Thomas Edison’s first recording of the human voice in 1877 is acknowledged to represent the baby steps of the modern music industry. Pioneered at his Menlo Park research facility, it was the inaugural laboratory of its kind geared to harnessing technological advances for industrial exploitation. It serves as an interesting footnote that the innovation, ascribed to him but the result of collaborative endeavour within that company, derived not from a flash of individual inspiration but as a direct result of profit-motivated industrial research. Nevertheless, the foundation of the music industry as we know it owes much to individuals deriving ways in which to make their creations heard. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was among the first to explore the possibilities of marketing his recordings for public consumption, in an effort to avoid indenture to the aristocracy and church. Though Mozart was always in receipt of a steady income through such patronage, his propensity for living beyond his means contributed to the series of ‘begging letters’ that survive him. Poverty has, seemingly, long held the hand of genius in the story of ‘independent music’.
By 1894 Emile Berliner’s US Gramophone Company were shipping dedicated musical units, which played a media of hard rubber records, while two years later Frank Seaman created the National Gramophone Company. By the last decade of the 19th century gramophone sales were rising, with the popularity of ‘lateral discs’ ultimately leading to Edison abandoning his cylinder disc technology in 1913 – the first of the music industry’s ‘format wars’.
Odeon Records was inaugurated in 1904 in Germany to sell double-sided discs that Zonophone had first produced in South America two years previously. It would later face an ignoble demise when entered into forced administration by the National Socialist Party (its factory was destroyed by the Red Army in Berlin in 1944, though it would survive to release the first Beatles singles in Germany). While HMV put an entire opera over 40 single discs in 1903, it was Odeon who released the first ‘album’, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, on four double-sided discs in 1909. Meanwhile Columbia had introduced the more enduring ‘Velvet-Tone’ shellac disc to reduce surface noise. The first phonograph device to achieve mass popularity came from Victory. Their Victrola upright cabinet design was the subject of mass advertising and rapidly became the first desirable, and commonplace, amplification unit of its type.
As is readily apparent, the initial innovations of the ‘inventor’, the creative originator, gave way quickly to companies and institutions with the wherewithal to harness these advances. But the pioneers remained. Not least John Lomax, who in 1908 recorded a black saloon keeper singing ‘Home On The Range’ in San Antonio, thus providing the inspiration for the Library Of Congress Archive Of The American Folk Song, which would eventually catalogue 10,000 similar ‘field’ recordings. Irish tenor John McCormack, meanwhile, became the recipient of the first recording contract proper, with Victor Company. In recognition of these developments, ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) was founded to enforce America’s 1909 Copyright Act.
The Original Dixieland Jass Band from New Orleans’ ‘Livery Stable Blues’ (1917) is widely regarded as the first de facto jazz record. It also heralded the jazz and blues boom, spearheaded by performers such as Ma Rainey and Mamie Smith. The latter’s ‘Crazy Blues’, from 1920, released on the Okeh imprint, is recognised as the first vocal blues recording. Okeh was founded by Otto K E Heinemann in 1916 after he purchased a recording studio and pressing plant in New York. After gravitating to the new lateral-cut phonograph discs, the company pressed in 10-inch and 12-inch denominations, retailing at between 75 cents and $1.25, Okeh enjoyed success with styles including vaudeville skits and popular dance songs, while also servicing Yiddish, Czech and German recordings to America’s immigrant communities. But with the success of ‘Crazy Blues’, the company hired Clarence Williams as director of ‘Race’ recordings at its New York studios, and also purchased a studio facility in Chicago in order to document the city’s vibrant jazz scene, including recordings by King Oliver and Louis Armstrong. In October 1926 Columbia acquired Okeh, one of the first acquisitions of an independent, though it continued to release records using its own marque until 1935. It has been revived periodically ever since, and is currently in the ownership of Sony.
Prior to this, Okeh, alongside other small imprints including Aeolian-Vocalian and Canada’s Compo, joined the Gennett Record Company of Indiana in defending a case brought by Victor. Gennett, which has strong claims to be the world’s first independent label, was the cradle of much of the jazz boom of the 20s. It was the first clash between the independents and a ‘major’ label. At this juncture, we can imbue in an industrial heavyweight such as Victor many of the qualities we would later ascribe to a major label, and it was around this time that the term became common currency. Victor, alongside Columbia and Edison, consequently came to be considered the ‘three majors’ of their day.
Victor and Columbia had come to an agreement regarding the ‘lateral’ recording disc, whereby they could extract licence fees from others seeking to replicate the technology. Starr, Gennett’s original holding company, were keen to produce lateral discs and were not minded to pay for the privilege. As jazz historian Duncan Shiedt wrote in 2001, “They were unwilling to go along with the licensing fees demanded by Victor, backed up by their supposed patent and powerful legal threats that had dissuaded previous attempts to avoid payments of fees by other small producers.” But the quick settlement that Victor anticipated, after two previous court victories, was not forthcoming. The case fell apart largely due to complications over the validity of various copyrights, including the discovery of an earlier British patent. Starr, an established piano vendor with sound financial resources, had the muscle to withstand a protracted legal dispute. After months in court, it carried the day. In October 1922 the US Supreme Court found in favour of Gennett, holding that Eldridge Johnson’s 1897 patent had no application, in the process putting the ‘lateral cut recording technology’ into the public domain. Victor appealed the decision but failed to have it reversed.
The significance of this is worth digesting. Had Victor won the case, the monopoly on distribution of recorded music – now overwhelmingly undertaken via lateral discs – would have been confirmed and the dominion of the ‘major’ labels over the next few years would have been absolute. Licence fees backed by a watchful legal team would have ensured that new entrants to the music business would have faced insurmountable hurdles. It would also have narrowed opportunities for dozens of artists, especially in niche markets, where the independents operated most effectively and where there was little or no interest from the majors.
It may have been a highly technical and complex case, but its repercussions were enormous. Shiedt: “[the decision] would not materially affect the well-being of Victor and its ally, Columbia, who were enjoying unparalleled success in an industry not yet threatened by the advent of radio. What it would do was to open up opportunities for a myriad of small companies to enter the recording field, bringing to market new types of product to new audiences. In the process prices were reduced in many different outlets, such as mail order, department stores, and the popular five-and-dime chains. Starr, and its Gennett family of labels, would naturally share in this all-too-brief boom in phonograph record sales …” From a reported 14 record labels extant at the time of the ruling, soon there were hundreds. From 1920 onwards, Gennett had established its pressing plant to manufacture its own wares and those of other independents, with millions of records released each year covering a diverse array of compositions from symphonies to vaudeville, but also comedy, exercise records and sermons. Among the mainstays of the era were Gennett’s King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, Jelly Roll Morton and Bix Beiderbecke. Gennett would also specialise in hillbilly artists including Gene Autry.
Gennett was establishing a template for independent labels that sign-posted later developments in the industry. Records were tailored for a youth market, often allowing expression to acts who had been passed over by the majors. Its business operated on much tighter margins with limited promotional budgets. Significantly, artists were encouraged to record their own material rather than mimic versions of established hits, and the product line was responsive to regional developments and trends. The key men at the majors included Fred Gaisberg at Victor, and, later, John Hammond at Columbia. Gaisberg encouraged composers and opera stars such as Enrico Caruso and Elgar to make their first recordings. Hammond, one of the most influential men in American music, was a Yale dropout who nurtured the careers of artists from Count Basie to Bob Dylan. These were ‘music men’ in the classic sense, mavens in their fields with longstanding pedigrees. The staff at Gennett, conversely, would have to halt recording sessions when trains passed, and would record any artist – regardless of race – they felt would provide them with a hit. Elizabeth Surles is project co-ordinator of the Starr-Gennett Foundation. “I believe that Ruby Greenberg, aka Carl Fenton, served as the musical director in Gennett’s New York studio at the end of the 1920s. I suspect that the company found talent in several ways: staff at Starr Piano showrooms recommending certain musicians to the recording division, company executives making requests for certain performers and/or styles, musicians requesting recording gigs, and recommendations of other musicians by musicians who recorded for the company. Based on the account provided in an oral history interview the Foundation conducted with a fiddle player who recorded for [subsidiary label] Champion in 1934, the band played an audition before being granted a recording session.”
By the mid-20s, Gennett was pressing upwards of three million records annually. Yet the depression hit them hard, and in 1932 it was forced to close its doors (alongside others such as Grey Gull and Emerson) as Victor and Columbia both moved into recording hillbilly and ‘race’ music, previously Gennett’s preserve, and radio’s popularity took off. Times were sufficiently hard that even RCA Victor considered closing its record arm while a number of independents merged with the American Record Corporation, which subsequently acquired Brunswick and later Columbia. The first phase of independent record production ended with Gennett’s demise.
In the UK the first independent record label of note was not only divorced from the commercial instincts of its early American counterparts, it was diametrically opposed to the tenets of capitalism full stop. Topic Records began life as an outgrowth of The Workers’ Music Association, founded in 1936. Around 1939-40 the WMA established a recorded music wing, inaugurated with the Unity Theatre’s Paddy Ryan (an alias adopted by the artist for professional reasons since he was a doctor) and his ‘The Man Who Put The Water In The Workers’ Beer’. It was to run parallel with its Keynote Series booklets such as Background of the Blues and The Singing Englishman – an Introduction to Folksong.
Only after World War II was Topic cut free from the WMA to lead a life as an independent entity. Ewan MacColl, Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger were prominent early artists, as was Michael Redgrave from the Unity Theatre (his daughter Vanessa later became a Topic recording artist). The catalogue was avowedly political with sundry versions of ‘The Internationale’, as well as Russian, Irish and English revolutionary material, songs of internationalism and solidarity. Some were perennials such as ‘The Peatbog Soldiers’. Others were definitively of their time, such as ‘The Soviet Airman’s Song’ and the Central Song and Music Ensemble of Hungary’s Ironworkers’ Union (gasp for breath) ‘Song of the Tractor Drivers of Deszk’. It would later release work by Woody Guthrie. Topic continues today, as the oldest independent label still extant, with a roster of artists including Eliza Carthy, Martin Carthy, June Tabor and others. BBC radio stalwart John Peel purchased his first Topic release in 1955 and continued to support the label until his death. His protégé, Andy Kershaw, cites it as “the most important record label in Britain”. Trevor Midgley, aka recording artist Beau of Peel’s Dandelion Records, attests to the label’s influence on the DJ. “The first time I went to his mews place just off the Marylebone Road – this would be some time in early ‘69 – I was nosing along his massive record racks and noticed the number of Topic releases. The reason they jumped out at me was because I was also into Topic (though not as heavily as John!). If I remember rightly, he had a McPeake Family album that was also in my collection and The Art Of William Kimber, the great Oxfordshire Morris concertina-man.” Midgley doesn’t believe Topic directly influenced Dandelion, “but I don’t have to look too hard to see parallels between Folkways and Elektra in the States, and Topic and Dandelion in the UK. I think these are comparisons John could live with.”
As Midgley intimates, in many ways an American counterpart to Topic, albeit with a less defined political agenda, Folkways was founded in New York by Moses ‘Moe’ Asch and Marian Distler in 1948, a successor to the Asch and Asch-Stinson labels. It too remains active today, under the revised appellation Smithsonian Folkways, which gives notice of its historical import to American song development. Folkways’ founding principle was to document the entire strata of sound in all incarnations, ranging across ethnic and traditional music to the contemporary, as well as spoken history. It pioneered the concept of world music, as well as left field folk institutions Seeger, Guthrie and Leadbelly. The Smithsonian Institution Center’s acquisition of the more than 2,000 recordings made at Asch’s behest was completed on the understanding that it would keep all the releases in print for posterity, a commitment it honours to this day.
As demonstrated by the Starr-Gennett case, competition between major labels and smaller entities was a phenomenon that predated the arrival of rock ‘n’ roll. With the post-war introduction of the long-playing record in 1947, the ‘war of the speeds’ broke out between Columbia and RCA Victor, with Capitol the first of the majors to support releases in all three formats (78rpm, 45rpm, 33 1/3rpm). A pattern emerged in the business climate of the late 40s and early 50s in which large, monopolistic conglomerates sought to establish and further their dominion by putting the squeeze on smaller counterparts. With the exceptions noted above, the 30s and 40s had been dominated by Decca, RCA-Victor and Columbia. To those three could now be added the growing power of Capital (founded in 1942), Mercury and MGM (both 1946).
But the arrival of rhythm and blues brought with it a clutch of smaller, more responsive labels. They were quick to spot trends and fleet of foot – and sometimes unperturbed by conventional business wisdom – in satisfying demand. In the 30s Beacon, Keynote and Exclusive were founded. The latter, formed by black brothers Otis and Leon Rene in New Orleans, served as a means of distributing songs they had written, before they subsequently founded Class Records. Joe Davis’s Beacon had a roster of influential early artists including Savannah Churchill and Una Mae Carlisle. But the real explosion took place from the early 40s onwards. The most notable of these were Herman Lubinsky’s Savoy (1942), Ike and Bess Berman’s Apollo (1943), Al Green’s National (1944) and Ed and Leo Mesner’s Aladdin (1945). They were followed in the immediate post-war period by Chess, King, Imperial, Dot, Vee-Jay, Specialty, Excello, Meteor, Red Robin and Sun Records. This growth market coincided with mass migration from southern states to the industrial bastions of the mid west and north east, and a flush of optimism following the end of war among a suddenly reinvigorated civilian nation, awash with demobbed youth. The new independents focused on grass roots forms such as the blues and hillbilly, as the melding of these musical forms began to assemble themselves as the foundation for the coming rock ‘n’ roll boom. Many of those involved, notably Lubinsky, were equally legendary for their failure to pay a dime in royalties to their artists.
The great American R&B catalogue was established not in boardrooms, but in the bedrooms, kitchens and living rooms of one-man operations run on shoestring budgets. Many are the stories surrounding these ‘personality labels’. Notable among the innovators was Syd Nathan’s King Records. Nathan, who later added Federal to his empire, set up shop in an abandoned ice house in Cincinnati, and purchased his own pressing plant, enabling him to handle the entire production process in-house, thereby reducing his cost base. A roster that included the Dominoes, Five Royales, Otis Williams and the Five Keys made him a legendary figure on the 50s R&B scene. He would also give Seymour Stein an early break in the music business. Chess, originally Aristocrat, operated out of a Chicago storefront owned by eponymous brothers Leonard and Phil Chess, and documented the thriving local blues scene. So too did Vee-Jay, which was tipped to become the first black-owned ‘major’ with a roster including Gladys Knight, the Dells and the Impressions, although ultimately it would be Motown who came closest to that achievement.
