How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (33 page)

‘One of the secrets of Blast First’s success, certainly Sonic Youth’s success, was the fact that I invited all the people that packed and unpacked the records,’ says Smith. ‘Those were the guys who would stay an extra hour to ship your records out so all those people were on the guest list. When Sonic Youth played at ULU, which is 800-capacity, there was a guest list of 270. The warehouse couldn’t get into a fucking Woodentops gig for love nor money, not that they’d necessarily want to go, but nonetheless …’

As Rough Trade grew more professional an us-and-them culture was entrenched within the building and Smith was becoming something of a union leader for the warehouse staff. It would prove a temporary rally. The professionalism that he
railed against would never take hold at Collier Street but in the glass-fronted offices of Manhattan, Smith would come face to face with the realities of the American entertainment business.

‘It sounds incredibly simple-minded because it was incredibly simple-minded’, he says, ‘but I thought, I don’t really care if the third accountant or something can’t get in with his six faxes to see Sonic Youth, although later on I would learn the lesson that that would be a good thing to have on your guest list.’

‘Paul could handle a guest list remarkably well,’ says Thomas, who promoted the ULU show. ‘He was excellent at building
contacts
and the Rough Trade shop had become incredibly influential again. Word of mouth often started to sell things out there.’

The Rough Trade shop off Portobello Road, which had felt increasingly isolated from its former sponsor and partner, the Rough Trade record company, was finding its feet and a new audience for the kind of music Blast First was representing in the UK. Having wrestled ownership of the shop from Travis and Scott five years earlier, Pete Donne, Jude Crigton and Nigel House had seen the shop rediscover its primary focus as a nexus for
non-mainstream
music, becoming an alternative retail space, selling releases outside both the Top Forty and the clearing house amateurism of the bottom half of
NME
indie charts.

‘From our point of view the American post-hardcore things going on, the SST stuff, that was what we were really interested in,’ says Pete Donne. ‘We did some great deals buying direct from SST and Hüsker Dü. They were all our kind of music, for the three of us. We really liked that West Coast stuff much more than The Smiths, none of us were Smiths fans.’

‘Most of Rough Trade ran on speed,’ says Smith. ‘I think I only once mistakenly opened the photocopier and put some paper in without looking, to hear about twenty people go, “Oh my God,” and me go, “What, what? – oh, sorry guys.” I think I went out
and bought them another gram. That’s how that how place ran, downstairs ran on drugs and alcohol, upstairs ran on camomile tea and some idea that they were doing something.’

While Smith’s metabolism ensured he was sufficiently wired without the need for anything other than a regular pint rush (‘God knows what it was like walking anywhere with Americans then,’ he says. ‘I’d always be two blocks ahead thinking, where are they, we’re losing valuable pints time here.’) He was still winging his every move with no base or structure other than whatever chair and telephone he could quickly occupy within Collier Street, bobbing between offices, quickly pulling strings and favours when the powers that be were looking the other way.

‘Because I didn’t have an office in London, or anywhere else for that matter, I used to squat, either in production, which was Richard Boon, or just lean over and make a few more phone calls on Pat and Liz’s desks. People forget about how you couldn’t communicate at that point – telex was a popular item – people would come and say, “Oh, look, the telex machine.” I’d do that and one day I was given a phone, saying it was Daniel Miller for me. I thought, oh, Daniel Miller, electronicy man.’

*

Having left the Depeche Mode producer’s chair behind, Miller was interested in expanding Mute’s operations to include other labels. Alongside Blast First, Miller would add Rhythm King and Product Inc. to the Mute portfolio. Intrigued by a Head of David single Smith had released, Miller asked him over to the newly purchased Harrow Road offices which Miller had bought with the proceeds of Depeche Mode and Yazoo but which were run on a make-do-and-mend budget.

‘I had to trot over to fucking west London to go and see him,’ says Smith, ‘and I met the Mute Beauties, as we knew them at that point – he had all these girls working for him. They weren’t
like the 4AD super elegant girls, they were heavy-duty party girls who were looking at their watches, waiting for Dan to leave so they could rip it up. Their desks were all made out of doors on trestles as opposed to 4AD where everything had obviously been designed by Ben Kelly and money had been spent on furnishing.’

