How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (57 page)

‘XL had strings and strings of Top Twenty singles by artists that came and went,’ says Mills, ‘but then there was also Prodigy, which bucked the trend and which kind of rewrote the rulebook on how genres converge.’ The Prodigy started to regularly infiltrate the charts; their debut single ‘Charly’ made it to no. 3, by which time XL was run by Richard Russell. As a DJ and as an artist Russell had graduated from being a regular Groove customer to an A&R at XL, before becoming the company’s MD in 1994. ‘We were a scene label,’ he says, ‘with all the things that go with that. We were very deep in a scene; I was a DJ, I was an artist, I was a producer, and we were in that scene, so it was very flowing, it had a lot of momentum. There was no thought, there was no analysis, it was all very quick-fire and very exciting.’

The scene XL was part of was the wider rave culture that was captured perfectly in the artwork of Prodigy’s
Music for the Jilted Generation
album. The inner gatefold picture featured a righteous – if a little crusty-looking – raver, cutting off police access to an illegal rave by taking a knife to a rope bridge.

‘The records we released were not on the radio. They were not
written about by the music press, but they sold a lot,’ says Russell. ‘We used to be able to sell a couple of hundred thousand, all vinyl. If it worked when you played it that was it, the simplest thing in the world really, and Prodigy was a cassette through the post. We were the obvious place to send the cassette to and, at that point, we listened to everything, ’cause we didn’t get sent much, so it was easy.’

Mills and Beggars were educated in the rave scene as mini-buses would arrive at the Alma Road offices to ferry the staff to the furthest corners of Essex to experience the XL music and culture in its working environment. By the release of
The Fat of the Land
it was an experience that was understood and enjoyed worldwide. ‘First we were a rave label, and then we were Prodigy’s record label,’ says Russell. ‘Our destiny was to fulfil the potential of that, and that happened over the course of three albums up to ’97 when
The Fat of the Land
became this tremendous phenomenon.’

The Prodigy’s audience had grown to the point where the band had a no. 1 album in over twenty territories, including America. For Russell and XL it was a remarkable achievement, one that put Mills’s years of experience to vigorous use. ‘It was no. 1 in twenty-seven countries,’ says Mills. ‘I think they sold far more records than Oasis ever did … it sold seven and a half million all round the world … I don’t think Oasis ever got near that … it was a huge record by anyone’s standards and I would say it was a huge international record. Whereas many huge English records don’t travel, this one did.’

‘A lot of people go mad trying to run an independent,’ says Russell. ‘I’ve always just leaned on Martin very heavily so that I could try and stay as creative as possible, so that’s just always been a big help. I know lots of people that do things 100 per cent on their own and that’s very tough, ’cause you get into this as a
music fan, so when it becomes a business you’ve got all that stuff to deal with.’

After the worldwide success of
The Fat of The Land
, Russell found himself hollowed out. All his energies had been spent on the momentum of one band rather than on the label. ‘For the rest of the Nineties everything just bottomed out a bit,’ he says. ‘We went to the MTV awards one year, in Milan. We went to a party at Donatella Versace’s house and Madonna was there, and George Michael. It was that kind of thing. I got back from there and I went to a party in London where all my friends were, and I was talking about it and I remember someone saying to me, “You just sound like such a prick,” and they were right. But it was very hard to not get confused by all this stuff, very difficult, very difficult.’

The perception of XL was that it was the Prodigy’s label and little else. When Russell ended the campaign for
The Fat of the Land
he realised that he had received a top-to-bottom education in the music industry and was now in a position where he could change the dynamic of the company. ‘I felt I was a bit born again at the turn of the decade, really, where I was like, I just thought, this isn’t good enough, we’ve got to do more interesting things, and I had a bit of an awakening, I think, personally and with what we were doing, which was like, “We can do anything now.” and I really reconnected to music.’

