How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (30 page)

In America Miller’s decision to let his producer, rather than his business, head make decisions was starting to pay off for the band. While in Europe and particularly the UK the band were still trying to convert their
Smash Hits
synthesiser appeal into a more serious reputation, in America their increasingly discordant
and lyrically provocative songs were striking a chord with adolescents equally horrified by the home-grown saturation of Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson and the imported MTV hair-extension pop of Culture Club and Flock of Seagulls.

Marc Geiger, a youthful college DJ on the late-night show of his local station, was, like his listeners, hungry for more demanding and intelligent music. ‘The station was called 91X,’ says Geiger, who still retains the boyish demeanor of his freshman years. ‘It was in Tijuana, the most influential station was KROQ, which is terrible today, but on the air still, and was vital at the time, and so was a station just outside of New York called WLIR in Long Island.’

Playing a mix of releases on Factory, Mute, Rough Trade and 4AD, stations like KROQ and WLIR gained an Anglophile reputation that found an eager and large listenership. For Depeche Mode it was the perfect opportunity to recalibrate their image away from teen magazines and
Top of the Pops
into something that suited their new, darker material. A world away from the three-minute formats of daytime Radio 1, the American stations could stretch out their playlists to include extended mixes by New Order and Depeche Mode. While many of the releases were not available domestically in the States, the impact of hearing up-to-the-minute contemporary sounds on the radio resulted in an expanding audience keen to explore the bands’ music.

‘Depeche Mode started to bubble up through 12-inches,’ says Geiger. ‘Those artists – their fans knew how to dig deep and where they dug was in the import sections of all these record stores that were very vibrant at the time, and you could see the ones that understood what 4AD or Factory or Rough Trade was. If you were in that world and you were lucky enough to be near one of those radio stations at the time, you saw how big things could get,
because on KROQ a new Depeche Mode track would come on and they’d sell out an arena much faster than one of the big rock bands would sell out. If you were tuning in, you could feel the subculture the same way you could in any subculture, before that and after that, but this one was ignored by mainstream media.’

To the astonishment of many of the artists on 4AD, Rough Trade, Factory and Mute, they suddenly found themselves with an eager fan base in the biggest music market in the world. With barely any promotional activity and the thinnest of media coverage for their releases, Cocteau Twins, Depeche Mode, Echo & the Bunnymen, The Smiths and Cabaret Voltaire now had the opportunity to tour America on a professional footing. The days of being the toast of Manhattan’s nightclubs were passing and a new world of young Anglophile record buyers became one of the fastest-growing audiences in America.

With the zeal of a music-obsessed young man in his early twenties, Geiger was convinced of the possibilities for UK acts beyond the cultural capitals of LA and New York. He was determined to invent a new touring structure that opened up America to the cream of the UK’s independent acts.

‘Sometimes, when I’m critical of people in the UK, it’s because there are fifty-foot walls round the British Isles and they don’t want to look outside of it,’ he says, ‘and New York has some of that – you’ve got New Order coming to play a club in New York and that’s it. Everything else is an afterthought. The Ruth Polskys and others – their modus operandi was to get them to play their club. I wasn’t that interested in hanging with the bands and doing coke with them. I was more interested in letting them and their label bosses know that I understood more about their 12-inches than they did.’

A generation of bands who had played a few club dates at Danceteria and possibly visited Boston, Chicago or the West
Coast could now play to crowds whose size was beyond anything they could experience at home. ‘The cities were bigger,’ says Geiger. ‘The market place was pretty refined. The English just didn’t really realise it, ’cause they hadn’t really been here. Nobody really wanted to work with those artists, so I went immediately to the UK and I went and picked up The Smiths, the Bunnymen, New Order, Depeche Mode and a bunch of others.’

