Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  “It wasn’t always sweetness and light,” Burgess continues. “I do recall at a latterly infamous gig in Omagh how Terry – on being bugged one too many times by me for a release date for ‘One by One’ – let go a strangled yelp and brandished a stool above his head. In fairness, this was unusual and somewhat out of character. Ruefrex seemed to have that effect on people. Anyhow, a semi-ape-like creature and muscle-friend to the band known as Mahaffey ensured that Terri would in fact not strike down the one true voice of Ulster agit-politico-pop and he left somewhat chastened. Hardly good artist-label relations, but we were all making it up as we went along.”

  It Makes You Want To Spit co-author Sean O’Neill concurs. “No-one went to punk gigs here thinking that they were anti–sectarian. Nobody even thought about it. It just happened naturally through the music without anyone having to make a big point about it. Perspectives change with the passing of time and when hindsight kicks in. I can recall reading at the time that The Outcasts ‘You’re A Disease’ was not about VD, as I’d thought, but about scorning religion – surely the most lethal disease in Northern Ireland at the time.” But then, as he rationalises, “Yeah, punk really did mean something more than a fashion trend in Northern Ireland. It brought kids together from both sides of the religious divide (unheard of at the time).

  It also straddled class backgrounds too. There were two very polarised communities in Northern Ireland back then. I can remember in the early 80s when all the Mod revivalists were wearing those red, white and blue Union Jack shoes. In Belfast, they actually sold green, white and orange pairs, too!”

  “I’d certainly agree that to suggest that punk deliberately brought any huge changes in the way people thought or behaved here would be revisionist and hopelessly naive too,” notes Brian Young. “But it’s also undeniable that punk, by its very nature, did make you question things and look at things differently. I know many people who did ditch at least some of the usual tired Northern Ireland attitudes – and many who didn’t. What I would say though is that, definitely more by default than design, punk in Northern Ireland had a generally constructive/positive impact. I’m sure it was the same in many other places – but that certainly was a sharp contrast to the public face of UK London-centric punk which was so deliberately, studiously nihilistic and negative, at least on the surface.”

  Hooley and Good Vibrations have latterly been honoured, and given a financial shot in the arm, by the local music community in two significant benefit shows. The first, featuring The Undertones, Shame Academy (ex-Rudi/Outcasts) and Ruefrex, helped him to re-open as Phoenix Records in the city’s Haymarket after his North Street Arcade premises burned down. A second, with a similar line-up (minus Ruefrex), on the 30th anniversary of the release of ‘Big Time’, took place at the Mandela Hall in Belfast. Immediately prior to which Hooley, via his friend Arthur Magee, was the recipient of a glowing eulogy from former US president Bill Clinton. “By supporting young musicians in Northern Ireland and introducing them to audiences in England and elsewhere, Good Vibrations not only helped individual musicians to realise their dreams, but also offered listeners the opportunity to better understand and appreciate each other through the common language of music.” According to Magee, when he passed the note to Hooley, he was, for the first time in his life, “speechless”.

  Not for long, mind. “Aye, that was embarrassing. When I heard, I said, ‘fascist bastard’. ‘You can’t say that, you’re going on radio tonight and television tomorrow morning.’ ‘What? We’re not telling anyone!’ But they’d informed the press, the bastards. And I went on television and I said, ‘well, he is a musician.’ But so is Tony Blair, and if I’d have got a letter from that Tory bastard I’d have killed him.” Maybe Clinton is a closet Protex fan? “You never know! One time someone wrote from the House of Commons asking for a copy of one of our records. So we sent him one and asked for a cheque, but he never paid!”

  “I still think Terri deserves a lot more in terms of recognition from the city of Belfast for what he did,” adds Bradley, “and what he continues to do. The great thing about Terri is that he never made any money from it. Even if that was his intention, he was financially incompetent! But I think his intentions were just to get the music out there, and the old Communist ideas he used to have, old socialist ideas, were quite heartfelt. It was about making records and not any personal gain.” A point also conceded by Brian Young. “Though I’ve fallen out bitterly with Terri more times down the years than either of us would care to remember, he’s still, underneath all the bravado and bluster, one of the eternal good guys and the world would be a much duller place without him.”

