Rip It Up and Start Again (7 page)

The same egalitarian idealism that informed the workaday operations of Rough Trade governed its dealings with artists. Contracts were for one record at a time and based around a 50/50 split of the profits between band and label. “We fronted all the money for recording, promotion, whatever,” says Travis. “The artists provided their labor, inspiration, and genius. The fifty/fifty split has since been adopted by countless indie labels—Joy Division at Factory, Depeche Mode at Mute, they were all on that arrangement.”

One advantage to these one-off deals, typically based around verbal agreement and personal trust rather than lawyers and contracts, was their rapid-response nature, so much more suited to the speedy stylistic fluctuations of the postpunk universe. “It meant you could see an amazing band and say ‘let’s make a record’ that very night, and in four weeks, the record’s out,” says Travis. “You could get on with it.” Travis also believes the 50/50, one-record-at-a-time deals helped create a nurturing environment for bands. “It creates the psychological conditions for musicians to do their best work if they are in control but they have a partner who is not weak, who can help them.” In contrast, the major-label system seduced bands with large advances against future royalties, in return for signing away their lives, and then put them under immense pressure to achieve sales. “It doesn’t matter how much ‘creative control’ a band is given,” Travis told
Rolling Stone
. “You’re still indentured. Long-term contracts will put a band in debt from recording and touring costs. Then you have to produce when you’re not ready. You have to write songs when you have nothing to say.” Few bands survive to the sixth or eighth album designated in their contracts.

There was a downside to the 50/50 split, though, according to Nikki Sudden. “You make a lot of money if you sell a lot of records, but if you don’t sell many or any, you don’t get
anything
.” With no advance to cover living expenses, bands were unable to give up their day jobs. Still, they could always work at Rough Trade, as many of the label’s artists did. “Me and Epic both worked in the shop for about a year,” says Sudden. “I got sacked for being rude to the Rasta customers. They would come in and want to hear all the reggae prereleases, each six minutes long, all the way through, and you knew they were never going to buy anything. After a while I got fed up and put everything on for half a second!”

Having the musicians get their hands dirty as sales assistants or packing records up for distribution fit Rough Trade’s philosophy. It had a faintly Maoist air, getting the intelligentsia to labor in the paddy fields. Certainly, Travis liked to think of the musicians less as artists or stars than as cultural workers. He talked of how Rough Trade was neither the record business nor art but a space of cultural production, involving collaboration and mutual support. It was this pragmatic, slightly dowdy vision that gave the label something of a “brown rice” image.

But then Rough Trade weren’t into romanticizing things or preserving the mystique of rock ’n’ roll. They believed in demystification. “People exert control through mystification,” says Travis. “They like to make you think it’s all over your head. Recording engineers can be like that in the studio. I’d got no studio background at all, but I produced ‘Nag Nag Nag’ by Cabaret Voltaire and coproduced records by the Raincoats, Stiff Little Fingers, the Fall. We didn’t really know what we were doing, but at that point in history, you had the confidence to just go ahead and do it.”

Without effective distribution, the do-it-yourself ethos was just shouting into the void. But Travis adamantly opposed the idea of infiltrating the mainstream and signing to majors in order to use their distribution muscle. “Changing things from the inside is nonsense,” he declared. Where were the historical examples of anyone who’d actually done this? Rough Trade’s greatest achievement was organizing the Cartel, an independent distribution network built around an alliance of London-based Rough Trade and Small Wonder and their regional counterparts Probe, Revolver, and Red Rhino. Nationwide distribution for small labels and self-released records held out the possibility for real communication, reaching a scattered audience of like minds. It also meant one had a better chance of recouping costs and carrying on. Unglamorous but absolutely vital, the Cartel network provided the infrastructure for a genuinely alternative culture. Today Travis talks about independent distribution as being “based on a sound political principle—if you control the means of distribution, you have a great deal of power. It was obvious that the channels of culture were being controlled. It made me angry you couldn’t buy decent left-wing literature or the feminist magazine
Spare Rib
in retail chains like WHSmith. So there was a very clear political imperative to build a network of outlets for things we liked.”

