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

by King, Richard

  However much he enjoyed the limelight and Creation’s worldwide reputation, McGee was growing listless. When Oasis played to the multitude at Knebworth for two nights, in his heart of hearts he registered that the moment had peaked. ‘I love rock ’n’ roll,’ he says, ‘but there’s a point, even with me, when Oasis were getting into helicopters at Knebworth and it was a 125,000-crowd giggle. That was the point that I thought, exit, and I didn’t have the balls to do it; and I should’ve done it then. It would have been a better statement to end it at Knebworth, and let them just start their own record company after that.’

  Instead one of his next signings would prove to be one of Creation’s most controversial. Kevin Rowland had endured some painful moments and wilderness years after the million-selling career of Dexys Midnight Runners. Having been in and out of recovery, he was ready to make a new record and McGee had no hesitation in wanting to work with one of his heroes. Rowland recorded an LP of cover versions, whose lyrics he altered to make them more autobiographical and reflect the experiences he had undergone. Entitled My Beauty, the record featured some soaring performances from Rowland that were equal to the best of his Dexys work. My Beauty should have found a willing audience, one that wanted to welcome a returning hero who had found salvation in a set of poignant life-affirming songs. Along with finding meaning in material that he had first heard as a teenager, Rowland had also taken to wearing a ‘man-dress’, a costume to which he occasionally added jewellery and make-up, something he did for the album’s sleeve, which featured the singer in a purple frock.

  In more enlightened times, the gesture might have been considered a further example of Rowland’s eccentricities. The singer had often changed his appearance – Dexys Midnight Runners had variously dressed as dockers, gypsies and Wall Street preppies, but at the height of the Loaded era, the majority of his original fans found his new wardrobe shocking.

  The video for the album’s single, ‘Concrete and Clay’, was also far from straightforward. In between close-ups of Rowland’s stockinged thighs, it featured the singer gyrating provocatively with exotic dancers, as backing singers, dressed as angels, cooed approvingly.

  Creation’s marketing expertise and budgets ensured that the image of a cross-dressing Rowland was fly-posted across the country, something that, rather than promoting the album, guaranteed it almost certain death. ‘If it hadn’t been for the cover with Kevin in a sarong then the bottom line is it would’ve hit the Radio 2 audiences,’ says McGee. ‘It’s an amazing record. But you know what, Kevin was Kevin and there’s nobody can tell Kevin what to do. People thought I’d put him up to it!’

  Another factor was playing on McGee’s mind. Without any common purpose or enemy to fight for or against, he had, in its smooth-running success, grown increasingly bored of the label and had mentally begun to wind Creation down. ‘I was left with two choices with My Beauty’, he says. ‘Put it out like that or don’t. It was the end of Creation anyway. I was really at the end of it, phoning up Dick and saying, “Fucking hell, I’ve just got so fed up with this label,” and I think it was like a breath of fresh air for him to actually tell the truth finally: “I’ve been fed up for years, Alan, and I’ve been waiting for you to tell me that you couldn’t be bothered any more.”’

  As McGee started examining the paperwork of the Sony/Creation deal to assess the ramifications of closing the company down, it also became apparent that the label might end on a high. Primal Scream had recorded a new album, XTRMNTR, that not only matched the creative peak of Screamadelica, it was its menacing, nihilistic animus.

  Jeff Barrett had always been involved with Primal Scream, either formally or informally, or usually both. He was significantly involved in XTRMNTR as he helped supervise the release in the absence of Creation’s MDs, who were distracted by the winding-down process, as Sony, McGee, Green and their lawyers negotiated a settlement. ‘Bobby [Gillespie]’s really upset that we weren’t around for XTRMNTR, which is fair enough,’ says McGee, ‘but I couldn’t stand Sony. Sony realised that on our overhead they could actually save half a million by letting us go six months early and at that point I was like fucking off the roof, man, “Come on!”’

  XTRMNTR was Creation’s last album and its last masterpiece. After a long succession of half-baked, marketing-heavy records, the label had returned to its roots and released a record of energised, mercurial rock ’n’ roll. As well as featuring one of Kevin Shields’s finest guitar lines, the closing track, ‘Shoot Speed/Kill Light’ reintroduced the word ‘speed’ into the Creation lexicon. During its early, folded-sleeve years, speed had been Creation’s key signifier and featured in many of its song titles. On its final release the label was once more celebrating velocity.

