Original subtitles

This programme contains some strong language.

# When I get to Warwick Avenue

# Meet me by the entrance of the tube

# We can talk things over little time... #

In March 2008, Duffy topped the UK singles and album charts.

Behind her success lies a management team with a 30-year history,

and a legendary status in the music business.

We are saying the market place is a force of creation

and has very little to do

with the reality of what people might want, given the options.

Rough Trade began life as a small but hip record shop.

From humble beginnings

it grew to drive and define a revolution in independent music,

as a bunch of radical idealists and maverick musicians

turned the record industry on its head.

If you were DIY, Rough Trade for the perfect label for you.

Single handedly, really, Rough Trade

gave me back some kind of faith in the music industry because up

to then I just thought, it's a bunch of (BLEEP) crooks.

But at the height of its success, Rough Trade went spectacularly bust.

It was a very black time and very hard time and I feel grateful

to have still be here today, really.

Rough Trade fought its way back, and after three decades of

defiant independence finally made it to number one.

# Baby, you hurt me... #

Subtitles downloaded from www.OpenSubtitles.org

The Rough Trade story began more than 30 years ago.

20th February, 1976.

NEWSREEL: 'Then the second bomb

'in a furniture shop gutted the four-storey building.'

Britain was in the grip of an IRA bombing campaign.

Labour has gone on spending our earnings and spending our savings...

A future prime minister was beginning to make her mark on Middle England,

where punk was yet to run amok,

and a young Cambridge graduate called Geoff Travis opened a new shop

at 202 Kensington Park Road, just off Ladbroke Grove in West London.

I have always bought records all my life, and, you know, I love music.

And I was in the States for quite a long time.

When I came back to London,

I didn't feel like there was anywhere I wanted

to so I thought, well, I'll have to start somewhere.

After I finished university,

I went to visit an old girlfriend in Canada.

We hitchhiked together from Chicago to San Francisco

and I bought lots of second-hand records from Salvation Army stores

25 cents, a dollar, and a friend said,

"What you going to do with all those records?

"Why don't you ship them back to London and start a record store?"

Geoff Travis named his shop Rough Trade,

partly after an obscure Canadian band,

partly after a trashy novel,

and began to offer his friends and customers, like minded,

left wing music lovers such as Steve Montgomery, the chance to work there.

It was fun. You could listen to music all day.

We had a policy, if you wanted to hear a record, we'd play it for you.

Rough Trade sold obscure and challenging records by bands

such as American art rockers Pere Ubu.

Its music policy and its communal vibe set it apart from conventional,

commercial record shops

and the middle of the road rock music that dominated the music business.

I started the shop on the basis that a record shop could be something

a lot more than just a place where bought records,

as though you were going into a chemist.

We were very enamoured by the idea of City Lights bookshop

in San Francisco, where you could sit in the basement of the shop

and drink coffee and read poetry and you wouldn't be chucked out.

It was about an environment where you could just listen to music.

It wasn't a faceless, mindless organisation

attempting to exploit the general public for as much money

from their pockets as you could get.

We were all pretty naive, all pretty innocent,

but we figured we could change the world.

West London's new music store had a clear alternative agenda.

And when punk rock exploded in the summer of '76, just a few months

after the shop's opening right on the doorstep of local heroes The Clash,

it became a natural headquarters

for punk's revolt against mainstream music.

When they released the Clash album,

it was an incredible number of albums we moved in one day.

It was either a thousand or a couple of thousand.

The record companies all wanted to give us accounts

because they saw the power that we wielded

although we didn't look at it as power.

We just looked at it as, we're making this material accessible.

But the shop didn't stop at selling punk records.

From mid-1976 on they carried the first issues of Punk magazine

from New York and Rough Trade was very important

in that it started to carry English fanzines

Mark Perry's Sniffing Glue, Sandy Robertson's White Stuff,

Tony Dee's Ripped And Torn, and they carried my fanzine,

which was called London's Outrage.

Punk's home-made fanzines were the first products of

a do it yourself attitude that would become key to Rough Trade's identity.

But the shop's location, just off Ladbroke Grove,

made it more than just a punk rock ghetto.

I knew Ladbroke Grove because of spending time

at Vivienne Goldman's flat

at 145a Ladbroke Grove, above the betting shop, next to the chip shop.

The area where the first Rough Trade store was is now a full

of boutiques and restaurants.

Back then it was rough.

It has always been a bohemian area of London.

It's had its history of the riots.

It has its history of its Rachmanite landlords.

It has a huge West Indian community and it's just been a place

where it has been cheap to live.

And where a place is cheap to live, you find musicians.

So, that was the right place for us to be, really.

We weren't trying to have an upmarket shop.

We just wanted to feel comfortable.

It was full of squats!

And it full of music,

starting from the hippie era, with Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies,

and then, of course, with the Caribbean community.

The Rastas were all coming to Rough Trade,

partly because of its location on the carnival route!

So, in the very heart of the West Indian community.

In keeping with its location, Rough Trade deliberately forged

what seemed an unlikely alliance between punk and reggae.

I came into Rough Trade as an outsider.

To me, punk music was just spitting

and vomiting and people looking funny.

How do they say in football terms? I was tapped up!

I was tapped up!

I was working for a company driving around in my little Escort van.

We are coming down to Ladbroke Grove station.

It's on the right hand side.

So, I went to Rough Trade, sold them some...

I can't remember what it was.

If it was a Lee Perry album or if it was a Culture album.

I went back and they said, can I have 50 of that!

Come on, darling.

The last thing you want

when you open a shop in a community is a tourist.

It was very important we sold Jamaican music.

They kept saying to you, come and work for us!

And I thought, well, no. I don't want to work for punks, you know?

And then, when I went to work there,

it was like, "Oh, you're in charge of reggae!"

The bohemian lifestyle and political activism of Ladbroke Grove,

reggae's independent record scene and punk's rebellious

do it yourself attitude, gave Rough Trade a unique spirit.

In January 1977,

when a record by Manchester punk ban Buzzcocks appeared in the shop,

Rough Trade found itself in the right place at the right time

to make an impact far beyond that of a neighbourhood music store.

# If I seem a little jittery

# I can't restrain myself

# I'm falling into fancy fragments Can't contain myself... #

That was my first encounter with Rough Trade.

We pressed a thousand copies of the seven inch

called Spiral Scratch.

Someone rang up, "Can we have a couple of hundred?"

What Spiral Scratch did is that it showed that you can make

a great record, fund it yourself, put it out on your own label,

and you could sell 15,000 copies. Bang! Go!

When Spiral Scratch was released in 1977,

the idea of putting out a single without the support

of an established record company was incredible.

A handful of major record companies

controlled most of the power in the music industry.

Rough Trade was to become the headquarters of a revolt against

this corporate monopoly by stocking records by bands inspired by the idea

that they could do it themselves.

Bands like The Desperate Bicycles.

Well, we made a record independently, basically

to show that anybody could go ahead and make a record.

You didn't need the backing of a large record company.

Eager to empower others, The Desperate Bicycles

turned their record sleeves into instruction manuals.

The Desperate Bicycles were really the first to demystify a process

by giving the information on the record sleeve

and then a lot of other people followed.

And when The Desperate Bicycles did it,

and when I found their record at Rough Trade, it was like, jeez!

