How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (11 page)

All the while, the smiling fresh-faced guitar bands in jumpers taking up residence on
Top of the Pops
were starting to get on Collins’s nerves. ‘I was quite bitter and twisted about it,’ says Collins, ‘especially Haircut 100. I used to get quite furious but they would always make a much better commercial job of it than Orange Juice ever managed to.’

Accompanied by a suspiciously box-fresh-looking assemblage of such Orange Juice signifiers as Aran jumpers, Gretsch guitars, Breton tops and checked shirts, Haircut 100 took the Orange Juice funkiness into Essex soul boy territory, revealing a highly proficient musicianship and willingness to play the game: in Haircut 100 videos the viewer was only ever a frame or two away from some scantily clad female accessory.

‘With Haircut 100’, says Ross, ‘it was right in our faces, seeing them coming out straight on to
Top of the Pops
, played on the radio all the time; that was what Orange Juice had always been seeking, mainstream pop success.’ Orange Juice did finally get the opportunity to cross over with ‘Rip It Up’, a genuine hit single reaching no. 3 in the charts. When the band were duly invited into the
Top of the Pops
studio to perform during the single’s four-week residency in the Top Ten, they treated the enterprise with their customary sense of professionalism. Ross recalls, ‘It was amazing, we’d been desperate to get on
Top of the Pops
for two years. Then once [we’d had] our first appearance, we were really excited, then two weeks later we were already pretty bored and we got in trouble for mucking about.’

After ‘Rip It Up’ Orange Juice produced the rather hamstrung mini LP,
Texas Fever
. Although sympathetically produced by Dennis Bovell, it sounded, by Orange Juice’s standards, dislocated and brooding, or as Collins puts it ‘an unconvincing attempt to be weird’.

The follow-up full-length album,
The Orange Juice
, arrived
when Polydor had just about run out of patience with Collins, who, having grown equally frustrated with the label, was determined to have some fun playing Polydor at its own game. ‘I marched into the office and said, “I want television advertising,” which they never did, only for massive groups. They laughed me off and I retorted, “Well, if you won’t pay for it, I will.”’

The video for the band’s penultimate single had been shot by Derek Jarman, featuring an ad hoc cast of punk femmes fatales, Patti Paladin and Jayne County, the bassist from Amazulu, and Maxwell’s neighbours’ children. Shot in Maxwell’s house in Willesden, it was Orange Juice at their most waspishly playful make-do-and-mend best.

‘The person who produced the video with Derek was Sarah Radcliffe, who became a very famous film producer,’ says Maxwell. ‘I phoned her up, asking, “How should I go about getting TV advertising?” and she goes, “Well, I’ll do it.” She just took it on, brilliant, and they did it for nothing. We got the ad made and I phoned up Channel 4 and go, “Hi, I’m just nobody and how do I go about getting an ad on the telly?” and they go, “Come for lunch.” Channel 4 was very young then and Channel 4 advertising was handled by the various independent people.’

As a final act of playful, knowing subterfuge, the television ad for Orange Juice’s final album was a masterstroke. Collins and Manyika, holding a large salmon, which they had bought from Harrods, look straight to camera and deliver their promotional message. Collins starts the ad by saying, ‘Hello viewers, this is to announce our new record
The Orange Juice
.’ Without missing a beat Manyika picks up the theme, ‘Which includes the flop singles “What Presence” and “Lean Period”.’ Along the bottom of the screen, instead of the usual message of ‘available at the following stores’, the Orange Juice sales pitch, ‘flop flop flop’, passes elegantly by.

From the start, says Ross, ‘The aim with Edwyn and Alan was always to have a hit, an independent hit. I don’t know what record you could say was the first independent record really in the charts. You’d get weird reggae records in the charts but after us came Blue Monday and The Smiths.’ But Orange Juice as a band had ceased to function.

Back in Glasgow the impact Postcard had made was sustaining an influence beyond Orange Juice’s contemporaries in the charts as a younger generation of teenagers were now hyped up on guitars and smart DIY vinyl.

