‘In the two years that I was at North London Poly,’ says Thomas, ‘I did New Order, Pere Ubu, Cabaret Voltaire, The Fall, Au Pairs, Young Marble Giants, A Certain Ratio, Aswad, Nico, Virgin Prunes, bands like that, and it was basically a financial success.’
Indicative of the idea that Rough Trade had a constituency of Leftish students, nearly all of the bands Thomas promoted were either released or distributed by Rough Trade. Though never directly politically aligned, Travis and Scott’s idea of building a separate channel for the open-minded and curious music fan was gaining traction with an ever-widening audience.
‘It was a very interesting political and social era,’ says Thomas. ‘You had people who were teenagers then who were sort of the first of their generation to go to university. If you were in one of the major cities, you’d be the first generation to have grown up with black people in your school, but that would’ve been only the major cities – if you were coming from west Wales, Devon, Cornwall anywhere else, you met black friends for the first time. It coincided with things like feminism, and someone admitting to being gay. As an example of how underground the gay scene was in those days, someone started a gay society there and asked me, “Do you want to be the DJ?” and in all honesty there were about ten or twelve genuinely gay people and about a dozen people came from the college branch of the SWP to show their alliance. My friend in the SWP comes up and he goes, “You know the music that unites everyone? Sixties soul music.” I had a box of all my Sixties soul, so here I am at the gay society disco playing “When a Man Loves a Woman”. All those things were fermenting in those days.’
The combination of the music press, the John Peel show and the likes of Thomas’s concerts at North London Poly and their regional equivalents provided a genuine alternative to the mainstream music business. Simultaneously Rough Trade label’s roster of This Heat, Swell Maps, YMG, Raincoats, Scritti Politti and Red Crayola was at its most clearly defined as the sound of a group of loosely affiliated artists, all expressing their impulses through often thrillingly individual and, in most cases, reasonably accessible music.
As Rough Trade expanded, its staff came to include some very sharp-minded and eccentric individuals, light years away from the standard music industry character, but brimming with ideas. Among those finding a corner to work in above the Kensington Road Shop were Claude Bessy, an acerbic Frenchman who as Kickboy Face had helped start the LA wave of street-level punk through his fanzine Slash. Bessy shared the upstairs office space with Scott Piering, an American émigré with a ferocious appetite for new music and first-hand experience of American college radio, and Mayo Thompson, formerly of Red Crayola, a Texan ideologue with an acute analytical mind who had been introduced to the conceptual British Left through collaborating with Art & Language.
‘Claude Bessy worked for Rough Trade in the promotion department,’ says Richard Boon. ‘This is when bits of Rough Trade started developing – booking agency, promotion department – all working inside but in a sense outside of the shop and Geoff.’
Boon had first met Claude Bessy in his Slash-editing pomp when Buzzcocks played LA. ‘Claude had to leave America because he’d been involved in a car accident and went through a windscreen and had lots of surgery,’ says Boon. ‘He didn’t have any insurance, and when the time to pay the bill came round he fled to London, where, of course, he was welcomed with open arms, because everybody loved Claude.’
Bessy’s gleeful mix of iconoclast, agent provocateur and back-room philosopher was perfectly captured in The Decline of Western Civilisation, Penelope Spheeris’s hand-held 1979 documentary on the underground LA punk scene. Asked for a definition of ‘new wave’, his eyes and skin glistening with the distinctive pallor of Venice Beach after dark LA, Bessy launches into one of his trademark riffs:
There was never any such thing as new wave. It was the polite thing to say when you were trying to explain you were not into the boring old rock ’n’ roll, but you didn’t dare to say punk because you were afraid to get kicked out of the fucking party and they wouldn’t give you coke any more. There’s new music, there’s new underground sound, there’s noise, there’s punk, there’s power pop, there’s ska, there’s rockabilly. But new wave doesn’t mean shit.
