The year 1976 has become a uniquely mythologised one in British musical culture. It is not that the punk generation was the first to celebrate its youth a quarter century along its timeline, more that, in the new millennium, that same generation enjoys unprecedented levels of media access. While the much discussed tenets of the punk era hold true – a reaction against a stilted music scene, a government in crisis, a peeling back of post-war austerity etc, the crucial enabling event was the piecemeal arrival of a series of labels able to operate outside conventional music industry structures. That is one good reason why the terms ‘punk’ and ‘independent’ have become so synonymous. Did punk spawn independent music as we now know it, or vice versa? It is a defining chicken and egg question for any historian of the era.
The historical fudge is, however, appropriate. The stories of the labels and artists who were involved in sowing the seeds of that particular revolution can be individually attributed to either theory of chronological hierarchy – that punk begat the modern concept of independent records or the reverse. Collectively, the evidence is contradictory.
Stiff Records, one of the most colourful stories of this or any musical era, and headed by two of its most abrupt but intriguing characters, was not coincidentally founded in London in 1976 by Dave Robinson and Andrew Jakeman (later to take the name Jake Riviera). The ethos of the label combined self-deprecating and provocative humour, embodied in their defining slogan, “If it ain’t Stiff, it ain’t worth a fuck”, a highly individualistic A&R policy and a can-do work ethic. Another of the label’s mottos also proved highly pertinent – “When you kill time, you murder success”. It underscored their blunt realism and unabashed concern with the bottom line. Riviera, in particular, cultivated a brusque press image that helpfully intimidated promoters and distributors into paying in full and on time, while many artists were openly in thrall to his domineering persona. And Dave “nor shall my baseball bat sleep by my side” Robinson was no pussycat either.
Stiff was most remarkable, however, in terms of innovation. They were an independent who held major labels in complete disdain, yet exhibited globe-conquering ambition. Certainly their package tours in the late 70s, which featured almost their entire artist roster on a shared platform, were huge logistical exercises that defied the homespun, DIY ethic that grew out of punk. There was none of the timorous hiding behind fringes or aesthetic pretension that characterised some later independent labels, or any shame in hyping records in what was then an otherwise uneven playing field. Their A&R policy, from Nick Lowe to Elvis Costello to Ian Dury, and onwards through Madness and The Pogues, revealed an instinct for discerning creative longevity rather than the pot-shot 45s that so eloquently announce punk’s esprit de corps.
There was good reason for that. Many Stiff acts had roots in the pub rock scene that immediately presaged punk, and it seems certain that Riviera and Robinson, the latter Riviera’s flatmate’s boyfriend, would have sustained some foothold or niche in the music industry regardless of the generational upheaval going on around them. But they were smart enough to realise that punk was opening up doors – or forcing entry – quicker and more effectively than they could have managed otherwise.
Both founders had long pedigrees. Robinson had briefly worked for Jimi Hendrix in the 60s, before going on to manage pub rockers Brinsley Schwarz and, intermittently, Ian Dury’s first band, Kilburn & The High Roads, as well as Graham Parker. Similarly, Riviera was a former tour manager for Doctor Feelgood and manager of Chilli Willi & The Red Hot Peppers. He had previously been involved in a failed independent label venture, Revelation, which housed the Chilli Willis’ debut album Kings Of The Robot Rhythm (1972). Robinson too had experienced his share of setbacks – he was behind the famously disastrous ‘hype of the century’ attempt to launch Brinsley Schwarz by flying a plane-load of journalists, DJs, competition winners and hangers-on to America for a show at the Fillmore East in New York.
It was the Feelgoods’ Lee Brilleaux who loaned the duo the initial £400 to establish the label. Or at least, that became the cover story. “We never cashed that!” confirms Robinson. “The cheque was on the wall for years. It was very nice of him to do it. We gave him shares, actually. At some point we gave everyone a few shares in Stiff – not very valuable in the final analysis, but there you are!” In fact, the initial funding for Stiff came from the duo’s management activities. “I was a manager and Jake managed the Chilli Willis. I had a management company, so when we decided we might do the label I gave him half of it. And essentially the finance that made the label work was the income from the management company. We were managing Graham Parker at that point and Ian Dury for a while, and obviously eventually Elvis Costello.”
The label was based at 32 Alexander Street, with Blackhill Enterprises, another management concern helmed by Pete Jenner and Andrew King, former Pink Floyd managers, located upstairs (in the mid-60s, the top floor flat had been home to Roger Waters). Robinson had already convinced Blackhill to invest in Ian Dury’s publishing, and that eventually led to them taking over Dury’s management in February 1976. When the concept of a record label was formalised over a pub conversation between Riviera and Robinson, knowing that Blackhill had some spare floorspace, they decided to site their operation there. Robinson would initially sleep under his desk.
The duo’s background in the business proved crucial to Stiff’s approach and development. Indeed, the label was named after the industry term for a ‘flop’, tacitly acknowledging the duo’s previous misadventures. The impetus for the label had grown out of their frustration at working with major labels. “It was essentially a situation where we were managers, and had a band called Clover, who were signed to major record labels, Phonogram mainly,” Robinson continues. “And the essence was that their marketing was not what Jake and I both thought marketing should be. In those days the groups just went on tour, and you struggled for a bit of tour support possibly, but that was all you got. A quarter page ad in Sounds was the extent of their marketing. They didn’t have any ideas about how to place the ad and how to make something out of the ad, really, apart from occasionally using a few reviews, if you had them. The great slogan the record industry was run on, and still is, was ‘out now’. That was their only way to attract any attention to a record that would obviously have some quality or you wouldn’t be putting it out. But they had no slogans, or attitude; they didn’t think the public was interested in marketing ideas other than live touring and the odd ‘out now’. As a manager you’re trying to get some movement forward, and you’ve got ideas for your artists, but you couldn’t get the majors to cough up and take an interest. So we used all those ideas at Stiff.” The initial influence for Robinson was Chris Blackwell’s Island Records – which would ultimately provide its own horrible irony. “Island was the great model, and I certainly had that in my mind for the record label – a kind of family label that took care of its artists in general, and were able to do quite a lot of the chores of management. Cos a lot of our groups obviously didn’t have managers.”
Just as importantly, both Robinson and Riviera were aware of a pool of unexposed talent that the majors were effectively ignoring. Robinson: “When I ran the pub thing in 1972, there were an awful lot of bands and musicians – we’re speaking pre-computer or digital music – and everyone had to play. And I had a predictably close feel for live music. Although I’d made some efforts to get A&R people from major record labels down, and although the pubs were heaving with people, they would just say ‘it’s a pub thing’ and weren’t interested. So there was a lot of very good stuff at that time drawing big crowds, with A&R people ignoring it – the majors having decided that theatrical rock and platform shoes were where it was at. So we were diametrically opposed to what was happening musically and stylistically in the major record labels. We were anti-major as a result. We resented them. And laughed at them generally.”
The first release came from Nick Lowe. His ‘So It Goes’ has long been considered part of the fabric of the punk story, but in truth is a much more restrained endeavour than its upstart peers, indebted to the artist’s long established credentials as a songwriter on the pub rock scene with Brinsley Schwarz. Yet is served as the perfect bridge between the backgrounds of all those involved with Stiff and the new dawn musically. It was accompanied by a mocking press release, advocating sound over technique, and songs of less than three minutes’ length and a similar number of chords. The author was Vinyl Mogul, a pseudonym for Riviera. That ‘punk’ manifesto was also reflected in Lowe’s dextrous referencing of the coming era. The song title was derived from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 catch phrase and also used as the title of Tony Wilson’s Granada TV music show, which would first screen the Pistols. The b-side, ‘Heart Of The City’, meanwhile, featured a closing reference to the (pre-Clash) 101ers’ ‘Keys To Your Heart’, freshly released on Chiswick. The recording costs of just £45 were comfortably recouped after sales in excess of 10,000 copies. To that point penniless and dispirited by the music industry, Lowe’s days kipping on Riviera’s couch were drawing to a close.
The early Stiff discography thereafter ranged from the pub rock of Roogalator, Tyla Gang and Lew Lewis to underground garage rockers The Pink Fairies (who had recently been augmented by ex-Chilli Willis guitarist Martin Stone). Indeed, original plans (ventured in an early press release) were to issue unreleased recordings by prior management concerns Brinsley Schwarz and Chilli Willi. Each of these releases boasted a ‘gimmick’. The Pink Fairies (BUY 2) single ‘Between The Lines’ was the first Stiff release to feature a picture sleeve, while Roogalator’s effort played at 33 1/3RPM, with a sleeve that parodied With The Beatles (and was withdrawn after complaints from EMI). The Tyla Gang release, led by former Ducks Deluxe guitarist Sean Tyla, was promoted as ‘the world’s first double b-side single’. If the pub rock connections weren’t explicit enough, the follow-up came from Lew Lewis, the former Hot Rods’ harmonica player, backed by pseudonymous Feelgood members. A projected concept trio featuring Larry Wallis, Sean Tyla and Dave Edmunds recording themed songs such as ‘Food’, credited to the Takeaways, was confined to an appearance on the later odds and sods compilation album, A Bunch Of Stiffs.
Riviera also made an attempt to licence the Modern Lovers’ album from Beserkley, a label he’d been impressed by, but that plan was scuppered where the American label elected to set up its own UK base in Kingston Upon Thames. Stiff also placed an advert inviting new talent to submit demos. The first respondent was Declan MacManus, who turned up for an audition after the release of ‘So It Goes’ with guitar in hand. In the event, neither Riviera or Robinson were at the office, but they made him their first signing after hearing the demo he left behind (Lowe had never signed an official contract). Similarly, Eric Goulden handed in his demo in person, but was so nervous he got drunk beforehand and bolted from the office after handing it over. Within days he too, under the name Wreckless Eric, joined the fledgling label.
