Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  Eric’s the club begat Eric’s the label, essentially A&R’d by Eagle. Its first release was, naturally enough, Big In Japan’s debut single, a split a-side with the Chuddy Nuddies (The Yachts under a pseudonym). Eagle christened it ‘Brutality, Religion And A Dance Beat’. When Drummond dared to ask why, he was regaled with a list of artists who had embodied those traditions and appraised of the fact that incorporation of same was ‘rock ‘n’ roll rule number one’. Eric’s would also house the first releases by Casey’s subsequent band, Pink Military, two pre-Frankie Goes To Hollywood Holly Johnson singles and the debut by The Frantic Elevators. The latter’s singer, Mick Hucknall, was another taken under Eagle’s wing.

  Fulwell, meanwhile, released the debut single by Pete Wylie’s Wah! Heat when Eagle rejected it on a second Eric’s related imprint, Inevitable Records, in the early 80s. Inevitable would also unveil Wylie’s one-time partner in Eric’s one-night-standers The Mystery Girls, Pete Burns, under the name Nightmares In Wax, as well as the first single by his more famous subsequent band, Dead Or Alive. The label’s fourth release, Wah! Heat’s ‘Seven Minutes To Midnight’, garnered reams of press, including an NME front cover story by Paul Du Noyer. Other releases would include the first vinyl by Modern Eon, It’s Immaterial and China Crisis. Fulwell would go on to manage a clutch of Liverpool pop bands, including Wah!, It’s Immaterial and Black.

  It was Big In Japan alumni Balfe and Drummond who would be responsible for Liverpool’s most distinctive punk era label, however. “Were we downhearted when Big In Japan didn’t go further?” ponders Drummond. “Not at all, really. We had meetings with a couple of record companies, and they weren’t interested in us. And it didn’t take much hindsight to realise why they wouldn’t be interested in us. Although at the time we were a little disappointed.” Zoo Records initially had no fixed abode. “The office was basically the phone box down the end of the road – I lived off Penny Lane, and there was a phone box at the end of Penny Lane. Ian McCulloch, Gary Dwyer and Pete Wylie had a flat about 100 yards from me, above a chippy on Penny Lane. I used to go down there, sit at the kitchen table and go through things. We didn’t really think of it as an office. It was just wherever we were.”

  Zoo was chosen as the title of this new enterprise after Balfe decided to throw his hand in with him – meaning original moniker Bill’s Records was jettisoned. The inspiration was twofold; punk provided the impetus, but Drummond’s favoured listening at the time was black American music. “For most of the first half of the 70s, what I was into was black American music. We didn’t call it R&B at that point – R&B meant 50s music. The music that was coming out of small labels all over the States, especially the southern states, that’s what I was into and that’s what I collected. I loved the visual look of the labels. I loved TK out of Miami; they had crossover hits with Betty Wright and KC & The Sunshine Band. Before I was in Liverpool I spent two years at art school in Northampton, and there was a specialist shop there for DJs. Hardly any of this music existed on albums, it was all imported 7-inch singles. So when I started Zoo, that was as much of an inspiration as the punk thing, to have a label like that, though I knew nothing about these artists, I would just go into import shops and buy them on impulse, based on the names or how the labels looked. The punk thing, we didn’t even call it that in 1977 – that was something the newspapers called it. But that ‘just go out there and do it’ thing, yes.”

  The first release was a posthumous EP of Big In Japan recordings, which materialised in November 1978. Subsequently Zoo housed the earliest recordings by a new breed of Merseyside post-punk pop bands that were finally able to spring the city from its 60s nostalgia trap. The most notable were the obtusely named Echo & The Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes – comprising two-thirds of Liverpool’s legendary Crucial Three, who never went further than rehearsals, but featured the baby steps of Messrs Cope, McCulloch and Wylie.

  Drummond had fallen in love with the Bunnymen after watching their first show, supporting The Teardrop Explodes in November 1978. After releasing the mature, uber-cool psych-pop 45 ‘Pictures On My Wall’ for Zoo, they would be ghosted away to Warners subsidiary Korova via Rob Dickins. Drummond remained their manager, charting a course of wilful perversity typically culminating in the grand gesture performance – be it in the Royal Albert Hall, the Isle Of Skye or the home-spun ‘Crystal Days’ day-long activity break. The Bunnymen at their peak, as Drummond once recalled in a sleevenote, were “a glory beyond all glories”. The Teardrop Explodes, who also made their debut on Zoo and recorded two further singles, were, for a short time, almost the Bunnymen’s equal. Both Balfe and Drummond served as managers, and in Balfe’s case, keyboard player.

