How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (15 page)

‘Something like Laurie Anderson, “O Superman”, is a typical Scott Piering record,’ says Richard Scott. ‘I think Scott probably introduced that record into Rough Trade, probably sent a copy in to Peel who played it, and then we got import copies because of the contacts that Scott had or whatever, and sold hundreds through the shop and thousands more through the distribution. That network of conversation, whether on the radio, Peel, fanzines, word of mouth, meant that records like that would just fly. You’d have a Saturday when something like that came in and every customer that was coming in was getting that as well as a batch of other stuff.’

If Rough Trade could score the odd unlikely radio hit in the form of ‘O Superman’, its continuing wish to put ethos before hard commercial profit meant its air of amateurishness 
was maintained. Having bought in thousands of copies of ‘O Superman’ from America, Rough Trade needed to sell it at a higher than usual import retail price, as was standard on all imported records. Pete Donne was horrified to discover that both the shop and distribution had been making a 50p loss on every copy sold. ‘The idea was, “This is a £3 record, that’s its value to the customer”,’ says Donne, ‘but it had cost us £3.50 per unit to import. It’s a good example of how the business was run.’

Its international contacts meant Rough Trade had exclusive access to the kinds of music that echoed its own principles around the world. It particularly developed contacts in New York, where many of the bands on the label found themselves the toast of the downtown club scene and returned to London with DIY American releases packed in their bags.

‘All the 99 and Lust On Lust releases, all that New York batch of things were definitely coming through directly to the shop,’ says Donne. ‘With Claude, Mayo and Scott there was that network of conversations going on and obviously Rough Trade was exporting as well, so it was a two-way conversation, people like Viv Goldman that were doing things themselves and using the phones or the telex machine or whatever.’

Viv Goldman’s single ‘Launderette’ not only remains one of the best songs of the era, but it captures the feel of the early 1980s West London of Rough Trade. Featuring a series of photos shot in the house Goldman shared with Travis at 148a Ladbroke Grove, along with images of the streets up and down the Grove, the sleeve of ‘Launderette’ is Portobello at its most dowdy and seductive. A dubbed-up pop song about a relationship gone sour, ‘Launderette’ was played by an ad hoc frontline supergroup of Keith Levene, Jah Wobble and sundry Raincoats and released on the ultra-hip New York-based 99 Records, named after its address, 99 MacDougal Street. If Rough Trade had an equivalent 
anywhere in the world it was 99, a record and badge shop that under the direction of its owner Ed Balham started releasing records by Liquid Liquid, ESG, Bush Tetras and Glenn Branca. The label’s releases were a document of the cross-fertilising sounds emerging from a New York that had only just avoided bankruptcy, but whose downtown was becoming an after-dark laboratory of wired neon rhythm.

Buzzcocks’ erstwhile manager Richard Boon had been keeping an eye on developments at Rough Trade, and was perennially on the verge of being asked to work there full-time. He was also one of the first visitors to Rough Trade’s new headquarters. Having outgrown the premises of Kensington Park Road, the company had moved to premises around the corner at 137 Blenheim Crescent. The building was a three-storeyed house that accommodated all Rough Trade’s growing portfolio, the most significant and lucrative of which was its distribution division.

‘Distribution had faced several challenges in keeping up with the amount of material being put through its channels,’ says Boon. ‘Richard Scott’s idea was to co-ordinate a network of like-minded retailers to serve as a national distribution arm – The Cartel.’ Though London would be its nexus, the idea was that no cog in The Cartel’s chain would be more powerful than any other. Each distributor would provide a point of access and egress for any band, label or fanzine writer that wanted to lock into Rough Trade Distribution’s perpetually turning wheel, thus ensuring nationwide distribution without the need to supply and co-ordinate their releases via the hothouse of London.

‘First of all he wanted to develop the independent retailers that were increasingly the hub of their local activity,’ says Boon. ‘You’d have a shop like Probe in Liverpool, who’d phone all these other people saying, “Well, I’ve got this, listen.” If you’re developing a programme or policy of access, decentralisation 
is something to support and encourage. There was a sense that there were people out there on the same wavelengths who would talk to each other and there was a community of interest, even if you didn’t necessarily like what someone else in the community was doing.’

