Although it wasn’t actually a new phenomenon at all, at that particular moment in history the idea of releasing your own music felt fantastically novel and revolutionary. Spiral Scratch’s initial pressing of one thousand copies, funded by loans from friends and family, sold out with staggering speed. It ultimately chalked up sales of 16,000 (with even more to come when it was reissued a few years later). This was an astonishing achievement given that a distribution network for independent records didn’t exist in 1977. “Mail order was very important,” says Boon. “Rough Trade was just a shop with a mail-order service in those days. And we knew the manager of Manchester’s Virgin shop and he persuaded some of his regional colleagues to stock it.” People were buying Spiral Scratch for the music, but also for the sheer fact of its existence, its status as a cultural landmark and portent of change.
But why was the idea of independently recording and releasing music so surprising in 1977? After all, approximately 50 percent of American rock ’n’ roll and R&B hits in the late fifties had been released through independent labels such as Sun and Hi. All through the sixties and seventies independents flourished in regional markets and niche genres, such as jazz (Sun Ra’s Saturn, the U.K. free-improv imprint Incus), British folk (Topic), and Jamaican imports (Blue-beat). Even during the commercial boom of “serious,” album-oriented rock, when major labels dominated the market, you still had crucial “progressive” independents like Virgin and Island. But there was a significant difference between these labels and the postpunk independents. “The people who started Virgin and Island were enterprising, sure, and ‘independent’ in terms of what they did creatively,” says Iain McNay, founder of leading postpunk indie Cherry Red. “But they had the support of major record company distribution, finance, and marketing.”
Just before punk, a couple of labels formed that were independent in terms of their financing and distribution. Chiswick and Stiff both emerged from England’s pub rock scene. Chiswick debuted with the amped-up R&B of the Count Bishops in November 1975, Stiff with a Nick Lowe single the following year. Unlike the amateur-hour neophytes of New Hormones, though, the figures behind the pub rock indies were seasoned veterans of the record business, entrepreneurially savvy insiders. Furthermore, neither Chiswick nor Stiff made an ideological meal out of being independent. Both soon eagerly hooked up with major-label distribution, with Stiff becoming a leading New Wave hit maker behind Ian Dury and Elvis Costello.
When punk came along, the top bands without exception fell back into the traditional way of doing things. “The disappointing thing for me historically was the Clash and Sex Pistols’ signing to majors,” says Geoff Travis, cofounder of Rough Trade. Even Buzzcocks buckled under. After the group’s original singer, Howard Devoto, quit, Richard Boon and the band planned to put out another independent record through New Hormones, an EP to be titled Love Bites. “But then the drummer’s dad came to see me, saying his son had just left school and had an offer of a job as an insurance clerk and ‘what are you going to do with the band?’” recalls Boon. “So that was when we had to decide ‘God, we’re in this for real!’ Which meant finding other resources. Which meant signing to a major. Because doing it independently wasn’t supportable at that point, you couldn’t just get enough revenue selling through mail order and a few sympathetic retailers.”
As the band’s manager, Boon got Buzzcocks a deal with United Artists, and Love Bites ended up being the title of the group’s second album for the major label. But as an amateur entrepreneur he continued New Hormones as a back-burner operation for several years, sporadically releasing esoteric postpunk like the Pete Shelley side project the Tiller Boys and Ludus, an arty feminist band fronted by the charismatic Linder (whose real name was Linda Sterling). Released at the very end of 1977, almost a full year after Spiral Scratch, ORG-2 wasn’t even a record, but a booklet of collages by Linder and Jon Savage. “It didn’t have a cover price, so it didn’t sell very well. Nobody knew what to sell it for!” laughs Boon. “But it did its job. The title The Secret Public was all about that other side of the DIY thing—trying to locate kindred spirits who would ‘get it’ and respond.”