Most important and emblematic of this young wave of independents was Atlantic, founded by the son of a Turkish ambassador, Ahmet Ertegun, in 1947, alongside Herb Abramson, who had previously served as A&R head for National Records. With the aid of a loan from the family dentist, they rented a small office in Manhattan, with a business desk at one end and a make-do ‘recording studio’ at the other. With Jerry Wexler sprinkling the studio magic, Atlantic, under Ertegun’s stewardship, became one of the world’s largest and most revered record labels – and one of the few to treat its artists with a scintilla of respect. Ertegun scouted New Orleans for talent, but, unable to replicate the tonal quality of sessions with Professor Longhair etc, he created the ‘Atlantic sound’ as a by-product, a luminous mix of blues and jazz with New Orleans mambo, swing from Kansas City and the urbane arrangements favoured by New York.
Routinely garlanded as “the world’s greatest independent label”, Ertegun’s love of black music led to huge success with Ray Charles and myriad others, before branching into jazz and developing the careers of Ornette Coleman,
John Coltrane, Charles Mingus and others, and later ‘white’ rock ‘n’ roll, via Bobby Darin. Ertegun took the decision to sell the label to Warner Brothers in 1967 for $17 million in stock, sacrificing much of its independence in the process. Some of the proceeds saw them found the New York Cosmos soccer team. Throughout, however, Ertegun remained a friend to upstart record companies, helping to finance, among many others, David Geffen’s Asylum Records in 1970. Despite his initial love of black R&B, Ertegun also sensed the commercial potential of rock acts like Led Zeppelin, Cream and Crosby Stills & Nash. He also signed the Rolling Stones to a distribution deal, as Atlantic remained probably the only imprint from those glory 40s years to survive the merger-crazed 90s with its identity relatively intact.
During the 50s a profusion of smaller indies like Bruce, Herald, Old Town, Tico and Whirlin’ Disc had sprung up to document the melting pot of black and Hispanic sounds on New York streets. They were powered by entrepreneurs such as Bobby Robinson, still active in Harlem to this day, George Golder and Hy Weiss (self-professed payola king of New York and inventor of the “fifty-dollar handshake” to encourage DJs to play his records). Grand, Gotham, Parkway et al provided a similar service to the residents of Philadelphia. Many of these were fly-by-night operations, set up by sharp-thinking businessmen with an eye not for the value of the music they released, but for the opportunity of a quick buck.
But as Roger Armstrong of Ace Records points out, there were often more complicated relationships at work beyond the merely exploitative. “The key thing that ran through that – it was mainly white entrepreneurs, with some exceptions, and a lot of Jewish white people running independent record labels. What I boil it down to is this. The Jews and blacks in America were both under-classes. The Jews were white and could get credit. The blacks were black and couldn’t get credit. That was the bold truth in those days. You can’t run a business unless you get credit. Unless you’re born rich. Credit is what you live off. There are other views about Eastern European Jews who got into black music because of the minor chords and minor keys – there was a musical connection. But my old friend Hy Weiss, he ran Old Town Records. He had a lot of success with doo-wop, but he was a blues fan. He made some great blues records. There was some paternalism. And a very close relationship between the artists and the owners; they were really tight. I remember the horrible quote they used when Adam Sweeting wrote about Bo Diddley’s death [in The Guardian] – ‘I was never paid anything’. [The actual quote was sourced to Diddley himself: “I am owed… I’ve never got paid. A dude with a pencil is worse than a cat with a machine gun.”] “That makes Bo look really stupid,” Armstrong continues. “Why did he stay with Chess for 12 years if they never paid him anything? Of course they paid him. The interesting thing is not whether he got paid, it’s how he got paid, and how much. Leonard [Chess] once went on record when someone said he didn’t pay Bo enough. He said, ‘I don’t get any money out of his live gigs. He gets his live gigs cos we promoted his records.’ Talk about the 360 degree thing mentality [now advanced by the contemporary music industry as a salve to provide income in the download age by taking part of an artist’s merchandise and touring money]. It was always there. There was that close but sometimes contentious relationship.”
“Hy was a notoriously wild character,” Armstrong continues. “Runyonesque isn’t in it, and he had every scam in the book going. He told me some of them, and some were brilliant. But every artist I ever met who was on his label said, ‘I love that man, he’s just fantastic. Never really paid me properly, but I love him!’ I remember the Solitaires. The guy was saying, ‘Hy, we always thought he wasn’t paying us properly. But he was so generous with his information and told us how to function.’ And that guy went on to be head of marketing at CBS in black music. He said, ‘I learned it all from Hy, if it hadn’t been for him, I wouldn’t have had my job.’ With the American indies, you lived in each other’s pocket. That’s how tight and close things were. You had an agent to put the band on the road and get the local gigs. Mary Love on Modern Records told us the company used to have a room for their artists with telephones in it. They didn’t charge for the telephone, and they could go in there and book their own gigs. And in our early days of being an independent record company, it was very intimate, in that sense, you knew your artists personally, you hung out with them and saw them at clubs. There was a big socialising thing and you had the feeling of all being in the same boat. That closeness maybe doesn’t quite exist with majors.”
“It is, of course, always a mistake to make sweeping generalisations,” notes American R&B independents discographer Bob McGrather. “However, America revolves around the dollar. Making money as a priority is not frowned upon as it is perhaps elsewhere. Someone once asked me when I was interviewing for an advertising position if I wanted to be either rich or famous. It seemed odd to me at the time that these were considered the only options. Oftentimes a producer or artist would get the itch to start a new label and of course enlist partners outside the music business — perhaps the owners of a local beauty parlour or car dealership—the priorities are obvious here and rightly so just as with shareholders in a larger concern. It’s not hard to accept that to climb out of the ghetto (or improve one’s lot within it) was the prime motivator and to use one’s craft to do it was the obvious vehicle. Sports and music being the two most likely as in the early days most everything else was a closed (white) shop.”
The ad hoc nature of some of the independents was something Charlie Gillett would experience first hand on his trips to the deep south in the early 70s, licensing tracks for what would become his Another Saturday Night compilation. He further endorses the view that equating the music of these times with ‘art’ leads to some dangerously wrong-headed conclusions. “I doubt if the attitude has ever really changed. The only thing that changed is people like you and me coming in and considering that this music can be cast as art and talked about as art. But it hardly ever has been made with that intention. Maybe Radiohead think that way – but I’m not even sure they do. I’m sure they chuckle at times at what everybody makes of what they do. It’s much more instinctive. The reason why people are musicians and become musicians – most musicians are inadequate, it’s all they can do, this is what they’re good at. It’s a bit like footballers. If you could have understood what they were talking about in your history or physics or chemistry lessons, you’d have gone along the track that everybody wanted you to. But you couldn’t get your head into that stuff. And the guys running the record labels are pretty similar people most of the time. For a lot of us, it’s the only thing we’re capable of doing. But a lot of it is doing what you want to do, what you feel is in you. Rather than trying to tailor what you’re doing towards what someone says will get played on the radio. There’s only a small proportion of all the people in the game, whether running record labels or as musicians, who have any inclination to do that.”
Gillett found that few of the record labels he came across resembled anything he might have imagined. “One of the labels, Goldband Records – the guy running it, Eddie Shuler, was a TV repair man, literally. So the label was essentially a hobby. And at an earlier stage we went looking for a guy called JD Miller, a name I was familiar with as a producer of Slim Harpo and one or two quite big names in this blues/Cajun area. We’d been given his address and all we could see was that it was a women’s hairdresser’s. So we went out on the street and asked people where this address was, and they pointed me back to where I’d been. True enough, you went through the hairdresser’s and at the back, there’s JD Miller sitting at his desk in the classic kind of back room scene you’ve seen in so many mafia or gangster movies, like at the back of a restaurant in Brooklyn, or whatever. JD Miller was the sheriff of the town, he managed the local projects, so he had a multiple role in this town of Crowley, Louisiana.”
Gillett encountered numerous other small label owners on the trip. “We went to a place called Ville Platte, Louisiana, where the guy who ran the label, Swallow – his name was Floyd Soileau, but his label was the bird swallow – to his father’s great disappointment, he told us! His was the only one of all those little Louisiana operations that looked like what you might expect to find. The main building was a record shop, or the front half of it, and the back half was a warehouse with stacks and rows of metal frames with records on. Some of which were the stock for the shop, and others were his own records, in multiples of 25 a box. And to the side of that was the studio where he recorded all his records, so that’s what felt like a proper record label. And he was just a fantastic man. I’d never be able to express my appreciation of how well he treated us, what a reasonable deal we got – the guy at the back of the hairdresser’s said, ‘Boys, you can have anything you like – $100 a song.’ $100 in 1972 was a lot of money. That would be $1,200 to put an album together, and that was more than we could imagine. Whereas Floyd went $20 a track – that was more like it.”
There were undoubtedly good eggs of Floyd’s ilk, but the buccaneering 50s was also boom time for a collection of spivs, criminals and hustlers, and ties with mobsters were evident from the outset. These links had been established through the pre-radio dominance of jukeboxes as principal outlets for dispersal and promotion of recorded music. A case in point would be notorious music industry legend Morris Levy, proprietor of Roulette Records (formed in 1956), a man described as an “octopus” by Variety magazine in 1957. A perennially shady and intimidating character, thrown out of school for assaulting one of his teachers, he moved from nightclub photography to club and restaurant ownership and thence a record company and publishing. He would build a multi-million pound fortune and become a father figure to CBS head Walter Yetnikoff. Levy continued to deny Mafia links all the way up to his indictment by the FBI for conspiracy to commit extortion in 1988. He died of cancer before serving a single day of his ten-year sentence. But his past enterprises were indeed funded by mob money (rumoured to have come from Tommy Eboli and Vincent ‘Chin’ Gigante, later head of the Genovese family). He was also brighter and more business-savvy than other early independent operators – swapping the promise of a quick buck for a sustainable income. To this end, he was one of the first to recognise the importance of rights ownership – having started out with staples such as ‘The Yellow Rose Of Texas’, his Big Seven company went on to hold 30,000 copyrights. He was none too averse to the practice of removing an artist’s name from a record label and substituting his own to ensure writer’s as well as publishing royalties, nor to settling scores and disputes, either in business or with his artists, with a baseball bat. Present at the meeting at a Broadway Diner with Alan Freed (whom he would manage briefly) when the term ‘rock and roll’ was first suggested to describe the younger music beginning to filter through, he clearly recognised the ramifications quicker than most.
Tico owner George Goldner could talk with authority about Levy as the ‘octopus’. One of the most revered talent spotters in the early R&B boom, he discovered and nurtured artists including Tito Puente – whom Levy enticed away to RCA – and then Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the Imperials, among many others. However, the multitude of labels he started – beginning with Tico in 1948 and continuing through Rama, Gee, Red Bird (where he fostered the talents of songwriters Leiber and Stoller, and Andrew Loog Oldham and Seymour Stein first met) and others – was a result of his gambling addiction. When the need for fast cash arose, he would simply sell the labels to Levy to reconcile his debts. Stein knew Leiber and Stoller but principally worked alongside Goldner. “I really worked on the other side of things. But I met Andrew Oldham when he came up to the offices of Red Bird. Jerry Leiber didn’t see him. Mike Stoller wasn’t around. I chased him out to the elevator and caught him. We were both in our early 20s. They [the Rolling Stones] were not known in America, but I knew who they were. So I said come up and listen to some songs. So I played him a load of songs, and they recorded ‘Down Home Girl’.”
The R&B independent boom inexorably led to the fusion of white (country or hillbilly) and black (blues, R&B) styles that would birth rock ‘n’ roll, signified by the arrival of Elvis Presley. And, initially at least, it was independents that nurtured the hybrid. Sun, established by farmer’s son Sam Phillips, was one of the few labels borne out of a genuine love of the music it documented. Founded in March 1952, the initial intention was to market ‘black’ music beyond racial barriers, scoring its first hit with Rufus Thomas’s ‘Bear Cat’ – an answer record to Big Mama Thornton’s ‘Hound Dog’ whose copyright, it was later ruled, the record infringed. Other artists included Junior Parker and Little Milton. But Sun underwent a radical change of direction in 1954 when Phillips first encountered Presley. He recorded him in various styles – ballads, country and R&B – until he stumbled upon the ‘Sun Sound’. He would ultimately sell Presley’s contract to RCA for $35,000 in 1955 and focus his efforts on turning first Carl Perkins, then Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis, into superstars. Phillips eventually sold the label to Mercury producer Shelby Singleton in 1969.
The field was open for such businessmen, who could sense profit in documenting what surrounded them, capitalising on local knowledge and contacts. There was also, at a corporate level, a reluctance to embrace either R&B and rock ‘n’ roll as anything more than a faddish diversion. Rather, they would attempt to ‘clone’ breakout hits from the indies (Fats Domino, Little Richard etc) with artists like Pat Boone. The initial surge in independent R&B labels in the 40s was thus replicated by the rock ‘n’ roll boom years, as TV’s American Bandstand and increasingly radio) came to accept the music as something other than a coarse and ignominious assault on the nation’s morals. The independents responded, predictably, much quicker. The first independent regional distributors allowed them to do so, liasing with local radio stations to furnish listeners with the latest sounds. Suddenly, established lines of protocol were smashed as independent labels, promoters and artists found themselves able to have their records heard by audiences hungry for them.
Greg Shaw estimated in his 1982 essay on the music industry for The History Of Rock that between 1956 and a decade later, some 150,000 independent records were released, on not less than 500 separate imprints. This ‘golden age’ was made possible by regional hits reaching a far wider audience. Sun prospered with Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins et al, Specialty with Little Richard, Chess with Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, Vee-Jay with John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed and Imperial with Fats Domino. Dozens of new labels sprang up, including Swan, Bell, Gone, Carlton, Cadence, Big Top etc. The level playing field promised by the R&B boom came to fruition in a tangible and lucrative fashion in the rock ‘n’ roll years.
The success of the independents was in part an indictment of major label sloth and inefficiency, in particular, its distribution methods, aggravated by America’s intimidating geography. The majors opted for branch distribution, shifting records from large industrial units serving huge territories that could contain massive demographic differences. That, to an extent, dictated their A&R policies. As Shaw would write: “The advantage of branch distribution was that a company could deliver hit products anywhere in the country with speed and co-ordination. The disadvantage was that this national scope tended to dictate a concentration on artists with all-round, mainstream appeal. For decades the majors had taken great pains to groom young singers and then transform them into seasoned stars, matching them up with songs, arrangers and orchestras as they saw fit. The A&R men in charge of all this may have been aware that a vital new music was emerging. But their usual response was to wait until a hit song appeared in the ‘race music’ charts and then dish up whitewashed versions of the same tunes with their own singers.”
