Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  His musical interests arose “from just being a typical kid growing up in London with wide musical tastes,” he continues, “luckily being exposed to lots of people that had good record collections and good taste. And also going to the Roundhouse in London, that was a big part of my education. They had Implosion there every Sunday. You paid eleven and six and you got there at 3.30 and left at 11.30 at night, and they had the most fantastic acts on. Jeff Dexter was the DJ.” The Implosion nights, which began in 1969, hosted bands like The Pink Fairies, Pink Floyd and Kevin Ayers, and were pivotal events in the development of ‘freak’ culture, a more radical branding of hippydom whose advocates also included Small Wonder’s Pete Stennet. “I went to school at the Angel, Islington, and the West End’s not that far away,” Travis continues. “We’d often go into the West End after school. So I went to The Marquee, with my school satchel, to see The Who. I saw John Mayall, loads of great things and it was just mesmerising. I didn’t really ever think I was going to work in music one day. You don’t make that connection. When you’re just a fan, you don’t really think about that, it’s just another world. I never had a big plan.”

  Friend and housemate Vivien Goldman depicted the shop in a Sounds article in January 1977 and underscored its thematic link to the American beatnik world. “… lots of green plants in the window; a table-full of mags for the customers to leaf through whilst they drink mugs of tea; nice things on the walls (more a pad than a shop); lots of good sounds and lots of good vibes. Geoff is open, friendly, and a True Fan… It’s a traditional California New Wave consumer concept, but since the Alternative Society wheezed into terminal breakdown, nobody’s succeeded in reviving that relaxed ambience – in London at any rate. Geoff must feel like ol’ Doc Frankenstein when he sees how that simple recipe has blossomed a hole-in-the-wall shop into a nerve centre, Energy Transmission H.Q.”

  The shop was given the name Rough Trade, Travis enjoying its undertones of illicit vice, though its roots seem to be in either a pulp novel or from Carol Pope’s Canadian group of the same name. As he later told Word magazine, he had seen the band play in Toronto in 1975. “I didn’t think they were any good but I liked the name – and the reference – so I stole it and hoped they wouldn’t get anywhere.” However, the name did lead to some problems, “mainly some very strange phone calls to the shop about the sort of services we were offering”. Clients who were in the market for something even more exotic than American and Jamaican vinyl imports were in for a disappointment.

  However, from its opening on 20 February 1976, the shop struggled. Located in a primarily West Indian area due to the affordability of the rents, barely any customers graced the shop in its first few months of existence. “The first few years of the shop were very slow,” Travis admits. “There weren’t that many customers.” Davidson’s appearances were almost as sporadic. “[The shop] was his idea, he wanted to be part of this. He opened the shop with me, Ken, but he just got very disaffected very quickly. Because I don’t think he had realised that if you have a shop, you have to be there every day, for certain hours. ‘I think I’m going to go and play tennis.’ ‘Fine, see you later, Ken.’ As we know, life is unglamorous, and it’s 90% work. I think he got disenchanted, Ken, and he had a terrible demise in Amsterdam.”

  Gradually things improved. Soon, they were able to compete in servicing local and visiting reggae fans, which might have seemed improbable. “You know why I think we did OK?” Travis asks. “Dub Vendor [which opened a secondary outlet in Ladbroke Grove in 1980 as an extension of its original base in Clapham] and Rough Trade would buy our pre-release records from the same source, from a distributor in Harlesden. So it was a matter of getting your hands on the best records. In terms of A&R, it’s a fantastic discipline to have to listen to twenty seconds of a pre-release and decide whether you’re going to order it. It’s a great way of honing your musical knowledge. And of course, being a stupid white boy, there’s every likelihood they’re going to try to get rid of their worst records, [the ones] that nobody else wants. So you have to be on your game. It’s really good fun, and I loved doing that.”