  Cope and McCulloch started out first as band and then label mates, but would take turns in knocking spots off each other in the press; each unflinchingly begrudging of the other’s success as they battled for the status of Merseyside’s authentic post-punk icon. McCulloch would take particular delight in attacking Cope’s ‘woolyback’ credentials as a middle-class former teacher training student from Tamworth. Cope gave as good as he got and is still doing so (notably in his Head On autobiography). At their height, it added a delicious frisson to Liverpool’s music scene. And yet, “on the whole, they got on with each other,” Drummond states. “It was only once success started happening that it became more obvious. That was more the rivalry between Ian McCulloch and Julian Cope [than the bands]. And what had gone down politically when they were in The Crucial Three. There was more rivalry at that time between Pete Wylie and the Bunnymen/Teardrops. The Bunnymen and Teardrops would gang up together against Wylie, and vice versa, because Wylie was the most charismatic and vociferous. And still is.”

  The Teardrops recorded first. “The Teardrops were further down the line,” says Drummond, “they were more musically accomplished. The Bunnymen were more an idea at that point”. Cope has publicly credited Drummond with his transformation from ‘farm punk’ to pop star. “I was goaded into becoming a rock star by Bill Drummond,” he would tell The Guardian in 2008, “and the pseudo-intellectual side of me thought it would be quite charming.” By the turn of the decade, spearheaded by the Teardrops, Bunnymen and Wylie’s various Wah! incarnations, Liverpool was the foremost principality of pop for the first time since the Beatles’ heyday. And none of them were giving an inch in acknowledgement of their peers. “There were only about five good things in the 80s,” McCulloch would tell this writer in the 90s. “Us, New Order, R.E.M. I can’t think of the other two.”

  Zoo’s distribution was rudimentary. “Dave Balfe and I would drive down to London in his dad’s car,” Drummond recalls, “pick up boxes of records from the pressing plant we used down there, sleeve them in the back of the car, then cart them round the independent shops and small distributors. Geoff Travis at Rough Trade was a phenomenal inspiration. We went in, and we weren’t thinking what we were doing with the Teardrops and Echo and the Bunnymen was the future of anything. It was just us doing stuff as best we could, with our mates, or our rivals, but Geoff was a real inspiration. As were the other people who worked at Rough Trade at the time, like Richard Scott and Mayo Thompson. You couldn’t leave their set-up without feeling – it’s worthwhile, whatever we’re doing.”

  Later, in 1979, Zoo moved to Chicago Buildings, close to Brian Epstein’s NEMS. “The walls were turquoise,” reminisces Drummond. “We had a carpet, a dark, dusty green, must have had the ash of a million cigarettes ground into it, not that either me nor Balfe smoked. We had my carpentry work bench, with cupboards underneath it where we kept stock. We had one chair, a desk, and a telephone. We didn’t even have a filing cabinet. And we had an old sofa someone had given us. Nothing on the walls. We didn’t have a record player or cassette player. All we had was an answaphone, which used cassettes in those days. If a band brought a cassette back from the studio, we would listen to it through the answaphone speakers. Nothing more than that. If it passed that, it was good.” In the city of a thousand jea
lousies, Zoo actually kept a low profile. “We didn’t get many demos sent, because nobody knew where to send them. Some bands in Liverpool would try to attract our attention, but generally their attitude was more, ‘fuck them, we can do that ourselves.’ There was so much rivalry in Liverpool, they wouldn’t want to come to us, they’d want to do it themselves.”

  The label also showcased the emergence of Drummond and Balfe as artists in their own right. The plan was to record something with the charm of 60s girl group offerings by such as the Shangri-Las pinned to a disco backbeat. Art student Lori Lartey was recruited as vocalist because she “looked weird and pretty and vulnerable with big sad eyes” after they saw her in the street. ‘Touch’, credited to Lori And The Chameleons, was cut with the assistance of former Deaf School drummer Tim Whittaker and Gary Dwyer of the Teardrop Explodes. Issued in July 1979, it immediately picked up strong reviews (“genius” frothed Dave McCullough in Sounds, “an impossibly sexy record” eulogised NME’s Paul Rambali) and was subsequently licensed by Sire. But despite daily exposure on the Dave Lee Travis show, ‘Touch’ would stall at number 70 in the charts. Follow-up effort ‘The Lonely Spy’, which used a KGB narrative in place of its forerunner’s oriental theme, bankrolled by Sire, failed to do the expected business. The £4,000 advance they’d received for it was useful, however, and was pumped into The Teardrop Explodes to help them record their debut album. “Nobody was interested in signing them,” Drummond recalls, “so we thought we’d see if we could record an album ourselves, and then we got a deal with PolyGram for it.”

