How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (32 page)

T
he disintegration of The Smiths understandably left Travis reeling. It would be some time before the label would start to sign bands that connected again with a wider music
press-reading
audience, never mind achieving the kind of generational consensus afforded by The Smiths. One of the label’s most successful late Eighties signings, the Sundays, felt like a band that had been focus-grouped to try to fill the vacuum left and prove that Rough Trade could still break bands into the Top Forty. Away from the drama of The Smiths’ dissolution there were increasingly rowdy noises off at Collier Street, made by a section of the staff that couldn’t have cared less about the fate of Travis or Rough Trade. An altogether more vibrant if unruly cast of characters had started to congregate at the Malt & Hops at lunchtime; soon they would be working with some of the most invigorating and powerful music produced in the Eighties and, unlike anything that had previously been boxed up and shipped from Rough Trade, the music was American and imbued with the aesthetics of rock music: guitar solos, long hair, volume and raw power.

‘It felt very odd with Collier Street,’ says Liz Naylor, who with her sister Pat was installed on the first floor in the Rough Trade press office. ‘It was Sonic Youth versus The Smiths. We’d spend as much time as possible at the Malt & Hops and basically, at lunchtime, cue Paul Smith.’

‘It was a collection of people broadly from the north,’ says
Smith. ‘Richard Boon would count the hours until the pub opening at eleven and be in there for twelve, and you could drink four pints during lunchtime, which I would do, as would Liz, Pat and everybody and we’d all get really jolly, then we’d go back to work in the afternoon and we’d get stuck in.’

‘I don’t know what cause we thought that we were advancing,’ says Naylor, ‘other than the cause of going to the pub at lunchtime, taking loads of speed and being crazy. Paul was coming down from Nottingham. He didn’t have anywhere to stay in London and slept on the floor in our kitchen. It was mad and free-form. It felt very much like Paul out on his own just going for it – I remember going back to his house in Nottingham with Sonic Youth, he lived on a Shane Meadows-type estate and they were all sleeping on the floor surrounded by their guitars.’

Paul Smith, whose tight curls and fondness for beads gave him the air of a Berkeley radical transported to a Midlands tap room, single-handedly brought the cream of a generation of American bands into the UK and Europe on an incandescent five-year trajectory that would see the groups operate a scorched earth policy, reconfiguring the British guitar underground in a manner that sent shockwaves through their
C86
contemporaries and inspired a new generation of British bands to explore noise, aggression and distortion.

‘Lunchtime at the Malt & Hops was where I learnt the most about pretty much everything,’ he says. ‘Spending time with Claude Bessy – I don’t think you can say his name too many times … Claude Bessy … weird connector …. impossibly comedic French accent … having his first couple of pints, and trying to find the gram of speed that was in one of his pockets but he wasn’t sure which one, but super fucking committed to stuff. Both he and Richard Boon, a fantastically theoretical man who never quite got out there and got all the things done that he
could’ve or should’ve done, were both very generous at passing things on.’

Smith’s route into the world of lunchtimes at the Malt & Hops had been via Cabaret Voltaire with whom he had set up a fledgling video company, DoubleVision. Now the technology was relatively affordable, Smith and Stephen Mallander and Richard Kirk of Voltaire had intended to build on their ideas about DIY multimedia, releasing long-form video cassettes of their like-minded contemporaries. Voltaire took the decision that DoubleVison would never release material by the same artist twice and they would concentrate on artists like the Residents, Chris & Cosey and Clock DVA, who trod a similar multidiscipline anti-rockist line. They soon realised, however, that releasing records as well as videotapes was going to be necessary to keep DoubleVison in business. One of their earliest record releases was
In Limbo
by the queen of Lower East Side confrontation, Lydia Lunch, now a temporary resident in the UK and a fully integrated member of the court of the Bad Seeds, many of whom were fellow Malt & Hops habitués.

‘Lydia said, “I have these recordings which I’ve never done any vocals for.” The two-inch tapes were underneath her bed,’ says Smith. ‘She was like, “I don’t suppose you’d want to put those out?” Lydia went up to Sheffield to do her vocals – terrified the life out of Richard and Mal – and we released it almost immediately.’

