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

by King, Richard

  Six months earlier, a mile and a half north-west of Clerkenwell Road, Cerne Canning had an idea that he thought might help reconnect Rough Trade with the street-level buzz of the live sector in a way that had helped define the label in its infancy, something that had been missing since its move to King’s Cross. ‘Geoff and I were having conversations about how the live scene was sort of bubbling under,’ says Canning, who was promoting regularly at Bay 63, the former Acklam Hall in Ladbroke Grove. ‘McGee was doing The Living Room and Dan Treacy was putting on bands like Shop Assistants and the Pastels at his club Room at the Top, but I got the sense that Rough Trade wasn’t that bothered.’

  Canning started promoting London shows for many of the bands Rough Trade distributed, ensuring that the likes of the Soup Dragons and Bogshed had a small foothold in the capital. Realising the bands could be collated into a spirit-of-DIY-type festival he booked five nights at the Hammersmith Riverside billed as ‘The Week of Wonders’ in October 1985. As well as featuring the June Brides and the Stone Roses playing their second London show, the week leaned heavily towards Creation whose night featured Joe Foster, the Pastels and the Membranes and an argument over the running order. Rough Trade’s latest signings, the Woodentops, who the label was hoping would develop some Smiths-style momentum, were also pitched heavily to the press. The result was that the week had the air of a showcase for the two most media-friendly companies. ‘I got in trouble with the other labels,’ says Canning, ‘for putting Rough Trade and Creation on the posters.’

  The presentation of a cross-section of the DIY underground – an underground that was connected by occupying the same low-budget rung of the music business ladder rather than any musical style – caught the attention of the press, particularly the NME, which by the middle of the Eighties was facing stiff competition from the success of the style magazines and suffering one of its periodic crises of identity. Roughly divided into two camps, the paper was split between writers wanting to cover the innovative hip hop music emerging from the USA (along with its counterparts in electro and go-go) and those members of staff who were insistent that the paper stay loyal to its roots in the early Eighties as a champion of independent guitar-based music, the music with which its readership closely identified. The tendency to cover the more dynamic new sounds often won out; on the front page alongside writer bylines were pictures of Cameo, Mantronix and Schoolly D. The newspaper also attempted to appeal to the wider youth subculture, breaking out from exclusively covering music by running a series of cover stories on, for example, Jimmy White, the ubiquitous film Absolute Beginners and Olympian decathlete Daley Thompson, with the result that it came across as a Polytechnic version of The Face.

  For the writers on the paper who still aligned themselves with guitar music and the indie charts it hosted every week, Canning’s mini-festival provided a sense of locus and occasion that they thought worthy of investment. ‘Out of the Week of Wonders I got approached to do the C86 live shows,’ says Canning, ‘which inspired the NME to do the cassette.’

  C86, an NME-curated and cover-mounted cassette of the type of bands Canning was promoting, was an opportunity for the newspaper to realign itself with guitar music. The wider media, now run by many of those whose lives it had changed, had started the year noting that 1986 was the tenth anniversary of punk, prompting a protracted series of think pieces and histories. For its fans at NME, independent DIY guitar music, however amateurish in its conviction, was one of punk’s lasting legacies.

  NME regularly cover-mounted tapes and flexi discs throughout the period. It had recently produced collections of northern soul tracks from the Kent label and on one cassette, entitled The Latin Kick, had tried to turn fans of The Fall and the Wedding Present on to the delights of Joe Bataan and the Fania All-Stars. The idea of doing a zeitgeist-defining tape of independent music was borrowed from C81, a cassette the NME had launched in conjunction with Rough Trade five years earlier. Featuring the Specials, Cabaret Voltaire, Orange Juice and Scritti Politti and others, C81 had captured the creativity and ambition of a sector of the music industry that, despite its hand-to-mouth precariousness, was awash with experimentation and ambition and that had its eyes fixed towards a future it was determined to write.

  The twenty-two bands compiled five years later on C86 were at the apex of a very different career arc, drawn from labels that were taken seriously by fanzine editors and the staff of Rough Trade Warehouse but practically nowhere else. Close Lobsters, A Witness and the Shrubs, for example, were caught somewhere between a charitable John Peel session and a Top Ten appearance in the indie charts rather than the national Top Forty.