‘By the time we were doing things in Glasgow,’ says Stephen McRobbie, whose group the Pastels were among the first wave of Glaswegians to pick up on Orange Juice’s deconstruction of what an independently made pop single might mean, ‘Orange Juice was a London-based group. Postcard and Orange Juice was inspiring for us; the bands in our situation, like Strawberry Switchblade, the Pastels, Primal Scream and the Jesus and Mary Chain, could exist because of them, but, really, in a way we made our own scene rather than joining in with one.’

The legacy of Postcard would ebb and flow before reaching its first zenith in 1986. But the Postcard agenda of well-informed DIY pop-modernism had been immediately understood in its home town of Glasgow.
*
‘I think a lot of Glasgow music was very subject to our city and maybe slightly more open-minded than other things in Glasgow,’ says McRobbie. ‘In Glasgow David Bowie and the Velvet Underground were enormously influential by the time punk rock had spread out. I remember going to see
an Orange Juice and Fire Engines show and thinking that it had a really amazing level of intensity.’

While the blue-eyed soul of Hue and Cry and Wet Wet Wet would proclaim its antecedents in Orange Juice’s
listener-friendliness
, this was merely using birthplace to its full advantage. ‘A lot of the bands in Glasgow in the Eighties were incredibly careerist, stampeding over each other to get to the treasure chest,’ says McRobbie ‘and although Orange Juice had a high level of ambition, they seemed like something else.’

Horne’s influence was pervasive. The nascent Pastels had one Brian Superstar, formerly of
Swankers
and Alan Horne’s flat, as a rhythm guitarist. Jim and William Reid, two brothers from East Kilbride who had formed a band called the Jesus and Mary Chain, had forlornly sent a demo tape to Horne hoping he might pick up on their shared love of the Velvet Underground’s wall of noise. In Birmingham, the lead singer of a mysterious new band called Felt, who used only his first name, Lawrence, had managed to engage Horne in a correspondence about a demo he had sent Postcard. Horne, though less dismissive than usual, had critiqued the Felt tape as being too like the Velvet Underground’s
Loaded
(and not, perhaps, enough like the Velvet Underground’s eponymous third album).

Another teenager in thrall to Postcard was Nick Currie, an Edinburgh student whose band the Happy Family had tried to get the label interested. ‘Josef K happened to split up the week that I’d handed Malcolm Ross a demo tape,’ he says. ‘I was at their last gig in Edinburgh and I asked him to pass it on to Alan Horne, but he never did because the whole thing had imploded by that point. I met Alan once, very briefly on the street, he was just this legendary figure when I started.’

And the legend has grown ever since. In the eighteen months it lasted, Postcard and Orange Juice, Horne and Collins,
had managed to start a bedroom pop revolution that would eventually scale the pinnacles of the charts. Postcard created a new way of thinking about guitar music that would ultimately change the soundtrack to British daily life.

With the exception of restarting Postcard briefly in the early Nineties, Horne has been largely quiet since. He is known to take afternoon tea in the faded Victorian splendour of Glasgow’s Western Baths Club in the West End, just a stone’s throw from the flat in West Princes Street where Postcard began, one
well-appointed
Glasgow institution playing host to the razor-sharp mind that created another. If Horne is an enigma whose lasting legacy is a legendary, and legendarily flawed, record label, then that, one assumes, is exactly the way he likes it. 

N
ick Currie may have missed out on working with Alan Horne but his band soon found themselves working with another newly formed label. In tone, design and musical ethos, it could not have been further removed from Postcard: 4AD.

‘I worked with Ivo from ’81 to ’82 making an LP with my group the Happy Family on 4AD,’ says Currie. ‘We first met him in the Beggars shop on Hogarth Road, and he looked faintly disappointed when he clapped eyes on us. We were these rather gawky, very young-looking idiots. Even then, with Ivo there was a sense of this refined style, he was living in this rather grim suburban British house in Acton, and Ivo had a whole floor all painted lilac. There were orchids, birds in cages and he had a fantastic record collection.’ In 4AD Ivo Watts-Russell would, with this refined sense of style, create a label whose musical and visual identity was as distinct as his piercingly good taste, his thin frame and his handsome, aquiline features.

