In signing international bands to long-term deals, Watts-Russell was leaving the intimacy of 4AD and becoming more of a player on the main stage, occupying a role he felt ill-suited for, while simultaneously bending to the orthodoxies of the industry.
‘As you started doing contracts with options, you’re taking on a responsibility – you’re taking on a band’s life,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘So it’s your obligation and duty to do as much as you can to get their music across to people. Quite often I’ve wished I’d been more of a despot and just decided, no, we’re not going to release a single from an album, and, no, we’re not going to make a video because it’s a waste of money. I’ve still massive regrets about virtually every video we ever made. We could have given the money to somebody on the street and got more of a result, artistically and as a promotional tool.’
As someone who had always responded to the studio and the sound-world bands had imagined and carefully created for themselves, often with his help, Watts-Russell’s next move took his colleagues by surprise. Sensing that he needed to add to the release schedule, Watts-Russell did something wholly uncharacteristic. He went to a gig at the Camden Falcon and signed both bands on the bill: Lush and the Pale Saints. Not only was it the first time Watts-Russell had offered bands a contract on the basis of a live performance, but both groups bore the influence of 4AD quite heavily. Compared to the leap in direction he had taken in signing the Pixies, Lush and Pale Saints felt like a more orthodox pair of additions to his roster.
‘One had to be careful, because there was a lot of stuff that wasn’t very good and had been clearly influenced by what we were doing,’ says Watts-Russell, who had encountered a gentle sea-change in the indie nightlife from the austere atmosphere of the 4AD nights at the New Cross Venue. ‘I remember being at the Camden Falcon and people coming up to me going, “Oooooooh,” and rubbing me saying, “I really love you, Ivo,” – that was starting to happen. Not me particularly but Vaughan. You’d see it every day, there was loads of that going on.’
On top of cocaine the slow emergence of Ecstasy also started to make its presence felt at Alma Road, with Oliver finding the drug conducive to some of his more heightened flights of fancy. At his most ebullient and in his element when in his design studio going through proofs with a visiting band, he regularly held court in a manner his clients would never forget.
‘There was a band called Spirea X,’ says Oliver. ‘We had a glass roof over the studio that dropped two floors and halfway through the presentation I said, “Keep them talking.” All the stuff’s out on the desk and on the way upstairs I dropped everything. I was totally naked and slid down the roof with the whole scrotum flattened out and the band look up in horror. I suppose that’s a couple of Es later. We worked on the stuff and we were certainly productive on it.’
While 4AD didn’t have a reputation for heavy partying in the industry, behind closed doors at Alma Road drugs became a regular part of the daily routine. ‘Ivo really didn’t care what you did as long as you were there doing the work,’ says Wallace. ‘Because I grew up with such a strong Protestant work ethic, I was there every day. Didn’t matter what state I was in, I’d still be there and I’d still be doing it, and Ivo was the same. We’d still all turn up, but it did get a bit mental, not as bad as Creation – we weren’t party animals like fucking Creation became.’
* As he was his neighbour on the same Kings Cross estate, and in an arrangement that sometimes involved visits from the constabulary, Richard Thomas always kept a spare key to Shane MacGowan’s flat in case the Pogues’ front man should lose his own.
12 We Love You
Jeff Barrett, round the back with Loop, Croydon 1988. From left to right: Robert Hampson, Jeff Barrett, Neal Mackay, James Endeacott (photograph by James Finch used by kind permission of the photographer)
Creation’s reputation for becoming genuine rock ’n’ roll party animals – as opposed to a collection of people in thrall to the idea of being rock ’n’ roll party animals – was secured in euphoric riots of colour and carnality, thanks to McGee’s wholesale embrace of a new drug. Because of his links with Factory, while his contemporaries in the world of London guitar music were still content with a few lines of speed and a cider chaser, McGee became immersed in Ecstasy. For all his hedonism, the hand-to-mouth precariousness of Creation was still an issue that permanently played upon his mind as he balanced his ambitions with the realities of unpaid invoices and a tired-looking release schedule. Hardly anyone, including the bands, was getting too excited about the forthcoming Razorcuts and Jasmine Minks albums. In need of a renewed focus but feeling too listless to motivate himself, McGee was seriously considering giving up Creation.