  McGee encountered no little degree of rancour at his decision to close Creation. Primal Scream especially, the band whose members he had known since their teens and been the label’s hallmark, felt abandoned. ‘I never said it was for life. I never said I was going to be Primal Scream’s dad,’ he says, ‘and you know what, I’m not perfect and maybe I did leave at a really rotten time for them in particular, and, you know what, I apologise. I fucked off, and people got pissed off. But this is where people don’t understand me, I don’t care about indie music, and it’s not because I think I’m better than indie music, it was a means to an end.’

  Away from the fall-out of the label’s demise Dick Green had quietly approached Bowen about the possibility of doing something together. They had developed a close working relationship separate from the Oasis engine room, one in which they had maintained the label’s rapport with bands that had been signed before the move to Primrose Hill, notably the Boo Radleys and Teenage Fanclub. Green suggested to Bowen that if they were to work together, then the pre-gold-record era of Creation, for which Green held the most affection, should be their inspiration. ‘Dick was sat there and said, “Look, I’d really like to do another label,”’ says Bowen, ‘“but it’d be really totally different to what we’re doing: no staff, no office, just real back to basics, start again, start right at the beginning, get away from all this,” and I didn’t even have to think twice.’

  A year after Creation was laid to rest McGee started a new label, Poptones, with the financial backing of the founders of Richer Sounds. Poptones was short-lived and achieved worldwide success with The Hives, something that further convinced McGee that he had grown bored not only of Creation, but of the music business as a whole. Green and Bowen launched their new company Wichita with minimum fanfare and little reference to their previous lives and slowly grew into the artist-led label they had imagined. ‘Dick’s a magnificent individual,’ says McGee. ‘To be honest, he did what I failed to do, which was have two successful record companies in a row.’

  *

  Creation ceased trading in 1999. Three years later Daniel Miller sold Mute to EMI. Miller had taken the momentous decision once he realised that he had fallen into a business cycle that was becoming as stressful as it was repetitive. ‘At various times during Mute’s histories, we’ve made redundancies and rehired,’ he says. ‘You have to over-hire to manage the situation, but then you have to say, “Well, look, we can’t afford it any more.” And it was very painful. The whole Britpop thing fucked it up for me, added to which it was a terrible time for music – it felt like we had fallen into a loop. You couldn’t get any press or any radio. The media was very weak and very unimaginative, and it felt like this was the end of music.’

  Miller’s frustrations were exemplified by the lack of coverage for the album Play by Moby. It was the artist’s fifth album in what had been a genre-hopping and sporadic career, one that had started with a no. 1 single and the worldwide hit ‘Go’, followed by cover versions of Joy Division. It was the kind of career path that was no longer of interest to a success-driven media, one that now gauged an artist’s relevance by making comparisons with the exponential curve of million-selling guitar bands. Play was a collection of electronic torch songs that featured ethnograph
ic gospel samples and crisp production. It was also one of the first albums to benefit from the new strategy of synchs, or synchronisations, the use of an artist’s material in an advert. Synchs had started in the mid-Eighties as ad land excavated Fifties and Sixties soul singles to sell Levi’s 501 denim. By the mid-Nineties the trend had developed to include songs by contemporary artists, offering a reputationally risky but instant return in a manner which the Top Forty charts could no longer guarantee. By the release of Play, Moby issued a press release indicating that the ubiquity of synching had reached a new level – according to the PR every track on the album was being used in an advert.

  ‘It wasn’t every track,’ says Miller. ‘That’s a myth perpetuated by Moby, which backfired on him I think. I had people coming up to me saying, “How come that isn’t doing better?” and I couldn’t explain it. Radio was its usual bollocks, some excuse – too old, too young, too slow, too fast, too electronic, not electronic enough, whatever – and so when we got the opportunities we decided to take them and Moby’s always been open to that. “If the radio’s not going to fucking play it, let them hear it like this.”’