This is it!

Who knew that you could actually ring up a pressing plant yourself

and say, "I want to press some records?"

I had grown up imagining that mere mortals couldn't do that.

Inspired by this home-made revolution, Scritti Politti,

a band of communist intellectuals, were the next punk DIYers

through the Rough Trade door.

I went in with our own, song in '78, which was called Skank Bloc Bologna.

That was on our own St Pancreas records, named after

the Young Communist Branch of the Young Communist League.

We had a meeting in the back office with Geoff,

and then he said, "Oh, let's go and play it in the shop."

We played the demos in the shops while people were flicking through.

And he is kind of doing his Geoff thing...

"Um hum, um hum."

And then he said, "We'll distribute it."

Scritti Politti took the Desperate Bicycles' cover design

one step further by printing the production

budget on the record sleeve, which was, of course,

made out of paper and assembled at home.

So, recording, �98. Blimey!

You had the up to date information, so you'd bang that information

on the back of the sleeve.

The main cost was the pressing.

2,500 copies at 13p, done in Surrey.

Mastering 40 quid. Labels �8.

So, whoever picked that record up could then go ahead and do it.

We just stamped these on the kitchen table.

And that was absolutely essentially important to the whole business of

bothering to make music and being in a band, as far as we were concerned.

That way, the record business would change

because everyone would just be able to do it themselves.

Activists like Scritti Politti, and their friends at Rough Trade,

were the intellectual, political wing of punk.

Anti-capitalist, democratic and determined to break

the stranglehold of the major labels.

We were Marxists, so major record labels, given what they represented

at the time, would have just been the enemy.

This is our first single was recorded in a rehearsal studio

on this cassette recorder on a built-in condenser microphone.

And our second single was recorded on a borrowed reel-to-reel recorder

at home in our front room.

Now anybody could make a record.

And Geoff Travis had assembled a staff of like-minded music lovers,

including local artist Shirley O'Loughlin

and avant-garde Texan musician Mayo Thompson who might sell it for them.

I would go through 20 tapes a day, 50 tapes a day.

People writing in, sending in tapes,

wanting to be part of it.

Wanting to make their own world happen in some way.

One review in NME, and one play on Radio 1.

The mission was not Rough Trades all over the UK, or all over the world.

The mission was "Here you are, you can do it."

We pressed 1,000 records which cost about �300,

of which we sold about 350, so we lost about �150.

We'd almost always take people's records, even if it was only a box.

If it was a phenomenal we'd take a lot more.

It was definitely worth doing.

Can you say that again with more enthusiasm?

It was definitely worth doing.

But selling a few independent records over the counter

was not going to change the world.

In the '70s record distribution was entirely controlled

by major companies.

Even early independent labels like Virgin and Island had no alternative

but to hand over their distribution to the likes of EMI or CBS.

But one man at Rough Trade was about to challenge this monopoly.

We started to get five, 10, 20 letters a day's saying,

"Can we buy this cos we can't buy it at a local shop?"

So it made sense to start

up a mail order. And when the mail order

had been going a few months shops were writing in and saying,

"I can't get records from normal wholesalers,

"can I buy any excess stock you have?"

It was like there was a huge vacuum and we were sucked into that.

Richard Scott joined Rough Trade in 1977 after managing

reggae band Third World.

He began by offering mail-order accounts

to other independent shops around the country.

Richard would go on to develop a much grander scheme that was

nothing short of revolutionary - independent nationwide distribution.

One day I was trying to put together some orders for some shops.

It was completely hopeless.

At one of the shops that I'd been supplying was a shop in York.

I phoned up Tony Kaye at Red Rhino and said

could he sell to shops in the North-East if I sent him the stock?

He said yes. We then quickly picked up other people in other

regions like Probe in Liverpool, Backs in Norwich, Fast in Edinburgh.

A shop called Revolver in Bristol.

It all came down to having control over what you're doing.

Being independent.

Not being subservient to a large multinational corporation.

We're saying the market place is a false creation and has very little

to do with the reality of what people might want given the options.

We wanted to have a distribution network where the decisions about

who went into that network

was controlled about ourselves and no one else.

It was born of frustration of mainstream culture being,

to our mind, boring and excluding interesting things.

You had the idea that ordinary people would like it.

At least they should have a chance to make up their own minds.

Rough Trade had begun to open up a commercially viable market

for music overlooked or dismissed by major labels.

The shop could now offer experimental musicians like Daniel Miller

the chance to sell records nationwide.

I'd been a huge fan off Krautrock and electronic music.

I loved Kraftwerk and I loved punk.

I'd been a frustrated musician all my life because I had music ideas

but could never really play.

I thought I'm going to try and get a synthesiser and made a punk record.

I can visualise it very clearly.

I went in the front door and thought, god, this place...

I didn't think of myself as being very cool and this place was

full of cool dudes and going to be very judgmental and everything.

I went to the back of the store and there was Geoff and Richard,

they were dealing with a customer.

They said, "Hang on a second."

I was looking round and taking it all in.

It was really exciting.

All these boxes of records with names of bands that I liked.

Then we went back into the shop to have listen of the record.

This was a public airing of my first single, I was very freaked out.

As you can imagine, very nervous.

'TVOD. TVOD.'

They said, "How many do you want press?"

I said, "I'm going to press 500 and hope for the best."

They said, "Well, I think you should do 2,000,

"we'd like to distribute it." I said, "OK, fine."

That was it really. It was as simple as that.

'I don't need a TV screen.'

'I just stick the aerial into my skin

'and let the signal run through my veins...'

TVOD. And warm leatherette.

Two of the most important tracks of the era.

He went away, pressed a record up and started his own record label.

Mute Records.

Daniel Miller set up Mute Records in 1978.

It would become one of the most important and successful

independent companies in Britain,

selling millions of records by bands like Depeche Mode and Yazoo.

It was just one of many independent labels

using the Rough Trade distribution network.

There'd be Dick Odell coming in who was managing The Slits

and Pop Group and had Wire records.

There were people coming down from Postcard records.

Tony Wilson would come in at least once a month to talk about Factory,

because we were manufacturing and distributing their label.

Just like... People just coming in all the time.

Independent labels were beginning to make a significant impact on

the major companies' control of the music market.

And so it seemed almost inevitable

that when a bunch of French punks wandered into the shop in 1978,

Rough Trade was prompted to become a record label in its own right.

We'd been distributing a record by this French group Metal Urbain.

I was behind the counter and they gave me a cassette

and they said, "We don't know what to do with it, can you help us?"

That was the eureka moment where I thought, well,

we could press this up and put it out ourselves.

The Rough Trade label was born, and by the end of the year

it had released a dozen singles by an eclectic mix of post-punk artists

who found the label's attitude towards record contracts

typically subversive.

Music industry orthodoxy dictated that record companies

offer new artists a cash advance, contractually binding them

for a number of albums,

for which they would receive a modest percentage of any sales profit.

It was a notoriously exploitative arrangement.

Rough Trade had a much simpler deal.

"Clause 1.

"Rough Trade and dot, dot, dot, dot

"agree to make records and sell them until either or both

"of the parties reasonably disagree with the arrangement. Clause two.

"We agree that once agreed recording, manufacturing

"and promotional costs

"have been deducted we will share the ensuing profit equally."

