by Alex; Ogg
“Pete Burns was actually mostly polite to people,” continues Davies. “But he had this great mouth – I remember thinking he was like Joan Rivers, just so funny. I once had to intervene with someone trying to fight Pete Burns once – the nearest I got to a fight in 30 years – but people would sometimes come in and want to jeer at him or attack him, just because of how he looked. But Probe was friendly – it had a stool in there, and we’d make people a couple of tea. I think this thing about being nasty to people has been overplayed.” This writer’s own experience of Probe doesn’t match the off-putting reputation. Dawn Wrench, a student and a feisty bargain hunter, once purchased a terrible album by Middle Of The Road – so terrible it didn’t even feature ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ on it – which had been marked down to one pence. The shop’s staff cheered as she went up to the counter and applauded her exit from the shop. ‘Thank fuck for that, someone’s bought it.’ But, as Wrench pointed out, “it was worth it for the bag”. Probe’s distinctive monochrome ‘Bedlam crowd scene’ carrier was very much the item to be seen walking around town with.
In a broad sense, Probe was the retail outlet for the Eric’s generation. “Me and [Eric’s co-founder] Roger Eagle went to see the building where Probe stood before we moved there,” remembers Davies, “he was interested in having an office space in there, after winding up doing the Liverpool Stadium concerts. We became good friends. I used to put him up many a time, cos he was still travelling up from Manchester. He took a little area of the shop where he was planning things, selling posters and tickets for Eric’s shows. He moved out after about nine months of the shop opening.”
In May 1981 Davies began to run Probe Plus Distribution from his famously tatty, disorganised upstairs office. “Richard Scott knew about Probe, and said it had been one of the inspirations for the original Rough Trade shop,” Davies says. “That’s true,” admits Scott. “Geoff was a wonderful man – he started off as a runner for the Liverpool stock exchange. But Probe, apart from maybe Sam The Record Man in Toronto, was probably the best record shop I’ve ever been in, in its heyday. I remember he had a hundred different Elvis albums in boxes on the counter – an absolutely extraordinary record shop.”
“We were among Rough Trade Distribution’s biggest customers,” Davies continues. “Richard asked if we wanted to join this Cartel thing, and wholesale independent records in the north-west of England. I was very reticent about it, because I was just about to start up the label and I was always over-committed. But he quietly convinced me to do it.”
Unfortunately, Probe would be the first of the founding fathers to leave that network. “By October 1984, I was almost forced to pull out, because I was in so much debt to the other Cartel members,” Davies says. “The idea was that we’d buy from each other. I was dealing with, say, a market stall in Holyhead or a shop in Burnley. I would go up in an estate car two or three days a week to these people. They didn’t have accounts with major labels, and you had to prove to them that these punk records would sell. I used to leave them on sale and return. Then you’d go back and most of them would have sold, so you’d convince them to pay up front for stock. But a lot didn’t seem to want to settle their debts. They’d disappear and you could never find them. I was in a right hole. Richard Scott offered me a get-out, really. We’d spoken about the state I was in financially, and he suggested he could get most of the Cartel debts wiped, and in return, I’d pass my customers on – I had built up a network of over 90 shops, from North Wales up through Lancashire and most of Cheshire. I must say, I was quite relieved. I felt I’d sort of failed and messed up, but the burden was lifted. I was getting a bit tired of going to these Cartel meetings too. There was less and less talk about music, it was targets and things like that. And I was beginning to feel the odd one out. The others were a bit more business-like than I was.”
Davies had launched the Probe Plus label at roughly the same time he was cajoled into joining the Cartel. Yet neither of the predecessor Liverpool punk era labels, Eric’s and Zoo, were a major influence. “We used to stock records direct from Zoo, but there was no great friendship with Bill Drummond. I used to know all the bands because Julian [Cope] and [Ian] McCulloch were always hanging round the shop, and we’d go for a drink in the Grapes up the road. But I was never dead crazy about them – Julian’s music was OK at first, but I didn’t like the first album, with all the brass. The Bunnymen I got tired of. For me, McCulloch has always been a big-headed, tight, pain in the arse. So it taints the music. The reason why I first did Probe Plus was coming across some bands that I knew were having trouble getting records out. It was almost an extension of the Cartel thing – I’ll have a go at seeing if I can get this out. I wasn’t taking it dead seriously.”
