How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (27 page)

A new addition to the Creation roster was Nick Currie who, now recording as Momus, had released a debut album,
Circus
Maximus
, on él, a new label that the quickly rejuvenated Mike Alway had founded after his unsuccessful attempt at being a more conventional record industry player with Blanco y Negro. él was Alway, even by his standards, at his most quixotic. If Alway’s ideas for Cherry Red and Blanco had been a stylish and curatorial approach to the trends of the day, él was going to be something else entirely. Financed by a magnanimous Iain McNay, who was prepared to take Alway back into the fold at Cherry Red, él’s roster would be populated largely by figments of Alway’s vivid imagination.

Thinking as an auteur rather than as an A&R man, Alway had no interest whatsoever in scouting out whichever bands were playing on the first rung of the live circuit for él.

‘I stopped going to shows. I was just so bored with it,’ he says. ‘I watched a lot of television, and long-forgotten films, and went back over all this and started to put a label together based on all that. Admittedly, I saw things in a very Arcadian type of way – I wanted it to be this mixture of Surbiton meets Tuscany. You couldn’t go out in Richmond and buy a cup of coffee, so I spent most of my life in the West End in Soho in Old Compton Street, or up where the offices used to be in Bayswater, which were really
cosmopolitan places where you could drink espresso all day and it was the best stuff.’

Alongside Momus, the él roster featured The King of Luxembourg, the Would Be Goods and Bad Dream Fancy Dress, all distillations of Alway’s current tastes: the gentle but fractious Sixties Eastman colour Sunday afternoon of Joseph Losey’s
Accident
interrupted by a visit from the cast of a Lance Percival B-movie. ‘I tried to make it like you would direct a film,’ says Alway. ‘You would have an idea of what you saw there and you would basically get the personnel that was appropriate to put that together. All the bands were basically grotesque enlargements of certain parts of their character.’

In Simon Fisher Turner, who had been Jonathan King’s child protégé, Alway had the perfect character actor to cast as The King of Luxembourg. Turner, who simultaneously composed soundtracks for Derek Jarman’s films during his ‘career’ as The King of Luxembourg, had, having been David and Angie Bowie’s babysitter of choice, a wealth of imagery and anecdotes to draw on. Covering songs like the Television Personalities’ ‘Picture of Dorian Gray’, Alway and Turner supercharged Sixties revivalism with something that had been missing from The Living Room and Splash One: high camp. Bad Dream Fancy Dress’s album
Choirboy Gas
was produced by Turner (who described his tenure at él as ‘like being a pantomime dame’); featuring such tracks as ‘Leigh-on-Sea’ and ‘The Supremes’, it mixed girl-group infatuation with seaside fish and chips, as if
The Leather Boys
had been the subject of ‘Leader of the Pack’. The Would Be Goods were named after an E. Nesbit book and their leader, Jessica Griffin, sang in an accent worthy of Jenny Agutter in
The Railway Children
. A couplet from the Would Be Goods’ debut single, ‘The Camera Loves Me’, ‘Another gin and tonic and I’m yours for sure/They never took my photograph like this before,’ sung as
woodwind flutters around Griffin’s debutante ingénue delivery, encapsulates the él world of deportment, intoxication and a very British sense of pop abandon. ‘I was going back to the Monkees,’ says Alway, ‘and trying to add art.’

él’s sleeves certainly carried the air of an exhibit. With soft pastel labels and Kodachrome-style photography, the imagery, along with the acute lower-case ‘e’ on él, looked like travel brochures from a future where Huxley had written the characters of
Brideshead Revisited
into
Brave New World
.

‘él was about a world that was coming, a world of espresso and everything being out of doors, and affability,’ says Alway, ‘and none of this mean, nine-to-five stuff and a sad fried egg. It was the same thing that basically inspired Habitat; it was against things like stout.’

But if Alway had predicted the establishment’s naive yearning for a UK cafe society about fifteen years before it happened, his new label largely baffled the stalwarts of the
independent-championing
media. ‘I had quite good press with él in England actually,’ he says, ‘but Peel never supported me.’

Circus Maximus
by Momus was él’s most successful release and had received favourable notices, thanks in part to Momus being a character drawn largely from Currie’s rather than Alway’s imagination. Momus was able to thrill journalists by referencing Brel and Bataille with the conviction of an erudite Edinburgh graduate exploring the impulses behind perversion.
Circus Maximus
was also a record that had held McGee’s attention.