  Play had coincided with Miller’s first serious experience of business difficulties. Mute hadn’t released a Depeche Mode album for several years and the band were at a hiatus. The acts that had sold healthily through Mute’s history, like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, had reached a sales plateau, one which some of the label’s newer signings would struggle to reach. ‘I’d been through this low point mid to late Nineties when actually we were in real financial trouble for the first time ever … We were managing OK but … and we were still selling lots of records overseas and getting nice advances to cover that, but the underlying business was bad and I was in a position where I was starting to have to talk to people about possibly working together.’

  Mute was the last of the labels that had started in the post-punk vanguard to remain independent. If Miller was going to sell the company he was keen not to repeat the mistakes he had seen some of his contemporaries make. McGee had sold Sony 49 per cent of Creation for a tidy sum, one that was significantly increased by the success of Oasis. However, as Oasis had become a bigger entity than their record company, Creation had become the junior partner in the three-way relationship between Sony, Oasis and themselves. Although Sony technically owned the smaller half of the label, in reality they owned a great deal more.

  ‘I was advised by my lawyer’, says Miller, ‘that the trouble with those deals is that you’re constantly ending up negotiating for your whole life and jockeying for position. They populated Creation with people from Sony and stuff like that. I don’t know who knows what the right thing is, but any of the pros and cons of doing the deal with EMI had nothing to do with the fact that it was 49, 51 or 100 per cent – that wouldn’t have made any difference. I thought, you’re either in there or you’re not.’

  Miller’s timing was propitious as he started negotiation, a process that took well over a year to complete. Mute’s luck returned and Play went on to be a blockbuster. ‘I was coming off the back of a couple of huge records, so I felt that that was probably the highest value I was going to get for the label and I was right … and then, of course, the industry then went down the tubes.’

  The scale of Mute’s achievements are best illustrated by the number of artists Miller has worked with who have remained on the label. Long-term high-profile careers between artists and labels are often associated with relationships like those between Pink Floyd and the Beatles at EMI. Depeche Mode and Nick Cave have both enjoyed longer careers with Miller and Mute, a tribute to both his loyalty and his ability to recognise the shifts in the business long before his rivals. ‘The first contract I did with Depeche was well into their career,’ Miller says. ‘We still ended up being a fifty-fifty profit share, but they had to do a contract for some other legal reasons. The way the industry’s going is more going back to that in a way, not no contracts, but more partnership. What chance has a record company got these days without being open to other things?’‡

  A year before Miller and McGee sold up, they were once again joined in the market place by one of their contemporaries, one who had been a quiet background presence for most of the decade. In 1999 Geoff Travis and Jeannette Lee relaunched Rough Trade and almost instantly achieved the kind of self-contained success with which the name was associated.

  Jeannette Lee had been working with Travis since Rough Trade had begun to fracture at the Seven Sisters Road office where Andy Childs had joined them as a label manager. After the dissolution of the Rough Trade group of companies in 1991, the remnants of Rough Trade Records – Travis, Lee, Andy Childs and a handful of staff – moved to a small office on Golborne Road. The premises, a ground floor and basement, were ten minutes’ walk from the original Rough Trade shop and reconnected Travis to his Ladbroke Grove roots. ‘I think Jeannette’s incredibly important to the whole thing,’ says Childs. ‘Geoff’s always relied on Jeannette’s musical knowledge and taste as well. As an A&R Geoff always talks in terms of, “We like this,” and, “We like that.” Jeannette understands the way artists think and work and can relate to them. I can’t imagine Geoff not having Jeannette there to rely on.’

  As a teenager in the late Seventies Lee had worked with Don Letts in the King’s Road punk boutique, Acme Attractions, a job that placed her at the heart of the Clash’s extended west London family. During Rough Trade’s early years, she had only been familiar with Travis by sight. ‘I can remember seeing him on the Tube, I was on the Tube with Don,’ she says. ‘We got off at Marble Arch and he was in front of us with his big Afro and a big raincoat and we were like, Oh look, there’s Geoff Travis … hippie.”’