  A week-long run featuring the bands on the tape was booked at the ICA for July. The NME heavily promoted the cassette and Rough Trade pressed up a vinyl edition. A few weeks after the tape had been played by its readership the newspaper began receiving letters complaining about the sound quality.

  The recordings had been made cheaply and quickly and, inevitably for a collection of nascent bands still putting their first tentative steps into a recording studio, the results were mixed. While the energy of most of the groups was not in doubt, especially those like Stump and Bogshed who were used to working up a cider-and-black-fuelled crowd, the sense of being underwhelmed that this was the best the current generation of maverick independent artists had to offer was palpable.

  What the compilation succeeded in doing was drawing attention to the network of fanzines and smaller labels that were still conceived in the ethos of DIY and self-expression. While musically wholly dissimilar, Big Flame and the Bodines, for instance, both represented the independent music sector in all is low-fidelity glory. One of the bands featured that would often be associated with the compilation once it had become an adjective was the Pastels. ‘In the 1980s I think the music scene was quite sprawling,’ says McRobbie. ‘People would meet up accidentally. We would often play with the Membranes and we really liked their energy. A lot of bands would just play together and at some point Rough Trade decided to try and define this scene. The timing of it was really good.’

  Canning, who has now seen the C86 idea celebrated, reviled and rediscovered, locates the innocence and commitment of the groups as its lasting legacy. ‘The thing I really liked about C86 – and it does get a mixed press, a lot of the music was fairly naive and hasn’t stood the test of time – was the attitude. I did nearly a hundred bands during that period and nearly all of them would turn up to play talking about music and with their leads in plastic bags.’

  ‘There was definitely an idea that the interesting things were about getting stuck in and doing everything yourself, and that had a pure expression,’ says McRobbie. ‘You’re in charge of the sleeve and you end up with something that’s very much you.’ The bands included, whose sound has become synonymous with C86, the Bodines, the Soup Dragons and Byrds-influenced-period Primal Scream, combined the Sixties references of Orange Juice and the splayed wilful amateurishness of TVPs. The bands lacked Orange Juice’s charm – mistaking their schoolboy insouciance for a contrived awkwardness – and were too inexperienced to be familiar with the genuine darkness of alienation and addiction that ran through Dan Treacy’s songwriting. All of which, along with many of the bands’ fondness for anoraks, meant that there was something of the school project about C86.*

  Creation was the most represented label on the compilation. Primal Scream, the Pastels, the Bodines and the Servants had all put out releases through McGee, but the label moved as quickly as possible to distance itself from the project.

  ‘C86 was a really bizarre, stupid and patronising collection of stuff,’ says Foster. ‘It also didn’t include loads of people who were very important. It included people who were like, “Who the fuck is that?” It got it completely arse backwards, totally wrong, to an alarming degree. You would think that people working with journalists would have a slightly better grasp of what was going on.’

  Buoyed by the impact of the cassette the NME made unli
kely and temporary cover stars of the Shop Assistants and the Mighty Lemon Drops. However, a glance at the 1986 end-of-year charts in the paper confirms that its alignment with independent guitar music – which it was now calling ‘indie’ as a genre – had been short-lived. In the top five there was only one guitar album, Evol by Sonic Youth at no. 4, with the triumvirate of Parade by Prince and the Revolution, Rapture by Anita Baker and Janet Jackson’s Control all resting above it. The Queen Is Dead by The Smiths, a record to which NME would dedicate whole issues in the future, was nestling at no. 9 in the list, lodged between The Album by Mantronix and Raisin’ Hell by Run DMC.

  Such was the sense of deflation around C86 that many of the bands struggled to build on its rickety momentum, which only reinforced the sense that the compilation had front-loaded careerism and ambition on to a handful of bands who were quite happy playing to a hundred people in a pub. ‘Not many groups had managers at that time, and the concept of a producer, and a lot of what the music industry did, just seemed quite irrelevant,’ says McRobbie. ‘Of course, many people were very quick to re-embrace those more traditional aspects as soon as they were offered to them. A lot of groups became so messed up with drugs that they needed managers so that became part of the culture again. I remember the Mighty Lemon Drops had management and that seemed quite unusual to us; they seemed to quite embrace professionalism.’