  Fortunately there were few costly disasters. “Well, I didn’t order huge numbers. Certainly, if they weren’t the absolute best releases of that week, they wouldn’t sell. Richard Scott was working in distribution and mail order, and he had his Jamaican background, because he used to manage Third World.” Scott, introduced to Travis by Goldman, was invited on board to extend the shop’s acquisition of new reggae releases and also establish a mail order function. “I went to see Geoff one evening in the shop in 1977,” Scott recalls. “Yes, Viv introduced us, because she had been the press officer at Island when Third World signed for them.”

  Scott would subsequently run the distribution arm of Rough Trade – an enterprise which dwarfed the label in terms of personnel and turnover – for over a decade. He also found time to encourage and mentor individual artists, distributing a booklet (based on Scritti Politti’s template) advising aspirant musicians how to produce and manufacture their own singles. “Richard had a great collection of reggae records,” says Travis. “We were always connoisseurs of good music. That’s what it boils down to. And we were pretty secure in our tastes. If we liked it and everybody else said it was crap – what do they know?” he laughs.

  “Suddenly it took off and it got really busy,” Travis continues. “On Fridays and Saturdays it was really exciting, because it got really jammed. We had these huge reggae speakers and played music very loud, it was really exciting. It was like any other day working in a record shop, the difference being that we were doing distribution in the back yard, making and packing orders. Playing music all day long is the basic staple. Then taking orders and tracking down records. The days went by very fast. And then at night going to a gig.” Three or four times a week? Travis smiles. “No, about seven! Most of the time we went to gigs, the Roxy or the Marquee. The other thing was, in the first years of the shop, the pay was so low because there was no money being made, I would DJ at Dingwalls a lot. I would play black music, basically. Except on the Crazy Cavern nights, when I’d play rockabilly. And you had to play really good rockabilly, because you were faced by serious rockabillies. That was fun, and I really enjoyed it, it gave me some living money and an education. Also I used to write reviews for Record Mirror. I once got sent to Amsterdam to review The Commodores when they played at an ice rink. They were fantastic. I was a freelancer, and when you went to the Record Mirror offices, there were all these review copies in a drawer. And all the ones that nobody else wanted I used to get, and they tended to be the soul ones.” Travis has an instinctive distrust of arbitrary stylistic judgements. “And I really liked that! We didn’t really sell that many soul records, but I liked the fact that I had knowledge of that area.”

  More importantly for the shop, a niche was soon established as American imports by artists such as The Seeds started to trickle in. But hadn’t Rock On already sewn that market up? “Yeah, but they weren’t interested in the same things,” states Travis. “Rock On was a fantastic shop, and yes, they would have had the Flaming Groovies. But I think we started to find things like Television, Ork’s ‘Little Johnny Jewel’ single, Blondie’s first single ‘X-Offender’ on Private Stock. That was the fun, tracking these things down and then ordering them. Those were things probably slightly outside Rock On’s orbit. Ted and Roger and the boys had a more purist, 50s rocker mentality. You know, Vince Taylor. Of course, we loved all that stuff, but our niche was slightly different. With Pere Ubu, I wrote off to David [Thomas], because it was his label. And those singles were extraordinary. And it was lovely to be able to correspond direct with the artist. That was a new thing. It was exciting. That was part of the do it yourself culture. You can’t imagine getting a letter back from Keith Richards, if he can in fact write!”

  As Richard Scott points out, such connections also grew naturally from the shop’s business. “We’d been dealing with the shop in Cleveland, Discodrome. We
’d bought all the early Pere Ubu singles in bulk, the three classic singles. We’d had a relationship with David before that – he was a journalist, Crocus Behemoth, on a Cleveland magazine we used to import, alongside Slash from Los Angeles, Search And Destroy from San Francisco and others.”