“Things we liked” included not just records but fanzines, the print media version of do-it-yourself. “
Sniffin’ Glue
was so important,” says Travis of the pioneering punkzine. “We bought loads off its founder, Mark Perry, and also let him use our office as somewhere to staple it together.” By 1980, Rough Trade received an average of twelve new zines
each week,
and distributed nationwide the ones that passed its rigorous scrutiny for ideological soundness. “Rough Trade would actually tell fanzine editors, ‘We will read your zine and if there’s anything racist or sexist in it, we’ll return it,’” recalls
Jamming
’s Tony Fletcher. There were also unofficial interventions: “I remember getting some returned copies of
Jamming
and someone from Swell Maps had scrawled on it because they disagreed with my review of them! It was a very argumentative culture.”

A few blocks from Rough Trade’s Ladbroke Grove base stood a company called Better Badges, the market leader in New Wave badges (a crucial way of emblazoning your allegiances on your lapel in those heady days). Now the company “became the clearinghouse for zines,” says Fletcher. Better Badges’s owner, an idealistic hippie turned postpunker called Joly, offered fanzines something similar to Rough Trade’s P&D deals, a print-now/pay-later service to help fledgling zines get off the ground. Rough Trade, meanwhile, was becoming more and more businesslike and ambitious, diversifying into music publishing, organizing Rough Trade tour packages, and even talking about starting its own alternative culture magazine.

The idea of the independent label and the DIY movement was so new and exciting then, says Travis, “that people would rush out and buy
anything
that was part of it. This is what people forget. Back then, the records used to
sell
. Nowadays, you’d shift maybe two thousand if you were lucky, but back then anything halfway decent sold from six to ten thousand.” Certain epochal singles—“Warm Leatherette” being a good example—could sell thirty thousand plus. But what really put the label on the map and made the majors sit up and take apprehensive notice was when
Inflammable Material,
the Rough Trade album by Belfast punk band Stiff Little Fingers, went straight onto the U.K.’s national
pop
charts at number fourteen in February 1979.

By then alternative groups had their own target to aim for—the Independent Singles and Albums Charts, conceived by Cherry Red boss Iain McNay at the end of 1979 and initially published by the trade magazine
Record Business
. “Independent” was defined as independently produced, manufactured, marketed, distributed, and retailed. The weekly music papers had published indie charts before, but they’d been based on what was flying over the counter in a single record shop, whereas the
Record Business
charts used sales data from a host of small record stores across the country.

But although the independent charts hugely strengthened the scene’s sense of its own identity, some critiqued them for encouraging bands and labels to aim low, in the process creating a sort of neohippie ghetto. “I don’t believe in dropping out or alternative cultures or any of this nonsense,” Bob Last told
NME
. “I think the New Wave is about dropping
in
, fighting your way in. You’ve got to get in there and struggle.” Accordingly, Last encouraged Fast Product’s four major bands—the Mekons, Gang of Four, the Scars, and the Human League—to sign to the London-based majors at the earliest opportunity. Eventually, he sold the entire Fast Product back catalog to EMI and closed down the label, feeling its “intervention” had been completed.

This question of independence versus infiltration, regionalism versus centralization, was one area where Fast Product and Factory strongly disagreed. Tony Wilson had watched how the first indies in Manchester, New Hormones and Rabid, had capitulated to the capital. He recalls asking Rabid’s Tosh Ryan in the fall of 1977 why they’d let London-based major labels take their biggest artists, Jilted John and John Cooper Clarke. “I can remember him saying, ‘Oh being independent was just a little period we went through of idealism.’ It was as if the only point of indie labels was to exist for a few months so that managers could get their bands signed to majors.” Wilson was determined to resist the centripetal pull of London and build up a power base in Manchester, the city he loved. His fervent pro-provinces stance was echoed by other indie labels throughout Britain, especially those in the North and Scotland. For a period, the independent album chart invariably featured a couple of regional or city-based compilations each week, such as Cardiff’s
Is the War Over?
and Sheffield’s
Bouquet of Steel
.

From style-conscious conceptualists like Fast Product and Factory to the more earnest, businesslike operations like Rough Trade and Cherry Red, the U.K.’s postpunk independents often disagreed about music, packaging, politics, you name it. But for a brief golden age, a five-year stretch from 1977 to 1981, they were all in the same boat. “The thing that united us,” says Daniel Miller, “was that none of us knew what we were doing! We were huge music enthusiasts, though, with a strong idea of what we liked and what we wanted. I had no grounding in business whatsoever. But all of a sudden you realized you could have access to this industry that had always seemed very mysterious. The record industry went from being pretty closed, which it was even during the first wave of punk, to totally open. And that encouraged a lot of people like me and Tony Wilson—not obvious record company people by any means—to get involved and make our dreams come true.”