In 1977, many people did “get” Spiral Scratch and responded to it as a call to action. “My girlfriend Hilary gave me a copy and that was the key moment,” says Bob Last, founder of the Edinburgh indie Fast Product. The idea of Fast Product already existed in his mind as a brand, but Last had no specific ideas about what the actual merchandise would ultimately be. “I had a logo and an idea of the attitude the company would embody, but it was Spiral Scratch that gave me the idea of music as the product. I popped into the Bank of Scotland and said, ‘I’m going to put a record out, can I borrow some money?’ And bizarrely they gave me a few hundred pounds! I had absolutely no idea there’d been a history of independent labels before that. Spiral Scratch turned my head around.”
A former architecture student and technician/designer for a traveling theater club, Last conceived Fast Product as a hybrid of art project and renegade commerce. The company’s first press release trumpeted the slogan “Interventions in any media” as a sort of all-purpose promise/threat. Starting with the Mekons’ “Never Been in a Riot” single in January 1978, Fast’s products were strikingly designed and highly collectible. At a time when business—big or small—was regarded suspiciously as “the Man” and consumerism was something to feel guilty about, Fast Product provocatively highlighted the notion of the commodity as fetish. This became the label’s signature balancing act, celebrating consumer desire while simultaneously exposing the manipulative mechanisms of capitalism. Fast Product represented an emergent Left sensibility that would flourish in the eighties, a “designer socialism” purged of its puritanical austerity and fear of pleasure, attracted to stylishly made things but vigilant about being hoodwinked or exploited.
Like New Hormones had done with The Secret Public, Fast Product moved quickly to show that it was more than just a record label. FAST 3, The Quality of Life, consisted of a plastic bag filled with nine Xeroxed collages—including pictures of German terrorists, taken from a Sunday newspaper’s color magazine but labeled “entertainment”—along with various items of consumer detritus. “We had someone carefully peeling oranges and putting a bit of peel in each bag, to guarantee that each package would be unique, with a different pattern of rotting on each strip of peel.” A later nonmusical release, SeXex—another plastic bag, this time containing a dozen Xeroxed sheets, a badge, and an empty soup carton—was conceived as a promotional campaign for a totally imaginary corporation. “Both Quality of Life and SeXex used the cut-up, photocopied aesthetic of the time,” says Last. “But what drove them was this sense that they were a perverse advertising campaign for a product that didn’t actually exist. And they sold quite well, got debated and referred to quite extensively.”
“The first really arty, clever label was Fast Product,” says Tony Wilson, cofounder of Manchester independent Factory Records. “A hell of a lot more arty than us. If I could have put orange peel in a plastic bag and released it with a catalog number, I would have been very proud!” A local TV host, Wilson was a Cambridge-educated aestheteprovocateur who loved record packaging and wanted his label to have a clear design aesthetic. He got young design student Peter Saville to give Factory its own visual identity, influenced by the starkness and severe functionalism of early twentieth-century modernist design movements such as Bauhaus, De Stijl, constructivism, and Die Neue Typographie. Saville’s record sleeves and label typography made Factory and its groups—Joy Division, Durutti Column, A Certain Ratio—stand out from the postpunk pack. The austere elegance was a new thing in rock packaging, a cleansing break both with prepunk romanticism and New Wave’s own clichés. The label’s first release, A Factory Sample, was a double EP packaged in glistening silver. “It just seemed so special,” says Paul Morley, who was NME’s Manchester correspondent at the time. “The fact that it was so beautiful looking showed the possibilities of what could be done
, and it showed up the London record industry for being so boring.”
Soon Factory was outdoing Fast Product’s collectible Earcom samplers and bizarre packages like Quality of Life by bringing a Marcel Duchamp–like absurdism to their catalog. Numbers were assigned to anything and everything: pipe dreams, whims, unrealized projects, movies that were never finished or never started. Fac 8 was a menstrual egg timer proposed by Linder but never actually constructed. Fac 61 was a lawsuit from the label’s former house producer Martin Hannett. Fac 99 was a dental bill for Factory codirector Rob Gretton, who’d had his molars reconstructed.
For Wilson, this sort of mischief was in the prankster spirit of the situationists, a French anarcho-Dada movement of the sixties whose ideas he admired. The situationists believed that rediscovering play was the remedy for “the poverty of everyday life,” the feelings of alienation amid abundance generated by Western consumer society. Above all, they wanted to smash “the spectacle,” all those mass-media forms of entertainment such as television that enforce passivity rather than participation. The situationists were also scathing critics of commodity fetishism, however, so it’s pretty unlikely that they would have approved of Factory’s sumptuously designed records.