Bessy’s articulacy displayed a mind full of interventionist ideas on permanent rotation. Together with Piering he started working in the nascent Rough Trade promotions department, which helped internationalise and corroborate Rough Trade’s reputation. In the same office the Raincoats manager, Shirley O’Loughlin, and a friend, Mike Hinc, developed a booking agency for Rough Trade artists, All Trade. In addition Mayo Thompson and Travis became Rough Trade’s in-house record producers, recording the Raincoats, The Fall, Scritti Politti and Pere Ubu in crisp lo-fi vérité.
‘Somebody like Claude’, says Richard Scott, ‘we asked to join ’cause we got all our information from Slash, and it was such a great source of information, so we spoke to him quite a lot … I think Mayo just came by – I’m not sure about his politics even now. I have a great deal of time for Mayo, perhaps not so much musically, but he did Panorama and stuff like that. He comes from a very interesting background.’
Pete Donne, a teenager who worked in the shop, would notice that as he started locking up at the end of the working day the off-stage activities above and behind the shop would carry on late into the night. ‘Scott and Claude were there through the night loads of times making tapes. Scott was just incessant, the whole C86 thing came out of Scott’s tapes. He’d make these tapes every week of the new releases. Scott would listen to everything, just a workaholic, Claude as well; Claude was a drinker, smoker, speed, the lot, Capstan Full Strength – he was very rock ’n’ roll.’
Along with cataloguing every new release on cassette, Piering would record nearly every concert related to any of Rough Trade’s artists live from the mixing desk, amassing a highly detailed archive of the era. Piering and Bessy who bonded, among other things, over their shared experience of the music business in the States, brought a more extrovert and social side to Rough Trade, one that was engaging and intelligent. The artists they represented on Rough Trade benefited from their around-the-clock approachability, something that Rough Trade, at least outside opening hours, had previously been lacking.
‘Claude was a very close friend,’ says Richard Thomas. ‘An absolute genius … Claude’s last editorial in Slash, which summed up everything, was 1980 … it’s along the lines of “If you’ve got a great idea, do it now, ’cause the days of the amateur are about to end” and that’s what it was. If Claude had a weakness, it was that he loved starting things but often wouldn’t see them through.’
Bessy’s valedictory editorial highlighted his waspish romanticism just as he was acknowledging that Slash’s moment had passed. Written in his trademark jive it even manages to carry an air of wistfulness, revealing that despite the frozen-stared cynicism, the author may in fact have been experiencing a small pause for nostalgia:
First we had no intention of sneaking out of the back door like adulterers in the night, we’re not done with the incomprehensible propaganda yet and there was such an overload of information to lay on your frail intellects, such a gorgeous display of terminal confusion and unexplained phenomena to report and inflict on your village sensibilities as well as much local cliquey foulness to deposit on your elegant rug and offend your world-conscious sophistication (we welcome all types – even the proxy thrill seekers who go slumming thru our X-rated binges), there was so much to give and share and communicate (oh what a sense of duty) that even Jah Jah the old tea head himself couldn’t have stopped this cultural apotheosis. A man with a mission delivers the goods, and when many are involved and they all come thru (take a bow boys and girls) watch out, timber, the impact might kill you. Potent stuff everywhere, droogies, a panoramic scope without equal even if it occasionally blurs out, stunning absence of manifestos and editorial unity (meaning respect in the reader and a stand still at the office), obscure
beliefs exhumed from the tomb, cover symbolism (Indian land and punk music meet with …) that doubles as a fashion exclusive. No one asked for it but we can’t resist showing off, there was more but you can only take so much of a good thing. And you ought to know when to stop. Like now?
Piering’s incessant recording and collating, and his excellent working relationship with John Peel, ensured Rough Trade had a certain, if limited, degree of clout and access to the Top Forty. While nearly all releases either on or distributed by Rough Trade would fall outside the charts, the company managed to occasionally penetrate the mainstream Top Forty. Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’ would go on to make no. 2 in the Top Ten, but only once it had been taken off Rough Trade’s hands by Warner Brothers.