THE SLITS AND THE POP GROUP
founded their own independent label, Y Records, which went through Rough Trade. But before the two groups joined up to form a kind of postpunk tribe, they both made separate stabs at the infiltrate-from-within strategy. Signed to major labels and releasing debut albums in 1979, the Pop Group and the Slits were regarded as two of the most exciting and innovative bands of postpunk’s first wave.

The genius of the Pop Group lay in the way they were pulled every which way by their passion for black music. They couldn’t settle on just reggae, or just funk, or just jazz, so they went full throttle for all three simultaneously. This identity crisis caused their ultimate downfall, but along the way the Pop Group’s chaotic gigs and flawed but compelling records served as a blazing beacon for countless other bands looking for the way forward.

Funk was one of the things that sustained the future members of the Pop Group during the midseventies prepunk lull. “We were the Bristol Funk Army,” says the group’s singer, Mark Stewart. “We’d go to clubs and dance to heavy bassline imports from America, tracks by B.T. Express, Fatback Band, Ultrafunk. I was fourteen in 1975 but could get into clubs because I was six foot seven.” For U.K. funkateers, clothes were as crucial as the music. “We wore things like brothel creepers, zoot suits, plastic sandals, mohair jumpers,” recalls Stewart. “Later I discovered that in cities all over the U.K. before punk there’d been similar kids into funk and fifties clothes. And most of them got into punk when it arrived.”

As for reggae, the Pop Group assimilated that almost like inhaling the Bristol air. The city had a substantial black population, due in large part to an influx of Caribbean immigrants in the 1950s, but also to the fact that Bristol was one of England’s leading ports for the slave trade in the eighteenth century. Mostly concentrated in the St. Paul’s area, Bristol’s Caribbean population made the city one of the U.K.’s great zones of punk and reggae intermingling. A shabby neighborhood of terraced houses and low-rise apartment blocks, St. Paul’s didn’t really look like a ghetto, but in April 1980 it unleashed one of the most destructive antipolice riots in U.K. history. Stewart and future Pop Group drummer Bruce Smith and bassist Simon Underwood regularly ventured into St. Paul’s to check out the blues parties. “Generally we’d be the only white guys there, but we’d never get any hassle,” says Smith. “Well, maybe I’d get ripped off trying to buy weed, before I got wise!” They also devoured reggae vinyl. “Every Friday when we were fourteen or fifteen, we’d go to this record store Revolver to check out the new reggae prereleases that had just arrived from London by van,” recalls Stewart.

Along with funk and reggae, the young friends began to explore jazz, thrilling to the ferocity of its abstract emotional expressionism, its lofty intellectual edge and cosmic ambition. Undeterred by lack of technique or formal grounding in the music, the Pop Group hurled themselves into improvisation, with Stewart’s howled vocals and Gareth Sager’s sax blasts being the most obviously “free” elements in the maelstrom. “My remembrance of us playing was that it was either really extraordinary or pretty awful,” laughs Smith. “There wasn’t much in between!” The Pop Group worshipped the Beat culture surrounding jazz and poets and writers like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs. Stewart’s original fantasy version of the group was called the Wild Boys, after Burroughs’s novel.

Blue-eyed funkateers, white Rasta ranters, “beatniks of tomorrow,” as they dubbed themselves in one interview—the Pop Group refused to choose a single identity. Bearing impeccably hip references and exhibiting vaulting ambition, the Pop Group arrived on the postpunk scene with perfect timing, just when everyone was scratching their heads and wondering, “Where next?” Their impact on the music press was instantaneous. The Pop Group appeared on the front cover of
NME
in September 1978, before they even had a record out. Their very amorphousness made them a Rorschach blot for critical fantasy, a color-saturated canvas for exploring ideas about “after-punk.” “Older journalists dug us, because they could use us to talk about the stuff they secretly preferred to punk rock—dub, Captain Beefheart, Miles Davis’s early seventies records,” says Stewart.

