Along with their pals the Television Personalities, Swell Maps invented a whole strand of postpunk that made a fetish of naïveté, characterized by weak vocals, shaky rhythms, rudimentary droning basslines, and fast-strummed discords. The DIY bands reveled in the noise-generating potential of the guitar, but they didn’t exactly rock and they certainly didn’t roll. For believers, much more than the “sped-up heavy metal” that was first-wave punk, this was the true realization of the here’s-three-chords-now-start-a-band ethos—except some of the groups didn’t even have three chords. “It took me two years to learn two chords,” Sudden told NME. “I can’t ever see ourselves becoming polished, note perfect and all that. We hardly ever rehearse—about once every six months.”
Fervent amateurists, Swell Maps believed bands got ruined when they depended on playing gigs and releasing records in order to make a living. One of the reasons the group split, shortly before the release of their second album Jane From Occupied Europe, was that they were becoming too successful, with a tour of America looming. Many of the groups in Swell Maps’ wake, though, went a step further and equated amateurism with amateurishness, the deliberate avoidance of anything that smacked of professionalism or slickness. From the liberating declaration that “anyone can do it,” DIY became a confining injunction to sound like anyone can do it. Swell Maps themselves were always more expansive and experimental than this: For every frantic racket such as “Let’s Build a Car,” there was an eerie metallic instrumental, such as “Big Empty Field,” clangorous and full of cavernous hollows, the missing link between Neu! and Sonic Youth.
Swell Maps initially had some problems shifting “Read About Seymour.” Sales of the debut single stalled at around 750 copies, despite an early boost of support from Radio One DJ John Peel, who played the single more than a dozen times within three weeks on his late-night show. The day after coming up to London to record a Maps session for Peel, Sudden happened to walk past Rough Trade’s record shop, which also doubled as the headquarters of the fledgling Rough Trade distribution company. “One of the guys asked, ‘Have you got any of your single left?’ and I said, ‘Oh, about a thousand.’ So he said, ‘We’ll take the lot.’”
The alliance that subsequently developed between Rough Trade and Swell Maps was a prime example of the role the London label rapidly assumed as enabler in chief for the U.K. independent movement. Initially Rough Trade had seemed like just another one of the first wave of postpunk indie labels, no more central than other pioneers such as Small Wonder, Cherry Red, Rabid, Industrial, and Step Forward. But soon it started to dispense information, encouragement, and support to other young labels. Most crucially, Rough Trade fronted money to bands to enable them to start their own labels or press more copies of a release. Often it formed partnerships with small, one-band labels (such as Swell Maps’ own Rather) in which Rough Trade paid for the pressing of the record and got distribution rights for the release. On one level, this was a canny form of enterprise (Rough Trade made much of its money from distributing independent records). But these “P&D” (pressing and distribution) deals were also freighted with an intense charge of idealism. Rough Trade was ideologically committed to helping individuals achieve self-realization through creative autonomy. Daniel Miller, for instance, was given three hundred pounds to press an extra two thousand copies of “Warm Leatherette,” which Rough Trade then distributed. They also provided a base for his fledgling Mute label. Says Miller, “I didn’t have an office, so they let me get the records delivered there from the pressing plant, and do my mail-outs from their HQ.”
Like many independents of this era and afterward, Rough Trade was a record store before it was a record label. A music-obsessed Cambridge graduate, Geoff Travis hitchhiked across America in his midtwenties. He picked up “literally hundreds of records by the time I got to San Francisco,” then shipped them back to London. A fantasy was forming in his head about “opening a shop where you could listen to records all day without anyone bothering you too much.” Acquiring stock from a bankrupt Cambridge record store, Travis eventually settled on scuzzy, low-rent Ladbroke Grove as a London location that offered sufficient “passing trade” thanks to its mix of bohemians and reggae-loving Rastafarians from the local Caribbean population.
