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

a cassette release on Industrial, another, Cab’s first vinyl release, Extended Play , on Rough Trade. I regarded that as part of my job at that time, putting people in touch with each other.’
    Jon Savage felt that things around punk London in general were starting to dissipate. ‘I felt that the Rough Trade scene was getting very dislocated. I didn’t want a whole load of people telling me what to think. I was desperate to get out of being a lawyer; I got in touch with Tony and said, “I want to get a job in telly,” and Tony said, “Right, well, Granada are having boards for researchers,” and I went up for a board in November ’78 and I got the job.’ The Tony in question was a fellow Cambridge graduate, a suave former grammar-school boy from Salford: Tony Wilson.
    * The manager’s name was John Webster. As well as taking a box of Spiral Scratch on commission, Webster would go on to work at Virgin in the marketing department, where he would be part of the team behind the Now That’s What I Call Music series of compilations. A decade later he would come up with the idea of the Mercury Music Prize. All of this suggests that the impact of Spiral Scratch was far-reaching.

2 All Night Party
     
     
    Echo & the Bunnymen on their first visit to New York, April 1981. The band’s bassist Les Pattinson is out of shot as he took the photograph. From left to right: Bill Drummond, Will Sergeant, Ian McCulloch, Pete De Frietas ( photograph by Les Pattinson used by kind permission of the photographer )
     

     

 
    ‘ M y dad’s a poet,’ says Nathan, son of Roger McGough, ‘and Wilson was posted at the Liverpool Daily Post in Liverpool as a journalist just after Cambridge and he was a fan of my dad’s poetry. My dad had bought this stucco townhouse built by the Earl of Sefton in the early 1800s, but it was basically in the postcode of Liverpool 8, which the outside world knows as Toxteth, and because of that people didn’t want to live there. Wilson used to come and knock on the door; my mum used to hate people calling round, so she just used to be very rude to this guy who turned up on the doorstep. He’d start saying God knows what and she’d just close the door on him. He kept persisting and one day, when I was about thirteen or fourteen, I came downstairs; and by this time Tony Wilson was a young broadcaster on Granada TV, and he was sat in our front room.’
    The young Tony Wilson, perfecting the mix of provincial but urbane, louche but culturally thrusting, that was to define his media person for the decades to come, made a big impression on the teenage McGough. ‘There was this dude off the TV sat in a blue velvet armchair with a denim shirt on and a white tuxedo jacket, and he was rolling this spliff. He was very charismatic and kind of became a friend of the family and he turned me on to Kurt Vonnegut and Shakespeare and music. At that time, it was about ’74, ’75, and Tony was a bit of a hippie.’
    Wilson worked at Granada TV, which, before the advent of Channel 4 in November 1982, could easily compete with LWTas the leading independent televisual cultural voice of the age. As well as reading the local news Wilson had aspirations to be a more authentically northern, and much more streetwise, Melvyn Bragg. One thing he particularly coveted was the chance to put contemporary music in front of a television audience, something with which he initially struggled. ‘When I started putting music on the TV in ’74,’ said Wilson, ‘I thought it would be appreciated by my generation, but it was hated and detested by my generation then and I just couldn’t understand it.’
    Once punk broke through into the mainstream, Wilson’s attempts to put the bands in front of the camera resulted in his temporary resignation from Granada. ‘Wilson was the only one of the intelligentsia, or even the pot-smoking hippie lot, who embraced punk immediately,’ says McGough. ‘He saw its power and its radicalism, and