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

by King, Richard

  A generation of bands who had played a few club dates at Danceteria and possibly visited Boston, Chicago or the West Coast could now play to crowds whose size was beyond anything they could experience at home. ‘The cities were bigger,’ says Geiger. ‘The market place was pretty refined. The English just didn’t really realise it, ’cause they hadn’t really been here. Nobody really wanted to work with those artists, so I went immediately to the UK and I went and picked up The Smiths, the Bunnymen, New Order, Depeche Mode and a bunch of others.’

  Depeche Mode was one of the first bands Geiger booked. Building on their status as one of the most played bands on KROQ, he concentrated on the West Coast where the band suddenly found themselves walking out on to the stages of sunlit open-air auditoria. ‘It was very unexpected and it was very surprising,’ says Miller. ‘They’d done a couple of tours, then they didn’t go back to America for Construction Time Again because they felt they weren’t getting anywhere with it and they’d hit a certain point, and things just took off. We were gonna play the Palladium in LA in 1985, a 2,000-seat club, and then that sold out overnight, so we booked another date, that sold out overnight, and then they booked Irvine Meadows which is in Orange County which is an open-air shed which holds 15,000, and that sold out, so before you knew it, three years later they were playing to over 60,000 people at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.’

  Courtesy of alternative radio, Depeche Mode were now a stadium band in California, figureheads for a new audience, one that the American music industry would start to call alternative. It was a market it would come to understand through the series of tours booked by Geiger. Initially, the American executives were weary and dismissive at this imported culture which seemed to attract black-clad teenagers in make-up into the ninety-degree temperatures for an afternoon – a crowd that was thrilled at the idea of singing along to the new, darker Depeche Mode lyrics for ‘People Are People’, ‘Master and Servant’ and ‘Blasphemous Rumours’, each song dealing with the kind of subject that was left undiscussed in the never-ending of ‘Morning in America’.

  ‘It was Some Great Reward that really blew it up,’ says Geiger. ‘I remember when they sold out a stadium, and the world still didn’t notice. I was like, “Everybody else, get out of the way.”’

  Playing in the California heat, Depeche Mode dressed in leathers and chains in front of a full lightshow were more than adept at turning into rock gods while staying utterly connected to their minimal synth etiquette. ‘It was very Bon Jovi,’ says Miller. ‘Lots of leather and volume … but there was no drummer, and practically no guitar, at that point.’

  For the next album Miller proposed that Depeche Mode build on their sense of risk. Miller suggested that Jones, himself and the band start the record at Hansa Mischraum and live every day of the record from beginning to end without a day off – a journey into the heart of studio darkness as they submitted themselves to the samplers and mixing desk.

  ‘It was a very light version of Werner Herzog,’ says Miller. ‘I was quite influenced by that kind of very focused, living-it, thing, I was thinking about how he had made Aguirre, the Wrath of God and undergone such extremes.’

  Herzog’s idea of ‘ecstatic truth’, whereby the tensions and difficulties of making a film on a punishing schedule in an unforgivable location would reveal a larger truth in the narrative, had resulted in some extraordinary films, accompanied by equally extraordinary stories of tensions, fallings out and hysteria on the part of the actors, crew and director.

  ‘I’m a huge admirer of all that,’ says Miller. ‘I don’t really think I can do it properly myself, but I thought we could add just a little bit of that into the making of the record, so we did … and we all nearly cracked … and I was trying to run the label at the same time – that was the bigger problem.’

  ‘We did it without a day off,’ says Jones, ‘and I think we all drove each other a bit nuts … but it was all very song-led. We all thought the songs were really good and because it wasn’t a normal group, the machines played nearly everything. Martin played a little bit of guitar and Alan played a little bit of piano, but basically it was a sequencer playing everything – that was then orchestrated by whoever wanted to do it. We were doing what we thought of as ground-breaking work with sampling: the sequencer was liberating, we would sample a sound and make that sound play that beat, it was quite incredible.’

  Just as Herzog had found his working methods produced intolerable arguments with Klaus Kinski and the process would break down through a lack of planning, the participating members of the experiments at Hansa also experienced waves of studio torpor, often enhanced by varying amounts of intoxication. ‘There were many days when nothing happened,’ says Jones. ‘There were some days where we literally didn’t do anything and there was a reasonable amount of pot-smoking going on, no hard drugs, but there was quite a lot of drinking and excellent pot – but this was long before Dave did his life-threatening junkie phase or anything like that. It was just a general bit of medium-grade partying.’

  The process of Black Celebration had taken its toll on Miller, who realised the responsibilities of running a company with a multimillion-pound annual turnover could no longer co-exist in parallel with the highs and lows of letting creativity run wild in the recording studio. ‘After Black Celebration I came out with the sunlight in my eyes for the first time in four or five years,’ says Miller. ‘I realised that I wanted to get on with running the label and I kind of was a bit out of touch … We were doing great. We had the Bad Seeds, we were about to sign Leibach and Diamanda Galás, but I felt things were moving on and I really wanted to get out into the world and listen to music and figure out what was going on.’