Opening in February 1976, Rough Trade “became a magnet for the local community,” says Travis. “It was somewhere you could hang out and browse without anyone harassing you, this place where you could listen to music really loud all day long. We had comfy chairs, huge speakers pumping out music, and all the reggae prereleases, which I’d buy every week from a warehouse in North London.” Because Joe Strummer’s 101ers played nearby at the Elgin pub, and Mick Jones lived by the Westway flyover, “Rough Trade made the connection with punk really early,” says Travis. “And Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols would come in to sell records he’d stolen!” Rough Trade was the only place in London where you could buy American imports such as Punk magazine and singles by Pere Ubu and Devo released on their own tiny independents Hearthan and Booji Boy.
Although it was a privately owned company, Rough Trade was run as if it were collectively owned by the workers. Everyone had equal say and equal pay. “They actually had a ‘rota’ [rotation] system, with everyone taking turns to make the tea or do the sweeping up,” says Tony Fletcher, teenage editor of Jamming fanzine, who used to hang out at Rough Trade after school, still wearing his uniform. Constant meetings took place, during which weighty ideological issues and mundane operational details were discussed with equal fervor. This kind of communal ethos was easily mocked as a hippie throwback, but Travis stresses that “although people have this antileftist view of co-ops as disorganized, with people sitting around talking all day and nothing ever getting done, Rough Trade wasn’t like that at all. It worked for a number of years and we got a lot done. But the lines of responsibility were quite clear—people looked after different areas.”
Collectivist values of this sort were very much part of the radical culture of the midseventies. Both Libération, the French left-wing newspaper, and Time Out, London’s bohemian listings magazine, were run as cooperatives, with no hierarchy or pay differentials. By the late seventies, there were around three hundred cooperatives in the U.K., half of them whole-food shops, the rest ranging from radical bookstores to crafts stores. It was actually during the early to midseventies that the counterculture ideas of the previous decade were most widely disseminated and implemented. Squatting, for instance, was “huge,” recalls Travis. “I lived in squats all over London.” But the cooperative movement wasn’t just about grubby commune-dwelling hippies and anarchist dropouts. Collectivist ideas had currency in the political mainstream. In 1974, the Labour government’s resident hard Left cabinet member Tony Benn had grand plans for state-subsidized workers’ co-ops that would take over failed companies, something that actually happened with the Scottish Daily News and the motorcycle company Norton Villiers Triumph.
In addition to deriving inspiration from British socialist culture, Travis could also draw on his firsthand experience of kibbutz life in Israel. “I’m Jewish, and my parents sent me one summer to visit my distant relatives, and I spent some time on a kibbutz. There was a lot of idealism in the early days of the movement. The impetus was quite pure. I liked the way they were organized—people having breakfast together, living communally, making decisions in a relatively rational way. Everyone knows what’s going on. It seemed a more sensible way to run things—semiutopian, but not impossible.”
As with other record shops turned labels, the Rough Trade staff’s day-by-day activity—sifting through releases and judging which ones were good, the innumerable small decisions about how many of a particular record to stock and whether to reorder—soon evolved into an A&R–like intuition about what was “hot” musically and where postpunk as a whole was heading. Still, two full years elapsed between the opening of the store and the label’s debut release in February 1978: Metal Urbain’s “Paris Maquis.” “We thought
they were the French Sex Pistols,” says Travis. Next came an Augustus Pablo single. But it was ROUGH 3—the Extended Play EP by Sheffield experimental trio Cabaret Voltaire—that really tapped the emergent postpunk gestalt.
The same egalitarian idealism that informed the workaday operations of Rough Trade governed its dealings with artists. Contracts were for one record at a time and based around a 50/50 split of the profits between band and label. “We fronted all the money for recording, promotion, whatever,” says Travis. “The artists provided their labor, inspiration, and genius. The fifty/fifty split has since been adopted by countless indie labels—Joy Division at Factory, Depeche Mode at Mute, they were all on that arrangement.”
