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

negotiating a new kind of ad hoc business.
    ‘Our motivation was really to take control of our own destiny’, he says, ‘by making our own records. It was all about not being interested in joining existing systems, but just getting on with doing your art – and then there being an independent structure that you could tap into which gave you access to the market, without having to engage with all the normal routes. You know, going to Sony records saying, “Please, sir, will you give me five shillings?” – and that’s what independence is, it’s about building structures outside of the mainstream, structures that can help you infiltrate the mainstream. We knew that, and we knew that someone somewhere else was making decisions about what you had access to.’
    The name Rough Trade was delightfully apposite. It suggested a below-the-counter approach to commerce and a willingness to deal in black-market goods. In its appropriation of the slang term for male prostitution, Rough Trade carried a slyly knowing air of antagonism and wilfulness. The shop, as well as its name, caught the mood of the times and proved a success. Set up as a co-operative , it ran more or less as a collective with no real business plan other than to try to sell records that the handful of staff liked to anyone who was interested. Rough Trade quickly gained a reputation for both the depth of its stock and the knowledge of its staff. Rather than concentrate within a specialised genre it traded on the quality and diversity of the records it carried. Everyone who walked through the shop’s doors was energised by either the sweetly harsh buzz of the first punk releases pumping out of Rough Trade’s in-store sound system or the dubplate pre-releases the shop was importing from Jamaica. Or in many cases by both.
    New forms of music were attempted, often by people with only a passing interest, let alone ability, in their particular medium. Musical dexterity or accomplishment were blunt instruments compared to a speeding mind flickering with a newly discovered articulacy. The shop had created a rapidly growing microclimate that was now expanding at speed via the newly fused circuit board of punk. It sold interesting music in a way that no one else did. Increasingly its stock was being bought directly from the artists themselves while the shop could bypass the usual channels of record companies, their sales reps and their distribution divisions.
    James Endeacott, then a teenager, would go on, as A&R for Rough Trade, to help sign both the Strokes and the Libertines. He remembers the impetus abroad in the early and mid-Eighties. ‘No one knew what a manager was, no one knew what an agent was – we didn’t want to talk about that, we wanted to talk about records. I didn’t know when our records were coming out and I didn’t really care. I didn’t know the business – I didn’t want to know – now it’s all bands know. Now it’s, “Here’s this band who’ve done half a gig and they’ve got a lawyer.” It was never a career path to me, it was just what you did.’
    Travis realised that as well as selling records full of new ideas in the shop, he was getting requests to stock these releases from other retail outlets across the UK. However small, a burgeoning alternative to the mainstream Top Forty market was developing. Rough Trade was in a position to represent this music outside London and 202 Kensington Park Road would have to expand its horizons from retail to distribution. It would have to start reaching out to sell these records and would do so quite easily. And the records kept landing on the Rough Trade shop doormat, and they kept being dropped off at the counter. The recordings they contained highlighted strange new forms of creativity, artfully, at times almost gnostically, packaged. Along with the urgent need to create, these discs revealed a heavy degree of purpose and consideration. As well as starting bands these people had decided