  As a member of Public Image Limited, Lee had been the band’s de facto manager and had learned to negotiate and argue the band’s corner with a record company – skills which had enabled her to develop a detailed understanding of the industry and which had led her to having to liaise with some of its senior figures. ‘I was PiL’s ambassador with the record company,’ she says. ‘I always got on quite well with the individuals involved, but as far as we were concerned they were always on the other side. I met Richard Branson and people like that a lot.’

  During the closure of Rough Trade, Lee and Travis had started managing bands and had their greatest success with Pulp. Lee’s experience of the business outside the Rough Trade milieu and her enthusiasm and energy revived Travis as he started to emerge from the fall-out of the label. By the mid-Nineties Lee and Travis were business partners and the idea of relaunching Rough Trade as a record company was fermenting in their minds. Once the wounds of the original company’s collapse had healed, Travis had tried a number of ways to once more use the name. One Little Indian had bought some of the catalogue and the Rough Trade name in the company’s fire sale. A mooted partnership between Travis, Lee and One Little Indian barely got off the ground and Trade 2, an imprint with Island, was equally unsuccessful.

  ‘I don’t think it ever went away really, the label,’ says Lee. ‘It was always rearing its head and we were trying to do it whilst doing other things full-on. It takes a few years to set something up with a new bunch of people and for it to fail … We’d probably gone through the setting-up and failing at One Little Indian and then we went through a setting-up and failing at Island, so that whole nine years was pretty much used up.’

  Once the ownership had reverted to Travis and Lee they were joined by James Endeacott as the label’s head of A&R. Endeacott had had a colourful past, rooted firmly in the world of independence, and which suited his natural exuberance and his distinctive strawberry-blond curls. He had been a member of Loop, after which he had been offered a job (but no salary) at Creation during the Clerkenwell era before he eventually managed the Tindersticks.§ At Rough Trade he was given the brief to sign new talent for a new phase of the label, one that coincided with the start of a new millennium.

  ‘I wasn’t a spring chicken. I was in my early thirt
ies,’ he says, ‘but this door opened: this whole possibility of the hours between six and ten when the band goes on, when I was normally travelling, now were just spent in the pub. My whole life became an endless succession of bars and gigs. Falling over and just having the best time of my life … it was brilliant.’

  Rough Trade had yet to develop a fresh roster and Endeacott had licence to investigate whatever the London indie club circuit had to offer. The first handful of releases was something of a mixed bag, neither Terris, Birthday or Cadallaca would go on to releases albums. Another signing raised eyebrows as to where, exactly, the new Rough Trade’s antennae were focused. ‘We had a band called Queen Adreena,’ says Endeacott. ‘It was some kind of crazy, gothy, metal thing and the girl singer used to take her clothes off and shout.’

  The signing that was to reconfirm Rough Trade as a pre-eminent independent label came from a tape that had been sent to Travis by one of his contacts, Matt Hickey, who booked the Mercury Lounge club in New York. The cassette was by the Strokes, a New York band that had recorded three songs of vintage Manhattan, street hassle rock ’n’ roll. Upon hearing the tape, Travis and Lee’s reaction was of instant air-punching excitement. ‘Geoff and Jeannette were just going crazy about it and I was just jumping up and down,’ says Endeacott. ‘They flew over to New York. Two days later, saw them in upstate New York somewhere, got back and said they’d seen the second coming! Jeannette said, “We’ve just seen this band with five of the most beautiful men you’ve ever seen.” Geoff signed them for a one-single deal and then, of course, every A&R man in New York just went mental.’

  Rough Trade released the tape as a single, ‘The Modern Age’, and the Strokes flew over to London where their arrival started a music-industry bush fire. Rough Trade had taken a gamble by not trying to sign the band to a long-term deal, but the energies and hype surrounding the band left no one in any doubt that Rough Trade was at the centre of what was about to become a phenomenon. ‘It all really kicked off ’cause there was a photograph of the band sat around in this bar, and it was the first time anybody apart from Geoff and Jeannette had seen them,’ says Endeacott. ‘We got this photograph and it went in the NME, and on the Tuesday afternoon that the NME came out, the phone was just off the hook. All these people that we all knew in the business were going, “What the fuck … This band … Oh my God” … Every guy was just going, “I wanna be in that band” … Every girl was going, “I wanna shag all of them at once.”’