Armstrong believes that the consequent stratification is vital to any understanding of the way the American music industry operated. “One of the reasons records didn’t move outside borders that much in America, apart from the odd crossover, was because someone in Detroit wasn’t going to ‘get’ a Texan record. The proof of the pudding is in the exceptions, like ‘She’s About A Mover’ by the Sir Douglas Quintet in ’65. That was a pure Tex-Mex record that was a smash hit. In 1965 you could have bought 2,000 pure Tex-Mex records that weren’t smash hits, and that no-one in Detroit bought. I first discovered the blues through the Yardbirds – and then suddenly you find ‘Smokestack Lightning’ by Howling Wolf on a Pye single – you heard it and it blew your socks off completely. Then you find Muddy Waters and Little Walter, and you think you’ve discovered the blues. But that was Chicago blues. That wasn’t T-Bone Walker and the Texas scene; that wasn’t Johnny Guitar Watson on the coast. That wasn’t BB King down in Memphis, etc.”
Gillett actually encountered the man behind ‘She’s About A Mover’ on his travels. “Whereas JD Miller’s office was at the back of the hairdressing saloon, he himself had nothing to do with it, that was just something he owned. But Huey Meaux, the producer in Houston, that was his day to day profession. That’s how he made his living. By the time we met him, he wasn’t doing that any more, but he had done that for the first 20 years while producing records on the side, until he finally made it big.” ‘She’s About A Mover’ boasted a highly unusual pedigree. Legendarily, with the British Invasion in full swing, Meaux had taken a box of Beatles records into his hotel room for study purposes, ingested a large quantity of wine, then decided that the beats resembled old-style Cajun dance songs sufficiently that he might combine both traditions.
“It’s a very touch and go game,” Gillett continues. “You can have big hit records in America without ever really getting the money back from them. Because the distributors, shamelessly, only pay you back when they want your next record – i.e. when they think your record will be at least as big as the one they’ve just sold for you. Until then you’ve got this horrible problem of manufacturing records with the pressing plants demanding to be paid in 30 days – the best deal you can get is 60 days – and you don’t get paid by your distributor, at the earliest, until 90 days after the sale. So there’s this big gap, and the more successful the record, the greater your problem is. Cos you’re having to manufacture thousands of records without getting paid for them. That’s why so many of those indies went running to the bigger labels. All those companies down in Louisiana, when they had a hit, they always had to go to a bigger company to carry it to the charts, because they couldn’t deal with the problems I just described. If it was a hit in Texas or Louisiana they could manage it, but the minute it went national, they had to go to a bigger company.”
Another famous example of which was Phil Phillips’ ‘Sea Of Love’. Gillett: “That was recorded in the studio of the guy I described, Eddie Shuler, the TV repairman. His neighbour, who ran a little record shop, George Khoury, was the actual producer of ‘Sea Of Love’. But Eddie Shuler agreed to record the song in his studio in return for getting the publishing rights to the song. So Phil Phillips brought the song along, George Khoury was going to put it out. He claimed half the songwriting, which is where he added to his income. Shuler published it, and they put this record out – and it was barely taking off locally. Then they went to Mercury and a guy called Shelby Singleton, who was based in Nashville but was originally from Louisiana and had his ear to the ground there, picked up a number of hits from that region that went national on Mercury. That happened a lot in those days. There was an indie scene at one stage, then suddenly it would be on a major, and the majors tended to retain the rights ever after. They could afford to repress, and part of the original definition of a major label in the United States was that you owned your own pressing plants. Except King Records, which had James Brown, was an anomaly, because they owned their pressing plant, so they could be said to be a major, but they were never seen as that, they were an indie really, and their pressings were appalling. So there were a whole bunch of independent pressing plants all around the country, and all kinds of rackets went on in order to get your records pressed here and there. There were, I think, 13 regions, each with their own separate distributors, so if you were an indie label in Los Angeles, you had to place your record with a different distributor all across the country.”
The underworld played a key part in financing records and also reaping the rewards of hit singles. The corruption extended beyond the labels to the pressing plants, distributors and numerous DJs, leading to the great ‘payola’ scandal of May 1960 surrounding DJ Alan Freed. Payola – a contraction of the words pay and Victrola, a throwback to the record playing device – was nothing new to the entertainment industry. It has been rampant in the 20s and 30s in vaudeville and big bands. Indeed, Chairman Oren Harris’s House Oversight Subcommittee’s inquest into the recording industry was prompted largely by pressure from ASCAP (American Association of Composers, Authors and Publishers), who considered rock ‘n’ roll a fad, and the recent denouncement of corruption on rigged quiz shows. The immediacy of the evolving business and its lucrative potential, plus the dispersal of ‘shady’ money, meant ready temptation for a DJ willing to favour a particular artist or label. In the court case that led to a $2,500 fine for Freed, Dick Clark’s association with Jamie Records also came under scrutiny. A total of 25 DJs and programme directors were investigated by the committee, leading directly to the establishment of America’s anti-payola statute. Freed, the man who first popularised the term rock ‘n’ roll, would die a penniless alcoholic. Morris Levy, undoubtedly far further up the payola food chain, escaped any conviction and never appeared at the Congressional hearings.
The case was undoubtedly linked to reservations about the growth of an independent music network that was answerable, if not to nobody, then certainly not to the major labels. Part of ASCAP’s motivation was their disapproval of rival organisation BMI (Broadcast Music Incorporated), who principally represented black musicians, and had become more amenable to the artists populating the emergent rock ‘n’ roll scene. ASCAP believed BMI was using payola to leverage its artists. Many others, however, believe that the organisation’s intention was retaliation over loss of market share, while others still contest that institutional racism was a motivating factor.
“One thing I didn’t really understand when I was writing Sound Of The City,” says Gillett, “was the fundamental role of payola of one kind or another, which was what enabled the little labels to get played on radio stations. The paradox being that the bigger labels like RCA and Colombia would not be seen dead in those days paying payola – they had shareholders. So I remember talking to the guy who produced Bill Haley – Milt Gabler – and he said it was incredibly frustrating. Because your records weren’t getting played on the stations that should have played them, and would have loved to have played them, because there was no payola. And the other thing was the role of publishing companies in those days. The role of publishing was very critical in America. By the time you get to 1976 in Britain, the role of a publishing company doesn’t feel so significant, and I don’t think it is. Publishing is more riding on the back of the energy of the record labels. But back in those days, publishers were very active, and were part of the promotion and by implication part of the payola as well, the means by which all that got dealt with. So Alan Freed, his manager was Morris Levy, who ran not only Roulette Records, but Ark Publishing – and Ark Publishing represented all of Chess, and Checker Records, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and all those guys. And part of the way those records would get on the radio in New York was through Ark Music having an interest, and making sure those records got played on the right radio shows, etc. Most of the people from that era got away scot-free – Alan Freed himself did do some time, which was always very unfair.”
In contrast to the largely enthusiastic if not necessarily altruistic spirit that would define the late 70s UK independent boom, there was a level of cynicism at work beyond payola. Many rock ‘n’ roll records were produced by house bands and session musicians, some clearly disinterested in their employment. Some of the arrangers and songwriters the labels retained shared their cynicism, resulting in bland ‘teenage-fodder’. Partially as a result of these creative frustrations, independent producers came to the fore. Often songwriters themselves, they would recruit musicians and singers to record, then pass the results on to a label to manufacture and distribute, before returning to the studio for their next venture. Music publisher Don Kirshner was one such creature, using writers Carole King and Gerry Goffin to produce recordings licensed to both majors and indies. The team dominated the pop charts of the early 60s. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were veterans of the R&B scene who founded Red Bird Records before selling it on. Kirshner also established his own imprint, Tomorrow, as did his associate Lou Adler, who started Ode. Gamble And Huff wearied of writing bland pop hits for Cameo-Parkway and set up their own operation in Philadelphia, while a short-lived artists’ co-operative, AFO, was founded in New Orleans by veteran session musicians. In Memphis, Stax moved from its association with Atlantic to operate in its own right.
It was a fertile period for mavericks, entrepreneurs and square pegs. An illustrative case is that of Phil Spector and his Philles label, founded in 1961. At 21 Spector became America’s youngest label head. Already an industry veteran having assisted Leiber and Stoller in New York and produced hits for Ray Peterson and Curtis Lee for Dune Records, Spector grasped the importance of retaining control of his catalogue and the production process. That was all very well while the hits flowed from his Goldstar Studios in LA, beginning with the Crystals and continuing through smashes for Darlene Love and the Ronettes. But after Ike and Tina Turner’s ‘River Deep, Mountain High’ failed to do satisfactory business in the US, Philles closed in 1967. Which was heartening for the distributors who had become used to wielding near total control over the labels they worked with and didn’t like Spector’s feisty and outspoken style one iota.
In the process these labels, predominantly working with black singers and artists, committed some of the great American songs to posterity, and were able to assert their claims by dint of talent and personal industry. Others came out of the majors to strike out on their own, notably Berry Gordy Jr, who had piloted Marv Johnson’s career at United Artists and started Tamla and Motown, just as R&B gave way to a new generation of soul artists. Alongside Philadelphia International, Motown rose to become the definitive independent of the early 70s, retaining its own masters until its sale to MCA in 1988 for $61 million.
From 1961 to 1971, Motown had 110 Top 10 hits. Key to this was the fact that, unlike some competitors who released singles in a piecemeal fashion, Gordy believed in artist development and a co-ordinated, highly drilled back room operation. In the process he fostered probably the most impressive roster of talent ever to be assembled under the auspices of a single label – from Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye to Diana Ross, the Jackson 5, The Temptations and the Supremes. Each was in receipt of fastidious grooming; the maintenance of a dignified image helped make the label appeal to white Americans as well as black. Gordy prized elegance and deportment highly, and refined the manners and speech – even to the extent of elocution lessons – of performers he rescued from backgrounds in impoverished urban projects. They were choreographed and rehearsed relentlessly, and most took part in the Motown Revue tours of the chitlin circuit to hone their performances.
A similar methodology was applied to crafting hits at the label’s Hitsville USA recording studio. Every Friday, Gordy would chair quality control meetings, rejecting any recordings that didn’t fit the style of the top selling discs that week. The ‘Motown Sound’ was created around a nucleus of fantastically able musicians known collectively as the Funk Brothers, while the dominant songwriting team was Holland-Dozier-Holland (brothers Brian and Eddie Holland with Lamont Dozier), as well as Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong. At least until the loss of Holland-Dozier-Holland due to a royalties dispute in 1967, Motown operated in a fashion akin to battery farming, rotating acts in the studio with those on tour, while the studio was open up to 22 hours a day. Visionary and driven, Gordy accepted no compromise in keeping the hits coming, though there have been several who dispute the equanimity of the wealth distribution. Kim Weston, best known for her duets with Gaye, took an action against Gordy in 1994 for non-accounting (her original royalties all having been offset against production costs, she claimed). Teena Marie famously sued Berry over her contract – leading to the Brockert Initiative or ‘Teena Marie Law’, which acted as a benchmark for limiting the length of recording contracts. Further, she was signed without the use of an attorney, aside from the one appointed to her by the label – the common-law wife of Gordy’s brother. Other instances abound, but it’s hard to begrudge Gordy his success. Studio musicians were paid relatively good wages for the time ($5 to $10 per session – or until “everything was right”) to staff the cramped Studio A they nicknamed the Snakepit. Though $10 was, of course, a long way short of what they could have earned had they retained any of their copyright.
But what of the UK? Here, notable exceptions like Topic apart, there was no such tradition of independent labels. The geography of the British Isles meant that the economics of national distribution were far easier for major labels to navigate, leaving less room for niche outlets. Additionally, the majors had affiliates in America who could farm out American hits to them, giving them an innate advantage. Hence the market dominance of EMI, Decca, CBS, Pye and Phonogram by the 60s.
Formed by Alan Freeman, Polygon was arguably the first documented attempt by a British independent to operate within mainstream popular music. In 1949, armed with a small inheritance, and a promise from a contact in Australia that he could export ‘pop’ records there, Freeman alighted on the former child film star Petula Clark, who had been performing with the Rank Organisation. Freeman had spotted a gap in the market. EMI and Decca were not prepared to sign Clark as an adult singer, while Freeman could see her potential in that role. He approached her father and business manager, Leslie Clark, who was taken by the idea to the extent that he also invested in what would become Polygon Records.
The first fruits of this liaison arrived with the 1950 cover version of ‘Music, Music, Music’, which became a major success for Esquire in Australia (whereas in the UK the Teresa Brewer version of the song was a hit in 1950). The first British Polygon releases, meanwhile, were a Louis Prima recording licensed from America, a series of three singles from Clark and future DJ Jimmy Young’s ‘Too Young’, which became the label’s first substantial UK hit in the summer of 1951 and sold a quoted 130,000 copies. However, the label wasn’t equipped for that success, mirroring the difficulties American independents often faced when scoring a runaway hit. Young would subsequently join Decca and informed the NME that the label was unable to press copies fast enough. He further commented: “Basically I wanted to stay with Polygon, partly on sentimental grounds and partly because I had great personal admiration for Alan Freeman, who was running it. However, my advisers felt that I ought to be on a major label with distribution all over the world”.
For Petula Clark, speaking in 2007, there are nothing but good memories of Polygon. “I don’t think we realised at the time we were making history. Alan was great. I think it was his dad who was financing it. I was a young woman, I didn’t know any of the ins and outs of any of this stuff. I just went in and sang. I was only interested in singing. I’m still only interested in singing. Any of the rest of it doesn’t really interest me that much. I adored Alan, we had lots of fun together, and it was all on a shoestring. There was nothing glamorous about it at all. He had this funny old car, and he used to go round distributing the records himself, with the records in the back. He would actually physically load the car with records, and I remember the car was scraping the road because there were so many records in the boot and back seat. But he took all that on. Certainly in those days independent really did mean that – you’ve got to get out there, you don’t have the help of the big houses. And of course, getting them pressed too is something else, the whole business is a struggle. If I think about it now, I’m sure it was a struggle for Alan, but he was just spurred on by his own enthusiasm and determination.” John Repsch, who interviewed Freeman before his death, casts a slightly different light on Freeman’s diligence. “He was in love with Petula. Absolutely.”