But it was with the release of BUY 6 in October 1976 that Robinson and Riviera’s then tiny independent gave the world its first taste of punk on vinyl. The Damned’s ‘New Rose’ beat the Sex Pistols to the punch, providing irrefutable evidence that a new breed of independent could now respond quicker to events than hidebound majors. The Pistols’ delay in reaching vinyl, though only a few months, was decisive in this fast-moving timeframe. Despite their unconventional billing and reputation, the Pistols were put through the same ‘development’ rigour as other EMI artists – different producers were assigned to perfect the sound, discussions were held between management and label as demo tapes were circulated, etc.
The Damned came to Stiff’s attention after playing alongside a clutch of their bands at the first Mont de Marsan European Punk Festival and had their effort recorded, cut and in the racks within weeks. They were ably, albeit nonchalantly, assisted by Nick ‘Basher’ Lowe (nicknamed thus due to his titular ability to ‘bash it out’) “We were much faster,” agrees Robinson. “At the end of the day, we could do everything very, very quickly. And we planned to. We did plan to have the first punk album [a feat Stiff duly achieved with the March 1977 release of Damned Damned Damned]. There were a load of punk singles about, but obviously getting the first punk album out was an effort that was worthwhile. There was a huge crowd of people who wanted to buy an album but nobody had made one. So that was a big moment.”
Although the Stiff connection to punk was tenuous, Robinson was quite happy to use the window of opportunity to help the label build up a head of steam. “It pointed the press at us a bit, because we had The Damned and [later] The Adverts. But there were four or five papers at the time, and the amount of weekly news that was required was huge – so any kind of pumped story was of interest to the papers. Any new band you made a bit of a hubbub about, which we planned to each time, would get coverage. Do something unusual, put them in an odd place – we were thinking that punk would be the way to open the door towards music that we considered very good, but was ignored by everyone else. It was a way of getting the focus of the public on it, and of course John Peel – he really liked Stiff, and he played ‘So It Goes’ – he was a huge part of it.”
The immediate successor to ‘New Rose’ was Richard Hell’s ‘Another World’. Better known for one of its b-side tracks, ‘Blank Generation’, it provided a domestic showing for the late 70s New York CBGB’s set that many consider punk’s true progenitors. Notable for a sleeve featuring a topless Hell and razorblade typography, it was licensed from Terry Ork’s independent Ork Records who had also released Television’s debut single. This time the gimmick was the numbered pressing – 5,000 copies were seemingly all given the release number ‘0001’, which still bemuses unwary collectors to this day.
Thereafter, Stiff releases reverted to type. Plummet Airlines were a band who established an accommodation between pub rock and punk, while Motorhead offered a similarly perfect hybrid with metal. However, Motorhead’s ‘White Line Fever’ (BUY 9), was pulled from the schedule for reasons aligned to ongoing negotiations with Island for a full distribution deal. Skydog eventually licensed the single for a French release. Stiff’s eventual two-year deal with Island was ultimately celebrated by the release of a second Damned single, ‘Neat Neat Neat’. Stiff deleted all their previous single releases not just as a mark of respect, but a statement of intent.
“We were very lucky to be able to get some help from United Artists,” remembers Robinson, discussing the link to a major that technically saw the label cease to be a true independent. The association had begun when Riviera brought in his old friend Andrew Lauder at United Artists to cope with the demand for ‘New Rose’. “To begin with, you couldn’t press records. There were very few records made outside the majors’ manufacturing factories. And they weren’t that pushed about doing other people’s records. The whole basis of the majors is that they would be distributors and manufacturers. Because they had factories, they signed up their own groups.
That’s how they started. Originally they were manufacturers and distributors. And essentially that’s all they were ever fucking good for, in my book. Even to this day, look at the chaos they’ve caused in the music industry – the fact that people are downloading for nothing and feel that music is free is all down to the attitude of the majors. They’ve buggered up everybody’s game here in the record industry. They’re still thrashing around not quite knowing what to do and allowing Apple to run their businesses. They can’t last much longer. But they weren’t that clever then, either. At the end of the day, manufacturing was hard to come by, so United Artists manufacturing our records through EMI was a boon. Then Island, who were independent, or at least running their own business, came in through EMI.”
This was, indeed, revolutionary stuff, and others took note. “All the indie labels started calling us saying, ‘How do you do it?’ We did a sheet that gave them the in-roads of how to make labels, and what to do and how to get your records made, your 7-inch or whatever. We sent out loads of those. I suppose, to a degree, you’ll find that Rough Trade, Beggars Banquet, all those kind of labels, essentially got their start in life from a photocopied sheet from Stiff. We started saying,’ We’ve no time to be dealing with your stupid questions, but here are the details.’”
In fact, despite their accumulated wealth of experience, Stiff’s founders were navigating their own voyage of discovery. “We knew nothing about labels. We had been brought up on the idea of signing a band to a major and them becoming Decca Recording artists, etc. It was still in that kind of era. No, we didn’t know anything. So when we found we were pressing up a record – we didn’t have a huge amount of money but we could press 1,000, which we got rid of quickly. Then we pressed another 1,000 and then another 1,000. Eventually we took the plunge and pressed 5,000. It was all feeling it out. But, between us, Jake and I, I suppose all our efforts in music as long-term managers had been towards this particular end. I started as a photographer, I worked at printing for a while – I had learned a great deal. I had produced quite a few records – nothing very good, but things like Frankie Miller. So when it came to the record label, we found, between Jake and I, we had pretty much all the talents to make it work, from the advertising through to the physical production of the vinyl. And we put it in picture bags because we were keen on artwork – we had Barney Bubbles, don’t forget, probably one of the great UK graphic artists. He was working for Stiff. So we had great art. We had a lot of music that was organically produced by the bands themselves, we had Nick Lowe to do it in the studio, and Jake and I were, I think, quite talented promotion men.”
Indeed, Bubbles, aka Colin Fulcher, was among the most innovative designers of the punk era – his influence openly acknowledged by the likes of Malcolm Garrett and other scions. A former illustrator for Oz and Friends magazines, and sleeve designer for underground rockers Hawkwind (he would actually record an album with Hawkwind’s Nik Turner in 1982 as the Imperial Pompadours), his friendship with Robinson dated back to the latter’s days at the Famepushers’ PR agency. He was also an intimate of Riviera, having designed the sleeves for his Revelation releases. Probably his most iconic designs were the mock-Cubist Blockheads’ logo and the 1978 redesign of the NME masthead that still survives in adulterated form to this day. However, he committed suicide in 1983, and his longstanding refusal to sign his work limited his legacy. “Only a unique man with Barney’s immense dignity and talent had both the courage and modesty to do just that,” Riviera would later state.
Riviera came up with most of the slogans, though the most memorable, ‘If It Ain’t Stiff’, was coined by Kilburn & The High Roads’ drummer George Butler, who was eventually paid a £100 gratuity for his masterstroke. The limited print run of the singles was done with a wary eye on the collector’s market – making public their intention to delete everything in the catalogue after release. Bulk orders soon flooded in from retailers. And, as was the case with The Damned’s debut album, Stiff weren’t above old-fashioned hype – proclaiming the fact that a quantity of the sleeves featured a picture of Eddie And The Hot Rods ‘mistakenly’ printed on the rear. They were also aware of their own history and that of the band’s – the Hot Rods had replaced The Damned at the Nashville after the infamous 100 Club bottling incident, the group being dismissed by the Pistols’ John Lydon as “a glossy Eddie & The Hot Rods”. “Of course it was a stunt,” Scabies later told Will Birch. “Although it was described at the time as a printer’s error. But it’s safe to blow it now. Jake had worked out how many LPs we needed to sell to recoup the recording costs. That was the quantity that was pressed with the Hot Rods picture on the back; about two or three thousand only. Jake knew that it would appeal to the collector’s market. He was totally hip to all that. The marketing was brilliant.”
Meanwhile, Stiff’s greatest asset had been kept under wraps – principally because it took a little while for everyone to recognise its potential value. MacManus’s first recordings for the label had been made with Lowe back in September 1976, but the proposed selections, ‘Radio Sweetheart’ and ‘Mystery Dance’, had lost their place in the schedule. So too had ‘Whole Wide World’ by Eric Goulden (shortly to be renamed Wreckless Eric due to his predisposition for anxiety and alcohol). At one point there was a proposal to release a joint album featuring both. After hearing demo tracks recorded by Costello during studio downtime at a Goulden session, both Robinson and Riviera immediately recognised the potential of the songs. MacManus was thereafter remoulded into the now familiar image – skinny-tied punk rock Buddy Holly complete with horn-rimmed glasses – with Riviera suggesting he adopt the name Elvis. In the event, his first single for the label, ‘Less Than Zero’ (BUY 11), failed to sell. The same fate befell a follow-up, ‘Alison’, which led to a revision of plans. Stiff asked Costello to give up his job as a computer programmer at Elizabeth Arden and turn professional. In return they would throw the label’s weight behind him and guarantee him a wage – he was married with a young child – and also sponsor a full-time backing band. Costello thereafter became Stiff’s ‘priority’ act.
With the release of music hall comedian Max Wall’s version of Kilburn & The High Road’s ‘England’s Glory’, two things became readily apparent. First, the label’s rising profile could not rescue a commercial flop of that magnitude. Secondly, there was no ‘Stiff sound’. Robinson believes that what Nick Lowe, working at the famously budget-conscious Pathway Studios, brought to the table was exactly that he didn’t stamp his production style on those records. “Essentially the groups at that time would do their own rehearsals,” he says. “They’d have written the song, worked it out – they were all live bands, they’d all have played the songs in. And so Nick would, as he well put it – ‘bash it down, and tart it up’. And that stops long recording sessions. We were allowing time very much like the Atlantic or early R&B labels in America, where you would come in for a session of three hours, and produce an a-side and two b-sides.” That efficient use of time and resources “is the reason I think some of the tracks still sound OK – they were made to a unique kind of ethos. They weren’t ‘produced’ into any kind of stylistic production arena, really.” Thereafter Stiff also used the services of a second ‘in-house producer’ in the shape of Larry Wallis, freed for the task after the collapse of The Pink Fairies. He was set to work on the one-off single, ‘One Chord Wonders’, produced by Stiff’s second legitimate punk act, The Adverts, though bass player Gaye Advert was not best pleased with the scam of using her image alone on the single’s cover. The label’s unapologetic exploitation of female sexuality would continue well into the 80s.
