How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005

by King, Richard

  Another member of the Warner A&R staff who found corporate life difficult to deal with was Bill Drummond who, having relinquished control of Echo & The Bunnymen, was held on by their parent company in an A&R consulting role; negotiating the power politics of the managerial decision makers around Dickins was something he had only a listless, passing interest in, a way of killing time while he was considering his next move. ‘I’d fucked myself,’ says Drummond. ‘I’d even bought a Paul Smith suit.’ Bumping into McGee in Warner Brothers, Drummond found someone who felt even more isolated from the executive processes but whose enthusiasm had remained undimmed. ‘He was totally into it all,’ says Drummond. ‘He’d done the deal for Elevation and it was a complete disaster. At that point he was as bad as me, you know, stick whatever he’s got into a major record company and see what happens and it’s just no good, that’ll never work.’

  Drummond had been among the first to hear what McGee was bringing into Warners, and was struggling to see the connection between McGee’s enthusiastic flights of hyperbole and the finished recorded product that was played on the boardroom stereo. ‘I was aware of the Mary Chain,’ says Drummond. ‘We’d have a weekly A&R meeting at WEA and Max Hole, who was head of A&R, played this tape of a cat being taken hostage and I just thought it was rubbish. But McGee started making a presence in the building. He’d come round and get to know me and it’s like he thought, there’s that guy, he was in the Bunnymen.’

  Making contact with Drummond was one of the few positive outcomes of McGee’s dalliance with Warners and having caught the ear of one of his heroes McGee was quick to share in the delights of the Creation roster, taking Drummond to one side for a close listen and discussion about the merits of the Moodists, Meat Whiplash and demos for the Primal Scream album.

  ‘He played me these things,’ says Drummond, ‘and I thought, this is rubbish, this is all rubbish, what are you talking about, “This is the greatest this that and the other.” I can’t hear it, these are badly made records, cheaply made records, but I found him endearing, you know, I found him – whatever.’

  Finally tiring of Warners and the industry in general, at the ripe old age of thirty-three and a third Drummond decided to retire and issued a suitably self-mythologising press statement.

  The very gesture of turning a resignation letter into a state-of-the-union address highlighted Drummond’s unique sense of occasion. ‘In some ways Bill was the best manager I think I ever worked with,’ says Houghton, ‘in terms of being an amazing catalyst and such an inspirational figure, but he was an appalling businessman, he really was. I probably did more of the relationship with the record company than he did because he just couldn’t deal with them. He didn’t feel comfortable with them.’

  Drummond’s first decision upon ‘leaving the industry’ was to reverse roles and become a recording artist. ‘When I decided I was going to leave the music business for ever, I’m like, I want to make a record: write the songs in a week, make the album, release it and that’s it,’ he says. ‘I went along to McGee and said, “Look, I wanna do this, do you wanna put it out?” He says, “Yeah,” instantly. He didn’t even ask me what sort of music it was let alone, you know, the songs. So I went and did the whole thing and just took it round to his flat. And he was dumbfounded; he couldn’t understand how I’d made this record. Just couldn’t believe it.’

  Listening to the album, which Drummond entitled The Man, is to be transported to the back room of an out-of-the-way pub in rural Dumfries & Galloway. In a rich brogue Drummond and a pick-up band rattle through eleven songs that combine those self-mythologising tendencies with Highlands surrealism. Its most remarked-upon song was ‘Julian Cope Is Dead’, a frontiersman’s response to Teardrop Explodes’ ‘Bill Drummond Said’. For a rendition of Robert Burns’ ‘Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation’, Drummond also invited his father, a Presbyterian minister, to recite the poem in his authoritarian and empathetic voice, accompanied only by a few notes on a banjo and the sound of wind blowing across the glen.

  ‘The Man is one of the most extraordinary records ever made actually,’ says Mick Houghton. ‘It was a cross between C86 and Ivor Cutler or something. I don’t think anyone else would’ve put that record out, and equally I don’t think anyone else could have made that record.’

