Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  Horne’s one-time flatmate Brian Superstar (aka Brian Taylor), meanwhile, had joined The Pastels, formed by Stephen McRobbie, who cultivated an image that amplified Orange Juice’s slightly doe-eyed, wistful, schoolboy demeanour, albeit without Collins’ trademark smirk. Horne, reputedly, loathed them with a passion. McRobbie played a prominent role in the development of Scotland’s independent scene, establishing the 53rd & 3rd imprint, titled after the eponymous Ramones’ song, from 1985 onwards, alongside Sandy McLean of Fast Product. “Stephen had the A&R input,” McLean recalls, “and because the Shop Assistants were about to put Safety Net’ out, he got [guitarist] David Keegan on board, because he knew it would do well. I basically put up the money for all the recording, manufacture and distribution, and that was great fun. Stephen had really good ears, and he brought us the BMX Bandits, Jowe Head & The Househunters, Talulah Gosh and the Vaselines.”

  53rd & 3rd effectively documented the first wave of ‘twee’ indie-pop (aka anorak, shambling, or whatever the NME’s sub-editor dreamt up on a given Monday morning). A sound/aesthetic that saw its zenith in the Sarah Records roster and (elements of) the NME’s C86 compilation. Taluluh Gosh’s name had been taken from a Clare Grogan quote, while the band itself formed after Amelia Fletcher and Elizabeth Price bonded over the fact that both were wearing Pastels badges at an Oxford club night. They’d recorded their debut single for Sha-La-La, the imprint Matt Haynes ran as a prequel to his involvement with Sarah Records. And for whom Fletcher’s subsequent band Heavenly would record prolifically.

  “When The Legend! [Jerry Thackray; Alan McGee’s close friend] worked for NME,” McLean continues, “he was a big supporter of our stuff. He had Talulah Gosh on page three before they even put a record out. So we went down to London to see them in a crappy pub, and asked them to do a record. And they already had written the song, ‘The Day I Lost My Pastels Badge’, so they were quite keen to be on Stephen Pastel’s label! They came up to Edinburgh and recorded four songs. We listened to those and didn’t know what to release as a single, so we ended up putting them out on two singles [‘Beatnik Boy’ and ‘Steaming Train’] on the same day in November 1986 – and they ended up both being number three hits on the indie charts.”

  The label also released some notable American recordings, including Ben Vaughn, discovered by Next Big Thing fanzine editor (and Cramps’ fan club founder) Lindsay Hutton, Beat Happening and the Screaming Trees. They almost signed My Blood Valentine too. “When they left Lazy Records,” McLean recalls, “me and Graeme Roberts, also ex-Fast Product, wanted to sign them. The band were up for it too, as they knew Graeme from touring with the Soup Dragons (he was their road manager and taught them how to drink – they were very young). Stephen wasn’t so keen on them at the time, so it wasn’t followed up quickly. One day the phone rang at the Fast Forward office and it was Colm Ó Cíosóig from the band who was very apologetic, but said they were signing to Creation Records. Here in the 21st century, Stephen admits he was wrong and didn’t get it at the time, but they are now one of his favourite ever bands. And I’ll bet Alan McGee wishes they had signed to 53rd & 3rd, saving him a lot of money and grief.”

  The Pastels themselves had debuted in 1982 with a release on Whaam! Records – tellingly set up by Dan Treacy and The Television Personalities; very much their spiritual ancestors. Indeed, long-standing TVPs bass player Jowe Head would record extensively alongside The Pastels, as well as leading The Househunters as staples of the 53rd & 3rd roster. “The Pastels very much benefited from having records out on Whaam! and Rough Trade,” McRobbie would later tell Heather McDonald, “as those labels had very strong identities which helped consolidate our audience’s sense of where we belonged and what we were about. Rough Trade was my favourite label and Whaam! was the Television Personalities’ label; their listed address was the Kings Road, I couldn’t think of anything more glamorous.” As he would add to Jon Dale in 2002, “53rd & 3rd was flawed in so many ways and my involvement was often quite marginal. I was just happy to help some of my friends get their records out.” While the twee pop phenomenon saw its rebirth in Bristol with Sarah and London with the early Creation (and a relocated Alan McGee), the architects of that aesthetic were, with apologies to Dan Treacy, very much the Postcard generation.

