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

by King, Richard

  Barrett’s love of Americana archetypes like Brautigan would kindle an interest in the mythic West of cocaine highways and truck-stop satori as chronicled in books like Robert Greenfield’s STP and Stanley Booth’s Rythm Oil, full on rock ’n’ roll yarns that would become required reading at Creation as Big Star and Gram Parsons became totemic, elegantly wasted touchstones. Barrett called his next night ‘The Phil Kaufman Club’ in tribute to Parson’s legendary handler and fixer; though not every band he promoted was as refined as the club’s name and ethos. ‘There was one night, an Inspiral Carpets gig at the Falcon, and Richard Norris, who’d just done Jack The Tab, came up to me on the door and said, “You’re coming down to Clink Street later, acid house is happening and you need to be there.”’

  As different an environment as can be imagined from an Inspiral Carpets gig at the Camden Falcon, Clink Street near London Bridge was the address of a fitness suite that was home to Shoom, London’s first acid house club, hosted by Danny Rampling and his wife, which throbbed to the sounds of Italian and Chicago imports. Two Shoom regulars were Richard Norris and David Ball, now calling themselves the Grid, who along with Genesis P-Orridge had recorded Jack The Tab, an album that had been influenced by the idea, rather then the experience, of acid house. Jack The Tab was heavily layered and spacy – the opening track was called ‘King Tubby’ – the sound of dilated studio experimentation interspersed with Sixties drug movies. The record sounded like a Timothy Leary trip companion record re-imagined for the emergent acid house culture.

  ‘Richard had just done it, and I joined the party six months later,’ says Barrett. ‘We had nothing to do with that party starting at all, me or McGee, we just took pills. Alan was like, “Barrett, man, they’re amazing, you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do this,” and he did lead me into pilldom, but Richard was the first person to say, “You’ve got to come and do this.”’

  In the daylight hours Creation found itself in a market place that had changed. Dave Harper was now head of press at RCA, which, he was fond of telling everyone, made him Elvis’s PR man. On the basis of his track record with Factory and Rough Trade, Harper had been hired by Korda Marshall, an A&R at the major who felt Harper’s background would serve him well in negotiating the complexities of keeping the weekly press on side with two of his new signings: Pop Will Eat Itself and the Wedding Present, graduates of the school of C86 who were both now in competition with other RCA signings like Rick Astley to achieve chart impact and commercial breakthrough.

  The chances of either band succeeding in the pop mainstream were remote. The weekly press, while enjoying the ad revenues from major-label signed acts, largely took the signing of its formerly championed bands to a major as the green light to consolidate the process of knocking them down once the process of building them up had been completed. Without radio play, the Wedding Present and Pop Will Eat Itself faced an uncertain future of low-ranking entries into the Top Forty from which they might squeeze a Top of the Pops appearance and the illusion of career-building momentum. Another band comprised of friends and former band mates of Pop Will Eat Itself had circumvented such quasi-ideological problems by signing directly to a major and were reaping the benefits. The Wonderstuff were, depending on who you asked, either a breezy outlaw pop band or a bunch of chancing buskers who got lucky. Their debut album, the appallingly titled The Eight Legged Groove Machine, had entered the charts at no.13 and the band were proving themselves equally professional at handling Saturday morning TV kids’ shows as the cover of NME; a fact not lost on their contemporaries who, rather than chart success, were left fielding probing questions about their motivation and accusations of sell-out.

  ‘There was so much jealousy and hatred between all these people,’ says Harper. ‘Pop Will Eat Itself hated the Mighty Lemon Pips, as they called them, and they ended up falling out spectacularly with the Wonderstuff in this intense rivalry. It was a booze-fuelled repetitive cycle of failure, cocaine and hatred.’

  It was exactly this sort of cycle that McGee and Chadwick wanted to avoid for the House of Love. Well aware of the pitfalls awaiting a band making the transition between an independent and a major, they were in a rare and enviable position; the House of Love were subject to a major-label scrum. There was no need for conversations about development or crossover: as far as the labels competing for the band were concerned, the House of Love were hot property. McGee, under Chadwick’s instruction, was going to sign the band to the highest bidder. An offer for close to half a million came in from a bullish and charismatic major-label player, Dave Bates, head of A&R at Phonogram. McGee and the House of Love duly signed.