  Hooley’s still a people’s man. “Five years ago,” he recalls, “they started planting these trees here after an article in the [Belfast] Telegraph; Elton John, Bono, Cliff Richard, and a few locals like George Best and Alex Higgins. A few people wrote in and said, never mind that, where’s the tree outside Good Vibrations? Within a couple of weeks there was a tree there, and we planted it! There were some of my friends there, some ex-paramilitaries who’d done 16 years in jail were invited along. People said, you shouldn’t invite these people along. I said, but these people are changed people and they’re out in the community talking about peace and that’s what we want.”

  And Hooley’s still up to his eyes in music (“shouldn’t that be eye?” volunteers a waggish Sean O’Neill). Having relocated Good Vibrations – the name restored – into new premises in July 2008, the label released its first recordings for 17 years in September, in the form of Leonard Cohen’s Happy Compared To Me by the Minnows. And it all came about with a little help from his friends. “After the benefit for me in May this year for the 30th anniversary, we got new premises that belong to friends of mine. The guy who did the cut-out of Elvis was born in this house! It’s a three-floor terrace house in the Belfast centre, Winetavern Street. I met Sean McCann whose family owned it, and they said, ‘We’re going to do it all up for you.’”

  “Then I did this bus tour,” he continues, half-enraptured, half-astonished. “It was ‘Terri Hooley’s Alternative Belfast’! That was me riding about telling stories, reading poems, with a guitarist. But there’s nowhere left! The Harp bar and the punk venues and everywhere else from the 60s has all gone. So we went to Stormont, and went down Cypress Avenue, because of Van Morrison. And [Ian] Paisley lives there. And I was stood outside his house going ‘Never! Never! Never!’ I was legless. When we opened up the shop we had tons of publicity and everyone was glad we were back. When we got burned out four years ago (in the aforementioned April 2004 North Street Arcade fire) we lost everything, and we lost most of the history of Good Vibes.” But again, friends are helping out. Brian Young of Rudi, Good Vibes’ first signings, is among those to have donated memorabilia. “Brian always says I would never let the truth stand in the way of a good story… but then, neither would Brian! We’re setting up a bit of a museum. I’m trying to get a complete collection of singles and albums back, and posters.” Did any of the kids who nicked posters from the wall back in the old days return them? “Believe it or not, we had a 12-inch copper plaque that was stolen from the original building, and we got that back. Someone had a guilty conscience and returned it.”

  Chapter Ten

  Ever Present

  Cherry Red Records

  Cherry Red was founded not by a music industry ingenue, but a former financial controller with Bell and general manager at Magnet, two established middleweight record labels. Iain McNay’s experiences there had soured him to the politics of the mainstream record business, but new developments would afford him the ‘window of opportunity’ to start something on his own terms. Cherry Red grew from a promotion company he’d jointly founded in 1971 alongside Will Atkinson and Richard Jones, taking its name from a favoured Groundhogs song. Its initial business was promoting concerts at the Malvern Winter Gardens and other local venues.

  McNay was living in Thornton Heath, Surrey, working as an accountant for an
American film company. “Richard was into seeing bands at the Croydon Greyhound,” McNay recalls. “I was into music but not overly so at that time Richard said he and his mate Will were thinking of promoting gigs at Malvern Winter Gardens a 1,200-capacity venue, and he wanted someone to help look after the financial side. It sounded interesting as a hobby that fitted in with my day job. I went to Malvern, met Will etc, and thought this is great – I can do the promoting and, as I like walking, then go off up the Malvern Hills at the weekend. I didn’t know what type of bands we’d have, but Richard and Will were confident it would work. So we started on 3rd July 1971, the day after my birthday, with Hawkwind and Skin Alley. We really didn’t know how it would work out. We had the expense of paying the band something, pay the cost of the hall, promotion etc, but in the end we had about 600 people and just about broke even, so that was a positive step.”