  The pre-eminent independent label in Wales was Cardiff’s Z Block collective, though its roots lay in the Ebbw Valley. The name was taken from an annex in Crosskeys Sixth Form College, a mining town a few miles north-west of Newport, where Phil John, Simon Smith, Andrew Tucker and Spike Williams, among others, would congregate – often just to play table tennis while skiving lectures. Z Block’s first release was the ‘Don’t Give The Lifeguard A Second Chance’/’(WTB) White Tiger Burning’ single of May 1979, credited to Reptile Ranch. In fact, that name hadn’t been settled on until after the record had been pressed, with the band still to play a gig. Both songs appeared on either side of the vinyl, as both a cost-cutting measure and homage to The Desperate Bicycles. In an almost surreal twist, they’d also met Scritti Politti in a motorway service station on their return to Wales after picking up the singles, a confluence of events that led to Ian Penman reviewing their single in the NME (“A more serious than usual DIY… Shaky but unselfish”).

  Thereafter the Z Block enterprise was relocated to Cardiff in April 1979, barracked at Walker Road above the lodgings of one of the city’s prominent Hell’s Angels. “Determined to spread the gospel of independent record production to local bands,” Tucker would write for the Cardiffians website, “an evaluation of the local talent and live venues available was undertaken. Expecting to sweep all before us, it was something of a shock when the first band we went to see was Young Marble Giants. Even playing to an almost empty Grass Roots Coffee Bar, with an indifferent audience of wannabe punks and local layabouts, they were obviously something very special.” The Grass Roots would quickly become a haven for the local music community, and within a couple of months hosted a poster inviting local bands to contribute songs to a compilation album.

  Is The War Over? eventually followed in October, featuring contributions from eight local bands, most notably Young Marble Giants. “There was little quality control involved in the selection of bands,” Tucker noted, “if you turned up to the meetings and brought a cheque, you were in.” Recorded live at the Grass Roots, the exercise was funded by the bands themselves –£120 securing eight minutes of needle time. The album’s indebtedness to the prevailing DIY ethos was hammered home again via the appropriation of the Desperate Bicycles’ ‘It was easy, it was cheap, your turn next’ mantra on the rear sleeve. There was also the by now customary faithful breakdown of production costs for the release. These were quickly recouped – pressed in an edition of 2,500, the 1,000 advance sales booked by Rough Trade alone meant that all costs were immediately covered.

  Stuart Moxham of the Young Marble Giants was not initially similarly beholden to the same stockpile of early independent releases as Z Block and Reptile Ranch. “No, not at all,” he recalls. “I was more or less completely oblivious to all that. I had a very parochial attitude. I remember watching the Rough Trade documentary on The South Bank Show and thinking – pah, bunch of lefties! I just thought [of] Decca, EMI, Philips, Chrysalis – all the trendy labels. But it was magical, really, that you could make a physical record. It never occurred to me. So meeting Reptile Ranch and the whole Z Block thing was a revelation. You didn’t have to go through the hierarchy, you didn’t have to fight the fact that you were in Cardiff and no one gave a flying one – you could actually do it yourself. It was just a question of technology and a little bit of money. By splitting it through all the groups on that particular scene we made Is The War Over?”

  “Personally I didn’t like punk rock,” he continues. “Musically it was rock ‘n’ roll over again, just a bit faster, with puerile spitting and swearing. A very limited London thing that the music press were blowing up. It was only in retrospect that you realise it was a huge catalyst and essen
tial. You have to bear in mind I was 25 at this time. I’d grown up listening to all the rock giants, Motown, progressive rock. Looking back we were on the cusp of a massive technological change in music. The cassette was new. It was like, wow, you can do your own recording on a tiny machine that you can take anywhere as an alternative to vinyl. Before it reel to reel was expensive and bulky and the microphones were no good. I’d been buying five quid reel to reel Grundigs and things from junk shops in Cardiff since I’d been a kid, to mess about with. But then synthesizers and Fairlights were coming in, and samplers and sequencers were on the horizon. It was a really interesting time technologically. We were into Eno and Can and Kraftwerk. There was a lot of sexiness in getting away from conventional instruments.”