‘I had a conversation with Tony Wilson and I was kind of going to chuck it in. Nobody seemed to give a fuck about Creation,’ says McGee, ‘and he went, “Just keep going keep going, be an indie, fuck the majors.” It was around the end of ’87: we’d failed with the Scream, we’d failed with the Weather Prophets, the Mary Chain had sacked me and Tony gave me the team talk ninety minutes in. I was thinking, well, I’ve had a good run. I’ve had four years. I’m not in a real job but whatever. And then we came back and I had House of Love, the Valentines, Ride and the Boo Radleys – we put out a lot of really good records around that time.’
The House of Love were Creation’s first new signing after the Elevation debacle. The group’s lead singer and songwriter was Guy Chadwick, a slightly haunted but resolute-looking man in his early thirties. Older, more experienced and, crucially, outside Creation’s extended family, the House of Love created a hit debut album that would result in the label’s first gold record. With a trail of missed opportunities with various major publishing and record companies behind him, Chadwick had been around the block in several different bands before settling on the twin guitar-effects-driven House of Love sound. Arriving fully formed with an impressive range of chord changes, crisp musicianship and enigmatic lyrics, the band were a well-drilled unit on stage which blew away the amateurishness of their contemporaries on the London indie gig circuit. Ambitious to take his songs well beyond the indie charts, Chadwick had also asked McGee to manage the House of Love; both band and manager were sure that lessons learned from the Elevation disaster could be put to good use and Chadwick duly instructed McGee to land the band as big a deal with a major as possible.
The band’s success on Creation and their reception in the press as 1988’s unreserved critical breakthrough gave them a kudos as well as healthy sales. It was clear to McGee’s inner circle, however, that unlike the usual array of bedroom dreamers and music press scenesters that usually made up the Creation roster, the House of Love, and Chadwick in particular, were serious careerists. Where Chadwick had failed in the past with pop rock and Bowie-esque synth numbers in his previous lives, he had struck gold with the House of Love in the music press and with John Peel; the major labels were salivating at the prospect of accepting the challenge to develop their career ambitions and turn them into the world’s first stadium indie band.
For the first time since ‘Upside Down’, the House of Love catalogue gave the Creation office at Clerkenwell Road a much-needed cash injection from material the label had actually released, rather than from commission, whether from Elevation or from one of McGee’s managing jobs. Creation was starting to function along the lines of a record company for the first time and McGee and Green were now in a position to take on another full-time member of staff, James Kyllo, an alumnus of Cherry Red, with expertise in the more technical aspects of running a label.
‘It was just Alan, his wife Yvonne, who was withdrawing from it all as they were getting divorced, and Dick and Jeff Barrett and his assistant Emma Anderson – a finer collection of people you couldn’t hope to work with,’ says Kyllo. ‘Ed Ball would be hanging around but I think Joe Foster had gone by then. I was the first person there who was not just a friend. The House of Love album was out. The band weren’t signed to Fontana but negotiations were
going on. Alan was managing them and he and Dick wanted somebody to turn Creation into a real record company.’
One of the first things Kyllo was instructed to do was to find Creation a new office. He found a location and premises that couldn’t have been further away, both philosophically and geographically, from the independent nerve centre of Collier Street – a run-down unit in a former wholesalers in Westgate Street, a side road overhung by railway arches and brimming with a dead-end ambience in Hackney, which was, in 1988, an area untouched by either regeneration or anyone in the music industry.
‘I think as much as anything they wanted to separate themselves from Rough Trade,’ says Kyllo. ‘It was very much a M&D kind of deal, and everything was being funded by Collier Street. They were almost just an A&R going into Rough Trade.’
The premises, a warren of musty rooms with heavily trodden carpets and in constant need of rewiring, were offset by the smell of dampening cardboard. Tucked behind the main Hackney thoroughfare of Mare Street, it was something of a statement for a record company as media-reliant and extrovert as Creation to place itself in exile from the rest of the industry; as well as locating themselves at a complicated distance away from the West End, McGee was removing the label from the bustle of central pubs and venues that comprised the indie nightlife. Creation was instead going to submerge itself in the more colourful and more villainous lowlife of East London.