  One of the first decisions Miller made was to move Mute into larger premises on Harrow Road, a concrete, almost brutalist, building with basement warehouse and a network of corridors and offices. While getting a firmer handle on Mute’s day-to-day operations, Miller realised that the company, via Vince Clarke’s third group, Erasure, was about to have another platinum album. Erasure’s first album Wonderland, released in 1986, had been a modest success but a follow-up single, ‘Sometimes’, released later that year, went to no. 2, beginning a twelve-month period where Erasure were a fixture in the Top Forty. For someone who still flinched at the idea that he was running a record company, Miller was experiencing the kind of success for which major labels would spend months planning and a considerable fortune marketing.

  ‘Much as he loved mucking about with synthesisers and being in the studio, I think he realised he couldn’t be so hands on,’ says Jones. ‘It got a lot bigger when they went to Harrow Road, hugely bigger, and they started to lose the plot because there was no formal business training. Daniel told me someone said to him once, they came in to do financial trouble shooting for Mute, and they said it was bleeding money … from wounds all over the body of Mute. There’s all that money coming in and you want to get all this shit done, and you’re one visionary in charge of the company. You haven’t got time to do everything, you’re just on a big wave, surfing this wave, trying to stay up there.’

  Back in the States, Depeche Mode’s tour for Black Celebration was a twenty-eight-date riot of debauchery. The band had an unstoppable momentum in America, one which was now being shared by New Order and the Bunnymen as the country was becoming something of a fantasy world for their generation of music press-feted groups. If New Order and the Bunnymen’s carefully nurtured reputations of outsider seriousness was still present at home, in America, away from such image constraints, the bands found an appetite for one of the finest products the country had to offer a touring British band – the gold-plated rock ’n’ roll lifestyle.

  ‘They’d all rather come over to America,’ says Geiger. ‘First of all, America was cooler for them to hang out in – more fun, and they could get better drugs. The more people they knew, it became a lot easier to go to a party in New York and then, “Heh, great, I’m going to party in San Francisco and then
there’s this great party next week in LA.”’

  Geiger started to combine the bands of the stature of New Order and the Bunnymen as a package. On what were known as ‘shed tours’, two British alternative bands, appearing together in secondary market cities like St Louis which Geiger made a point of booking into, had an impact and drew a crowd that was more than the sum of its two parts.

  ‘The question was, how could you really show that these artists were big in comparison to Def Leppard?’ says Geiger. ‘If you could create a mini event, where you put a couple of bands that had a shared fan base together, then you get an explosion in the number of bodies and that’s really what happened, so we found a format. Those bands actually liked it, ’cause when they were on the bus rides for eight hours, or they would go play Cleveland, they were a little bored but if they were hanging with each other, they weren’t that bored, so when you had New Order and the Bunnymen as an example together, they were having a great time all the way through – they’re still talking about it today.’

  At the mention of the 1987 Bunnymen/New Order tour, in which his role was DJ-cum-northern-spiritual-advisor, Mike Pickering has the air of a veteran recalling a hard-fought campaign in difficult conditions. ‘I don’t know how we made it back from that tour to be honest. It took us nearly a year to recover.’ New Order’s American manager, Tom Atencio, was starting to field congratulatory calls from hard-bitten industry professionals who thought they’d seen it all. He says, ‘The promoters were doing incredible business. One of them calls me up before the LA show and says, “I’m not complaining, because tickets sales are really good, but I want you to know that your liquor rider is second only to the Rolling Stones, and they play stadiums.” We could go into incredibly lurid tales, they were incredibly punishing on themselves, I can tell you.’

  One band missing from the shed tours were The Smiths, who, having played the States only twelve times since New Year’s Day 1984, were incredibly hot property, with a pent-up audience spread across America desperate for them to tour.

  ‘I got The Smiths’, says Geiger, ‘booked their first tour, then Ian Copeland, who had been my mentor in many ways, took them on. He was better at hanging with Scott Piering and Mike Hinc. I think it had to do with Charlie but I don’t know a guy named Charlie … and I’m not a Charlie person … never was … anyway … There was a lot of Charlie going on at the time.’

  Geiger was not the only ally of the band frustrated at their inability to maintain a working relationship with a manager for more than six months. By the time The Smiths made their second and final tour of the States in 1986, they were capable of selling out two nights at Universal Amphitheatre in LA in a matter of hours, putting them on the cusp of the stadium league and in desperate need of a support infrastructure that could build on their momentum, something, since the retirement of Joe Moss, they had singularly failed to do. The result was a series of cancelled dates, including the last four shows on the ’86 American tour, one of which was a prestigious New York date where Stein and Sire had prepared an end-of-tour wrap party in the style only Stein knew how to throw. While the situation was frustrating for an American music industry finely tuned to notice when an opportunity was being so clearly missed, at home the band’s relationship with Rough Trade was starting to unravel.

  Cracks had first begun to appear in the summer of 1985 when Morrissey insisted that ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’ be released as a single from Meat Is Murder, considering both ‘How Soon Is Now?’ and ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’, two non-LP tracks, had already been released since the album came out; it was a curious decision that went against industry practice and common sense.