  Moxham viewed their prospects as akin to being on ‘a hiding to nothing’. “We were in Cardiff; we had no money, we were all unemployed. But that gave us the time to work out what we were trying to do. But nobody we knew had ever been successful through music. So what we had to do was be as noticeable as possible. And in the era of punk and noise and aggression, the obvious thing to do was go the opposite way. So the whole minimalist, ‘quiet’ thing was a sort of conscious choice. And getting away from the wall of sound, getting away from production, getting away from musical complexity. And basically using our Cardiffian blues roots. That’s how we came up with what we did.”

  As a direct consequence of Is The War Over? Young Marble Giants – who had momentarily split up before the album’s release – would be signed to Rough Trade. Geoff Travis dutifully rang the number on the reverse of the sleeve only to find out it was the nearest public call box. Z Block’s output, meanwhile, amounted to a further single by Reptile Ranch and a four-track compilation EP, both drawing on financial assistance from Rough Trade. But the loss of Young Marble Giants had a dispiriting effect. “There was no big bust up of the band or label,” notes Tucker. “It just kind of dissolved away in a combination of non-activity, lethargy and indifference into ultimate non-existence.”

  Wales had other independent labels, among them Pwdwr Records – home of the first Welsh language punk single, in the form of Llanelli’s Llygod Ffyrnig, whose guitarist Gary Beard recalls: “It got a very positive reaction. It got a lot of airplay, a lot of Welsh language coverage, but also John Peel was very supportive.” Again, however, the influences were clear. “The Desperate Bicycles were definitely the spur for us.” Other Welsh labels of note included Ralph & The Ponytails’ Ponytunes, Caenarfon’s Sain, founded as far back as 1969 by Oxbridge languages student Huw Jones and architect graduate Dafydd Iwan and still going strong with a staff of more than 30. Among the graduates of the label were Cardigan-based mod-punk hybrid Ail Symudiad, who in turn started their own Fflach label in 1981. Another early punk venture was Steve Mitchell’s Sonic International Records. Mitchell would later be behind the briefly successful/notorious 80s/90s label, Fierce Recordings.

  In Northern Ireland, one independent label dwarfed all others. Belfast’s Good Vibrations was founded by Terri Hooley from his record shop in Great Victoria Street. As Guy Trelford, co-author of the exemplary account of the province’s punk years, It Makes You Want To Spit, notes, it wasn’t the only label, or even the first. Just undeniably the most important. “Cliff Moore’s It Records label based in Portadown was inspired by a visit to Rock On and Chiswick Records in London, taking its name from the small chain of record shops he owned. It released the first bona fide Northern Irish ‘new wave’ 7-inch single in 1977 – ‘Big City’/‘All Day And All Of The Night’ by Speed. It should also be remembered that The Outcasts made their vinyl debut on the same label. However, It Records and other Northern Irish labels such as Shock Rock and Rip-Off were completely overshadowed by the success of Good Vibrations.”

  A former Kodak processing worker, Hooley had started out with music as a sideline, selling mail order records from his home, which eventually turned into a stall at St George’s Market. When his friend Dave Hyndman obtained a lease on a derelict building in Great Victoria Street, in order to set up a community printing press, he invited Hooley to help out with the rent. Hooley promptly occupied the first floor, above a health food store at ground level. With a full-colour wooden cut-out of Elvis Presley pointing the way upstairs to passers-by, Good Vibrations soon became a focal point for the local music scene. “That came from friends of mine at art college, John Carson and Leo McCann,” Hooley confirms. “Because we were on the first floor, I wanted to put something on the street to attract attention, and I wanted it to be something that everyone in the world would know. So we were going to use Jesus Christ, but we chose Elvis instead.” It would become so well known that after it was ‘borrowed’ by Queen’s university students during their rag week, its disappearance made the local TV headlines. Hooley found himself, to a large degree by accident, right at the centre of the punk movement. “It was a chance for me to relive my youth – and I haven’t stopped. It was all good fun at the time. Nothing had happened in Belfast since the 60s with Them. There was no recording industry here as such. It just seemed, from everything I’d learned before, that I was waiting for this moment in my life.”

