How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (18 page)

Within Factory, as well as outside the company in the broader groundswell of the city’s independent community,
City Fun
had a warm relationship with many of its readers which could all detect, in its penetrating humour, a print version of the dry northern wit with which the city operated.

‘Rob Gretton was fairly approachable’, says Naylor, ‘and Richard Boon was and is a great mediator. And, of course, we loved Kay’.

Kay Carroll was for several years Mark E. Smith’s partner and The Fall’s manager. A relentless and vituperative operator she would, despite her small frame, have no truck with anyone, whatever their position, who either got in the way of her charges or tried to pull a fast one. Behind her chain-smoking aggression lurked a fierce intelligence (which Martin Hannett once illustrated as the desire to ‘talk dialectics all night long’) and an uncompromising ability to hold her own in the music business.
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‘Kay felt much more like us,’ says Naylor. ‘She’d be on the phone screaming, “Where is my fucking money?” She was just like somebody that had come out of fucking Holloway. She had a certain quality.’

With Boon and Naylor joining the Rough Trade staff in London, the company was drawing on a wider range of experience. This strengthened the company, shifting its focus away from the Ladbroke Grove milieu in which it had been founded and was of great use to a label that had just signed a band from Manchester. It also meant Rough Trade’s sense of irreverence and bolshiness,
more or less a default position for Boon and Naylor, was becoming increasingly ingrained.

Having decided that ‘Hand in Glove’ would be released as a one-off single, Travis, to yet more disapproving noise from his colleagues in Rough Trade Distribution, continued to make it clear that he would like The Smiths to be the first-ever Rough Trade act to be offered a four-album deal. The band, happy to let some momentum build around them, outwardly gave the impression that they were undecided as they began to be courted by every record company in London. The reality was that The Smiths, despite whatever concerns they might have, had all but decided to sign long-term to Travis.

‘We knew Rough Trade was in trouble,’ say Moss, ‘but figured that they were in trouble because they didn’t have anyone that sold any records. We were the ones that were gonna change that. They had a booking agency with Mike Hinc inside the building, an art department, a press department and they had every independent record that was being distributed in England in the back room. So rather than being a small fish at a major we decided to go to Rough Trade, to take it over really. We knew we could sell them some records.’

Rough Trade was still a company coming to terms with its position in the music business, which by 1983 was no longer one of post-punk alternatives but, with the imminent market launch of the CD and the increasing influence of MTV, a far more competitive climate than the one it had set out to be an alternative to five years earlier.

‘At the time, and not just at Rough Trade,’ says Marr, ‘there was a “We fought the war for the likes of you”-type vibe. A lot of people I thought a bit old at that time, probably in their early 20s, were a bit lost because punk was over, in the press especially. Factory had a bit of it, Rough Trade definitely did, and maybe my 
generation brought a new optimism and ideas and energy.’

With that optimism and energy came a realisation from Travis that the game had changed. If Rough Trade was about to secure The Smiths for any length of time, it would have to start thinking very carefully about marketing and promotion, not as an experiment in proving to the mainstream how differently things could be done, but to compete, as Travis had tried and failed to do with Scritti Politti, on the mainstream’s terms.

To the likes of This Heat and The Fall this change in thinking didn’t go unnoticed. The Smiths were now occupying most of Travis’s thoughts and a break had been mentally made with Rough Trade’s recent past. The open-door policy of Blenheim Crescent was tightened up and all the company’s limited means were being spent in proving to The Smiths that the label meant business.

‘I saw a few funny things on the stairs at Rough Trade,’ says Moss. ‘Artists complaining, and asking, “What d’you have to do around here to get some attention these days?”’

But, true to their word, Rough Trade acted quickly and efficiently, booking the band a series of club shows in London on the eve of the release of ‘Hand in Glove’. For Moss, who was keen to see the band being taken seriously nationally and outside the boundaries of Manchester, this was all to Rough Trade’s credit. The Smiths played two nights spread over a fortnight at the Brixton Ace, ensuring that the rush of A&R men desperate for the band’s signatures only had to cab across town to see the band that was suddenly the talk of the London industry.

