Perhaps inevitably, the more the majors took their signings in one direction the more the indies reacted in the opposite direction, with the resulting polarization defining and reinforcing the
boundaries of creativity. Yet even among the indies there was a sharp divide between groups whose motivation appeared to be the articulation of socio-political statements and others for whom a
catchy hook was a greater priority. There were also two different types of indie label. Until the late seventies, successful indies, like Virgin and Island Records, were supported by funding and
distribution deals with the majors. Independent record companies that also had their own distribution networks enjoyed a fringe existence. The company that did most to transform the prospects of
this latter category was Rough Trade, and in doing so it helped broaden the market for indie music generally. When Rough Trade started (initially as a shop with a mail-order business in
London’s then tatty Notting Hill) in 1976, there were about a dozen independent labels in existence. Four years later, there were hundreds. It seemed a genuinely alternative approach to the
established ‘music business’ was under way.
Rough Trade was co-founded by Geoff Travis, a Cambridge graduate who had spent time on his uncle’s kibbutz in Israel. Travis ensured that what was technically a private company was
nevertheless run like a collective, with democratic decision-making and equal pay for all employees. Even some of the aspirant band members staved off poverty by working on the shop floor and, when
the time came for them to release a record, they benefited from the support, advice and mail-order service that the shop provided to get their cheaply produced recordings to a wider audience. In
this they were also helped by the open-minded enthusiasm and eclectic tastes of the BBC broadcaster John Peel, whose show on Radio 1 offered those lucky enough to catch his ear the prospect of
nationwide attention. The agreements signed after Travis launched the Rough Trade label in 1978 typically involved a fifty-fifty share of the profits with the bands (after manufacture, distribution
and promotion costs) and, again unlike the majors, left ownership of the master tapes with the bands rather than the record company. What was more, instead of the indentured labour-like conditions
that the majors offered, whereby signatories would be paid large advances in return
for being locked into multi-album deals which effectively committed them to meet
commercial as much as artistic imperatives, Travis was generally happy to limit his bands’ liability to one album at a time and gave them the freedom to follow their own creative path without
interference.
The obvious problem with this model was that while notional royalties were potentially considerably better than the usual 10–11 per cent (minus costs) offered by the majors, groups got
smaller advances for single-album contracts than for multi-album deals, and inevitably some acts concluded that a little creative compromise was a small price to pay for long-term financial
security. Stiff Little Fingers, Cabaret Voltaire and Scritti Politti were among those for whom Rough Trade proved merely a calling card to bigger labels. Their choice was between ‘selling
out’ completely to the major music corporations or switching to indie labels that collaborated with the majors on distribution and other expensively capitalist aspects of the trade. Foremost
among the more wordly indies was Island Records. Its founder, Chris Blackwell, having enjoyed an affluent adolescence split between Jamaica and Harrow School, had started off his extraordinary
enterprise roughing it as an importer of ska music, before branching out in the seventies with prog-rock bands as well as Cat Stevens and, most lucratively of all, Bob Marley and the Wailers
– a signing that all but catapulted reggae from the embrace of the Afro-Caribbean community into the British mass market. Blackwell’s eclectic taste and ability to invest in winners was
validated again in 1980 when he signed U2, an Irish rock group that had been turned down by every label it had approached and would proceed to take three years before justifying Island’s
faith with the release of
War
. Thereafter, U2 became one of the most successful bands of the eighties and beyond. Technically, Blackwell’s company was ill named because, far from being
an isolated outcrop, its reach extended to partnerships with a range of other labels. It was Island that provided the financial support for Trevor Horn to launch ZTT, having already effectively
rescued another seminal indie label, Stiff Records. In 1983, Stiff repaid the compliment: with Island having made the injudicious decision to expand into the film-making industry and in need of
money, Stiff’s co-founder, Dave Robinson, offered funds and Island acquired half of Stiff’s back catalogue while Robinson became Island’s managing director.
Stiff’s rise from trawling through unpromising pub-rock acts to collaboration with a company of Island’s standing was built upon success first with Ian Dury and then, crucially,
through its signing of Madness, the band responsible for more top-twenty chart hits than any other in the eighties. Madness consisted of seven lads, scarcely out of adolescence, from north London,
who enjoyed larking around and playing the music they liked. For them, the formative influence was Jamaican ska, which 2-Tone acts like The Specials had imbued with punk-like fury to create the
perfect staccato tunes to which
their (mostly white and male) following could bullishly stomp around. Indeed, getting feet moving at live performances was what the music was
primarily about, not spending months in the recording studio to craft an over-mastered album that was unplayable on a cramped, beer-stained stage.