We knew that if we'd gone with a major one

it was a lot more complex negotiations.

For us it was like, yeah, that makes sense.

Costs get taken out, 50/50. It's all good.

The way the music business approaches

the problem of dealing with someone that's making music

is, I think, delineated by the fact that they're going

to make some money out of this.

They are pushing to seeing it as a commodity that they have to sell.

We are very opposed to seeing any of the people that we deal with,

any of the music that we sell simply as a commodity.

You could say that really in business terms we were very naive.

Had we been interested in building an empire

we would have behaved very differently.

We would have signed artists a long-term deal.

We would have made sure we had the copyrights for that copyright.

We would have made sure that we had a publishing company.

We never did any of those things.

We weren't interested in building an empire.

We weren't trying to follow the capitalist model

of how do you accumulate wealth.

We weren't trying to be Virgin Records.

Rough Trade's ethic was directly opposed to the conventions

of the music industry.

Here was a business collective that put principles before profit,

run by a bunch of enthusiasts who wore their politics proudly.

Politics was very special to us.

At the very early stage

it was decided that it was going to be an equal paying,

non-management structure.

Rough Trade was kind of based upon the principles of

a kind of beat culture,

kibbutz collective.

Everyone was paid the same.

We had an environment where there was an equality of the sexes

and you felt you were participating in culture and building something.

You were just living in the present.

For a brief moment in time

we encapsulated everything that was right about the human race.

I don't know how many of you out there are thinking

of joining pop groups.

And when Rough Trade signed this bunch of Belfast punks in 1978,

they became not just an alternative ideological force,

but genuine competitors in the commercial music world.

# Take a look where you're living

# You got Army on the street

# And the RUC dog of repression

# Is barking at your feet

# Is this the kind of place you wanna live?

# Is this where you wanna be?

# Is this the only life we're gonna have?

# What we need... #

We started off, recorded our own first single.

I got in touch with Rough Trade and they started to sell copies

of that single for us.

When it came to the second single they asked us could

they pay the costs and so forth and go into it in a joint venture.

At the moment we are considering just continuing that way

cos it's on a straight 50/50 partnership.

Goodnight!

Signing Stiff Little Fingers was a major coup for Rough Trade.

Most successful punk bands, despite their anti-establishment roots,

were signed to major record companies.

The Sex Pistols signed to EMI, famously ended up on Virgin.

The Clash signed to CBS. They were the two leaders really.

If we signed for CBS tomorrow

all the kids on the street would say what a sell-out.

And the chances are very good our share of record sales would be

at most a half of what we are making at the moment.

In February 1979 Rough Trade and Stiff Little Fingers'

first album was released.

It went to number 14 in the charts, becoming the first independent album

in British music history to sell over 100,000 copies.

The day we made that record available I looked out the window

on Kensington Park Road and there were 20 taxis, 10 messenger bikes...

They were all there waiting for it.

As soon as it was released... Off it went into the world.

It was like woah, people do give a damn about this stuff. It's amazing.

We were just in total chaos.

I remember there were records flying in the front door

and flying out at the same time.

# Cos you started to shout out in the street... #

Stiff Little Fingers' album, Rough 1, was are their first album.

Miraculously it was hugely successful.

It sold 100,000 copies in virtually no time at all.

And it put the label on the map and made us say to ourselves,

"You know what, this isn't that hard, is it?"

The Stiff Little Fingers album was a pay-off of for an idealism.

The Clash didn't really need to go to CBS.

Stiff Little Fingers proved that.

100,000 copies, that generates a huge amount of turnover.

That in itself was the building blocks on which

the label was able to go forward.

That was the cash flow that enabled us to do other records.

Hello, Mike, how are you?

Stiff Little Fingers' breakthrough

was a key moment for the independent sector.

And it showed Rough Trade that one band's success

could fund a whole bunch of less commercial records,

as bands like The Raincoats happily discovered.

When they phoned from Rough Trade saying the record is here.

I just walked down and I just felt...

I was on top of the world... Completely.

# This is just a fairy tale

# Happening in the supermarket... #

The Raincoats were not alone,

as the label began to build a roster of artists that fulfilled

the Rough Trade ethos of offering a diverse alternative

to mainstream music.

Metal Urbain, Dr Mix who were Metal Urbain's alter ego.

Essential Logic, Young Marble Giants, Scritti Politti.

The Fall... Television Personalities.

Ivor Cutler. Swell Maps. Pop Group.

And then, of course, there were Kleenex. Delta Five. Slits.

The Electric Eels. Fantastic single.

Space Energy. Robert Wyatt.

James "Blood" Ulmer had worked with Ornette Coleman.

Subway sect, of course, seems like such an important record.

It's only one single. And there was all this electronic stuff.

Or they were doing the production and distribution for independent

record labels like Throbbing Gristle, Industrial Records

which at the time were selling absolutely pot loads of stuff.

# This is just a fairy tale... #

The variety that you find on major labels is just,

"Do you like this kind of music?

"What kind of party are you having?"

"Get you one of these, everything's gonna happen like that."

At Rough Trade you met a variety and range of people

who didn't have a look in in the mainstream industry,

and wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell

if that's all there was to it.

By 1979, while Rough Trade was starting to find its feet as a label,

Rough Trade Distribution was becoming a serious player

in the music business,

driving sales for a nationwide network

of increasingly successful independent labels.

Companies like 2 Tone, who'd signed The Specials.

# Why must you record my phone calls...

Here came somebody with something, who used Rough Trade distribution,

and they had that Al Capone single.

I remember going down with the band to Island, who were pressing it,

coming back to the Rough Trade office with all the boxes.

And then we all sat round with a rubber stamp,

pressing these records just to go downstairs and get distributed.

Rough Trade realised that it could marshal its forces around something

and actually make it happen.

We sold 375,000 of those singles.

That was the shift, in my mind, to an understanding

that it could serve us on the entry in,

people came in with ideas,

and it could also serve us on the outgoing idea.

"If you like that, no problem, we got it for you."

When Rough Trade began in 1976,

there were about a dozen independent labels in Britain.

By the end of the decade, there were over 800.

Rough Trade distribution

was at the hub of this explosion of independent music,

and the label had redefined the politics of record production.

The music industry would never be the same again.

'Stiff Little Fingers are about to embark on

'on a gruelling tour of the UK,'

but they are with us tonight, before they do that

with their single At The End.

# Back when I was younger they were talking at me

# Never listened to a word I said... #

In 1980, Rough Trade's socialist radicals moved into new offices

around the corner from the shop.

They were just one of a growing movement of left-wing collectives

like City Limits Magazine,

and activist groups like Rock Against Racism, that challenged the ideology

of Margaret Thatcher's recently elected Conservative government.

It was an era when moral values, respect for your fellow man,

an egalitarian sense of brotherhood and sisterhood came to the surface

in a corrupt, dog-eat-dog world.

Rough Trade represented a serious alternative

to the cut-throat, corporate music industry.

The shop had become a Mecca for independent music.

Richard Scott's distribution operation was expanding by the day.

Geoff Travis had released over 30 singles on the Rough Trade label,

and its debut album had smashed the chart monopoly of the major labels.

# And I'm running at the edge of the world

# They are criticising something they just can't understand... #

Rough Trade's biggest problem

was holding on to bands once they'd broken through.