The literate, caustic world of Momus was something of a leap for Creation to sign; though Currie did find common ground with McGee, as much with his interest in sex and decadence as with his learning. ‘I was getting a bit of press at the time in
The Face
and the
NME
,’ says Currie, ‘and I think Alan’s interest might have been perked by the fact I’d written an article about Jacques
Brel in which I said that Brel was more thrilling and dangerous than a thousand Jesus and Mary Chains, and Alan had just lost them at that point, so maybe something in that resonated.’

Having left él, the first Momus album for Creation was the Gallic-flavoured song cycle
The Poison Boyfriend
, a record that shone a light into a meditative and reflective voyeur’s idea of romance. The opening line of ‘Closer to You’, ‘Maybe you’re the Circle Line girl’, muttered with claustrophobic intensity, confirmed that Currie’s ambitions were set in an entirely different context from the rest of Creation’s roster.

‘I think I told Alan at our first meeting that I wanted to be bigger than David Bowie,’ says Currie, ‘and he said, “Well, that’s great, because most people that come to me want to be bigger than the Mighty Lemon Drops.” I knew that Alan had a really positive profile with the press and that I’d get more attention on Creation that I had done at él, although aesthetically it would possibly be a more toxic environment in some ways and there would be a certain kind of hideous Sixties revivalism saying it all goes back to the
Pebbles
compilation.’

While Momus may have felt like a breath of fresh air to McGee as an act that was straying from the canon, Alway was casting his eye over material to sign to él that had nothing to do with music whatsoever. If his vision of an epicurean future of badinage and fresh air needed a front person, then he was convinced he’d found his man. ‘I wanted to make a record with Keith Floyd,’ says Alway. ‘I phoned him and his producer David Pritchard when they were shooting
Floyd on Spain
and he agreed. I thought, this guy’s a genius. He was saying, “We’re all idiots because we don’t eat fish.” It was a metaphor for things beyond food.’

Sadly, like many of Alway’s ideas, it was rich in its impulse but more difficult to turn into a reality and neither the meeting of minds nor the record came to fruition. At Cherry Red, Alway was
struggling to get él taken seriously as a going concern. Iain McNay had joined the Rajneeshpuram community in Oregon, leaving the company in the hands of his label managers and publishers who, with their days spent working on royalty statements for Dead Kennedys and Tracey Thorn, were as mystified as anyone by Alway’s intentions. Meanwhile Currie’s decision to sign with Creation had allowed him to start thinking about making videos and taking McGee’s talk of world domination a little more seriously.

‘It was almost like Monopoly money with Mike,’ says Currie. ‘But there was a certain realpolitik in Alan’s discourse. He would call you into the office and say, “Look at this review in the
Melody Maker
, you’ve got half a page review here,” and on the facing page is some major-label album where they’ve spent £500,000 on it and they only got half a page as well. We spent £2,000 and we got the same amount of space in the music press.’

Six months earlier, a mile and a half north-west of Clerkenwell Road, Cerne Canning had an idea that he thought might help reconnect Rough Trade with the street-level buzz of the live sector in a way that had helped define the label in its infancy, something that had been missing since its move to King’s Cross. ‘Geoff and I were having conversations about how the live scene was sort of bubbling under,’ says Canning, who was promoting regularly at Bay 63, the former Acklam Hall in Ladbroke Grove. ‘McGee was doing The Living Room and Dan Treacy was putting on bands like Shop Assistants and the Pastels at his club Room at the Top, but I got the sense that Rough Trade wasn’t that bothered.’

Canning started promoting London shows for many of the bands Rough Trade distributed, ensuring that the likes of the Soup Dragons and Bogshed had a small foothold in the capital. Realising the bands could be collated into a spirit-of-DIY-type festival he booked five nights at the Hammersmith Riverside
billed as ‘The Week of Wonders’ in October 1985. As well as featuring the June Brides and the Stone Roses playing their second London show, the week leaned heavily towards Creation whose night featured Joe Foster, the Pastels and the Membranes and an argument over the running order. Rough Trade’s latest signings, the Woodentops, who the label was hoping would develop some Smiths-style momentum, were also pitched heavily to the press. The result was that the week had the air of a showcase for the two most media-friendly companies. ‘I got in trouble with the other labels,’ says Canning, ‘for putting Rough Trade and Creation on the posters.’