  ‘I said to him, “That’s not a good idea,”’ says Travis. ‘“It’s a bad idea, it’s not a single,” and he wouldn’t have that and, being me, I said, “Fine, you want it to come out, it’ll come out.” It came out, it got to no. 34. “Rough Trade are useless.” Of course we are, that proves it. That was the first moment I can remember of any friction.’

  Begun around the time of the release of ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’, the band’s next album, The Queen Is Dead had been recorded in extraordinary circumstances. Gossip around the band hinted that The Smiths would soon be leaving Rough Trade. In an act of hardball brinkmanship of which any major would have been proud, Rough Trade placed a high court injunction on the band recording for any other record company. The value of The Smiths to Rough Trade and the fragility of the band’s working relationship with them was now a matter of public record.

  Ensuring that Rough Trade would be able to release another Smiths record by pursuing the matter through the law courts was one of the few options left to Travis; The Smiths’ career was reaching breaking point and internal communication over the band’s finances had ended in stalemate. Rather than agree on a way forward, Morrissey and Marr externalised their problems, laying them all at the feet of their record company.

  ‘The moaning came after they began to think they were a bigger band than they really were,’ says Travis. ‘It got really mad towards the end, cancellations, releases approved then disapproved, it was chaos.’

  The tensions between Travis and The Smiths were accentuated by the closeness of their relationship. Apart from Morrissey’s concentrated and lengthy phone calls with The Smiths’ artwork supervisor, Jo Slee, it was left to Travis to deal directly with the band, an arrangement, in the absence of any kind of mediator, that was becoming increasingly difficult and personal.

  Remarkably, in the middle of such constant turmoil The Smiths released their masterpiece The Queen Is Dead. Aside from ‘Frankly Mr Shankly’, a thinly disguised open letter to Travis from Morrissey outlining his grievances, there were few signs within the record of the travails that had been the background to its creation.

  ‘Whenever there was a problem, there was no one around The Smiths that you could just go to and say, “There’s this happening, what do we do, what do you do?”’ says Richard Boon. ‘Everything was diffuse. Other than Mike Hinc, who I think the band had a lot of faith in, and Scott Piering’s on–off attempts to manage them, the reality was, we just thought, Morrissey goes home and talks to his mum about this. And Johnny ends up booking the van. There were issues about control between the two of them; they weren’t ever going to get a manager either of them were happy with, Ken Friedman being a case in point.’

  Ken Friedman was the last manager The Smiths appointed, a young and bright West Coast protégé of Bill Graham. With a reputation for being something of a bon viveur, he was in the perfect position to consolidate the band’s profile in the States and bring some straight-talking Californian ruthlessness into The Smiths’ dealings with Rough Trade.*

  Having resolved the impasse of the court injunction by agreeing a compromise to let the band record one more album for Rough Trade (the contract had previously stated two), Travis was expecting one last Smiths studio album to follow The Queen Is Dead. It was quietly pointed out to him via the offer of a buy-out from the major that EMI were The Smiths’ preferred label to release the forthcoming Strangeways Here We Come. An increasingly isolated Travis remained tenacious and turned down the offer from EMI. Strangeways would be coming out on Rough Trade whether the band liked it or not. It was obvious to all parties that the astonishing trajectory that had been shared by Travis and the band since they walked into Blenheim Crescent had come to an end. ‘In the time I was at Rough Trade, and I was there every day for a year and a bit during the height of their success, I never remember the band coming in the office,’ says Cerne Canning.

  Marr in particular had been frustrated by the limits of Rough Trade’s recording budgets, something that the label had failed to prioritise. ‘It was one of the label managers,’ says Boon, ‘Simon Harper I think. He was being driven around London on the back of a courier bike, knocking on studio doors asking if they’d accept payment for a Smiths session by credit card. It had gone beyond a joke – it really wasn’t funny any more – they always thought
they weren’t being looked after, and they’d make demands and throw tantrums.’

  The Smiths’ increasingly impulsive behaviour could turn on a whim or at the hint of any perceived slight, especially any on the part of Rough Trade. The last year of their career was a series of botched sessions and cancelled appearances, including turning down such prime-time TV appearances as Wogan, which earned the band a reputation, particularly at Collier Street, of remote, rock-star behaviour.

  ‘There were always completely unfounded rumours of Rolls Royces,’ says Canning. ‘It was like one of those films where the camera followed one person then changed POV as it walked past someone else. Rumours every day, lots of fragments of conversation and people shaking their heads.’

  The reality was that the band, particularly Marr, who tried to keep a hands-on grasp on organising the day-to-day arrangements of the band, were exhausted. ‘Because we were young and immature, the nature of The Smiths meant we would’ve taken the effects of Rough Trade’s precariousness and been hotheaded about it,’ he says. ‘They were learning too, they weren’t necessarily that old as a company either.’

  Ken Friedman, who had helped Simple Minds reach near-arena status in America, had anticipated that an injection of optimism and industry ambition into The Smiths would help facilitate a new and healthy relationship between the band and EMI as they embarked on the next stage of their career. If Friedman detected a willingness to finally start playing the game and abandon the haphazard point-scoring which had become the main feature of the band’s relationship with Rough Trade, then he was the only person who did.