Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  Another charm offensive – to get Psychic TV a deal – saw him send out brass phalluses to record company executives with the legend ‘Psychic TV: Fuck The Record Industry’, engraved underneath. And his playful spite wasn’t just directed at the music industry’s upper echelons. He famously ‘installed’ a chapel and confession box as part of his offices in Mayfair where those handing in demo tapes would be inducted – though other sources suggest this was one of many apocryphal stories he was happy to circulate. His relationship with his own artists, meanwhile, similarly stoked controversy. His fall-outs with Marc Almond were widely chronicled, and he was publicly criticised by both Genesis P. Orridge and Einsturzende Neubaten. Coil (formed by Christopherson with Throbbing Gristle ‘fan boy’ and lover Geoff Rushton, aka John Balance), went to the trouble of subtitling one of their releases: ‘Steve, Pay Us What You Owe Us’.

  When asked in 1990 by Ian Gittins if he shared any affinity with the likes of 4AD, Factory or Mute, Stevo’s response might have been easily guessed. “Yeah, but I think I’m better than all three of them, musically speaking… I look at Some Bizzare like this – a sculptor with mallet and chisel, or an artist in a recording studio, or a painter with a canvas, that’s the outlet for their frustration. They all have an outlet for their creativity. Some Bizzare is my outlet, and the way I sign people up is very particular. I’m playing chess, and I’m going to win.”

  Stevo’s link to Miller initially come through Depeche Mode, though via long-term collaborator Jim Thirlwell [an Australian ex-pat raised in Brooklyn whose artistic nom de plume was Foetus] he also brought subsequent Mute mainstays Einsturzende Neubaten to British ears. Depeche were unsure whether committing a track to Stevo’s proposed ‘futurist’ compilation would be in their long-term interests. It was during these negotiations that Stevo first suggested they approach Mute (in the end their track ‘Photographic’, produced by Miller, did indeed emerge on the Some Bizzare compilation). Ultimately, though, he would pass on offering Depeche Mode a management contract, as he had Soft Cell and The The, telling Simon Reynolds in Rip It Up that they were ‘too commercial and poppy’ for his tastes. Yet that was certainly part of Depeche Mode’s appeal to Miller.

  Thirlwell, meanwhile, also had his own label, Self Immolation, for his various exploits as Foetus (later serving as a ‘vanity’ stamp on his Some Bizzare releases). In a Magnet interview with Matt Johnson, Thirlwell remembered how the imprint grew out of his job in retail at Virgin – and how easy it was to benefit both in terms of finances and resources from the indie label surge. “I worked behind the singles counter for a couple of years. After that, I moved on to the warehouse, where I was buying all the independent 7-inches and 12-inches for the entire chain. So it was like, ‘Ooh, looks like we’re sold out of Foetus records. I guess I’ll have to order some more. I was just giving them away. I was buying them from myself. I was working at Virgin and doing Foetus concurrently. The way Foetus came about was when my lung collapsed. I had glandular fever. I was squatting at the time. I was out of commission for two months, collecting unemployment from Virgin. I couldn’t get out of bed, so I put all that money towards the studio, and that financed my first Foetus record. That was in 1980.”

  It took some time for Mute to shift its focus from singles to albums. The process began with the release of DAF’s (Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft)’s Ein Produkt Der debut. “Frank’s single came out around September ‘79,” says Miller, “so roughly a year later the albums came in fairly quick succession – DAF, Frank and then the Silicon Teens albums all came out pretty close together. All the singles were selling well – the Silicon Teens in particular. So I’d made enough money off them. The DAF album took three days to record. We’d started to get a really good relationship with Eric Radcliffe at Blackwing Studios. Any recordings we weren’t doing at home we were doing there, because it was cheap and he was great to work with. And none of us knew what we were doing. Frank recorded his album there, probably in about ten days. It was tight – it was always tight. But there were moments earlier on in the process when it had been more difficult. When I started to work with DAF, and they were sleeping on the floor, I really had no money at that point. Difficult times. When the singles started coming out, there was enough cash flow to do the stuff I needed to do, just. Now, you wait for six months after you finish an album to put it out; in those days you just put it out as soon as you could. You did everything as quickly as possible. We were spending virtually nothing on marketing or promotion or those sorts of things. But in those days you could sell enough singles to just about keep going.”