  ‘It’s absolute genius,’ says McGee. ‘I nearly drowned when I heard it. I had no idea that he was going to be singing in a broad Scottish accent and I’m lying in the bath and it was like “and the eyes and the trees of the nation” … it was all pulling me under the water.’

  Like all of the records Creation released, The Man was recorded in a matter of days but, with around five to ten years’ experience of both life and the record business and replete with backing singers and pedal steel, it has an alluring confidence in its simple arrangements and Drummond’s clear Lord Summerisle-style singing. Compared to the lost-in-reverb fumblings of the majority of the label’s early catalogue, The Man sounds like a gleefully recorded middle-of-the-road country and western album. It also, upon very close listening, reveals signifiers of Drummond’s future artistic direction.

  ‘Apart from it being genius, the great thing is, if you listen to that record you can hear The KLF in that fucking record,’ says McGee. ‘His arrangements of the pedal steel – four years later it’s the fucking KLF. I don’t mean it’s melodically The KLF, it’s the same way that it’s fucking put together. The pedal steel moves are acid house KLF. I couldn’t believe why he’d want to put a record out with me ’cause at that point we’d done fuck all really.’

  The sound of Drummond intoning his approval of ‘dirty girls’ on ‘I Believe in Rock and Roll’ over a shabby acoustic guitar may be light years away for the stadium house grandeur of The KLF, but there are certainly cadences of some of the imagery that would follow as The KLF developed their myth on the grand stage. In the lyrics to ‘I’m the King of Joy’, ‘I’ve a heart like a Viking with the faith of a child/Have you ever heard the song “Born To Be Wild”?’, the Norse biker archetype that would be a feature of KLF videos is certainly present. Somewhat more prosaically, Drummond admits, ‘Alan might be on to something actually. I only know three chords.’

  However much fun he was having by revelling in the capriciousness of his heroes, the reality for McGee was that Creation was stumbling around trying to turn its attitude into a coherent release schedule. Elevation had been no small failure, although as manager of the Jesus and Mary Chain McGee had not only earned himself a decent living, but he had also funnelled his share of the band’s income back into Creation. The label was still his priority, but meant little to anyone beyond his wider circle and their imaginary parallel Sixties punk universe. His fingers burned, McGee was determined to carry on his way, writing off Elevation as a failed experiment that had been condemned from birth by the short-sightedness of the suits at Warners. Moving Creation out of his front room, he set up camp in Hatton Garden, in one of the smallest rooms in a suite of maintained offices on Clerkenwell Road, in premises that had been found by Dave Harper while relocating from Rough Trade.

  ‘It was really cheap,’ says Harper. ‘Alan came in, then Wayne Morris, who managed the Primitives and sort of ran Lazy Records, followed. It was a very vibrant time, because everyone was doing more or less the same things. There was a pub opposite – and we weren’t too far from Collier Street, but believe me that was irrelevant.’

  The tenants of 83 Clerkenwell Road all had ambitions beyond what they had left behind at Rough Trade. Harper and his partner Nikki Kefalas, with their newly formed Out Promotions, were handling Factory, Mute, Creation and 4AD, and they were regularly approached by the majors, whom the likes of Morris and McGee were perpetually working on to try to fleece a budget for their charges. The sense of hustle and enjoyment and of being in the heart of a more celebratory and less austere part of the industry, at least compared to the dowdiness of Collier Street, was given an added frisson by the character of the other occupants in the buildi
ng.

  ‘There was a weird guy there who had been a plugger at a major,’ says Harper. ‘He was really sad, because he used to be Elton John’s plugger. He was desperate for friends and wired, and he had coke, and there was a private investigator opposite that was screwing the daughter of the woman who ran the front desk. He claimed to have worked undercover in Belfast and had had an axe put through his head – it was all very hush-hush. The place was full of all these really odd people – the music ones were sort of normal.’

  It was an environment in which McGee couldn’t help but flourish. Despite the prevalence of attitude over anything else, especially record sales, Creation and McGee were, thanks partly to their largesse when it came to hospitality and the cutting-edge success of the Jesus and Mary Chain, considered a record company on the up. ‘NME at that time was quite obsessed with Creation,’ says Houghton, who was now the label’s PR, ‘and at that time the NME was king, not that Melody Maker people would accept that, but they kind of were.’

