Despite Britain’s first ecstasy-related death on the dance floor of the Hacienda in 1989, rave culture surged, sprouting new clubs, new acts, and new indies by the handful. That year, Britain’s most iconic goth and coldwave label, 4AD, released a one-off experiment, “Pump Up the Volume” by a studio collective of musicians who called themselves M/A/R/R/S—a milestone smash hit. Dance-infused hits followed from the Stone Roses, Primal Scream, and even the original ecstasy dealers from the Hacienda—the Happy Mondays.
Just as dance culture and sampling went mainstream, Rough Trade’s distribution arm collapsed in 1991. Although £40 million worth of records were flowing through its nationwide veins, its success had made it too large and unwieldy for its idealistic founders to steer. Cash-flow difficulties on the distribution side capsized the entire enterprise—record company included. “Rough Trade’s great flaw was that we never had a financial director who understood the business,” sighed Geoff Travis with the benefit of hindsight.
For the hundreds of hand-to-mouth labels involved, it was more than just a distributor going bust. There had been a powerful cultural dimension to the Rough Trade experiment, and its sudden death created a vacuum. For 4AD boss Ivo Watts-Russell, “It was the end of an era. I, perhaps naively, always thought of Rough Trade as being filled with true music lovers. I felt the label was being handled by people, at the lowest levels, who knew its history and, with luck, enjoyed a lot of what we were releasing.”
Although another distribution company called Pinnacle provided the same core services, “the dream was over,” said Watts-Russell, “and faceless individuals, little different to those working at the major labels, would now be packing boxes with 4AD product. I think it was the beginning of the word independent or indie losing its meaning, its credibility.” It was at this crisis point, however, that one indie chieftain began to show his mettle—Martin Mills, the group owner behind Beggars Banquet and 4AD. As events would illustrate, through crises, Mills was in the process of becoming a resourceful guardian of independent values, somewhat like Chris Blackwell in the early seventies—though arguably more disciplined and committed to a collective cause.
As with most record men, the enigma of Martin Mills makes most sense viewed through the boy’s eyes. His father, the brightest son from a working-class Yorkshire family, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, where in 1939 he met his wife, an upper-middle-class girl from the home counties whose family history reached back to the civil service in India.
A product of this socially mixed student romance in Paris, Martin Mills was born in 1949. Unfortunately, “I don’t remember my father very well,” he confessed, “because he died when I was eleven. I don’t really have any clear memories of him apart from a few old photographs.” Growing up, Martin Mills was a brilliant student, but the shadow of his father’s death followed him to school and back home again. “It made me very insecure in my teenage years. It made me very, very, very insecure,” Mills acknowledged as a sixty-two-year-old man.
In the austere gloom of postwar England, the beat boom arrived like a circus coming to town. Listening first to the Shadows, then the Beatles, Mills as a boy got progressively drawn to the edgier sounds of the Stones, the Animals, the Kinks, the Who, and the Yardbirds. “I didn’t really get into Dylan until around 1966 when I first heard Bringing It All Back Home and began working backwards through his stuff,” explained Mills. “I wouldn’t say that I played Dylan to the exclusion of everything else; he was one amongst many. But I think with the benefit of hindsight, it’s pretty clear to see that he is the preeminent artist of that half century.”
With his mother working as a grade school principal in Oxford, Mills moved into student digs down the road, graduating from Oriel College in 1970 with a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics. While England was up to its eyeballs in psychedelia, “those years were not wild at all. I never took drugs, I was very rarely drunk. I had been an extremely conscientious schoolboy, and I obviously learned to have a bit more fun as a student. I think I was probably a late developer, to be honest. I was very shy as a teenager, and it wasn’t really until university that I began to come out of myself.”
After he applied for a job at every record company in London, the Hammersmith labor exchange found him work as a statistician for the Lane Committee, a group of politicians and specialists reporting on the reform of Britain’s abortion law. “I ended up being the person that wrote the report,” explained Mills. “I actually did all the analysis of all the research and pretty much wrote the statistical side of the report.”