  The Mighty Lemon Drops were now being managed by Canning and his partner Simon Esplen, as were the Shop Assistants. Both bands had been signed to Blue Guitar, a boutique faux-independent financed by Chrysalis and A&R’d by Travis, making the imprint the third label Travis could add to his collection of record companies. Encouraging Canning to manage the bands, Travis helped educate him in the rules of the game by licensing the Mighty Lemon Drops to Seymour Stein and Sire, which resulted in the band achieving the kind of medium-grade college radio career they could only have dreamt of while playing in Bay 63.

  Other bands on the compilation were consigned to be fondly, or not so fondly, remembered as being evocative of the tape’s happy amateurishness. ‘I remember being quite pleasantly surprised that Bogshed had made it on,’ says McRobbie, ‘but there were a lot of things that for a snapshot of things taking place that were interesting were missing. Felt weren’t on it, nor the Nightingales nor The Fall.’

  ‘Felt followed me to Creation,’ says Nick Currie, ‘and I remember speaking to Lawrence once about how we both loved the word Creation.’

  In his attempts to woo the cream of his Pillows and Prayers roster away from Cherry Red, Alway had promised Felt a deal with Warners through Blanco y Negro. Rejected at the first mention of their name by Travis and Dickins, the band were left to rue their lot as they shuffled back to Cherry Red while Alway licked his wounds. Felt remained prolific, and a widening aura of mystery surrounded the band with each new release. The combination of Lawrence’s bedsit metaphysics and the guitar lines of Maurice Deebank, one of the independent sector’s genuine virtuosi, made for spiralling and intense records, each a more detailed illustration of Felt’s isolation from most of their contemporaries and label mates. By their fourth album, Ignite the Seven Cannons, Cherry Red could stretch to a budget for the Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie to produce them. Fans of the band, Felt had been asked to support the Cocteau Twins at the Royal Festival Hall, exactly the kind of break that Felt, with their lack of sound man, appeared, despite Lawrence’s ambitions of stardom, to treat with wilful indifference. Such detached nonchalance was coming to define Felt. In interviews Lawrence gave the impression he was settling for discovery and deification by future generations of listeners; the cultivation of an enigma was, it seemed, of equal priority to selling records. The album’s lead single, ‘Primitive Painters’, featuring Liz Fraser duetting with Lawrence at his most assured and assertive in front of the microphone, became an independent chart hit crossing into early evening radio. Both ‘Primitive Painters’ and Ignite the Seven Cannons had topped the independent charts, meaning Felt were now in a hallowed position usually occupied by New Order, The Smiths, the Cocteau Twins or Depeche Mode. Poised on the cusp of some form of mainstream breakthrough, with perfect timing, tensions in the band led Deebank to quit. McGee, having signed them the moment their deal with Cherry Red elapsed, couldn’t wait to work with a band he was convinced could be his generation’s ultimate cult success.

  Felt’s Creation debut was, even by their standards, an obscure choice. A nineteen-minute album of instrumentals called Let the Snakes Crinkle Their Heads to Death, it highlighted, in the absence of Deebank, the organ skills of their teenage keyboard prodigy Martin Duffy.