A year later Wiiija and Walker also contributed to the impetus of Beggars Group. Cornershop’s third album,
When I Was Born for the Seventh Time
, became an international success and in the UK the band were at no. 1 in the singles charts with the Fatboy Slim remix of ‘Brimful of Asha’. ‘What really broke Cornershop in the UK’, says Walker, ‘was the fact that, all through that Britpop period, the majors were sending every fucking journalist out to America to do a feature: Longpigs break America, Supergrass
break America – of course they didn’t, but these journalists would come back and go, “Bloody hell, Gary, everyone over there wants to talk about Cornershop.”’

*

By the middle of the Nineties, Laurence Bell had established Domino as a label with a distinct identity, that of a company that released inexpensively but elegantly recorded albums, made mainly by American artists. The names on the Domino release schedule – Royal Trux, Palace and Smog – gave the impression that the label was defiantly representing outsiders. The impression was concentrated by the fact that the label had been started at almost the exact moment when the media, after years of covering American grunge and alternative, threw its weight firmly behind Britpop. A turning point was at the Reading festival in 1994 when, following Kurt Cobain’s suicide a few months earlier, sets by Hole and the Lemonheads disintegrated into cathartic and incoherent displays of public grief. A few hours later, Sebadoh’s performance collapsed into fits of screaming and instrument smashing. ‘Courtney Love was trying to invade the stage when Sebadoh was playing,’ says Bell, ‘and there was a lot of tears and blood and madness in the air, Evan staggering around. But that madness was obviously more exciting than everybody just obsessed with their careers saying, “We’ve got a fan base.” No one in America would know about the term fan base, or give a fuck about it anyway, and that was inspiring. That kind of careerism that was starting to happen in the UK just eggs on careerism.’

The chaotic scenes at Reading were followed by ‘Yanks Go Home’ editorials in the music weeklies. All eyes turned towards London where the major-label music industry and the media were aligned in their celebration of guitar bands, and according to their narrative, the capital started to swing again. ‘They moved
into Britpop very fast, and the whole media just became obsessed about that just on the back of Kurt dying,’ says Bell. ‘That was maybe a year into Domino, and there wasn’t much room at all. There was just a few people who’d be supportive of us.’

Mark Mitchell had left RTM to work alongside Bell at Domino as the label entered a hand-to-mouth existence, releasing considered and reflective records into a market full of brash, three-chord social observation. As well as the label operating at the margins of the wider musical culture, Domino’s artists all lacked the kind of career mechanisms that were now considered essential.

‘Nobody had managers,’ says Mitchell. ‘It wasn’t about business, it was love of music. You’d be scared if the drummer phoned up, quite literally. Oh God, we must really be in trouble.’

Domino’s releases were personal and impressionistic and recorded on the kind of budget that would have absorbed a Britpop band’s weekly cab fare. Whatever Bell’s ambitions for the label, the market realities were stacked against a company like Domino succeeding. ‘What held me back was not having the money,’ he says. ‘It was just so competitive at that time. A band like Moose would come and play and you’d think, oh they’re pretty good, I like that, and then they’re signed to Virgin the following Tuesday for quarter of a million and people are writing four-page features on them, and they’d barely got out of the rehearsal room. You’re just like, “This is nuts.”’

Despite Bell’s natural bonhomie and willingness to try and communicate his belief in his releases, Domino found itself in a position of almost exile from the mainstream industry. Other independents like Warp and XL operated in a separate culture to Britpop and benefited from the dance music press where titles like
MixMag
provided an alternative media. Domino was
reliant on coverage in the music weeklies, where it was forced to compete with the midweek Top Twenty culture of the day, and the label was perceived as being wilful, earning a frustrating reputation for wanting to deny itself success in the process.

‘It was not a good time at all,’ says Bell. ‘It was all about putting the ball in the back of the net. Friends in the industry would say to me, “We know people that just think you’re mad,” you know. But I certainly was very serious about it being a label and surviving as a label, and growing as a label. You can read all the books you like about Atlantic in the Fifties and Sixties but it was Putney in the Nineties, and it was really making it up as you went along.’

At times the sense of insularity at Domino became tangible. Mitchell was an ad hoc tour manager for several of the artists. Given that they very rarely toured, the experience proved challenging. It also illustrated how detached the label was from the mainstream. As a new generation of corporate festivals like V and T in the Park were launched to capitalise on guitar music, Mitchell was navigating his way through strange psyches and rural back roads in southern Europe.

