How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (56 page)

Mike Smith was a contemporary of Blur in age and had signed the band to a publishing deal while at MCA Music. He remained part of the band’s inner sanctum throughout their career, a sounding-board for their ideas and part of the hands-on team that helped differentiate the band from its contemporaries. ‘I think it was always a great bugbear of Andy Ross that he was never seen as being independent, because he was tied into EMI records,’ he says. ‘Unlike so many A&R men, who just sit there and nod and agree with bands, Food would go in and really roll their sleeves up and try and shape and influence what the band did. That doesn’t happen that much. I think there’s a very real possibility that if Blur had signed to another label they might not have succeeded like they did.’

As well as bigger recording budgets, multiformatted releases, radio play and blanket media coverage, there was another factor
that separated the class of Britpop ’95 from the class of
C86
. ‘For one thing,’ says Smith, ‘you had bands that wanted to sell a million records and I don’t know that that mentality was ever there in the Eighties.’ Whatever its ideas about celebrating the British way of life, or investigating a national identity via the tropes of dog racing and suburbia, Britpop was intensely parochial.

Many of the bands with which Britpop artists liked to think they had an affinity – The Smiths, New Order, the Bunnymen – had all sold healthily and made a significant cultural impact in America. Sony prioritised Oasis in America, where the band achieved sales in the millions and Blur, on their fifth album, a deliberately American-sounding record, went gold. Elastica, who were signed to Geffen, also achieved reasonable sales in America. In contrast to their successes at home, no other Britpop bands achieved meaningful sales outside the UK.

Few things ring as hollow as empty triumphalism, but Britpop, in its cocaine-fuelled self-confidence, was certain of its world-dominating prospects. To seasoned observers who had experienced the reality of how British bands fared abroad, what played well at home in the music weeklies was often a fallacy once the international sales figures had been accounted. Dave Harper, a veteran of music-press junkets to the US, had accompanied a succession of British bands and he looked on with interest as a new generation of bands attempted to re-educate the colonies in the former glories of the standard flag-and-music-hall irony.

‘Tom Sheehan used to be the main man photographer of
Melody Maker
,’ says Harper. ‘The number of times he’d flown to New York, to take a picture, usually of the Charlatans, and he’d take out of his bag a Union Jack and say, “Right, we’ll go to the Staten Island ferry, you stand there, so we’ve got the New York skyline in the background, hold the fucking Union Jack up and the headline will be … (Fill in name of band here) … take
America” … The same story, time and time again. None of them ever took America. How far have you got? New York City? You haven’t taken over America at all, have you?’

Despite the major labels’ best efforts, Britpop failed to find a significant audience outside the UK. As a result the domestic market became a hothouse, as ultracompetitive bands jockeyed to outbid one another for a higher chart placing and a band’s midweek sales figures began to determine their fate at the hands of the music weeklies. ‘
NME
in particular really did get obsessed with the midweeks,’ says Harper. ‘They suddenly discovered there was such a thing as the midweek charts. “What’s your midweek?” Top Ten gets you a cover, Top Twenty not on the cover, lead album review, not lead album review. They got obsessed with sales figures.’

For two years Britpop became the orthodoxy and bands that would have once been the preserve of early evening radio were celebrated in the mainstream media and backed with the kind of major-label campaigns usually reserved for George Michael. Such a heavily marketed and sales-driven genre needed success in more than one territory to justify its expenditure. Britpop’s cycle of midweek Top Tens was a false economy and proved, inevitably, short-lived.

‘Record companies had these financial targets and projections and quarter-yearly things to achieve,’ says Harper. ‘They always go, “Album one sold x, so in the third quarter, album two came to double x and album three will do triple y in quarter four.” You sit there with more of a
zeitgeist
-frame on, and want to say, “There’s absolutely no reason in the world why album two will sell double album one, let alone album three. More pertinently, album two was shit, so the mugs who bought it are not going to buy album three in a million years.” Sleeper are the classic example … massive hoo-ha, big budgets, bigger videos, more
expensive production … you might as well just hold a gun to your head … this is not going to work … it’s absurd … full-page ads, blah, blah, blah … it comes out, sells two copies, band gets dropped and decide, “The music industry’s unfair”?’

