Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  Most of No Future’s roster was drawn from working class industrial heartlands; Blitz and the inter-related Attak came from New Mills in Derbyshire, the Partisans from Bridgend, Red Alert from Sunderland, Blitzkrieg from Southport. Blitz’s debut album almost made the top 30 of the national charts. They invested heavily in a full colour sleeve and lyric insert, and such was the demand they had to use two separate pressing plants. They also picked up punk pathetique exponents Peter And The Test Tube Babies, who’d had some exposure on John Peel. Vocalist Pete Bywaters said they’d be interested in signing and Berry met them while he was on a union conference in Brighton, though eventually the arrangement would sour due to disagreements with their manager Nick McGerr. Channel 3 was licensed in from Robbie Fields’ Posh Boy label in America in the expectation of a similar reaction that Cherry Red had enjoyed with Dead Kennedys – although the first the band itself knew anything about the arrangement was when they received fan mail from the UK. The Partisans album, mixed by John Loder at Southern Studios, was also successful.

  The label continued from premises in Malvern, with no A&R department, just the occasional journey down to Rough Trade and chats with Daniel Miller. “Everything we put out sold,” recalls Berry. “I would think nothing of loading up a van at three in the morning and taking records down to London.” Impressed by Miller’s ability to run a label without contracts, Berry and Jones adopted the same model; 50-50 deals, royalties only, with no advance. Initially each release sold comfortably more than the 2,000 copies required for break-even, with press virtually guaranteed from Garry Bushell in Sounds (Bushell also introduced them to the label’s most controversial act, The Blood). There was an attempt to sign both GBH and Discharge, who opted to stay with a more local label, Clay, but otherwise, with the exception of Channel 3, all the No Future bands approached the label rather than vice versa. Initially selections were predominantly handled by Jones; Berry taking a more active role as the label developed. Eventually Berry would leave work to go full time, persuading his father it was a good idea on the basis of what were now impressive sales figures. Some of the material to be released on No Future might have been a little difficult to justify within the confines of the MoD, in any case. Especially The Violators’ ‘Summer Of ‘81’, probably the most vehement anti-police statement ever recorded by a UK band (“There’s blood on the street, and the smell is so sweet, cos another blue bastard has just gone down”)

  However, after the initial wave of success, Berry and Jones “over-reached”. The graph comparing record sales with production costs began to narrow and then cross. “Also, some of the bands started to believe their own publicity,” Berry concludes. Whereas before they’d been happy with a local 16-track, now they wanted to come to London and use state of the art studios. The downturn forced them to sell the label. “The formula had slowed down, it got harder to find new bands, the bands themselves got more tricky and wanted advances, and the music scene was changing again. We had a go at a label called Future.” The latter was invoked with Blitz’s ‘Telecommunication’, a sharp left turn into electronica from the group’s original four-square punk. “It sold OK, was radio friendly, but didn’t do nearly as well as their early releases. They were accused of selling out by the press, and I got tired of it all. I’d always wanted to move to London, Richard wasn’t so keen, perhaps that would have killed us off earlier, or perhaps we’d have survived.”

  Berry continued with Future Records, which ran for a dozen releases, as well as working with And Also The Trees, its mainstay act alongside Blitz. “The final straw was an offshoot of Blitz doing a cover version of ‘Suffragette City’,” he recalls, “and that was probably the end. I was in the Stockport studios, and the sound engineer had a good voice, so he sung the song. [Guitarist] Nidge was a good bloke, but he wasn’t Mick Ronson. It was very sad. It had been a fantastic 18 months or two years, and I had to go and get a proper job, and went into retail.”

  Founded by former Beggars Banquet employee Mike Stone after moving back to Stoke-On-Trent to marry his girlfriend Kim, Clay is best remembered for the flourishing of GBH and, in particular, Discharge. Convening a second-hand retail outlet under his own name, Stone’s experiences of working with The Lurkers and Merton Parkas in London left him itching to get back in the game. “Though I came away with nothing from Beggars,” he recalls, “I had the knowledge, and the fire and inspiration to want to do something.” The shop also instilled in him the belief that the public appetite for punk, far from being dead as declared by the print media, was voracious. “Nobody’s servicing these kids, I thought. They clearly want it, but they can’t get it anymore. That’s what I picked up on. The Pistols and Clash were art school boys, a different thing altogether. All the people I saw come into the shop were working class punks.” Clay was incorporated as a label in 1979. “I was naive about finances, but my brother-in-law at the time had a transport company, Spencer Transport. He started us off with two £500 shares and became a silent partner.” After 18 months, Stone was able to buy back the shares.

