How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (14 page)

‘
I
remember Paul Conway coming round, the person who actually drove Stiff,’ says Richard Scott, ‘asking us to stop putting out some new record of theirs, because it meant that they didn’t have time to actually establish an act, and work the media. I mean, that was the whole point.’

By 1982 Rough Trade had developed at breakneck speed to the point where it was now operating in parallel to the established industry and in its own nimble way moving much more quickly. Among any advances it was making as an alternative infrastructure, it was also developing a reputation as a talking shop. The lasting impression was of an environment run by worker committee with a communal kitchen and a cleaning rota.

‘We sat and talked a lot about what to put out and how to put it out,’ says Scott, ‘and how to organise people to clean the place and all that kind of stuff. In the Kensington Park days, at the most there were only ever about ten people working there. Upstairs all kinds of really weird things used to go on, but it was just pressure, pressure, and it was great fun.’

In this atmosphere of knocked-together shelves, hastily typed stock lists and overflowing ashtrays, an ever-increasing quantity of records was being sold and shipped around the country. Travis, who has been perhaps unfairly characterised as a corduroy hippie owing to the position Rough Trade took in its early years, concedes the company’s beginnings were of their time, when the radical politics of the Seventies was being absorbed into 
the mainstream, informing the records, delivery methods and payment percentages that Rough Trade was creating.

‘Certainly at the beginning there was more of an ideology,’ says Travis. ‘It was more like we’re a collective getting the same wages. I’m not the boss, that’s your area, that’s my area, it wasn’t like I was walking around telling them what to do, it really wasn’t like that. It was great: those were the good times at Rough Trade, really those first few years, and having Factory, Tony and Rob, John Loder at Southern and Daniel, all that wonderful explosion. There wasn’t a hierarchy or politics other than, “You can be Skrewdriver but we’re not distributing your records – someone else can support you but not us, these are our reasons, take it or leave it – we don’t care.”’

Although operating under the auspices of a collective, and certainly perceived as one by the outside world, Rough Trade was in fact a partnership with Travis as the senior stakeholder, an arrangement that would be of significant consequence through the ups and downs of Rough Trade’s lifetime.

In the wider culture of the times, ideas like co-operatives and self-critiquing organisations like Rough Trade that promoted feminism and vegetarianism and were anti-apartheid were encouraging behaviour that would get criticised as PC during the ascendency of the New Right and the New Lad backlash of the mid-Nineties. Rough Trade and its perceived ethos crystallised at a moment when the Left, enthused by movements like Rock Against Racism, held great sway over the emerging DIY and alternative cultures.

Richard Thomas, a Welshman with an owl-like countenance that would earn him the nickname ‘the Druid’, was a student at North London Polytechnic dipping his toe into concert promotion. ‘I started in 1980 when I was at the North London Poly,’ he says. ‘They still had these things called social secretaries: 
if you were in the right political party [and] had lots of friends, you’d be elected into a job which you had no experience of whatsoever. I had an 800-capacity hall to pledge. Every other thing that they had ever done had been a disaster, because if you get 800 students wanting to go to one show, then probably that act is capable of pulling 15,000 people. So I just came up with the idea of aiming at a student-type audience.’

The student-type audience was coalescing around the music press, particularly the
NME
which was taking a deliberately Leftist stance. With regular features on the Socialist Workers Party and interviews with left-wing politicians featuring alongside ads for the Greater London Council’s Christmas concerts for the unemployed, the weekly had firmly aligned itself to an anti-Tory narrative. Nearly all gig promoters differentiated between waged and unwaged in their pricing structure, in full realisation that in an era of widespread youth unemployment most of its audience would be jobless. The term ‘trendy lefty’ just about summed up this marriage of hip(ish) cultural awareness and centre-left(ish) politics. It would reach its apogee in Neville Brody’s rebranding of
New Socialist
magazine in 1986 and during the 1987 election, when Red Wedge, a collective of left-leaning musicians, toured in overt support for Labour. In the early Eighties this emerging sense of the Left being on the side of street culture was disseminated through concerts against apartheid and benefits for Nicaragua and Afghanistan; and as Thomas discovered, there was a market for the music associated, however vaguely, with the prevailing ideas of protest and counter-culture of the time.

‘In the two years that I was at North London Poly,’ says Thomas, ‘I did New Order, Pere Ubu, Cabaret Voltaire, The Fall, Au Pairs, Young Marble Giants, A Certain Ratio, Aswad, Nico, Virgin Prunes, bands like that, and it was basically a financial success.’

Indicative of the idea that Rough Trade had a constituency of 
Leftish students, nearly all of the bands Thomas promoted were either released or distributed by Rough Trade. Though never directly politically aligned, Travis and Scott’s idea of building a separate channel for the open-minded and curious music fan was gaining traction with an ever-widening audience.

‘It was a very interesting political and social era,’ says Thomas. ‘You had people who were teenagers then who were sort of the first of their generation to go to university. If you were in one of the major cities, you’d be the first generation to have grown up with black people in your school, but that would’ve been only the major cities – if you were coming from west Wales, Devon, Cornwall anywhere else, you met black friends for the first time. It coincided with things like feminism, and someone admitting to being gay. As an example of how underground the gay scene was in those days, someone started a gay society there and asked me, “Do you want to be the DJ?” and in all honesty there were about ten or twelve genuinely gay people and about a dozen people came from the college branch of the SWP to show their alliance. My friend in the SWP comes up and he goes, “You know the music that unites everyone? Sixties soul music.” I had a box of all my Sixties soul, so here I am at the gay society disco playing “When a Man Loves a Woman”. All those things were fermenting in those days.’