The main thing Clark can recall, however, is how much fun they were having. “We laughed all the time. He loved music, don’t get me wrong, he had a great sense of music. I don’t know if he was commercially very savvy, but none of us were really. It was just a joy being in the studio with him. The business was much smaller and the world was very different, so you can’t compare it with the record business of today, or even the 60s. It was all very ‘artisan’. Having said that, we used huge orchestras. I remember recording with Laurie Johnson [another Polygon artist who collaborated with Clark on songs such as ‘How Are Things With You?’) in a church, because that was the only place we could get all the musicians in! It was such a huge orchestra and difficult because the acoustics were terrible. But it was because Alan wanted this huge sound.” Indeed, several renowned orchestra leaders started out on Polygon, including Johnson, Frank Chacksfield and Ron Goodwin.
Although still succoured by the idea of an entirely independent company, Freeman was aware that Jimmy Young’s concerns, or at least those of his advisors, were legitimate. Eventually, this led to talks with Pye about using Polygon as their bridge to the pop market. Negotiations began in 1954 with a view to Freeman being installed as the A&R head of the new venture. Delayed by a bout of illness, the move was finalised in February 1955 when Polygon moved into the offices of Nixa (run by New Zealand-born entrepreneur Hilton Nixon), an earlier Pye acquisition. But the development of (Pye) Nixa meant the end for Polygon, whose final release came in October, after which all the label’s assets, masters and artists were transferred to the new label. The catalogue of 78rpm singles, nearly two hundred in total and some 23 by Clark, all produced by Freeman, were deleted. Or, in some cases, accidentally destroyed (towards the end of Polygon, Freeman had exacerbated the confusion by storing releases in garages in pressings of exactly 999 – to avoid VAT charges). As writer Theo Morgan observes, “After the move, the masters were stored in two Nissen huts, one of which Nixa decided was surplus to requirements. So they had it demolished without the contents being removed first. Thus, half the Polygon masters were lost.” Which is why subsequent compilations of this material, such as those Morgan has overseen for labels including Redline, have had to be remastered from original 78s. The carelessness with which the music industry has treated some of its prize assets evidently began early.
Oriole was, technically, even older, founded in 1927 by the Levy Company in London as a subsidiary, releasing American masters from Vocalion Records domestically. Though discontinued in 1935 it was revived in 1950 and enjoyed a few major hits including Maureen Evans’ ‘Like I Do’, Nancy Whiskey & Charlie McDevitt’s version of ‘Freight Train’ and Russ Hamilton’s ‘We Will Make Love’, which reached number two. Some of these records even made an impression on a pre-Beatles America, which was highly unusual in the 50s, as Seymour Stein acknowledges. “I always thought it was very strange. There were more hits in America coming from Italy, thanks to the San Remo festival, stuff like ‘Volare’, and from France, by way of the big French orchestras like Raymond Le Fevre and Paul Mauriat, who had a huge number one with ‘Love Is Blue’. Even German records; Bert Kampfert, who later wrote stuff for Sinatra, ‘Strangers In The Night’. There was hardly anything from the UK except oddball records, like ‘He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands’, by Laurie London, which was a one-hit wonder. Then [in 1957] Russ Hamilton had a big hit – not ‘We Will Make Love’, but the b-side, ‘Rainbow’.” In fact, Hamilton always attributed its success to the fact that American pressings had mistakenly swapped the two sides’ status. “These were the kinds of records that would break through,” Stein continues. “Oriole also had ‘Freight Train’ by Charlie McDevitt’s skiffle group. They had two big hits in America, and the others had none. So Oriole is very important.” Oriole also ran the subsidiary label Embassy, producing cut-price covers of chart hits directly for Woolworth’s. For a time it also licensed some of the early Motown hits, but was sold to CBS in September 1964 and transformed itself into the conglomerate’s English arm.
Aside from Polygon, the most revealing domestic story from the post-war period was Ember Records. Jeffrey Kruger was the owner of legendary fifties jazz club Flamingo in London’s Wardour Street, and would work with everyone from Billie Holiday to the Rolling Stones. He founded Ember in 1957 as a direct challenge to the monopoly that existed in record distribution and promotion, largely succeeding by issuing ‘budget lines’ and targeting non-conventional outlets outside of established record stores, which were sewn up by the majors. The label began as a direct consequence of the 50s independent boom in the US. Kruger, on one of his frequent trips to New York met legendary talent spotter and producer Murray Kaufman, a promoter of the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Inspired by the acts he saw there, Kruger became determined to replicate the success of the American independents. “Albeit a comparatively small fish in a big pond, so far as my contemporaries in the USA were concerned,” he states, “but a bigger fish in a smaller pond back home so far as I was concerned.”
Ember was envisaged as a joint venture with Al Silver (founder of Herald Records), who had already invoked that name in the US. Kruger’s Florida Music Company was to be represented by Silver and Doug Moody in America. Kruger would reciprocate by representing their Angel Music Company throughout Europe. Ember US was already exploiting the breakout of R&B (then still termed ‘race’ music), enjoying their first hit with Faye Adams’ ‘Shake A Hand’ followed by success with Lightnin’ Hopkins. “They had luck running for them and back to back they had at least six consecutive hit artists making the charts,” says Kruger, “often with records that were still in rough demo form. But because of the insatiable demand for the new music, records were rushed into the hands of powerful DJs who, to beat the competition, would put them on the air in acetate form.” In the end, however, delayed by a government licence necessary to complete transactions in foreign exchange, Kruger met EMI’s Len Wood and together they took the decision for Ember UK to sub-licence American chart hits to EMI Parlophone.
Kruger then embarked on establishing the basic networking necessities of an independent label – manufacture, distribution and promotion. “None of the existing British record companies, who each had their own distribution outlets and owned their own record manufacturing plants, would even consider helping us. I felt every door in these vital areas close in my face so I worked backwards through the three basics. I went into what was then a chain of some two dozen record stores owned and operated under the street name Keith Prowse Stores. On Bond Street I met the man in charge, Walter Woyda. He listened to me – in fact he was the first man to give me a dispassionate hearing – and he said he was ready to help and he would order our stock, albeit in small quantities initially. He would see I was paid promptly to help me through my cash flow.”
Through Wayda, Kruger linked up with an independent distributor (of radios and televisions) Lugton & Co. Another distributor was found to cover the Midlands, while the north west was covered by NEMS, run by the Epstein family, whose son Brian would shortly shepherd the Beatles to success. That in turn led to Glasgow’s Wolfson company, then Ireland’s Solomon and Peres – Maurice Soloman having previously helped finance Edward Lewis’s efforts to fend off predators at Decca in the late 20s. Soloman’s son Mervyn, meanwhile, let Kruger licence country records (via his company Emerald Records), in order to establish an LP line.
Distribution in place, at least theoretically, Kruger set about establishing a manufacturing base. In the end he alighted on a button manufacturing company in Edgware, London, called Orlake. “The same machine that was manufacturing buttons of all sizes was retooled to make vinyl records, and so I had my ability to press records. More importantly, they had storage space to hold some of the stock.” The final step was promotion. “I did manage to get an appointment at quite high level at the BBC and was told that they would be prepared to play my records. They were, after all, an impartial body. But the record industry, controlled by the then big boys, EMI, Decca, Philips and Pye, and to a lesser degree by Oriole/Embassy Records, had formed PPL (Phonographic Performance Limited). PPL had an agreement with the BBC. Only members of that trade body could have their records played on the BBC and share in the performance fees – of which I knew nothing at the time – that the BBC paid to the record industry for the right to air their records.”
This body, a cartel in all but name, refused Kruger membership. But Kruger wasn’t taking the black-balling sitting down. He talked it through with his cousin, lawyer Norman Beech. Beech considered the matter, before informing Kruger that, in his view, the BBC’s impartiality would be compromised unless they were able to enter into a similar agreement with Kruger. “It was brilliant. And that’s what happened. Ember signed an independent deal with the BBC much to the chagrin of the PPL. I could now get my records played on the air.”
By the mid-60s Ember was beginning to tick along nicely, though Kruger continued to be heavily involved with the Flamingo Club and arranging tours for visiting US jazz stars such as Carmen McRae, who later recorded for Ember. With the crucial support of the BBC, they scored a Top 40 hit with Jan & Kjeld. Other good sellers included Ray Ellington’s ‘Madison’, only their second release, and Michael Cox’s ‘Angela Jones’. Significantly, the latter was acquired from a fellow independent who lacked the resources that Kruger had built up for Ember.
Ember was able to license US hits, though occasionally Kruger’s comparative lack of industrial muscle would show. The Five Royales’ original version of ‘Dedicated To The One I Love’ on King Records was eclipsed by a version from the Shirelles when the song was picked up by a major. He also secured terms to licence 20th Century Fox’s music catalogue via Norman Weiser, an association that raised a few eyebrows in the industry. The partnership was inaugurated by the release of ‘Little Drummer Boy’ by the Harry Simeone Chorale, which reached the Top 40 three times during 1961 and 1962. There were also solid selling album releases from Art Tatum, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and others under the same arrangement. “All these we issued at a price of 26 shillings (£1.30), that undercut most label’s prices. They were, in effect, the first mid-price LPs. Some older material we put out on our Famous Artists series at 9/9d (49p), making them the cheapest albums on the British market – very attractive at a time when a 45 rpm single cost 6/9d (34p).”
According to Kruger, it was bad enough being an upstart independent challenging the monopoly, but his pricing policy was viewed as outright sedition. “Some time later I attended one of the annual trade dinners organised by the Gramophone Record Retailers Association [GRRA] to make an after dinner speech. The room was packed to capacity with all the heads of the major record companies and their distribution arms, the buyers and key executives of all the major and minor record shops and of course the trade press. I decided I might never get a chance to speak before such an august body again so I thought I would aim straight at their jugular. I spoke from the heart and the reaction was forceful. I told them I was in the record business, which no longer was the privileged domain of four or five companies, and was there to stay. There would be more independents coming up fast behind me, and if stores still refused to stock our product, then I and they would find other outlets. If I had to sell records through supermarkets or bookshops or in food stores or photograph stores then I would not hesitate. Records could be, and would be, sold outside of conventional outlets and the stores would only have themselves to blame.” The audience was not impressed. “I said what worked in the American market would follow here in the European market and they were visibly shaken. It took five years before I was formally vindicated, on the occasion of Ember’s seventh anniversary. In an editorial in the trade magazine Record Retailer on 29 September 1966, the editor, also a record store owner, upheld exactly what I’d said at the GRRA Convention. Unless dealers recognised the independents, the day would come when independent product and budget records would be sold against them in bookshops and supermarkets.” A blow came when Weiser had to explain to him that studio politics at
20th Century had led to them assigning a licence for the soundtrack to the company’s blockbuster Cleopatra to EMI. There were also reversals in obtaining licences from American labels who overestimated the potential of their records in what remained a thriving but niche market. “Betty Chapita of Vee-Jay Records made it quite clear that she thought I was trying to con her and she was interested only in serious money up front. She never made any attempt to speak to anyone who knew the UK market who could corroborate my account of that market. Many fine records were unreleased in Britain at the time, in my view, solely because of her greed.”
Similar problems overcame attempts to liase with Herman Lubinsky’s Savoy and Don Robey of Duke/Peacock Records. Kruger did, however, fare better with Saul and Jules Bihari’s west coast independent umbrella group, comprising Kent, Modern and Crown, leading to a fine catalogue of blues and jazz albums by BB King, Elmore James, Howlin’ Wolf et al. He was also able to work Syd Nathan’s King Records – although their initial meeting had to be convened around Cincinnati’s appearance in the baseball world series. “I love America and I love my native England, but I’m afraid that their respective summer games, baseball and cricket, do not hold me in their thrall,” notes Kruger. Despite this, he managed to convince an initially sceptical Nathan to allow him to licence a small trickle of records without an advance. Eventually, these resulted in the first UK releases by a young artist Nathan had introduced to him in his studio in 1965, James Brown. Eventually, Nathan gave Kruger access to his album releases, beginning with Billy Ward’s Dominoes (featuring Clyde McPhatter and Jackie Wilson). It was the first release on Ember’s full-price flagship album range. He also released dozens of rock ‘n’ roll classics by Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison and others via an agreement with Sam Phillips of Sun Records.
Ember released the Dave Clark Five’s debut, ‘Chaquita’, in June 1962, alongside domestic talents such as Lita Roza, the Dale Sisters, Grant Tracy & The Sunsets, Lewis & The Southerners (pre-The Ivy League/Flowerpot Men) and a pre-EMI Matt Monro. Composer John Barry also joined the label in 1963, as a refugee from politicking at EMI. “We were like chalk and cheese,” notes Kruger. “I was disciplined and businesslike and watched every penny – at times I had to. John, on the other hand, was a truly talented artist, a man of flair and confidence but not a student of budget control. If he came up with an idea, he wanted to go straight into the studio with a 40-piece orchestra and get on with it.” Barry was signed to the label (on a higher than normal royalty) and also became in-house producer. He would provide soundtracks to Bond film From Russia With Love and Zulu, also bringing the label his proteges, folk singers Chad Stuart and Jeremy Clyde, who eventually found success after being licensed to Pittsburgh’s World Artists imprint. Both ‘Yesterday’s Gone’ and ‘Summer Song’ were substantial American hits.
However, the relationship with Barry hit rocky waters when Kruger queried the escalating recording costs afforded an Annie Ross album, then soured further over Barry’s insistence he release any record he liked at any point, even if that stretched Ember’s still puny promotional resources. So in the end Barry’s contract was handed over to Marty Erlichman, Barbra Streisand’s manager. In the meantime, 19-year-old David Jones (later Bowie) signed to Ember’s publishing arm Sparta Music, while the record label also helped to turn Swinging Sixties model Twiggy into a recording artist.
The role that Decca’s London American operation played in the 50s and 60s is important to note, in so much as, while a major, it helped spread the independent gospel as the primary outlet for rock ‘n’ roll’s first generation. “My sense is that the blueprint for the golden age of UK indie labels came from their US counterparts some three decades beforehand,” says John Broven, author of Record Makers And Breakers: Voices of the Independent Rock ‘n’ Roll Pioneers. “There was a similar ethos of giving the public the good music it wanted and not what the major labels decreed. The pioneering US independent companies began springing up throughout the United States in the immediate post-World War II era, when the majors ignored the full impact of emergent rhythm and blues – a stylistic precursor of rock ‘n’ roll. The names of the leading R&B indie labels resonate with familiarity, especially Atlantic, Chess, Imperial, King, Modern, Specialty and Sun. Other important indie labels such as Cadence, Dot and Liberty were more pop-slanted. In varying degrees, these innovators licensed their masters – hits and non-hits – to London American, part of the Decca Records group, for global distribution during an epic period from 1955 through 1965.”
