How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 by Richard King Read Free Book Online Page A

didn’t know any of the people there,’ he says, ‘and I felt incredibly nervous.’ The tracks ‘TVOD’ and ‘Warm Leatherette’ were two corrosive and minimal songs that sounded as though they had been intimidated out of a synthesiser. Geoff Travis, as he did for anyone who walked into the shop, gave Miller a reassuring smile and inserted the tape into the Rough Trade tape-deck. A few feet away Jon Savage was flicking through the week’s new releases; he was in conversation with his fellow Sounds journalist Jane Suck as the pair debated which records might be worthy of further investigation or a review. ‘I remember Daniel coming into the shop with a tape of “TVOD” which he’d just made,’ he says. ‘Jane Suck just went berserk when she heard it – she thought it was Lou Reed’s new record.’
    To Miller’s relief and surprise Travis offered to manufacture and distribute ‘TVOD’ and ‘Warm Leatherette’ on the spot. ‘They listened to it and liked it and took over the distribution, which was fantastic,’ says Miller. ‘I’d walked in with a tape, and came out with a record deal. The weird thing for me was before that that I had no contact with the music business whatsoever.’
    Miller settled on the name Mute for his label and attended to the requirements, if only for one release, of becoming a record company. ‘I put my address on the back of the sleeve,’ he says‘because that seemed to be what people did. And I started getting demo tapes from people with long letters saying, please will you put my record out.’
    The atmosphere in the Rough Trade shop was buoyant. More and more 7-inches were being manufactured by Rough Trade on their customers’ behalf, and the racks of one-off statements, angular ideas about music, and primitive essays in pop started to swell. As well as over the counter at the shop, each release was also sold via Rough Trade’s ad hoc mail order system; a new haphazard form of supply and demand was being slowly created away from the established music industry.
    Richard Scott was tall and hirsute and still carried the air of his former occupation as an architecture tutor. He was now de facto in charge of the embryonic distribution of all the material flooding into Kensington Park Road and trying to organise a way for it to leave, the impetus of the moment almost willing the records out of the door. ‘There was just a huge energy,’ he says, ‘and very soon we could see that we could sell 10,000 of anything that was halfway decent and 10,000 actually generated a lot of money even then. I walked in there, I think it was late one afternoon, to talk to Geoff and they were busy collating any spare copies of Sniffin’ Glue and I was sort of spat out ten years later. I’d walked into something which was so dense that really there was no time to stop and think or catch your breath.’
    A community was building, but despite its energy and nervous ambition, it was still localised and small. ‘We used to go to gigs every night,’ says Scott, ‘and there was always a saying at Rough Trade that if there were more than six other people in the audience you were at the wrong gig. John Peel used to hang around the back. He used to come in and go through the shelves … he was so gentle.’
    Rough Trade were ready to take the next step and become arecord label, releasing singles that extended the DIY production values and sensibility. The early releases came from the diaspora of ideas fermenting around the shop, and drew on a regional and international talent pool. Kleenex were from Austria and Augustus Pablo maintained the store’s connection with reggae. Cabaret Voltaire were from Sheffield, and had been brought to Travis’s attention by Jon Savage.
    ‘I stayed at Richard Kirk’s one night,’ says Savage. ‘You could hear the factories, and they sounded just like Cabaret Voltaire. Richard was really into Kraftwerk, so they gave me a whole load of tapes, one of which became