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

review in the NME in February 1976. ‘The Neil Spencer review is fundamental,’ says Boon, ‘because there was a feeling around and it seemed to crystallise it.’
    Beginning with the words, ‘Hurry up they’re having an orgy onstage’, the review was certain to catch some teenage attention. The review concluded with a description of a chair hitting a PA and a quote from a member of the group declaring, ‘Actually, we’re not into music we’re into chaos.’ This was incentive enough for Boon, Trafford and McNeish to investigate further and visit the source. ‘Peter and Howard came down from Bolton to stay with me in Reading and we went to McLaren and Vivienne’s shop Sex. Malcolm said, “Oh, Sex Pistols are doing Welwyn Garden City tonight and somewhere else tomorrow.” We just went and talked to them and they were very excited by the fact we’d come from up north. It was very energising and very exciting stuff.’
    The surnames McNeish and Trafford became Shelley and Devoto and their band, Buzzcocks, was formed in order to support the Sex Pistols, whom they had invited to play at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in June. Such was the success of the concert that they invited them for a second performance a month later. By arranging and promoting these two Sex Pistols performances, Boon and the Buzzcocks ensured that Manchester was feeling, along with that summer’s stifling heat wave, the motivational shockwave of punk. In the weeks after the concerts the Buzzcocks found themselves at a loose end and assumed that their temporary moment in the spotlight had reached its natural conclusion. Still motivated by the experience of the Sex Pistols concerts they decided to take the unusual step of making their own record, a four-song EP, Spiral Scratch. ‘Spiral Scratch coincided with Howard having had enough,’ says Boon. ‘Howard was thinking he really ought to go back to college. We thought, “Well, we need to make a record” – for no other reason than to make a document.’
    Once Boon had made a few phone calls he found a local engineer, Martin Hannett, who was willing to make the recording. Although still young, Hannett was already a veteranof the more whole-food end of the Manchester music business. ‘Martin and his then partner, Susannah, were the last generation of Manchester bands that had some hippie, collectivist idea,’ says Boon. ‘They were trying to run a little booking agency, in this very sad little tiny room with the phones actually not ringing.’
    Hannett was credited on the sleeve of Spiral Scratch as Martin Zero, a name he briefly took in response to witnessing the Sex Pistols live. His interest in the first wave of punk was brief, as he had found its recorded documents one-dimensional and too willingly adherent to the industry’s standard practice. ‘I was running an office called Music Force,’ he recalled, ‘and anyone who was any kind of musician used to come up there eventually, ’cause they’d need to rent a PA. I went to the second Free Trade Hall gig, in June. I was really looking forward to the first Pistols record, and when I got it home I thought, oh dear, 180 overdubbed rhythm guitars. It isn’t the end of the universe, as we know it, it’s just another record.’
    Boon’s choice of Hannett as a producer was made out of necessity rather than any awareness of his gifts for producing. ‘We just thought, he knows what he’s doing, he can run that fader,’ says Boon. ‘This is all before he got his toys.’ Hannett’s alchemical relationship with the mixing desk was still in its infancy. Rather than inhabiting the depth of field of his later work, the four tracks Buzzcocks laid down on Spiral Scratch have an audio vérité that convey the creep of boredom with a celebration of bad nervous energy.
    ‘That’s what they sounded like,’ said Hannett. ‘It’s a document. Mr McNeish, Pete’s dad, came up with the money and we went into Indigo, a 16-track. I was