‘It had been a furriers beforehand but it was just full of empty space,’ says Kyllo. ‘There had been sweat shops, a warehouse. It was quite easy to take on more of it, and it was really cheap. The room that we took on first had a spiral staircase that went up into a glass-enclosed greenhouse thing and I just took Alan there; he went up the stairs and saw the glass room and said, “Yeah, we’ll have that” … he liked the idea of having his cabin up there. It became clear it wasn’t practical for anybody to be up there, though – it was far too hot if the sun was out.’
While it was stifling during office hours, increasing numbers of people would be watching the sun slowly rise over Hackney from the rooftop glasshouse in the small hours, as the distinction between work and play became more and more blurred in McGee’s mind. ‘It was an amazing building,’ says McGee. ‘James showed it me and I thought, we’re going to have some proper fucking rock ’n’ roll parties here.’
McGee’s love of partying had accelerated with his discovery of Ecstasy. While remaining undecided on the merits of the early acid house tracks that he was hearing, he was, as were many other initiates, evangelical about the drug’s properties. Waking up wherever he had happened to crash out, McGee was spending as much time in the flat above the Factory office in Alan Erasmus’s flat in Palatine Road in Manchester as in the new offices in Hackney. As he bonded with Wilson over drugs and the resilience of running an independent label, McGee, awestruck, held only Factory and Wilson in high regard among their peer group. In turn Creation was also popular at the Haçienda, a place that, Glasgow clubs aside, was one of the few venues at which its lesser lights were taken seriously. In particular, New Order had warmed to Primal Scream, inviting them to open for them at Wembley Arena in December 1987, an occasion for which Gillespie was so out of it that he had to be supported at the mic stand until he finally collapsed, singing the last number on his back. It wasn’t the first time Gillespie had shared a stage with New Order: he had briefly been in the Wake, a Glaswegian band signed to Factory whom Rob Gretton had invited to tour with New Order. The Wembley date was, however, the first time Gillespie had thrown up on stage in front of 10,000 people. Such rampant displays of rock ’n’ roll daring endeared Primal Scream to New Order and Wilson. The result was that McGee, Gillespie, Innes and their entourage were welcomed with open arms into the Factory inner circle. ‘Bobby always loved New Order and then I think they really got Creation and me,’ says McGee. ‘I hung out a lot with Bernard in Manchester, just socially at parties at six in the morning, talking to him. They were always really lovely.’ Completing two years of intensive international touring, New Order ended 1987 with a spectacular party in Manchester. Among the guests were the latest Factory signing, Happy Mondays. McGee, keen to try anything new, joined the small huddle around the Mondays as they started a brisk trade in some MDMA capsules they’d brought in from Amsterdam. Taking Ecstasy away from the pressures of London, in Factory’s after-hours playpen in the Haçienda basement with some of his closest friends and allies, McGee was empowered with an earth-shattering sense of empathy. ‘I was getting into E before anybody else really. The only person who was into it was Jeff Barrett,’ says McGee. ‘We were both bang into it. I was into drugs, he was into the music as well as the drugs and at a certain point I got the music. It took me about six months but I got there in the end.’
Barrett and McGee had got to know each other through Barrett’s ability to combine enthusiasm, organisation and hedonism; qualities that led McGee to ask Barrett to join Creation as its one-man promotions department in 1985, making him the first Creation employee. Barrett, whose shoulder-length locks and in-depth knowledge of black music set him apart, both visually and philosophically, from the other habitués of the Creation office, had first encountered McGee when speed and aggression was his behavioural code.
‘When I first got to know Alan he was like an expat Scot punk in London,’ says Barrett, ‘and a real punk, not just a King’s Road fancy. He was the ultimate indie kid – he loved the underground and he was making it up as he went along.’ Idly flicking through the sales sheets for a clutch of new releases in Revolver Records, Bristol, where he worked, Barrett was drawn to the angry screeds that accompanied Creation’s singles.
