How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (59 page)

A year after Creation was laid to rest McGee started a new label, Poptones, with the financial backing of the founders of Richer Sounds. Poptones was short-lived and achieved worldwide success with The Hives, something that further convinced McGee that he had grown bored not only of Creation, but of the music business as a whole. Green and Bowen launched their new company Wichita with minimum fanfare and little reference to their previous lives and slowly grew into the artist-led label they had imagined. ‘Dick’s a magnificent individual,’ says McGee. ‘To be honest, he did what I failed to do, which was have two successful record companies in a row.’

*

Creation ceased trading in 1999. Three years later Daniel Miller sold Mute to EMI. Miller had taken the momentous decision once he realised that he had fallen into a business cycle that was becoming as stressful as it was repetitive. ‘At various times during Mute’s histories, we’ve made redundancies and rehired,’ he says. ‘You have to over-hire to manage the situation, but then you have to say, “Well, look, we can’t afford it any more.” And it was very painful. The whole Britpop thing fucked it up for me, added to which it was a terrible time for music – it felt like we had fallen into a loop. You couldn’t get any press or any radio. The media was very weak and very unimaginative, and it felt like this was the end of music.’

Miller’s frustrations were exemplified by the lack of coverage for the album
Play
by Moby. It was the artist’s fifth album in what had been a genre-hopping and sporadic career, one that had
started with a no. 1 single and the worldwide hit ‘Go’, followed by cover versions of Joy Division. It was the kind of career path that was no longer of interest to a success-driven media, one that now gauged an artist’s relevance by making comparisons with the exponential curve of million-selling guitar bands.
Play
was a collection of electronic torch songs that featured ethnographic gospel samples and crisp production. It was also one of the first albums to benefit from the new strategy of synchs, or synchronisations, the use of an artist’s material in an advert. Synchs had started in the mid-Eighties as ad land excavated Fifties and Sixties soul singles to sell Levi’s 501 denim. By the mid-Nineties the trend had developed to include songs by contemporary artists, offering a reputationally risky but instant return in a manner which the Top Forty charts could no longer guarantee. By the release of
Play
, Moby issued a press release indicating that the ubiquity of synching had reached a new level – according to the PR every track on the album was being used in an advert.

‘It wasn’t every track,’ says Miller. ‘That’s a myth perpetuated by Moby, which backfired on him I think. I had people coming up to me saying, “How come that isn’t doing better?” and I couldn’t explain it. Radio was its usual bollocks, some excuse – too old, too young, too slow, too fast, too electronic, not electronic enough, whatever – and so when we got the opportunities we decided to take them and Moby’s always been open to that. “If the radio’s not going to fucking play it, let them hear it like this.”’

Play
had coincided with Miller’s first serious experience of business difficulties. Mute hadn’t released a Depeche Mode album for several years and the band were at a hiatus. The acts that had sold healthily through Mute’s history, like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, had reached a sales plateau, one which some of the label’s newer signings would struggle to reach. ‘I’d been through
this low point mid to late Nineties when actually we were in real financial trouble for the first time ever … We were managing OK but … and we were still selling lots of records overseas and getting nice advances to cover that, but the underlying business was bad and I was in a position where I was starting to have to talk to people about possibly working together.’

Mute was the last of the labels that had started in the
post-punk
vanguard to remain independent. If Miller was going to sell the company he was keen not to repeat the mistakes he had seen some of his contemporaries make. McGee had sold Sony 49 per cent of Creation for a tidy sum, one that was significantly increased by the success of Oasis. However, as Oasis had become a bigger entity than their record company, Creation had become the junior partner in the three-way relationship between Sony, Oasis and themselves. Although Sony technically owned the smaller half of the label, in reality they owned a great deal more.

‘I was advised by my lawyer’, says Miller, ‘that the trouble with those deals is that you’re constantly ending up negotiating for your whole life and jockeying for position. They populated Creation with people from Sony and stuff like that. I don’t know who knows what the right thing is, but any of the pros and cons of doing the deal with EMI had nothing to do with the fact that it was 49, 51 or 100 per cent – that wouldn’t have made any difference. I thought, you’re either in there or you’re not.’