‘Something like Laurie Anderson, “O Superman”, is a typical Scott Piering record,’ says Richard Scott. ‘I think Scott probably introduced that record into Rough Trade, probably sent a copy in to Peel who played it, and then we got import copies because of the contacts that Scott had or whatever, and sold hundreds through the shop and thousands more through the distribution. That network of conversation, whether on the radio, Peel, fanzines, word of mouth, meant that records like that would just fly. You’d have a Saturday when something like that came in and every customer that was coming in was getting that as well as a batch of other stuff.’
If Rough Trade could score the odd unlikely radio hit in the form of ‘O Superman’, its continuing wish to put ethos before hard commercial profit meant its air of amateurishness was maintained. Having bought in thousands of copies of ‘O Superman’ from America, Rough Trade needed to sell it at a higher than usual import retail price, as was standard on all imported records. Pete Donne was horrified to discover that both the shop and distribution had been making a 50p loss on every copy sold. ‘The idea was, “This is a £3 record, that’s its value to the customer”,’ says Donne, ‘but it had cost us £3.50 per unit to import. It’s a good example of how the business was run.’
Its international contacts meant Rough Trade had exclusive access to the kinds of music that echoed its own principles around the world. It particularly developed contacts in New York, where many of the bands on the label found themselves the toast of the downtown club scene and returned to London with DIY American releases packed in their bags.
‘All the 99 and Lust On Lust releases, all that New York batch of things were definitely coming through directly to the shop,’ says Donne. ‘With Claude, Mayo and Scott there was that network of conversations going on and obviously Rough Trade was exporting as well, so it was a two-way conversation, people like Viv Goldman that were doing things themselves and using the phones or the telex machine or whatever.’
Viv Goldman’s single ‘Launderette’ not only remains one of the best songs of the era, but it captures the feel of the early 1980s West London of Rough Trade. Featuring a series of photos shot in the house Goldman shared with Travis at 148a Ladbroke Grove, along with images of the streets up and down the Grove, the sleeve of ‘Launderette’ is Portobello at its most dowdy and seductive. A dubbed-up pop song about a relationship gone sour, ‘Launderette’ was played by an ad hoc frontline supergroup of Keith Levene, Jah Wobble and sundry Raincoats and released on the ultra-hip New York-based 99 Records, named after its address, 99 MacDougal Street. If Rough Trade had an equivalent anywhere in the world it was 99, a record and badge shop that under the direction of its owner Ed Balham started releasing records by Liquid Liquid, ESG, Bush Tetras and Glenn Branca. The label’s releases were a document of the cross-fertilising sounds emerging from a New York that had only just avoided bankruptcy, but whose downtown was becoming an after-dark laboratory of wired neon rhythm.
Buzzcocks’ erstwhile manager Richard Boon had been keeping an eye on developments at Rough Trade, and was perennially on the verge of being asked to work there full-time. He was also one of the first visitors to Rough Trade’s new headquarters. Having outgrown the premises of Kensington Park Road, the company had moved to premises around the corner at 137 Blenheim Crescent. The building was a three-storeyed house that accommodated all Rough Trade’s growing portfolio, the most significant and lucrative of which was its distribution division.
‘Distribution had faced several challenges in keeping up with the amount of material being put through its channels,’ says Boon. ‘Richard Scott’s idea was to co-ordinate a network of like-minded retailers to serve as a national distribution arm – The Cartel.’ Though London would be its nexus, the idea was that no cog in The Cartel’s chain would be more powerful than any other. Each distributor would provide a point of access and egress for any band, label or fanzine writer that wanted to lock into Rough Trade Distribution’s perpetually turning wheel, thus ensuring nationwide distribution without the need to supply and co-ordinate their releases via the hothouse of London.
‘First of all he wanted to develop the independent retailers that were increasingly the hub of their local activity,’ says Boon. ‘You’d have a shop like Probe in Liverpool, who’d phone all these other people saying, “Well, I’ve got this, listen.” If you’re developing a programme or policy of access, decentralisation is something to support and encourage. There was a sense that there were people out there on the same wavelengths who would talk to each other and there was a community of interest, even if you didn’t necessarily like what someone else in the community was doing.’