Despite renegotiating the Island/EMI distribution deal and extending it from two years to three, a third Costello single, ‘(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes’, again failed to establish him on release in July 1977. Anxieties were such that when his debut album My Aim Is True was finally released, it came with a ‘Help Us Hype Elvis’ leaflet – the first 1,000 purchasers would be entitled to a second copy of the album to be despatched to a friend. It almost crippled the label financially. That represented only one of myriad attempts to heighten his profile. Costello busked outside the Hilton Hotel in an effort to persuade American CBS executives to attend his performance that evening at Dingwalls. And Riviera took out double-page spreads in Sounds, Melody Maker and NME to promote the album – if each were cut out, they assembled into a giant poster. The album rose to number 14 and Elvis got his American deal through CBS-owned Columbia.
Meanwhile Ian Dury was growing frustrated, as the rest of the pub rock pack seemed to be overtaking him. Indeed, he had produced and drummed on the b-side to Wreckless Eric’s ‘Whole Wide World’, which finally emerged in August. Blackhill had funded the recording of his debut album, but hadn’t found a berth for it among the majors, despite protracted negotiations. So Blackhill took the step of suggesting he look downstairs, especially since Stiff now had the muscle of a major distributor. Licenses were signed and his ‘Sex & Drugs & Rock ‘n’ Roll’ was released the day after Wreckless Eric’s single as BUY 17. New Boots & Panties followed at the end of September.
Plans were being hatched for arguably the key moment in establishing Stiff’s identity. The 5 Live Stiffs tour started out on 3 October 1977, just after the release of New Boots & Panties, featuring Wreckless Eric, Ian Dury, Nick Lowe, Larry Wallis and Dave Edmunds. Again, it harked back to the American R&B model (the Motown Revue especially), but also to a 1968 tour Robinson worked on with Jimi Hendrix, The Move and Pink Floyd. Over 24 dates, mainly on university and polytechnic campuses, the Stiff bandwagon rolled, each performance concluding with a sozzled choir augmenting the finale of Dury’s ‘Sex & Drugs And Rock ‘n’ Roll’. The personnel was flexible. Dury would drum for Wreckless Eric, former Kilburn & The High Roads saxophonist Davey Payne would back both Dury and Wreckless Eric, etc. Kosmo Vinyl served as MC (and the bus driver, Trevor, would naturally become ‘Clever Trevor’ in honour of the Dury song) while everybody got a flat £50 a week fee. Of course, in later years it has emerged that serious rivalries rippled just below the surface among the label’s leading lights, especially concerning the abandonment of the original plan whereby the acts would alternate for headline status. The tour’s Olympian levels of debauchery – and the notorious ‘24-hour Club’ of hardcore drinkers – are thought to be the inspiration behind Costello’s ‘Pump It Up’ single. It certainly inspired the memos circulated to all artists telling them to stop charging any additional hotel refreshments beyond breakfast to the record label.
Costello and Ian Dury became natural figureheads for Stiff, but very much in that order. By now, music journalists were describing a more structured, traditional rock format derived from punk as new wave (although the etymology of that term is complicated and weaves in and out of the ‘punk’ story), and Stiff had the two most inspired and capable songwriters in that firmament. Dury’s vaudeville Cockney funk was more playful than Costello’s precise, erudite pop, but both were immensely gifted wordsmiths who would reinvigorate the pop charts. Sadly, Costello’s potential was only glimpsed at Stiff. Following the end of the Live Stiffs tour, Riviera moved on to form Radar Records with A&R legend Andrew Lauder. In the settlement eked out, he took Costello, Nick Lowe and recent Stiff singings The Yachts with him. Barney Bubbles would continue to work for both labels. The split sprung from a confrontation the two protagonists had on 24 September 1977, at which Riviera was said to have thrown a bunch of empty cider cans through the office window. The incident was later cheekily referenced in Nick Lowe’s first hit for Radar, ‘I Love The Sound Of Breaking Glass’.
“Essentially it was about 14 months, really,” Robinson remembers of the first phase of Stiff. “That’s how long it lasted. It seemed an awful lot longer at the time!” It’s tempting to assume that this was a natural conclusion for a relationship between two very strong-minded characters who were both natural ‘leaders’; that it could only have worked for a set amount of time “There was a bit of opportunism,” Robinson states. “I struggled quite a bit and got my foot in the door with CBS to get a record deal in America. The deal we were talking about would have moved us up several notches. But the major interest at the time was Elvis. And Jake saw an opportunity, I think, and wanted to do his own thing.”
Although Radar, backed by Warner UK, didn’t prosper as many expected, they released close on a century of records, following a similarly wide-ranging A&R brief (though they may have separated, it’s fair to state that Robinson and Riviera’s musical tastes didn’t diverge too greatly). As well as Lowe and Costello, there was power pop from The Yachts, Inmates and Bram Tchaikovsky, French avant garde from Metal Urbain, UK psych-pop from the Soft Boys, and a raft of formative American pre-punk reissues, including the Electric Prunes and 13th Floor Elevators. Finally came the experimental post-punk of Bristol’s Pop Group – which legendarily tipped Radar over the financial brink. By March 1980, Riviera had set up F-Beat, while the Radar imprint would latterly be used for Jools Holland’s solo releases. Later in 1980, in concert with Lauder and Elvis Costello, Demon Records became Riviera’s fourth record label in just over three years. Notable early Demon releases include Department S’s ‘Is Vic There?’, their first hit, as well as material by Bananarama, Lamont Dozier, Hoodoo Gurus, Men They Couldn’t Hang, That Petrol Emotion and Costello himself. Later the roster was notable for a clutch of US artists such as Thin White Rope, Giant Sand, Dream Syndicate and American Music Club that represented a halfway house between the Paisley Underground movement and the coming age of folk-rooted Americana. Acquired by Crimson Productions, a subsidiary of retail giant and Woolworth’s owner Kingfisher, it merged with its Westside Records operation in 1998. It is now known as Demon Music Group, though a repertoire that includes cruise singer Jane McDonald, and the absence of any of its founders, rather distances it from its historical origins.
In the absence of Riviera, Robinson had two general managers to fall back on; former agent and Kursaal Flyers’ manager Paul Conroy and Alan Cowderoy, previously a musician with Gracious, and the ex-product manager for Graham Parker at Phonogram. Conroy looked after UK marketing, while Cowderoy concentrated on International Exploitation – expanding Stiff’s impressive list of licensees, which at one point topped 36 separate agreements. It was the advances Cowderoy secured for these, as much as the hits that Stiff had, that kept the label profitable – in the process creating the blueprint for many 90s labels. “Jake was still there when I joined,” remembers Cowderoy. “I was working at Vertigo Records, and that’s how I first met Dave Robinson. He managed Graham Parker and the Rumour, and they were signed to Vertigo. We were creating great marketing campaigns for Graham Parker. And Dave Robinson was bringing in Damned singles and Nick Lowe singles, and saying, ‘this is how you need to do it’. We were getting on really well. We came up with creative ideas to market Graham Parker to the extent where he eventually said – ‘come over and join me’. I was at the right age. It was worse money, no company car, and no pension. There was no security at all. But I thought, ‘this is really exciting,’ so I took the plunge. But when I arrived there, Paul Conroy had arrived ahead of me. He was a friend of Jake’s, but I didn’t really know Jake. Dave and Jake shared an office and they were planning world domination from there. But I don’t think they communicated to each other quite as well as they might have done. So when I got there, Paul had set his stall out so that he was looking after the English marketing situation. Which was really what I wanted to do! So I ended up looking after the international situation, doing the licensing deals. Basically what I used to do is generate the income that allowed the label to carry on. Because really and truly, Robbo could spend every penny that was generated in the UK on marketing and being creative, but it was all for nothing unless I managed to get money in from overseas. So fortunately I managed to coax the French and the Germans and Scandinavians and Japanese and Australians, and get a great network of licensees for Stiff.”
Both Cowderoy and Conroy also helped out with A&R, while Cowderoy was additionally in charge of mastering. But the days immediately following Riviera’s departure were dark ones. “There was a guy Jake had appointed to be the bookkeeper at Stiff,” Robinson recalls. “When I looked at this guy’s desk and filing system, I found a lot of invoices that hadn’t even been opened. There was a huge amount. At that time, Jake was very keen to run very big ads on pretty much everything. I wasn’t against that, but at the same time, when he left, we owed about 150 grand, I think. That was very hard to overcome, because Elvis had gone and Nick had gone, and it was difficult. But we had a few quid in the bank. I started work on Dury. I think Jake, at the time, said that it would just die. I think his idea was that it would be better off me going back to management. That was one of the lines he gave me when he left. Which was guaranteed to make me want to carry on. I thought, fuck it, at the end of the day, if Jake hasn’t the bollocks or the bottle to continue, then fine. I don’t hold it against him. I wouldn’t say we’re close friends but we’re friendly, and it’s all water under the bridge. But at the time it was a bit of a fucking big blow.”
