How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (7 page)

They were thinking more in the abstract, calling their
prospective
project The Zoo. ‘It was called The Zoo – it wasn’t called Zoo records, and we wanted to do all sorts of things that were nothing to do with actually making records. Most of the stuff we never realised because what happened, by putting it out to a bunch of friends, “OK, do you want to put a record, we’re doing this label,” they say, “OK, yeah, we’ll do that,” and so the Bunnymen and Teardrops appear within that little hothouse of a scene in Liverpool.’

Amid the plethora of shared band members’ egos, cattiness and thrillingly confident music, Echo & the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes emerged as the bands with the strongest melodies, choruses, haircuts and self-belief in their own mythic powers. Alongside them were Lori and the Chameleons, Wild Swans and Big in Japan. Zoo’s catalogue sounds like a
Liverpudlian
Nuggets
, relocated from the garage to the four brick walls of Eric’s and the hours of discussion of Penguin Modern Classics over the same cup of tea at Aunt Twacky’s.

Two of the first singles released by The Zoo, Echo & the Bunnymen’s ‘Pictures On My Wall’ and The Teardrop Explodes’ ‘Sleeping Gas’ quickly made ‘single of the week’ in the music papers and before it was even ready to be opened to the public The Zoo was in business.

‘We very quickly ended up having to become their managers,’ says Drummond. ‘Not that we knew what management was, or that we were particularly any good at it. It’s very hard to be good at something if you didn’t even know what it is, but that completely took over from whatever visions we had for The Zoo.’

Sparked off by the ideas in Drummond and Balfe’s heads, not to say a rivalry between lead singers that ensures a heroic sense of one-upmanship, The Teardrop Explodes and Echo & the Bunnymen avoided the standard route to commercial pop success. In the years to come, the Bunnymen would play tours of the Outer Hebrides, building an anti-career of elemental glamour; they would be the first band to play the Albert Hall in a generation, selling it out for two nights in 1983. The huge – Top Ten,
Top of the Pops
– success of The Teardrops’ ‘Reward’, was followed by Julian Cope’s compilation of the then unsanctified Scott Walker’s solo recordings for Zoo:
Fire Escape in the Sky: The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker
, one of only a handful of records that Zoo actually put out.

Containing a discography of only two albums, both
compilations
, Cope’s Scott Walker collection and
To the Shores of Lake Placid
, a collection of Zoo’s single releases, Zoo’s catalogue was, as Drummond intended, a micro-regional representation of the local talent.

However, before all these myths-to-be could be constructed,
Drummond and Balfe had the small matter of trying to finance their artists’ direction without any collateral other than the ambitious series of ideas running in their heads.

‘The next thing with Zoo’, says Drummond, ‘is that I’d got to know Tony Wilson from The Teardrops and Big in Japan, ’cause we did his TV show, and we started doing gigs at the first Factory nights out on the Russell estate and he was totally, “Fuck those bastards down in London, we can do this.” We didn’t have that attitude, Dave and I – for a start I’m not from Liverpool, Dave is – but we used to think, “It’s all right for you, Tony. You’ve got this paid job. We can’t afford to do this – we have to do this thing for the bands – so we went and sold our soul or whatever down to record companies and that, basically, was the end of Zoo and we put out the last Wild Swans single, and put out a compilation. But I remember having this whole conversation with Tony, and he was saying, “Bill, it’s the album. If we can actually make an album, we’ve got them beat … if we can actually put all that together …’ Of course, he did that with the first Joy Division album.’

Like everyone else trying to get their box of records sold, Drummond and Balfe drove down to Ladbroke Grove and headed over to the counter of Rough Trade. ‘Dave had somehow got his dad’s old car for nothing,’ says Drummond, ‘and we used to just drive around. We’d go in and see Geoff and his team at the time, and we did a lot ourselves, just going into shops, and say[ing], “Heh, we’ve got a box of these,” and doing just a deal over the counter.’

One Zoo single was bought by Seymour Stein on one of his regular visits to Rough Trade where he would binge on the latest vinyl. ‘That store was like a listening post for me,’ says Stein, ‘and those three – two guys and a woman – that were there behind the counter, they were almost like my A&R staff.’