By the time Stiff Little Fingers made it to Top Of The Pops in 1980,

they were no longer a Rough Trade band.

Stiff Little Fingers couldn't wait to sign to a major

straight after they'd made their Rough Trade record.

Then it dawned on us we had a brain drain problem.

So there was always this anxiety about losing talent.

If we don't respond in some sense to the growth of our fans

by a certain amount of growth,

all it means is that we will be a nursery ground

for every major label that exists in this country.

And it doesn't seem, in the long run, that's a very good idea

because all it means is you give the band

a chance to live out their ideals for a few years

and then they go and join a corporation

and whatever happens is up to them after that...will happen.

It's very debatable whether that's good or bad. We think it's bad.

Rough Trade's principled refusal

to tie artists to conventional record deals

made the threat of losing its biggest bands ever-present.

Reconciling its alternative business ethic with the need to make a profit

would prove a major issue throughout the eighties.

It was a decade that would also raise some difficult questions

about what kind of music Rough Trade should, or shouldn't, be releasing.

A debate brought sharply into focus in 1981

when one of the label's most radical artists

announced a drastic change in direction.

Really what happened is I started to have panic attacks.

I didn't realise that's what they were at the time.

I ended up in hospital in Brighton.

I hadn't spoken to my parents for very many years,

so they got in touch and took me back to Wales, where I was born,

and tried to help me get myself back together.

And whilst I was there

I took the opportunity to take stock of what we were up to.

I listened to lots of records that I hadn't really listened to before.

Black American pop music.

So there was a discovery of black pop music and reading

lots of European thinkers, all of which ended up with me

deciding we should try and make pop music.

Making pop music meant swapping the low-tech, home-made aesthetic

that Scritti Politti had already pioneered on two Rough Trade EPs,

for expensive studio production and a slick sound.

Technically it was a new frontier.

I didn't know how to write a pop song

and I wanted to find out how you did it.

The resulting record was Scritti Politti's bid for chart success.

But not everybody approved.

# Sweetest girl in all the world

# Whose eyes are for you only... #

It was a significant moment, significant in as much as

there were lots of people at Rough Trade who kind of didn't like it.

At this time, there was a question of whether you liked

commercial musical not.

There was also a whole ideology going on within local culture

of independence versus mainstream, of non-commercial versus commercial.

I just thought this was shadow-boxing.

I didn't see it as making much difference

to the balance of power in the world between rich and poor...

..What kind of records you made.

I just couldn't see the connection.

But producing expensive, radio-friendly pop music,

seemed at odds with Rough Trade's alternative agenda.

To some, this was tantamount to chasing hits and selling out.

The Sweetest Girl got �60,000.

Here is a record company, Rough Trade,

who is very careful with its budgeting.

I don't know what it is,

it's like we really are going to take over the world. Damn!

I don't know if it's drinking too much of your own piss,

starting to believe your own publicity...or what.

I don't know.

That was the first evidence of a sort of cancer.

Evidence of people swimming uphill to try and compete in this industry

where we were doing all right, being an outsider.

It was this kind of moment of like, "Oh, no, we need to plug records,

"we need to sell lots of records, we need to make really polished music,

"we need to have hits." Well...

This is a very interesting charge.

I just don't think that I've ever gone looking for a hit

in anything that I have ever thought about.

I think there's a very different thing when somebody makes a hit

and gives you a hit.

I think Scritti Politti's Sweetest Girl

is, without a shadow of a doubt, worthy of being a hit.

The Sweetest Girl's highest chart position was 64 in 1981.

It wasn't a hit.

Undeterred, Rough Trade went on to sign

another more commercially focused band.

Contemporaries of Orange Juice,

some three years ago on the Postcard label,

are now tasting the heady world of success on the Rough Trade label

with their first LP.

Could you please welcome to the studio, Aztec Camera.

# Last summer We walked to the farm. #

They began to be these discussions going around the office

about we can disguise the socialist political agenda and make it pop,

so we can get kids singing along to pop records with this agenda,

that they were going to be able to push across to Top Of The Pops

or something, and began to be all this weird talk

about whether it would sell or not, which had never been their...

..their modus.

I think people forget that Stiff Little Fingers

was a big commercial success.

That we were distributing records that were hits.

It was never part of the Rough Trade project

to shy away from the mainstream if the mainstream came to Rough Trade,

but we never went running after it.

# I hear your footsteps In the street... #

Three lads from Glasgow woke up this morning to find

that their single has leapt into the top 20, can you believe it?

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Aztec Camera.

# Oblivious...#

When Aztec Camera did make it into the charts in 1983,

just like Stiff Little Fingers before them, they'd left Rough Trade.

# Next time I go to bed I'll pray like Aretha Franklin. #

And a year later, when Scritti Politti finally made the top ten,

they too had signed to a major.

It seemed that the label couldn't deliver a hit,

even if it had wanted one.

We were still very young as a record company.

We still had a huge amount to learn about selling records,

of sales forces, of sales teams,

of making deals with supermarkets,

as making sure that we were as competitive as the next person.

But just as Scritti Politti left Rough Trade,

their guest keyboard player did, unexpectedly, crack the top 40.

# Is it worth it?

One of the few songs inspired by the recent Falklands war

was called Ship Building.

It was written by Elvis Costello and Clive Manger,

and performed by Robert Wyatt.

It won various critics' polls as the best single of last year,

and now it's been re-promoted by Rough Trade

in an effort to give it the success it deserves.

Geoff Travis signed Robert Wyatt

in an attempt to rescue an important artist from musical obscurity.

Hit records were not on the agenda.

We were trying to earn a living.

I hadn't been in the wheelchair that long.

I'd been in a wheelchair since ...

hospital in '73, put a record out in '74.

And I just got in a panic after a while.

The record company I was officially with, I didn't want to be with.

They didn't allow me to make any LPs for anybody else,

even though I couldn't make any for them either.

And Geoff said, "Let's make some singles then."

The great thing about making singles for Geoff

was that the commercial potential was ignored. Just as well.

Robert Wyatt took Shipbuilding,

an anti-war protest song, to number 36 in 1982.

It displayed Rough Trade's political credentials,

and chimed with the label's support for other left-wing campaigns.

It's almost as if the great unconscious of pop musicians

has slightly been pricked by a few things in the past few months,

and I think it's wonderful.

The charge that Rough Trade was only interested in chasing hits

was also at odds with a roster

that included Mark E. Smith's uncompromising band

of maverick Mancunians, The Fall.

Something to dance to.

I wasn't expecting Mark to have a hit.

I was just expecting him to make great records.

# Lousy celebrity makes record Smiles. #

Records by The Fall, Pere Ubu, Cabaret Voltaire and The Swell Maps

proved Rough Trade's commitment to challenging and alternative music.

And even without hit records from the label,

Rough Trade's distribution turnover was huge.

Ad-hoc arrangements with independent record stores had been formalised

into a sales network called the Cartel,

which supplied over 300 shops with records from over 500 labels.

But as some of these labels began to enjoy massive sales,

it became obvious that, in business terms,

Rough Trade's inexperienced staff were way out of their depth.

# And I watched that man to A stranger. #

We had no business experience in those days.