The label was inaugurated in November 1981 with Ex Post Facto’s debut single. However, the Probe Plus name only appeared for the first time on its second release by Cook Da Books, as initially Davies didn’t want to attract attention to his involvement. “I wanted to just put a toe in the water and keep it fairly anonymous. The band had actually packed in and fallen out with each other in ’84. But my first album was by a Somali Scouser, Mr Amir, which was reggae, really.” Throughout, the label remained pretty much a sideline. “I wasn’t giving it my all, and some of the stuff I’d released wasn’t really me. I’d pay bands to go into the studio and sometimes they wouldn’t even turn up. The bands disappointed me in that way, so I took a more active interest in the recordings. So by ’85 I was actively co-producing the records I was doing. The period from ’84 onwards is the period I’m happiest about. Most of them were flops, but what made all the money was Half Man Half Biscuit.”
Nigel Blackwell’s Birkenhead group had amused most everyone with their initial releases, scandalising children’s TV programmes, pondering the allure of European football kits and fetishising unlikely television icons like snooker referee Len Ganley. Or lambasting Liver Birds actress Nerys Hughes – loathed by many on Merseyside for her fake Scouse accent. John Peel loved them, but they were refreshingly hopeless at climbing any greasy poles. Most famously they refused to make a scheduled TV appearance on The Tube because Tranmere FC were playing at home that evening, despite Channel Four offering to fly them by helicopter to the game.
Perhaps, given such an innate lack of careerism, it should have been no surprise when Blackwell decided to derail the momentum by breaking the band up, but it was still a blow to Davies. “The last gig was October 3rd ’1986, at the Chelsea College, London,” he recalls. “We had another gig booked in Birmingham, and I phoned Nigel to make arrangements. He said, ‘I’m not doing it.’ ‘Why? Are you not well?’ ‘Nah. I’m fed up with the lot of it. I can’t be bothered.’ I went along to see him, went over the water, but that was that. He’d had enough. We’d had nearly a year of lots of activity, they were the darlings of the press. Although it came out at the end of ’85, Back In The DHSS was the biggest selling independent record of ’86. ‘Trumpton Riots’ was the co-biggest selling single. By the time ‘Dickie Davies’ Eyes’ came out, it had just got to number one in the indie charts when Nigel dropped this bombshell on me. I just accepted it. We didn’t fall out, though it cost me a few bob. I had to get a fake doctor’s note for him! It was fairly inconvenient, but I kept on paying him on sales of the records. And he sold his guitar, and a few years later he said he’d written some new songs. And that’s how it’s been since. I’ve never had a recording contract with them. And when they were ready, we’d do some recording.”
Other bands on the label included Gone To Earth, the closest the region came to an approximation of the punk-folk hybrid of The Pogues. “I co-produced their first single,” remembers Davies. “! brought in Sam Davis, who I knew from years ago as a member of Deaf School. And we called ourselves the Bald Brothers, cos we were both prematurely bald.” Psychotic stoner freak-punks The Mel-O-Tones would evolve into The Walking Seeds. “Their first album is a really powerful record – the best version of ‘Iron Man’ I’ve ever
heard, it’s terrifying! That was my idea, ‘let’s make this really horrible and nasty sounding.’” The Walking Seeds included in their ranks both Bob Parker, omnipresent behind the Probe counter at the time, and later La’s guitarist Barry Sutton (though half of Liverpool, seemingly, played with the La’s at some point). Davies also introduced the world to Wirral poet and later author Jegsy Dodd, whose Winebars and Werewolves album sold well in 1986. Dodd’s backing band, The Bastard Sons Of Harry Cross, were named after the feisty pensioner played in the local Brookside soap opera franchise by fellow Wirral native Bill Dean. Some wit on the set consequently couldn’t resist the temptation of displaying one of the band’s flyers in the same character’s bungalow. Davies has released records on Probe Plus intermittently since its 80s heyday, but eventually sold the shop and retired. He remains involved with various musical projects, however, and can still talk about music for hours, and with undiminished enthusiasm.