One advantage to these one-off deals, typically based around verbal agreement and personal trust rather than lawyers and contracts, was their rapid-response nature, so much more suited to the speedy stylistic fluctuations of the postpunk universe. “It meant you could see an amazing band and say ‘let’s make a record’ that very night, and in four weeks, the record’s out,” says Travis. “You could get on with it.” Travis also believes the 50/50, one-record-at-a-time deals helped create a nurturing environment for bands. “It creates the psychological conditions for musicians to do their best work if they are in control but they have a partner who is not weak, who can help them.” In contrast, the major-label system seduced bands with large advances against future royalties, in return for signing away their lives, and then put them under immense pressure to achieve sales. “It doesn’t matter how much ‘creative control’ a band is given,” Travis told Rolling Stone. “You’re still indentured. Long-term contracts will put a band in debt from recording and touring costs. Then you have to produce when you’re not ready. You have to write songs when you have nothing to say.” Few bands survive to the sixth or eighth album designated in their contracts.
There was a downside to the 50/50 split, though, according to Nikki Sudden. “You make a lot of money if you sell a lot of records, but if you don’t sell many or any, you don’t get anything.” With no advance to cover living expenses, bands were unable to give up their day jobs. Still, they could always work at Rough Trade, as many of the label’s artists did. “Me and Epic both worked in the shop for about a year,” says Sudden. “I got sacked for being rude to the Rasta customers. They would come in and want to hear all the reggae prereleases, each six minutes long, all the way through, and you knew they were never going to buy anything. After a while I got fed up and put everything on for half a second!”
Having the musicians get their hands dirty as sales assistants or packing records up for distribution fit Rough Trade’s philosophy. It had a faintly Maoist air, getting the intelligentsia to labor in the paddy fields. Certainly, Travis liked to think of the musicians less as artists or stars than as cultural workers. He talked of how Rough Trade was neither the record business nor art but a space of cultural production, involving collaboration and mutual support. It was this pragmatic, slightly dowdy vision that gave the label something of a “brown rice” image.
But then Rough Trade weren’t into romanticizing things or preserving the mystique of rock ’n’ roll. They believed in demystification. “People exert control through mystification,” says Travis. “They like to make you think it’s all over your head. Recording engineers can be like that in the studio. I’d got no studio background at all, but I produced ‘Nag Nag Nag’ by Cabaret Voltaire and coproduced records by the Raincoats, Stiff Little Fingers, the Fall. We didn’t really know what we were doing, but at that point in history, you had the confidence to just go ahead and do it.”
Without effective distribution, the do-it-yourself ethos was just shouting into the void. But Travis adamantly opposed the idea of infiltrating the mainstream and signing to majors in order to use their distribution muscle. “Changing things from the inside is nonsense,” he declared. Where were the historical examples of anyone who’d actually done this? Rough Trade’s greatest achievement was organizing the Cartel, an independent distribution network built around an alliance of London-based Rough Trade and Small Wonder and their regional counterparts Probe, Revolver, and Red Rhino. Nationwide distribution for small labels and self-released records held out the possibility for real communication, reaching a scattered audience of like minds. It also meant one had a better chance of recouping costs and carrying on. Unglamorous but absolutely vital, the Cartel network provided the infrastructure for a genuinely alternative culture. Today Travis talks about independent distribution as being “based on a sound political principle—if you control the means of distribution, you have a great deal of power. It was obvious that the channels of culture were being controlled. It made me angry you couldn’t buy decent left-wing literature or the feminist magazine Spare Rib in retail chains like WHSmith. So there was a very clear political imperative to build a network of outlets for things we liked.”
“Things we liked” included not just records but fanzines, the print media version of do-it-yourself. “Sniffin’ Glue was so important,” says Travis of the pioneering punkzine. “We bought loads off its founder, Mark Perry, and also let him use our office as somewhere to staple it together.” By 1980, Rough Trade received an average of twelve new zines each week, and distributed nationwide the ones that passed its rigorous scrutiny for ideological soundness. “Rough Trade would actually tell fanzine editors, ‘We will read your zine and if there’s anything racist or sexist in it, we’ll return it,’” recalls Jamming’s Tony Fletcher. There were also unofficial interventions: “I remember getting some returned copies of Jamming and someone from Swell Maps had scrawled on it because they disagreed with my review of them! It was a very argumentative culture.”