‘He was a great host,’ says Currie. ‘He’d obviously put up the Birthday Party and all sorts of people who would crash in his spare bedroom and he’d play records by John Cale and Tim Buckley, things I’d never heard before.’

‘I grew up on a farm, youngest of eight, in rural Lancashire, says Watts-Russell. ‘Jimi Hendrix on
Top of the Pops
– that and Pink Floyd’s
Piper at the Gates of Dawn
made me realise that that’s what music could be. That was my club. My relationship to music was very, very personal the way I responded to it on my
own, and in isolation, and that’s what I felt 4AD became’

As a teenager Watts-Russell’s tastes were informed by listening to John Peel’s
Perfumed Garden
and
Top Gear
programmes, on a transistor radio under his bedclothes, bringing the sounds of Can and Bridget St John to a countryside childhood. ‘Without John Peel none of us would have had a shot,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘He was my professor. I was kicked out of school but it didn’t matter – it gave me more time to concentrate on what proved to be my education and my passion.’

After being expelled from school and working through a variety of record-store jobs, by his early twenties Watts-Russell was managing the Earls Court branch of the Beggars Banquet chain of independent record shops that looped around London. Started by Martin Mills and Nick Austin, the Beggars shops, like Rock On and Rough Trade before them, and countless others to follow, set up a record label of their own.

‘Earls Court is a strange place,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘and it was open till ten or eleven at night. So at night time there’d be tourists, but it quickly got a reputation that there was a record label there – but the music they were putting out wasn’t that good.’

The early releases on Beggars Banquet lacked a convincing or cohesive musical style. However, the label’s releases, as disparate as the suburban Bowie pop psychodrama of Tubeway Army to the punk by numbers of the Lurkers, sold healthily in a market gasping for product. Tubeway Army managed a staggering half a million sales, all coordinated from the upstairs room of the Earl’s Court branch of Beggars. Tubeway Army’s success was an early indication of Mills’s capabilities. An Oxford graduate in PPE, Mills would steadily and methodically become the backbone of the independent sector. Combining a quick-witted shrewdness with a deep love of music, in the late Seventies Mills was, like other storeowners, indulging his passion by releasing records. 

‘It surprised us when we put out our first record,’ says Mills, ‘in that we sold ten or fifteen thousand just like that. In the early days of punk there was so little available that whatever you put out, people bought and even a few years later in the early days of 4AD there was a thirst for, and a scarcity of, music like that.’

Behind the counter in Earls Court, Watts-Russell noticed the steady queue of hopeful bands waiting for the right moment to drop off their demo cassettes growing bigger. A self-released 7-inch single placed alongside the pile of tapes caught his attention. ‘Modern English came in and we heard a couple of songs they put out themselves. The next thing I know the Beggars owners, Nick Austin and Martin Mills, were approaching me saying, “Why don’t you start a label?”, but indicative to that, they gave me a contract, which was just absurd.’

Already, before he had even really begun, the orthodoxies of the industry perplexed Watts-Russell. Mills, while operating as an independent, was in no way interested in the amateurish largesse and faux mutualism of the kind of fifty-fifty deals offered by Rough Trade, Factory and Mute.

‘It reached a peak’, says Watts-Russell, ‘when I sat in with Rema Rema and Beggars were signing their publishing for an EP. That’s all it was going to be, one record. And here was this document that covered a lifetime of publishing. It crystallised so many things for me. It became clear from then on we were going to be doing deals on our own terms and leave the Beggars way of doing things behind.’

Mills recognised that Watts-Russell was able to fulfil some of the goals that had already been superseded by Beggars’
breakaway
success. On the back of Tubeway Army’s commercial breakthrough, Mills had had to sign a distribution deal with Warner Brothers, which, while ensuring that Beggars didn’t suffer from Rough Trade’s regular headaches in reaching the
wider market, meant Mills was putting all his efforts into keeping up with the Warners release schedule.

