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

trying to do things, and the engineer was turning them off. He said, “You don’t put that kind of echo on a snare drum!” It was never finished. I would have loved to have whipped it away and remixed it, but the owner of the studioerased the master because he thought it was such rubbish.’
    Boon’s first move was to contact the local manager of Virgin Records in Manchester to canvas some retail interest at street level. * The buyer assessed his wares and agreed to place a box of singles on the counter. ‘In ’76 majors still had regional offices,’ he says. ‘EMI and CBS had an office in Manchester for their sales force. This is all before centralised buying, when people like Virgin Records store managers had a degree of autonomy, and, I thought, we’ll actually get rid of them and we’ll get the money back.’
    Jon Savage had been sent a copy of Spiral Scratch and saw Buzzcocks play the Roxy in London: having had his antennae alerted, he become one of their key supporters in the press. ‘The first time I ever went up to Manchester was to see them at the Electric Circus,’ he says. ‘I thought they were terrific and they weren’t up themselves. What everybody forgets now there’s this punk nostalgia industry is a lot of the punk groups were really shit; it just became a cliché really quickly, and the Buzzcocks just came in, no messing about.’
    Along with the empowering impact they had made by putting do-it-yourself into action, the fact Buzzcocks were based outside London ensured their parochialism became a further asset. As well as proving that a band could take control of the means of production, Buzzcocks had shown that it could be done in Manchester, a fact not lost on many of their contemporaries in the region with little or no contact with the London music business. ‘All these nascent bands [were] getting in touch,’ says Boon. ‘Gang of Four from Leeds sent a cassette, Cabaret Voltairesent a cassette and by now we’re into the re-pressing cycle of Spiral Scratch . There was no intention to be a record label, so my policy was, well, if we’re going to play in London, we’ll take a Manchester band with us, just in case there’s a review. So we’d bring people like The Fall and The Worst to reinforce the regionalism.’
    Whatever his attempts at showcasing the provinces, Boon was left with the realisation that the band could re-press Spiral Scratch and sell it in their own ad hoc way, but other than repeating the process by recording and manufacturing another single, there was little that could be done to build on the impetus that Spiral Scratch had created.
    ‘The trouble with all dominant cultural forms is they don’t invite you in,’ he says. ‘They just want you to buy. We got to 16,000 sales and we’d had enough – by which point labels were phoning up about Buzzcocks.’
    Boon and the band were initially reluctant to sign with a major. They had hoped that they might find a deal which allowed them to remain outside the music business while being able to utilise its distribution systems. ‘What we saw as the difference was trying to get this material out,’ he says, ‘maybe over the same counters but through different channels.’
    While Boon was trying to work out his next move, Geoff Travis in Rough Trade was echoing his thoughts. The shock of hair may have long gone but the concentrated glint of determination still burns brightly when Travis reflects on the start of a process that would slowly change the music business permanently. ‘We always saw distribution as a political thing,’ he says. ‘We learned when we were students that controlling the means of production gives you power. We wanted there to be an independent structure that you could tap into which gave you access to the market without having to engage with all the normal routes. That’s whatindependence is: it’s about building structures outside of the mainstream but that can help you infiltrate the