We had to make it up as we went along,

and as a result of just the pure volume going through,

we actually ran into financial difficulties fairly regularly.

# New life, new life. #

I think the first problem arose out of the Joy Division record,

Unknown Pleasures.

They ran out of money before they could pay the factory.

A similar thing happened with Mute as well.

Mute had two big records,

the first Depeche Mode record and then the first Yazoo record.

# Complicating circulating New life, new life. #

And again the money wasn't managed very well

so when they came round to paying me,

they'd already spent the money.

Following a series of cash flow crises,

Rough Trade brought in its first qualified accountant in 1982.

He found the company was close to going bust.

A financial audit revealed that the company owed money

it simply didn't have.

The record label and distribution system

were Rough Trade's core activities.

If they were to be saved, everything else would have to be sacrificed.

That meant disposing of the shop.

You know, I don't know too much about that, I have to say.

I think I must have been distracted by something else,

because I can't remember being particularly party to discussions

about what was going to happen to the shop.

So that's lost to me, in that difficult period.

We were called in to a meeting,

as I recall, sort of, individually,

and told that they were going to shut the shop.

We felt kind of betrayed,

and so we went back to Geoff and said, if we can

keep the name, can we carry on with the shop?

In December 1982, six years after opening,

the Rough Trade shop was sold to three of its staff.

They kept the name and still run the shop today.

Financial collapse, for now, had been averted.

But the crisis exposed a rift

between the label and Rough Trade's distribution arm.

Geoff asked me to leave at that time, just completely out of

the blue, which came as a bit of a shock.

But after talking to

others there,

I was then persuaded not to.

Who asked him to leave?

He said that you did.

Well ... yeah.

Really I can't remember.

I wonder what he did.

I think he was being more and more antagonistic, really.

But yeah.

He thought that I'd been personally responsible for some of the

worst losses.

I could then never actually regard or deal with Geoff in the same way.

From that point on,

it seemed to me that the record label became completely

the domain of Geoff,

whereas the distribution was being masterminded by Richard.

The conflict between record label and distribution would never be resolved.

The communal vibe of Rough Trade's early days seemed a long way away.

Where before you could be relaxed and do your thing

and get through, now you had targets,

you had this to do, and if you didn't keep the targets,

they'd be asking why you hadn't kept your targets.

So there's a lot of pressure put on people.

That mood of, you can kick back, I'll do it tomorrow,

all that had gone.

And then you've got people started getting worried,

because of job security.

If this wasn't selling, or this group didn't do their thing

or you know, didn't sell enough units.

And in Rough Trade we never talked about selling records as units.

Rough Trade's rapid growth had raised some difficult dilemmas.

Distribution demanded increased record sales

to drive its ever-expanding operation.

The record label needed commercial success, but fiercely guarded its

independent identity, built on the alternative credibility of its music.

The perfect solution to all of these problems came from

a pair of ambitious songwriters from Manchester.

The only way that I could find any mental relaxation

is just simply go out and walk,

which can seem quite depressing to most people.

But for me it was perfect fuel,

because then I would go home and I would write furiously.

And I found that

for me it was a brilliant outlet.

It was the thing that helped.

But also you have to have a grain of hope,

which is a very difficult thing to have.

The first day that we were officially like a partnership,

which was the second time we got together,

part of our get together was making this almost, like,

mental wish list, if you like.

And part of that conversation was,

we should sign to Rough Trade Records.

On a Friday afternoon in April 1983,

Johnny Marr walked into the Rough Trade offices with a demo tape.

I said I wanted to see Geoff Travis

and I was kind of hustled out, really.

But I kind of hung around, kind of pretending to be like

doing stuff with records.

And I was in there for an hour or two,

and then I saw Geoff come out of his office.

I think he was a little taken aback.

I think I actually grabbed his sleeve

and stopped him, because he was trying to get away.

And I gave him this cassette, and I said,

"I'm from Manchester. This is my band, the Smiths."

And something along the lines of,

"You won't have heard anything like this before."

I took it home that weekend and listened to it about 20 times

and was really intrigued by it.

# I'm in love

# The sun shines out Of our behinds. #

You couldn't really make out the words,

but it was something wonderful.

To Geoff's absolute credit, he called first thing on Monday

and said "This is the best thing I've heard for ages,

"and I want to sign it to Rough Trade."

It was like, "Bullseye, that is what we are going to do."

# And if the people stare then the people stare. #

The Smiths and Rough Trade were a perfectly-timed marriage.

The original impact of the post-punk, new wave

and New Romantic movements had passed.

It was time for something new.

That something was indie music.

And it began with the Smiths.

I grew up on the Smiths. They defined my teenage years completely.

So the first time I saw the name Rough Trade

was on the back of Hand In Glove, the first single.

I didn't know Geoff Travis or Rough Trade.

I didn't know anybody. I was a schoolboy.

But the way I saw it was that it was a battle.

It was alternative and independent,

and to major record companies, that was a dirty word.

They were the enemy. Rough Trade was the enemy.

They were seen as just infiltrators, out to spoil the party.

And groups like the Smiths were out to spoil the party

for Simple Minds and Wet Wet Wet and all this kind of rubbish.

It was just rubbish.

Facing fierce competition, Rough Trade abandoned the principle of the

"no ties", 50-50 deal, and for the first time in its history, offered

the band a conventional record contract,

a long-term deal that guaranteed the label four albums.

The majors started inviting us to meetings and got interested in us.

But we didn't want to be on a major,

and Rough Trade didn't want to be majors.

It was a really great partnership.

Johnny puts the music down on a cassette,

and he gives me the cassette, and I live with the cassette

for a few days, and I just wheedle words into the cassette.

And then we just all get together

and it happens at the drop of a cassette.

Rough Trade gave the Smiths independent credibility.

Morrissey and Marr put their new label into the charts at number 25,

with release number 136.

# A punctured bicycle On a hillside desolate. #

When This Charming Man came out,

it wasn't just that things were going the right direction.

It was like the sun came out for the label and the band and the fans,

and fans of indie music.

# This Charming Man. #

There was a big difference between This Charming Man

and Club Tropicana.

You know, there was a big fucking difference to me.

It meant the world to me that I could explain what that difference

was to almost everybody that I met.

# I would go out tonight, but I haven't got a stitch to wear. #

What they made me recognise was that pop records were a great art form.

Three minutes could change your life completely.

Or they could make you get out of the dreary existence you had,

and save you from it.

# A jumped-up country boy. #

To promote its first hit single, Rough Trade hired London Records, a

major label sales force, and mounted an expensive marketing campaign.

# I would go out tonight

# But I haven't got A stitch to wear. #

It was certainly unusual for Rough Trade to be spending

a lot of money on this blanket poster campaign.

But it wasn't an issue of them sitting around going,

"Does it go against our principles?"

"We have got a record that demands a poster campaign. Fantastic.

It's all gonna come together."

They were still Rough Trade records.

Doing things in an independent way, and they had a band who wanted to be

with them who were about to have this big run of singles.

And they were high on the success they were about to have as a label,

and we were high on our success.

It was like a perfect kind of union at that time.

A string of Smiths hits followed,

but there were internal murmurings of discontent

as Rough Trade's sales strategies began to mimic

the marketing machines of the major labels.