  Eventually, however, Drummond’s loyalty to his two major bands was tested. “That did happen, in that I stopped managing the Teardrops, or rather sold the management of the Teardrops, a long time before I stopped managing the Bunnymen. I did see the bands in different ways. I always saw The Teardrops as Julian Cope – it wasn’t to begin with, but it became that way. The Bunnymen were very much a band. The sum was greater than the parts, and that was not the case with the Teardrop Explodes. It was easier to have loyalty to the Bunnymen, because it wasn’t a loyalty to any one individual. With the Teardrops, as soon as [keyboard player] Paul Simpson left, right near the beginning, it was very much Julian’s thing.”

  Zoo managed to earn itself a place on the fabled Factory catalogue (FAC 15; ‘Factory Meets Zoo Half-Way’) when Drummond and Tony Wilson combined to organise a festival in a disused coal-field near Leigh on the August bank holiday of 1979. The line-up featured the stars of both camps; Joy Division, A Certain Ratio and The Distractions from Factory, the Bunnymen, Teardrops and Drummond’s Lori & The Chameleons from Zoo. The idea was mooted by Wilson, whose label shared a friendly local rivalry with Zoo, reflecting a municipal pride rooted in musical as well as civic allegiances. But his enthusiasm for the project was spectacularly misplaced; it took months to organise, and the local promoter, Joan Miller, was bankrupted. “The difference between the Manchester groups and the ones from Liverpool,” Wilson shit-stirred to the press, “is that in Manchester the groups steal their equipment and in Liverpool their parents buy it for them.” Intriguing to note that, nearly 25 years prior to subsequent London mayor (horror of all horrors had Wilson lived to see it) denouncing Merseyside for its ‘victim culture’, the bragging rights Wilson half-mockingly evoked were crime statistics. Yet it’s equally true that the fact that Unknown Pleasures emerged on a home-grown independent and Crocodiles on a London-based major reflected something about the group’s cities of origin.

  But then Drummond argues it was largely practicalities. “We folded because of finances. Tony Wilson told me, ‘Bill, don’t do that’, when I was about to sign the Bunnymen to a record label in London. I had this conversation. ‘Look, you’ve got a well-paid job at Granada TV, you can do this financially.’ We couldn’t. We didn’t have the finances he had, or the confidence and media savvy. He was already a major figure in the media in the north-west. We were still on the dole. To get off the dole, we had to sign to a major record company.” Or, as he would deliberate in his book, 45. “Up until then none of the rash of indie record labels that had sprung up around the UK in the wake of the punk DIY ethic had produced anything but seven-inch singles. As far as I was concerned, this was part and parcel of some vague ideology. I assumed that most other people out there running small independent labels must think the same way. That they too were going for the eternal glory of pop and the seven-inch single. The Alan Hornes, the Bob Lasts. So when Tony Wilson implied I was selling out and buckling to the power and money of London, I didn’t get what he meant. As far as I was concerned he was the one compromising, by giving in to the indulgent muso tendencies of Joy Division and letting them record an album for Factory.” Zoo had lasted for nine singles, plus a Scott Walker reissue and the elegantly packaged From The Shores Of Lake Placid compilation album.