Richard Scott, while permanently pressing for The Cartel to be run collectively, was its de facto organiser and head. Along with Rough Trade, The Cartel drew together six other distributors: Probe in Liverpool, Revolver in Bristol, Red Rhino in York (whose owner Tony K was a vociferous and pragmatic counterpart to Scott), Backs in Norwich, Fast Forward in Edinburgh and Nine Mile in Leamington Spa. The idea of a nationwide distribution network was simple and fitted perfectly with the Rough Trade ideals of access via mutual, co-operative control, and for many years The Cartel succeeded on those terms.

What few of its members could see was how easily and how rapidly such a system could overheat. As with many of Rough Trade’s ideas, what began as a pragmatic solution became coloured by its internal politics. ‘It started as a conversation,’ says Boon, ‘which later became an argument.’

*

‘The whole of the Postcard story is a good issue,’ says Scott. ‘I didn’t realise, but Geoff by that time was after hits, and in Roddy Frame and Orange Juice he saw a good chance to achieve that kind of chart success. I was in Canada when he did the deal with Postcard and I was absolutely livid, because by my definition we should have got them going in Glasgow. We should’ve actually really established them there. I don’t actually think Alan Horne would’ve gone for it, but the actual politics of it should’ve been to make them a successful Glasgow-based operation.’

Bob Last of Fast Product established the Scottish link in The Cartel chain in Edinburgh. Although agreeing with The Cartel’s 
broader programme of access for all, Last’s interests were now more aligned with Travis’s desire for hits.

‘One of the things I enjoyed about pop music was its functionality’, says Last, ‘in popular culture and in people’s lives. So although others and I brought this substantial theoretical and intellectual ferment of ideas, I wanted to engage with that functionality. The intellectual ideas were fundamentally about a Leftist tradition, trying to find a way of engaging with the popular, because the Left had somehow disengaged with the popular; it was entirely about finding a strategy to be aesthetically adventurous and engage with the popular.’

One of Rough Trade’s most Left-leaning acts was having the very same debate as Last – with itself. Scritti Politti had overhauled their ideas about collectivity and were firmly interested in engaging with the popular. Following a long recuperation after the speed and squatting lifestyle had ended in exhaustion, Green Gartside had fallen in love with contemporary R&B music and its combination of functionality, optimism and hedonism. Above all he was becoming convinced of its ability to achieve entryism into the mainstream, where Gartside’s playful intellect and engaging way with a melody would have more of an impact. Travis and Gartside quietly began a conversation about how Scritti might gain access to the charts, though all such talk was held in confidence, as the idea of commercial crossover success was still anathema to most of the staff at Rough Trade. The results of Gartside’s pop ambitions were Scritti Politti’s almost polished debut album,
Songs to Remember
and its accompanying
leadin
single, ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’, whose parenthesis-heavy title suggested Gartside hadn’t quite shed his love of linguistic theory. Reaching no. 64 in the charts, it was another example of an act on an independent, despite its pop ambitions and the label’s attempts at a marketing push, failing to reach the Top Forty; 
and in doing so, lacking the all-important badge of mainstream validity.
Songs to Remember
, was released six months after ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’ and fared far better, entering the album chart at no. 12. If it was only its fan base propelling it there, Gartside had enough approval to suggest that his ideas of Scritti making mainstream music were worth pursuing. The whole campaign around
Songs to Remember
was to prove one of the most divisive moments within Rough Trade to date.

‘I can remember people at Rough Trade being absolutely livid that all the money was being spent on Scritti Politti, and not on This Heat,’ says Scott. ‘I now think back and think that that was where the fault line was first shown. Scritti were fantastic. As a live band I thought they were excellent and I think that “Sweetest Girl” is a great song, and I think that the drum track on it is possibly the worst drum track I’ve ever heard on anything, and how the hell anybody thought that they could get that past any audience, I’ve absolutely no idea.’