  In fact, the reason Miller was unable to initially sign The Birthday Party – who would move to 4AD instead – was due entirely to those stretched finances – and a floor full of Germans. “I was broke. It wasn’t that I couldn’t sign them, because nobody was getting advances anyway. The point is that I had DAF – five German guys sleeping on my floor, and no money. When I first met The Birthday Party. they’d come recommended to me by their label in Australia, a guy called Keith Glass. How he would recommend Mute, a record label that had only put out a few singles, I have no idea (Glass himself can only recall dealing directly with 4AD). And I loved the album. But that’s five Australians and five Germans – I don’t know how I’m going to deal with this. I was pretty stressed out at the time. So I might have phoned Ivo and said, check it out. There was definitely that kind of a dialogue going on between us. It would never happen today, even between independent labels. If you heard something and thought, this is really a Factory or a Rough Trade record, you’d ring up Tony Wilson or Geoff Travis and say, ‘Check this out, it might be up your street.’ You weren’t keeping things to yourself.”

  The reason The Birthday Party would eventually bounce back to Miller’s custody had much to do with the label’s ability to market Depeche Mode, who quickly validated his conviction that a new era in music was imminent. In many ways they also built on the premise Miller had explored with the Silicon Teens. “I thought, fucking hell – they weren’t like the Silicon Teens, but this thing was inevitably going to happen. And it happened and there they were – kids aged 17 and 18 on stage, each with a cheap synthesizer, the only synthesizers they could afford, on beer crates, playing along to a little drum machine. And Dave Gahan with one light pointing up to his face to make him look Gothy. In a pub, with great pop songs.”

  As Tom Bailey of the Thompson Twins confirms, the choice of instrument was as pragmatic as Miller has always maintained. “It’s one of those things that nobody talks about – in those days, a guitar was £100, and a synthesizer was £3,000. So guess which one you bought to get on stage?” Miller’s dream of a gathering army of young men (and admittedly, most such musicians were indeed male) marching forward into history’s lens with Korgs and Roland synths slung under their arms was not unique to him. But his committed sponsorship of the band who would ‘break’ electronic instrumentation within a conventional pop music context probably was. The Human League would admittedly reposition themselves at around the same time and commit to a similar aesthetic, and it’s important to remember Numan’s contribution in this sphere. But his Tubeway Army records and beyond were never rooted in conventional melody and song structure at this stage. Those records were instinctively alien to the pop discourse, no matter how well they sold. Depeche Mode were, to all intents and purposes, about ‘pure’ pop records; a shift in form rather than substance.

  Though he didn’t recall it at the time, Miller had met Depeche Mode briefly at Rough Trade. “Oh, God! I was doing Fad Gadget’s album, Fireside Favourites. I remember the sleeves had come back to Rough Trade that day and there was some error or something, and I was really fucked off and angry. And the late Scott Piering, who was a very important radio promotion person from that era and right through the next 20 years, was working at Rough Trade. He said, ‘Daniel, you might like these guys, come and have a listen.’ And I just saw these four spotty new romantics, and I thought, ‘I can’t handle th
is now, I’ve got to sort out my sleeves.’ And they remembered that very clearly. I didn’t. Even when I saw them play. I didn’t connect them as being the people who had been in Rough Trade at that time.” Miller’s trusted associate Seymour Stein was equally enthused by a Depeche Mode live performance, this time in their native Essex. “I got up early one morning and was reading the NME – ‘Daniel Miller has a real band, and they’re playing such and such a day.’ This is Daniel Miller’s band? They’ve got to be fantastic. So I flew right over and I signed them right there on the spot.”