  ‘When I worked at Phonogram as a product manager,’ says Cally Calloman, ‘they said, “Well, you’re just starting you can have all the loons – Elton John, Bob Geldof, Marc Almond, Julian Cope, David Essex, all of the Some Bizzare roster. They said, “Right, that all happens in that room,” and it was a complete loon scene, but the most level-headed and engaging of them all was Julian Cope, because Julian’s an interesting bloke.’

  Cally Calloman was a unique figure within a major record label. A twenty-four-carat music head, he had run the psych label Bam Caruso and published Strange Things, a psychedelic periodical with Richard Norris, earning him the coveted status of company freak. Calloman was equally adept at handling meetings with Elton John’s management company, giving him a rare three-hundred-and-sixty-degree perspective on the internal politics of a multinational like Phonogram. His senior, Dave Bates, a self-styled maverick in a world of major-label power games, was similarly able to talk at length about marketing campaigns and Deram B-sides. Such was his success at Phonogram, where he had masterminded the careers of Wet Wet Wet and Def Leppard, that he had been gifted his own imprint, the resuscitated Fontana label. It was to Fontana, his bespoke imprint, that he had signed the House of Love. From day one Calloman could see that a boutique label within a major-label structure was always a nice idea, but one that was unlikely to succeed within the framework of Phonogram. Unlike Geoff Travis, who had his A&R instincts continually sharpened at Rough Trade while being able to use the Warner/Blanco y Negro system, Bates was operating as an in-house tastemaker with no form of outside influence. Bates was quietly admiring of the independent sector but considered any debate between majors vs indies to be vacuous. As far as he was concerned, Bates had created for himself his own label to run with the finesse of a Tony Wilson or Ivo Watts-Russell but with all the resources Polygram had to offer.

  ‘Dave Bates didn’t see Geoff Travis as a competitor. He saw him as a role model,’ says Calloman. ‘Dave saw Chris Blackwell and Island, and thought, that’s what I want to be. I got on really well with Dave and I used to argue with him and say, “No, no, Chris Blackwell and Island is based on, for a start, fifteen years of putting out Ernest Ranglin singles. You’ve got to do all of that. Then you need a Spooky Tooth and then you need a Traffic. You need things that are a fair degree of unsuccessful music saleswise, but very successful credibilitywise, in order to be able to turn around and say, “Right, Bob Marley is now going to mean something.”’

  The Island or Rough Trade ethos of music-first, hand-to-mouth survival was admired by Bates, but was one he considered an irrelevance to his own situation. In Fontana he had the best of both worlds: total control with which to implement his A&R vision without any interference or financial insecurities. If the House of Love were serious about succeeding they now had the resources to do so. Bates was rehearsing an argument that echoed through every major-label meeting room as executives tried to square the circle of once-considered stellar independent bands seeing their careers disintegrate quickly into major-label ignominy.

  ‘What Dave didn’t realise is you need to put the work in and you need to remortgage several houses in order to get there,’ says Calloman. ‘We were all highly paid executives and just said, “We’ll sign Tom Verlaine and Pere Ubu – that’s instant credibility.” I’d say, “Tom Verlaine and Pere Ubu are on the wane, w
hat you should have done is sign Television.” Bates would say, “No, no, no, I’m just buying it in,” and they started getting bands to try and make records that sounded like great records, so you’d get the House of Love to sound like Television. It’s like greatness by proxy, it’s greatness at arm’s length.’

  Calloman’s analysis of the House of Love’s position at Phonogram was piercingly astute.

  However much the majors paid to buy the talent in, the cultural differences that existed between the independents and majors, however meaningless or dubious, were still an underlying factor in the perception of an audience’s relationship with a band. One CD single or picture disc too many could just as easily see the record-buying public turn away as send the single into the Top Forty.

  Working with Phonogram had given McGee a crash course in protracted legal negotiations once the House of Love deal made it to the contract stage. With the majors prepared to invest close to half a million in a band that had been on Creation, McGee and Green realised that, whatever else their priorities for the label, they needed to put their relationship with its bands on a more professional footing.

  ‘There were pretty much no contracts,’ said Kyllo, ‘just profit-share handshakes. I think maybe My Bloody Valentine were the first to actually sign something, however vague it was, and from then on we had contracts.’