  *

  The Felt album that quickly followed, four months later in the autumn of 1986, Forever Breathes the Lonely Word, was a masterpiece. ‘If I have one regret about Creation,’ says McGee, ‘[it] is that we didn’t know how to make that record happen.’ To record Forever, Felt had returned to Woodbine Street studios in Leamington Spa and its owner and in-house producer, John A. Rivers, with whom the band had made their early records. Though still recorded on only as high a budget as Creation could squeeze out of Rough Trade, one of the strengths of Forever Breathes the Lonely Word is that it sounds like a record that has been produced. Martin Duffy’s Hammond drifts like mist, either churning with a freewheeling melody or colouring the slower songs with a brittle texture. While lightly shrouded in the standard reverb of the day, rather than masking the inefficiencies of Felt, it highlights the band’s strengths. In its opening lines, ‘Seven brothers on their way from Avalon’, Forever instantly left the previous few months’ C86 world of satchels and la, la, las behind. At just over thirty minutes Forever was the first Felt album to contain no instrumentals, only Lawrence’s neatly structured songs set in an autumnal hue; it was as near to an album in the classic style of their heroes as anyone on Creation was likely to get. With an overall sound pitched between Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and, particularly in Lawrence’s Tom Verlaine delivery, Television’s Marquee Moon, the album aimed for a timelessness that twenty years later would have ensured performances on Later with Jools Holland and widespread coverage in the heritage rock media. In 1986 not even the fast-talking hustle of Creation could elevate the record beyond their comfort zone (although Lawrence, in an act of supreme wish fulfilment, was profiled in Smash Hits the following year). The NME, having decided to feature the band in depth, swapped what was intended to be a Felt cover story with a feature on the rise of teenage suicide rates. In its move into sociology the paper had blown Lawrence’s chance of front-page stardom. The interview, while lavishing praise on the record, highlighted Lawrence’s many idiosyncrasies, which included an aversion to vegetables and an OCD relationship with hygiene, air fresheners and anyone thinking of using his lavatory. An accompanying feature in Melody Maker started with the heading ‘Felt Make Brilliant Records that Nobody Buys’, spelling out Felt and Lawrence’s destiny in inky black.

  For the bands seizing their post-C86 moment, Woodbine Street and John A. Rivers briefly became the Abbey Road of their generation, a Mecca for a gated drum sound, buzzsaw guitars and reverb. Initially used by Swell Maps, another touchstone for the C86 generation, the studio was now running sessions for Close Lobsters, Mighty Mighty and Talulah Gosh and the like. The Pastels recorded their debut Up For a Bit with the Pastels there. ‘It was quite strange for a while,’ says McRobbie. ‘We were recognised in the street in Leamington Spa.’

  The breathless urgency and rush against the studio clock of those bands’ recordings was in stark contrast to the refined, lambent sound of Forever Breathes the Lonely Word. Felt entrenched their position as the éminence grise of both the Creation roster and their C86 contemporaries. The Creation office in Clerkenwell was an increasingly relaxed and happy place as the hedonism of rock ’n’ roll, even if was just the budget version, was now making its siren’s call. McGee and his acts were all cover stars in their heads and, in the blurred network of fanzines at least, they often were in reality as well. Creation�
�s ability to have a good time was not going unnoticed. A mess of cheap Ray-Bans and wild Dylanesque ginger hair, McGee was a regular feature in the NME gossip columns.

  As C86 had been a press concoction, it needed to justify itself. Doing what only it knew how to do best, the paper invented a genre. The word ‘indie’ appeared as an adjective to describe a look and sound rather than an economic position. C86 may in time have become associated with a specific core style of twee guitar music, but ‘indie’ now had little to do with the charts or the way a record was financed. As far as NME and the rest of the music press were concerned, any passing gaggle of white boys and girls who had started a band, irrespective of which label they were signed to – a corporate major or a bedsit start-up – was now called indie.

  Within this new world of indie, the acts on Creation proudly appointed themselves as its bespoke bad-behaviour bands: decadent, dissolute and, in a stopping-signing-on way for a handful of them at least, enriched. ‘The ambition was very attractive,’ says Nick Currie. ‘We were all Scots on the make in London. It was almost like being Poles or Lithuanians, having a little exiles’ club in a capital city. You feel this opportunity but it’s not exactly your culture. There was a sense that we were trying to sleep with beautiful girls and trying to make money.’ At Clerkenwell Road, rock ’n’ roll was alive and well and breathing out elegantly wasted plumes of smoke, with, just occasionally, the odd new substance being added to the speed. The opening lines on Forever Breathes the Lonely Word’s final track, ‘Got into something dangerous and strange’, were indicative that, for some, the partying was starting to get a little harder and a little darker.