Miller felt that the Herzog-style tunnel vision he had applied to
Black Celebration
had left him behind the times. ‘I wanted to work with people who were starting to put out records that I didn’t quite understand,’ he says, ‘not to recapture anything, as Mute was doing fine, but more to work with people I found intriguing, and with music that I couldn’t initially work out.’

Having fallen out with Rough Trade over
Halloween/Flower
, Smith spent over three months in protracted conversation with Miller while struggling to raise the finance for
Evol
. ‘Dan was saying, “Well, I can’t A&R any more people and I’d like to expand,’ says Smith, ‘and I want labels that don’t in any way clash with what Mute is, but at the same time are run by people who think they know what they’re doing.’

Agreeing a standard fifty-fifty profit split and attending to Blast First’s modest running costs, Miller invited Smith into Harrow Road where Blast First were given a small office. Smith duly asked Liz Naylor to join him in what he called the Blast First ‘cupboard’, where they mapped out their release schedule in an environment they found increasingly comfortable compared to the uneasy bureaucracy of Collier Street. ‘As Collier Street got more professional, those of us who still had legs to run ran,’ says Naylor. ‘They were releasing Shelleyan Orphan,
*
which was
really disgusting, and Richard was just sitting there in the middle of it looking like he always looks … bewildered. I came back from a six-month drug bender and Paul was already in situ in Harrow Road. Someone had just started at Rhythm King down the corridor and they’d ordered a cab. Daniel walks in the door and this woman goes, “Oh, you must be the cabbie” – so he had the sort of air of a cabbie about him. Daniel was nice: he wasn’t intimidating in that kind of Cambridge way that Geoff had, and it was ’86, in the middle of jangle which I hated.’

Miller, having given a platform to three new labels, was fully aware of the risks he was taking in letting such a disparate group into his operations, part of which involved factions arising in Harrow Road, as each of the labels competed over ownership of the
zeitgeist
. Smith and Naylor were unsurprisingly highly adept at being bloody-minded and bellicose. ‘Blast First became the Mute awkward squad,’ say Miller. ‘It irritated me occasionally, but I put up with it. There was definitely hedonism everywhere but I felt like there had to be one person around that wasn’t off their heads.’

Given a free hand by Miller, Smith was starting to feel like he’d landed on his feet. ‘We were not interested in integrating with anybody at that point,’ he says. ‘What I wanted was people I could argue with passionately, at length, in the pub ideally, about what we were doing and why we were doing it.’

The momentum of the label’s release schedule and its reputation for uncompromising volume, speed and aggression, along with the fact it was a UK company specialising in American music, gave it a cachet and outsider image that made it almost instantly iconic. John Peel, who booked all of the label’s bands for sessions whenever they were in the UK, in an unguarded moment of effusiveness declared Blast First the most important label of the age.

‘Days would go by without sleep on the incredibleness of the whole thing,’ says Smith. ‘There was always one more fax, one more phone call … I was completely driven, and I actually didn’t realise how fucked-up driven I was until it stopped.
Bad Moon
was like a starting gun and I was like, “Whoa, fuck, OK … nobody else around” …’

Alongside Sonic Youth Smith signed a handful of British bands but he concentrated on American bands who soon gained the status of visiting dignitaries when they made semi-regular tours into the UK. As well as London, Manchester and Glasgow, the Blast First bands played ‘rust belt’ cities like Nottingham, Newport and Bradford, where the music found a heightened connection with the audience.

Smith’s signings were a by-product of the intensive networking undertaken by Sonic Youth, who, having signed to the West Coast SST, had broken away from New York and were sharing
cross-country
tours with a peer group of like-minded bands on a zero budget. Moore in particular had an inquisitive enthusiasm that made him something of a spokesperson or statesman, regularly encouraging and boosting many of his contemporaries. As well as a charismatic front person he was also one of the finest A&R men of his generation, and Smith was made aware of his energies and ambassadorial instincts instantly.