Jake’s departure was also “a bit of a shock” for Cowderoy. “I have to say I was enjoying the working relationship, sitting in on meetings. And I felt with my major label experience that I had an idea of what may or may not have been successful on radio. And I was trying to help them as best I could with, say, choosing the right Nick Lowe single. Then suddenly one day Dave said Jake was going to leave and he was going to take Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello with him. And that was a shock. That was everything we’d been working towards. We had started to work a little bit on Ian Dury & The Blockheads, and fortunately very quickly they filled the gap. I could have got another job, but I don’t remember thinking like that. My overheads were fairly minimal. Dave was a very inspiring person back then. Well, he still is. With hindsight, you can say they weren’t communicating as well as they might, even though they were sharing an office. I think they were in their own little worlds, really. Which I suppose is why Jake left. At the point Jake decided to go, I don’t remember if that was a shock for Dave at all. I don’t remember ever asking him that question. But it was certainly a shock to us, because we had no warning. On the ground floor, the troops didn’t have any warning. I think Jake was probably a fairly impulsive person, so it wouldn’t surprise me if it all came about over the weekend and was announced to everybody on the Monday.”
“Jake had a much higher visibility than Dave,” notes Nigel Dick, who had joined the label as a motorcycle messenger. “Jake had done all the interviews whereas Dave was the man behind the curtain – the bad-tempered, Irish, charming, crazy, wily man behind the curtain. He was a brilliant, insightful, difficult man, and I hated and loved him. He was the reason Stiff lasted so long and also the reason the label crashed and burned so brightly. When I joined it seemed every week as if the company was going to implode. There was never any money to pay bills. Soon I reached the conclusion that my £14 a week wasn’t enough money to make me lose sleep about whether the company would survive. I figured that was Dave’s problem and started sleeping much better.”
Dick had come to Stiff as “a rabid music fan with a degree in architecture, who couldn’t find a job. I’d spent the summer in Paris sleeping on someone’s floor playing my guitar in the subway for dinner money when I saw a Melody Maker in the gutter with the announcement of the Live Stiffs tour. My immediate thought was, ‘What the fuck am I doing in Paris? That’s where I need to be!’ I cashed in my chips, caught the ferry back to England and got a job as the Stiff motorcycle messenger. The pay was £14 a week and I had to provide my own motorcycle, which cost me £7 a week on the never-never. It was brutal but enormous fun. I’d already bought a number of the Stiff singles and Elvis’s album in the months before I went to Paris so I was well into the vibe of Stiff, though my flared jeans and moustache didn’t last more than a few days. The company was in huge disarray. Jake left the week I arrived and it was all doom and gloom because Elvis, our only true hope, was leaving with Jake, and the VAT man was after the company for unpaid tax. Luckily Dury’s album took off shortly afterwards and the leaking boat managed to continue floating.”
Dick’s brutal initiation involved “just jumping in and paddling as hard as I could. ‘Take this here. Take that there. Now! Faster! Go!’ As I said, the company was frankly a mess on an organisational level. I had to take boxes of mail down to the post office every evening and I stunned everybody by saying, ‘let’s buy a weighing scale and give me a hundred quid so I can buy stamps and we’ll do the stamping at the office.’ They thought I was some kind of nutcase for suggesting something so organised. Of course, within days I’d lost the weighing scales – one of the roadies was using it for measuring out the drugs! Then I ordered a franking machine and that was the last straw – they pulled me off the bike and parked me next to [Paul] Conroy and promoted me to office boy.”
He remembers vividly the chaotic scenes at Stiff, especially when artists were allowed to man the telephones. “When I rang in from the road (this was an era before cell phones and pagers) to ask for my next assignment, Captain [Sensible] would answer the phone and say, “Dick? Fuck off, cunt!” and slam the phone down. This led me to think that maybe he was taking the punk attitude a little far as I was spending half my time working on his career. Dave Vanian was very stand-offish and when I had to drive him somewhere once was mortally offended that I was picking him up in the office Golf and not a limo. He sat gloomily in the back while I debated with myself whether punks should be seen dead in limos.”
Larger premises had been acquired further down Alexander Street, with operations shifting from number 32 to number 28 [above John Curd’s Straight Music operation, though 32 was retained for merchandising]. But that move had been conceived on the basis of the Robinson/Riviera roster of artists, which had now dwindled in both size and quality. And that wasn’t all. The Damned, the label’s resident punk rock sensations, were splitting into factions following Brian James’s introduction of second guitarist Lu Edmonds. The result would be a poorly received second album Music For Pleasure, almost inconceivably produced by Nick Mason of Pink Floyd. Drummer Rat Scabies walked, while the album’s sales of 20,000 were less than half of their debut. In critical terms, the Damned were “over”. Riviera, it seemed, was the only one capable of keeping the straining chemistry between the band members in place. Robinson lacked the patience.
Crucial respite was derived from the slow-build success of New Boots & Panties. Robinson: “Dury’s album hadn’t really been promoted. Jake was biased towards Elvis quite a bit, I don’t think Dury got a fair crack of the whip. He’d sold a few records, but then the album had pretty much stalled, and I thought it had more mileage. So we put the budget that we had left into that, and did a whole series of ads. The major theme was ‘give up smoking and give us your money’, if I remember correctly. That got going, and then Dury and Chas Jankel produced those great singles, ‘What A Waste’, ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful’ and ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’. So things moved on.”
50,000 copies of the album had been sold by the end of the year, boosted by Dury’s popularity on the Live Stiffs tour [a live document of which would also breach the Top 30]. It would go on to remain in the charts for 90 weeks – an almost unthinkable attainment for an independent label. Those returns, allied to those for ‘What A Waste’, the label’s only significant hit single in the early months of 1978, as well as the overseas licences, effectively bankrolled Stiff through the storm immediately following Riviera’s departure.
Pete Frame was another brought in by Robinson on Riviera’s departure to handle press – ironically, he’d been one of the journalists to burst Robinson’s bubble on the Brinsley Schwarz ‘hype’ by writing a less than glowing review for Zig Zag. “The Fillmore thing was in April ‘70,” Frame recalls, “and you’re right, I was critical of the way the band had been launched on a flying carpet of hype. At that time, integrity was all-important, and true underground bands didn’t resort to that kind of thing. Most of the journalists on the plane wouldn’t have known Brinsley Schwarz from Delmore Schwartz but I had actually seen them at the Country Club some weeks before and knew they were a cool band. I was also the only journalist on the trip who stayed to watch both their sets at the Fillmore. So even though they were unhappy with what I wrote, I think they respected me for it. After all, they knew it was true.”
In fact, Brinsley Schwarz would even play a benefit gig for Frame’s ailing Zig Zag at one point. “I used to hang around with Dave [Robinson] and Nick [Lowe] a bit, after the band split up,” Frame continues. “We would bump into each other, here and there. When I was A&R man at Charisma, I would use Dave’s studio at the Hope & Anchor to record demos, and Nick played on one or two of them. When punk came along, I knew it was all-change, clean-out time – I’d seen it happen 20 years earlier, with skiffle and the first primitive rock ‘n’ rollers [documented in Frame’s book The Restless Generation] and I felt decidedly old and in the way. I always hated old creeps who pretended to be part of something they patently had nothing to do with. So I handed Zig Zag over to Kris Needs and went to work for a local building firm, drawing plans for extensions, etc. Stuff I’d been trained to do before I dropped out, man. It was fucking horrible, so in late ‘77, when Dave phoned and asked if I’d like to be press officer at Stiff, I said yes! What else was I going to say? So I was back in the thick of it, wahooing with Wreckless, Larry, Devo, Jona, etc.”
“I always liked and respected Dave,” Frame continues. “I still do – even though I haven’t seen him since 1989. He had a piece of advice for every occasion – and one I remember particularly was ‘never expect someone to give you 100% if you’re only prepared to give them 80’. I always kept to that one. He also said that whenever he got a contract, he struck out several clauses as a matter of course – but I’ve never managed to pull that one off. Anyway, I did OK at Stiff, got tons of good press, even though I wasn’t there long. I was never a hustler kind of person and therefore not really suited to PR, and I went back to scratching for a living. Dave and I were always mates, and I knew Paul Conroy very well too. Great bunch of people, everyone who worked there, everyone on the label.”
Another to help fill Riviera’s shoes was Andy Murray. “I used to book bands off Paul Conroy, who by 1978 was the general manager. He’d previously been at Charisma agency. So I kept up in touch with him and when I left Leeds Poly in 1975, I came down to London and I was an agent. I decided I was a rotten agent, so I quit my job and went to work for Virgin Retail. I edited Circuit magazine for a year, from ‘77 to ‘78, and I got a call from Paul in the process, cos I was hyping up Stiff acts. I’d sold the first, Buy 1 [‘So It Goes’] at Marble Arch when Jake came in with a little flyer, and said ‘pin this up on the wall’. I knew Jake briefly from the Naughty Rhythms tour, and Paul Conroy was the agent. So it was all very much that little scene, what came out of pub rock, in essence. I put up displays for Elvis Costello’s first album in Virgin Croydon and the display team for Stiff at the time was Paul Conroy’s dad Dennis, who was a retired policeman. Anyway, I get a call from Paul one day, saying we’ve got a tour going by train. Elvis and Nick left to go with Jake to their Radar label. So then you’re into the second generation of Stiff, which was just Dave Robinson running it. When I started working there, it was 28 Alexander Street. They were going through a slight expansion, and they added a couple of people to the art department, and Nigel Dick, having been the bike messenger, was then the production co-ordinator. He was getting the records pressed, and they had a new deal with Island. So they were getting much more commercially orientated, shall we say.”