In truth, the only remotely situationist aspect to Factory was what Wilson described as the label’s “continual denial of profit.” No contracts were signed with the groups, who were free to leave when they liked and retained ownership of their own music. “I sometimes flatter myself that the way we behaved, which was not about wanting to be rich, and the way we lived out that attitude every day, was maybe what might’ve been suggested by the situationist philosophy,” says Wilson. Weirdly combining a sometimes ruinous aesthetic perfectionism (covers that cost more than the profit margins) with lackadaisical nonprofessionalism, Factory didn’t act like a business at all.
Far from Fast Product’s and Factory’s sly, postmodern games, the punk band Desperate Bicycles had a much more dour but probably more faithful take on the situationist antagonism to “the spectacle.” Do-it-yourself, for Desperate Bicycles, meant the overthrow of the establishment music industry through people seizing the means of production, making their own entertainment, and selling it to other creative and autonomous spirits. DIY’s most fervent evangelists, the Desps chanted “it was easy, it was cheap—go and do it” at the end of their early 1977 debut “Smokescreen.” That slogan then became the chorus of “The Medium Was Tedium,” the follow-up released later that same year. “No more time for spectating,” they declared on “Don’t Back the Front,” an antifascist anthem on the flip side of “Medium,” adding the listener-inciting battle cry “cut it, press it, distribute it/Xerox music’s here at last.” A sleeve note revealed that “Smokescreen” had cost only £153 and said the band “would really like to know why you haven’t made your single yet.” As for the Desps’ actual music, it was almost puritan in its unadorned simplicity, its guitar sound frugal to the point of emaciation. For the Desperate Bicycles, it was as though sloppiness and scrawniness became signs of membership in the true punk elect. The very deficiency of traditional rock virtues (tightness, feel) stood as tokens of the group’s authenticity and purity of intent.
The Desperate Bicycles’ 1977 singles had an even bigger impact in the U.K. than Spiral Scratch. The demystify-the-process data on the back of “The Medium Was Tedium” and the group’s fervent exhortation “now it’s your turn” catalyzed a scrappy legion of do-it-yourself bands. Among them were many of the key figures of the postpunk era: Swell Maps, Scritti Politti, Young Marble Giants, the Television Personalities, Thomas Leer, and Daniel Miller, aka the Normal. “I don’t know if I ever heard their records, I just got infected by the energy and inspiration the Bicycles put across in this Melody Maker article about how easy it was to make a record,” says Miller, who in 1977 was a twenty-six-year-old fan of German electronic music and a thwarted musician. After reading the MM feature, he rushed out and bought a secondhand Korg synth for £150 and then worked overtime at his film-editing job until he could afford a four-track ministudio. Working in his North London bedroom, he created “T.V.O.D.” and “Warm Leatherette,” the two sides of his self-released debut single as the Normal. “I never thought of approaching a ‘major’ label,” he recalled. “I didn’t like them because they’d ruined quite a few of my favorite bands—like Virgin did with Can, Faust, and Klaus Schulze.”
The Normal’s sound was electropunk. “Warm Leatherette” especially—all harsh stabs of analog-synth distortion and dispassionately perverse lyrics about the eroticism of car accidents, via Ballard’s Crash—could hardly have been further from the floridly romantic keyboard synth arpeggios of prog rock. The single did unexpectedly well, selling thirty thousand copies, and inadvertently turned Miller into the CEO of his own record label. Mute Records was the name he’d put on the back of the single, along with his home address. Many people assumed Mute was a proper record label specializing in weird electropop. Within a week of the release of “Warm Leatherette,” all kinds of peculiar demo tapes started arriving in the mail. “Fad Gadget was the first one I liked enough to want to put out,” Miller recalls. “Before I knew it I was running a record company—working from home, with no staff or anything like that, but a record label nonetheless.”