“Accordingly,” Broven continues, “the fabled London label introduced teens everywhere to a long line of now classic artists, including Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Eddie Cochran, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Everly Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and Ricky Nelson – and, crucially, to the independent spirit. Only major label signings Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and Gene Vincent seemed to be missing. Among the eager young record collectors would be impressionable future UK indie artists, shopkeepers and label owners. Just as their US forebears had done, the vibrant UK indie labels injected much-needed life into a moribund musical scene. Then the establishment started to retaliate, in an action replay of the earlier US scenario. It was great while it lasted.”
Joe Meek cuts unarguably the most tragi-comic figure in the story of independent UK pop in the late fifties and early sixties. His name has become part of an iconography of ‘swinging London’ that includes Kenneth Williams and Joe Orton (and also, Brian Epstein). All were gay men in an era, despite the increasingly libertarian climate, that remained almost unremittingly hostile to the notion. His career and life are well documented elsewhere, notably in John Repsch’s book The Legendary Joe Meek. The lurid tales surrounding his home studio in a flat above 304 Holloway Road continue to enthral as much as the sonic alchemy he produced there. Marshalling household items alongside wholly invented or customised electronic gadgetry for recording sessions that saw musicians perform on stairwells and the bathroom, Meek went to extraordinary lengths to replicate the sounds he heard in his head. Always a notoriously difficult and exacting man, his descent into drug-fuelled paranoia eventually spiralled into murder and suicide, and remains one of the most compelling stories in British post-war history.
Meek was responsible for more than 300 records between 1956 and 1967, among them some of the treasures of our pop culture – notably the science fiction-themed instrumental ‘Telstar’ and the definitive ‘death disc’ ‘Johnny Remember Me’. Notoriously temperamental and violent, disparaging of the Beatles initially (and much else), Meek’s work has latterly been recognised as the output of a kind of idiot savant. The fact that he was mentally incapacitated as he faced the final curtain is indisputable. At which point his decline began is open to conjecture. Biographer John Repsch is as well placed as any to comment. “I interviewed about 120 people, and I would always ask each one of them at the end, if I can’t find out what made him tick, the story is inadequate. And they would say, ‘What made him tick was that he loved his music,’ or ‘he was so lonely as a person’. And no-one came up with this, but it dawned on me that it was all there in his childhood and upbringing. This desire to overcome his complexes, that he felt inadequate in himself, and he was desperate to prove to the world he was a force to be reckoned with.”
Meek grew up in the quiet village of Newent in Gloucestershire, where he was remorselessly teased by his siblings for his theatrical interests and mannerisms, exacerbated by the fact that his mother, who had hoped for a daughter, dressed him in girl’s clothing. It inculcated in him a lifelong pursuit for acceptance. “Always he wanted to prove himself,” states Repsch. “You have to go back to his childhood, and the fact that he had a tough upbringing in that he was an outsider, and he couldn’t bear being teased, and he had a rotten time of it. And he discovered this talent for electronics, and that gave him a way to prove himself as something other than a little wimp that liked wearing girl’s dresses, and to prove he had a brain in his head. And the attitude to him in the small village he lived in drove him out. He might well have stayed there had he been accepted. But he went through mental turmoil, and that drove him to London. He thought he would be better accepted there and things would be different. Homosexuality was very frowned upon in those days. It’s said in the music business, music is the great leveller. It doesn’t matter if you were queer, black, Jewish, two-headed or three-legged, if you could produce good music, you were in, and an equal. But he proved that was not the case at all, as he still had tremendous difficulties. But then he made a rod for his own back, because he was so temperamental. It possibly wasn’t always due to that prejudice.”
Meek took a job at a radio shop on Edgware Road briefly but then began working at IBC Studios during 1954 as a “glorified projectionist”, showing prospective advertisers TV commercials broadcast in America at the dawn of commercial television. Soon he was drawn into the Radio Luxembourg road shows that toured the country, and with whom IBC had a contract to provide technical support. Eventually he became a ‘tape monkey’, a junior assistant engineer who would make the tea and place microphones. “There was another character there, Allen Stagg, who became the studio manager, and he wasn’t an ‘inventive’ person,” says Repsch. “It was all rules and regulations. Allen made life very difficult for Joe. He hated homosexuals.”
Meek desperately wanted to become a senior engineer, and would petition Stagg and get nowhere. “So he started asking the producers who came in to put pressure on the office, because he wanted to do big jobs. One of those was Arthur Frewin. Arthur Frewin worked for cheap budget labels, and he was paid for setting up sessions. He said, give the lad a chance. He got nowhere initially, but there was a big studio production, a big orchestral session with Alyn Ainsworth for ‘Music For Lonely Lovers’. Arthur was the producer. Joe had never done a senior balance engineer job before – apart from engineering a Big Bill Broonzy blues record – and it was actually Allen Stagg’s attempt to undermine and capsize Meek’s prospects, because he thought he would fail.”
He didn’t, and Meek quickly gravitated to becoming producer Denis Preston’s favoured engineer. “When Denis discovered Joe, he didn’t want Allen any more.” On his death in 1979, the Sunday Times described Preston as “probably the most important figure to emerge from the British jazz business”. Repsch cites Meek’s debt to Preston as ‘inevitable’. “The fact that they worked together so closely, there’s no way Denis couldn’t have been an influence on Joe. Norman Granz was the king of recorded jazz in America, and Denis had taken a leaf out of his book. In fact, he said, ‘If only I’d had the chance to work with artists of the same calibre, I’d have done even better than Norman Granz.’” That may have sounded a boastful claim, but it was undoubtedly true, at least in terms of sonic fidelity. Granz, the original founder of Verve, was dismissive of ‘hi-fi’, and instead appended the legend ‘Recorded in Muenster Dummel Hi-Fi’ to his record labels. This was actually in tribute to two breeds of dogs he owned, and the sound was, usually, dreadful. But certainly Granz served as the model of kindly patrician that Preston came to be to Meek, until the latter fell out with him in yet another fit of pique. The production company he established in 1954, Record Supervision Ltd, enabled him to work with selected artists to produce recordings which were then licensed to major record labels – effectively the path Meek too would follow. This resulted in a long association with Pye Records and recordings by Chris Barber, Acker Bilk and many others, which evolved into a subsequent deal in 1959 with EMI’s Columbia label, helping to document the ‘trad jazz’ boom. But he also dabbled in other fields, including folk, calypso. flamenco guitar, popular song (Roger Whittaker) and was behind many of Donegan’s skiffle recordings.
Meek’s already fertile persecution complex, meanwhile, was given ample scope to prosper in the stiff, regimented environs of IBC. “He was recording Petula Clark, and they always worked late without overtime, all of the engineers,” notes Repsch. “He got back to bed in the early hours, and he was late getting up. So he walks in all smiles, and there’s the studio manager at the door, tapping his watch. ‘What time do you call this, Mr Meek?’ He couldn’t cope with that attitude.” When Meek told Preston he was leaving, fed up with being ‘picked on’, not just for his sexuality but also the way he liked to tamper with recording equipment, that gave Preston, who had long harboured the ambition of starting his own recording studio, the nudge to leave IBC too.
“It was on the cards when Joe came to realise how appreciated some of his work was,” says Repsch. “It made him ambitious. He wasn’t getting the credit due to him, because he was putting the gloss on those records at IBC, but he didn’t have his name on the records. Denis Preston did put Joe’s name on a lot of jazz records. But Joe was having success with things like ‘Lay Down Your Arms’ by Anne Shelton, and Frankie Vaughan’s ‘Green Door’, and lots of Lonnie Donegan records. A lot of the pop stuff, the engineers’ names weren’t mentioned, but Joe thought he was the one making them hits. One of the recordings that Meek made with Denis was Johnny Duncan’s ‘Last Train to San Fernando’, which sold an awful lot of records. With the income from that, they were able to set up Lansdowne, which was being used as a tiny studio by an amateur cellist. And it was just round the corner from where Meek was living. Denis dived in and bought the place, and Joe helped set it up, and became the studio manager. He was there only for about 18 months, but he made his mark there.”
By 1960 Meek had founded Triumph Records, using downtime at Lansdowne Road and a flat in Holland Park. Few of his initial releases, with the notable exception of ‘Green Jeans’, made much impact, though they are recalled today as visionary experiments and early blueprints for ‘Telstar’. Triumph, formed with William Barrington-Coup of Saga Films, didn’t last long. Meek saw what he believed would be a potential number one hit escape his production of Michael Cox’s ‘Angela Jones’ after the pressing plant he’d found was unable to satisfy demand after the singer appeared on television promoting it. Very quickly Triumph disappeared as Meek assessed he was better served by handing over the masters to those able to get records into the shops. With investment from the colourful Major Banks (to be played by Kevin Spacey in an upcoming film of Meek’s life – “I wanted that part!” laughs Repsch, himself an actor), he took up the flat in Holloway Road that would become his stronghold. They jointly formed RGM Sound as a production company. “Without Banks there would have been no ‘Telstar’,” says Repsch. “He was the one funding it all. Joe was a leper and a pariah in the industry after walking out of Lansdowne. And word gets round. He gave Joe the security. Unfortunately, he could be a little mean too. He was an astute businessman, and he wanted all Joe’s money from composing to go straight back into the company. But apart from that, having anyone in authority over him was something that Meek couldn’t live with. He thought anyone telling him what to do undermined his ability to be creative.” Meek wasn’t himself above being presumptuous about financial matters. Money was dispensed often purely on the basis of favouritism. “He wanted the money going into his pockets, but it wasn’t re-channelled as it should have. A lot of people sold a lot of records and didn’t get remuneration for it.”
Meek dismissed all who stood in his way as ‘rotten pigs’, a term which started out as a collective demarcation for his enemies and increasingly became the basis for a full-blown conspiracy theory. Yet there was evidence to support some of his hostility. White-coated cutting engineers rejected some of his early recordings, believing his distortion techniques would damage speakers. They would be forced to take him seriously after a typically outlandish recording session (some of the musicians involved didn’t even meet their colleagues as they were located elsewhere in the three-storey flat) resulted in ‘Johnny Remember Me’. Sung by TV star John Leyton and written by Geoff Goddard (aka Anton Hollywood), the single reached the top of the UK charts in July 1961 after Meek licensed it to Top Rank.
The second massive hit from Holloway Road linked straight back to Meek’s earlier experiments and, in particular, his fascination with space travel (its subject was the recently launched AT&T communications satellite). ‘Telstar’ again reached the top of the UK charts, and was the first single by a British ‘band’ to reach the top of the US charts. This despite initial concern from Decca, who licensed it, that the recording was technically sub-standard. Sadly, Meek would never receive substantive royalties for the record. A court case, not settled until after Meek’s death, was launched by French composer Jean Ledrut claiming that it infringed copyright on his soundtrack to the 1960 film Austerlitz.
Thereafter, the chaotic world Meek had built began to fall apart. Smitten by blond star Heinz Burt, he dedicated many of his efforts to securing a pop success for him (finally doing so with ‘Just Like Eddie’). He was then arrested and fined for importuning at a toilet in Madras Place, resulting in unwelcome press attention on the front page of the London Evening News and eventually an escalating number of blackmail threats from alleged former conquests. All of which pushed Meek further into a vicious cycle of pill-popping and bizarre seances where he would consult the spirit of his father, Buddy Holly and Pharaoh Ramesses The Great of Egypt. There was another number one success with the Honeycombs’ Have I The Right’, but even that brought a further legal stand-off over disputed authorship and a rupture between him and former ally Goddard. “He got worse when the hits stopped coming,” Repsch notes. “He felt he was being elbowed out, and then he thought it was due to being caught messing about in lavatories. They [the majors] didn’t want to know him any more. They also got fed up with his floods of tears. He’d take a recording that he’d worked very hard on and it would be dismissed, and he’d break down into tears. They’d say, ‘Sorry Joe, there’s no market for this.’ Sometimes he’d get on to Joseph Lockwood, his knight in shining armour, who looked after him because they were similar in a way; he was gay too. But as the hits stopped he became more and more strange. A weird psychic lady would tell him which days to record and which not. And the drugs he was experimenting with made things worse. He was a hypochondriac. All that loud noise, I don’t think that’s good for you, either. He once said he had to listen to Ted Heath when he was with Denis Preston – he said it was so loud it made his ears bleed. That control room of his was only 10ft by 10ft, full of spinning tape machines as well, which probably made it more like 3ft by 3ft.”
Meek had begun routinely bugging his own studio, so convinced was he that the place was awash with spies stealing his ideas and selling them to other record labels. When Phil Spector came to London and asked if he could pass by Holloway Road to show his appreciation, Meek slammed the phone down on him with such force it broke. On 3 February 1967, exactly eight years after the death of Buddy Holly, following an argument with his landlady Mrs Shenton, almost certainly about unpaid back rent, he discharged a shotgun into her back, killing her, and then turned the gun on himself.
The Meek story is as tragic as it is gripping – he would doubtless have been feted had he been able to overcome his neuroses, which Repsch believes could have happened had suitable psychiatric intervention taken place. But for our purposes it is probably the prime example of the way in which an independent producer could overturn the apple cart. Meek paved the way for the likes of Jonathan King (who also recorded unreleased work with Meek) and Mickie Most. “He showed prospective engineers and producers that they could do it,” says Repsch. “You didn’t need to hire the Royal Albert Hall, or have a studio the size of Abbey Road – you could do it in your own front room.” There is sufficient evidence that the establishment did indeed loathe him, though not nearly to the extent his troubled mind presumed. But for a golden period, what is indisputable is that the majors were so dismayed at the way the charts had been overtaken by an ‘amateur’ that they came to him for hit singles. Meek took enormous delight in the fact that the ‘rotten pigs’ were emasculated so, if only for a brief but glorious period. As it was, his life mirrored his art rather too closely. “He wouldn’t know when to stop,” says Repsch. “He would do things that other people were not prepared to do. He would turn the dial that extra turn. And if it wouldn’t turn, he’d get his screwdriver out.”
By the mid-60s a new generation of labels were evolving. Continuing the producer as independent hitmaker ethos of the likes of Spector and Gamble and Huff in the US and Meek in the UK, came Chicago native Shel Talmy, who had shared a classroom with Spector. Arriving in London to convince Dick Rowe of Decca that the demo tapes he played of the Beach Boys and Lou Rawls were his own work (they were not), Talmy became a freelance at the label. Regardless of the propriety of his appointment in 1962, Talmy soon rewarded his new employers with a hit record, the Bachelors’ ‘Charmaine’. And, after a couple of years working on stock pop fodder, he became one of the most celebrated producers in rock via his work with first the Kinks and then the Who. By 1965, inspired by Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate, he decided to take the plunge and form his own record label, Planet. The idea was to work across the board in terms of genre, to make the imprint a mark of quality rather than style, and to this end he set about recruiting R&B singers, crooners, girl groups and strains of the emergent Mod movement.