  Depeche Mode broke through to the Top 20 in June 1981 with ‘New Life’, followed by a Top 10 single in ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ and a Top 10 album, Speak & Spell. It was satisfying for Miller, who had been repeatedly told – the message relayed in whispers to the band – that it would be impossible for them to enjoy chart success on such a small label. At the exact moment of his vindication, Depeche Mode’s principal songwriter, Vince Clarke, made the decision to leave. “I think a lot of people thought when Vince left Depeche, it was the end of the group,” says Miller now. “On paper it was. He was the main songwriter, he was the driving force behind the band. It was his sound. And he was the guy who was the most ambitious. So on paper, yeah, the end of Depeche Mode. But by the time he’d left, they’d all become much more ambitious. They saw the possibilities. I don’t think they’d have got there without him, because he was the really pushy one. But once things got going, they’re all smart guys – they were just a bit cautious before. They all had jobs and he didn’t have a job. That was the thing. In the end, he needed the job.”

  Rather than seeing his best-selling act disappear, Miller found himself with two major chart acts when Clarke went on to form Yazoo with Alison ‘Alf’ Moyet. Upstairs At Eric’s, their debut album, stormed the charts, despite the humble origins its title reflected. “I remember that we had to build a studio in my house in about ten days,” the eponymous Eric Radcliffe would subsequently recall, “to complete the recording of Upstairs At Eric’s because Blackwing Studios was fully booked. My mother provided us all with her famous ‘egg and chips’ and also appeared on the record. Wonderful days!”

  “It was insane,” Miller confirms. “Vince left at the end of ‘81, and by the spring of ‘82 we had the Yazoo album selling 600,000 copies in the first week or something.” However, Miller is honest enough to concede he didn’t see that coming. “I wasn’t sure. I only heard [the single] ‘Only You’ at first, and I wasn’t sure about it. It was confusing to me. I got it in one sense very quickly, but my enthusiasm for it – shall we say it developed over time? It wasn’t immediate, and I think Vince was quite downhearted by that. He said that, which is fair enough. But then I met Alison and heard her – and we’d decided to put the single out anyway. By that time I had a little team of people, not actually working for Mute, but a freelance radio promotions guy, another guy doing press, and they said, ‘You’ve got to put this out, it’s brilliant.’”

  The second Yazz long-player, You And Me Both, became the first number one album distributed by Rough Trade. A fact that, tellingly, Miller has no recall of. “I know we didn’t have a number one single till 1992 or something. We had loads of hits and number twos, but ‘Abbaesque’ [by subsequent Vince Clarke vehicle Erasure] was the first number one. I had a vague recollection the album went to number two… Rough Trade had already done well with the Stiff Little Fingers album, and they’d done very well with Unknown Pleasures. They were building up to it. It was there to be done.” With Erasure proving hugely popular throughout Europe, and Depeche Mode being one of the few UK acts of the last 20 years to enjoy sustained success in America, Mute would achieve financial stability at exactly the time when several other notable independents such as Factory were beginning to struggle.

  That unique situation – Mute having two highly successful acts at the same time – and therefore not undergoing the destabilising impact of having one ‘star’ name on the roster, helped shape not only the label, but Miller’s role within it. “Yes, partly because I took the responsibility in making sure those artists and projects worked at the level everyone was expecting them to, not just in terms of marketing and international sales, but also in terms of the records themselves. In those early days, we’re talking about the early 80s, especially with Depeche, I was still very much in the studio with them as well, three or four months each year, and they were making albums every year. And obviously I was overseeing Yazoo and then Erasure. Erasure came along when I was finishing my stint with Depeche – I did five albums with them between 1981 and 1985/86, and that’s just when Erasure started to take off. But yes, I hardly signed anybody in that period. I started to work with Nick Cave, but virtually nothing else really in that period between ‘81 and ‘85, those four years, I can’t think if I signed anyone in that time. Which was weird. But I was just so deep in what I was doing, and it was still a very small company and I was doing all the A&R. I wasn’t really at a moment when I wanted to hand that off to anyone, so it was kind of down to me. I wasn’t complaining – I enjoyed it. I was in the studio most of the time, and the rest of the time, I was trying to get those records finished, marketed and sold. I felt a huge amount of responsibility. Those artists put their trust, and their careers, in my hands. They didn’t have to. They had plenty of other options. So I felt very responsible that I did the very best I could do for them. It was making sure they developed as artists and made good and interesting records. And then we ended up having hits, and meeting the expectations we all had for it – they were basically pop bands and we wanted to make sure they sold as many records around the world as possible, and developed their careers.”