As manager of Human League, Bob Last, in contrast to anyone at Rough Trade including Travis, was used to dealing with the corporate structures of major labels in America. He could see that in its attempts at breaking
Songs to Remember
, Rough Trade was having difficulties reconciling its ethos with the realities of distributing consumer goods to the market. ‘Rough Trade Distribution had a completely and utterly different perspective to me,’ he says. ‘The cheap shot would be to dismiss it as coming out of a hippie thing, but obviously that hippie thing in the UK had much deeper roots, going back to the Luddites and so on, and you could see that with Crass and people like that. At the time when Scritti were thinking in terms of success, that was certainly something that Rough Trade, to the extent that it stood for something specific, were deeply, deeply uncomfortable with.’ 

While expensively recorded, part of
Songs to Remember
’s problem was that despite Gartside’s mellifluous and confident vocals, the music still carried a hint of the striving amateur. The mix was muddy and drew too much attention to the record’s more expensive components: drum machines, backing vocals, programmed keyboards and brass, as though the fact of pointing them out to the listener might encourage sales. It was the sound of a band putting itself under commercial pressure.

‘Rough Trade spent a lot of possibly other people’s money trying to make Scritti Politti the cash cow,’ says Richard Boon. ‘Geoff was accounting across the little bits of Rough Trade, possibly being not very professional. I think Daniel Miller woke up one day and said, “Just a minute, they owe me money,” but it had been spent on shuffling Green’s tapes across from here to Jamaica and Green didn’t make it – and
Songs to Remember
, albeit a great record, didn’t sell. And that provoked a big rift between the label and distribution side, particularly between Geoff and Richard Scott.’

Scott grew increasingly weary of what he perceived as Travis’s interest in chart success and was under no illusions that the
company’s
ambitions were beginning to diverge. If Travis wanted hits, it was the distribution side that would have to pay for them. ‘I realised that that was the push,’ he says. ‘
Songs to Remember
was just phenomenally over-produced. I can remember hearing the sort of girl choruses on it thinking, “God, has it really come to this?”’

After the half-hearted success of
Songs to Remember
, Gartside realised he would need more structured support than Rough Trade could afford or provide, and approached Last with firm evidence that his intentions were serious. ‘Green had a demo which had Nile Rogers on it, which was what really swayed me’, says Last. ‘More than anything else, although it was very cool, 
the fact that they’d actually gone to Nile Rogers told me, “OK, they get what this journey’s going to be about.”’

Last signed Scritti Politti more or less as a solo vehicle for Gartside to Virgin, who were now enjoying their first real
multi-platinum
success in over a decade thanks to Last and the Human League – the success of
Dare
, having, as Last puts it, ‘saved Virgin’s arse’.

Despite Gartside and Travis’s attempts at achieving a crossover for the band, Scritti’s departure from Rough Trade was a turning point. While highlighting the company’s modest skills and budget for marketing, it was also the first moment an artist so heavily ingrained into the Rough Trade ethos, once its living, breathing, communally living theoretical conscience, had left the label – for a more formal career in the music business. Whatever the pragmatism of the move, it threw Rough Trade’s position in the market into sharp relief.

Last, who had so effortlessly been able to make the move from Fast Product’s witty post-modernism to LA power lunches, could see that Rough Trade had arrived at a point where it had outgrown its initial impetus to provide an alternative to the market, but was now treading water in terms of where to steer itself next. On the brink of the aspirational Eighties thrust, Rough Trade’s loose collection of policies and orthodoxies was being superseded by ideas about style and entryism. The ideas Rough Trade had started with no longer felt so relevant.

‘The particular musical moment in which Rough Trade started attracted a vast range of people’, says Last, ‘who thought long and hard intellectually about popular culture and economics, and given the number of people it attracted it’s not surprising that something sort of emerged from it, but I think it does go back to the real political instability particularly in the UK in the early to mid-Seventies: if that hadn’t been there, none of this would 
have happened, because it created a sense of belief that things suddenly might be a bit different.’

However much Rough Trade had made a difference and created its own corner of the market, and in doing so built its own hermetically sealed world, there was an inevitability that, once the buzz of the Rough Trade level of success had worn off, many of the bands would now want the real thing: legitimate gold-record-sales commercial success and not the Rough Trade version.