The 7-inch Stein had bought was ‘Touch’ by Lori and the
Chameleons, Balfe and Drummond’s post-Big In Japan band fronted by a teenage art student, Lori Larty, in which he had heard commercial potential.

‘We’d already put it out on Zoo,’ says Drummond, ‘and got “single of the week”, stuff like that, and then Seymour had licensed it, and he had an option of a second single but not on an album. I remember writing him this whole letter, actually, ’cause he’d turned round and said, “We want to do an album.” The idea of an album – I loathed the idea of it, I thought it was just the late Sixties: it comes from the same place, it comes from 1969, early 1970, just thinking like, these English rock heads, it’s rubbish, that’s what I was thinking.’

However strident in his opinions about the music business, Drummond felt he was still green. ‘I’d got no idea how the music industry works,’ he says, ‘but the money we got from that – the advance we got from that – was enough to make The Teardrop Explodes album. We’d recorded the album before they were signed, ’cause nobody wanted to sign them. People were bending over backwards to sign the Bunnymen, which we couldn’t understand, and Julian definitely couldn’t understand, but nobody wanted to sign The Teardrop Explodes, so we used all the money we got from Seymour, this is about £4,000, and spent it on making this Teardrop Explodes first album … We then sold all the rights to it.’ Rehearsing an often repeated line about losing one’s music industry virginity, Drummond is succinct: ‘We gave it all away, basically.’

But if Drummond liked to think of himself as antithetical or uninterested in the music business, his ability to disengage with its player politics was to his advantage. Stein certainly thought he was up against another keen operator.

‘The idea that Bill didn’t know what he was doing is absolutely not true. Bill Drummond was very difficult and very wily. I was
over in London, February 1979. I had heard that there were four bands playing at the YMCA on Tottenham Court Road and the one everyone was shouting about was Teardrop Explodes. But Echo & the Bunnymen went on first. But before that I had to walk down six flights of stairs … which meant I was going to have walk up six flights of stairs, so I said to [Stein’s partner at Sire] Michael Rosenblatt, “I think we better find something here,” and the minute I heard [it] … I said, “We’ve found it” and that drum machine …the songs and the voice it was like poetry … Mac [Ian McCulloch] was so fabulous and I did a deal with them right there at the YMCA and when I got home, New York was shut down already, that’s how late it was, but I called LA and I called up a lawyer and I said, “Look, I’ve done a great deal, worldwide for this band, Echo & the Bunnymen … they’re really fantastic” … “Seymour, I’ve got news for you, you’ve signed too many artists this year” – at least he was always on the level, so I said, “How the fuck am I going to sign this band?”’

Prone to over-signing in his desire to constantly be on top of the next possibly big thing in England, Stein had a tendency to collect bands in the way he collected art deco. Realising he had run out of funds on his Sire account with Warner Brothers, Stein had hit a brick wall in the States, but he remembered that he had an ally at Warner Brothers back in London.

‘I’d done a few projects with Rob Dickins’, says Stein, ‘who was running Warner Publishing, so I went in and I said to him, “Rob, you’re the best A&R man in Britain,” and he loved that. “
You
’re the best A&R man in Britain, you could have your own label,” he says. “Oh, you’re right, I should,” I said. “Why don’t we start one together? … In fact, I’ve got the band to kick it off with, you can sign the next one.” So he said, “Well, let me hear it,’ and if anything I have to say he probably loved them even more than I did.’

Drummond, thinking he and the Bunnymen were going to be signing to Sire, was trying to keep a handle on Stein’s manoeuvring. ‘Seymour set up a company with Rob Dickins, who was the head of Warner Music,’ he says, ‘this thing called Korova, so it was a British-based company for the world, which meant the American company, Warners on the West Coast – there wasn’t that much money in it for them. The Bunnymen weren’t bothered about that – they weren’t that bothered about the hard work like U2, they weren’t interested.’

The work ethic of relentless touring and meet-and-greets of every regional radio station and sales force was a world away from Aunt Twacky’s tearoom, and in terms of the Bunnymen’s frames of reference – wintry coastal skies, moonlit walks and Parisian absinthe bars – practically worthless.