The backing tracks for
In Limbo
had been recorded in 1982 and featured in their line-up Thurston Moore and Richard Edison, two members of Sonic Youth, a band formed just as the brutal energy of No Wave was burning itself out and being replaced by a second, more conceptual wave of bands who were as likely to play at installations on the Lower East Side as they were the clubs in lower Manhattan.

‘We gave her enough money for a one-way ticket back to New
York,’ says Smith. ‘She obviously hadn’t been there since the No Wave period more or less, and ran into Thurston and said, “I’ve met this guy. He was able to do this for me, maybe you should send him stuff.” So Thurston sent me about two-thirds of
Bad
Moon Rising
.’

Sonic Youth’s second full-length album,
Bad Moon Rising
took its title from a Creedence song, which, along with its
scarecrow-on
-fire sleeve, signalled a move away from the band’s art space roots towards a deconstruction of the John Carpenter or Stephen King version of a primitive-gothic heartland America. The record left the New York grid for a trip down forbidding back roads. The title of the track ‘Ghost Bitch’ was a reference to the Native American Indian relationship with pioneering settlers. ‘I’m Insane’ and ‘Society Is a Hole,’ both coloured by the burnished open-wound textures of the band’s guitars, turned the record into a raw meditation on the corn belt. The album’s closing track, ‘Death Valley ’69’, a duet with Lunch, referenced the Manson murders. The cult of Charles Manson would become a trope that would spread through the American underground in the Eighties and beyond to the point where Guns N’ Roses would cover one of his songs. In 1985, before Mansonphilia took hold, ‘Death Valley ’69’ was a shock reminder of the unwanted houseguest at the macrobiotic dinner party. The song was a throw-down to the baby boomer settlement, which, in typical me-generation fashion was beginning to navel-gaze at its lost innocence and ideals through such pieces of retro-analysis as
The Big Chill
and
Running on Empty
. The tapes Moore sent to Smith had a depth of texture more akin to cinema than to the scratchy sounds of Manhattan performance spaces.

‘For somebody who’d loved and absorbed a lot of music, it was quite clear to me that this was an actual, living Velvet Underground,’ says Smith. ‘It just hit me incredibly hard
emotionally.’ Convinced of the need to get the record a European release, and with an evangelical zeal that would sustain him until the end of the decade, Smith hustled every contact he had in the hope of finding
Bad Moon Rising
a home.

‘First of all I took it to DoubleVison,’ says Smith. ‘Richard said, “Well, it’s guitars … it’s rock ’n’ roll. We don’t do rock ’n’ roll,” so I trotted round various other labels, pretty much actually every independent label at that point, including Mute, and nobody was interested.’ Met with indifference, Smith resorted to doorstepping the staff at Rough Trade at every opportunity, turning lunchtimes in the Malt & Hops into lobbying sessions on the merits of Sonic Youth. Richard Thomas, another regular at the Malt & Hops (‘It was,’ he says, ‘the nearest I ever had to an office.’) worked with Smith from the start of Blast First. In less than four years Thomas and Smith promoted shows that saw Sonic Youth grow from an audience of 200 to over 5,000, but such a quick trajectory for the band was initially far from certain. ‘Pete Walmsley, who was in charge of label management at Rough Trade, offered him an M&D deal’, says Thomas, ‘to basically shut him up more than anything else.’

‘Peter Walmsley said, “You get the rights, I’ll make the records, let’s talk about something else,”’ says Smith. ‘He always wanted to talk about football. I’m not interested in football but there we go. The people that ran labels were all sports failures, and the people who ran the distribution side of it were all sports interested. We wanted to talk about catalogue numbers and Can out-takes, they all wanted to talk about how Arsenal did or whatever it was.’

Smith’s ambitions consisted of little more than seeing
Bad Moon Rising
released. In his off-the-cuff negotiations he was, however, becoming Sonic Youth’s semi-official representative, manager, booking agent and now their one-man record company – a position that would become more and more draining and
problematic. ‘Walmsley said, “What’s the name of the label?”’ says Smith, ‘and I said, “What label?” and he said, “Your label” … I actually hadn’t thought it through to the point of having a name for the label. I’d always been a bit of a Wyndham Lewis fan: “Oh, Blast First, this is good, this is all about warm winds from America keeping England mild … here’s Sonic Youth making a bit of a racket” … a bit of English irony. But having a record label wasn’t in my plan, well, more than that – I didn’t have a plan.’