  More than a retail outlet, Rough Trade became a talking shop, where likeminded individuals – especially those with an interest in the counter-culture and music – could congregate and cogitate as they grazed the racks. There were regular team meetings, and all staff were paid an equal wage regardless of position. Rough Trade was definitively not an entity founded by music industry veterans like Riviera and Robinson at Stiff, though Scott had certainly learned much from Chris Blackwell at Island. In contrast to Stiff’s proprietors’ back story of tough exchanges with bands and promoters, Rough Trade was formed according to broadly Marxist principles, developed by Travis while a student. It’s questionable whether more than a handful of the bands or fanzine writers whose products Rough Trade stocked would have understood the continuum to 60s idealism that the shop represented. This was no year zero concern as dictated by punk’s shrill rhetoric, but then so few of the indie start-ups truly were.

  Theft at Kensington Road was rife and accounting haphazard. Among the rich mix of patrons were record dealers, attempting to hawk their wares within the shop’s chaotic confines, and increasingly a gaggle of aspirant musicians who often ended up on the other side of the counter. They included Ana Da Silva of the Raincoats, a band who, to all intents and purposes, formed readymade from the shop staff. Others included brothers Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks of the Swell Maps and Barbara Gogan of The Passions. “I worked for Rough Trade Records for about a year organising tours for the label’s groups,” notes Gogan, “up until we got signed to Fiction toward the end of 1979. Rough Trade had never had an iota of interest in The Passions – even to the point of me being told by my boss, Pete Walmsley, that I should ‘on no account take advantage of any contacts gained’ there. And that I should ‘give up playing in that worthless band’. They were a self-righteous bunch for the most part. Not the bands though, they were in the main a pretty decent bunch of people, creative too, and a joy to work with.”

  As Rough Trade’s reputation grew, established acts such as The Ramones and various Sex Pistols and associates also called in, the former playing a memorable one-off gig there, as did Patti Smith. Such in-store performances didn’t happen “too often”, says Travis. “But if you imagine how many copies of The Ramones album we sold? We were on the radar of the record company. So it was probably their idea to say, do you want the band to visit? Yeah, that sounds great. And Patti we knew because of the ‘Piss Factory’ single, we got that straight from maybe Lenny [Kaye] himself, so it was exciting that they came to visit us. Talking Heads came as well. What I always say is that when The Ramones came, it was packed. It was a big to-do. And when the Talking Heads came there was nobody there at all.” Other regular or casual staff included Jude Crighton, Nigel House, Pete Donne and Shirley O’Loughlin, who later managed The Raincoats. Vivien Goldman and Jon Savage also served behind the counter while establishing themselves as journalists.

  Travis immediately embraced punk when he first heard it, but was at pains not to dismiss the prior musical generation, considered obsolete by more arbitrary and self-conscious taste-makers, who seeded the revolution. Equally, the virtues of the records themselves, rather than the hipness of their creators, was his paramount consideration. “I loved the [new] records. ‘Keys To Your Heart’ by the 101ers was a fantastic record. The Damned’s first single was fantastic. Everyone derides the Damned. But they made some wonderful records. They were brilliant in those days. Of course they were uncool, in terms of the gradations of what was acceptable to the musical hierarchy. But they were terrific. The other thing is pub rock. I loved Brinsley Schwarz and Kilburn and the High Roads. I saw them a few times and they were really fantastic. Ducks Deluxe really were good to go and see. The Tyla Gang, and obviously Doctor Feelgood were fantastic. It was a great time for music in London, pre-punk. And then punk happened and it was really exciting. The Nashville changed from being Elvis Costello, Brinsley Shwarz and Eggs Over Easy and those American bands, I liked all those bands unashamedly. I loved The Band, and I love The Grateful Dead. I always will. I’m not ashamed to say it. It’s great music. There’s not much better. But I can’t see why you can’t like that and also love ‘Anarchy In The UK’.”

  As the first handful of independent releases turned to an avalanche, Rough Trade found itself at the heart of the careering snowball. The shop proved crucial to the fortunes of the likes of Stiff and Chiswick in the days before they were able to secure distribution from majors. While such releases began to take up more shelf space, and the shop clientele underwent a subtle shift, Travis also kept his ear to the ground for emerging opportunities. One arose when The Sex Pistols’ aforementioned ‘Anarchy In The UK’ became briefly unavailable despite the band’s notoriety. Rough Trade satisfied that demand by importing the Barclay edition from France, with Malcolm McLaren and Glitterbest’s approval. “I knew that Malcolm had done a deal in France that excluded the rest of the world,” Travis confirms. “The rest was common sense.”

