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

healthily and became a focal point for the emerging style. Both Sex Pistols and Clash albums sold in the thousands at Rough Trade, making the shop an unexpected market-leader in a new sound.
    To Andrew Lauder, who had signed the Stranglers, and Dan Loggins at CBS, who had signed the Clash, the pent-up demandfor new music was obvious and punk’s instant commercial success suggested it might have long-term potential. ‘I was very friendly at that time with Dan Loggins,’ says Lauder, ‘and he’d got a Clash album out the week before the Stranglers album, and he rang up. We were discussing chart positions and he said, “Guess where the Clash is?” I think it was twelve or something, the next week I rang up and said, “The Stranglers are number four” and he fell off his seat.’
    Where chart success led, the music business surely followed. ‘The “professional manager” quickly came to the fore,’ says Lauder. ‘Someone who’d previously been involved with something else entirely, bringing some tapes along – “Oh I’ve got this new lot, you’re going to like this one. I know what you like, here’s one for you mate.” It was pretty awful.’
    If Lauder recognised the camel-coat behaviour of Tin Pan Alley negotiating its way through punk, Travis recognised something else. ‘I felt I’d seen it before. We’d seen the MC5 sold out, the corporate marketing game turning rebellion into a commodity. We’d seen the White Panther Movement become a laughing stock very quickly.’ In contrast to the second-generation punks that were making themselves available to the highest bidder, Rough Trade was now becoming a source of new interesting and unclassifiable music.
    ‘Geoff would be the first to have things like Pere Ubu and Devo, which sounded remarkably ahead of their time,’ says Lauder. ‘We’d go in every weekend, leaving with armfuls of records, mainly 7-inch singles.’ Such exotic items, imported from a strange-sounding middle America, were indicative of a shift in how music was being recorded and manufactured.
    Articulate documents reliant on bedroom or rehearsal-room economics started to appear: 7-inch singles, fanzines and posters for ad hoc concerts in weird locations were being introduced intoa tentative new market outside the mainstream. Customers were approaching the Rough Trade counter and asking if they could leave a fanzine or tack a message to the shop’s noticeboard. Within a few months the same customers had become artists and musicians, and were asking if the shop would sell their self-released records. As he surveyed the new kinds of product being brought in, Travis wondered what type of system or infrastructure might support these new energies. ‘In those days, with Gang of Four, there was a lot of talk when they signed to EMI about how they would change the system,’ he says, ‘but all they were really doing was saying, “Please, sir, will you give me five shillings?” Spiral Scratch was the first independent record that people really wanted. We must have ordered thousands of them, and it was that that got us thinking we should become distributors. That’s how that all started.’
    Richard Boon had been friends with Howard Trafford since childhood. ‘When I was in adolescence at school in Leeds with Howard and we were bored, we did a little xeroxed magazine called Bolshy that we’d sell for tuppence,’ he says. ‘The anarchist bookshop obviously took some; we sold some in the folk clubs and stood outside the school gates saying, “You want some of this?” It was a generation waiting to happen … I was an art student at Reading University and Howard was up at Bolton Institute of Technology, where he met Peter McNeish, [and] where they were being not that happy with what they were doing.’
    Trafford and McNeish in Bolton and Boon in Reading, along with, it would seem, half their generation, had their curiosity piqued and their self-belief aroused by the first Sex Pistols