Teaming up with a friend, Martin Mills and Nick Austin set up their own specialist record store, Beggars Banquet. They opened a total of five Beggars Banquet shops, and, as with other specialist retailers of the seventies, the punk explosion was cue for a label, Beggars Banquet Records. After three years releasing punk records, their lucky ticket, Gary Numan, arrived right in the middle of the 1979 recession. They were dipping into the cash register to pay for his synthesizers as bills began piling up in the back office. “We were about to go bust. We were bouncing salary checks. The shop’s cash flow just couldn’t fund what we were trying to do with the label anymore. We were steering over the cliff at that point.”
Luckily the redundant managing director of Arista’s London office found them a lucrative deal with Warner. Mills and Austin sighed a shoulder-load of relief cashing their £100,000 check—a lifesaver, and in hindsight a smart gamble on Warner’s part, comfortably recouped a few months later by Gary Numan’s transatlantic smash hit, “Cars.” Reinvesting profits into a new sublabel, Mills and Austin set up 4AD, run by one of the store managers, Ivo Watts-Russell. Ironically, the younger imprint, by about 1985, began to eclipse the parent company with a string of dark gems: Bauhaus, Modern English, This Mortal Coil, Dead Can Dance, and the Pixies.
By the mideighties, Nick Austin was cartwheeling off on his own artistic tangent. While Martin Mills was focusing his efforts on breaking the Cult, Austin’s fascination with New Age music and jazz-funk left him isolated inside his own company. With tensions turning to estrangement, Mills bought him out. Possibly regretting his ill-timed departure, Austin sued a few years later.
“The fallout with Nick Austin was the only big one of my life, and it was mega fallout,” confessed Mills. “We spent three months in court with each other at the end of it. So it was an absolutely enormous event. It put me hugely into debt.” Ivo Watts-Russell confirmed the saga cast a dark cloud over the group. “It was just so strange from my perspective. It just seemed obvious that Nick, having not really succeeded with his new solo venture, decided he deserved more money from Martin. By this time, 4AD was doing really well, was even financially very flush. The Cult, I think, were also doing quite well. Perhaps Nick felt he was entitled to some of that.”
To pay for his legal costs, Mills had to tap into 4AD’s cash reserves, but in doing so he rewarded Ivo Watts-Russell with 50 percent of the label. “He did not have to do that,” said the equally gratified Watts-Russell. “I only went to the courthouse once to see what was going on, but I did go on the day the judge ruled in Martin’s favor.” Unaware the heavyweight independents from London to Los Angeles were all lurching irreversibly into the jaws of major buyouts, Martin Mills stepped out of the courtroom into a bright future. “In the pub afterwards you could see this huge weight lifted from Martin’s shoulders,” remembered Watts-Russell. “We all had tears in our eyes.”
Symbolizing his ascension to the top of the indie mountain, it was Martin Mills and Mute financial director Duncan Cameron who ran in as firefighters once Rough Trade collapsed. They set up a new distribution company called RTM. “The objective was to try to preserve the spirit of Rough Trade,” explained Mills, “but to put it in a more organized and secure context. And those labels that went from the Cartel to RTM didn’t lose any money. We came up with this rather neat idea to subcontract the actual distribution to Pinnacle, so RTM was actually a sales and marketing organization, and it
subcontracted all the putting of records in boxes to Pinnacle. There was a slice of the distribution fee which went to repay the old debt. It took about eighteen months, but it succeeded in getting everyone’s money back.”
Not all other chieftains were as determined to salvage the indie spirit from the smoking ruins. “When everything collapsed,” recalled Ivo Watts-Russell, “quite apart from the trauma and tedium of having to attend endless meetings in rooms filled with far more people than I tend to feel comfortable being around, there was a feeling of everyone scrabbling around trying to save their own arses. Even before it was inevitable that Rough Trade would not pull through, I had a phone conversation with [Creation founder] Alan McGee trying to persuade him not to jump ship. To no avail.”