‘The Smiths were big in London before they were big in Manchester,’ says Moss. ‘We played the Ace, then again two weeks later, and it was just chaos. This guy, Gordon Jarvis from EMI, kept getting on stage and dancing, he was dead keen. We played Warwick University the night after, we were about to sign 
to Rough Trade and Muff Winwood [head of A&R at CBS] came up to Warwick and said he’d really like to do a deal. I told him we were definitely going to sign to Rough Trade and there was no way we were going back on that.’

For Marr, being courted by the majors was flattering, but the difference between Rough Trade and the corporate companies was made obvious the moment The Smiths walked through their glass doors. ‘We got pretty serious invitations from CBS, and Warner Brothers,’ he says. ‘We went over to meet them just for the experience and I was immediately struck by the lack of records in these buildings. As someone who was a record freak, it immediately made me want to run across London back to Blenheim Crescent. On the few occasions that I’d been in the Factory flat or whenever I’d been around Rough Trade, it was almost like a record company trying to operate under mounds and mounds of vinyl. All that CBS and Warner Brothers had to show that they were record companies were huge posters of their artists on the wall, and that was a big thing for me.’

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After the release of ‘Hand in Glove’ Scott Piering booked the band a quick-fire series of radio sessions for the John Peel and David Jensen evening shows on Radio 1. Piering was now working freelance at Blenheim Crescent, allowing him to concentrate on breaking The Smiths through the Radio 1 evening shows and, he hoped, have his and Rough Trade’s first act on the playlist of daytime radio. The idea of The Smiths being an act suitable for national airplay was helped by Moss and the band’s desire to play in London as much as possible, a hitherto unknown quality in a northern band.

‘Scott Piering kicked it off with John Peel,’ says Moss. ‘We supported Sisters of Mercy at ULU [University of London Union] and the place was absolutely packed, but there wasn’t one 
person in the actual hall, not bloody one. Morrissey was on stage shouting out “Come alive!” trying to get people from the bar, Scott Piering was there with John Walters and myself, and the three of us stood there watching as John Walters flipped.’

Walters, Peel’s gregarious and similarly bearded producer, also acted as his gatekeeper, insulating the DJ from the ups and downs of BBC scheduling and programming policies, something he mixed with a ceaseless appetite for going to gigs to uncover new talent.

‘I know Walters gets credit,’ says Moss, ‘but he doesn’t get a tenth of the credit he deserved for the Peel shows, ’cause he did all the legwork, and he certainly introduced Peel to The Smiths.’

One newly written song was first aired at the band’s second Peel session, recorded just after the release of ‘Hand in Glove’. ‘This Charming Man’ had a buoyant rhythm over which Marr’s guitar, at its most delicate and assured, rippled through an arpeggiated riff. The song fitted Morrissey’s range perfectly as he sang yearnfully about a hillside encounter drawn in the imagery of the black-and-white Sixties films of which he had a peerless grasp. At three and a half minutes long, its insistent melody and sense of drama made it the band’s most commercial song to date.

‘Geoff and I went along to Maida Vale,’ says Boon. ‘We were both familiar with all the live material because we’d seen them so often. During the session this song emerges that’s totally new to us, and we huddled in the corridor while they were still mixing saying, “That’s a single and possibly a hit,” and we both agreed, and a lot of effort went into making “This Charming Man” a hit.’

Whatever pennies were dropping among the more dynamic and media-savvy staff at Rough Trade, some of the company’s long-term problems had come back to haunt them. Upon its release initial pressings of ‘Hand in Glove’ were mismanaged, and Rough Trade Distribution was unable to supply many 
of its stockists. The combination of members of The Cartel being behind on their credit terms and the unprecedented nationwide interest in the single meant that many of Rough Trade’s frontline High Street shops could not stock the record. Most disconcertingly Probe, The Cartel’s north-western link, was unable to supply copies to any Manchester shops. Determined to circumvent the problem, Moss decided on a hands-on solution, and to the delight of the band, went around the city, walking up to record shop counters offering copies of the single for sale from a box under his arm. ‘I’m glad to have that on my CV,’ he says. ‘We did it old-style out of the boot of my car.’