9
The additional element came with the accompanying fashion, which harked back to the pre-reggae/pre-hippie 1960s ‘rude-boy’ look of Jamaican youths and to the British mods: sharp,
tailored suits, thin ties, braces, white socks, sunglasses and even pork-pie hats. It was a revivalist style given a timely boost in 1979 by the success of Paul Weller’s sharply dressed group
The Jam and the release of the film version of
Quadrophenia
, set amid the seaside scuffles of Mods and Rockers fourteen years earlier.
Madness took many of 2-Tone’s elements with them when they signed to Stiff Records in 1979, but before long their music had evolved beyond its ska roots into an uncategorizable and
consequently timeless pop, whose appeal crossed the generation gap and bridged the deep divides separating the period’s rival tribes. Perhaps their own definition of it as the ‘nutty
sound’ could not easily be bettered. Whereas The Specials were racially mixed, rooted in the economic and social problems of the Midlands and committed to writing serious, urgently political
songs like ‘Ghost Town’,
EN25
Madness (though appearing at several centre-left benef t gigs) conveyed all the apolitical, carefree good
cheer of seven white lads from the greasy spoon and tatty pub end of Camden Town enjoying a good knees-up. The songwriting duties were shared among them – although, while the public quickly
recognized the lead vocalist, Suggs (real name Graham McPherson), as the front man, it was the Hornsey art college drop-out Mike Barson, on keyboards, who was the more prolific composer. There was
a hint of 1930s music hall about Madness, seeking out laughs by dancing in a silly and un-cool way, even performing a signature ‘train’ shuffle which resembled the conga for the
non-spatially aware. Such exuberance was retained for their low-budget but inventive videos, from the flying saxophonist in ‘Baggy Trousers’ to the group donning pith helmets and Eighth
Army uniforms for ‘Night Boat to Cairo’. Old-fashioned and nostalgic at a time when the cultural running was being made by the electro-pop futurists, Madness’s emphatic
Englishness and unapologetic love of the simple pleasures and mores of working-class culture were equally the antithesis of the operatic pop baroque of the narcissistic, image-conscious New
Romantics.
Yet while some of the band’s lyrics might just as easily have been croaked out by the then popular pub-piano act Chas ’n’ Dave, only the most superficial listener could have
mistaken Madness for being asinine. True, there was none of the overt, almost preachy, socio-political commentary of The
Specials’ Jerry Dammers (son of a vicar) or The
Jam’s Paul Weller (son of a taxi driver). Suggs (abandoned as a toddler by his drug-addict father, left school with two O-levels) sang wry, sometimes funny and often poignant observations
about the struggles of ordinary life, self-effacingly explaining: ‘You should write songs about things you understand.’
10
‘Our
House’ was a celebration of living in a terrace, exalting if not exactly the property-owning democracy then at least the traditional notion of an Englishman’s home as his castle, while
‘Baggy Trousers’ offered a nostalgic reflection on the missed opportunities of schooldays. Not all the songs came wrapped in such cosy conservatism. ‘Embarrassment’ was
about the social ostracism of having a mixed-race child. ‘Cardiac Arrest’ described an overworked, white-collar professional having a heart attack on his morning commute. ‘House
of Fun’ – which reached number one in the charts – was obliquely about a blushing youth attempting to buy his first packet of condoms. The BBC, which two years later would ban
Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Relax’ because of its sexual connotations, showed no such qualms about promoting a double-entendre-laden song about prophylactics, though it
effectively dropped ‘Cardiac Arrest’ from its playlist out of sensitivity towards the Radio 1 DJ Peter Powell, who had recently lost a relative.
11
These were songs and subjects in the tradition of Ray Davies of The Kinks or even Flanders and Swann. And with them, between 1979 and 1985, Madness had twenty consecutive top-twenty hits;
indeed, of the seven years over which the band existed, four of them were spent with a single in the charts.