  The emergence of both Depeche and Erasure did indeed enable the label to put their energies into the long-gestated relationship with The Birthday Party. “I’d kept in touch, because by that time they were living in London,” says Miller. “I saw them at gigs and stuff, especially Mick Harvey and Phil Calvert, the drummer at the time. Chris Carr, the publicist, was doing some stuff for Mute, and he was also sort of managing The Birthday Party. His wife was an Australian and knew them from the old days, and somehow they landed on his doorstep instead of my doorstep to crash. Initially they came to me about publishing. I didn’t have a publishing company, so I started one, ‘cos I wanted to work with the guys – I always loved them. So, yeah, let’s do the publishing thing together. Then soon after that, Chris was a bit concerned because 4AD needed a bit of money to make the next record. And by that time I’d had some hits. So I said, well, if it’s OK with Ivo, I’d love to. I don’t even know if Ivo and I discussed it. It just happened and it was very natural. And then of course they split up almost immediately! We only got an EP out of them. Then I got another two and a half or three bands out of the split!”

  Despite such capacity for implosion, Miller was willing to keep the faith. “The individuals in the band were all really talented. And Nick was the writer of the lyrics and the singer, so his talents were more obvious in a way. But it wasn’t his band, it was their band. It was him, Mick and Roland, and Tracy. Mick Harvey, then as now, manages them, effectively. He was the only one who was in any state to do anything that made sense. He doesn’t get enough credit either. He kept a level head. For a lot of things, that’s still the case.”

  There were other parallels with 4AD. Shortly after Ivo Watts-Russell chanced upon Throwing Muses, Mute’s Blast First subsidiary, run by Paul Smith, was inaugurated with the release of Sonic Youth’s Bad Moon Rising. Smith had previously run the Doublevision label from the back bedroom of his house in Nottingham, in association with Richard H Kirk and Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire. After a disillusioning spell working in music retail and managing acts in Yorkshire and the Midlands. he and friend John Moon started a music video project at the Midland Group Arts Centre, presented on a bank of ten second-hand televisions. Among those he collaborated with were Cabaret Voltaire. “Cabaret Voltaire released Red Mecca and did an interview with the N
ME,” he told Mute’s Documentary Evidence website in 2005, “talking about their interest in funding a pirate radio station. As this was at the height of Thatcher’s powers I was doubtful such a notion would last for any length of time and knowing the Cabs’ interest in film and video, I re-contacted them about the possibility of starting an independent music video label. This, with Cabaret Voltaire’s sole funding, and their considerable effort in making their own 90-minute programme, became Doublevision DV1.”

  Doublevision Presents Cabaret Voltaire was released in 1982, initially as a standalone project, and as such was the first independent music video release. It went on to showcase material by Throbbing Gristle, Chris & Cosey, 23 Skidoo, The Residents and filmmaker Derek Jarman and the TV Wipeout compilation, available free in exchange for a blank VHS. Vinyl followed, ultimately including various Kirk and Cabaret Voltaire related projects, plus Clock DVA, The Residents, Chakk and The Hafler Trio. These were initially marketed as ‘soundtracks’, as that was the only way to get the label’s video output reviewed in the press. The founding of Blast First rose directly from this; Smith had intended to offer a deal to Lydia Lunch, then domiciled in South London, to record her 50 One Page Plays, written with Nick Cave. When that fell through he offered her a deal for her In Limbo mini-album, in exchange for a ticket back to New York. It was Lynch who would tell Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth about Smith, who in turn supplied him with a cassette of an early version of Bad Moon Rising. Kirk wasn’t interested in releasing ‘American rock ‘n’ roll’ on Doublevision, so Smith endeavoured to find a different outlet. Eventually he persuaded Pete Walmsley, as head of Rough Trade International, to provide finance to press it.