From the May release of ‘Hand in Glove’ through to the November release of ‘This Charming Man’, The Smiths hardly came off the road. The sense of a working band was palpable. The band played London alone nineteen times in the year and mixed the concerts with an endless string of radio and studio sessions. For Mike Hinc, the band’s agent at Rough Trade, the demand for The Smiths was unprecedented. Rather than having to drum up interest for a new act on the release schedule, he found his phone was constantly ringing with promoters outbidding each other to book The Smiths live.

‘I had a lot to do with Mike,’ says Moss. ‘Mike you’d never forget. I spent most of the time hoping that Mike was OK. He’d say, “If I don’t speak to you before midday, forget it.” He’d get in there at half ten and he’d be straight on the cans at eleven.’

Sitting a few desks down from Hinc was Dave Harper, who was now starting to handle the band’s PR alongside Piering and whose exposure to Hinc’s working methods was something of an education. ‘Mike was a nutcase,’ he says. ‘I was twenty-three and he was about forty. Mike was one of these people who works the phones. He’d snort speed off a bowie knife and drink a can of Lilt, usually followed by a can of lager. His favourite expression 
to a social secretary at a university who didn’t give him the right offer was, “Fuck off and die” – he spent the whole day going, “Fuck off and die.”’

Piering’s work on radio meant that while the band had only released one single, audiences were starting to hear new Smiths songs through the radio sessions, which meant the demand surged beyond anyone’s expectations. Initially booking the band a run of dates around their debut single, playing clubs on the first rung of the touring circuit, Hinc found that most of the venues were being sold well over capacity and the venues were duly upgraded.

‘Around “Hand in Glove” you could actually see it grow,’ says Moss. ‘The dates were all switched to the university venues, which were the bigger halls. We played Kingston Poly, which was just absolutely crazy – there were more people locked outside than had made it in.’

The Smiths, who weren’t interested in video, may have been promoting themselves the old-fashioned way by playing live, but their rise was as meteoric as anything witnessed by the
MTV-assisted
overnight successes of their contemporaries. Insisting on playing in auditoria where there was no crowd barrier between band and audience, the only divide was the lip of the stage; their live performances from their first year were a chaotic, jubilant and celebratory run across the UK. Compared to anything else he had experienced before, as far as Travis was concerned, this was Beatlemania. ‘The pace of things was so fast. It was crazy, and they certainly lived up to expectations on every occasion,’ says Travis. ‘That whole thing of, “We’ve got to do a session next week, let’s get together and write a new song over the weekend,” they were like that, and that was wonderful to see. They had that thing, “This is our job, this is what we do,” in a very nice way.’

Moss and the band’s decision to concentrate their energies away 
from Manchester had paid off in spades. The Smiths were now a band on the national stage; the sense of isolation or, perhaps, the vague hint of regional snobbery that had run through an earlier generation of Mancunian bands had been replaced by an intense and growing bond between band and audience.

‘Factory used to play the Moonlight or the North London Poly with Richard Thomas,’ says Moss, ‘but The Fall mainly played around the north. We were the first to concentrate elsewhere.’

Despite the presence of the city in much of their catalogue and its locus in their mythology, The Smiths played Manchester only eleven times in their entire career – a decision that had had its roots in their earlier appearances at the Haçienda.

‘At that Haçienda gig, when there was only twenty people there, the two guys in front of me were talking to each other between numbers,’ says Moss. ‘One goes, “They’re great aren’t they?” and the other guy said, “He’s got a shit shirt on.” And I think that sums up Manchester then, and it sums up quite a lot of the attitude.’

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‘After “This Charming Man” you could feel it was just all happening,’ says Travis. ‘I had a huge responsibility on my shoulders, I knew that we would have to deliver for them and I knew that they deserved it.’

The pressure on Travis, having signed the band to an albums deal, was enormous. He was convinced more than ever that mainstream success was within his grasp and had worked with the major-label competition to ensure ‘This Charming Man’ had been a hit – a decision that had been the subject of some involved debate among the independent community.