  “I didn’t know much about the music scene in Stoke,” he concedes, “but people knew I’d worked at Beggars. One day a girl, Tanya Rich, came in. She said she managed this band called Discharge. ‘Why don’t you come and see them?’ They were playing at Northwood Parish Hall, near where I lived. It was unbelievable. It was sweaty, packed, leather jackets and spiky hair. I walked through the door and a big piece of raw meat came flying through the air. I was knocking on at the time, I wasn’t exactly a teenager. I thought, ‘God almighty’. This band kicked in. ‘Fuck me!’ What is this?’ But they were great. I got talking to these lads, and I could barely get a sentence out of them. They didn’t talk. Communication was out of the window. ‘Why don’t we do a record?’ They agreed.”

  Discharge’s ‘Realities Of War’ EP was Clay’s first release in April 1980. Though under-produced, it was remarkable for the savagery of its disposition, a kind of pneumatic drill minimalism that sounded like aural trepanning. Music, or at least punk, hadn’t passed this way before, or been quite so reductive and intense. Nobody suspected it, but Discharge would become one of the most influential groups in the history of late 20th century rock. “We went up to this little studio in Market Drayton just outside Stoke, Red Ball Studios,” recalls Stone. “I went in there with them, and I did the stupidest thing. I said to [vocalist] Calvin, ‘Let’s track your vocal on here. Me in my naivete! We tracked it, and when I look back at it now, we shouldn’t have done. We did it all in four hours. But when you listen to that first record, it’s totally ridiculous. I pressed it up, sent a few copies to John Peel, started going round the wholesalers and independent distributors. We did a good sleeve, and the record was totally different to anything that was out. I could feel the distributors sniggering. ‘We’ll have a few copies off you, Mike.’ I had this old BMW at the time, driving round with these records. I palmed a few off. Rough Trade, Fresh, went all round the country. It started trickling steadily. One day I was at home decorating. And John Peel played it on the radio. I nearly fell off the stepladder. That was it, a week later it went ballistic. All the dealers were ringing me up.” It would eventually sell around 40,000 copies, while Discharge would cement their legacy with 1982’s starkly packaged Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing album. A milestone in the development of a ‘thrash’ aesthetic within punk, though its influence was more acutely felt within the hard rock/metal firmament, its hectoring infatuation with the agonies of war mirrored the output of Crass. Indeed, at the time Discharge, by dint of their pacifist pre-occupations and stark, monochromatic artwork, were viewed to have a foot in the anarcho camp. Garry Bushell, the isolated advocate of new punk in the mainstream press, was so indignant at Discharge’s lack of concession to tune or melody, meanwhile, he almost expired in one memorable editorial. “Umpteen versions of the same pneumatic drill solo… awful… no tunes, no talent, no fun… dull, boring and monotonous… the musical equivalent of glue-sniffing.”

 
; Stone would go on to have similar success with GBH, though their influence was less noteworthy. In a less than crowded field, the Birmingham quartet proved among the more photogenic of the street punk brigade (though, notoriously, their debut Clay 12-inch would be titled ‘Leather, Bristles, Studs and Acne’ because that’s all that could be made out after a trip to a photo booth). “They were playing the Victoria Hall in Hanley,” remembers Stone. “And I was thinking, I need some more bands. The bass player didn’t turn up. They played half the set without him. I was quite impressed by that! They were getting spat at left, right and centre, and Colin [Abrahall; vocals] just spat back. Most people were, ‘Don’t spit at us, we don’t want that.’ They just did the business. I went round the back and said, ‘fancy doing some records?’ They knew about Discharge. That helped me, and gave me a bit of standing. I found this place in Rochdale called Cargo, I took GBH up there. When we were mixing ‘Leather’, a local taxi rank was coming through on the monitors. I said to the engineer John Brierley, that sounds great, we’ll leave it! Yet that was a step up in quality.”