EN26
Yet, remarkable though this level of
consistency was, it was not the nutty boys of Camden Town but four Mancunians in a traditional guitar and drum four-piece who secured the period’s most enduring critical acclaim. At its most
hyperbolic, this led to The Smiths being spoken of in the same breath as The Beatles. Although there were some comparisons to be made between the respective song-writing partnerships of Lennon and
McCartney and Morrissey and Marr, it was a difficult analogy to sustain. While The Beatles were an international phenomenon, The Smiths, despite tours to the United States, were primarily for
domestic consumption: a British band speaking to British adolescents. Musically, they were not innovators, and while guitar bands of the next decade like Oasis cited them as an influence, their
legacy produced few noteworthy imitators. Although they thought of themselves as essentially a traditional ‘singles’ band, they never remotely equalled Madness’s success with the
format. Despite recording over seventy songs and releasing eighteen of them as singles during a career of less than five years, no Smiths’ single climbed higher than number ten in the charts,
nor did they produce a song that came to define their age. Rather,
The Smiths’ appeal was demonstrated by the success of their four studio albums, which reached,
respectively, numbers two, one, two and two in the album charts between February 1984 and August 1987.
More than any of their contemporaries, it was The Smiths who epitomized and helped prop up the indie music business – as was evident from the sector’s troubled fortunes after the
group eventually walked out on it. Rough Trade had been close to bankruptcy when in 1983 The Smiths’ twenty-year-old guitarist and song-writer, Johnny Marr, approached Geoff Travis with a
demo tape. Travis’s offer of a £22,000 advance stretched to the limit the sums he was prepared to commit to new acts, but it proved sufficient. Though the one-year-old band was already
attracting interest from other A&R men, their decision to sign with Rough Trade was a clear vote of confidence in the ability of a supposedly non-commercial label to propel the four Mancunians
to the top – where, with remarkable self-confidence, they already believed they belonged. And thanks to the ensuing album sales, they proceeded to help keep Rough Trade afloat at a time when
a host of unsuccessful signings had risked its future. It was a salvation for which many other independent labels – including Factory Records – were grateful, given their own dependence
on Rough Trade distribution.
Of course, to speak of The Smiths’ significance purely in business terms is to miss their point. Johnny Marr was an admirer of the song-crafting skills of Leiber and Stoller, and the chord
changes and complexity of his compositions returned rock to a period before its subjugation to the primitive impulses of punk. That The Smiths broadened the parameters of rock music’s message
was largely the work of the band’s singer, front man and lyricist, Morrissey. Preferring to be known only by his surname, Steven Patrick Morrissey was an unemployed writer of such
under-appreciated tomes as
Exit Smiling
(a digest of Hollywood’s also-rans) when Marr first approached him to join his band. As Marr reflected five years later: ‘On the face of
it we wanted to ditch everything that people superficially think is rock ’n’ roll – leather trousers and long hair and drugs – but the most important aspect of rock
’n’ roll, the gang mentality, with something exclusive to say and the arrogance, was our forte and still is.’
12
This credo
forced Marr to suffer for his art, as he later admitted: ‘All through that time what I wanted to talk about was clothes, football and smoking pot. I felt I had to keep that side away in a
sense because it wasn’t what the group was about.’
13
The discipline was less of a struggle for the bookish loner Morrissey, whose very
un-rock-’n’-roll stage persona involved sporting a rockabilly quiff and NHS glasses, throwing gladioli at the crowd and breaking into the sort of falsetto warble that was wholly at odds
with what was expected from northern guitar bands.
The doctrine of Morrissey and Marr rejected the overbearing posturing of
traditional rock groups no less than the pretentious art-college posing of the synth-pop duos and
New Romantic dandies. Calling their band The Smiths was a conscious declaration of ordinariness, and they were even reluctant to accompany their singles with videos – though they eventually
relented, and even called upon the directorial talents of Derek Jarman, video never became a core component of their promotion. They disarmed the testosterone-charged rebelliousness of rock with
Morrissey’s reflective lyrics about the unheroic loneliness and isolation of adolescence. This individualism countered rock’s presumption that youth stood proudly united behind one side
of society’s great generational dividing line. ‘A child of punk with all the rage and enmity turned inwards,’ Morrissey ensured, in one critic’s assessment, that
‘where their predecessors celebrated fun, danger, passion and excitement, The Smiths were about despair, disgust, boredom and, at their most proactive, panic’.
14
Such expressions of inadequacy and resignation were a startling retort to rock’s two decades of glorifying sex, licence and gratification. Despite concerted
attempts by journalists to label him as homosexual, Morrissey maintained that he was an asexual celibate. Influenced by northern, female-oriented, ‘kitchen-sink’ dramas like Shelagh
Delaney’s
A Taste of Honey
, he was the Alan Bennett of pop.