’ll become this huge cult band around the world. Although I hated the Grateful Dead, I liked the idea that just they built this world that’d got nothing to do with the passion of the era or the industry. It somehow existed outside, and I saw that as a fantastic thing. I just thought, “This is it, boys” – I wouldn’t have said boys, and sounded as patronising as that, but I felt this is it, this is as good as it’s gonna get.’
However grand and widescreen his vision for his managerial charges, Drummond acknowledges that his romantic ambitions for their careers took precedence over the day-to-day business of handling their affairs. The industry may have let him have his creative run, but in the end its orthodoxies and accounting procedures got the better of him.
‘I fucked it. I fucked it up, I did, with the Bunnymen and The Teardrops. I did worldwide deals, so I didn’t have that position of them going to American companies, so the American companies were never that bothered. We went our separate ways, the Bunnymen got American management – that’s when the kind of joint headlining tour with New Order happened, and they made certain inroads into the States and got that college radio level of whatever.’
In his dealings at the Warners office Drummond had made an ally in the press department, a witty and discursive former journalist with an encyclopaedic knowledge of psychedelia, Mick Houghton. ‘I started working for Warners in ’79. Without it sounding arrogant, I sort of almost invented the modern school of PR, which was just to kind of know what you’re talking about,’ he says. ‘My first month there, Warners licensed Sire which at the time was [releasing] the second Talking Heads album, second or third Ramones album – nobody at Warners actually saw any potential in those bands. It was unbelievable, someone like Tom Waits – almost to a man I’d say, the whole label was resistant to that music. I think it’s true of journalists then and to a large extent true of journalists now. Journalists don’t understand how the music industry works at all, and I don’t think you do until you become part of it. When I went to work for Warners it was such a shock to me to suddenly find myself working for a corporation where nobody seemed to like music at all. The radio department was about getting on the playlist and getting on Top of the Pops and that was the be all and end all of it, and if a record didn’t have, as they would say at the time, legs, they just weren’t interested.’
Stein’s presence at Warners, however, was an antidote to the rest of the company’s indifference. ‘It was kind of weird with Seymour, he had the heavyweight background but at the same time what was remarkable about him was that he just had the extraordinary talent for seeing the potential in bands.’
As much as Drummond and Stein were in business, Drummond was resistant to the epicurean side of Stein, declining Stein’s endless invitations to lunch, dinner and whatever else. He became familiar with Stein’s storyteller persona through the simple act of making deals together. ‘You know, I wasn’t interested in going to restaurants and doing the whole raconteur bit that Seymour can do and is great at. I’m not saying I’m a better person than that, I was just too driven by, you know, making records or what a band could be within the psyche of a generation, all that kind of stuff. But I learnt a heck of a lot from Seymour, a hell of a lot. You couldn’t have conversations with Seymour without learning tons and tons of stuff. And I found him eternally fascinating because his history that went back to eras of music that I really loved, late Fifties, early Sixties, to telling me about his first job, how he worked the charts, plugging, working for [people at the] Brill Building, you know, all of those things and he was the epitome of that – New York, Jewish, music, wheeling and dealing, the whole thing – and he had an incredible love of music as well as being that clichéd Jewish music business hustler, and making things work.’
Among the anecdotes, salacious gossip and hustler’s advice that poured out of Stein was a piece of wisdom that, in its hard-headed pragmatism at making the music industry work for you, Drummond found astonishing. One particular piece of advice horrified him: ‘Seymour says, “Bill, this is how you make money out of the music business: you do a deal with a record label. You say, ‘I’ll give you six albums, and you give me x thousand dollars.’ So, say he gets 100,000 dollars for six albums, you go out and you sign six bands, any old bands, it doesn’t matter who they are, you stick them in a studio, you record an album and you record the album for 5,000 dollars. The band will love you ’cause they get to record an album – that’s all they’ve ever wanted to do all their lives. You tell your band, ‘OK you’ve got to get it done in four or five days,’ and you get the album done. So you’ve got your six albums done for under 20,000 dollars, whatever. You’ve just made yourself 80,000 dollars. It doesn’t matter a fuck whether these records happen or not.”’
This cold-hearted reality was an eye-opener for Drummond, who couldn’t help but notice when, a few years later, Stein’s business model had failed him. ‘Seymour came a cropper doing it his way. This was in parallel with his total love of music: these two things were running in parallel but once he got Madonna it was fucked. It wasn’t really even in his interests with Talking Heads or for the Ramones or any of us, or any of them, to sell a lot of records, ’cause suddenly he’d be owing them royalties – money he’d already spent on art deco stuff, and on his houses. So when Madonna starts really selling, he’s rumbled. He can’t do it any more, so that’s when he has to sell his whole thing to Warner or whatever it was – 51 or whatever per cent – I mean, he ended up selling the whole lot and that’s the reason.’