Miller’s timing was propitious as he started negotiation, a process that took well over a year to complete. Mute’s luck returned and
Play
went on to be a blockbuster. ‘I was coming off the back of a couple of huge records, so I felt that that was probably the highest value I was going to get for the label and I was right … and then, of course, the industry then went down the tubes.’

The scale of Mute’s achievements are best illustrated by the
number of artists Miller has worked with who have remained on the label. Long-term high-profile careers between artists and labels are often associated with relationships like those between Pink Floyd and the Beatles at EMI. Depeche Mode and Nick Cave have both enjoyed longer careers with Miller and Mute, a tribute to both his loyalty and his ability to recognise the shifts in the business long before his rivals. ‘The first contract I did with Depeche was well into their career,’ Miller says. ‘We still ended up being a fifty-fifty profit share, but they had to do a contract for some other legal reasons. The way the industry’s going is more going back to that in a way, not no contracts, but more partnership. What chance has a record company got these days without being open to other things?’
‡

A year before Miller and McGee sold up, they were once again joined in the market place by one of their contemporaries, one who had been a quiet background presence for most of the decade. In 1999 Geoff Travis and Jeannette Lee relaunched Rough Trade and almost instantly achieved the kind of
self-contained
success with which the name was associated.

Jeannette Lee had been working with Travis since Rough Trade had begun to fracture at the Seven Sisters Road office where Andy Childs had joined them as a label manager. After the dissolution of the Rough Trade group of companies in 1991, the remnants of Rough Trade Records – Travis, Lee, Andy Childs and a handful of staff – moved to a small office on Golborne Road. The premises, a ground floor and basement, were ten minutes’ walk from the original Rough Trade shop and reconnected Travis to his Ladbroke Grove roots. ‘I think Jeannette’s incredibly
important to the whole thing,’ says Childs. ‘Geoff’s always relied on Jeannette’s musical knowledge and taste as well. As an A&R Geoff always talks in terms of, “We like this,” and, “We like that.” Jeannette understands the way artists think and work and can relate to them. I can’t imagine Geoff not having Jeannette there to rely on.’

As a teenager in the late Seventies Lee had worked with Don Letts in the King’s Road punk boutique, Acme Attractions, a job that placed her at the heart of the Clash’s extended west London family. During Rough Trade’s early years, she had only been familiar with Travis by sight. ‘I can remember seeing him on the Tube, I was on the Tube with Don,’ she says. ‘We got off at Marble Arch and he was in front of us with his big Afro and a big raincoat and we were like, Oh look, there’s Geoff Travis … hippie.”’

As a member of Public Image Limited, Lee had been the band’s de facto manager and had learned to negotiate and argue the band’s corner with a record company – skills which had enabled her to develop a detailed understanding of the industry and which had led her to having to liaise with some of its senior figures. ‘I was PiL’s ambassador with the record company,’ she says. ‘I always got on quite well with the individuals involved, but as far as we were concerned they were always on the other side. I met Richard Branson and people like that a lot.’

During the closure of Rough Trade, Lee and Travis had started managing bands and had their greatest success with Pulp. Lee’s experience of the business outside the Rough Trade milieu and her enthusiasm and energy revived Travis as he started to emerge from the fall-out of the label. By the mid-Nineties Lee and Travis were business partners and the idea of relaunching Rough Trade as a record company was fermenting in their minds. Once the wounds of the original company’s collapse had healed, Travis had tried a number of ways to once more use the name. One Little
Indian had bought some of the catalogue and the Rough Trade name in the company’s fire sale. A mooted partnership between Travis, Lee and One Little Indian barely got off the ground and Trade 2, an imprint with Island, was equally unsuccessful.

‘I don’t think it ever went away really, the label,’ says Lee. ‘It was always rearing its head and we were trying to do it whilst doing other things full-on. It takes a few years to set something up with a new bunch of people and for it to fail … We’d probably gone through the setting-up and failing at One Little Indian and then we went through a setting-up and failing at Island, so that whole nine years was pretty much used up.’