Richard Scott, while permanently pressing for The Cartel to be run collectively, was its de facto organiser and head. Along with Rough Trade, The Cartel drew together six other distributors: Probe in Liverpool, Revolver in Bristol, Red Rhino in York (whose owner Tony K was a vociferous and pragmatic counterpart to Scott), Backs in Norwich, Fast Forward in Edinburgh and Nine Mile in Leamington Spa. The idea of a nationwide distribution network was simple and fitted perfectly with the Rough Trade ideals of access via mutual, co-operative control, and for many years The Cartel succeeded on those terms.
What few of its members could see was how easily and how rapidly such a system could overheat. As with many of Rough Trade’s ideas, what began as a pragmatic solution became coloured by its internal politics. ‘It started as a conversation,’ says Boon, ‘which later became an argument.’
*
‘The whole of the Postcard story is a good issue,’ says Scott. ‘I didn’t realise, but Geoff by that time was after hits, and in Roddy Frame and Orange Juice he saw a good chance to achieve that kind of chart success. I was in Canada when he did the deal with Postcard and I was absolutely livid, because by my definition we should have got them going in Glasgow. We should’ve actually really established them there. I don’t actually think Alan Horne would’ve gone for it, but the actual politics of it should’ve been to make them a successful Glasgow-based operation.’
Bob Last of Fast Product established the Scottish link in The Cartel chain in Edinburgh. Although agreeing with The Cartel’s broader programme of access for all, Last’s interests were now more aligned with Travis’s desire for hits.
‘One of the things I enjoyed about pop music was its functionality’, says Last, ‘in popular culture and in people’s lives. So although others and I brought this substantial theoretical and intellectual ferment of ideas, I wanted to engage with that functionality. The intellectual ideas were fundamentally about a Leftist tradition, trying to find a way of engaging with the popular, because the Left had somehow disengaged with the popular; it was entirely about finding a strategy to be aesthetically adventurous and engage with the popular.’
One of Rough Trade’s most Left-leaning acts was having the very same debate as Last – with itself. Scritti Politti had overhauled their ideas about collectivity and were firmly interested in engaging with the popular. Following a long recuperation after the speed and squatting lifestyle had ended in exhaustion, Green Gartside had fallen in love with contemporary R&B music and its combination of functionality, optimism and hedonism. Above all he was becoming convinced of its ability to achieve entryism in
to the mainstream, where Gartside’s playful intellect and engaging way with a melody would have more of an impact. Travis and Gartside quietly began a conversation about how Scritti might gain access to the charts, though all such talk was held in confidence, as the idea of commercial crossover success was still anathema to most of the staff at Rough Trade. The results of Gartside’s pop ambitions were Scritti Politti’s almost polished debut album, Songs to Remember and its accompanying leadin single, ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’, whose parenthesis-heavy title suggested Gartside hadn’t quite shed his love of linguistic theory. Reaching no. 64 in the charts, it was another example of an act on an independent, despite its pop ambitions and the label’s attempts at a marketing push, failing to reach the Top Forty; and in doing so, lacking the all-important badge of mainstream validity. Songs to Remember, was released six months after ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’ and fared far better, entering the album chart at no. 12. If it was only its fan base propelling it there, Gartside had enough approval to suggest that his ideas of Scritti making mainstream music were worth pursuing. The whole campaign around Songs to Remember was to prove one of the most divisive moments within Rough Trade to date.
‘I can remember people at Rough Trade being absolutely livid that all the money was being spent on Scritti Politti, and not on This Heat,’ says Scott. ‘I now think back and think that that was where the fault line was first shown. Scritti were fantastic. As a live band I thought they were excellent and I think that “Sweetest Girl” is a great song, and I think that the drum track on it is possibly the worst drum track I’ve ever heard on anything, and how the hell anybody thought that they could get that past any audience, I’ve absolutely no idea.’
How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 Page 13