  McGee had become familiar with My Bloody Valentine through their label Lazy, whose offices had neighboured Creation in Clerkenwell. While not quite dismissing them as also-rans or wannabes, McGee and Green saw them as no threat to Biff Bang Pow as they granted MBV a support slot on one of their infrequent shows at a club in Canterbury. The Creation MDs’ jaws dropped to the floor as the newly regrouped My Bloody Valentine put on a display combining the volume and intensity of a Blast First band with the instant rush of pop art.

  ‘Some bands really needed help,’ says McGee, who, as well as wholeheartedly enjoying getting messed up with his bands, was also rediscovering the thrills of being a hands-on A&R man. ‘The Scream in the beginning of their metamorphosis needed help, Ride and the Boos needed a little bit of help, but Kevin never needed help at all – apart from me choosing “You Made Me Realise” as a single, which he thought was a B-side.’

  Kevin Shields, with his band mates Bilinda Butcher, Colm Ó’Ciosóig and Debbie Googe, arrived at Creation with perfect timing for both the band and label. Having hinted at a direction beyond Sixties-referencing buzzsaw pop on their Lazy releases, they recorded their debut album for Creation, Isn’t Anything, in a fortnight, trailing its release with two extraordinary singles, ‘You Made Me Realise’ and ‘Feed Me With Your Kiss’.

  Aggressive yet feminine, the band sounded unlike anything else; a languorous blurring of Shields and Butcher’s voices with the hollowed-out sweetness of their guitars and a rhythm section that explored the low notes with ferocity. One of Isn’t Anything’s defining features was its use of bottom end. Ó’Ciosóig made full use of his kit, hammering the toms in counterpoint to the bass lines which flowed with an equally heavy precision. For a label that, if it had a trademark sound was that of hiss and reverb, Isn’t Anything introduced Creation to the full sound spectrum. It was the first time the label had released a record by a band that sounded like the future, rather than a join-the-dots reworking of the past, however shambolic or elegant.

  ‘I called it the weird stuff,’ says McGee. ‘I said to Kevin, “Give me some more weird stuff.” It got amazing reviews, and I think it sold 50 or 60,000 copies in Britain, it did pretty well for a weird album. Kevin knew what he was doing really from day one. That first album probably cost about seven grand to make, but it sounds incredible.’

  Isn’t Anything was by far the most accomplished and disorientating album released by a British guitar band in 1988, and was worthy of inclusion of the year-end lists alongside Dinosaur Jr’s Bug and Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, the two bands who had clearly influenced Shields in his leap into pop abstraction. That year along with My Bloody Valentine were several other bands who were also experimenting with volume; though, in growing their hair long and stepping on the wah-wah pedal at a moment’s notice, they were a little more transparently in thrall to their influences. Two bands in particular, Loop and Spacemen 3, joined My Bloody Valentine in a vanguard of groups determined to rock out. Both bands were midwifed by a man for whom McGee had a growing affection: Dave Barker of Glass records, one of the unsung heroes of independence and occasionally his own worst enemy. Run on a shoestring from a room above a shop in Kilburn High Road, Glass had surreptitiously developed in the aftermath of C86 as a slightly eccentric but happening label. Rereleasing such curios as Mayo Thompson’s singer-songwriter LP Corky’s Debt To His Father, alongside a steady stream of albums by the Jazz Butcher, Barker earned a reputation as a man with an ear who knew his stuff. His earthy bonhomie and round-the-clock musical enthusiasm had been an open door to the Pastels, who joined Glass for their seminal piece of anorak garage, Truck, Train, Tractor.

  McGee was alert to Barker’s blossoming relationships with the Glaswegian beau-monde and Glass became something of a testing ground for Creation. McGee invited one of Barker’s first signings, the Jazz Butcher, to sign on the dotted line.

  A band out of time, the Jazz Butcher was based around Pat Fish, who sang wry observational and tuneful Jonathan Richman-esque songs, with a world-view framed in the Northants area rather than New England. It was in a biker pub in Rugby where Fish had seen a young band of teenagers, Spaceman 3, playing overloaded Stooges covers to a delighted crowd of Hell’s Angels.