Depeche Mode was one of the first bands Geiger booked. Building on their status as one of the most played bands on KROQ, he concentrated on the West Coast where the band suddenly found themselves walking out on to the stages of sunlit open-air auditoria. ‘It was very unexpected and it was very surprising,’ says Miller. ‘They’d done a couple of tours, then they didn’t go back to America for
Construction Time Again
because they felt they weren’t getting anywhere with it and they’d hit a certain point, and things just took off. We were gonna play the Palladium in LA in 1985, a 2,000-seat club, and then that sold out overnight, so we booked another date, that sold out overnight, and then they booked Irvine Meadows which is in Orange County which is an open-air shed which holds 15,000, and that sold out, so before you knew it, three years later they were playing to over 60,000 people at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.’

Courtesy of alternative radio, Depeche Mode were now a stadium band in California, figureheads for a new audience, one that the American music industry would start to call alternative. It was a market it would come to understand through the series of tours booked by Geiger. Initially, the American executives were weary and dismissive at this imported culture which seemed to attract black-clad teenagers in make-up into the ninety-degree temperatures for an afternoon – a crowd that was thrilled at the idea of singing along to the new, darker Depeche Mode lyrics for ‘People Are People’, ‘Master and Servant’ and ‘Blasphemous
Rumours’, each song dealing with the kind of subject that was left undiscussed in the never-ending of ‘Morning in America’.

‘It was
Some Great Reward
that really blew it up,’ says Geiger. ‘I remember when they sold out a stadium, and the world still didn’t notice. I was like, “Everybody else, get out of the way.”’

Playing in the California heat, Depeche Mode dressed in leathers and chains in front of a full lightshow were more than adept at turning into rock gods while staying utterly connected to their minimal synth etiquette. ‘It was very Bon Jovi,’ says Miller. ‘Lots of leather and volume … but there was no drummer, and practically no guitar, at that point.’

For the next album Miller proposed that Depeche Mode build on their sense of risk. Miller suggested that Jones, himself and the band start the record at Hansa Mischraum and live every day of the record from beginning to end without a day off – a journey into the heart of studio darkness as they submitted themselves to the samplers and mixing desk.

‘It was a very light version of Werner Herzog,’ says Miller. ‘I was quite influenced by that kind of very focused, living-it, thing, I was thinking about how he had made
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
and undergone such extremes.’

Herzog’s idea of ‘ecstatic truth’, whereby the tensions and difficulties of making a film on a punishing schedule in an unforgivable location would reveal a larger truth in the narrative, had resulted in some extraordinary films, accompanied by equally extraordinary stories of tensions, fallings out and hysteria on the part of the actors, crew and director.

‘I’m a huge admirer of all that,’ says Miller. ‘I don’t really think I can do it properly myself, but I thought we could add just a little bit of that into the making of the record, so we did … and we all nearly cracked … and I was trying to run the label at the same time – that was the bigger problem.’

‘We did it without a day off,’ says Jones, ‘and I think we all drove each other a bit nuts … but it was all very song-led. We all thought the songs were really good and because it wasn’t a normal group, the machines played nearly everything. Martin played a little bit of guitar and Alan played a little bit of piano, but basically it was a sequencer playing everything – that was then orchestrated by whoever wanted to do it. We were doing what we thought of as ground-breaking work with sampling: the sequencer was liberating, we would sample a sound and make
that
sound play
that
beat, it was quite incredible.’

Just as Herzog had found his working methods produced intolerable arguments with Klaus Kinski and the process would break down through a lack of planning, the participating members of the experiments at Hansa also experienced waves of studio torpor, often enhanced by varying amounts of intoxication. ‘There were many days when nothing happened,’ says Jones. ‘There were some days where we literally didn’t do anything and there was a reasonable amount of pot-smoking going on, no hard drugs, but there was quite a lot of drinking and excellent pot – but this was long before Dave did his
life-threatening
junkie phase or anything like that. It was just a general bit of medium-grade partying.’

The process of
Black Celebration
had taken its toll on Miller, who realised the responsibilities of running a company with a multimillion-pound annual turnover could no longer co-exist in parallel with the highs and lows of letting creativity run wild in the recording studio. ‘After
Black Celebration
I came out with the sunlight in my eyes for the first time in four or five years,’ says Miller. ‘I realised that I wanted to get on with running the label and I kind of was a bit out of touch … We were doing great. We had the Bad Seeds, we were about to sign Leibach and Diamanda Galás, but I felt things were moving on and I really wanted to get
out into the world and listen to music and figure out what was going on.’