With Dickins in with the money side of the deal, Stein had his elliptical northern band tutored in Drummond’s air of mystique. Stein’s vision of an alternative Eighties would pay dividends throughout the decade as a succession of pale British boys from the provinces would find themselves flown across the world by Sire, walking out on to the arena stage, blinking into the Santa Monica sun.
As the decade was just starting, all Mick Houghton was witnessing in the Warner press department, however, was real horror at the thought of any of this kind of music succeeding. ‘The first year I was there, the groups like the Bunnymen, Talking Heads, Ramones were getting mountains and mountains o
f press, the guys in promotion and radio just thought it was unplayable. Warners at that stage didn’t see any kind of commercial potential in those records. I think they were also reeling, to a certain extent, from the reaction of punk against their stable of artists, the Foreigners and Fleetwood Macs. But obviously the whole thing about punk was that it didn’t change anything in terms of certain rock dinosaurs – Genesis, Yes, the Moody Blues of this world – who were possibly more successful after 1980 than they were before, and after Live Aid it just expanded those bands’ horizons to an even greater extent. I was always aware anything coming out of America had that kind of corporate clout behind it. If it was Foreigner, there’d be a big hoo-ha you know, getting them press, getting them radio, and there was inevitably some huge lavish reception. The only reason I remember the Foreigner one is that there was an album called Cold As Ice, and they threw this massive reception at some Intercontinental hotel and they thought it was a really good idea to have the Cold As Ice logo, in ice, but it was delivered some time in the afternoon so by the time everyone got there, this thing just melted and dripped all over the floor.’
For Rob Dickins, the young English executive running the London offices of an American company, having hatched a scheme for him and Stein to develop home-grown talent, the future lay somewhere over the horizon with this new emerging guitar music.
‘The Bunnymen happened quite quickly in that sense,’ says Houghton. ‘The Bunnymen only made one single for Zoo, and I think Rob Dickins was astute enough – Rob wanted a label that was like Stiff, he wanted a label that had hit records.’
But Dickins would have to wait for his hit from the Bunnymen, for all the press inches Houghton racked up for the band, and for all Drummond’s mise en scène, the radio department at the record company, never mind the playlist controllers at daytime radio, remained hostile. ‘It took the Bunnymen three albums and countless singles before “The Cutter” went Top Twenty, says Houghton. ‘Before that they had the odd “single of the week” in the music press and being played on John Peel, I mean that was it.’
For Drummond, beyond his mythic approach to managing his charges, which meant his idea of planning a campaign was a day of bike rides culminating in a performance at Liverpool Cathedral, the record business remained a thing of blunt, bemusing nonsense. ‘The demograph,’ he says, ‘is a word I learnt in California. “What is the demographics of Echo & the Bunnymen?” “What are you talking about?” Demographics? The demograph is whoever buys the record, that’s the demograph.’
Drummond, who would draw rabbits’ ears over maps and plan a tour accordingly, was on a different path. The Bunnymen’s performances of ‘A Crystal Day’ at Liverpool Cathedral, touring the leylines of the Orkneys and playing the Albert Hall, while securing their position as the ultimate cult band of the 1980s, were above all an article of faith in the grand gesture.
‘The Orkney Islands tour, the Crystal day, the romance of it all,’ says Houghton, ‘the romance of it all but also the gesture – what Bill has always been good at was the gesture.’ And if his love of the gesture was only half-realised in his managerial capacity for Echo & the Bunnymen, when he re-entered the music business as an artist several years later these gestures, traceable in part back to the ideas of The Illuminatus! at the Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun, and partly, an outrageously self-confident response to the rave culture spilling out around him, would be magnified, contorted and escalated into one of the most astonishing acts of theatre in the history of independence. Not to mention one of its most lucrative.
* Bill Grundy famously attempted to interview the Sex Pistols for Thames Television on 1 December 1976, but the broadcast deteriorated into an intergenerational swearing match.
† The advertising campaign for Ocean Rain contained the strapline ‘The Greatest Record Ever Made’. ‘That was my idea’, says Drummond. ‘I mean, why fuck around? The marketing department never spoke to me again.’
3 What Presence?!
An early Orange Juice photo session featuring Alan Horne standing in for absent bassist David McClymont. From left to right, Steven Daly, Alan Horne, Edwyn Collins, James Kirk (photograph by Tom Sheehan used by kind permission of the photographer)
‘At the time when we were forming Postcard,’ says Edwyn Collins, ‘the things that got adopted later by the jingly-jangly groups … I never really liked the interpretation of it, I just remember a lot of spitting going on.’ In Glasgow, punk had happened a little later than the rest of the UK, but its in-your-face brutish side had found an affinity with the city’s take-no-prisoners night-time etiquette. ‘Punk in Glasgow’, says Collins, ‘was a lot of groups called The Sick and The Vomit, The Drags, The Jokes. Glasgow was comfortable with that and always had that tough guy, no messing, obsession.’