Their LP called The Smiths is coming out on February 24th,

and they have got a hit single called What Difference Does It Make?

You break a single the first week, and then the third week is crucial.

Does it drop, or does it go up to 36?

Here they are, the Smiths, this week's number 20.

What Difference Does It Make?

If it goes up to 36, you might break it.

# What difference does it make? #

You get a plugger. You get more professionals in,

more and more expertise.

You apply these devices to this thing

and try to make it happen in some terms.

You start playing the game. Number 23 this week, the Smiths.

# Would you like to marry me? And if You like, you can buy the ring. #

I can remember Geoff saying

to me one day that Morrissey was going to be the new Boy George.

And I remember thinking, is that what I'm coming to work for?

Is that what really need?

I mean, I was astounded that there was that kind of change.

We only have one thing to say to that.

Things had changed.

I had appointments with a guy

who ran Virgin Records, and I was negotiating with him

about how many signed copies of Smiths records he was going to get,

who was going to get the T-shirts.

Suddenly we had licensing in Germany and Austria.

The GAS territories, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Suddenly, you know, it is in Japan.

You got to satisfy Woolies, you got to satisfy Our Price,

you've got to satisfy Virgin. You've got to satisfy HMV.

You are part of a machine.

# In my life. #

For the label, it was definitely a period of

re-evaluation internally.

Because it was really quite dogmatic,

this collective democratic immovable model that it had set itself up as.

But it really needed to move forward,

and Geoff in particular I think wanted that, and knew that.

They were the best group around.

They were making music, and even though it was strange,

it was still hugely commercial.

I think if we were going to have any chance of keeping them,

and perhaps by now we had got fed up with losing

these artists, and thought, we need to do this job properly now.

Rough Trade was becoming more business-orientated.

In 1984, Richard Scott secured the lease on a warehouse near

King's Cross, and the company left its spiritual home in West London.

This would be the new headquarters of a now global outfit

with offices throughout Europe and in America.

Rough Trade had never been so big or so profitable.

Qualified professionals were recruited to manage its growth, and

they demanded changes to the business that meant sacrificing

many of Rough Trade's original collective values.

I think that too much of the record industry is like the Civil Service,

where there's a fear of making a decision in case you make a mistake,

and if you make no decision then you can't make a mistake,

and you keep your job.

But that isn't not how rock and roll got started.

And suddenly it had gone from being me and a few other crazy people

into something that was about 40, 60, 80, 100 people.

It was a big organisation.

And with a big organisation came a board, which met to make decisions.

And an influx of a more professional middle management kind of creature.

Who spoke a kind of language which was just gobbledegook.

It was something that you learn from a book.

And that really was not helpful.

I was one of those people.

I was one of the middle managers that was brought in.

Still in that period where everybody was being paid the same salary.

�7,800.

And you really couldn't get people to come in and manage it for �7,800.

In 1987, Geoff Travis and a handful of the original staff

handed over control of Rough Trade to a management trust.

It meant the introduction of differential pay

and departmental structures.

A whole new way of working.

It was a very difficult transition.

And it was a hard transition for Geoff.

He was...

turning over something that he started to other people who,

in his mind, probably had no vested interest in music.

Couldn't care less about the music, which was as far removed from what

Rough Trade was when it first started.

But far from making Rough Trade a leaner outfit,

the new structure was bureaucratic and unwieldy,

and inflamed the ongoing rift between distribution

and the record label.

There's a power struggle really.

And my mistake was...that I was not interested in the power struggle.

And I was very quickly marginalised on the board,

so that anything I said, no one took very seriously.

And distribution went its own way.

By that time, there was a war

between distribution and the record company.

You couldn't guarantee you were gonna have a hit record,

so sometimes you're having a bad season, right,

but distribution's always there, increasing in power...

And then Rough Trade just gets to be another label,

which is served by the distribution company that it started.

# Panic on the streets of London

# Panic on the streets of Birmingham

# I wonder to myself... #

War was also brewing on another front.

Despite a number one album and six top 20 singles by 1986,

The Smiths' relationship with Rough Trade

was becoming increasingly antagonistic.

# But honey pie you're not safe here... #

Studio time was always at a minimum. For me, that was a bit of a problem.

Some records didn't arrive at some places on time occasionally.

There was some issue with That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore,

where I think there weren't enough records pressed.

And the band had no manager,

so the two principal members of the group are dealing with the label.

And it's like any relationship, you are spending a lot of time together

and there's a lot of issues and a lot of things at stake.

So, like, things get blown out of proportion.

Rough Trade weren't exactly blameless,

but it wasn't like a catalogue of catastrophe or anything like that.

# Burn down the disco

# Hang the blessed DJ

# Because the music at the concert... #

Morrissey always used to say, "We're never on the radio."

And of course they were on the radio.

# Hang the DJ hang the DJ

# Hang the DJ... #

They did have a series of hit records.

But I think they just felt...

they should have more.

And I mean that's understandable, but irrational.

The Smiths were not making

anodyne pretty pop records for 14-year-old girls.

Therefore they're not gonna sell as many records as Duran Duran.

It's just a fact of life.

You have to get used to that, Morrissey.

# Sweetness sweetness

# I was only joking when I said by rights

# You should be bludgeoned in your bed... #

During the recording of the third album, The Queen Is Dead, in 1986,

The Smiths tried to sign to EMI.

Yet again, Rough Trade looked set to lose its biggest act.

But this time it had the protection of a contract.

We were stupid.

We had a couple of people around us who gave us incorrect

and bad advice.

And this lawyer saying, "Well, go and sign to someone else."

And shopping for a deal we didn't really have the rights to do that.

And Rough Trade said, "Hang on a minute,

"you owe us a couple more albums." So it caused this stand-off.

Then we were told, "This record you're working on

"will be injuncted." This lawyer told me that.

And that was a bit of a buzz killer, when you're trying to make a record.

Like, "Guess what, it's not going to come out." Right.

# I've got no right to take my place with the human race..."

Because they didn't have a manager, they lacked any kind of voice

that gave them some semblance of reality.

That's what destroyed them.

We didn't have a calming...organising presence.

And, um, that led to...

a lot of chaos and a lot of drama and a lot of neurosis.

And ultimately the band's demise.

But all of that drama and intensity went into the music.

You can hear it in the music.

The Queen Is Dead was released on Rough Trade.

But after the next record, The Smiths were free to leave.

Strangeways, Here We Come was to be their last release on Rough Trade.

But the band was falling apart.

And it would be their last album, full stop.

In the end, they signed to EMI and they never gave EMI a record.

# I am the sun

# and the heir... #

The Smiths' departure was demoralising,

but income from their sales

continued to roll in long after they'd gone

and the future was far from bleak.

# Because we do it once do it twice

# Every single time will be twice as nice... #

By 1989, the label had its biggest roster of artists to date,

including The Woodentops and The Sundays, whose debut album

reached number four in the UK charts.

# England my country the home of the free

# Such miserable weather... #

But indie music was becoming mainstream,

as every major label rushed to sign

jangly, guitar-driven, Smiths sound-alikes.

The real independent spirit had shifted to an emerging scene

that was the most revolutionary musical movement since punk.

RAVE MUSIC BLARES

When the rave scene exploded at the end of the eighties,

Rough Trade Records seemed to have missed the boat.