The first record that Andy Murray ‘worked’ was the Akron compilation, a regional sampler that featured the likes of Jane Aire, the Waitresses and The Rubber City Rebels, encased in a ‘scratch ‘n’ sniff’ sleeve’ that supposedly smelt of rubber as a nod to the city’s tyre industry. The album concept was inspired by a trip to the US at the end of 1977 by Conroy and Cowderoy, whereupon they first encountered Devo. The latter would enjoy chart success in April 1978 with their deconstruction of ‘(I Can’t Get Me No) Satisfaction’, following debut ‘Mongoloid’. Despite singing their label’s praises with a third single, ‘Be Stiff’, Virgin nipped in to sign the rights to their debut album. Virgin would also attain the signatures of bright new hopes The Members after they released a one-off single ‘Solitary Confinement’ for Stiff. But at least Devo led Stiff to the overlooked talent that existed in Akron. Via local svengali Liam Sternberg, they licensed sufficient tracks for a compilation, though plans for individual album releases by the featured artists were either dropped or hastily amended. For example, an emergency recording session with members of The Rumour was convened to bolster the contents of Rachel Sweet’s release with the addition of four cover versions.
The compilation was promoted in typical Stiff fashion. “The first thing Paul Conroy had me do was to call up every airline and ask if they’d sponsor us,” remembers Murray, “they’d done a competition to win a trip to Akron. But of course, they hadn’t arranged anything. This would have been classic Stiff. They’d made the arrangement, so it was, ‘we need a free flight now.’ I wasn’t able to get one. Everyone said, ‘Stiff who? What? Operator? Hello?’ We paid for the ticket, if indeed we ever let the person go. We probably forgot all about it.”
Murray was specifically delegated the task of organising a follow-up Stiff package tour in July 1978. Sweet, Jona Lewie, Wreckless Eric, Mickey Jupp and Lene Lovich, who had been recruited via a recommendation from Charlie Gillett, the original link to Elvis Costello, comprised the line-up. “She was incredibly charismatic but very resistant to invitations for her to sing,” Gillett recalls, “but we prevailed eventually and made a demo of ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’, and took a demo tape of the whole project to Stiff. The only one that Dave liked at all was ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’, which he wanted to immediately put out. Overnight Lene and Les Chappell, her songwriting and life partner, wrote ‘Lucky Number’ to be the b-side. Dave said, ‘Right, let’s have an album’. Within a matter of about a week, they wrote most of the album – we put a couple of Jimmy O’Neill songs on the album as well, and one song by Nick Lowe – and they re-recorded ‘Lucky Number’. And then Lene went out on that second Stiff tour with Wreckless Eric and Mickey Jupp. This was truly an independent spirit in every meaning of the term. They were conceiving a totally new way – well, it was recreating the R&B package tours that went out in the 50s. Long before even Stax or Motown. In the 50s you’d have a headline act – I saw Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers and The Platters – then a few kind of relatively unknown British acts, and very often a comedian or two. It was a package, all-round entertainment. The greatest thing about those shows was that nobody outstayed their welcome. Everybody did their hits. If they had one or two hits, that’s what they did. The band at the top of the bill had five or six songs you knew and they did all of those. And that was the principle behind the Stiff tour, which was parallel to punk – the songs were generally not very long, and it suited every aspect of music at the time to have a 30 or 40 minute set, that was perfect.”
The original intention had been for Devo to headline before their defection to Virgin. Ironically the tour proceeded under the title Be Stiff, borrowed from their final Stiff single. Additionally, each member of the tour recorded versions of that track for a promotional 12-inch. Each of the five artists released albums on the same day, 6 October 1978, in three formats (black vinyl, picture disc, coloured vinyl). It was a huge logistical exercise and massive financial commitment. And all five of the albums bombed commercially, at least initially. There was also disquiet between the artists on the tour.
“The idea for the new tour was to travel by specially-chartered train,” Murray recalls, “and they needed an organiser – which was me. I joined as the man running the tour, so I had to book the trains through British Rail, have the meetings, and also present it to the trade press. So I did my whole presentation to them, talked it up, then I did all the regional press. I got a train ticket from British Rail so I could go every day. Every morning I’d get up at seven, get on a train with my free ticket, get off at the station wherever the tour was going by. I’d go round the town, speak to the retailers, go back to the station, meet them off the train, and meet them at the soundcheck, which tour manager Kellogs [John Kalinowski] would get them to. I’d whip up a bit of interest, talk to local dealers, give them some free records, see the show, go to bed, get up the next day, do it all over again.” This was all Robinson’s idea, Nigel Dick recalls. “Then it was all hands to the pump. It was just the idea of survival. Any big plans always got swallowed up by day to day realities.”
“I’d see the artists occasionally,” Murray recalls, “and they’d say, ‘Why are you here?’ ‘I’m here every day!’ But usually we’d never see them because I was off doing business type stuff. But when the tour ended, they wanted somewhere for Rachel Sweet to stay. I said, ‘my flatmate’s got a spare room,’ so Rachel Sweet ended up being my flatmate, with her sister as a sort of chaperone. That was quite entertaining. I have to say that, apart from incessantly playing my copy of Bat Out Of Hell and scratching it in the process, they were model flatmates. After the tour ended I officially became the head of press, because we didn’t have a press office at the time. Pete Frame had been the previous head of press and I knew him slightly, plus, of course, I was an avid Zig Zag reader. So I tried to copy Pete’s approach by being iconoclastic and amusing, and trying to do special things. So we did various anarchic photo sessions and quizzes instead of formal press releases, all sorts of bumph”
Murray worked the aforementioned quintet of releases by Mickey Jupp, Lene Lovich, Rachel Sweet, Jona Lewie and Wreckless Eric’s second album. “There would have been a lot of trying to get reviews, plus they almost all had a single. Of course, I knew very little about press apart from having been on the other end of it. I had to teach myself the job, and there was nobody really to learn from. There was me in the basement, and Sonnie Rae, who had worked at Sonet Records. She was our regular plugger, and was far more experienced and far more of a secret weapon than I was, because if she could get something on the radio, on the playlist, you might have some chance of having a hit. Which we did, with Lene Lovich [whose ‘Lucky Number’ eventually reached number three in the charts after being re-released when its popularity on the Be Stiff tour became apparent]. We didn’t have very much success at all during the tour radio-wise, apart from Rachel Sweet’s ‘B.A.B.Y’, which was playlisted by Radio 1, which was a source of much aggravation to Dave. But he hadn’t really planned it that way. Stiff Mark One wasn’t really about having hits – it was about being an American-style indie, like one of those local Louisiana indies that had someone like Professor Longhair on. It was about putting singles out that your majors wouldn’t touch. The second part of that was having picture sleeves, which you would only get in France and Holland at that time. But your British standard ‘hit’ was only ever a 7-inch, never a 12-inch. No picture sleeve, no video, nothing. It just came out, and if you got it on the Radio 1 playlist, it was a big hit. But even then you wouldn’t necessarily sell any albums. People didn’t relate singles to albums selling until much later, really the early 80s.” Robinson, too, didn’t make the connection between singles driving album sales that became so prevalent later. “Singles then sold in vast quantities. If you got a big single to go, you might sell more singles in value than you do in albums. After the first year and half, we had worked on a basic audience that bought Stiff stuff, no matter what it was – about 40,000 people. Which was comfortable, but not creasing up the majors. We were in a good, comfortable state, because we were a small record company with a vision.”
That said, some mistakes were made. “When we put out our albums,” notes Murray, “they all had top-opening sleeves, and some of them didn’t even have a list of the tracks on the back. If I’d known what I know now, I’d have said to Dave and Paul – this is madness. So there were various things like that, which the industry taught themselves at the time. Stiff was really artistically orientated in the sense that they weren’t ever trying to be cool. The label was actually very uncool in many ways, and would sign people that no-one else wanted. But Stiff was quite guilty of being snobby in one sense. We liked songs over posturing. But we weren’t snobby in the modern sense of everybody desperately trying to be cool and looking over their shoulders to see what everyone else thinks. The fact that it was called Stiff in the first place showed that there was a large element of self-mockery as well as iconography.”
Finding it hard to break these new artists, at least temporarily, Dury steadied the ship with the label’s first number one single, ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’, in January 1979, which sold nearly a million copies in the UK. It established Dury as a major star – at least until the release of his singles-free second album, Do It Yourself. There was a licensing deal with Arista for American distribution, but that soured when Kosmo Vinyl, who had moved on to become Dury’s press officer, threw Clive Davis out of a dressing room. They did open an outlet in the States, Stiff Inc, though it was largely unsuccessful and quickly became a drain on the UK operation. Of course, the label would maintain its maverick reputation (see the release of ‘The Wit And Wisdom Of Ronald Reagan’, which sold 30,000 copies despite, or rather because, it contained absolutely no audio). There were also promotional doormats, roadmaps and jigsaws.
“In January 1979 I presented the Be Stiff tour as Marketing Campaign of the year for the Music Week Awards,” Murray recalls, “and won – against all major company opposition. The judges were impressed by the strong tour branding, the planning, the merchandising, all the press we got, the different formats, including coloured vinyl and picture discs on every album, etc. But they felt that since we’d only sold 10,000 of each album, it couldn’t actually be given the award for ‘Best Marketing’. So they invented a new category, ‘Top Promotion of the Year’, for us specially (they still spelt my name wrong on the award). Paul Conroy made the acceptance speech, for which he, Alan and myself were dressed as undertakers. We were each meant to say a line; ‘Thanks for the award / We couldn’t have won / If you hadn’t lost’. Paul changed it to: ‘We won this award because we’re the best fucking record company with the best fucking acts,’ which shook up the room a bit. Remember, this was all black-tie and very formal.”