‘It was the anti-sales sheet,’ says Barrett. ‘These sheets are supposed to say, “Buy me,” and these were like, “Hate me.” And I loved it. I just thought it was fucking hilarious.’ Deciding to investigate further, Barrett rang up the the McGees’ flat in Tottenham, encountering McGee at his most dissolute. ‘I went, “Hello I’m Jeff Barrett. I’m calling from Revolver in Bristol…. this is the distribution company that do your records for The Cartel … I’m moving back to Plymouth and I’m going to put groups on. I was wondering …”’ says Barrett. ‘Then this voice interrupts, “You’re taking the piss, man” … “What?” “You’re taking the fucking piss.” I just went with it, then he kind of loosened up and he said to me, “Man, you know that fucking band you’re talking about … I live in London, right … I put them on in fucking Tottenham Court Road … Nae cunt comes – you’re ringing from 250 miles away – and expect cunts to come – you must be taking the fucking piss.” Then the phone went down.’
Relocated to Plymouth, Barrett proved highly adept at promoting underground bands, hosting the June Brides, Big Flame and much of the Creation roster for their only likely booking on the south-west coast. ‘We were putting the Scream, on all the time down there,’ says Barrett, ‘all the fucking time, then I joined Creation and there was no job description. But McGee put me on this enterprise allowance scheme – so he put £200 into my bank account, I’d go qualify, he took the £200 pounds out, and I’d get £25 a week on the scheme, which is obviously not enough money to live on. So I carried on putting groups on. Me and McGee ended up having these tandem lives. I think he wanted me to be pure McGee and I wasn’t. But Alan was great. The guy was enthusiastic and he was driven, in a different way to me and probably in a different way to most people.’
Barrett had an immediate impact on London live music. As well as taking over the promotion of Bay 63 from Cerne Canning, he started a succession of nights in north London, making the short walk between the Black Horse and the Falcon in Camden Town a path well travelled for a small section of the music-weekly reading community. In each venue they would soak up the atmosphere of steaming audiences enjoying loud music in shabby pubs, run by swearing Irish landlords who couldn’t believe their luck as their side-street backwater locals became over-capacity with a heavy drinking, if unruly, audience. ‘I’d walk in and say, “I’d like t
o put a gig on here, please, mate,”’ says Barrett. ‘The landlord would go, “We haven’t got a music licence.” “No, no, you don’t understand, I’d like to put a gig on here.’ I just love anything that’s round the back – it’s got much more of a frisson.’
The frisson of the Black Horse and the Falcon would become a popular experience for much of the London media that still took an interest in the indie charts. ‘Everyone would be sort of colliding with Jeff,’ says Dave Harper, ‘’cause Jeff was always one of the good guys, putting on the gigs, shooting his mouth off and genuinely, genuinely enthusiastic. There was a scene around Jeff more than there was with Alan really.’ Barrett started booking the next generation of bands that succeeded the C86 acts he had promoted in Plymouth. More raucous, dissonant and confident, people were leaving the Camden back rooms having had a good night out. ‘As well as putting on Happy Mondays when all the other promoters hated them, the groups that I liked putting on at the time were things like the Sperm Wails, the kind of band that were rubbish but were great – Silverfish, things that became the Camden Lurch scene.’ Like most, if not all, music press-sponsored scenes, the Camden Lurch scene was a figment of journalists’ imagination. Made up of scenesters and other band members, the nights in the Black Horse and Falcon were the first time since The Living Room that the capital had its own thriving guitar underground nightlife, even if its environs were far from glamorous. ‘The Black Horse was a shitty-arsed little room with no stage,’ says Barrett ‘with a mantelpiece with a stuffed heron. And you’d play there and it was really good. It was somewhere that was created by a bloke who cared and the posters and the flyers all had attention to detail. I called the first club The Back Door to Babylon, as a take on the Richard Brautigan chapter, ‘The Front Door to Babylon’ [from his novel Dreaming of Babylon]. So it was bohemian. I stood at the door and got hammered. It was fun.’
How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 Page 31