The music press continued to champion Britpop and its second-and third-division bands were rotated as cover stars while their releases were marketed into the Top Twenty. ‘It’s quite a simple sort of relationship,’ says Harper. ‘They’re selling records so we can sell more newspapers on the back of them selling records; in fact, we can make them sell more records. It became self-fulfilling madness which then sort of blew up in everybody’s face.’

‘In 1996 I walked into work every week and I’d have a band in the Top Twenty,’ says Smith. ‘I began to appreciate what it feels like to be in a band. It just feels, whatever I do, I can’t stop being successful. It was a really weird, dangerous time. In that rush, an awful lot of mediocrity gets signed up, and there’s nothing wrong with mediocrity getting signed, that inevitably happens. What’s scary is when mediocrity gets half a million pounds of marketing money behind it – gets rammed down everyone’s throat – and by ’97 people were getting really sick of having rubbish marketed at them very aggressively.’

What had started as a revision of the Kinks and the Small Faces and the kind of British music that had seemed forgotten in 1992 had degenerated into the Benny Hill parody of the Country House video and the mannered and unconvincing virility of the New Lad.

‘Everybody was really fucked up,’ says Smith, ‘because everyone had had way too much success, way too young, loads of disposable cash. None of us had any real responsibilities. Everyone had just gone out and bought paintings and armchairs. I woke up one morning and just went, “Oh God, this is all shit.
I may have an Eames lampshade but my life is completely meaningless. I felt completely aimless at that time and it was a horrible time, everyone was really not very nice.’

*

Away from Britpop’s mockneyisms and fry-ups, the independent sector had become a small marginal facet of the music industry. Hundreds of thousands of units were being sold and distributed independently, nearly all of which were on dance labels. The most financially successful was Ministry of Sound, which operated as a conglomerate selling a lifestyle brand for the weekend clubber, a PWL for the rave nation.

Any guitar music other than the major chord vignettes in the charts was a minority concern. At the start of the decade, the Rough Trade shop had once again become an under-
the-radar
locus for bands wanting to self-release angular and noisy experiments. ‘It kind of evolved in exactly the same way that the first Rough Trade label had,’ says Pete Donne, one of the shop’s three partners. ‘People were coming into the shop asking to leave sale-or-return 7-inches. On the verge of that Camden scene, there was a rebirth of that DIY ethic to an extent: instead of just sending these people John Peel’s address, it was “Why don’t we try making one ourselves?”’

The Rough Trade shop once again became a record label, taking its name from compressing the store’s post code W11 IJA, into Wiiija (pronounced Ouija), where the Rough Trade ethos of self-expression and investigation was rekindled on a much smaller scale. Wiiija was run by Gary Walker, a sales assistant in the shop who, at twenty-two, was already a veteran of the Blast First and Camden Lurch scenes and was putting all his efforts into two of Wiiija’s newest signings, Huggy Bear and Cornershop.

Huggy Bear were aligned with the Pacific Northwest’s Riot Grrrl movement. A constantly evolving network of fanzines, promoters
and bands, Riot Grrrl is often defined as feminist punk rock. It was a much more nuanced – and much more exciting – force than such a reductionist interpretation implies. It was a movement that made the most sense in the States, where restrictive licensing laws, the inaccessibility of mainstream media and an existing underground infrastructure all allowed a new self-determined network to function. The independent American punk scene had a residual blue-collar machismo, a context in which the confrontational energy of Riot Grrrl flourished.

‘Part of what the Riot Grrrl impetus was didn’t really exist here,’ says Walker. ‘If you looked vaguely eighteen you could get into a gig. Here, there were girls playing in bands. Whereas, in America, mainstream culture is so oppressive, here mainstream culture absorbs new ideas so quickly.’

Mainstream culture tried to absorb Huggy Bear in the form of an appearance on
The Word
TV show, which included the band intervening during what they considered a sexist feature on the show. A small-scale media furore followed, including a
Melody Maker
cover feature, but the band resisted being co-opted by music-press hype.