  The operation evolved to become, in McNay’s words, “almost a community service”. Finances were watched closely. “A lot depended on us finding out what did or didn’t work and we didn’t make too many mistakes to begin with. It was also a question of having the bands available that would pull sufficient people. I remember we booked The Strawbs three or four months in advance. When we had them, ‘Part Of The Union’ was near the top of the charts that week, and we’d booked them on a fixed fee – £1,000 guaranteed. I have to confess we sneaked a few over the capacity that night and it was a very successful evening.” All of this continued in parallel to McNay’s career in the music industry. “In the summer of 1972, a year after starting the promoting, I worked for De Lane Lea Studios. They had three film studios in Soho but also had a studio called The Music Centre just by Wembley Stadium. They had bands there like Wishbone Ash and Vinegar Joe, and I do remember saying directly to at least one band that they should come down to Malvern.”

  By the time that punk came along in 1976, they were immediately receptive; but cautiously so, as Jones remembers. “We had the Sex Pistols booked as the SPOTS [their ‘secret’ name to allow them to tour following the Bill Grundy farrago]. I recall Iain saying to me, ‘We’re going to have to tell the Winter Gardens the real deal over this, they can’t just turn up, because they would blow it.’ He spoke to Glen Kilday, the venue manager, and he said, ‘There’s no way I can allow that, I’ll lose my job,’ and we had to pull out.” Some of the punk bands who did come to Malvern included The Stranglers, Damned, Adverts, etc. “Looking back over the punk period,” notes Jones, “the only major band we didn’t book apart from the Pistols was the Clash the Winter Gardens was too small a venue for them.”

  McNay rented the flat above Jones’s parents in Wells Road as a base of operations when he visited, where Jones could also produce artwork for posters and tickets, and began selling records he’d taken back to Malvern. “The interesting punk stuff wasn’t really available in the local record shops,” McNay recalls, “so we got a buzz going with the punk scene in Malvern and that was the beginning of us promoting punk gigs, which led to Richard finding The Tights. They were Malvern’s answer to the Sex Pistols, young 15- and 16-year-old kids in a punk band. Richard had been to see them and liked them, and suggested starting the Cherry Red label to put their records out.”

  It was at Malvern Wine Bar on New Year’s Eve 1977 that Jones finally persuaded Iain McNay to start a record label. “We got a 15-minute set together and started to play parties and pubs,” recalls Tights bass player Barry Island. “We soon attracted the attention of Cherry Red and a meeting was arranged with Iain McNay. Iain was really excited by the new punk scene and said Cherry Red would be interested in putting up the money for us to record a debut single. A demo was recorded in a local builder’s warehouse comprising three songs; ‘Bad Hearts’, ‘It’ and ‘I Can’t Sing’. Iain loved the demo and promptly booked Millstream Studios in Cheltenham to record our first EP.” McNay was able to utilise the contacts he’d built up in the industry. “John Acock was an engineer at De Lane Lea Studios, who also came from Malvern, and had started to produce records, like Steve Hackett albums. I got friendly with John and played him a demo of The Tights. He really like them and agreed to produce our first release.”

  Cherry Red thus became a record label on 2nd June 1978 with the release of ‘Bad Hearts’. It was single of the week in Record Mirror and, endorsed by plays on John Peel a week later, swiftly sold out of its first pressing of 2,000 copies. It would ultimately sell double that amount. McNay arranged for Rough Trade to take 300 copies initially, with the sleeves and records manually repatriated on their return from suppliers. Again, though, he could sense a better way to do things, and utilised another business contact, David Thomas of Magnet, who had started Spartan Records. “We were their first clients,” says McNay. “They had a warehouse at the back of Wembley station, and The Tights singles were the only ones sitting in the warehouse to begin with. They didn’t know about Rough Trade and Rough Trade didn’t know about them, so we introduced them to each other. In the early days, Rough Trade couldn’t get into the mainstream shops. Because Dave and Tom [McDonald; David Thomas’s business partner] came out of the more establishment side of the record business, they knew how to get into Woolworth’s and the other chains. Rough Trade were part of an alternative network, so that was an important relationship, and it was the start of the comprehensive distribution network that had eluded the whole independent system before that.”