It didn’t hurt that the Pop Group looked great. Their suits evoked both a timeless, unrock stylishness and a bracing sobriety and seriousness. In interviews, they came across as intellectual firebrands. Early features on the Pop Group typically started with the journalist’s marveling at the group’s erudition and argumentativeness while noting their impressive book and record collections. “We were sixteen, seventeen, staying up all night talking, smoking weed,” recalls Smith. Sparks flew as systems of thought—Wilhelm Reich’s libidinal liberation, Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty, situationism’s revolt against alienation—collided and came into friction. Drunk on ideas, the group dedicated itself to systematically breaking down all assumptions and received ways of thinking. “We started challenging everything right down to the core of personal relationships, the things between the audience and the band,” says Stewart. According to Vivien Goldman, a journalist friend of the band’s who dated Stewart for a while, “The Pop Group had this obsession with being endlessly in the vanguard of finding a new way of doing everything.”

Out of all this turmoil of inspiration and self-questioning emerged a kind of Dionysian protest music, a maelstrom of writhing noise and imagistic words that dissolved the artificial divisions between politics and poetry, lust and spirituality. Stewart saw the Pop Group as part of a grand tradition of politically engaged avant-garde artists, a continuum stretching from the radical salons of the French Revolution, through dadaists and surrealists who were also committed Communists, to 1960s movements like Fluxus and situationism, which saw radical art and political revolution as inseparable. Just as the situationists railed against affluent consumer society’s “poverty of everyday life,” Pop Group songs like “We Are Time” blazed with a rage to live. “Not wanting to just be alive,” says Stewart, “but to rid yourself of all constrictions. We had this romantic idea of going through nihilism, this intense deconditioning process, and emerging on the other side with something really positive.” Comparing the Pop Group to the then little-known syndrome of spontaneous human combustion, Stewart told
ZigZag,
“Our creating music is the result of acute internal pressure.” Fire figured in the Pop Group’s imagination as an ideal state of being, evoking inner-city riots, pagan rituals, the 1960s free jazz of Archie Shepp’s
Fire Music
. One of the band’s best songs, “Thief of Fire,” used the Prometheus myth to talk about the quest for “prohibited knowledge, going into unknown areas.”

The Pop Group’s rise had a wildfire quality. Within a few shows, they became the epicenter of the Bristol postpunk scene. Soon they were opening up for major artists like Patti Smith, Elvis Costello, and the Stranglers, whose singer, Hugh Cornwell, was so infatuated that he produced and financed their demos. In the late spring of ’78 the Pop Group accompanied Pere Ubu, then at the very height of their critical stature, on their debut tour of the U.K. The band began talking to Andrew Lauder, the founder of Radar Records (who put out Ubu’s
Datapanik
EP). A veteran A&R man who’d deftly survived the transition between prepunk progressive music and the New Wave, Lauder had previously signed the Stranglers and Buzzcocks while working at United Artists. Now he was looking for cutting-edge groups for Radar, a quasi-autonomous label that combined an edgy, independent sensibility with all the benefits of major-label distribution.

Released by Radar in March 1979, the Pop Group’s debut single, “She Is Beyond Good and Evil,” was an exhilarating splurge of disco bass, slashing punk-funk rhythm guitar, and deranged dub effects, with Stewart caterwauling lines like “our only defense is together as an army/I’ll hold you like a gun.” Lyrically, says Stewart, the song was “a very young attempt to mix up poetic, existentialist stuff with political yearnings. The idea of unconditional love as a revolutionary force—the way it kind of switches on a light, makes you hope for a better world, gives you this idealism and energy.”

To record “Beyond Good and Evil,” the Pop Group hooked up with Dennis Bovell, who at that point was the only British reggae producer brilliant enough to bear any comparison with the Jamaican greats like Lee Perry and King Tubby. A key figure in the U.K. reggae scene, Bovell had operated the Jah Sufferer Hi Fi Sound System, formed the popular British roots band Matumbi, and pioneered the hugely successful genre of lover’s rock (a homegrown U.K. fusion of reggae and soft American soul that appealed largely to women). If that wasn’t enough, he wrote and produced the backing music for militant poet Linton Kwesi Johnson’s albums while releasing his own LPs, like
Strictly Dub Wize,
under the name Blackbeard. Bovell’s musical scope stretched way beyond reggae, though. He’d played lead guitar in a Hendrix-influenced band called Stonehenge and believed that Jimi had created the first dub track ever in 1967 with “Third Stone from the Sun.”