But Rough Trade Distribution had embraced a new wave

of independent labels driving the dance music revolution

and its expansion continued apace.

# The notes will flow yo For the words I speak

# Rap is weak so I teach and I reach A positive vibe, a way of life... #

When I joined Rough Trade in that first year in '86,

it was something like an �8 million a year turnover.

Within three years it went to �25 million.

# What time is love?... #

By the end of the decade,

distribution accounted for 90 per cent

of Rough Trade's overall turnover of around 40 million.

In July 1990, the company once again moved to bigger premises.

But, despite its growth and professional management,

the move was just one of a series of disastrous decisions

and financial blunders which, combined with political in-fighting,

brought Rough Trade, at its financial peak,

crashing to the ground.

We moved to a building without disposing of the previous lease.

So we were paying for two buildings. You can't do that.

Distribution bought a computer for a quarter of a million pounds.

It didn't work.

They were unfortunate to be hit by some credit control issues

where other companies went bankrupt owing Rough Trade a lot of money.

From my point of view, the people from distribution just disappeared.

The senior sales people left because they could see...

no end to the arguments with Geoff.

And once they had gone,

the management structure ceased to exist.

It wasn't really anyone's fault, it just grew too big.

And there was a lack of collective will on the board

or an ability or experience to work together to solve these problems,

and that's what happened I think.

Geoff, I have read...

saying things about the bad management at the end.

Well, I mean, Geoff didn't even turn up to board meetings.

So the whole thing had fallen apart.

In the end, it was simple cash flow mismanagement

that sealed Rough Trade's fate.

They were having a huge amount of success,

all the money was going into the warehouse,

all the money was going into the software.

Geoff was releasing quite a lot of records at that time.

Cash flow projections were either incorrect or ignored, you know.

And they ran out of cash.

In December 1990, hamstrung by a series of unpaid distribution debts

and despite a record annual turnover,

Rough Trade's cash flow ground to a halt.

By March 1991, two-thirds of the staff had been axed,

the administrators were called in

and Rough Trade's assets were frozen.

I probably very nearly went under.

Because the pressure of it was really awful, day-to-day,

the responsibility.

It was a very, very difficult time.

A very black time and very hard time

and I feel grateful to still be here today really.

But it taught me a lot.

The company that sold its first record in February 1976

ceased trading on June 1st 1991.

Its demise marked the end of an era -

15 years in which a bunch of idealistic hippies and punks

had written the rule book for the production and distribution

of independent music.

# Last night I dreamt

# That somebody loved me... #

The end of the '70s, beginning of the '80s, when we all started,

nobody knew what the fuck they were doing.

We didn't know how to deal with selling records overseas.

We didn't know that much about distribution, copyright, anything.

By the end of the '80s, people like Rough Trade, Factory, KLF,

Beggars had had big worldwide success with their artists,

not even just in the UK but worldwide.

And were very happy to share

any information they could with people who wanted it.

All the myths had been busted by that point.

Actually, the irony is that it was probably one of the most successful

periods of independent music, ever,

in Britain at the point at which Rough Trade went bust.

At their peak in the '80s,

independent labels commanded a 40 per cent share

of the record market.

Major record companies had begun setting up

their own in-house boutique labels,

branding them as apparently "independent",

and signing up indie bands who were now seen as mainstream artists,

releasing music once viewed as marginal and alternative.

Geoff Travis, Rough Trade and their independent allies

had radically reshaped the musical landscape.

Although the company had been dismantled,

its assets, including the name itself, stripped down and sold off,

the Rough Trade story was not over yet.

In 1991, Geoff Travis moved into an office

about half a mile from the original Rough Trade shop

with his new business partner, Jeannette Lee.

They would go on to revive and re-invent Rough Trade.

The formula with Geoff and myself is really quite simple.

If we get really excited about something,

we just totally go for it.

In the '80s Jeannette Lee had been part of Public Image Ltd,

the band formed by John Lydon after the demise of The Sex Pistols.

She had also worked with Geoff Travis at Rough Trade

for several years prior to the company's collapse.

Now they set to work on a number of new musical projects.

And one day in 1993 they met a troubled musician

who would draw them into the world of artist management.

We'd kind of got ourselves into a bit of a mess.

We had the remnants of an old record deal

with an unscrupulous independent label.

Island Records wanted to sign us,

but once they heard about all these complications and all this stuff,

they wouldn't come near us, wouldn't touch us with a barge pole.

A friend said, "Why don't you go and talk to Geoff Travis?"

He sat in this office and he told us his sorry tale.

We liked him and were very excited by it.

So we took on the task of managing them

and we spent a lot of time

disentangling the legal mess they were in

and effecting the sign to Island, and it all worked out.

Single-handedly, really, Rough Trade, Geoff and Jeannette

gave me back some kind of faith in the music industry.

Up to then I just thought, "It's a bunch of fucking crooks."

# She came from Greece She had a thirst for knowledge

# She studied sculpture at St Martin's College

# That's where I

# Caught her eye... #

Geoff and Jeannette had become an artist management team.

And, with Pulp signed to Island Records, they began to apply

their independent ethic to the world of major-label pop stardom.

# She said

# I wanna live like common people I wanna do... #

There was this thing in record companies,

maybe to justify their jobs,

they were always coming up with strategies

of how you got a good chart position or how you sustained

your chart position, like that spray you spray on your cock

to keep it hard.

And at the time when Common People was due to come out,

the big thing was format - split the format.

One CD comes out week one.

Week two, the other CD comes out.

You don't go in as high,

but you sustain and that's what's important.

# ..Live like common people... #

We'd waited over a decade to have a chance at some kind of pop stardom

and we said, "We're not really interested in sustaining.

"We just want to go in, full force.

"And if it fucks off the next week, fair enough, whatever."

# She just smiled and held my hand... #

If we'd been managed by anybody else,

I'm sure that wouldn't have happened,

but they backed us with that and we managed to get it through.

It was our finest hour. We went in the charts at number two.

# You'll never live like common people... #

From that point on is where Pulp's success story came from really.

# You'll never watch your life slide out of view... #

Beginning with Common People in 1995,

Pulp enjoyed a string of five consecutive Top Ten singles.

For Geoff and Jeannette, even after the achievements of The Smiths,

this was a new level of mainstream success.

In managing Pulp, we had to interact with a big major.

So we learnt how to play the game in a different way

and interact with people that were more mainstream

and make it successful.

I think we learnt a lot actually.

With Pulp, Geoff and Jeannette had a series of hit records.

What they didn't have was a record label, or even the Rough Trade name,

which had been sold along with the other assets

when the company folded.

But in 2001, at a party to celebrate the 25th anniversary

of the Rough Trade shop,

Geoff and Jeannette decided to bring Rough Trade Records back to life.

I think probably Geoff clicked into some kind of gear again that night.

He just thought, "This is worth doing again."

Everybody kept saying,

"Rough Trade it's a wonderful thing, a great thing."

It made us realise,

it dawned on us that it meant a lot to other people.

We decided that we would make another attempt

to buy the name back.

So we started, and the first thing we did was sign The Strokes.

MUSIC: "Last Nite" by The Strokes

The timing was perfect. By sheer coincidence, a few months earlier,

Geoff Travis had received a tape that would lead to New York

and quite possibly the best unsigned band on the planet.