  A second single by The Tights, ‘Howard Hughes’, followed, though not without some difficulty in finalising the artwork. “I was going to do the cover,” remembers Jones. “The obvious connection was to have the big limo he drove round in with the windows blocked out with newspaper. Because there was no internet, we had to come up with the limousine. At that time Will was working for a funeral director, so he arranged one weekend to borrow a sleek modern hearse, a Ford, and we got it in a car park and put newspaper all over with windows and photographed it. It looked absolutely brilliant but the photos didn’t work at all. So we used the picture of the car, got newsprint and substituted that over the newspaper-ed windows.”

  The success of a second single persuaded McNay to make a full-time commitment to Cherry Red. “I’d left De Lane Lea in ‘74, joined Bell Records, then left to join Magnet Records in May ’77. I’d joined Bell Records when a job came up as their accountant. Bell was so successful at the time; Showaddywadday, Gary Glitter, David Cassidy, Bay City Rollers – lots of really big acts. I saw it as an opportunity to get into the record business in an exciting, successful company. Bell was owned by Columbia Pictures in the States. I was there for three years. After it became Arista Records I had the chance to join Magnet Records as general manager, working for the man who is now Lord Levy, which I saw as a step up in terms of my experience.”

  It was his experiences with Bell that began to convince McNay that his future should be self-determined; that he was no ladder-climber. “When Bell became Arista it started to become more corporate. Previously I’d just been reporting to the UK managing director, and now I was reporting to the financial vice-president in New York. It was a whole corporate thing creeping in. I was never a very good corporate animal, to be honest. I was very much my own man, going off with projects I felt strongly about. When I was at Bell, although I was officially the financial controller, I was adding things under my wing the whole time. I took over the business affairs because no-one was doing it, then the licensing out, because no-one was doing it. I just took on jobs because I wanted to learn. So it was a fusion of having an understanding of how money works, which you need to run a label, but also having an openness and an interest in real creativity – you get good creative people to do what you can’t. And that’s the foundation of a good business.”

  By the time the second Tights was released in the autumn of ’78, McNay had committed himself full time to Cherry Red, working out of his flat at 199 Kingston Road in Wimbledon. “I was getting to the end of the line with working for other people. I just felt that there was an opportunity. In that
first wave of punk, there was a whole change, not only in the music, but in the structure of the music business. There were record companies springing up all over the place, there were new distribution companies, and promotion companies and marketing companies; all kinds of freelance services to back it up. So it was just a very exciting, productive and fast-moving period. At the time I must have been about 31 or 32, and I just decided that this was my chance to have a go at running my own business. And if I’d left it too long, maybe that window of opportunity would have gone.”

  The third release on Cherry Red was the first of a number of records licensed externally. McNay had been reading about Destroy All Monsters in the pages of Sounds. “They had a picture of Niagara, the [female] singer. And because of the credentials of the band – there was Mike Davis who’d been in the MC5, and Ron Asheton from the Stooges, and Niagara looked great – I just thought, and I hadn’t even heard the record, that I can see this working. I wrote to the record company, IDBI (I Don’t Believe It). They were a Detroit label, run by a journalist called David Keeps. He managed Destroy All Monsters. We licensed it for $500 or something. And we put it out in the UK on red vinyl, to make it different from the American one. It got great reviews, and I got loads of pictures of Niagara from David, mostly scantily clad, and I gave them to Sounds, and they’d turn up in their letters page. For the next few weeks, everyone who come round to my flat, I would ask them to write a letter to Sounds demanding another picture of Niagara. So we had a little letter-writing campaign going.”