  Very much wanting to project themselves as kings of speed, leather and sunglasses – a fanzine writer’s version of a biker outlaw – McGee and Foster along with most their charges were out every night, even if the extent of their decadence was the upstairs room of a north London pub and a tinny PA. ‘It sort of goes back to journalists actually being very naive,’ says Houghton. ‘At that point there was very little debauchery around the Creation offices. They were kind of like silly schoolboys, getting pissed and taking too much speed, but equally that was the extent of the debauchery of most music journalists. The most debauched band I worked with at that point was Talking Heads and they did it in style, fantastic parties, and they were very smart people. Compared to that, Creation was really quite provincial.’

  A new addition to the Creation roster was Nick Currie who, now recording as Momus, had released a debut album, Circus Maximus, on él, a new label that the quickly rejuvenated Mike Alway had founded after his unsuccessful attempt at being a more conventional record industry player with Blanco y Negro. él was Alway, even by his standards, at his most quixotic. If Alway’s ideas for Cherry Red and Blanco had been a stylish and curatorial approach to the trends of the day, él was going to be something else entirely. Financed by a magnanimous Iain McNay, who was prepared to take Alway back into the fold at Cherry Red, él’s roster would be populated largely by figments of Alway’s vivid imagination.

  Thinking as an auteur rather than as an A&R man, Alway had no interest whatsoever in scouting out whichever bands were playing on the first rung of the live circuit for él.

  ‘I stopped going to shows. I was just so bored with it,’ he says. ‘I watched a lot of television, and long-forgotten films, and went back over all this and started to put a label together based on all that. Admittedly, I saw things in a very Arcadian type of way – I wanted it to be this mixture of Surbiton meets Tuscany. You couldn’t go out in Richmond and buy a cup of coffee, so I spent most of my life in the West End in Soho in Old Compton Street, or up where the offices used to be in Bayswater, which were really cosmopolitan places where you could drink espresso all day and it was the best stuff.’

  Alongside Momus, the él roster featured The King of Luxembourg, the Would Be Goods and Bad Dream Fancy Dress, all distillations of Alway’s current tastes: the gentle but fractious Sixties Eastman colour Sunday afternoon of Joseph Losey’s Accident interrupted by a visit from the cast of a Lance Percival B-movie. ‘I tried to make it like you would direct a film,’ says Alway. ‘You would have an idea of what you saw there and you would basically get the personnel that was appropriate to put that together. All the bands were basically grotesque enlargements of certain parts of their character.’

  In Simon Fisher Turner, who had been Jonathan King’s child protégé, Alway had the perfect character actor to cast as The King of Luxembourg. Turner, who simultaneously composed soundtracks for Derek Jarman’s films during his ‘career’ as The King of Luxembourg, had, having been David and Angie Bowie’s babysitter of choice, a wealth of imagery and anecdotes to draw on. Covering songs like the Television Personalities’ ‘Picture of Dorian Gray’, Alway and Turner supercharged Sixties revivalism with something that had been missing from The Living Room and Splash One: high camp. Bad Dream Fancy Dress’s album Choirboy Gas was produced by Turner (who described his tenure at él as ‘like being a pantomime dame’); featuring such tracks as ‘Leigh-on-Sea’ and ‘The Supremes’, it mixed girl-group infatuation with seaside fish and chips, as if The Leather Boys had been the subject of ‘Leader of the Pack’. The Would Be Goods were named after an E. Nesbit book and their leader, Jessica Griffin, sang in an accent worthy of Jenny Agutter in The Railway Children. A couplet from the Would Be Goods’ debut single, ‘The Camera Loves Me’, ‘Another gin and tonic and I’m yours for sure/They never took my photograph like this before,’ sung as woodwind flutters around Griffin’s debutante ingénue delivery, encapsulates the él world of deportment, intoxication and a very British sense of pop abandon. ‘I was going back to the Monkees,’ says Alway, ‘and trying to add art.’