As an example of the opportunities Rough Trade still afforded anyone with a degree of enthusiasm and a tape of new music, Smith’s arrangements with Walmsley were among the last of the off-the-street Rough Trade deals. Simon Harper, who as a label manger was negotiating the increasingly difficult complexities of the company’s structure, could sense a wave of enthusiasm building around Smith and his ability to turn lunchtime drinking sessions into strategic meetings for the coming counter-cultural revolution, one that would be soundtracked by the white heat of Blast First; it would be, as Smith christened a label compilation he released four years later,
Nothing Short of Total War
.

‘Paul Smith was a remarkably social man,’ says Harper, ‘and a culture then existed of throwing ideas around in a very social environment, namely the Malt & Hops.’ It may have been pub talk turned into an improvised release schedule, but within three releases Blast First’s relationship with Rough Trade had already faltered. ‘Blast First’s first release or two was through the record company,’ says Smith, ‘and then we got kicked off after the cover of Sonic Youth’s
Flower
offended them.’

The sleeve of Sonic Youth’s
Halloween/Flower
12-inch was a smudged black-and-white photocopy of a topless model in a downward-gazing pose. Alongside the image were the song’s lyrics in handwritten capitals: ‘Support the Power of Woman/Use the Power of Man/Support the Flower of Woman/Use the Word:/
Fuck/The Word is Love’ At the bottom left of the sleeve is a single word, ‘Enticing’. The sleeve was a copy-shop approximation of the kind of sleeves Raymond Pettibon was producing for the SST label in California: illustrations of blank-eyed characters of SoCal suburbia inhabiting empty spaces, both physical and mental, that despite their best efforts, consumerism and sex couldn’t fill. What made sense in the context of the American
underground
, where such signifiers formed part of the bands’ running commentary on their surroundings, had an equal resonance with Sonic Youth’s connections with the Artforum sensibilities of New York galleries. In the context of Collier Street, it was given short shrift, dismissed as either a piece of New Yorker
know-it
-all provocation, or the kind of straightforward exploitative misogynist artwork that belonged on a heavy metal album.

‘I remember passing through big debates about the Sonic Youth
Flower
12-inch,’ says Cerne Canning. ‘“I’m not fucking working that record”, that kind of thing. There was a lot of that which I must admit I quite like, some of it was time-wasting but there other elements, which revealed people’s passion for things. Without being misty-eyed, we live in a blander era. I quite like the fact that people felt strongly about things and felt empowered to kick up a fuss.’

The discussions at Rough Trade were enough to prompt a news story in the
NME
, in which Travis was quoted as saying, ‘It’s not that the naked form is sexist in itself, it just
looks
like another sexist piece of shit. We don’t want to be a party to their muddleheadedness.’

Smith relished the air of provocation starting to form around Blast First and the confrontational sound of its releases, and sensed that Travis, in such an act of censorship, was now being left behind; having just received a tape of Sonic Youth’s next album,
Evol
, Smith did, however, need to quickly find a way of
maintaining enough good will to ensure both its release and Blast First’s momentum. With zero budget for anything resembling promotion or marketing, Smith used such episodes as the
Halloween/Flower
fracas to his and Blast First’s advantage. In deciding to work with Liz Naylor and her sister Pat, Smith found the perfect foils to maximise the label’s reputation for the ornery and unconventional. The Naylors were wholly unconvinced of the need to respect the orthodoxies of the music press. They also disliked nearly every journalist they had to work with. Blast First nevertheless received excellent coverage.

‘The opportunity to put out the records was one thing,’ says Smith. ‘The opportunity for either of the Naylors to be involved, due to their loathing of young male journalists and their sexual orientation and everything else, just created a whole other way of operating.’

Smith also built a power base among the more disenfranchised members of staff in the Collier Street warehouse who were far more at home with the Blast First work ethic of inebriation, amphetamines and loud confrontational music than with the target-led structure of the critical path.