  Drummond took a post with Warners that was inevitably never going to fulfil him. “I don’t know if it was inevitable, perhaps it was with hindsight,” he says. “The reason why I took a job with Warners, or WEA as it was then, was because I was financially fucked. I’d borrowed £12,000 to set up a PA company with the guy who used to do the sound for the Teardrops and Bunnymen, and that all went wrong. So I owed the bank £12,000, and I needed to get myself out of that situation, so I took a consultancy job. They gave me an office, all my phones free, all that kind of stuff. But once I was in that situation, I was completely seduced by it. I became the record company arsehole. It just didn’t work. I couldn’t function, basically, creatively, in that situation. I couldn’t do anything that was worthwhile.” There was chart success for one of his signings, Strawberry Switchblade, but Drummond learned that “having a couple of hit records doesn’t mean success on a major. In record company terms, you’ve got to have two very successful albums to pay for everything.” His enthusiastic backing and patronage of Brilliant, in particular, would have been ruinous for a smaller company. In July 1986, on the advent of his 33 and a third birthday, he resigned from the corporate music industry, issuing a grandiloquent press release to that effect. “Well, I had a three-year contract, and I don’t think they’d have renewed the contract with me anyway. But I’d made a decision before my time was up that I’d resign and handed in my resignation.”

  He had already cut himself adrift from managing the Bunnymen a couple of years previously, and subsequently recorded a solo album in Galloway, backed by The Triffids. The Man included ‘Ballad Of A Sex God’, his tribute to recently deceased Bunnymen drummer Pete De Freitas, as well as the infamous ‘Julian Cope Is Dead’. The latter, a fantasy about assassinating his former charge to avoid him soiling his legacy, had been inspired by the Cope track ‘Bill Drummond Said’, and, doubtless, Cope’s complaints to the press about Drummond’s lack of fiscal transparency. Dave Balfe also moved on to work with the majors, folding his Food imprint – originally an independent distributed by Rough Trade – into the Parlophone empire. He would retire to the ‘Country House’ made famous in Blur’s number one single on the proceeds, return with Sony in the late 90s, before completing a scriptwriting course.

  By 1987 Drummond had formed Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu with Jimmy Cauty of Brilliant, enjoying a number one record with ‘Doctorin’ The Tardis’ (under the guise of The Timelords). The duo subsequently formed The KLF, who turned into an unlikely hit machine, the proceeds of their considerable chart success facilitating such stunts as the depositing of a dead sheep at the door of an after-show party following the 1992 Brit Awards. And, most famously, the ritual combustion of £1 million sterling on the Isle Of Jura in 1992. The fact that their accountant couldn’t write off the loss as an ‘artistic statement’ would facilitate a tax bill of £330,000 as a kicker. Otherwise the exercise was undoubtedly a high watermark in the art over commerce debate.

  Chapter Nine

  The Sound Of Young Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales

  Fast, Postcard, Good Vibrations and Z Block

  In 1977 Lenny Love, encouraged by his friend Bru
ce Findlay (of Bruce’s Records), founded Sensible Records in Edinburgh, with the specific intention of releasing the first record by The Rezillos, the estimable but offbeat group formed around Edinburgh’s art school campus. Love, moonlighting for Island while working in an ad hoc capacity as the band’s manager, named the imprint in honour of Captain Sensible of the Damned. ‘I Can’t Stand My Baby’ was released in July 1977, making it Scotland’s first punk record, followed in short order by Dundee’s The Drive (who released ‘Jerkin’ for NRG in August) and fellow Edinburgh natives The Valves (‘For Adolfs Only’; Zoom, September).

  Findlay, as well as being the enabling link behind The Rezillos’ debut single, was also Zoom’s founder. He had started his record shop in Falkirk in 1967, building it up to a chain of 13 stores before selling the equity to Guinness Holdings. He’d long thought of starting a label after time serving as an A&R advisor for, again, Island Records, of whom he was a large customer. However, a series of rejections of his recommendations, some of whom would achieve significant success, hardened his resolve. “The next thing is, the Humblebums, come up, with Gerry Rafferty, Billy Connolly,” Findlay recalls. “The Vikings move to London and Alan Gorrie formed Average White Band, things like that happened. They’d say, ‘Quite a lot of the artists you’ve mentioned do go on to success, Bruce, have you ever thought of starting your own record label?’ ‘Aw come on, it takes millions to start a record label. I can’t afford to do that.’ They said, ‘We’ll help fund you. We’ve helped Virgin, Chrysalis, Charisma.’ And it’s true, they’d distributed a lot of labels and helped them. So I went out and looked for a band, with a view to signing them to my new record label that Island were going to fund, a band called Cafe Jacques. I fell in love with them, flirted with them and wooed them for a month or two, then got in touch with Island.” Of course, Island, almost inevitably, passed. Findlay was incensed. “You NEVER like the bands I’ve mentioned! I’m not going to be an A&R scout for you [any more].”