How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 Read Free

joined by a younger generation of backroom entrepreneurs: Steve Beckett, Richard Russell, and Laurence Bell. This book, with an additional cast of bands, artists, co-conspirators , miscreants, drug dealers, DJs and other visionary chancers and con men, is their story.
    Remembering his contemporaries, Daniel Miller reflects on their similarities: ‘If you look at all those people – we were all roughly the same age, in our mid-twenties, when we started, which meant we were old enough to remember the whole ’68 thing. We were all involved with the protest movement in some way or other. We were all young, but we were also old militant hippie types turned on by punk.’ A lack of music industry experience was a benefit not a hindrance. ‘Everybody was in the same boat – OK, Geoff had owned a shop for a little bit, Martin Mills had owned a shop for a little bit and Tony had had a TV show. But nobody had a clue about running a record company and that was the best thing about it … and I try to know as little about running a record company today.’
    The labels this generation started: Factory, Rough Trade, Mute, 4AD, Beggars Banquet and Creation, would trade on an ethos and identity no brand consultant would now dare dream of. Their releases enabled a fierce loyalty from their fans, resulting in a confidence on the part of the consumer to buy whatever the label released. As well as the music recorded, the distinctive logos and typefaces found on releases by Factory, Mute and 4AD were signposts to a secret knowledge. The sleeves celebrated the sense of artefact inherent in a 12-inch record cover and stretched its design possibilities to an almost ecstatic breaking point.
    Factory, in particular, under the guidance of graphic designer Peter Saville, who favoured mixed media card and die-cut or fold-out designs, revolutionised the concept of what a record sleeve could be.
    Between them Miller, McGee and Wilson, along with Travis, Watts-Russell, Mills and the labels that followed their lead, discovered and released music by artists who represent the DNA of popular culture: Orange Juice, The Smiths, Depeche Mode, Joy Division, The Fall, New Order, Cabaret Voltaire, Cocteau Twins, Happy Mondays, Sonic Youth, Primal Scream, Aphex Twin, Teenage Fanclub, Pixies, the Strokes, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, My Bloody Valentine, Autechre, White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand, Antony and the Johnsons, and Arctic Monkeys to name but a handful. The above bands barely scratch the surface of the independent catalogue but they represent the spine, if not the centrifugal force, of any record collection, etched as they are into the musical consciousness of generations. The independent catalogue has provided the soundtrack to self-discovery, teenage kicks and every other type of hedonism; it can be viewed almost as a contemporary art collection, but functions just as easily as a backdrop to everyday life. Above all, it’s the sound of musicians and artists being not only allowed, but actively encouraged, to do whatever the hell they want and damn the consequences.
    In today’s climate of demograph-dictated consumerism and the corporate desire to access the ‘reputation economy’, it is ironic that the independent music industry was birthed, and chaotically nurtured, in a scruffy anonymous shop in down at heel, if not downright knackered, Ladbroke Grove. In February 1976 Geoff Travis opened a record shop at 202 Kensington Park Road, Ladbroke Grove, London. The cheap rent and the premises’ former role as a head shop reinforced the area’s reputation as an ashtray for the burnt-out remnants of laissez-faire hippie lifestyle experimentation. In the back room Travis would set up a desk and, phone in hand, start fielding calls and making decisions that fell well beyond the remit of buying and selling records. Within a year of its opening, any surface not occupied by the shopfront activities of 202 Kensington Park Road was used to start organising and