Once the ownership had reverted to Travis and Lee they were joined by James Endeacott as the label’s head of A&R. Endeacott had had a colourful past, rooted firmly in the world of independence, and which suited his natural exuberance and his distinctive strawberry-blond curls. He had been a member of Loop, after which he had been offered a job (but no salary) at Creation during the Clerkenwell era before he eventually managed the Tindersticks.
§
At Rough Trade he was given the brief to sign new talent for a new phase of the label, one that coincided with the start of a new millennium.

‘I wasn’t a spring chicken. I was in my early thirties,’ he says, ‘but this door opened: this whole possibility of the hours between six and ten when the band goes on, when I was normally travelling, now were just spent in the pub. My whole life became an endless succession of bars and gigs. Falling over and just having the best time of my life … it was brilliant.’

Rough Trade had yet to develop a fresh roster and Endeacott had licence to investigate whatever the London indie club circuit
had to offer. The first handful of releases was something of a mixed bag, neither Terris, Birthday or Cadallaca would go on to releases albums. Another signing raised eyebrows as to where, exactly, the new Rough Trade’s antennae were focused. ‘We had a band called Queen Adreena,’ says Endeacott. ‘It was some kind of crazy, gothy, metal thing and the girl singer used to take her clothes off and shout.’

The signing that was to reconfirm Rough Trade as a
pre-eminent
independent label came from a tape that had been sent to Travis by one of his contacts, Matt Hickey, who booked the Mercury Lounge club in New York. The cassette was by the Strokes, a New York band that had recorded three songs of vintage Manhattan, street hassle rock ’n’ roll. Upon hearing the tape, Travis and Lee’s reaction was of instant air-punching excitement. ‘Geoff and Jeannette were just going crazy about it and I was just jumping up and down,’ says Endeacott. ‘They flew over to New York. Two days later, saw them in upstate New York somewhere, got back and said they’d seen the second coming! Jeannette said, “We’ve just seen this band with five of the most beautiful men you’ve ever seen.” Geoff signed them for a
one-single
deal and then, of course, every A&R man in New York just went mental.’

Rough Trade released the tape as a single, ‘The Modern Age’, and the Strokes flew over to London where their arrival started a music-industry bush fire. Rough Trade had taken a gamble by not trying to sign the band to a long-term deal, but the energies and hype surrounding the band left no one in any doubt that Rough Trade was at the centre of what was about to become a phenomenon. ‘It all really kicked off ’cause there was a photograph of the band sat around in this bar, and it was the first time anybody apart from Geoff and Jeannette had seen them,’ says Endeacott. ‘We got this photograph and it went in
the
NME
, and on the Tuesday afternoon that the
NME
came out, the phone was just off the hook. All these people that we all knew in the business were going, “What the fuck … This band … Oh my God” … Every guy was just going, “I wanna be in that band” … Every girl was going, “I wanna shag all of them at once.”’

At the band’s first London concert in the Monarch pub in Camden, the air of anticipation was unlike anything that had been witnessed since Oasis had made their debut at the Water Rats six years earlier, as the assembled crowd witnessed the return of sharply dressed three-minute rock ’n’ roll. ‘At the end of the set Jeff Barrett from Heavenly was walking round shouting … “It’s year zero … It’s year zero … It’s year zero.”’ says Endeacott. ‘We all thought, this is something happening, this band is really going to be enormous.’

Geoff Travis had witnessed the highs and lows of hype many times in his career. While the rest of the industry and the media started to become obsessive about the potential of the Strokes, he took a more guarded view as he began to negotiate a long-term relationship for Rough Trade and the band. ‘It actually makes me really anxious when people say, “This is going to be huge,” he says. ‘It heralded the end of our Blanco y Negro relationship. When Rob Dickins left Warners he was replaced by a guy called John Reid, who couldn’t cope with the fact that bands might want to go elsewhere.’

Under Travis’s arrangement with Warners, any band he wanted to sign to Rough Trade was asked to consider signing to Blanco y Negro as an option as well. It was a situation that the new generation of Warners executives were uneasy with. ‘John Reid, because he didn’t know what he was doing basically, couldn’t handle it. So when we wanted to sign the Strokes, John Reid said, “I’ll come and see them.” That was the last thing any of us wanted.
We went through this whole song and dance where he sent his American people to go and see them and talk to them. And they were all crap, just stupid absolutely bog-standard major-label A&R people, no vision, no ideas, no interest in anything other than their careers.’