Unlike Liverpool, Norwich has never been celebrated as a hotbed of popular music – the siting of Alan Partridge’s hapless, exiled DJ there serving as some kind of barometer of its distance, both geographical and aspirational, from the larger urban arts centres. Backs, the East Anglian arm of the Cartel distribution chain, predictably started as a shop, titled after a pub of the same name in Norwich’s city centre. From there it moved naturally into wholesale, at which time Rough Trade approached them to organise its distribution network in the region as a founding member of the Cartel. “Johnny [Appel] set it up,” notes current Backs employee Derek Chapman. “It started as a record shop back in 1979. And then Rough Trade, also a shop at that point, were starting their distribution of all the independent labels. What they did, in effect, was to find the best independent shop in each area, and go to them and say, ‘Would you like to distribute these labels for your area?’ It was based on the fact that they were best record shops in the different regions.”
Cartel meetings were hosted in the different regional centres on a round robin principle. “So everyone would troop off to York or Bristol or whatever,” remembers Chapman. Were the meetings fun? “They were! They got a little political after a while, with strategies and things. There were some pretty punchy characters, and to be fair, a lot of them are still working in the independent music industry. There’s still a lot of them around. Or sometimes they went on to record labels, of course. It’s an obvious point for us to make, but the distribution side is one of those things that did tend to get forgotten. But a lot of those mavericks running independent record labels needed the support of a distribution network – we’re also funding them in terms of manufacturing costs and so on, which some people, no names mentioned, sometimes forget. It was a fertile time. Because the record shops were in the front line, people were coming into the shop asking us for records that weren’t on the EMI listings – so it was a natural extension to hunt out these records because people wanted them. Where the hell do you get the Desperate Bicycles, or Stiff Little Fingers, or the Normal, whatever these records they were asking for, from? So it developed from that period. We didn’t create the demand, we supplied it.”
“It then developed over the next few years,” Chapman continues, “each member of the Cartel began to find its own distribution and labels, obviously reflecting what was going on locally and nationally. And then we started to sell them all amongst ourselves. We would pick up on a label and sell it to Red Rhino, Fast, Rough Trade or whatever, and they would equivalently give us their stuff to sell in our area. If Red Rhino had a new release, we would take a hundred copies or something, and sell however many we could, and pay Red Rhino for what we’d sold. And they’d probably take a hundred copies of one of ours, and sell what they could and pay us.”
The move to helping local bands distribute their records was as obvious to Backs as it was to their fellow Cartel members. Among the first examples were the Romans In Britain sampler Welcome To Norwich: A Fine City and the Disrupters’ first EP, ‘Young Offender’. The latter was released under the auspices of anarcho-punk label Radical Change, while the former subsequently housed the debut single by one of the compilation album’s leading lights, The Higsons (‘I Don’t Want To Live With Monkeys’). It sold 15,000 records before the band moved on to another Backs’ affiliate, Waap! and thence a series of unsuccessful relationships with a variety of suitors. Having demonstrated that they could successfully finance and distribute subsidiary imprints, the shop staff decided they’d have a crack themselves. Backs Records was an immediate success, with The Farmers Boys, like The Higsons before them, a huge hit with John Peel, though they too would jump ship to a major.
Even without the two bands whose lustrously melodious pop had single-handedly invented a ‘Norwich sound’, Backs continued to enjoy qualified success. Gee Mr Tracy and the Bible both did well for them after a run of misfires (Testcard F, Happy Few, Gothic Girls, Mad About Sunday). The Bible subsequently found themselves restored to a major (singer Boo Hewerdine having previously recorded for Phonogram with The Great Divide), as they were first licensed to, and then signed by, Chrysalis. “We had to be realistic,” notes Johnny Appel. “If the band has released a couple of singles and done really well and you have people sniffing around offering all sorts of things, the next stage is an album. If we wanted that LP to be successful enough, you’re talking vast sums of money. If you haven’t got it, why be stupid? We hadn’t got the money. We could do with some as we had fledgling bands coming along that needed investment. It was a way for the band to get what they wanted – to sign to a major label with unlimited resources and an opportunity for us to glean back a few pounds to invest in new bands.”