  There was plenty of product, legitimate or otherwise, to service. When Zig Zag magazine published its Small Labels Catalogue in 1978 it featured 231 entries. When it did so again two years later, there were over 800 labels listed. Rough Trade, following Richard Scott’s arrival, had long since acted as a portal for this new breed of labels, supplying other shops and outlets from 1977 onwards.

  Of course, the two most luminous examples of the DIY boom were Buzzcocks’ ‘Spiral Scratch’ EP and the Desperate Bicycles singles. Both parties were visitors to the shop. “They just came in and were really lovely people,” Travis remembers of the Bicycles. “A little blue bag with their record in, ‘this is our record, would you like to stock it?’ Love to, really interesting. Not the world’s greatest record, but what an artefact – and it has a lot of charm.” He was knocked out, however, by ‘Spiral Scratch’. “Absolutely thrilling. Immediately. I think we said to Richard [Boon], we’ll take 250. They only pressed 1,000, so it virtually sold out, which was fantastic.”

  The economics of releasing a single from a standing start became tenable almost overnight. Rough Trade would customarily stock between 300 and 500 copies of your self-released 7-inch single – nearly recouping the initial outlay in one fell swoop. For that reason, Rough Trade could count on flocks of impish young bands from all over the UK descending on them, usually on an away day ticket that would also stretch to a visit to Small Wonder. The third leg of any aspirant DIY band’s illustrious voyage would often be an attempt to sneak past BBC security in order to hand deliver a copy of their precious cargo to John Peel. Who would, seemingly more often than not, play it. And that direct route from creator to audience, unfiltered by the raft of considerations and compromises that to an extent was the music industry, was completely extraordinary too. The link between the Rough Trade generation of bands and Peel has been made frequently. Partly, to an extent, because they shared an ethos. Peel championed the underdog, and made it his business to support those in most need of his patronage (sometimes, one senses, at the expense of critical judgement about merit). There were other similarities, too. Neither Peel, who always maintained that he was able to exist happily on his BBC salary, the odd voiceover for adverts aside, nor Travis, were money-orientated. Similarly, although playful at the notion of their ‘celebrity’, they were by and large not interested in inflicting their egos on others. Contrast that with the loudhailer personalities running the majors across the Atlantic, where CBS’s Walter Yetnikoff, David Geffen et al indulged themselves in endless turf wars. Or in the UK, Richard Branson’s use of his record empire as leverage for a quasi-Boy’s Own adventurer lifestyle.

  I wondered whether Travis actually bought some of the more dreadful singles out of sympathy? “Honestly, the standard was good
,” he states. “There weren’t that many awful records. The awful ones were things like Skrewdriver, which we didn’t want to stock. When you get someone like The Rezillos coming down from Edinburgh with their first singles, and asking us to stock their records – it wasn’t like us being benevolent and acting like we really cared, it was mostly really good stuff. It didn’t happen every day that someone came in. There were lots of visits. The Bluebells arrived exhausted, virtually sleeping on the floor of the shop. It was exciting. But it was such a fantastic thing to have distribution and the shop, in terms of being an A&R source. I don’t think you could ever again be in such a powerful position in terms of the market, it’s something I miss really. It gave us such a huge advantage over everyone else. Being the first port of call. Johnny Marr [of The Smiths] came to us to give us ‘Hand In Glove’, and if we didn’t have the shop, it would have made it much more difficult for them to find their way to us. It was deliberate, that access and open house [policy]. And even now we’re on the street, you don’t have to take an elevator and get through four security people, that’s not us really. You never know what might happen, some determined person might walk up and be the new Prince.”