Huggy Bear functioned better in the autonomous environment of the Peel show, and their record releases, one of which, the single ‘Her Jazz’, was as powerful and immediate as some of the slogans they wrote on their arms. Such was the scrutiny of the band and their motives that Walker eventually stopped going out in Camden. He was constantly asked why he had signed a band that ‘couldn’t play’, and the band themselves were often accosted and provoked. In the overheated theatre of the music weeklies, any kind of movement needs to be simplified down into its basic tenets. Features were run asking, ‘Are You a Riot Grrrl?’, a question often answered with the unlikeliest of answers. Huggy Bear’s refusal to participate in the process led them to be
dismissed as Polyannas with hair slides, or dilettanteish theorists who hadn’t thought things through.

‘Huggy Bear supported Blur,’ says Walker, ‘and Cornershop supported Blur a bunch of times. There were a couple of gigs where they were
Sieg Heil
ed by idiots in the audience and I was coming to the realisation just how small the audience actually was for what Wiiija was doing.’

Huggy Bear came to the attention of Liz Naylor, who after years of disinterest in music had started a label, Cat Call, in order to release records associated with Riot Grrrl. Its first release was
Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah/Our Troubled Youth
, a split album between Huggy Bear and Olympia’s Bikini Kill. ‘Bikini Kill came and stayed in my flat,’ she says. ‘They stayed there for a month or so, just hanging out, being American. They didn’t quite understand England very well – they were a bit like, “Why can’t we do
all-ladies
shows in people’s basements?” It was like, “Nobody has a fucking basement in England, we all live in tiny spaces that we can’t afford. It’s not full of rich kids that go, ‘Heh! Ladies-only show.’” They were a bit kind of like punk rock, but my punk rock was the Nightingales in a pub.’

The co-headline tour Bikini Kill and Huggy Bear undertook was a cathartic and often fractious set of dates. Many in the audience had experienced Riot Grrrl only as a music-press phenomenon and were unsure how to react to the bands’ performances. In a sympathetic city like Glasgow, the concert was an empowering night of thrilling rock ’n’ roll. In less ’zine-literate towns the shows often disintegrated into mêlées of thrown beer and accusations of ignorance from the stage.
*
‘Those shows were amazing,’ says
Naylor. ‘I’m quite proud of the chaos. There were riots, it was fantastic. I was in the middle of a fight thinking, this is fantastic, this is what I wanted all along. Steve Albini would never get stuck in, he’d be worried about the cost of the microphone.’ The tour was the last mainstream flickering of Riot Grrrl in the UK but its impact reverberated and continues to reverberate and grow, particularly in the digital age.

In a mark of its impact and cultural value, Kathleen Hanna donated her archive of ’zines and other Riot Grrrl material to the New York University Special Collection Library. ‘It all ended really really bad,’ says Naylor, ‘and I’m not really bothered about it ending badly. These things should. They really understood something about indie, though, Huggy Bear. Kathleen’s a kind of diva for a generation. What’s great about her is, she stops things. She has a good instinct for ending things.’

For Walker, the experience of representing Huggy Bear had been exhausting but enlightening. ‘When it ended Niki, Chris and Jo didn’t form other bands’, he says. ‘They went off and did childcare work. Niki works in Holloway women’s prison and so in that sense they did talk the talk. It was all very all or nothing. And then a commercial version of it came along, what I’d call the upper-middle-class version of it, bands like Sleeper and Echobelly.’

*

Walker and Huggy Bear generated sufficient media interest for Wiiija, still a fledgling label run from the back of a record shop, to be courted by other record companies. Martin Mills gave Walker a deal within the Beggars Group where Wiiija joined the next generation of labels, the most successful of which, XL, via its band, The Prodigy, was superseding 4AD as the Beggars Group’s most valued imprint.

‘I never particularly liked Britpop to be honest,’ says Mills.
‘It felt like the next kind of major label, homogenised and normalised music, and it just wasn’t particularly interesting. Cornershop and Prodigy were operating in much more exciting territory.’ The Prodigy’s single ‘Firestarter’ became a worldwide hit, taking the group and its label away from its breakbeat roots and into the mainstream.

XL had originally started as an offshoot of City Beat in the late Eighties, a label that was run out of Groove Records in Soho. Groove was as totemic a destination for London’s B Boys and B Girls, searching for import Def Jam releases, as Rough Trade had been for DIY singles in the late Seventies. City Beat was run by Tim Palmer, whose mother owned Groove and who started XL to cover the rave scene.