Making It Up As You Go Along

Think of the word indie and what springs to mind? A flock of hipsters drinking Polish lager in London Fields surrounded by fixed wheel bikes, listening to James Blake through an iPhone? Or maybe Bombay Bicycle Club, four white guys strumming away and singing about their problems on stage at a festival sponsored by a mobile phone company. There’s indie cinema, indie porn, indie haircuts, indie publishing, indie coffee shops… the list goes on and on. Whichever way you look at it, indie—once an abbreviation of independence—is not what it used to be. But does that matter anymore?

Well, it does to Richard King, who’s written an excellent book called How Soon Is Now? that looks in detail at the evolution of the independent music industry over a 30-year period. Subtitled The Madmen and Mavericks Who Made Independent Music 1975–2005, Richard spent four years conducting hundreds of interviews and researching this 600-page survey in a bid to find out what it really means and what kind of person it takes to be truly independent.

“I got the idea in 2007,” he says. “I got so fed up with seeing the word indie everywhere and since then it’s got even more omnipresent. I thought the definition of independence had been lost within indie and I just really wanted to write down what I felt about it.”

Happily, Richard’s credentials are none more indie— he’s closely affiliated with the Domino label and used to play guitar for Bristol space-rockers Flying Saucer Attack—and he writes with authority on a subject in which he’s clearly immersed, conveying his knowledge and enthusiasm in an entertaining manner. It’s a cracking read.

VICE: How did you decide who to cover and who to leave out for How Soon Is Now?

Richard King: The people I’ve written about are people who all ended up in the mainstream whether they liked it or not. So there’s lots of labels and bands that aren’t in there who are very indie—Crass aren’t in there, for example. I wanted to write about these people who’d ended up in the mainstream, and that’s when it gets interesting because then they can change things. They have to deal with things they weren’t expected to deal with, and some people cope with that better than others. To me, that sort of independence is finding yourself in the real Top 40 and wondering what you’re meant to be doing and how to do it. All you know is about making it up as you go along and suddenly you’ve got to make it up as you go along on a much bigger scale. And that’s when interesting things happen—the KLF being a good example.

Kings—andqueen—of the wild frontier: Rough Trade’s Jeannette Lee and Geoff Travis

You speak to many of the greats of indie—Geoff Travis, Daniel Miller, Alan McGee, Ivo Watts-Russell—and what strikes you is how driven they were by their ideals, and still are to a degree.

I just thought no one really knows what those people went through—and some of them continue to go through—just to get records out the door. No one quite knew how crazy it got because it was all so untutored and unknown and unprofessional. When you’ve got a space where people can just decide, “Well, I fancy releasing this record today and I don’t really care what happens or how it will do commercially”— and if you’ve got 20 or 30 people doing that and finding they’re connecting with things and that allows them to do it more and more—then over the years you suddenly have this annexe of the music business full of people who’ve never been told what to do, never had job descriptions and never had targets. They tried to introduce targets at Rough Trade and it was a disaster. So there’s a lot of what you call fiscal ineptitude but also unbelievable creativity and risktaking and arsing around and drug-taking.

By doing something you love, which then becomes hugely successful and you’re at the heart of it, that can damage you, I suppose.

You’ve got to be very thick-skinned and a lot of these people were pretty hedonistic. I think they all were. I don’t think you can underestimate the impact of ecstasy. I mean, I do mention the story of [4AD’s influential graphic designer] Vaughan Oliver sliding naked down a glass roof…

I had to rediscover the art of daytime drinking doing a lot of these interviews because a lot of people are a certain age and it takes a couple of pints to get to know each other and a couple of pints to fly through the reverie and then a couple of pints of sort of nostalgia to ease back into the here and now. I did that quite a few times.

Ivo Watts- Russell of 4AD

Was there a precedent for your book that you came across? 

Not really, not in music, no. I think if I’m honest, in the back of my mind, maybe Easy Riders, Raging Bulls [Peter Biskind’s acclaimed romp through 70s Hollywood].

In the way that book told the zig-zag story of a defining period in modern cinema?