It didn’t quite pan out that way. The label was extant only from December 1965 to December 1966, failing to enjoy commercial success for any of its 22 singles. He was naïve in signing a contract with Philips that was heavily slanted in their favour, and took his eye off the ball while he continued to work on production for major label artists. That said, there is much to admire about (some of) the releases on Planet – notably the Creation’s ‘Making Time’ and ‘Painter Man’, the group’s name subsequently inspiring one of the great UK independent labels of the 80s and 90s. But when Phillips wouldn’t renegotiate the contract, Talmy shut it down.
Strike Records, and its subsidiary Go, with releases by Neil Christian, the Deputies, JJ Jackson and a pre-‘Kung Fu Fighting’ Carl Douglas, added to the 60s pop dynamic over the course of 35 singles. Established in 1965 by Adrian Jacobs and Lionel Segal out of their publishing company, it hinged on the talents of songwriters Miki Dallon and Pierre Tubbs. The latter was the beneficiary of a bespoke studio installed in his parent’s Surrey Garden – two pre-cast concrete garages laid end to end with cork and egg boxes for soundproofing. But distribution was one of Strike’s great obstacles. Like Ember before them, they used Lugton’s, which operated out of a flat above a shop on Tottenham Court Road. Other attempts were made to overcome distribution problems using the services of Max Factor and Smith’s Crisps, while releases were supported with airtime on pirate radio stations. But after the initial success of Neil Christian’s ‘That’s Nice’, Strike floundered, as Tubbs and Segal moved on to their next business venture. The first Neil Christian knew about its closure in 1967 was when the tour van he was travelling to Germany in was impounded by bailiffs.
In the legal fallout that followed Strike’s dissolution, Dallon launched Young Blood Records with his then lawyer Gerry Black. With distribution via EMI and Beacon, it was better facilitated to succeed than its forerunner. And Dallon this time ensured he would spread his net wider, securing deals and licensing arrangements throughout Europe, to facilitate the growth of the label. Launched in August 1969, with an advance from German label Hansa on condition they had an option on any of his recordings, Dallon deliberately targeted records at the French and German markets, tying up a deal with Eddie Barclay in France in addition to Hansa. Famously he was paid in the currency of onyx ashtrays by one Yugoslavian licensee. “I didn’t want to be a pop label,” Dallon later told Kieron Tyler, “I thought we can be a bit of a rough diamond R&B label, something different to your run-of-the-mill pop.” Yet their first UK hit was Don Farden’s tribute to George Best, ‘Belfast Boy’, in February 1970, though by then Dallon had already enjoyed a handful of European hits. ‘(The Lament Of The Cherokee) Indian Reservation’, recorded with Sorrows’ singer Don Farden and already an unexpected success in America after it was licensed to independent GNP Crescendo, finally became a major UK hit when released on Young Blood. It was followed by ‘In A Broken Dream’ by Python Lee Jackson, fronted by Rod Stewart, which charted in 1972 (two years after it was first released). The label persevered with a bizarre mixture of acts, including Apollo 100, who had a major American hit with ‘Joy’, their reworking of Bach’s ‘Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring’, the rock-operatic Julian’s Treatment, who enjoyed surprise popularity in Germany and the incomprehensible Dando Shaft. Other oddities, however, like the glam-influenced Damned (titled prior to Sensible et al taking the name in the punk years) fell off everyone’s radar, though even Bearded Lady stumbled upon a German hit. Despite scoring a novelty chart success with the awful ‘Nice One Cyril’, Dallon’s interest in Young Blood faded and he departed in 1976. The label struggled on for a few years without ever enjoying the same stature.
But the most important, and most arresting UK independent label of the 60s was the aforementioned Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate enterprise. Oldham, self-confessed ‘godfather of hype’, was manager of the Rolling Stones and a man upon who you could comfortably weave a narrative that takes in most of the essentials of the 60s music revolution. He founded Immediate in 1965 alongside Tony Calder, with the focus on the British blues boom as well as R&B, though if anything, the label sound-tracked the Sound Of Swinging London. The ethos was to indulge its artists by giving them free reign to make the ‘hippest’ records they could – artistry without financial impediment – with results that confirmed the genius and the folly of such an approach. With Mick Jagger and Keith Richard serving as producers (and occasionally songwriters), the label’s slogan ‘Happy To Be A Part Of The Industry Of Human Happiness’ did not seem unduly hyperbolic at one point. However, an enterprise untethered by accountants and obeying only its own internal logic, somewhat waylaid by the fleshpot and pharmaceutical attractions of the time, was ultimately destined to consume itself in an implosion of ego and recrimination.
Among the label’s roster of stellar acts were PP Arnold, John Mayall, Savoy Brown, the Small Faces, the Nice, Fleetwood Mac, the Groundhogs and Humble Pie, spanning anything from straight blues-rock to folk, psychedelia and prog. The label was behind dozens of touchstone recordings (notably the Nice’s eponymous album, the Small Faces’ Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake, PP Arnold’s The First Lady Of Immediate etc) until the Small Faces left in 1969 as the debts began to mount. The label closed in 1970 due to financial problems, or alleged impropriety. Kenny Jones of the Small Faces, who claims they didn’t receive a fraction of the income due to them for their string of hits, states that much of the money the label generated was spirited away by one of the senior accountants to offshore bank accounts.
Questioned about accusations made in pianist Ian McLagan’s book, Oldham would concede that after 1970 there were issues about unpaid royalties, caused by his sale of masters to Patrick Meehan and arrangements with Castle/Sanctuary (the subsequent rights holders). However, he insists that monies owed up to 1970 were faithfully accounted, and the black hole that appeared in the Small Faces’ finances were due entirely to their own profligacy.
“Independence?” ponders Loog Oldham now. “Independence in those days was a pipe dream. A pretend game. That said, we still pursued it. It was not even pragmatic. You exchanged a producer/artist royalty, which had the overheads of studio, musicians etc, for a larger royalty and a larger overhead. Seemingly some of the annoyance of dealing with a major record company were removed, but some of the restraints, which in hindsight, sometimes had their blessings, went out of the window as well. At the end of the day, I probably achieved us much independence with Decca and The Rolling Stones and Marianne Faithfull as I did with Immediate and the Small Faces; except that when I was right with Decca, they paid the bill. Please do not think that I look back in anger, or rancour, but if, as Woody Allen once said, cocaine was God’s way of telling one that one had too much money, then Immediate was God’s way of telling me the same. I love the effect Immediate had on the world of music as much as anyone, but know better than anyone the house of cards upon which it was built. I love the fact that, in the UK at least, a lot of the recordings are life-changers and life-givers but the Woody Allen ode remains the truth. By ‘65 I too stoned to deal with majors. I was banned from the Decca building because my driver cum minder roughed up a doorman who did not whistle me in fast enough for my speedy ego. By ‘68 I was banned from the EMI building in Manchester Square for putting sleeping pills in the soup of the reps and salesmen at a sales dinner. EMI by now distributed Immediate, having taken over from Philips, who were headed by Leslie Gould, the man who first did a deal with us and let us ‘in’. In any event, we paid all the acts and writers’ wages, paid the rent on most of their flats, paid their doctor’s bills, etc, and their dealers. And when they only sold so many records and people came along whispering sweet nothings and trying to steal them, most of the acts forgot what we had in fact done, and soon the dream was gone. And without the faith and the dream …”
In common with other UK independents, Loog Oldham admits to owing “a great debt to America”, and, “in particular Jim Lee and Bob Crewe for the independent idea. To Phil Spector I owe a lot, but not structure. Jim Lee wrote, produced and published the Chris Montez record ‘Let’s Dance’ [a # 4US/# 2UK hit released on Monogram Records]. Whilst doing their PR in ‘62, he was very gracious with his time and sharing and I learnt a lot. He was also the record company. Bob Crewe produced and sold independent masters and he was also generous with lessons about the game.”
Crewe is an interesting example of the independent writer-producer ethos in that in some ways he was almost the polar opposite of Joe Meek. A handsome former model and an effortlessly charismatic man, he charmed all he met. Responsible for the lyrics of classic songs such as ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You’, ‘Lady Marmalade’, ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’ and ‘Walk Like A Man’, he would enjoy enormous success with Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons in the 60s. What is most arresting about Crewe in this context, however, is his early years with former bandleader Frank Slay Jr. They were able to place songs with a number of labels, but feared that the inferior nature of the final recordings would damage their reputation. To that end they decided instead to create their own masters, starting labels to market that product.
“But we were all mad and not entitled to be heads of companies,” Loog Oldham concedes. “England had a good history of independent producers, way before Immediate or Track. You had the likes of Joe Meek and Robert Stigwood who had velvet entry into Sir Joseph Lockwood at EMI.” Please read into that what you will. “Having John Leyton and his looks helped, I’m sure. Then you had Denis Preston and his Lansdowne studio set-up and his success with Chris Barber and Lonnie Donegan. and the often forgotten great couple of harlots; Michael Barclay and Phillip Waddilove, who had a huge house on Gloucester Place, all built upon the questionable longevity of [sixties pop idol] Eden Kane.”
David Platz is the other key figure in the development of an independent aesthetic in British popular music, his influence still evident today, long after his death. By the mid-60s his Essex Music was the dominant independent music company in the UK. It held the publishing of The Rolling Stones, The Who and Marc Bolan, and he had a thriving independent production company that would fund producers on individual projects that would then be licensed to majors. This was generally done through the auspices of a raft of production companies such as Straight Ahead, founded in July 1967, by Platz and South American-born but privately educated English producer Denny Cordell. Instead of artists, Straight Ahead used a roster of producers who would cut master recordings at Trident and other studios, their efforts administered by Platz’s publishing offices. Cordell would oversee the music side, while Platz hooked up the various projects with interested major labels, notably Decca’s Deram and EMI’s Regal Zonophone. Major commercial success resulted via hits by The Move, Procol Harum and The Moody Blues. Meanwhile, those session producers that came through the system included Tony Visconti, who started out as Cordell’s production assistant, and Gus Dudgeon, who was producing Elton John.
It was the Platz connection that led to Visconti working with Bolan and David Bowie. Both artists were struggling at the time, though Platz managed to revive the latter’s ailing progress by using his publishing connections to encourage other artists to cover his material. “Bowie was still signed to Deram when I was asked to produce him,” says Visconti. “Deram didn’t like our efforts, ‘Let Me Sleep Beside You’ and ‘Karma Man’, which led to him being dropped. Platz knew nothing of Bowie and Feathers [a temporary congregation featuring Hermione Farthingale and John ‘Hutch’ Huchinson] until I took them into the studio without his approval or knowledge and recorded the ‘Ching A Ling’ song and the b-side. Platz was very angry with me. I thought he’d love it once he’d heard it, but that was not the case, and I nearly got fired.” In the event, the breakthrough that the Platz/Visconti team were looking for came with Bolan’s ‘Ride A White Swan’. It was eventually released on Fly Records in October 1970, at which time the single (credited to T-Rex) became a number two hit in the UK charts.
There was a nice line of continuity with its indie forerunner Immediate. When Loog Oldham’s label sundered, Fly acquired its stock of distinctive lilac labels. Building on his breakthrough, Bolan then piloted T-Rex to huge album success with Electric Warrior, which topped the British charts. Fly’s success with T-Rex was followed by releases from Joe Cocker, John Williams, Third World War and Vivian Stanshall. However, Fly’s brief ascendancy concluded with the release of Georgia Brown’s non-charting ‘I Scare Myself’. Label manager Malcolm Jones departed, as did Cordell (to form Shelter Records in the US). The label changed name to Cube, and was home to artists including Bolan, Cocker, Budgie and others), with pop chart success for John Kongos, Joan Armatrading, Gordon Giltrap etc. There was also a selection of Pete Cook and Dudley Moore’s Not Only… But Also TV shows released on The Clean Tapes.
Alongside Immediate, the other most notorious 60s independent in the UK was Track Records, founded by Who managers Kit Lambert, once famously described as an ‘aristocratic hothead’, and Chris Stamp, brother of actor Terence. They were an interesting partnership. Lambert, an Oxford graduate and son of composer Constant Lambert, could hardly have offered more of a contrast to Stamp, son of an east end tug boatman. Their initial problem was in extricating The Who from their contract with Shel Talmy and Brunswick, which went to court. As an interim measure, they had released Who material on Robert Stigwood’s Reaction Records, started a year previously. Stigwood, an ex-pat Australian entrepreneur, is inextricably linked with so many other aspects of the music industry’s development – he had John Leyton on his books as an actor at the time of his success with Joe Meek, which convinced him there was potential in Meek’s model of the independent producer. He would also initially sub-let office space to Lambert and Stamp, who legendarily teased him mercilessly.
Talmy, speaking to Ritchie Unterberger, gave some insight into the way the duo announced themselves to the world. “My problems with The Who were with Kit Lambert, who was out of his fucking mind – I think he was certifiably insane. If he hadn’t been in the music business, he would have been locked up. The problem with him was his giant-sized ego plus paranoia. He felt I was usurping his authority because I was producing these [Who] recordings. His partner, Chris Stamp, was hardly ever around. I always got along with Chris, I thought. But Chris never said a word.” Track became an outlet for The Who, but also a nursery for the emerging talent of Jimi Hendrix (after Chas Chandler had beaten them to a management contract). Both Track and Reaction were dependent on Polydor Records in the absence of any independent distribution network; part of an experiment in Polydor developing its claim on the emerging 60s pop phenomenon, having previously been best known as an easy listening and orchestral specialist.
Track can lay claim to having released possibly the greatest opening salvo of rock singles – a sequence that ran ‘Purple Haze’ (Hendrix), ‘Pictures Of Lily’ (the Who), ‘Desdemona’ (John’s Children) and ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ (Hendrix) – at the start of 1967. These were accompanied by albums including Are You Experienced? And The Who Sell Out all in the same year. Though it was impossible to maintain that level of aural splendour, the label continued through the 70s, working with acts such as Crazy World Of Arthur Brown and Thunderclap Newman. However, an inability to diversify away from The Who and Hendrix saw them stall, especially after Hendrix’s death and The Who’s move to Polydor following Quadrophenia. The latter came about when the band discovered gaping holes in the accountancy at the label, with concomitant tax issues. Group members had also become alarmed by Lambert’s rapidly advancing alcoholism. It resulted in a writ served in July 1975, which brought the onset of a two-year legal tussle. That left the label with just Golden Earring on its books during that period. Track finally closed in March 1978 – ironically a year after it released the Heartbreakers L.A.M.F., a harbinger of the punk boom, but an album Track effectively signed up for as a last throw of the dice with their creditors circling.