Sony swooped in and plucked Creation Records from the wreckage—the label behind Primal Scream and, later, Oasis. Then in 1992 another bombshell hit; Factory Records went bust. For the founder of 4AD, these years of upheaval were too much. “Back in 1979, I was given the opportunity, along with Peter Kent, to start a record label. By the early nineties, I was running a record company. I didn’t enjoy it and I was useless at it. More importantly, I felt in danger of losing my love of music.” Just two years after Rough Trade’s demise, Ivo Watts-Russell relocated to California and retired.
It was the same story for Sub Pop in America. Once grunge began exploding, Nirvana was lured to David Geffen’s new label, DGC Records. “Of course Jon Poneman and I were disappointed in the move,” admitted Sub Pop founder Bruce Pavitt, who nonetheless received a lucrative override of 2.5 percent for Nirvana’s first three albums. “Although in retrospect DGC was able to really get Nevermind out to a much larger audience—which it deserved. It’s an amazing record. I’m honored to have worked with Kurt and Nirvana.”
Despite the cash injection from Nirvana’s success, Sub Pop was forced to sell half the company to Warner. “As the label grew, the culture changed,” lamented Bruce Pavitt, “becoming more departmentalized and less spontaneous. Although we were technically independent, in reality, we were competing with majors and adopting their characteristics. My partner, Jon Poneman, seemed to be much more comfortable with this approach. I left, moving to Orcas Island in Washington State to raise a family. Jon continued to build the label, and it has done good business under his management. It’s just not as innovative, as fun, or as culturally significant as it once was.”
With the majors becoming hugely rich and powerful, for Mute founder Daniel Miller, the consensual, bland pop-rock of the nineties was a hostile environment for anyone with an adventurous imagination. In the early eighties, Miller regularly turned down lucrative offers from the likes of Richard Branson, “because why would I sell out? I was young, independent and doing really well.” Things turned sour soon after Rough Trade’s collapse. “There was a struggle, but not just financially,” confessed Miller. “There was a musical struggle, for me to be honest. There was a period in the midnineties—the Brit Pop era—which I hated. It was counterintuitive to me. I didn’t really sign very much because anything that wasn’t Brit Pop was very difficult to get exposed. Radio 1 and the media was completely taken over and obsessed with Brit Pop. And we were not doing brilliantly financially at that time. So I was a bit depressed about everything.”
In the midnineties, Daniel Miller convened a supper at Julie’s Wine Bar in Kensington. Joining him were twelve or so indie chieftains including Martin; Mills; Derek Birkett, owner of One Little Indian; Martin Goldschmidt, owner of Cooking Vinyl; and Derek Green, by now owner of his own indie, China Records. As the evening progressed, the veteran Derek Green surveyed the table: “All these characters sitting there with their eccentricities—it was quite a funny kind of gathering because as a community they’re not necessarily close to each other, they’re fiercely competitive, very private, not very easy to speak to. Their egos are very big. They need to be just to meet the everyday battle.
“Anyhow, in that wine bar, I’m sitting there and listening to the debate. All the frustrations are coming up. ‘We can’t get our records on Radio 1; we can’t get seen in HMV because all the marketing clout is with the majors.’ There was a moment in that dinner when a light flicked on in my head. ‘I know what everybody in this room has in common! Everybody around this table is losing money.’ And when I clocked that, I laughed to myself. Then I thought, that’s probably true, none of us are making money. So why then do we do it? Well, the only reason we do it is because on our balance sheets we have the value of our masters and the value of our contracts marked as zero. Therefore technically every year our accountants tell us we’re bankrupt. But what we really know and believe is that the majors will pay millions to buy us.”
Half the table did eventually throw in their napkins and ask for a check. In 1995, Go Discs!, then enjoying success with Portishead, sold out to PolyGram. In 1997, Green, enjoying success with Morcheeba, sold his label to Warner. The party host, Daniel Miller, held on for the best part of a decade “limping along financially and artistically.” The only way to raise enough cash to keep Mute afloat was a big worldwide license with a major. “But we weren’t really getting any interesting offers,” said Miller. “Then suddenly, we had this huge hit with Moby’s Play and of course now everybody wants to do a fucking deal with me!”