Moreover the Backs’ team routinely referred to their label as ‘comic relief’, and very much a diversion from the day to day business of stocking, distributing and promoting records. “Distribution was the main business, that’s where all the efforts went,” confirms Chapman. “The label was how we lost the money we made. The Backs label almost came to a halt in the early 90s. I think the last release was Venus In Furs. We called it a day on that and started a different label. It was briefly resurrected five or so years back for a Farmers Boy release, the BBC sessions album, and just for old times’ sake, we put it on the Backs label.” Their commitment to the Cartel was ongoing, however, at least until the collapse of Rough Trade Distribution in 1991.
Chapman maintains that the independent ethos remains strong in terms of Backs’ activities. “Yeah, and it’s always going to be driven by the music, really. For new music to come along it needs ways of being disseminated and distributed. So it tends to come out through the independent network rather than a major, because we’re fleeter of foot and faster to react. Whereas once the machine of Universal Music Inc or whatever they’re called tries to move, it can take a while.”
South-west Cartel member Revolver grew out of the independent record shop run in Bristol by Chris Parker, with Lloyd Harris originally looking after distribution. Sited in the ‘Triangle’ at the top of Park Street, Revolver was a focal point for the city’s post-punk arts community and musicians, with shop floor graduates including Grant Marshall of Massive Attack. In a familiar pattern, Parker also set up Recreational Records, whose releases included the first singles by local reggae act Talisman and Bristolian punks the X-Certs. Jamie Hill, who would go on to be Revolver distribution’s warehouse manager, was a member of two bands who recorded for its in-house label; Mouth (who featured Nellee Hooper of The Wild Bunch and Rob Merrill, later of Roni Size’s Reprazent) and Animal Magic. “Richard Grassby-Lewis of the Startled Insects produced most of the records in Bath,” Hill recalls. “But Chris Parker was definitely the main guy. With Mouth we’d just done a bedroom demo, so we turned up at the shop on the Triangle, played them the tape, and got a yes. We’d only played two gigs and had about five songs.”
Revolver was an exemplar of a Cartel staple; that of record shop turned hang out turned epicentre of the local music community. “We used to knock off school when we were about fou
rteen, fifteen,” Mark Stewart of the Pop Group would recall in Straight Outa Bristol, “go for a smoke over a mate’s house and every Friday we’d go to Revolver to listen to the new reggae pre-releases, right? We used to talk about this van from Zion that every Friday would bring the pre’s. Revolver would only stock so many records, but I was heavily into the dub stuff so as the two lads in the shop were playing through the pre’s to see which ones to stock, we’d check the dubs [dub plates or reggae acetates] to try and find which ones we wanted. And then [it turned out] that it was Adrian [Sherwood] delivering on the van to Revolver; it was his first driving job and he was bringing the dubs down to Bristol when he was eighteen or nineteen.”
Present in the shop from 1975, Mike Chadwick, alongside Harris, would take control of distribution from 1983, offloading the retail side to Roger Doughty, former owner of Cheltenham’s Drifting Records and a member of the pre-Pigbag group Hardware. But unlike other Cartel members, from that point Revolver’s retail/distribution disciplines were entirely separate. “I started working weekends at Revolver around 1983,” recalls Sean Mayo. “Then Roger [Doughty] moved to Bristol and bought the shop. The distribution moved to the Old Malt House, just off the M32. I moved to that side of it, and went into telesales and packing orders. It was a four-man operation with me, Pete Theelke and the two directors, Mike Chadwick and Lloyd Harris. The way it worked with the Cartel was you had a loose but very loyal group of companies that represented things regionally. Each company would be acquiring labels to distribute through The Cartel, then trading records between them for wholesale. Each company would then tele-sale to their area. We were selling to the whole of the south-west, South Wales, the whole of Cornwall, Devon, down to Dorset. You had call cycles with the shops. Back then the business was so strong, you were dealing with these people on a weekly basis, pre-selling releases, four to six weeks in advance, and also taking stock orders. We also did our own exports. It was friendly. We were all into it for the same reasons. It was about the music. But not just the music – it was independent, and all that represented. It was doing it for all the right reasons.”