Track made a concerted effort, as best as their sensibilities and finances allowed, to garner a foothold with punk, placing adverts for new bands in Sniffin’ Glue. As author Marcus Gray would recount, “Lambert played for time by using The Who’s name to secure a bank loan of £56,000, but when Leee [Black Childers; Heartbreakers manager] approached Track, time was about to run out. A manic looking Christ Stamp seemed enthusiastic about the idea, seeing it as a last desperate lifeline. The contract that Stamp presented to Leee and business manager Peter Gerber offered a £50,000 advance – coincidentally almost exactly what Lambert had borrowed.” Under the guidance of Malcolm McLaren’s assistant Nils Stevenson, Siouxsie & The Banshees would record demos for Track, though Stevenson was aware of the situation at Track and quickly circulated the paid-for demos among other labels. When Track finally went phut, Childers arranged to have the offices broken into to secure the master tapes from the hands of the Official Receiver (they were released by Jungle in 1984, in remixed form). Lambert died just three years later. The label has now been revived under the guidance of former Stranglers, Cult and Big Country manager Ian Grant. Stamp, meanwhile, is a psychotherapist specialising in addiction.
The biggest UK independent record label of them all, until it was sold to PolyGram in 1989, was Island Records, originally founded in Jamaica in 1959 by Chris Blackwell and Graeme Goodall. Richard Branson, proprietor of nearest competitor Virgin, has openly acknowledged that Island was the model on which he based his own enterprise. Blackwell, the son of wealthy plantation owning Jamaican parents, named his label in tribute to Alec Waugh’s novel Island In The Sun. Laurel Aitken’s ‘Boogie In My Bones’ gave him his first hit, topping the Jamaican charts for 11 weeks. His first album release, jazz pianist Lance Heywood’s At The Half Moon Hotel, was given the catalogue number CB 22 – Blackwell was 22 years old at the time. At this stage, Blackwell maintained, he was only thinking in terms of a handful of releases documenting the Jamaican ska era and not building a global brand.
In May 1962 he moved to London and took out a loan with the specific intention of providing a bridge to the UK for Jamaican artists. Renting a house from Church Of England Commissioners, he piled imported Jamaican records into the back of his Mini Cooper and made daily trips around London record shops. He also supplied sound systems in the bustling ex-pat Afro-Caribbean strongholds of Brixton and Notting Hill. Karlo Kramer at Esquire magazine gave him a list of 20 stores specialising in black music to set him on his way. Spooky Tooth (then called Art) and Stevie Winwood’s Traffic were the first major white artists to come on board once Blackwell took the decision to diversify the label in 1967, with the assistance of Steve’s brother Muff Winwood. He had already had Winwood’s Spencer Davis Group on his books, but licensed their hits to Fontana. At the time, he didn’t believe he had the wherewithal to take them to market.
By the start of the 70s, Island had become the leading ‘prog rock’ label, enjoying huge commercial success with King Crimson, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Free and Jethro Tull, and also, through producer Joe Boyd, the folk rock of Nick Drake and Fairport Convention. John Martyn and Cat Stevens were even more successful. In 1972 Roxy Music were signed, also yielding to solo Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno albums. But it was the breakthrough of defining artist Bob Marley, originally as a member of the Wailers, which returned the label to its Jamaican roots. In the process Island had “a black rock star as big as Jimi Hendrix”, according to Blackwell’s own rhetoric, promoted in the manner of mainstream white rock acts. Despite warnings that Marley was an untamed ghetto child, Blackwell invested £4,000 to finance the recording of The Wailers’ Catch A Fire. His sponsorship of Marley broadened the British musical landscape and legitimised a musical idiom Island was uniquely placed to profit from. As well as being the most popular artist on the label’s roster, Marley’s breakthrough helped highlight a generation of Jamaican acts, many of whom had already recorded for the label in the 60s, but found interest renewed, as well as indigenous UK reggae groups, notably Aswad and Steel Pulse.
While Virgin prospered in the punk years, Island was more hesitant, counting only the Slits among its major discoveries, and even they were signed after protracted inner discussion (though that band’s intuitive connection to reggae was, with hindsight, self-evident). Outside reggae, the label’s major acts were Grace Jones and Robert Palmer. But as punk’s cannons cooled, Blackwell signed U2 in 1980, unarguably the most commercially arable seeding of post-punk guitar rock. By the mid-80s U2’s laborious ascent to the self-mythologised position of biggest rock band in the world had begun in earnest. In the meantime, however, Island, wrong-footed by punk, had lost some of its commercial momentum (Marley died in May 1981). Blackwell used the label as collateral to leverage Island Alive, a film distribution company. In fact, U2 were partially responsible for refunding the label. In an astute piece of business, U2 provided Island with a loan, offset by their right to buy back their master recordings and enjoy a much higher royalty rate.
In July 1989 Island was sold to PolyGram for $272 million, ending their era of independence (though by this time definitions of independence had, by popular assent, extended to means of distribution, which Island had long since routed through a succession of majors including Capital, Warners, Atlantic and Phonogram). The deal was overseen by lawyer Allen Grubman, who also handled the $295 million acquisition of publishing house SBK by Thorn-EMI, and EMI’s $75 million acquisition of 50% of Chrysalis Records just a couple of months later. It was a period of intense consolidation, triggered by Sony’s February 1988 $2bn acquisition of CBS Records at a hugely inflated price. And it wasn’t the end of it; in September 1989 Sony also acquired A&M for $460 million and in November 1990 Matsushita bought out MCA.
It’s perhaps telling to relate a tale from the board meetings that took place around the time of these transitions. One senior management figure at Island, who wished to remain anonymous, recalls being told that, henceforth, artists would only be paid mechanical royalties if they came after the new-look label with a lawyer. PolyGram, meanwhile, began a major reissue campaign, converting the Island back catalogue to compact disc. The Island Records of the 21st century is little more than a rubber stamp for PolyGram, Blackwell having long since fled, resigning officially in November 1997. Just over a year later, it was part of the Seagram take-over of PolyGram that saw it merged into Universal Music Group, where it currently resides, a meek shadow of its former glory.
Another stain on Island’s reputation – and that of U2’s – followed the hideous court case against art mavericks Negativland, which occurred while Blackwell was still at the helm. In 1991 Negativland issued its ‘U2’ record, featuring samples of a recording by America’s Top 40 host, Casey Kasem; the band’s logo displayed in large type on the packaging. The music was based on parodies of ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’, with kazoos used to deconstruct the sampled original. Kasem’s rant (“These guys are from England and who gives a shit?”), drawn from a fraught rehearsal, was the real motivation behind the collage. In the run-up to the release of Achtung Baby, Island’s lawyers issued writs against the band for violation of trademark and copyright law. Negativland were forced to settle out of court on the basis that they could not afford to defend the action. Had they done so, the band still believes, they would have established a new precedent for fair use. But this was a case where those with the financial resources rather than the moral high ground dictated events. Negativland maintained (most famously in an interview with Mondo magazine where they were able, via a little chicanery, to question U2’s guitarist The Edge) that they had been given no opportunity to withdraw the offending release. They also made the perfectly legitimate claim that U2 themselves had glorified indiscriminate copyright infraction by playing a series of clips from satellite TV stations when they set up their Zoo TV tour.
Island pushed for costs, which covered the efforts of an expensive legal team. The fallout meant that SST, one of America’s most distinguished independent labels (though not one that has been removed from harsh criticism itself from the artists it has worked with for non-payment of royalties, including several notable court cases), went into a tailspin. The term ‘pro bono’ has rarely taken on such conceptual duality. Moreover, the incident was testament to the extent to which the Island brand had become an avaricious entity, in thrall to corporate concerns, and incapable of recognising the validity of ‘art’ outside of the money chain.
And yet, certainly in the 70s, it would be a mistake to underplay the role of Island Records in establishing the foundations for an independent label culture – both in terms of its A&R reputation and its pioneering work in logistics. “Chris Blackwell was the role model for a lot of people,” states Richard Scott, then manager of reggae act Third World, and later head of Rough Trade Distribution. “If you think about what they achieved, not only did they have their own distribution, but they did their own manufacturing too; they had their own pressing plant and reps round the country. Island is much more important than Virgin. Island did all of Virgin’s distribution, and Branson knows nothing about music. Blackwell does. When Third World signed to Island in ’75, I spent a lot of time with Chris. I can remember a day we spent talking about whether he should drop Virgin. I spent another day talking to him about whether he should drop Roxy Music! He was using me as a sounding board. But I learnt a lot about the distribution business and how things worked through Chris.”
There is no more justifiably loved figure in the evolution of independent music than BBC disc jockey John Peel. Always a fierce but mostly intuitive advocate of the outsider, without his patronage this book would not exist. As an adjunct to his eyrie at the Beeb, he began the Dandelion label in 1969, alongside Clive Selwood, to offer an outlet for artists he liked who lacked any other means of exposure. Yet the part that Selwood played in the development of ‘Peel’s Dandelion Records’ is often overlooked. Trevor Midgley, aka label artist Beau, traces that back to the development of American independent Elektra and its forerunners. “In the mid-60s, Jac Holzman [Elektra’s founder] took the key decision to diversify and re-focus the catalogue. In came the Doors, Love, Carly Simon et al, and away went Theodore Bikel, Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs and the rest of the troubadours. Jac also launched the highly successful Nonesuch classical label to run alongside Elektra. At just this changeover point, the man who was charged with promoting the new Elektra/Nonesuch identity in Europe was Clive Selwood. When Dandelion was conceived in 1968, I don’t think John or Clive were consciously trying to produce an Elektra Mk. II. And of course, in the event, Dandy had neither the artist roster nor the longevity of Elektra.
However, it is interesting that even with its limited number of signings, in its three years Dandelion issued folk, art-rock, old-time rock ‘n’ roll, hard rock, proto-punk grunge, psych-folk, avant-garde jazz, and classical albums, plus sets in a couple of other genres that even now are tricky to categorise. Without John’s inquisitive and restless musical mind, none of this would have come about. But I’m also sure that Clive’s years of involvement with Elektra made him the perfect partner for Mr Peel. Extreme diversity within a label might be new in the UK, but it wasn’t strange to Clive. In a slightly different way, he’d seen it done before.”
Dandelion’s name came from one of Peel’s pet hamsters (as did the allied publishing business, Biscuit), at the suggestion of his then flatmate Marc Bolan. The label effectively exhibited his personal tastes. As well as attempting to revive Gene Vincent’s career, it released material by new artists including Beau, Medicine Head, Bridget St John, Clifford T. Ward, Stack Waddy, Tractor and Kevin Coyne (with his original band, Siren) amongst others.
Medicine Head provided the label with its only hit single, 1971’s ‘(And The) Pictures In The Sky’, which reached 22 in the charts (although Beau’s ‘1917 Revolution’ had topped the charts in the Lebanon a couple of years previously). While commercial returns were never a motivating factor, a respectable level of sales were required to keep the ship afloat. The label was successively distributed by CBS, Warner Brothers and Polydor, but closed its doors in 1973 when the latter deal ceased. The eventual loss of support from the major labels was, according to Midgley, inevitable. “The Dandelion ethos was at a tangent to the mainline record industry of the time. John’s name and reputation were vital when it came to getting CBS, Kinney [for a brief period the holding company for Warners] and Polydor to play ball, but there really was a culture clash which in the end could only have one result. But by the time the plug was finally pulled on Dandelion, foundations had been laid and blueprints established for future independents to take up the baton. As we now know, many did, with a vengeance.”
Dandelion released 28 albums and a dozen singles that, collectively, evade easy classification. There’s no doubt that Peel was somewhat dismayed by the way some of the artists on the label expected more than he had resources to provide. Speaking to me in 1991, he obliquely referenced this, when I asked if he tended to avoid music that was pompous or the result of overly inflated ego. “Yes, that’s right. I always find it quite laughable, really. It doesn’t irritate me. There might have been a time when it would have done, but now it just seems to me to be comic. Nobody’s that important. I suppose it’s one of the aspects of the ‘rock’ industry that I’ve always disliked. I’ve disliked it for lots of reasons, in that in the past it’s removed some very good friends from my orbit. In that they’ve become ‘rock stars’, and they start to live such a bizarre life, through no fault of their own. Most of them are not particularly bright, and they’re surrounded by people whose jobs depend on telling them how wonderful they are – so that they lose all touch with reality.”
“Whether John was sanguine about things that were going down, I can’t say,” admits Midgley. “What I can say is Peely loved to please, and didn’t like aggression or confrontation. If frustrations ever turned into argument, I can’t think he’d have found that agreeable. I personally didn’t have an issue [over promotion], because I knew Dandelion didn’t have bottomless coffers. I also appreciated John’s position at the Beeb, and of course I had another career outside music. I never had reason to discuss lack of promotion with either John or Clive because, quite honestly, I had enough on balancing the demands of two careers as it was.”
Nowadays Dandelion is remembered as one of the ultimate cult labels but, as Midgley suggests, it would be a mistake to simply consider it ‘Peel’s indulgence’. “To characterise Dandelion [in that way] would be to misunderstand a basic – and revolutionary – tenet of the label; that of artist control. In giving control of the recording process to those of us on the label, John and Clive sowed seeds, the fruits of which others would later reap in spades. It’s no coincidence, for example, that Richard Branson launched Virgin Records almost as Dandy exited the scene. Richard had that one tremendous slice of luck when one of his artists – Mike Oldfield – broke very, very big. If he’d been asked (and I don’t know that he ever was!), I’m sure John would have attributed Branson’s success with Mike and Tubular Bells to the promo budget Virgin was able to muster. Not to put too fine a point on it, Dandelion promoted on a shoestring, and John’s privileged position at the Beeb was only of limited benefit when it came to pushing Dandy and its artists. Though as I’ve said at another time and place, ‘the simple fact that John was associated with (Dandelion) gave the label a stamp – not just credibility, but also the cachet that a lot of people felt about Peel himself. It was quality stuff Peel would have played on his ‘Perfumed Garden.’”