  Not that it was the only record shop in town to serve that community, as Brian Young of Rudi notes. “Before Good Vibes opened the main record shop where people in Belfast would meet and hang out was Caroline Music in Ann Street in the city centre. It had both a knowledgeable and friendly staff – Kyle Leitch from the shop actually helped a lot of locals bands, including Stiff Little Fingers. He ‘managed’ Rudi for a short time and it was Kyle that arranged the cheap rates we got in Solomon Peres studio in Templepatrick to record [Rudi’s Good Vibrations debut] ‘Big Time’. Caroline was also bang up to date on all the new punk records. Later, when Good Vibes opened it was quite a bit outside the city centre – then inside the infamous ‘ring of steel’ security gates/checkpoints where everyone had to be searched when you went into the city centre. These were locked at night apart from a couple of the main gates which stayed open – but as no-one went into the city centre much at night back then that hardly mattered. Terri’s shop was located on Great Victoria Street, which was pretty nondescript back then – in later years that street became the ‘golden mile’ of restaurants/night-clubs etc. Back then it was close enough (and safe enough) to walk to – just a few hundred yards from the main city centre and also far enough outside the ‘ring of steel’ that the rates were much lower.”

  Its entrance stairway bedecked with posters advertising local shows, frequently liberated by enthusiastic visitors, a growing community of local punks would congregate and converse. Eventually one of those upstart punks, Wee Gordy Owens, asked Hooley to attend a show at The Pound, with The Outcasts and Rudi playing. It’s worth acknowledging Owen’s broader role as an activist/agitator on this early scene. “Gordy was a few years younger than us,” says Young, “but we’d hooked up as he was nuts about music. Gordy lived in Sandy Row, only about 100 yards from Terri’s shop and just never bothered going to school. Gordy soon became legendary cos of his phone exploits – not everyone had phones at home back then. But Gordy had a red public call box near his house and he used to ring up Tony Parsons and other journalists with a pile of 2ps and ask them all about the ‘happening’ punk acts. Tony used to slip him all sorts of people’s phone numbers and many well known rock stars were doubtless unamused to have Wee Gordy ring them up and start asking them all sorts of personal questions or slagging them off in a broad Belfast accent. Typically, if we ever went to (or more often gatecrashed) a house party, Gordy would invariably make straight for the phone if there was one and ring up the likes of Joan Jett in Los Angeles. As soon as Good Vibes opened, as it was close to his house, Gordy basically haunted the shop.”

  At the Pound show, Hooley was enthused both by the music (especially Rudi’s) but also the youthful spirit of rebellion that occasioned the audience reaction to the arrival of the police and UDR. As a direct result, Hooley looked into the possibility of helping finance a
flexidisc, to be given away free with Alternative Ulster – one of the earliest punk fanzines from the province. Written by Gavin Martin, Dave McCullough and later Roger Pearson, its debut issue had come out in September 1977. The connection was straightforward – by the second issue it was being printed by Just Books Print Workshop, which shared the same Victoria Street premises. But when Hooley looked at the costs, a flexi was only marginally cheaper than real vinyl. Hence the release of the first Good Vibrations single, ‘Big Time’/‘No.1’ in April 1978. An indignant tribute to the DIY ethos and a rejection of the star circuit, it became Belfast punk’s defining anthem.

  “Just Books involvement in the Good Vibes story is often unfairly overlooked,” notes Young. “Dave and Marilyn printed most all of the local zines very cheaply and provided any advice that was needed on how to set em out etc, and printed most all the band posters. They were very much from an anarchist background and I think imagined that a lot of the bands here might share their politics. They had an artists workspace in Lombard Street which they let bands rehearse in and hire vans for us and provide folks who would drive us to gigs outside Belfast. Dave also printed all the early Good Vibes sleeves – the dreaded fold-over A3 sheets which we all spent hours folding. The flexidisc idea was mooted I think after Sniffin’ Glue gave away ‘Love Lies Limp’ by ATV. But when Terri priced it, it would been silly not to spend the extra 2p or whatever. Cliff Moore [It Records] had already proved it could be done locally and so we played a heap of gigs to raise the money to pay the recording/pressing costs. There were no contracts and we agreed a 50/50 split. It was the first time any of us had been in studio and as we didn’t know any better we simply played and recorded the entire backing track as we played it live. George Docherty produced the session and did a great job. At the time I remember we thought it was kinda ‘clean’ sounding but in hindsight he did us proud and I only wish he had produced our other Good Vibes recordings.”