A few blocks from Rough Trade’s Ladbroke Grove base stood a company called Better Badges, the market leader in New Wave badges (a crucial way of emblazoning your allegiances on your lapel in those heady days). Now the company “became the clearinghouse for zines,” says Fletcher. Better Badges’s owner, an idealistic hippie turned postpunker called Joly, offered fanzines something similar to Rough Trade’s P&D deals, a print-now/pay-later service to help fledgling zines get off the ground. Rough Trade, meanwhile, was becoming more and more businesslike and ambitious, diversifying into music publishing, organizing Rough Trade tour packages, and even talking about starting its own alternative culture magazine.
The idea of the independent label and the DIY movement was so new and exciting then, says Travis, “that people would rush out and buy anything that was part of it. This is what people forget. Back then, the records used to sell. Nowadays, you’d shift maybe two thousand if you were lucky, but back then anything halfway decent sold from six to ten thousand.” Certain epochal singles—“Warm Leatherette” being a good example—could sell thirty thousand plus. But what really put the label on the map and made the majors sit up and take apprehensive notice was when Inflammable Material, the Rough Trade album by Belfast punk band Stiff Little Fingers, went straight onto the U.K.’s national pop charts at number fourteen in February 1979.
By then alternative groups had their own target to aim for—the Independent Singles and Albums Charts, conceived by Cherry Red boss Iain McNay at the end of 1979 and initially published by the trade magazine Record Business. “Independent” was defined as independently produced, manufactured, marketed, distributed, and retailed. The weekly music papers had published indie charts before, but they’d been based on what was flying over the counter in a single record shop, whereas the Record Business charts used sales data from a host of small record stores across the country.
But although the independent charts hugely strengthened the scene’s sense of its own identity, some critiqued them for encouraging bands and labels to aim low, in the process creating a sort of neohippie ghetto. “I don’t believe in dropping out or alternative cultures or any of this nonsense,” Bob Last told NME. “I think the New Wave is about dropping in, fighting your way in. You’ve got to get in there and struggle.” Accordingly, Last encou
raged Fast Product’s four major bands—the Mekons, Gang of Four, the Scars, and the Human League—to sign to the London-based majors at the earliest opportunity. Eventually, he sold the entire Fast Product back catalog to EMI and closed down the label, feeling its “intervention” had been completed.
This question of independence versus infiltration, regionalism versus centralization, was one area where Fast Product and Factory strongly disagreed. Tony Wilson had watched how the first indies in Manchester, New Hormones and Rabid, had capitulated to the capital. He recalls asking Rabid’s Tosh Ryan in the fall of 1977 why they’d let London-based major labels take their biggest artists, Jilted John and John Cooper Clarke. “I can remember him saying, ‘Oh being independent was just a little period we went through of idealism.’ It was as if the only point of indie labels was to exist for a few months so that managers could get their bands signed to majors.” Wilson was determined to resist the centripetal pull of London and build up a power base in Manchester, the city he loved. His fervent pro-provinces stance was echoed by other indie labels throughout Britain, especially those in the North and Scotland. For a period, the independent album chart invariably featured a couple of regional or city-based compilations each week, such as Cardiff’s Is the War Over? and Sheffield’s Bouquet of Steel.
From style-conscious conceptualists like Fast Product and Factory to the more earnest, businesslike operations like Rough Trade and Cherry Red, the U.K.’s postpunk independents often disagreed about music, packaging, politics, you name it. But for a brief golden age, a five-year stretch from 1977 to 1981, they were all in the same boat. “The thing that united us,” says Daniel Miller, “was that none of us knew what we were doing! We were huge music enthusiasts, though, with a strong idea of what we liked and what we wanted. I had no grounding in business whatsoever. But all of a sudden you realized you could have access to this industry that had always seemed very mysterious. The record industry went from being pretty closed, which it was even during the first wave of punk, to totally open. And that encouraged a lot of people like me and Tony Wilson—not obvious record company people by any means—to get involved and make our dreams come true.”
Rip It Up and Start Again Page 6