The internal culture of Stiff at that time reflected the personalities of those involved.. “Paul Conroy can be a big teenager in a lot of ways, which can be one of his strengths,” says Murray. “But Dave Robinson was very anti-establishment, and wasn’t trying to prove anything so much as wanting to do things his way. And he was very amusing. He was a real Dubliner at a time when to be Irish was really rather denigrated. So Dave was a total outsider having been a roadie for Jimi Hendrix and a photographer, and I didn’t appreciate him as much then as I do now. And it’s really very sad that the, shall we say, more fairground showman side of his nature has come out subsequently, rather than actually his really aggressive creativity, which was what Stiff was mostly about. Doing different things, not just for the sake of it, but doing different things to make ourselves have success. We were pretty keen to have success on any level. We’d put out a record like ‘Toe Knee Black Burn’. It was then, and is now, rubbish, but it came out with as much the thought it might have been a hit as anything else. It wasn’t to be nice or horrible to Tony Blackburn. A track came along, and somebody, out of Paul, Alan or Dave, said, ‘we can have a hit here’.” The last-named oddity, recorded by Binky Baker And The Pit Orchestra, consisted of the DJ’s name being repeated, mantra-like, in a broad northern accent by Anne Nightingale’s husband. Binky had taken umbrage at Blackburn after an incident at a Mallory Park fun day where Blackburn had chastised him for interrupting his conversation.
The good auspices were cemented later in 1979 when Robinson signed arguably the best English pop band of their generation, Madness. “They were a good band,” he recalls, “and I could really see the sense of humour they had. I saw them as London folk music; songwriters who have a social lyric that covers their situation in life, that’s the ideal group. But that’s pretty much what we signed throughout. We were always looking for that kind of songwriter. We signed songwriters rather than good front people. Obviously, if you look at some of our front people! Chrysalis were keen to sign them, but Chrysalis were very slow.” In fact, Madness would release their debut single, ‘The Prince’, through Chrysalis subsidiary 2-Tone, but didn’t commit to them. “Someone told me Chrysalis had seen them eight times,” Robinson remembers. “I felt, well, if we’re going to sign them, we’d better hurry up! It takes a major about twelve gigs before they sign anyone, so we’ve only got a few more gigs and they’ll get signed. That’s the reason I auditioned them at my wedding.”
Indeed, the deal was thrashed out following Robinson’s nuptials, at the Clarendon Ballrooms in Hammersmith on 17 August 1979; an impressive feat even by his multi-tasking standards. Robinson booked them because, alerted to their popularity in London, he’d not been able to find a date to catch them live. As he would later relate, “I was getting married and I thought that’s my chance to see them. Why don’t we ask them if they’d play the wedding? And they said they would. They came and played at the wedding and my wife gave me hell afterwards saying you haven’t spoken to me all night, you’re up there watching the band. They were very good. It was ideal. It was a big record biz kind of party and they were great. I decided there and then that they were likely and signed them up as soon after as I could. Well, in hindsight one shouldn’t have done it but I suppose one was in a state of euphoric chaos so it seemed like a good idea. It could have been terrible”. There was certainly competition for their signatures. “I actually had Madness for the world,” remembers Seymour Stein, “but they performed for Robbo’s wedding. And he made such a fuss, that we had to do a split deal, but I think it worked out well for the band, I must say.”
“It was a great moment,” says Cowderoy. “Madness were all doing the nutty train-dancing around with the guests. Scary but fun! It was an extraordinary thing. Dave was very confident that he was going to get the act, and he developed a relationship with Madness, and they came round and played football with everyone. But they were skinheads, and they had a posse of people who were a little bit scary. But Dave was getting married in a registry office and he decided to get Madness to play at his wedding, and he invited them and they agreed! Everyone was going mad and getting a little bit merry. He continued to woo them after that point. Once you got to know them, they were fine, but I can remember when they played at the Electric Ballroom, and I invited a bunch of foreign journalists over. They didn’t speak much English, and the place was full of skinheads and it was very menacing. They’d ask you for 50p, etc. But the journalists didn’t know what they were saying. Suddenly I could see a journalist being surrounded by about a dozen skinheads, and they were about to kick seven shades of shit out of him, and little old me had to go in and rescue him! Your heart was in your mouth. It was scary but a lot of fun.”
Madness’s monumental success meant that the somewhat Machiavellian defection of Dury to Polydor in the summer of 1981 was a much lesser blow than it might otherwise have been. Notable also is the fact that Madness arrived after Stiff had renegotiated their distribution from Island/EMI (then on the point of being bought out by Thorn) to CBS. That new deal was viewed to be the major factor in Madness signing with Stiff, alongside the fact that its roster then still featured their hero, Ian Dury. Indeed, the band’s debut album, One Step Beyond, rush-released in October within weeks of the contract being signed, featured knowing references to Kilburn & The High Road’s ‘bus queue’ promo photographs, remoulded in their own distinctive style as ‘the nutty train’ pose. The inner sleeve fan shots, meanwhile, invoked the ‘ugly mugshot’ ruse piloted as a means for fans to enter the Blockheads ’77 Christmas party. The album rose quickly to number two in the charts and Madness were away.
“What was good about it was Dave’s confidence he was going to get the band,” says Cowderoy. “And once we had them, we had to motivate them. And he was great at that, Dave. He would say, ‘Look, there’s another Specials single coming out – you’ve got to step up to the plate.’ They were a bunch of lazy bastards and they wanted to do as little work as they possibly could. And he chivvied them brilliantly. As for the distribution, I’m not sure with distribution that our deal was as kind as it might have been. Certainly not as kind as it would have been if there had been independent distributors around then like there are now, that could have taken care of that kind of basic business. They [the majors] didn’t go out of their way to help you back then.” Nigel Dick: “Obviously you don’t sign an artist if you don’t expect them to break. So Madness’s success was certainly hoped for. The size of their success stunned everyone, though we soon got used to it and did a very good job for them, I think. As a press officer, marshalling their best years, was certainly my proudest achievement.”
Despite accelerated levels of success, close bonds between the artists and the label continued to be the norm at Stiff. “There was always a Stiff spirit, but of course everyone wanted a hit,” remembers Dick. “However, having worked at and with other labels, I would say that there was more friendship between the acts than any other place I’ve worked at. Dury was sometimes aloof and at others enormously friendly. He once bought me a huge bunch of flowers! Wreckless was, frankly, a drunk, and I never forgave him for ripping one of my shirts while I was still wearing it. His book [A Dysfunctional Success; published in 2003] was enormously entertaining, but I felt so sad that, to this day, he is convinced everyone wanted to rip him off and sabotage his career. Despite his whining and difficult behaviour we all worked tremendously hard to try to get him some hits. He wrote great songs and he really had something. But in the end the public didn’t want to know. If he wants to get angry he should get angry with his public. I made many great friends at Stiff and still keep in contact with many of them (artists included) which I think says a lot about the company and the spirit of the place. The ‘mavericks’ at Stiff were really no crazier than most of the other artists I’ve worked with over the years. The difference was we let their personality shine rather than trying to turn them into ‘stars’ … and if they didn’t have something idiosyncratic about them, we invented it!”
Crucial to that sense of camaraderie was the fact that everyone could contribute to the creative ‘pot’, rather than being delineated purely by a single job function. “Yeah, that was the theory of the whole thing,” agrees Robinson. “Everybody was involved. It’s my attitude to involve people. And yeah, the staff, all of them went on to do very well. Whatever we learnt, we all learnt it together. People used to come up to me and say, ‘What is it you taught these Stiff people? They’re just real workers and real grafters, and they all have ideas’. And that’s what you’d think the record business was going to be about – you’d think it was going to be an exciting industry and have some razzle dazzle to it – we are in the entertainment, and the illusion business, with some good music. It’s much better than a job.”
Andy Murray remembers Dave Robinson’s favourite moan was about “the English disease”, where people would rather spend time and effort on perfecting an excuse rather than get the task at hand completed. “I’ve never understood it,” says Robinson now. “People will trot you out a good excuse. You just say, ‘Look, never mind the excuse, why haven’t we done the work?’ It’s an attitude. Nowadays, it’s all, ‘one can push the worker too hard’. But if the worker works hard, he learns something. That’s my belief. Andy Murray and I had a few run-ins on this subject early on.” Cowderoy: “I never remember thinking, ‘God, I’m really bored, what are we going to do?’ It was very full-on and Dave never stopped. Dave’s attitude was ‘a tired band is a happy band’. And I think he also thought that ‘tired workers are happy workers’ too.”
Of course, there was a downside to that, too. Some felt overworked or under-appreciated, and there was a pattern of casual sackings. But Murray remembers Robinson’s aversion to the ‘English Disease’ as ultimately refreshing. “It’s as true today as it was then. It’s not necessarily British, but it is a trait of people in business. ‘Oh, I couldn’t do it.’ But that’s no good if you’re an entrepreneur. If you want something done, you just want it done. But Stiff was very single-minded, put it that way. It suited me very well in terms of the dynamics of the label. It didn’t suit me in terms of the way it was communicated. The reason I left was because I never knew what was going on. I was just told – this record’s coming out next week, get some press on it. I would say, ‘The papers go to press on Thursday, and this is Friday. I keep telling you, you’ve got to give me the stuff on a Wednesday.’ ‘Oh, do your best, shut up.’ ‘I can’t do my best because you don’t plan anything!’ That was my essential frustration. I felt that the marketing people were in charge of stuff and I wasn’t. So I got a job in marketing.”
In December 1979 the label moved premises again to 9-11 Woodfield Road, just off Harrow Road, above a taxi firm. It had previously been home to Virgin’s Front Line reggae imprint. While Madness reinvigorated the label, some of its stars from yesteryear began to fall away, including Mickey Jupp, Lene Lovich (after a last chart hurrah for second album Flex) and Wreckless Eric, whose prophetic titling of his third album Big Smash!, despite the quality of the contents, backfired. Rachel Sweet, too, had gone by the end of the year, after a second album Protect The Innocent, produced by Stiff’s new in-house producer Alan Winstanley, alongside Martin Rushent, flopped badly.