Collins was still at school when the first wave of punk arrived in Glasgow. His fellow pupils at Bearsden Academy, a secondary school in one of the city’s less turbulent suburbs, included Steven Daly and James Kirk. ‘All the Postcard people came from a teenage thing of not being tremendously confident,’ says Collins. ‘We were never the kids at school that people wanted to hang out with. When we met each other, we were all coming from an outsider perspective, it informed the way we were with each other.’
Collins, who read NME on the school bus, first noticed Daly, a few seats further down, reading the Melody Maker. Any potential kudos Collins thought he might gain by reading the less prog weekly was negated by Daly’s horror at the fact Collins proudly wore a Buddy Holly badge.
Their mutual passion for devouring music, hinging on such teenage minutiae as David Bowie’s hairstyles, Donna Summer’s appearances on Top of the Pops and forgotten Sixties B-sides, blossomed into Collins, Kirk and Daly dipping their collective toes into the punk ripples by starting a fanzine. Rather than covering The Sick or The Vomit, their fanzine was, tellingly, more interested in music from the past.
‘We did a fanzine in ’77 called No Variety,’ says Collins. ‘James wrote political pieces. When the Scotland football team were going to play in Chile, in the stadium where they’d had the executions in ’74 during the military coup, James wrote about why they shouldn’t do this, which ended with the line, “Will you wipe the blood from their football boots, Willy Ormond?” There were also retrospectives on the Troggs and I wrote a retrospective on the third Velvet Underground album.’
In the course of trying to sell fanzines in the local record shop, Daly had come across a fellow fanzine editor and self-publicist, Alan Horne. If Collins, Daly and Kirk had the textbook schoolboy desire to overcome their gawky shyness through their fanaticism with the pop world, Alan Horne seemed to be coming from somewhere slightly more perplexing:
‘Steven always wanted to be very hip,’ says Collins. ‘“Teenage Depression” came out the same week as “White Riot”, so he had two contrasting single reviews of them. He wrote, “Go fuck yourself, masters, fuck off with your pathetic old rock band. This is the only teen record that matters: ‘White Riot!’” Steven knew Alan Horne through the record shop Listen – they’d met through Alan’s fanzine, Swankers.’
Swankers took the fanzine template into slightly uncharted waters. Instead of profiles of Ayrshire’s nascent punk scene or live reviews of what was happening around town, Swankers was a series of character assassinations by Horne. Those unlucky enough to be counted among his nearest and dearest found themselves on the receiving end of his barbed and hostile surrealism. ‘He’d done Swankers solely to annoy his flatmate, Brian Superstar. They’d come from a seaside town south of Glasgow, a popular resort near Ayr. Alan called himself Eva Braun, and his friend the Slob, and he wrote about himself and Brian Superstar and this girlfriend character, Janice Fuck.’
Swankers seemed to blend small-town xenophobia with the more decadent end of Sixties rock and its amour fou for the stylistic trappings of fascism. ‘There was a bigot’s quiz,’ says Collins, and the picture of Brian Jones with the SS uniform, with Brian Superstar’s hea
d over it.’
Dismissing Horne’s politics as that of a bright but ignorant hick, Collins and Daly had detected an astonishing musical knowledge in Horne, coupled with an archness that frequently reduced them to hysterics. ‘We thought it was silly. Steven was very intolerant of anyone wearing swastikas, but he tolerated it in Alan, because Alan was also very camp. Alan insists that all the ideas he had then are the ones Morrissey had, and, because he’s adopted, he thinks Morrissey must have been his lost twin. Rita Tushingham, that whole frame of reference.’
With a piercing liquid gaze staring from behind glasses with either translucent or wire frames, Horne had cultivated a look that suited his thin build, somewhere between Truman Capote’s Factory screen test and a spikier version of Alan Bennett circa Beyond the Fringe. Holding it all together was a remarkable ability to project a fiercely vituperative intelligence.
Starting a shaky punk band of their own, the Nu Sonics, Collins, Kirk and Daly, though pleased to be making a racket, realised punk, especially Glasgow meat-and-potatoes punk, was creatively a dead end. ‘By ’79 none of us wanted to be associated with punk’, says Collins, ‘because of bands like Sham 69 and UK Subs coming up. All the neds.’
The Clash’s White Riot tour, however, would provide Scotland with a glimpse of a more interesting, subtle and less dogmatic musical style. Supporting the Clash in Glasgow were The Slits, Subway Sect and Buzzcocks.
How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 Page 7