In mid-1978, a curious spate of cultural synchronicity found “Warm Leatherette” being released at around the same time as several other lo-fi electronic singles, all put out on indie labels: Throbbing Gristle’s “United,” Cabaret Voltaire’s Extended Play EP, Human League’s “Being Boiled,” Robert Rental’s “Paralysis,” and Thomas Leer’s “Private Plane.” “There was this period when they all came out, one after the other,” recalls Leer. “And it was like, ‘Where are all these weird records coming from?’ None of us knew each other. There was obviously something brewing.”
Actually, Thomas Leer and Robert Rental did know each other. Two Scottish friends who’d moved down to London at the height of punk, Leer and Rental, like Miller, were inspired to put out their own records by the Desperate Bicycles’ example. Renting a multitrack recorder for five days, they took it to Leer’s apartment in Finsbury Park to record his songs, then moved it across the Thames River to Rental’s Battersea pad. “The records came out at the same time and they sounded similar, because we actually made them together,” says Leer. They also looked alike, with Xeroxed covers and hand-stamped labels. Leer and Rental were so captivated with the DIY ethos that they each decided to operate their own labels—Oblique and Regular, respectively—rather than jointly release via the same imprint. Leer only pressed 650 copies of “Private Plane” backed with “International,” but one of them made it to the office of NME, where it was made Single of the Week.
“Private Plane” sounded electronic, but Leer didn’t actually own a synth. Instead he processed his guitar and bass using various gadgets and played Rental’s stylophone (a gimmicky electronic keyboard played with a pen) through an echo effect. All these gauzy silverswirl textures gave “Private Plane” an ethereal feel perfect for its mood of remote serenity tinged with wistfulness, loosely inspired by a recent TV program about the reclusive multimillionaire Howard Hughes. Leer’s fey voice is equally perfect, but owed something to contingency: He had to whisper the vocal because the recording took place at night in his one-room apartment and he didn’t want to wake his girlfriend.
More so than on the electronic squad, however, Desperate Bicycles’ biggest impact was on the noisy-guitar brigade. Teenagers growing up in Solihull—a middle class suburb on the edge of the Midlands industrial city Birmingham—Swell Maps were a gang of friends centered around two brothers who hated their given surname (Godfrey) so much they renamed themselves Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks. When “Smokescreen” came out, Swell Maps had actually existed for five years already as a sort of imaginary rock band, getting together to record albums on reel-to-reel tape recorders and turning them into cassettes complete with cover art and even inner-sleeve booklets.
> “We would set up recording studios in the house when our parents went on holiday,” says Sudden. “But it wasn’t until Desperate Bicycles did their first single that we realized you could actually go book a professional studio and make a record. We thought only major labels could hire them, which seems ridiculous now! As soon as we grasped that anyone could do it, we immediately booked this place in Cambridge called Spaceward, which used to advertise in the back of Melody Maker and cost one hundred fifty pounds for a ten-hour session.”
Pooling their savings and borrowing more from the Godfreys’ parents, Swell Maps pressed two thousand copies of their debut, “Read About Seymour.” Released on the group’s own label, Rather, the single is often said to be about Seymour Stein, founder of the New Wave–friendly U.S. label Sire, who’d signed Talking Heads and the Ramones. Actually, the title refers to a totally different Seymour Stein, this one known as the “king of the mods” in 1960s England. The lyrics, though, were composed in cut-up fashion. Another song spliced its lyrics together by combining text from an Enid Blyton children’s story with words from a book about fighter pilots. Swell Maps were obsessed with war, but in a whimsical and boyishly innocuous way. “Then Poland,” “Midget Submarines,” and “Ammunition Train” drew on military history (especially the Spanish succession wars of the early eighteenth century) and the boys’ adventure story character Biggles, also a fighter pilot. The Maps also loved Gerry Anderson’s marionette TV shows of the sixties, Thunderbirds and Stingray. A Stingray episode provided the title for Swell Maps’ debut album, A Trip to Marineville. “I’d say our biggest influences were T. Rex, Can, and Gerry Anderson,” says Sudden. “Which isn’t a bad combination. We always wished we could use Barry Gray, the guy who did all the Thunderbirds themes, to do orchestrations of our tracks.”
Rip It Up and Start Again Page 5