  él’s sleeves certainly carried the air of an exhibit. With soft pastel labels and Kodachrome-style photography, the imagery, along with the acute lower-case ‘e’ on él, looked like travel brochures from a future where Huxley had written the characters of Brideshead Revisited into Brave New World.

  ‘él was about a world that was coming, a world of espresso and everything being out of doors, and affability,’ says Alway, ‘and none of this mean, nine-to-five stuff and a sad fried egg. It was the same thing that basically inspired Habitat; it was against things like stout.’

  But if Alway had predicted the establishment’s naive yearning for a UK cafe society about fifteen years before it happened, his new label largely baffled the stalwarts of the independent-championing media. ‘I had quite good press with él in England actually,’ he says, ‘but Peel never supported me.’

  Circus Maximus by Momus was él’s most successful release and had received favourable notices, thanks in part to Momus being a character drawn largely from Currie’s rather than Alway’s imagination. Momus was able to thrill journalists by referencing Brel and Bataille with the conviction of an erudite Edinburgh graduate exploring the impulses behind perversion. Circus Maximus was also a record that had held McGee’s attention.

  The literate, caustic world of Momus was something of a leap for Creation to sign; though Currie did find common ground with McGee, as much with his interest in sex and decadence as with his learning. ‘I was getting a bit of press at the time in The Face and the NME,’ says Currie, ‘and I think Alan’s interest might have been perked by the fact I’d written an article about Jacques Brel in which I said that Brel was more thrilling and dangerous than a thousand Jesus and Mary Chains, and Alan had just lost them at that point, so maybe something in that resonated.’

  Having left él, the first Momus album for Creation was the Gallic-flavoured song cycle The Poison Boyfriend, a record that shone a light into a meditative and reflective voyeur’s idea of romance. The opening line of ‘Closer to You’, ‘Maybe you’re the Circle Line girl’, muttered with claustrophobic intensity, confirmed that Currie’s ambitions were set in an entirely different context from the rest of Creation’s roster.

  ‘I think I told Alan at our first meeting that I wanted to be bigger than David Bowie,’ says Currie, ‘and he said, “Well, that’s great, because most people that come to me want to be bigger than the Mighty Lemon Drops.” I knew that Alan had a really positive profile with the press and that I’d get more attention on Creation that I had done at él, although aesthetically it would possibly be a more toxic environment in some ways and there would be a certain kind of hideous Sixties revivalism saying it all goes back to the Pebbles compilation.’

  While Momus may have felt like a breath of fresh air to McGee as an act that was straying from the canon, Alway was casting his eye over material to sign to él that had nothing to do with music whatsoever. If his visio
n of an epicurean future of badinage and fresh air needed a front person, then he was convinced he’d found his man. ‘I wanted to make a record with Keith Floyd,’ says Alway. ‘I phoned him and his producer David Pritchard when they were shooting Floyd on Spain and he agreed. I thought, this guy’s a genius. He was saying, “We’re all idiots because we don’t eat fish.” It was a metaphor for things beyond food.’

  Sadly, like many of Alway’s ideas, it was rich in its impulse but more difficult to turn into a reality and neither the meeting of minds nor the record came to fruition. At Cherry Red, Alway was struggling to get él taken seriously as a going concern. Iain McNay had joined the Rajneeshpuram community in Oregon, leaving the company in the hands of his label managers and publishers who, with their days spent working on royalty statements for Dead Kennedys and Tracey Thorn, were as mystified as anyone by Alway’s intentions. Meanwhile Currie’s decision to sign with Creation had allowed him to start thinking about making videos and taking McGee’s talk of world domination a little more seriously.

  ‘It was almost like Monopoly money with Mike,’ says Currie. ‘But there was a certain realpolitik in Alan’s discourse. He would call you into the office and say, “Look at this review in the Melody Maker, you’ve got half a page review here,” and on the facing page is some major-label album where they’ve spent £500,000 on it and they only got half a page as well. We spent £2,000 and we got the same amount of space in the music press.’