‘One of the first things Thurston said to me – in fact I think it was the first thing he said to me when I met them at Heathrow – was, “Oh no, you’re just like us,”’ says Smith. ‘They had been hoping a businessman would meet them because he’d brought this list of twenty-two bands that had to be signed immediately. Thurston was like, “You’ve got to put this out, you’ve got to put this out.” … The ones that I met that I liked then I put their records out, the ones that I met I didn’t like, well then, I didn’t.’

*

The first contact Smith made with anyone on Moore’s list was Steve Albini, whose band Big Black was a rendering of the sound of power tools in human form. ‘I ended up in Chicago with Sonic Youth,’ says Smith. ‘They were playing at the Metro and there was a xerox poster of Steve in the box office saying, “Do not let this man in under any circumstance,” and I remember thinking, that’s funny I wonder why, and then an hour later walking a couple of blocks down to some Mexican restaurant with Steve and Sonic Youth and people on the other side of the street yelling, “Fuck you, Albini, fuck you,” and screaming at him from the street and I was thinking, this is an interesting little man, what’s his thing?’

Formed by Albini while still at college, Big Black used modified guitars and a drum machine to create a brutal, electrifying primitivism, the aural equivalent of their songs’ subject matter: abattoirs, serial killers, alcoholism and paedophilia, one loud confrontational song after another taking the listener into the heart of a highly dysfunctional Midwest. Albini, a journalism major, would never feel the need to defend his motives but if pushed would explain he was holding a mirror to society, using a similar reflex to Genesis P-Orridge’s defence/thesis of Throbbing Gristle’s material. In addition to the punch-to-the gut dynamics of Big Black’s sound and its lyrical content, Albini enjoyed getting his point across in the records’ sleeves. The
Headache
EP came in a ‘body bag’ plastic cover that sheltered the unsuspecting record shop customer from its picture sleeve – a pathologist’s forensic photograph of a head split in two. The band’s first release, the
Lungs
EP, had been accompanied by whatever detritus was to hand, the sleeve contained such bonus material as blood-stained tissue, torn-out magazine photos and used contraceptives.

It was through P-Orridge that Big Black had come to the attention of Stevo of Some Bizzare, whom Albini had considered signing with when Smith met him in Chicago. He had gone as
far as organising a meeting in London. ‘They were going to see Stevo,’ says Smith, ‘and they had some contacts and I went, “Oh, I’m not going to be in my flat. You can have the keys to my flat and stay there and look for the deal,” and I came back the day that they were leaving and they were like, “We don’t have a deal but we’ve left you copies of the record, if you can think of anybody else that could put them out or something.” They left to go to the airport and I played the record and went, “I could do this.” All of Blast First was that, these happy accidents.’

In August 1986, just two weeks after the
C86
week at the ICA, Big Black made their British debut. The drum-machine-led assault of the band on a British audience, which saw Albini shake his wire frame into contortions when he sang about psychoses and sadism as the trio lined up in a row playing their guitars in anger, could not have been in a more marked contrast to the performances of the previous month at the ICA. Big Black played at an incredible volume, the kick from the drum machine reverberated in the audience’s chests giving their air of confrontation a physical dimension. As Smith had noted in Chicago, even in the tightly knit mutualism of the independent network in the States, Albini was a divisive figure. Either dismissed as sensationalist and tasteless or embraced as a fiercely loyal operator with his own distinct moral compass, he split opinion easily. Liz Naylor was on hand to liaise with the band in Smith’s absence and found herself in the former camp.

‘It was so loud and so sweaty when they came over and I thought, wow, pretty impressive,’ she says, ‘and then – I don’t know why, I’m not schooled in feminism particularly – but Albini came over and I remember going for a drink with him and he was teetotal, and he was really fucking nerdy and pervy; he was really provocative and unnecessary. He was just this sort of virgin geek.’

Albini’s reputation for no-compromise and not suffering fools gladly was met by Naylor’s own rigorous indignation. Sensing a bully at work she flatly refused to deal with the band. ‘I just thought he was an idiot and I then just thought, I’m really not fucking doing this. I remember that being an issue between me and Paul. It wrangled everything up.’