The move also coincided with Murray’s departure in January 1980. “Felt like a long year and a half! But I felt like I’d worked for the best independent, and I wanted to work for the best major, which was CBS at the time. So I went off to be a product manager at CBS [later working again with Paul Conroy, who became marketing director for Warner UK in 1983 and managing director between 1986 and 1989]. What was interesting was that it was instructive. People would go into Dave and say, ‘Well, I don’t like this mix’. And Dave would say, ‘Well, that’s the way it’s going to be.’ ‘Well, I’m just not going to have this! I’m going to…’ And you could see it going through their minds – ‘I’m going… to speak… to…’ And there wasn’t anyone to speak to, because Dave owned the label and he got his own way. And in a lot of ways, even though hardly any of the artists overtly liked it, they actually really did appreciate it. When artists dealt with, subsequently, the committees that record labels became, when nothing is ever decided, or worse, the artist could be allowed to entertain their genius in all sorts of expensive ways, absolutely not always successfully.”
While gripes were not uncommon, other artists respected Robinson’s ability to get things done, accepting the fact, though often in hindsight, that his belligerence may have enhanced their careers. “Well, we had a need to have a high percentage of what we did work at the end of the day,” Robinson reflects now. “Somebody has to have a vision. There’s no place for committees in a small record company that is constantly reinvesting in the music of that label. You have to have somebody who says yes or no and sticks to it, and that’s pretty much me, really.” And Robinson’s focus on the bottom line was one set by example. His decision to direct many of Stiff’s videos was an act born of both parsimony and pragmatism. “Well, the other people would listen to you, and then go and try to make their entrance into Hollywood. On your money. Fuck that.” The fact that this stoical refusal to throw away money actually resulted in some of the finest and funniest video clips of the decade, most notably with Madness, pinpoints Robinson’s dual strengths as a manager and a creative.
“I used to master all the records,” recalls Cowderoy. “Once the records were finished in the studio, I would take them to the mastering studio, where we would tweak them to suit Dave. And then I’d bring them back. At that stage you’d be inscribing the little slogans into the run-out grooves. That was one of my tasks. I remember going back to Dave with records and saying, ‘I’ve tweaked this, and I think you’re going to like it.’ And he’d listen and go, ‘No, no, no, I don’t like that.’ And in the end he got a graphic equaliser in his office. He always liked a lot of top-end, because he thought that would cut through the medium wave, which was the radio transmission medium at the time. And sometimes you’d think it was too much, but radio would add it and it would cut through. He invariably wasn’t wrong. And he had a good eye for art. The sleeves were always good. We had a great art department. There was a guy called Chris Morton, who was the first artist there. He designed the first logo and did some of the early sleeves and early compilations. Then Barney became the in-house art guy. And it was very important, that visual style, as much as the audible style – and the sense of humour. They were doing their thing, but at the end of the day, it would have to get past Robbo. And if he didn’t approve it, or had a better idea, that was it. You’d try to steer the ship, and Dave was the captain. Occasionally you’d try to sneak up behind him and try to distract him, and turn the rudder whichever way you wanted it to go. But essentially he steered the ship.”
New head of press Nigel Dick even found himself playing bass for the Top Of The Pops recording of Jona Lewie’s ‘You’ll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties’, which reached number 16 in April 1980 (and would later be followed by a much bigger hit, ‘Stop The Cavalry’). But the A&R policy remained esoteric. Joe King Carrasco rubbed shoulders with New York splatter-punks the Plasmatics (“not very engaging folk,” remembers Dick). There was reggae from Desmond Dekker and the Equators alongside medieval-themed folk-punk from Tenpole Tudor. Art lout John Otway and 70s glam leftover Alvin Stardust found themselves unlikely peers of American power poppers Dirty Looks and Any Trouble, whose singer Clive Gregson was deliberately modelled as a replacement for Elvis Costello. “I don’t think Stiff had a lot of respect for artistic … identity,” Lene Lovich would later tell Jason Gross, when informed that The Feelies were issued with a dictum to try to repeat the success of her ‘Lucky Number’. “They just wanted to be successful.” Several of those signings (though not the Plasmatics, whose GLC-aborted gig would hit Robinson in the pocket to the region of £20,000) were part of the 1980 Son Of Stiff package tour, the last and least successful of such enterprises.
Everyone, seemingly, was welcome to put forward their A&R suggestions, rather than it being a rigidly discrete department at the label. Nigel Dick remembers Robinson asking his opinion on whether to release Dury’s ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’. “I didn’t like it too much, and of course, it went to number one. I also discovered this young metal band from Sheffield who were fucking brilliant and had a single on their own label. I rang their manager who got a lift on the back of a motorcycle from Sheffield down to London to see me and give me a copy of the record. Robbo hated it and told me, somewhat archly, that we needed to sign bands that made money. The band was Def Leppard. 60 million albums later…”
“We all tried to do what we could,” recalls Cowderoy. “Dave had a list of people that he said major labels had overlooked. And then the list was added to with people like Wreckless Eric and The Damned. There were people on the list like Larry Wallis, and Ian Dury, and a few other people. Mickey Jupp was on the list, people who had been around a while. Dave was convinced, because they were on the list, they were people we should definitely sign. ‘The list’ had assumed some sort of magical, mystical property. A few of those that we’d worked with proved successful, so why wouldn’t the others? It was almost a religious thing. Paul and I and the others could sit round and say, ‘I’m not sure that we’re going to be able to sell a Larry Wallis record.’ The ‘Police Car’ single we put out was a great single, but we weren’t convinced Larry was somebody that I could sell overseas, and Paul could sell to the Brits. So we had reservations. So we tried to temper Dave’s enthusiasm in that way. And if something caught our eye, we’d try to encourage him too.”
But the idiosyncratic command structure could cause problems too. Andy Murray: “With Stiff, it was difficult for me personally, because the artists, funnily enough, were a bit snooty. They were used to dealing with Dave. Dave would say, ‘We’ll do this, and whatever you want, that’s fine.’ He was very generous to the artists in terms of accommodation or helping them out, or giving them extra money, or listening to them. The artists were a little bit stand-off-ish with me, funnily enough. But with major labels, as I say, they’re stand-off-ish with everybody, because they feel it’s an ‘us and them’ situation, which I would reasonably say was not the case at Stiff. They felt that if they were signed to Stiff – bear in mind that, very often they had been rejected by everyone else in the business – they were quite correctly grateful. Notwithstanding that, Dave could be very charming. Paul and Alan were certainly very helpful. If somebody wanted something silly, they would try to get it for them. There was never any talking down to the artists and telling them they shouldn’t want something. They might say it wasn’t possible, but they might still give it a go. Far more likely, with someone like Lew Lewis, you’d take him in and say, ‘Lew, we’re launching your album with a harmonica extravaganza at the Hope ‘n’ Anchor,’ and he’d go, ‘Fine, good, let’s go.’ There were positive suggestions about all sorts of things. Then in the 80s it became the era of the big manager, where the big manager would come in and bully the record company.”
Murray’s replacement would discover similar problems. Nigel Dick: “I was always more into the more jokey and cheeky side of things than Andy. In truth, if you’re ever working for Robbo, you will always have to be reactive – he wants things done NOW! Back then, when lead times for some magazines was anything up to six weeks, that was very, very difficult to achieve. Frankly, I didn’t much enjoy being a press officer and hated trying to blag articles out of cynical journalists who had seen it all and wanted lots of free drink. I didn’t drink.”
Dick would also discover the downside of Robinson’s perfunctory approach to human resources. “I left for exactly the same reason that everyone left. I was fired! Robbo grew tired of me. I knew it was coming and tried to leave but Robbo asked me to stay. Then one bright and breezy day I was summoned to his chamber and given 15 minutes to get out. After five years of working round the clock and phone calls in the middle of the night, it was all over. Behind his back one of the staff showed me how to fill in the forms to take him to the industrial tribunal for unfair dismissal. Robbo got wind of it pretty quickly and he paid me off.” Murray was never fired, however. “Oh, he tried. About three times. But Alan wouldn’t let him!”
Nigel Dick: “Then I got a phone call from Lene Lovich to go and work on her current tour in the US and I was off. Everyone on that tour, from the sound guy to the tour manager to the publicist, and even Lene herself, had been fired by Robbo. It was a badge of honour. Six months later, when I was working at Phonogram, I had Robbo on the phone begging for information on something (during my time there I had taken it upon myself to be a sort of archivist – I was always too much of a fan). I found it very difficult because deep down I wanted to help. But I told him that I no longer worked for the company and put the phone down on him. 25 years later, after the release of the Stiff film on the BBC, I sent him an e-mail. I explained that I am still, to this day, enormously hurt by his sudden dismissal, but I am also enormously grateful for five years of amazing times and for everything I learnt there – and I certainly learned a lot.”
Towards the end of 1983, Island Records purchased 50% of the label. Robinson was now in charge of both Stiff and Island. He enjoyed immediate and spectacular success with Island, through Frankie Goes To Hollywood and U2, while Bob Marley’s Legend became one of the all-time sure-fire catalogue sellers under his stewardship. And yet, he now reflects, it was a “mistake”. “I didn’t want to do it, quite honestly. You look back at things, and you think, what made you make a decision of that nature. I was so happy. Stiff had a new building in Bayham Street [Camden; in September 1982] that I was really happy with. It was a bigger building. It had a recording studio and a big warehouse. So we had everything under our own roof at that time, and I was very happy with the things we were doing. Musically we were good, we had plenty of money in the bank, and we were ahead of the game. We were in a very good position.”
“It was around that time when Blackwell called me,” Robinson continues. “I think it was November 1983. ‘Why don’t we work out some deal where he bought some shares in Stiff, and I ran Island as well as Stiff, blah blah.’ Quite honestly I turned him down. I thought about it, but, nah, I’m quite happy with the way things are. But he came back, and he’s a very charming bloke. And I’d known him for a number of years and I counted him as a close friend, actually. We to’d and fro’d, and Island was the model of the ideal record company in my mind anyway. So it seemed like something could be done. U2 was there. And Blackwell and I came up with a strategy – he wanted to be in the song business, really – so the company was being built up for a sale, and I had a share in Island, as well as them buying half of Stiff. The whole thing was an interesting step up. Nowadays I’d like to think I would have turned him down a second time and that would have been the end of it, but I took it on. What I didn’t do was I didn’t do any due diligence. Cos Island was a bigger record label than Stiff, on the cards anyway. And it turned out they were totally broke. And I didn’t know that. And I didn’t think to investigate that, because I wasn’t buying into Island, it was just a job with a profit-share.”