One of the first decisions Miller made was to move Mute into larger premises on Harrow Road, a concrete, almost brutalist, building with basement warehouse and a network of corridors and offices. While getting a firmer handle on Mute’s day-to-day operations, Miller realised that the company, via Vince Clarke’s third group, Erasure, was about to have another platinum album. Erasure’s first album
Wonderland
, released in 1986, had been a modest success but a follow-up single, ‘Sometimes’, released later that year, went to no. 2, beginning a twelve-month period where Erasure were a fixture in the Top Forty. For someone who still flinched at the idea that he was running a record company, Miller was experiencing the kind of success for which major labels would spend months planning and a considerable fortune marketing.

‘Much as he loved mucking about with synthesisers and being in the studio, I think he realised he couldn’t be so hands on,’ says Jones. ‘It got a lot bigger when they went to Harrow Road, hugely bigger, and they started to lose the plot because there was no formal business training. Daniel told me someone said to him once, they came in to do financial trouble shooting for Mute, and they said it was bleeding money … from wounds all over the body of Mute. There’s all that money coming in and you want to get all this shit done, and you’re one visionary in charge of the company. You haven’t got time to do everything, you’re just on a big wave, surfing this wave, trying to stay up there.’

Back in the States, Depeche Mode’s tour for
Black Celebration
was a twenty-eight-date riot of debauchery. The band had an unstoppable momentum in America, one which was now being shared by New Order and the Bunnymen as the country was becoming something of a fantasy world for their generation of
music press-feted groups. If New Order and the Bunnymen’s carefully nurtured reputations of outsider seriousness was still present at home, in America, away from such image constraints, the bands found an appetite for one of the finest products the country had to offer a touring British band – the gold-plated rock ’n’ roll lifestyle.

‘They’d all rather come over to America,’ says Geiger. ‘First of all, America was cooler for them to hang out in – more fun, and they could get better drugs. The more people they knew, it became a lot easier to go to a party in New York and then, “Heh, great, I’m going to party in San Francisco and then there’s this great party next week in LA.”’

Geiger started to combine the bands of the stature of New Order and the Bunnymen as a package. On what were known as ‘shed tours’, two British alternative bands, appearing together in secondary market cities like St Louis which Geiger made a point of booking into, had an impact and drew a crowd that was more than the sum of its two parts.

‘The question was, how could you really show that these artists were big in comparison to Def Leppard?’ says Geiger. ‘If you could create a mini event, where you put a couple of bands that had a shared fan base together, then you get an explosion in the number of bodies and that’s really what happened, so we found a format. Those bands actually liked it, ’cause when they were on the bus rides for eight hours, or they would go play Cleveland, they were a little bored but if they were hanging with each other, they weren’t that bored, so when you had New Order and the Bunnymen as an example together, they were having a great time all the way through – they’re still talking about it today.’

At the mention of the 1987 Bunnymen/New Order tour, in which his role was DJ-cum-northern-spiritual-advisor, Mike Pickering has the air of a veteran recalling a hard-fought campaign in
difficult conditions. ‘I don’t know how we made it back from that tour to be honest. It took us nearly a year to recover.’ New Order’s American manager, Tom Atencio, was starting to field congratulatory calls from hard-bitten industry professionals who thought they’d seen it all. He says, ‘The promoters were doing incredible business. One of them calls me up before the LA show and says, “I’m not complaining, because tickets sales are really good, but I want you to know that your liquor rider is second only to the Rolling Stones, and they play stadiums.” We could go into incredibly lurid tales, they were incredibly punishing on themselves, I can tell you.’

One band missing from the shed tours were The Smiths, who, having played the States only twelve times since New Year’s Day 1984, were incredibly hot property, with a pent-up audience spread across America desperate for them to tour.