Well, it wasn’t exactly social history, it was more about the economic situation of the time. I thought it was important to record that in the 80s Throbbing Gristle were able to live in squats and have an arts council-funded studio and also have a label [Industrial], and then you had [Glasgow’s pioneering indie label] Postcard run out of a flat, and in Manchester you could just be in the middle of a city really cheaply. And nearly everyone involved could sign on. So you have this economic space in which some people were really ambitious and wanted to sell a lot of records but some people didn’t and just wanted to be in that space, and it’s the sort of space that doesn’t really exist anymore.

The history of the 80s that we’ve had for the 80s revival, which as everyone knows has gone on longer than the 80s, doesn’t really talk about people on the dole putting out 7-inch singles. Not that that’s necessarily really exciting compared to Duran Duran on yachts, but within all that there’s some texture and ideas and some interesting experiments about how to be creative and how to live and make things work for you that I thought needed to be registered as being part of the 80s.

Was it easy to piece together a narrative? Most of it flowed chronologically, I imagine.

Yeah, I’d worked on it a lot before and I worked out that the people I wanted to write about were people who’d been in the mainstream, because that point where they collide with the mainstream is where interesting things happen. And Mute, Rough Trade and Factory all started synonymously and then Mute was sold to EMI within a month of Creation ceasing trading, and Factory kind of crumbled, so that was easy to do.

It was more trying to write about people who believed in the ethos of it all. Even people like McGee, who desperately wanted to make loads of cash, which he did—and he’s very clear saying he got in it for the money and to shag women—but, like a lot of these people, he wanted something to react against. Having your back against the wall and fighting against something is what really sustained these people. And that—saying, “I’m not like you”— means independence as much as being economically independent.

There’s very little for anyone to kick against today.

Yes, it’s unimaginable today people having those obstacles. Well, my own theory is there’s no such thing as the underground any more—there’s the internet, and if you chuck something out people will find it. If you’re putting out noise records there might be a hedge fund manager in Manhattan who really likes Merzbow, you just don’t know. And he’s as likely to find it as the guy who lives round the corner. So it’s more that the digital economy shut down the “us” and “them” or the “other”.

Mute founder Daniel Miller

I enjoyed the chapter on Blast First and its instigator Paul Smith, who pretty much singlehandedly brought the cream of the US underground—Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, Big Black—to the UK. What did Smith and Blast First get up to that you couldn’t put in the book?

Heh, oh fuck, stuff that you’re not allowed to print either! It was very funny interviewing Paul because he’s always lived in the East End of London and we were in that pub on Columbia Road that used to be a gay pub when I lived round there, the Royal Oak, it’s now quite smart. So we were in there and I said, Blast First got a bit curatorial when you did [infamous club night] Disobey, and he said, “Ah! The c word! Take a look around you—everyone in here is a curator and everyone’s got a record company!” And so he’s pretty entertaining about how all that’s taken over from the donkey work of running a company, how it’s become part of people’s portfolio now. Everyone has a label and everyone is a curator, and no one makes any money out of it. But Paul is a pretty wild bloke and a good example of someone just making it up as they went along. He fried his ears listening to Big Black on industry-standard headphones. He was on a one-man mission to bring those bands over and he was dealing with quite mental people.

The Steve Albini and Hunter S. Thompson story is funny. Paul took Steve Albini to interview Hunter S. Thompson after Blast First had finished for [early-90s music TV show] Snub TV and of course Albini is teetotal and very anti-drugs and Hunter is pretty whacked. Albini says, “OK, I’ve come all this way and it’s fairly obvious, Mr Thompson, that you’re fucked up on drugs.” And Hunter goes, “Fucked up on drugs? I’ll show you fucked up on drugs.” And he walks away and comes back half an hour later really really fucked up on drugs. So there was a lot of that.

What are you working on at the moment?

The next book is about Wales. I don’t sound it but I’m Welsh. The book’s going to try to talk about Wales in a non-BBC way—take the temperature of a country and look at its problems and weaknesses.

How Soon Is Now? Is out now published by Faber. Visit Richard’s blog at Howsoon. com for some of the tales that didn’t make the book.