‘I went to Spain with Will Oldham and Bill Callahan,’ he says. ‘I spent three or four days with them on this acoustic tour together. My two worst on-the-road experiences both happened at Domino, one with Will and Bill, one with Flying Saucer Attack. Spending days in close quarters with people who didn’t speak and didn’t communicate … You didn’t know where you were at any point, it was like some ridiculously hardcore type of Edwardian therapy.’

In 1996 Bell had been joined by his partner Jacqui Rice and, in a move that signalled the label’s ambitions, Domino signed Pavement. The band came back with one of their most coherent and immediate records,
Brighten the Corners
. Pavement had been absent for two years and upon their return found themselves
becoming the toast of London and something of an exit strategy for bands stuck in the prolix deflation of Britpop.

‘They came back with
Brighten the Corners
,’ says Bell. ‘Everyone was like, “All right, this is what a band should really be about.” They had a lot of stuff that people were jealous of. They had tunes and this nonchalant glamour, they had the songs, and people could see that this band were just making it up as they went along with this outrageous amount of talent. I think they all wished they were a bit more like them, ’cause they’d all been playing pretty serious career games in the West End of London.’

Blur’s self-titled fifth album was released on the same day as
Brighten the Corners
and along with dressing in faded baseball T-shirts rather than Fred Perry, the band name-checked Pavement in interviews.

A year later Domino released
Either/Or
by the Portland singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, an acute and wistful collection of observational songwriting. It quickly connected with an audience, occupying the space that had been opened by Nirvana’s bruised and broken
Unplugged in New York
.

Nirvana’s former agent, Russell Warby, had been approached from the States to book Smith his first European tour, and slowly developed a relationship with the singer. ‘He used to like staying at the Russell Hotel in London, because the staff were so rubbish that they would never get his messages to him or put his calls through. I went to visit him in the studio and we had a little chat and he was like, “I’ve really got this idea, I’ve got to get it done,” and you could see him burning – something he needed to put down and he went off and he was recording immediately. He had a terrible temper, I never really saw it in effect but he used to talk about it and you’d have conversations about him getting into fights.’

After
Either/Or
Domino released the rest of Smith’s catalogue, which received plaudits and allowed the label to position itself
a little nearer to the centre ground. ‘After years of real struggle it just seemed so painful, this going to the media saying, “You’ve got to listen to these people, Will and Bill. These are the best writers around, these songs are going to last for decades,” and try really hard to get a picture with a review and then after Elliot, Will came back as Bonnie Prince Billy, and suddenly everyone was just like, “These are masterpieces.”’

The renewed interest in contemplative singer-songwriting was not without its drawbacks. Domino was deluged with tapes from a succession of earnest young men who had poured their life experience into newly purchased Martin-copy acoustic guitars. Several of them were signed by the majors and launched to critical acclaim.

‘That all fed into everybody walking around saying, “Quiet is the new loud,” or something ridiculous,’ says Bell, ‘because then you got lots of rubbish English people playing acoustic music.’

The glow of
Either/Or
was short-lived for the label as the music it had represented started to fragment. ‘I just felt that this amazing generation of Americans that we’d been involved with was kind of ending in some way,’ says Bell. ‘Pavement broke up in November ’99, The Trux broke up about six months later, Sebadoh disintegrated around the same time and Elliott was off with DreamWorks.’

Domino saw turn-of-the-millennium success with Four Tet and a move away from acoustic music. It also opened a small office in New York where many of its releases found a larger audience than in the UK. Despite taking such steps towards growth, Bell, a positive and optimistic person by nature, was finding his frustration with the industry starting to harden. ‘I got very disillusioned,’ he says. ‘It got very harsh in the early 2000s, it became so painful financially, just constantly up against it finding the money to pay the rent and being able to do anything. We were definitely planning to stop the whole thing and give the tapes back to the artists and burn it down in some sort of KLF-type stunt and move on. There were definitely some pretty blue moments but maybe there’s always the glint that there’s something round the corner. But there was this long period of nothingness, just like, “Holy fuck, where are we going to find anything?”’