  ‘I heard the tape,’ says Barker, ‘and thought, it’s good but it’s very derivative – but, you know, what isn’t? They had one song – I think it was the last track on the record “O.D. Catastrophe” – and it’s “TV Eye”, note for note, it’s “TV Eye” with different words. When I saw them I knew they had something. They played some show with the Butcher somewhere and you could tell … they’re sitting down … what’s going on … there’s two guys sitting down, the bass player standing up, and, you know, there’s like a ten-minute gap between each song while they’re tuning up and they had all the psychedelic lights going and stuff, which was retro, but no one else was doing it.’

  The first Spacemen 3 album, Sound of Confusion, was a primitive, garage fusion of the Velvets and the Stooges. The record fell on completely deaf ears in the music press, even John Peel, who granted Loop three sessions, remained uninterested. The Perfect Prescription, Spacemen 3’s second album, was a much more measured work. The track ‘Ecstasy Symphony’ gave ample notice of the band’s drug-orientated perspective. It also sounded exploratory rather than derivative; on at least some of the tracks, their ideas, however pharmaceutically enhanced, went beyond reproducing their record collections.

  ‘No one give a shit,’ says Barker. ‘I couldn’t even get it fucking reviewed. I think they got a small feature in Sounds when The Perfect Prescription came out, in which Sonic Boom talked about heroin all the time, and that fucked up any opportunity of going to America.’

  Someone who did start to take an interest in Spacemen 3 was McGee who, in typical fashion, decided to manage the band overnight and was now entering a period of perpetual debauchery. ‘I just liked taking drugs with Sonic. We were just both a couple of cokeheads,’ he says. ‘“If you could give me a good night out …” – you were in … do you know what I mean?’

  Despite Loop earning a Melody Maker cover feature – which saw them permanently fall out with Spacemen 3 – both bands remained a minority concern. They were, however, starting a new underground, away from bands like Pop Will Eat Itself and the Wedding Present that Marshall had signed at RCA. And if the audience back home was meagre, Spacemen 3’s distorted take on the English Opium-Eater archetype found resonance abroad.

  ‘I admired it ’cause they were in their own world,’ says Barker, ‘and the commitment was 100 per cent. I went to Los Angeles – it was in 1987 – and there was a record shop on Melrose and I
see this card up on the wall “Drummer Wanted for Band, must be into the Spacemen 3”. They couldn’t get a review in the fucking Melody Maker or the NME and yet in Los Angeles, in ’87, just about the time the second record came out, some kid wants to form a band in Los Angeles that’s the Spacemen 3.’

  Barrett, the Spacemen and every other band and hanger-on at Creation was being invited to Hackney where the difference between day and night was beginning to dissolve as Ecstasy took hold.

  Any unlikely excuse was conjured up by McGee to justify a three-day Ecstasy bender. In his evangelical zeal he would occasionally go to extreme lengths. In the early summer of 1989, with the days lengthening, McGee felt the need for an epic bacchanalian record release party to rival those thrown by Ahmet Ertegun or Seymour Stein in their Broadway pomp. McGee, determined to make full use of the greenhouse and roof at Westgate Street, scanned the release schedule only to realise he had a problem: Creation had nothing but a compilation by The Loft due for release in September. A Primal Scream album was in the can, but the band were still undecided on acid house music; their release party was sure to be rock ’n’ roll, but not in the manner the newly Ecstasy-saturated McGee was proselytising. Not to be denied the opportunity of a weekend’s hedonism, McGee immediately decided to release a ‘Greatest Hits’ compilation of Biff Bang Pow tracks. It was little more than a round-up of their best, if little known, material from the previous four or five years; McGee had nevertheless decided on a title that he felt encapsulated the essence of his and Green’s band: The Acid House Album. He ordered 5,000 plain white cardboard sleeves and some Day-Glo paint and the early Clerkenwell spirit of folding paper sleeves into plastic bags on speed was upgraded. Three days of spraying paint on cardboard sleeves pinned against a wall turned The Acid House Album launch party into an orgy of blissed-out deprivation. Paint and the painters started to melt together in a mess of white long-sleeved T-shirts and fringes as acid house tracks and early Seventies Stones numbers competed for supremacy over the sound system. Breaking into a smile while recalling what, in a crowded field, may have been possibly the highest point of Westgate Street debauchery, McGee is wistful. ‘There’s a few people who got high off the paint,’ he says, ‘and they were high for quite a long time.’