Read Online Rip It Up and Start Again by Simon Reynolds - Free Book Online Page A

the deliberate avoidance of anything that smacked of professionalism or slickness. From the liberating declaration that “anyone can do it,” DIY became a confining injunction to sound like anyone can do it. Swell Maps themselves were always more expansive and experimental than this: For every frantic racket such as “Let’s Build a Car,” there was an eerie metallic instrumental, such as “Big Empty Field,” clangorous and full of cavernous hollows, the missing link between Neu! and Sonic Youth.
    Swell Maps initially had some problems shifting “Read About Seymour.” Sales of the debut single stalled at around 750 copies, despite an early boost of support from Radio One DJ John Peel, who played the single more than a dozen times within three weeks on his late-night show. The day after coming up to London to record a Maps session for Peel, Sudden happened to walk past Rough Trade’s record shop, which also doubled as the headquarters of the fledgling Rough Trade distribution company. “One of the guys asked, ‘Have you got any of your single left?’ and I said, ‘Oh, about a thousand.’ So he said, ‘We’ll take the lot.’”
    The alliance that subsequently developed between Rough Trade and Swell Maps was a prime example of the role the London label rapidly assumed as enabler in chief for the U.K. independent movement. Initially Rough Trade had seemed like just another one of the first wave of postpunk indie labels, no more central than other pioneers such as Small Wonder, Cherry Red, Rabid, Industrial, and Step Forward. But soon it started to dispense information, encouragement, and support to other young labels. Most crucially, Rough Trade fronted money to bands to enable them to start their own labels or press more copies of a release. Often it formed partnerships with small, one-band labels (such as Swell Maps’ own Rather) in which Rough Trade paid for the pressing of the record and got distribution rights for the release. On one level, this was a canny form of enterprise (Rough Trade made much of its money from distributing independent records). But these “P&D” (pressing and distribution) deals were also freighted with an intense charge of idealism. Rough Trade was ideologically committed to helping individuals achieve self-realization through creative autonomy. Daniel Miller, for instance, was given three hundred pounds to press an extra two thousand copies of “Warm Leatherette,” which Rough Trade then distributed. They also provided a base for his fledgling Mute label. Says Miller, “I didn’t have an office, so they let me get the records delivered there from the pressing plant, and do my mail-outs from their HQ.”
    Like many independents of this era and afterward, Rough Trade was a record store before it was a record label. A music-obsessed Cambridge graduate, Geoff Travis hitchhiked across America in his midtwenties. He picked up “literally hundreds of records by the time I got to San Francisco,” then shipped them back to London. A fantasy was forming in his head about “opening a shop where you could listen to records all day without anyone bothering you too much.” Acquiring stock from a bankrupt Cambridge record store, Travis eventually settled on scuzzy, low-rent Ladbroke Grove as a London location that offered sufficient “passing trade” thanks to its mix of bohemians and reggae-loving Rastafarians from the local Caribbean population.
    Opening in February 1976, Rough Trade “became a magnet for the local community,” says Travis. “It was somewhere you could hang out and browse without anyone harassing you, this place where you could listen to music really loud all day long. We had comfy chairs, huge speakers pumping out music, and all the reggae prereleases, which I’d buy every week from a warehouse in North London.” Because Joe Strummer’s 101ers played nearby at the Elgin pub, and Mick Jones lived by the Westway flyover, “Rough Trade made the connection with