The presentation of a cross-section of the DIY underground – an underground that was connected by occupying the same
low-budget
rung of the music business ladder rather than any musical style – caught the attention of the press, particularly the
NME
, which by the middle of the Eighties was facing stiff competition from the success of the style magazines and suffering one of its periodic crises of identity. Roughly divided into two camps, the paper was split between writers wanting to cover the innovative hip hop music emerging from the USA (along with its counterparts in electro and go-go) and those members of staff who were insistent that the paper stay loyal to its roots in the early Eighties as a champion of independent guitar-based music, the music with which its readership closely identified. The tendency to cover the more dynamic new sounds often won out; on the front page alongside writer bylines were pictures of Cameo, Mantronix and Schoolly D. The newspaper also attempted to appeal to the wider youth subculture, breaking out from exclusively covering music by running a series of cover stories on, for example, Jimmy White, the ubiquitous film
Absolute Beginners
and Olympian decathlete Daley Thompson, with the result that it came across as a Polytechnic version of
The Face
.

For the writers on the paper who still aligned themselves with guitar music and the indie charts it hosted every week, Canning’s mini-festival provided a sense of
locus
and occasion that they thought worthy of investment. ‘Out of the Week of Wonders I got approached to do the
C86
live shows,’ says Canning, ‘which inspired the
NME
to do the cassette.’

C86
, an
NME
-curated and cover-mounted cassette of the type of bands Canning was promoting, was an opportunity for the newspaper to realign itself with guitar music. The wider media, now run by many of those whose lives it had changed, had started the year noting that 1986 was the tenth anniversary of punk, prompting a protracted series of think pieces and histories. For its fans at
NME
, independent DIY guitar music, however amateurish in its conviction, was one of punk’s lasting legacies.

NME
regularly cover-mounted tapes and flexi discs throughout the period. It had recently produced collections of northern soul tracks from the Kent label and on one cassette, entitled
The Latin Kick
, had tried to turn fans of The Fall and the Wedding Present on to the delights of Joe Bataan and the Fania All-Stars. The idea of doing a
zeitgeist
-defining tape of independent music was borrowed from
C81
, a cassette the
NME
had launched in conjunction with Rough Trade five years earlier. Featuring the Specials, Cabaret Voltaire, Orange Juice and Scritti Politti and others,
C81
had captured the creativity and ambition of a sector of the music industry that, despite its hand-to-mouth precariousness, was awash with experimentation and ambition and that had its eyes fixed towards a future it was determined to write.

The twenty-two bands compiled five years later on
C86
were at the apex of a very different career arc, drawn from labels that were taken seriously by fanzine editors and the staff of Rough Trade Warehouse but practically nowhere else. Close Lobsters,
A Witness and the Shrubs, for example, were caught somewhere between a charitable John Peel session and a Top Ten appearance in the indie charts rather than the national Top Forty.

A week-long run featuring the bands on the tape was booked at the ICA for July. The
NME
heavily promoted the cassette and Rough Trade pressed up a vinyl edition. A few weeks after the tape had been played by its readership the newspaper began receiving letters complaining about the sound quality.

The recordings had been made cheaply and quickly and, inevitably for a collection of nascent bands still putting their first tentative steps into a recording studio, the results were mixed. While the energy of most of the groups was not in doubt, especially those like Stump and Bogshed who were used to working up a cider-and-black-fuelled crowd, the sense of being underwhelmed that this was the best the current generation of maverick independent artists had to offer was palpable.

What the compilation succeeded in doing was drawing attention to the network of fanzines and smaller labels that were still conceived in the ethos of DIY and self-expression. While musically wholly dissimilar, Big Flame and the Bodines, for instance, both represented the independent music sector in all is low-fidelity glory. One of the bands featured that would often be associated with the compilation once it had become an adjective was the Pastels. ‘In the 1980s I think the music scene was quite sprawling,’ says McRobbie. ‘People would meet up accidentally. We would often play with the Membranes and we really liked their energy. A lot of bands would just play together and at some point Rough Trade decided to try and define this scene. The timing of it was really good.’