Bovell’s mix of acid rock wildness and dub wisdom made him the perfect foil for the Pop Group. For “3:38,” the B-side to “Beyond Good and Evil,” he took the A-side’s music and ran it backward, psychedelic-style, then built a new rhythm track for it with Bruce Smith. “That really blew the band away,” Bovell chuckles. Necessity was the mother of invention here. “We’d almost run out of studio time, that’s why I reused the A-side.” Creative
and
cost-efficient, Bovell was the ideal candidate for the not so enviable task of giving the Pop Group’s unruly sound some semblance of cohesion.

Working on their debut album
Y,
Bovell quickly grasped that the rhythm section held the whole band together. “Simon Underwood and Bruce Smith, they were the Sly and Robbie of the postpunk period,
tight,
” says Bovell. “The thing that was
not
together about the Pop Group was Gareth Sager’s and John Waddington’s guitars and Mark’s singing, which would be drifting all across the frame.” Although the sheer funk force of Underwood and Smith makes the up-tempo songs like “We Are Time” physically compelling, elsewhere
Y
veers into texture-saturated abstraction with sound paintings like “Savage Sea” and “Don’t Sell Your Dreams.” Distended with effects and positively varicose with creativity,
Y
garnered a mixed reception. Typically, the faint praise was something along the lines of
NME
’s verdict, “A brave failure. Exciting but exasperating.” Today, it seems a notch more admirable and impressive, a heroic mess, glorious in its overreach.

The Slits started from the same chaotic place as the Pop Group, but unlike the latter, they didn’t initially have a solid rhythm section to anchor the anarchy. Only the faintest subliminal skank indicated the Slits’ punky reggae intentions. Whereas other punk bands talked about not being able to play but were secretly competent, the Slits were genuinely inept. Some people reckon the “true” Slits sound is their early naïve cacophony, the glorious racket of girls struggling with their instruments and vocal cords, impelled forward by sheer glee and gall. Actually, the Slits got better when they got, ah,
better
, picking up some rudimentary instrumental skills and establishing a firmer rhythmic foundation following the departure of original drummer Palmolive, who was unable to provide the reggae-inflected groove the rest of the band wanted. The Slits enlisted a male drummer called Budgie (who would later join Siouxsie and the Banshees) for their classic 1979 debut album
Cut,
on which producer Dennis Bovell also played a crucial role, helping the Slits transform their rampaging racket into a more shapely disorder.

In the beginning, though, the Slits were a feral girl gang, onstage and offstage. Just fifteen years old in 1977, singer Ari Up recalls being “wild and crazy, like an animal let loose, but an innocent little girl with it too.” From her striking image (tangled dreadlocks, underwear worn on the outside of her clothes) to her seemingly presocial antics, Ari Up inspired fear and fascination in equal measure. On one infamous occasion, she urinated onstage. “It wasn’t to shock anyone,” she insists. “I needed to pee. There wasn’t a toilet near. So I pissed onstage—on the side, but everyone in the audience saw it. I just didn’t care.” The singer came from a wealthy German background, but her heiress mother, Nora, was a bohemian and a rock scenester. The family home served as an open house for all kinds of stars, from Yes vocalist Jon Anderson to the Clash’s Joe Strummer. Slits guitarist Viv Albertine attended art school, where she met the Clash’s Mick Jones. Blonde, charismatic, and trailing a host of male punk admirers, Albertine shared a squatted apartment with Keith Levene and played in a short-lived band with him and Sid Vicious called Flowers of Romance. Balefully dark-haired and laconic, bassist Tessa Pollitt came from another all-girl punk group who trumped the Slits with a name—the Castrators—worthy of radical feminist Valerie Solanas, founder of the Society for Cutting Up Men.

A fan of Solanas’s
SCUM Manifesto,
Malcolm McLaren attempted to manage the Slits, seeing them as the female Pistols. Legend has it that his managerial come-on was, “I want to work with you because you’re girls and you play music. I hate music and I hate girls. I thrive on hate.” But instead of thinking up outrageous ideas worthy of Valerie Solanas or Sid Vicious, McLaren’s master plan was wildly sexist and degrading. After attacking the rock industry with the Pistols, he now wanted to infiltrate the disco movement. At first, he tried to get the Slits to sign to the cheesy German disco label Hansa. Then, when Island moved to sign the band and invited McLaren to make a movie around them, he came up with a screenplay that envisioned the Slits as an all-girl rock band that goes to Mexico only to find themselves effectively sold into slavery and ultimately turned into pornodisco stars. The Slits shrewdly extricated themselves from McLaren’s grasp. But they did sign to Island and started working on their debut album with Dennis Bovell in the summer of 1979.