Thanks to Moby selling 10 million records, “I was in a really strong position, so I went to [French boss of EMI-Virgin] Emmanuel de Buretel and made up a list of things I wanted, and he said, ‘Okay, I think we can do most of that.’ So I thought, I’m going to take that opportunity to work with somebody else. Plus, you know, by then I’d been doing it for what, twenty-four years?” In 2002, Miller secured a deal for a tidy £23 million.
Of the dinner guests, one conspicuous holdout was the quiet Derek Birkett, founder of One Little Indian, whose success with Björk helped keep the wolves from the door. Then, of course, there was Martin Mills, who, during his legal wrangles with Nick Austin just a few years previously, almost did consider the unthinkable. “You only ever really think about these things because of money,” confessed Mills. “It was a time when things were difficult and I was kind of, hmm, I thought about it once, but it passed. It was a moment of madness. It passed. Ever since then, I’ve just resolutely always said no.”
For his resilience, Martin Mills was amply rewarded in the midnineties when his new sublabel, XL Recordings, directed by the capable Richard Russell, struck gold with the Prodigy. Their dance-rock smash hit Music for the Jilted Generation assured the Beggars Banquet Group, and in particular its rapidly expanding XL Recordings imprint, an inside lane into the computer age.
Another determined face walking against the traffic was Laurence Bell, founder of a new indie label, Domino. “I was there when Rough Trade distribution collapsed,” said Bell of his formative years holding down odd jobs as a young man. “I was working in that office, saw it all go down. And it was pretty depressing … Everyone was going; Creation, Factory, it was all around; you saw independent labels fail, go bankrupt, or be sold. The majors were taking over everything; they were starting up these bogus independent imprints—the whole culture was being bought up and chewed up. But I was still excited by music and finding things. I just wanted to do something genuinely independent, start again, find some bands, go against everything that was happening. And there was some great music around then—1991 was a great year for music. That’s when I started to realize that I wanted to do this; to work with bands, put out records. So I set up my own label in 1993.” Before Domino hit the big time in 2004, courtesy of Franz Ferdinand, it operated out of a basement. Its first release was a simple U.K. license for an indie-rock group, Sebadoh, originally signed to Sub Pop. The story was moving full circle.
Refugees, exiles, outcasts—the combined effect of corporate concentration and Rough Trade’s demise left a generation of England’s left-field record men wandering aimlessly along the roadside. Exposed to the elements in the naughty nineties, many a weary warrior was lured inside by a h
efty check. Only a handful of die-hards had enough fire in their bellies to keep believing. Dust or pollen? The ruins of the proverbial temple blew away on the four winds—a sad memory for some, but for others, an ideal destined to come again.
30. BUBBLEGUM FOREST
First came the factories, then came the supermarkets. Enter the plastic jungle of artificial fruit whose sugary flavor can only be chewed for a while, then spat out. The new era oozed the musical equivalent of fast food—sold to children at adult prices. Quite literally, suits from food and drinks industries were taking over the conglomerates that owned the majors, and with them, along came their conception of a planned, supermarket industry.
“As the business got bigger, there was an arrogance,” said one of the era’s few genuine record men, Rick Rubin, who in 1988 left Def Jam for new adventures out west. In 1991, he produced Blood Sugar Sex Magik by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and on his new label, American Recordings, he directed Johnny Cash’s last four albums. “From the nineties onwards,” said Rubin, “record labels were all being run by accountants and attorneys. It was becoming a less pleasant business.”
The compact disc had brought profound changes to the very artifact itself—the record. Since the forties at least, buying the latest pop song had been most people’s initiation into the record-buying habit. As Elektra founder Jac Holzman points out, however, “singles did not have a format after the demise of the 45 rpm record. At the beginning of the CD, prices ranged between $15 and $18. They fell over time, but the model ran counter to the business. Singles have historically been important to the record business because they helped point people—they were calling cards for albums.”
Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry Page 39