‘At the point when 4AD started,’ says Mills, ‘Beggars was being hugely successful with Tubeway Army, and we were only four people so it was pretty difficult not to get completely overwhelmed by having three albums in the Top Twenty at the same time, by the same artist, which was unimaginably huge. Whilst that was great, we longed for what we’d lost in lots of ways, which was doing interesting new smaller things as well.’

As well as being sensitive to what he perceived as Beggars’ traditional music biz sharp practice, Watts-Russell was
increasingly
aware of his surroundings; Beggars Banquet acts may have had residencies in the Top Ten, but according to his more nuanced criteria the label and shop lacked identity.

‘Rough Trade was cool and Beggars wasn’t,’ he says. ‘I spent x number of years of trying to get out of the shadow of the infrastructure Beggars had, because I didn’t want to be associated with the stuff they were putting out. Which was great, because it fanned the flames of being bloody-minded,
single-minded
, all of those things I was often accused of.’ Taking up Mills’s offer to start a label, Watts-Russell and his behind-
the-counter
Beggars colleague Peter Kent, settled on the name Axis, quickly pressing four singles, only to be told that another Axis records already existed. Rechristened 4AD their label, devoid of anything as prosaic as the word ‘Records’, or any words at all, would fit perfectly with the aesthetics Watts-Russell would begin to develop. 4AD derived from a flyer which had been printed to promote the Axis releases, centring on some rather awkward wordplay and an early attempt at Eighties design minimalism: 

However, Watts-Russell and Kent quickly realised they had conflicting ideas for their new imprint; the third single planned for Axis, ‘Dark Entries’ by Bauhaus, sold so well the band and Kent felt they had already outgrown a nascent start-up like Axis/4AD.

‘It was summed up by Bauhaus,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘Pete and I learnt we had different ambitions. When we met Bauhaus, they played “Telegram Sam” and there was no way they would record it, but by 1980 not only had they recorded it but they’d put it out as the A-side to a single on Beggars. I was serious enough and passionate enough to know I didn’t want anything to go from 4AD to Beggars. Bauhaus were the first and last band to make that move.’

None of this was lost on Martin Mills, who was happy to see 4AD flourish on its own terms. ‘The idea was that it would be a feeder label for Beggars Banquet but it became pretty clear, immediately after Bauhaus, that 4AD was developing its own identity and was going to be more than a feeder label and fairly soon they developed along parallel paths.’

A relationship developed which meant Mills was a background presence offering advice and informal consultation to 4AD, bringing his astute readings of the technical aspects of putting out records to bear, while Watts-Russell could start building a creative hothouse in the image of his own, highly developed sensibilities.

‘Later on, even to the peak of our independence,’ says
Watts-Russell
, ‘when we were far more solvent and successful than the Beggars label, we still used their accountants. I never wanted to
employ anybody, never mind accountants. We were very lucky as a company not to have to worry about that side of things and that’s where Martin was just fantastic – he never influenced me at 4AD but he was always there.’

Now that he was operating solely on his own terms,
Watts-Russell
was free to start signing. The first artists that drew his attention were the expat Australian blues maelstrom, the Birthday Party. Fronted by Nick Cave they had arrived in London with the hellfire determination of landing a record deal, although their attempts at sparking interest were floundering a little. ‘They’d been to see Daniel Miller,’ says Watts-Russell, ‘who had got them to open for DAF. I saw them at the Moonlight where Mick Harvey was playing a Farfisa. No one in the club liked them. I went to see them again at the Rock Garden and told Mick I really liked that song, “The Friend Catcher”. He said, “We got a recording of that. Do you want to put it out?” Just like that. It was all exciting. 4AD was just me at this point.’