Robinson soon discovered that he’d have to lend Island £1 million from Stiff’s coffers to cover the deal. “At that time I really should have said, ‘Look, you’ve sold me a bit of a pup,’ and that’s the end of it. But I stayed with it, and they had their most successful year ever. They had Frankie Goes To Hollywood, which I kind of clawed off the floor because it was falling backwards big time [this might be disputed by journalist Paul Morley, who masterminded the project, and marketeer Garry Farrow], and the Legend album, which was something I really wanted to do. That was part of the reason I went there, I’m a big Bob Marley fan. And U2. An Irish band whom I originally sent to Island in the first place. There was an opportunity. The thing about Island at the time is, they didn’t follow up. They didn’t have the money and they didn’t have the attitude. They were kind of like a flaccid major, and they didn’t promote anything. They had a big staff. They had a lot of potted plants in the place, that I got rid of pretty damned quick. So that year, we did £56 million. They’d never seen that type of money. They paid all their debts off. But in order to do that, I had to concentrate on that label big time. There was a lot of to’ing and fro’ing. It turned out Blackwell hadn’t told me lots of things. America, for example, ran entirely off the UK label. They didn’t make any money. And they didn’t pay any royalties to the UK label. Now, I had a profit-share, so as part of the profit-share, I’m looking at the financial way the company is set up, and Blackwell and his mother were all on the American deal, and no money was coming through to England. Therefore, as a sharer of the profits, I was losing quite a lot of money, cos there’s an awful lot going out to America, and no royalties being sent to the UK.” But was it also a case of someone who had been used to acting wholly off his own instincts failing to acclimatise to a completely different culture? “You’re right to a degree, I found it to be a bitter pill to swallow. Blackwell essentially doubled-crossed me. At the end of the day, it’s one of those learning curves you can do without.”
By the time Madness departed the scene to sign with Virgin, under something of a cloud, they had scored 18 Top 20 hits as well as six Top Ten albums. Stiff was left with Tracey Ulman and Kirsty MacColl (who would soon depart to Polydor) and little else. “Having had a run of singles in the Top 40, there was a time when we weren’t notching up the same success rate,” recalls Cowderoy. “Things didn’t get on playlists, things weren’t going as well, and clearly you’re not generating the kind of income that you want. And if the bad times go on too long you get into a bit of a pickle. And at that point it had been going on longer and longer, and he decided to sell half the company to Chris Blackwell. I don’t think Dave’s eye was on the ball at that point. He was very much focused on maximising the potential there.”
Robinson would re-establish full control of Stiff in 1985, piloting its return to independent status. At which time he signed the last of the ‘great’ Stiff acts, The Pogues. “Oh, Shane is phenomenal,” he recounts. “There’s no doubt that he was fantastic. But, unfortunately, I led him to Frank Murray to be his manager, which was really a bad decision. Frank was out of work and I knew his wife, and he needed something to do. And he did add musically to the band, I think getting [former Steeleye Span multi-instrumentalist] Terry Woods in was a very inspired idea. But Frank, generally, I don’t think was the right kind of person. I’d kind of forgotten he was Phil Lynott’s tour manager – and that should have spoken volumes to me. But with Shane being such a delicate little flower – early on we were kind of controlling his drinking. He wasn’t NOT drinking, but he was doing it in a controlled way. We had a grip on it. But as soon as Frank took over, he wanted to get between the record company and the artist, like a true idiot manager. And taking Shane down to the pub was now in some way a managerial duty, and that was really fatal. That was a shame. Although ‘Fairytale Of New York’ was the height of what we did, perhaps, in the public area, there was incredible music there. Possibly it hasn’t been realised just how good he was.”
Despite significant success with The Pogues over the next 18 months, and a breakthrough with Furniture’s ‘Brilliant Mind’ that they were unable to capitalise on, the Mint Juleps’ ‘Girl To The Power Of 6’ (BUY 263) closed an illustrious era. Stiff collapsed in 1987 with debts of £1.4 million (less than the headline figure of £3.5 million that was quoted at the time according to Robinson, though others suggest the final figure was indeed close to the larger sum). The label’s masters were purchased by ZTT, one of the labels Robinson had helped establish at Island, for approximately £300,000. “It was unfortunate,” laments Cowderoy.” We tried to make things happen in a different way. But it did survive and we carried on and we had The Pogues. The ship kept sailing but in the end it sank. It ended up in the arms of Trevor Horn and Jill Sinclair. Jill was at ZTT, and obviously Dave had a relationship with them through Island, because ZTT was signed to Island. I wasn’t there at the time, but he continued to spend money. And at a certain point of time Jill just said, ‘I don’t want to spend any more money’ and they took over the company and Dave was gone.”
Robinson’s somewhat weary view on the denouement of Stiff needs to be taken in context. Everyone involved in the stewardship of the label (they even made Robinson joint managing director with Sinclair) wanted it to succeed. One of the final straws for Horn and Sinclair was the sale of Madness’s masters back to the band when Stiff couldn’t find £70,000 in back royalties it owed to them. To them, this was terrible short-term business. The Pogues catalogue (including masters) was sold to Warners to bail the company out – although that also solved the problem of Robinson’s dissolving relationship with Frank Murray - reducing further still its A&R assets. In the end, as the main creditor to Stiff, ZTT pursued a ‘hive-down’ sale of the company to protect what masters it did still retain. Bailing out Stiff very nearly sank ZTT – which was eventually put back on a firm financial footing with the success of Seal and the Art Of Noise, before it too signed with Warners.
Stiff was revived in 2006 (without Robinson or Riviera’s involvement) with the signing of The Enemy. “We’ve managed the catalogue for quite a long time,” reveals Pete Gardiner. “It was acquired by Trevor Horn and Jill Sinclair at the end of the eighties, because of a tie-up they had with Stiff at the time. We just ran it as a catalogue concern. But at the beginning of 2006, I met someone from the BBC and I pitched the idea of a documentary, just to give us a bit of catalogue profile, to be honest. The BBC ended up producing that documentary [If It Ain’t Stiff]. As we were doing it, we realised there was still interest and quite a lot of awareness of the brand. So we thought, why don’t we do some low-key bits and pieces, in the original manner of the label? We had an A&R guy that worked on the publishing side that went to Warners and came up with this band, The Enemy. So we did the first couple of singles. A lot of the originals on Stiff were one-offs originally. We never had any intention of signing the band to any long-term deal, we’re not in that sort of market. We did those two singles, just 1,000 limited editions, and they sold rapidly. Suddenly we had more and more interest and people contacting us. So we just thought, this is a good chance now. And it’s something we can manage – it’s being run as a relative cottage industry, if you like – we’re not heading for the big time with this one, unless something gathers its own momentum.”
The documentary proved popular, though not with everyone. Cowderoy: “The real essence of Stiff was never obvious in that TV programme – and that was the humour. We laughed all the time. It was that sense of humour and the trailblazing marketing we did – the visual style. When you look at ads today – there was Sounds, Melody Maker and NME in those days. And we would run ads in a given week in three papers, and each ad for each paper would be completely different. Nowadays you look at ads for Hard-Fi or whatever, and they all look the same. I just didn’t think it came across in the documentary the sense of fun we had.”
Also, getting everyone to contribute wasn’t all that straightforward: “We approached Jake,” recalls Gardener, “and apart from the documentary itself, he’s never talked about the label. And he was really reluctant to do so. We had a go from here, and then the BBC, and initially he just said ‘Fuck off, I don’t want to have anything to do with you.’ It’s a bit like the film Swingers. The guy meets a girl in a club, then he phones up and leaves a message. Then he keeps leaving messages until he breaks up without ever having had a date with her. Jake conducted that sort of relationship with us when he kept ringing up telling us to fuck off. In the end he just phoned us himself and agreed to do it.”
Your writer had a similar experience. Not that Riviera has gone to ground completely. Simon Morgan was involved in plans for a reunion of the original Damned in 2006, bridging the Sensible/Scabies divide, to try to get the warring factions to record Damned Damned Damned 2 with Nick Lowe. Riviera was brought into the equation in an attempt to knock heads together, as only he could. “Apparently, even after an agreement in principle,” recalls Morgan, “Dave ‘n’ Cap were not playing ball. Jake had wanted 2006 to be ‘The Year Of The Damned’ … but the current Damned were still taking bookings for the UK and Japan for the end of 2006. Dave’s email said that he and the Captain had spent the last ten years ‘building up momentum’ on the back of their most recent work, and that the ‘force’ was naturally with them. That ‘they’ were the bigger draw and that some financial dispensation had to be made with regard to this anomaly. Jake’s reply accused Vanian of ‘suffering from lead singer syndrome’, and that if that was the way the two of them felt, then they could both ‘go fuck themselves’. Jake signed off: ‘May the momentum be with you!’”
Unlike some of its peers and progeny, Stiff did not produce an identifiable sound. It is the spirit of the label, rather than the music (although it produced some of the finest of the era) that endures. Their innovations include, but are not limited to, the packaging of UK single releases, the importance of a good slogan (aped by the advertising industry wholesale), the irreverent pop video, the ‘package’ tour and high-profile, targeted press campaigns. So, when Carl Dalemo of Razorlight bears the legendary t-shirt ‘If It Ain’t Stiff …” on the cover of their album, it is a testament to the philosophical principles of ambition and sweat, as well as independence, that marked out Stiff. And singularly doesn’t mark out Razorlight or much of today’s music scene.