‘They were far more into Europe,’ says Drummond, ‘far more into the idea of making European music, even though they were doing rock music. It aspired to something European, and so did I. We just thought, “Fuck America.” So we go over to the States for the fourth album, do a three-week tour and I lost interest. They knew I wasn’t gonna deliver for them.’

Whereas The Teardrop Explodes had burned out in the aftermath of their euphoric commercial success after two and half albums and a mess of drugs and diminishing returns, Drummond had guided the Bunnymen through four albums in as many years.

Each record was sleeved in an elemental landscape: earth for the debut
Crocodiles
, sky for
Heaven Up Here
, the whiteness of the tundra for
Porcupine
and a richly shimmering aquamarine blue for
Ocean Rain
.
†

‘Once
Ocean Rain
was made I thought that was it, actually,’ says Drummond. ‘You’ve made your great record. It took you four albums to get there, there’s no point in doing any more. You should never make any more records, you should just now tour, and that’s it, don’t do records. You’ll become this huge cult band around the world. Although I hated the Grateful Dead, I liked the idea that just they built this world that’d got nothing to do with the passion of the era or the industry. It somehow existed outside, and I saw that as a fantastic thing. I just thought, “This is it, boys” – I wouldn’t have said boys, and sounded as patronising as that, but I felt this is it, this is as good as it’s gonna get.’

However grand and widescreen his vision for his managerial charges, Drummond acknowledges that his romantic ambitions for their careers took precedence over the day-to-day business of handling their affairs. The industry may have let him have his creative run, but in the end its orthodoxies and accounting procedures got the better of him.

‘I fucked it. I fucked it up, I did, with the Bunnymen and The Teardrops. I did worldwide deals, so I didn’t have that position of them going to American companies, so the American companies were never that bothered. We went our separate ways, the Bunnymen got American management – that’s when the kind of joint headlining tour with New Order happened, and they made certain inroads into the States and got that college radio level of whatever.’

In his dealings at the Warners office Drummond had made an ally in the press department, a witty and discursive former journalist with an encyclopaedic knowledge of psychedelia, Mick Houghton. ‘I started working for Warners in ’79. Without it sounding arrogant, I sort of almost invented the modern school of PR, which was just to kind of know what you’re talking about,’ he says. ‘My first month there, Warners licensed Sire which
at the time was [releasing] the second Talking Heads album, second or third Ramones album – nobody at Warners actually saw any potential in those bands. It was unbelievable, someone like Tom Waits – almost to a man I’d say, the whole label was resistant to that music. I think it’s true of journalists then and to a large extent true of journalists now. Journalists don’t understand how the music industry works at all, and I don’t think you do until you become part of it. When I went to work for Warners it was such a shock to me to suddenly find myself working for a corporation where nobody seemed to like music at all. The radio department was about getting on the playlist and getting on
Top of the Pops
and that was the be all and end all of it, and if a record didn’t have, as they would say at the time, legs, they just weren’t interested.’

Stein’s presence at Warners, however, was an antidote to the rest of the company’s indifference. ‘It was kind of weird with Seymour, he had the heavyweight background but at the same time what was remarkable about him was that he just had the extraordinary talent for seeing the potential in bands.’

As much as Drummond and Stein were in business, Drummond was resistant to the epicurean side of Stein, declining Stein’s endless invitations to lunch, dinner and whatever else. He became familiar with Stein’s storyteller persona through the simple act of making deals together. ‘You know, I wasn’t interested in going to restaurants and doing the whole raconteur bit that Seymour can do and is great at. I’m not saying I’m a better person than that, I was just too driven by, you know, making records or what a band could be within the psyche of a generation, all that kind of stuff. But I learnt a heck of a lot from Seymour, a hell of a lot. You couldn’t have conversations with Seymour without learning tons and tons of stuff. And I found him eternally fascinating because his history
that went back to eras of music that I really loved, late Fifties, early Sixties, to telling me about his first job, how he worked the charts, plugging, working for [people at the] Brill Building, you know, all of those things and he was the epitome of that – New York, Jewish, music, wheeling and dealing, the whole thing – and he had an incredible love of music as well as being that clichéd Jewish music business hustler, and making things work.’