For a sole trader still finding his way around releasing records a year into 4AD’s lifespan Watts-Russell, to his great surprise, had his first taste of transatlantic crossover success. The second Modern English album,
After The Snow
was achieving breakaway sales thanks to the inclusion of one of its tracks, ‘I Melt with You’, in a movie soundtrack.

‘The second Modern English album was our first platinum album,’ he says. ‘“I Melt with You” was in the first Nicolas Cage film
Valley Girl
; the soundtrack was a million-selling album in the USA. “I Melt with You”, the track, is in the top 500
most-played
tracks on the radio. They were hugely successful without having a hit. People were fired at Warner Brothers because they didn’t get out their Top Forty chequebooks at the right time to translate that into the colossal hit that it should have been.’

‘I Melt with You’ was an early example of the polished new
wave track that would cross over from John Hughes’s iconic run of coming-of-age movies in Eighties America.
Valley Girl
was directed by Martha Coolidge and, in its tale of star-crossed lovers from different sides of the Reaganomics tracks, was a precursor to the Hughes template. Setting a precedent for movie tie-in tracks like Psychedelic Furs’ ‘Pretty in Pink’ and Simple Minds’ ‘Don’t You Forget about Me’, ‘I Melt with You’ was a hook-laden rush of lustful teenage anxiety. Unlike the singles used in the John Hughes soundtracks, the video for ‘I Melt with You’ lacked any of
Valley Girl
’s footage, denying the track the benefit of the emerging marketing tool of the MTV age, synergy. The track reached only no. 70 in the
Billboard
chart. Despite all of this, 4AD had a six-figure-selling album on their hands. For
Watts-Russell
, still operating the label from behind the counter of the Beggars shop, the experience was bewildering.

The combination of the ineptitude of Warner Brothers in missing an open goal and the realisation that discreet levels of payola and insider trading still permeated the mechanics of Top Forty America meant that the success of ‘I Melt with You’ left a nasty taste in the mouth. Everything Watts-Russell distrusted about the music business – sloppy work, sharp practice and a wholesale lack of attention to detail – had given him his first hit.

‘That experience put me off licensing stuff to America and record companies in general for many, many years,’ he says. ‘I never even wanted to feel like I had a record company. From working in a record shop, you’d see the reps from places like Phonogram – they were like shoe salesmen, they knew nothing and cared nothing for music. We sold half a million albums; it culminated in the band playing a matinee performance and teenage girls throwing underwear and cuddly toys at Modern English. Quite extraordinary. Then they’d return to England to play at the Venue in New Cross if they could.’ 

Much to Watts-Russell’s annoyance, 4AD was starting to gather a reputation, via the Bauhaus and Birthday Party catalogues that continued to sell in great numbers, for black-clad cheekboned art-house records that fed the High Street underground
phenomenon
of Goth. One of 4AD’s next releases couldn’t have been further from the stereotype: an unsettling hybrid of a
singer-songwriter
album and a collage of soundscapes that might colour an Industrial album: Matt Johnson’s
Burning Blue Soul
. ‘That was our fifth album,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘The first time I met Matt he was more interested in the football, so we got on really well; he’d played me this tape that had been produced by Graham and Bruce from Wire and that’s what we put out.’

Mixing some early examples of sampling with a twelve-string acoustic and discordant rhythmic textures,
Burning Blue Soul
had been pieced together by Johnson, a tape op, using dead studio time. The album’s cover, featuring a Thirteenth Floor Elevators-style psychedelic eye, was a fitting metaphor for the music – jarring and intoxicating, it inhabited its own private sphere.

Releases like
Burning Blue Soul
ensured 4AD was developing a roster of distinct and individual pedigree, but it was
Watts-Russell’s
next signing that would fix the label’s identity and aesthetic: the Cocteau Twins. ‘To this day I remember hearing their music for the very first time,’ says Watts-Russell. ‘I’d driven to Spaceward Studios, where you watched them erase the masters at the end of the session, all kind of depressing. I was driving back, stuck the tape in and remember really enjoying this Siouxsie and the Banshees-esque distorted guitar where you could hear someone clearly sort of singing over the top.’