  Clay had several other acts that were effectively one-off signings. The Killjoys (not Kevin Rowland’s group) and Plastic Idols were local Stoke outfits (the latter signed before Discharge). White Door were an offshoot of prog rockers Grace, and there was a one-off album from The Climax Blues Band. But then Clay’s lack of adherence to punk orthodoxy was hardly unexpected, given that Stone had first seen Pink Floyd play in 1966 and remained primarily a rock fan. Play Dead were at the forefront of the burgeoning Gothic movement, while more conventional punk fare came from Abrasive Wheels, The English Dogs and, to turn the story full circle, The Lurkers. “The Lurkers had a different singer,” remembers Stone, “but that came about because of our friendship. I liked one of the singles, but I don’t think it quite worked, to be honest. I always had a lot of hope for [guitarist] Pete Stride, always thought he was pretty talented. Play Dead were a fantastic band. This really saddened me. As a label I was moving on. I did try to go for people who had a bit of substance, and it was around the period when Clay went bust, and it really pissed me off. But they suffered from a lack of press and image, which plays such a part in English music. In fact, nearly all the Clay bands, apart from Discharge, suffered from that.”

  Stone remains fondest of Demon, the hard rock band he manages to this day. Associated with the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal by default rather than intent, they were the fourth release on Clay, and went on to record two albums, Night Of The Demon and Unexpected Guest, that were licensed to Carrere Records. The latter went top 50. “When it came to the third album The Plague,” Stone recalls. “Freddie Cannon, who managed Carrere, turned it down. Atlantic thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. But it took six months to sort the contract out; it was like the Magna Carta. I was up to sixty-page contracts! Different ball game. I went to the New York Music Seminar, and the Atlantic boys were there to see me. They literally frog-marched me down to their office. I thought to myself, I’m going to make a story up here. I said, ‘I’ve got an appointment with CBS, by the way.’ James Wylie, who later managed The Eurythmics, worked for Martin Mills at Beggars Banquet. Martin had taken me over there and said, ‘You can use my solicitor if you like.’ I had no idea what to say, so James said, ‘Ask for £40,000 or £50,000.’ ‘You what?’ I couldn’t believe it. We did an eight-album deal, with me bluffing my way through. And we got it. When they put it out, they changed the sleeve, threw it against the wall and it didn’t stick.” Stone found the high finance posturing both bewildering and highly amusing. “And now,” he laughs, “the singer, Dave Hill, is working at Alton Towers, and I’m driving a van!”

  That change in circumstances was brought about by distributor Pinnacle’s collapse in 1984. “I was on the phone one day with someone down there, saying Pinnacle’s gone bust, you won’t be getting your money,” Stone recalls. “I was stunned. I was owed about £23,000. When you run a record label, you run it on what’s coming in, and I already owed a similar amount of money, on studios and advertising. I wasn’t worried about my own finances. As long as I could eat and run my car, I was quite happy. But I’d spent this money. I actually cried, to be honest. I broke down round the back. I was by myself, I ran the entire label by myself, and I went round the back and just cracked up. ‘What am I going to do?’ I knew it was the end. I didn’t have any money. Others could cast aside a loss, but they had money in reserve. I actually lost about £40,000 in the end.”

  He had no inkling. And it wasn’t the first time it had happened, either. “It wasn’t just Pinnacle. Fresh had gone bust on me and they owed me £6,000. An accountant here in Stoke I employed, unbeknownst to me, had got hold of Alex (Howe) and done some kind of settlement on a monthly basis, where Alex was paying this accountant back. And I didn’t know about it! This guy was pocketing the money. We found out, and he came in and said, ‘Oh, I was going to save it for you for a rainy day.’ Lying bastard. So poor old Alex, who I thought was the devil’s son, was doing his best to pay me back, and I didn’t know anything about it!”

  Stone did try to keep the company afloat, but found things spiralling out of his control. “One day I got a phone call from a guy called Frank who worked for Colin Newman at Trojan. ‘Look, we’ll give you x amount of money for the catalogue.’ And it was enough money to cover most of my debts to the bands and other companies. I ended up about £6,000 in front. Which I spent on classic cars, cos that market was booming. And the next week someone pulled the plug on that! Stoney makes another blunder! I moved to Wolverhampton and started Sonic Records, and kept working with Demon. I’d sold everything to Trojan except Demon. That was the thing I most loved, that I thought would one day make some money. I believed in them as writers and musicians. I still believe that. He came up to the shop with a box transit van, and took everything to do with those bands, including the artwork. Really, I should have hidden it! But everything was on the premises, and Colin Newman was a very shrewd man. The biggest mistake I made in this whole deal is that I chucked in the publishing! What I should have done was said, ‘OK, but I want so many points.’ And I didn’t. And I paid the penalty when six or seven years later, Metallica did two Discharge cover versions on Garage Inc. That was a knife-twister, to lose the record label and then find out that one of the biggest bands on the planet had covered one of the least coverable bands I could ever imagine. No disrespect to Discharge, but I never, ever saw that coming.”