Midgley remains convinced, too, that the label’s legacy should include an acknowledgement of the soundness of Peel’s tastes. “Personally, I always thought the David Bedford and Lol Coxhill discs were both adventurous and brave. This was the sort of stuff you mostly picked up on scholarly labels like Deutsche Grammophon; yet here they were, happily sitting alongside the rock offerings of Stack Waddy and Tractor and folkies such as myself and Bridget St John. For me, David’s and Lol’s releases epitomised the eclectic nature of Dandelion. They still do. All that said, I believe the greatest album to come out of Dandelion on so many levels – the one that will endure – is Kevin Coyne’s Case History. Quirky, soulful, heartbreakingly honest, I don’t think Kevin ever bettered it. That record just couldn’t have been made by any of the ‘corporates’ of the day. Many have said Dandelion was a great A&R resource for other labels. Indeed it was. And some of the music was truly innovative, deserving its place in the discography of the greats. Then there’s the spirit. Yes, it should be remembered for that. Dandelion was born out of John’s personal ideal, which was a kind of delightful (if naïve) confidence that if you produce something worthwhile, the world will beat a path to your door. But most of all, Dandelion was a trail-blazer. It wasn’t recognised as such at the time. But in the light of all that followed, Dandelion’s influence is plain. Without Dandy, the great British independent labels of the 70s and 80s would have had a very different look; if, that is, they would have existed at all.”
If Midgley makes the case convincingly that Virgin Records was influenced by Dandelion, the contrast between the two labels’ founders is acute. It’s hard to disassociate the rise of Virgin Records from its founder and relentless publicist Richard Branson, one of Britain’s most celebrated wealth-creators. The son of a barrister, and a veteran of Student Magazine, he established Virgin Records as a mail order chain, then retail outlet, alongside his second cousin, music buff Simon Draper. Virgin’s logo featured naked twins designed by Roger Dean, the centre-hole in the record placed between the crossed legs of the girl. It was a concept built on the casual misogyny of the era, but indicative of the boy’s club mentality Virgin embraced. After purchasing the Manor studio complex for £20,000, the label simultaneously released four albums on 25 May 1973 – Gong’s The Flying Teapot, a compilation of improvised music by friends including Robert Palmer and Elkie Brooks titled The Manor Live, Faust’s Faust Tapes and, most significantly, Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells. The latter would clock up sales of over five million. It established Virgin as a commercial force, even though the notoriously publicity-shy Oldfield proved hard to handle – the sole live appearance he made at the Queen Elizabeth Hall only came about after Branson promised him keys to a brand new Bentley. That early release schedule was an enterprising mix of traditional hippy fare (Gong), Oldfield’s extended arias, some messing about in the studio and Krautrock. And instantly there was much about the roster that reflected the ‘everything goes’ times – Faust once picked up a labourer from the roadside and installed him, on lead pneumatic drill, as an attraction at that evening’s show.
Subsequent prominent Virgin artists included Robert Wyatt, Ivor Cutler, jazz saxophonist Lol Coxhill, Kevin Coyne and Henry Cow – significantly, souls cast overboard when the good ship Dandelion hit the rocks. They also signed Captain Beefheart from America, alongside the likes of Link Wray and Yellow Dog. For a time Virgin was the de facto home for mavericks, left-field progressives and those who’d arrived too late for the 60s but fully endorsed its creed. But the transformation of Virgin from hippy bastion to the label with by far the most influential cast of punk characters was radical, and affirmation of Branson’s ability to shift gears. Of course, they lucked out on the crown princes the Sex Pistols, by dint of having the patience and fearlessness that it took to sign them in the brimstone days of 1977. So it was that, after the chairman of EMI got cold feet, Virgin upturned the jubilee crockery with the release of ‘God Save The Queen’. WH Smith left a blank at number two in their chart survey, and insiders are credited with ensuring the record did not overtake Rod Stewart’s ‘The First Cut Is The Deepest’ in the week of the festivities. It was followed by the release of Never Mind The Bollocks as the media fires were fanned further by a court case over the linguistic nuances of the title. Yet Virgin also prospered as a home to a clutch of punk/new wave groups beyond the Pistols, including the Ruts, Skids, XTC, Members, Penetration etc, and later Magazine and Lydon’s Public Image Limited in the post-punk era. There was no finer catalogue assembled in the period.
Many of the punk set were nevertheless signed to contracts in which royalties were cross-collateralised against dubious recording expenses. XTC, the Ruts and Penetration have all countered that they were badly informed and exploited. There are members of XTC, in particular, who are given to bouts of near psychosis whenever mention of their original contract with Virgin is made. It took a seven-year ‘artist strike’ to extricate themselves from that deal (though that has similarities with the situation that another punk-era legend, Joe Strummer, found himself in with CBS). It doesn’t seem outlandish to speculate that a subliminal mistake was made by many artists in thinking that the new age/new look ‘independents’, especially the affable hippies at Virgin, had their interests at heart any more than the old school did. “I think that it was definitely the public schoolboy mentality that they shared,” notes Poly Styrene, who was briefly signed to the company with X-Ray Spex, “that the artists were the workers and that is just the way it is. You work for peanuts and make the boss rich. But artists on music labels didn’t get the same protection as workers, in terms of pensions etc., because they have supposedly entered into a business deal.”
Others, like Bruce Findlay, formerly head of Scottish independent label Zoom and manager of Simples Minds, counters that Virgin simply employed the same tactics as everyone else, albeit under hippy camouflage. “Simon Draper is the best A&R guy I’ve ever worked with. It’s like any record label. If they’re into you, they’re the best label in the world. If they’re not, or they fall out with you or go cold on you, they’re the worst record label in the world. My experience of Virgin was nothing but pleasure. Virgin were as good to me during the 80s, as Island had been as a retailer in the 60s or 70s. I got very close to Virgin – but then we sold 20 or 30 million albums for them, so of course they liked us!”
As for the cross-collateral approach. “EMI, Warner Bros, they all did that, all record labels,” says Findlay. “To be honest, Virgin were a wee bit like that. When I did the deal with Richard Branson, I had two different deals on the table. EMI and Polydor were both after Simple Minds, and I’d managed to split with Arista and we were free. Richard’s deal was very good, but not quite as good as the Polydor deal, but I liked them. I said to Richard, ‘Your deal’s not as good as Polydor’s, there are a couple of points I don’t like. You say we have to use your studio, I’m not doing it. We’re NOT using your studio. Put it this way, Richard, we might use your studio, we might use the Manor.’ Richard was being business-like, he was saying, ‘I want to recoup, there’s more than one way of recouping. If we’re going to spend a fortune on recording, I’d rather our recording studio was making the money. So let’s have the best recording studio. If songs are going to get published, let’s see if we can get our company to do the publishing.’ But all the record companies did that. That expression – cross-collateralisation – until that period, as a manager, I hadn’t heard of that before, but I was learning quickly. There’s a terrible naivete about bands who say, ‘You got us into expensive studios. Why did you not say no?’ Why did you accept the expensive studio? Why did you accept the expensive director to make your videos? Why did you accept the expensive photographer? Why did you never question the cost?” Presumably because of the naivete Findlay alludes to. “Well, their managers should not be naïve. As bands get more sophisticated and managers became more sophisticated, they got to know better. I’m being defensive of Virgin, because I don’t think they were any better or worse. I can tell you horrible stories about independents.”
Virgin continued to prosper through the auspices of Phil Collins, Culture Club and Human League as the eighties dawned, but in 1985, a private placing of 7% of convertible stock with 25 English and Scottish institutions prefaced the company’s flotation a year later. This saw all Virgin’s musical, retail and property assets become public property, thereby ending any pretence to independence. Over 100,000 private investors applied for shares in a company that now employed in excess of 4,000 people, with an annual turnover of close to £200 million. “In many ways going public was an attractive option,” Branson recalled in his autobiography. “It would enable Virgin to raise money which we could invest in new subsidiaries. It would swell our balance sheet and so enable us to enjoy more freedom from the banks and use our expanded capital base to borrow more if we wished. It would enable me to issue shares, which they could easily trade, as incentives to the Virgin staff. It would increase Virgin’s profile; and a thought lurking at the back of my mind was that, in due course. It would enable us to use the Virgin shares as currency to make a bid for Thorn-EMI, the largest record label in the country.”
While Branson’s ambitions to take over EMI never came to fruition, it is remarkable that an independent label founded only just over a decade previously was able to contemplate such a take-over. Moreover, however, Branson’s reasoning displays a mind focused on the balance sheet. Music is ranked alongside shop premises and bricks and mortar in these exchanges. And that was surely always the nature of the beast, meaning that, while the company’s founding principles were certainly rooted in ‘independence’, music merely served as a product line with the end goal of being the biggest lion in the jungle. But Branson has never denied his indifference to music. “I’m more cynical than 99 per cent of the people who work for Virgin,” he told Paul Rampali of The Face in 1984. “Simon [Draper] loves records and his whole involvement is through that. With me it’s different. It’s not a love of music. I enjoy people, I enjoy working with friends, I like finding out about new things, new areas I know nothing about.”
Were labels like Virgin truly independent? For many they were not. As Fredric Dannen would write in Hit Men, “For nearly a decade, the notion of the independent label had been largely a myth. By the eighties, a better term for record companies such as Chrysalis, A&M, Island, Virgin and the like would have been ‘dependent’ labels – dependent on one of the six majors for their distribution and, in a number of cases, manufacturing”.
“Island and Virgin were originally independent, depending on your definition,” reflects Branson’s one-time assistant, David Marlow. “They were privately owned, medium-sized record labels, but very iconic. They ceased to be perceived as independent only because they were successful. I was thinking about Paul Conroy at Stiff Records and people like that, who ended up working for the majors, who were from the small labels ethos, and essentially they were record fans. You could certainly say that of Simon Draper and Chris Blackwell. While some of the acts that Simon signed were commercial and pragmatic, that wasn’t always the case. I was always a Henry Cow fan. Who else would have signed them? I suppose they thought they were plugging into the hippy market, but I think Simon was a genuine Henry Cow fan. And his personal tastes extended to ECM Records and all that sort of stuff, which he licensed at one point.”
One of the important ‘linking’ labels to the subsequent late 70s boom was Oval, founded by Gillett in 1972, though it didn’t release its first record until two years later. It used Virgin’s infrastructure initially, though that “felt different from if you’d been with EMI or Decca or whatever,” Gillett states. “Although Virgin were substantial, they themselves at that point were distributed through Island. We were basically piggy-backing on other companies. We put out an album of Louisiana music called Another Saturday Night which had a track called ‘Promised Land’ by Johnny Allen. It got played a lot on Capital and was quite inspirational to people like Nick Lowe, who just loved its rock ‘n’ roll innocence – it had a bit of accordion in the middle of it which made it sound quite unusual.”
The origins of Oval say much about how little anyone knew about the process of starting a record label in the mid-70s. “I was on the radio at that point, just starting to do Honky Tonk on Radio London, playing a lot of American music, mostly on independent labels. And a friend of mine asked how do you start an independent label? At the time, it seemed a bit of an unfair question. ‘Well, I don’t know exactly.’ ‘Well, if you did start one, what would you put on it?’ And at the time there wasn’t any British group I was particularly interested in, or British groups that were looking for a home. My instinct immediately went to American music, and although most of it was available in this country, Louisiana music wasn’t. We actually went across a lot of America, looking at all sorts of doo-wop labels and different stuff, but when we came home and listened to everything, this definitely stood out as being the best idea, and it hung together as a compilation. It did pick up some interest. Eventually we probably met everyone who bought the album – it did sell 10,000 in the end, but in the early days it sold about 2,000 or 3,000. We ourselves felt it was so good that it was very frustrating never to be able to work out how to sell more. I knew hardly anybody in the industry and I didn’t know what to do. There wasn’t an independent distributor, or not that I knew of. So it didn’t really seem possible just manufacturing a record and putting it out – how the hell were you going to get it into any shops? So having tried one or two labels that I knew, they shrugged their shoulders and said we don’t know what to do with it, we got side-tracked by seeing Kilburn & The High Roads and becoming very impressed with them and becoming their managers, and finding a record deal for them.”
The Kilburns connection would establish the link to Dave Robinson, Paul Conroy (who booked the band through the Charisma agency) and Stiff. “Of course, the whole thing was, you need an artist to play live to sell records,” says Gillett. “I was quite naive in those days and didn’t quite appreciate it wasn’t enough to put out a good record – you didn’t need a campaign exactly, but you definitely needed an artist to work on your behalf, or on behalf of the record they’ve made. We didn’t run across anyone who quite met that brief until Lene Lovich came to us. We were very impressed by her and put together a group, which included her playing saxophone originally, in a band led by Jimmy O’Neill. Eventually we persuaded her to sing and took a demo to Stiff, who had been going for a year or two by then.”
Another important link to Stiff came through Gillett’s early advocacy of Elvis Costello. “Elvis just posted me a tape that I played on the radio. And I really, really liked it a lot. But I didn’t get much feedback from listeners. For Elvis, this was by far the most positive reaction he’d had so far. If we’d had musicians to hand, we’d have got together and made a record with him. But we didn’t. So we then ran off to Stiff and they put Nick Lowe and an American band together and put them into Pathway [Studios]. That was what made us think, fuck, we really do need our own set of musicians, so if that happened again, we’d be ready. Jimmy O’Neill was writing terrific songs, but we weren’t quite convinced about him as a singer at the time, although he did eventually form the Silencers, after Fingerprintz, who did quite well.”
“We had a lot of tapes we’d take to Dave Robinson,” Gillett continues, “and he’d turn them down flat, except for Lene. But those tapes we’d then take to A&M, and Derek Reid said, ‘Well, I don’t know about your tapes, and I definitely don’t like that girl singer, but I like you guys, let’s do a deal.’ So we had a label production deal with A&M for exactly a year, parallel to having Lene at Stiff. At the end of that we just decided we wanted to be a proper indie on our own, and we put out a couple of records. One was a group called Local Heroes SW9, whose guitarist Kevin Armstrong remains one of the greatest talents I’ve ever known.” Oval also worked with Harry Kakoulli, Squeeze’s bass player, while running a Monday night residency at the jokingly titled 101 Club in Clapham Junction, which resulted in the submission of demo tapes and eventual releases by Holly & The Italians and the Reluctant Stereotypes. These records were now distributed by Rough Trade and Spartan. “We actually launched the newly, properly independent Oval with an album called The Honky Tonk Demos, literally demos sent into my show on BBC London, which I’d done right up till the end of 1978. Most famously, I played the demo of ‘Sultans Of Swing’ by Dire Straits, and they let me have the original demo for that – which hadn’t otherwise come out.”
Although Oval’s output was limited, thematically it provided a link to the next generation of punk-era independents that is more instructive than any comparison with Island or Virgin Records. Not least because Gillett’s diligent first-hand research into the American R&B independents briefly discussed here would prove to have an enormous impact on the foundation of the first true punk-era UK independent, Chiswick Records.