The combination of the music press, the John Peel show and the likes of Thomas’s concerts at North London Poly and their regional equivalents provided a genuine alternative to the mainstream music business. Simultaneously Rough Trade label’s roster of This Heat, Swell Maps, YMG, Raincoats, Scritti Politti and Red Crayola was at its most clearly defined as the sound of a group of loosely affiliated artists, all expressing their impulses through often thrillingly individual and, in most cases, reasonably accessible music. 

As Rough Trade expanded, its staff came to include some very sharp-minded and eccentric individuals, light years away from the standard music industry character, but brimming with ideas. Among those finding a corner to work in above the Kensington Road Shop were Claude Bessy, an acerbic Frenchman who as Kickboy Face had helped start the LA wave of street-level punk through his fanzine
Slash
. Bessy shared the upstairs office space with Scott Piering, an American émigré with a ferocious appetite for new music and first-hand experience of American college radio, and Mayo Thompson, formerly of Red Crayola, a Texan ideologue with an acute analytical mind who had been introduced to the conceptual British Left through collaborating with Art & Language.

‘Claude Bessy worked for Rough Trade in the promotion department,’ says Richard Boon. ‘This is when bits of Rough Trade started developing – booking agency, promotion department – all working inside but in a sense outside of the shop and Geoff.’

Boon had first met Claude Bessy in his
Slash
-editing pomp when Buzzcocks played LA. ‘Claude had to leave America because he’d been involved in a car accident and went through a windscreen and had lots of surgery,’ says Boon. ‘He didn’t have any insurance, and when the time to pay the bill came round he fled to London, where, of course, he was welcomed with open arms, because everybody loved Claude.’

Bessy’s gleeful mix of iconoclast, agent provocateur and back-room philosopher was perfectly captured in
The Decline of Western Civilisation
, Penelope Spheeris’s hand-held 1979 documentary on the underground LA punk scene. Asked for a definition of ‘new wave’, his eyes and skin glistening with the distinctive pallor of Venice Beach after dark LA, Bessy launches into one of his trademark riffs: 

Bessy’s articulacy displayed a mind full of interventionist ideas on permanent rotation. Together with Piering he started working in the nascent Rough Trade promotions department, which helped internationalise and corroborate Rough Trade’s reputation. In the same office the Raincoats manager, Shirley O’Loughlin, and a friend, Mike Hinc, developed a booking agency for Rough Trade artists, All Trade. In addition Mayo Thompson and Travis became Rough Trade’s in-house record producers, recording the Raincoats, The Fall, Scritti Politti and Pere Ubu in crisp lo-fi vérité.

‘Somebody like Claude’, says Richard Scott, ‘we asked to join ’cause we got all our information from
Slash
, and it was such a great source of information, so we spoke to him quite a lot … I think Mayo just came by – I’m not sure about his politics even now. I have a great deal of time for Mayo, perhaps not so much musically, but he did
Panorama
and stuff like that. He comes from a very interesting background.’

Pete Donne, a teenager who worked in the shop, would notice that as he started locking up at the end of the working day the
off-stage
activities above and behind the shop would carry on late into the night. ‘Scott and Claude were there through the night loads of times making tapes. Scott was just incessant, the whole C86 thing came out of Scott’s tapes. He’d make these tapes every week of the new releases. Scott would listen to everything, just a workaholic, Claude as well; Claude was a drinker, smoker, speed, the lot, Capstan Full Strength – he was very rock ’n’ roll.’ 

Along with cataloguing every new release on cassette, Piering would record nearly every concert related to any of Rough Trade’s artists live from the mixing desk, amassing a highly detailed archive of the era. Piering and Bessy who bonded, among other things, over their shared experience of the music business in the States, brought a more extrovert and social side to Rough Trade, one that was engaging and intelligent. The artists they represented on Rough Trade benefited from their
around-the
-clock approachability, something that Rough Trade, at least outside opening hours, had previously been lacking.

‘Claude was a very close friend,’ says Richard Thomas. ‘An absolute genius … Claude’s last editorial in
Slash
, which summed up everything, was 1980 … it’s along the lines of “If you’ve got a great idea, do it now, ’cause the days of the amateur are about to end” and that’s what it was. If Claude had a weakness, it was that he loved starting things but often wouldn’t see them through.’

Bessy’s valedictory editorial highlighted his waspish romanticism just as he was acknowledging that
Slash
’s moment had passed. Written in his trademark jive it even manages to carry an air of wistfulness, revealing that despite the
frozen-stared
cynicism, the author may in fact have been experiencing a small pause for nostalgia:

Piering’s incessant recording and collating, and his excellent working relationship with John Peel, ensured Rough Trade had a certain, if limited, degree of clout and access to the Top Forty. While nearly all releases either on or distributed by Rough Trade would fall outside the charts, the company managed to occasionally penetrate the mainstream Top Forty. Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’ would go on to make no. 2 in the Top Ten, but only once it had been taken off Rough Trade’s hands by Warner Brothers.