  Had he retained the publishing, Stone would now be a rich man. “When Clay went bust, I became a very weak person. I was punched in the guts. When I sold all that, I was at my weakest point. I was a little bit naive, a little bit ignorant, but weak. I took the money and run. Only I didn’t, I took the money and paid all my creditors back! I’m quite embarrassed about it all, and I beat myself up about it. I’m older now and I could really use the money and I regret what happened. But I’m still very proud of what we did and the records we released.”

  Flicknife’s catalogue, meanwhile, comprised a bizarre mixture of Hawkwind and their innumerable spin-offs such as Inner City Unit and Robert Calvert solo recordings, plus new punk bands like Erazerhead, Major Accident and Instant Agony. There was also classic pop from the Barracudas, and proto-Goth from Zero Le Creche, Alien Sex Fiend and The Marionettes. Run by ex-biker Mark ‘Frenchie’ Gloder and his wife Gina Nares, Flicknife was inaugurated in 1979.

  Hawkwind’s decision to throw in their lot with Flicknife after breaking from RCA was explained by Dave Brock to Alan Moore of Sounds in 1982. “[RCA] is a great big company, bringing out 20 albums a week and anything a bit unusual tends to get pushed to one side. Now on the other hand you’ve got Flicknife, who brought out the ‘Urban Guerrilla’ single, and they’re a small independent label… I think we’re happy with the personal touch that you get with Flicknife. I mean, you can get on the phone and get straight through to Frenchie and Gina… with RCA there’s no contact with people. Or, you’ll have a guy on the case for a cou
ple of weeks and then it’ll just evaporate.”

  That was the attraction for others on the roster, too. “We got involved with Flicknife records through Pete McCarthy, who approached us after our second gig,” Zero Le Creche bass player Terry Miles remembers. “He said he was a manager involved with a group from Yorkshire called Southern Death Cult. Frenchie was erratic, but he was fun to work with”. Or, as drummer Richard Olley recalls, “Flicknife’s offer meant that we got a single released. Frenchie was a really cool bloke. Had vision and wasn’t too stressed about stuff. Seem to remember he had this cool little Morris Minor van.” Hawkwind weren’t the only group to defect from a major. “After EMI had ditched us we were rather chastened and also desperate to establish our survival and commitment to pursuing the direction we set with songs like ‘Violent Times’,” Jeremy Gluck of The Barracudas told NKVD. “[Frenchie] loved The Barracudas and wanted to record our second album with us.” Flicknife ran to some eighty or more releases before retiring hurt, its catalogue sold, like so many other 80s punk labels, to Cherry Red. Gina went on to manage a coffee and flower shop in West London, while Frenchie has retired from view.

  Razor Records wasn’t a pure punk play like No Future, its catalogue, like that of Flicknife, split between new punk and more quixotic releases. Its proprietor, Robin Greatrex, boasted a long apprenticeship in the music industry, having taken his first job in Southwark’s Tunnel rehearsal studios, working with Island and Chrysalis artists, including Bryan Ferry and Bad Company. Later he started a management company and press agency with Camilla Hellman. Their most notable clients included Tyla Gang and Straight Eight, who were signed to Pete Townshend’s Eel Pie, as well as Gary Holton of Heavy Metal Kids, whom he’d managed while at The Tunnel. “The press agency paid better than the management,” confirms Greatrex, “We worked with Showaddywaddy and the Only Ones. The management side petered out because we found it increasingly hard to get recording contracts.” One of the last acts they signed for management, however, was Chron Gen, who had just left Miles Copeland’s Step Forward. Greatrex helped them put an album together for Secret Records, which promptly hit the Top 40. “I thought, that’s incredible.” It convinced him to start Razor, which was ostensibly modelled on Secret.