# Last night she said Oh baby don't feel so down

# See it turned me off... #

They were playing around the New York club circuit.

They hadn't really played outside New York.

I was sending out their demo

to everybody just to try to get them gigs or some attention or some love.

Geoff comes in earlier than me.

OK, let's admit it.

I came in one morning and he was blasting out some music

and called me straight in to his office and said, "Listen to this!"

It was really exciting.

I posted it out and two days later, I walked in to work at 10am

and Geoff rings up,

"We'd like to put this out."

They didn't believe us or take us very seriously,

so we decided to go to New York to meet them.

# Last night she said

# Oh my baby don't feel so down... #

In September 2000, Geoff and Jeannette

arrived at an out-of-town bar to see the band

that would kick-start Rough Trade's future - The Strokes.

We were in a dump in New Jersey and we were like,

"Man, this is the place where we're gonna play for a label?"

There's no-one there, just a few friends and a few strangers.

There was nobody there.

Just a bunch of people who had gone out on a Saturday night for a drink.

# Last night she said Oh baby don't feel so down... #

We were both just completely dumbstruck at how...

absolutely perfectly formed and amazing they were.

It was just so exciting.

I got a feeling of exhilaration watching them

that I hadn't had since punk days.

We were just dumbstruck. We just looked at each other and were, like,

"We've got to make this happen."

Well, it's time for a brand new band from America

and they are tipped for great things. We agree.

These are The Strokes!

Making it happen meant putting out an EP, bringing the band to England

and employing all of the marketing skills

they'd learned while working with Pulp

to show The Strokes what Rough Trade was capable of.

The press and everything just lit fire with it. It was really wild.

We marketed The Strokes in a way

we hadn't marketed anyone else really to that point.

We realised that this was the time that we

had to do all that stuff that hadn't happened in the past.

# New York City cops New York City cops... #

Rough Trade had turned The Strokes from an anonymous bar band

into the hottest property of the year.

What they hadn't done was ask them to sign a record contract.

# ..they ain't too smart... #

We found ourselves in a situation where we loved this band,

we really wanted to work with them, but now everybody knows about them,

and everybody wants to sign them and everybody's got more money than us.

We didn't have to sign with them.

Everything sparked with them and all the labels came to the table

and were chasing the band, which was nice.

We could have went with anyone.

# ..One day we're gonna leave this town... #

You could say, from a business point of view,

the naive mistake is to bring them over to England, pay for a tour,

without having any futures with them. That's a crazy thing to do.

But that's the philosophy of, well, you don't know us,

we're gonna show you who we are.

Not many people do that.

It is the old, "These people are really stupid.

"They don't know how to run a business"

or it sells and that's what makes them different.

Geoff and Jeannette were building a leaner version of Rough Trade,

whose independent reputation,

combined with an uncharacteristically

slick marketing operation, would prove a winning formula.

The Strokes became the label's biggest signing since The Smiths,

revitalising an indie guitar band scene,

which after the Brit Pop explosion of the nineties,

had become stale and derivative.

# ..you gave me your address so I was so bold... #

Five months after releasing The Strokes' first album,

Rough Trade signed The Libertines, the edgiest English equivalent

to their New York label mates, and began to build a diverse

artists' roster based on Geoff and Jeannette's musical tastes.

The only thing that we really have is our own response to the music,

and to know that we think it's really special, it moves us.

And that is a rare thing. And that's it.

Records by The Libertines, British Sea Power, Belle & Sebastian,

Arcade Fire and Antony & The Johnsons

helped to re-establish Rough Trade's reputation

as an important independent label and even brought them the odd award.

But the biggest prize of all

would come from their artist management arm.

MUSIC: "Warwick Avenue" by Duffy

Rough Trade, Geoff and Jeannette,

have been managing Duffy for four years.

When they met, she was a musical novice with a great voice,

but seemed an unlikely addition to the Rough Trade roster.

I'm not gonna lie to you and pretend I was wise when it came to music.

I'm still not.

I only discovered Nick Cave about ten minutes ago downstairs. Massive!

Massive! This happens to me all the time.

I come in, Joy Division's playing, I fall in love with it...

I came into this hub of credibility

and didn't have a clue about anything.

And I just thought, I've never been anywhere so exciting in all my life.

Geoff and I both met her.

I made a real connection with her, I thought she had a great voice

and I really liked her as a character.

And I felt that she had something really special that was really worth

working with, but at that time, it wasn't quite right for me.

They kindly put me on a development deal.

They said, "We'll look after you for a little while,

"and see what you wanna do.

"No pressure, we're not going to make you do anything.

"We're not gonna tell you what we wanted to be.

"We'll give you a little bit of time and a little bit of space,

"to find out who you are as an artist."

That meant a fully funded apprenticeship for Duffy,

but no record releases, and no income for Rough Trade -

yet another alternative approach to music industry convention.

It was a risk. And it paid off.

It coincided completely with the music industry

being completely wrecked by Pop Idol and X-Factor

and all that kind of complete rubbish...

that completely patronises all the people out there who have

got technical ability and some kind of sense of humanity and soul

and aren't being given an opportunity to nurture it and create music,

because it's being nurtured into just cans of beans to put on a shelf.

MUSIC: "Mercy" by Duffy

She wasn't manipulated or cultivated like a Pop Idol person.

No-one held her hand and took her to a writing session and said to her,

"Write a song in the style of this."

She was just given time to develop.

What fascinates me about it is that what would happen if you took

somebody who could've been put into the situation, and could have

ended up a cabaret star, and was from a perfectly normal background

without a Rough Trade record collection,

but just had a pure heart and a pure enthusiasm

and tried to nurture something great out of it.

# You got me begging you for mercy

# Why won't you release me?

# You got me begging you for mercy

# Why won't you... #

What happened was that after nearly four years of development for Duffy,

and over thirty years of waiting for Rough Trade,

they were rewarded with their first number one single.

It is a dream to have something that's great that is also popular.

It was a great moment. Yeah.

30 years since Rough Trade released its first single,

it continues to attract a range of like-minded musicians

inspired by its past,

while Geoff and Jeannette focus firmly on its future.

# Tonight I wanna celebrate with you... #

This happens to be Rough Trade's 30th anniversary.

They were started in 1978, and 1978 is the year that our drummer,

Patrick Callaghan, and myself were born.

I believe that since the beginning of both of our lives,

we've been coming to meet at this moment in time.

# Let him go let him go let him go from me...#

There are bad labels and there are OK labels

and there are great labels,

and it was quite quickly evident which was which.

# There's a link between the stars I Think... #

The most exciting thing for me was when we signed, because I didn't

really realise that Jeanette was, like, part owner of Rough Trade.

I was kinda like, are you Jeanette Lee that was in Public Image Ltd?

She said, "I am indeed" and she poured me a glass of champagne.

And that was exciting. Rather than meeting someone in a suit,

you're meeting a person that played in Public Image Ltd.

And the guy who was in the room when they made the Raincoats album.

It's kind of a flattering that anybody's interested in the past

and what used to happen.

But it's not really much concern to us.

The important thing is to live in the present, the moment.

The only thing that's important is what happens now, what happens next.

And, you know, we've got in the pipeline so many good things

which you ultimately will be the judge of, when they come out.

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