Read Online Rip It Up and Start Again by Simon Reynolds - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Simon Reynolds
Tags: Non-Fiction
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punk really early,” says Travis. “And Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols would come in to sell records he’d stolen!” Rough Trade was the only place in London where you could buy American imports such as Punk magazine and singles by Pere Ubu and Devo released on their own tiny independents Hearthan and Booji Boy.
Although it was a privately owned company, Rough Trade was run as if it were collectively owned by the workers. Everyone had equal say and equal pay. “They actually had a ‘rota’ [rotation] system, with everyone taking turns to make the tea or do the sweeping up,” says Tony Fletcher, teenage editor of Jamming fanzine, who used to hang out at Rough Trade after school, still wearing his uniform. Constant meetings took place, during which weighty ideological issues and mundane operational details were discussed with equal fervor. This kind of communal ethos was easily mocked as a hippie throwback, but Travis stresses that “although people have this antileftist view of co-ops as disorganized, with people sitting around talking all day and nothing ever getting done, Rough Trade wasn’t like that at all. It worked for a number of years and we got a lot done. But the lines of responsibility were quite clear—people looked after different areas.”
Collectivist values of this sort were very much part of the radical culture of the midseventies. Both Libération, the French left-wing newspaper, and Time Out, London’s bohemian listings magazine, were run as cooperatives, with no hierarchy or pay differentials. By the late seventies, there were around three hundred cooperatives in the U.K., half of them whole-food shops, the rest ranging from radical bookstores to crafts stores. It was actually during the early to midseventies that the counterculture ideas of the previous decade were most widely disseminated and implemented. Squatting, for instance, was “huge,” recalls Travis. “I lived in squats all over London.” But the cooperative movement wasn’t just about grubby commune-dwelling hippies and anarchist dropouts. Collectivist ideas had currency in the political mainstream. In 1974, the Labour government’s resident hard Left cabinet member Tony Benn had grand plans for state-subsidized workers’ co-ops that would take over failed companies, something that actually happened with the Scottish Daily News and the motorcycle company Norton Villiers Triumph.
In addition to deriving inspiration from British socialist culture, Travis could also draw on his firsthand experience of kibbutz life in Israel. “I’m Jewish, and my parents sent me one summer to visit my distant relatives, and I spent some time on a kibbutz. There was a lot of idealism in the early days of the movement. The impetus was quite pure. I liked the way they were organized—people having breakfast together, living communally, making decisions in a relatively rational way. Everyone knows what’s going on. It seemed a more sensible way to run things—semiutopian, but not impossible.”
As with other record shops turned labels, the Rough Trade staff’s day-by-day activity—sifting through releases and judging which ones were good, the innumerable small decisions about how many of a particular record to stock and whether to reorder—soon evolved into an A&R–like intuition about what was “hot” musically and where postpunk as a whole was heading. Still, two full years elapsed between the opening of the store and the label’s debut release in February 1978: Metal Urbain’s “Paris Maquis.” “We thought they were the French Sex Pistols,” says Travis. Next came an Augustus Pablo single. But it was ROUGH 3—the Extended Play EP by Sheffield experimental trio Cabaret Voltaire—that really tapped the emergent postpunk gestalt.
The same egalitarian idealism that informed the workaday operations of Rough Trade governed its dealings with artists. Contracts were for one record at a time and based around a 50/50 split of the
Although it was a privately owned company, Rough Trade was run as if it were collectively owned by the workers. Everyone had equal say and equal pay. “They actually had a ‘rota’ [rotation] system, with everyone taking turns to make the tea or do the sweeping up,” says Tony Fletcher, teenage editor of Jamming fanzine, who used to hang out at Rough Trade after school, still wearing his uniform. Constant meetings took place, during which weighty ideological issues and mundane operational details were discussed with equal fervor. This kind of communal ethos was easily mocked as a hippie throwback, but Travis stresses that “although people have this antileftist view of co-ops as disorganized, with people sitting around talking all day and nothing ever getting done, Rough Trade wasn’t like that at all. It worked for a number of years and we got a lot done. But the lines of responsibility were quite clear—people looked after different areas.”
Collectivist values of this sort were very much part of the radical culture of the midseventies. Both Libération, the French left-wing newspaper, and Time Out, London’s bohemian listings magazine, were run as cooperatives, with no hierarchy or pay differentials. By the late seventies, there were around three hundred cooperatives in the U.K., half of them whole-food shops, the rest ranging from radical bookstores to crafts stores. It was actually during the early to midseventies that the counterculture ideas of the previous decade were most widely disseminated and implemented. Squatting, for instance, was “huge,” recalls Travis. “I lived in squats all over London.” But the cooperative movement wasn’t just about grubby commune-dwelling hippies and anarchist dropouts. Collectivist ideas had currency in the political mainstream. In 1974, the Labour government’s resident hard Left cabinet member Tony Benn had grand plans for state-subsidized workers’ co-ops that would take over failed companies, something that actually happened with the Scottish Daily News and the motorcycle company Norton Villiers Triumph.
In addition to deriving inspiration from British socialist culture, Travis could also draw on his firsthand experience of kibbutz life in Israel. “I’m Jewish, and my parents sent me one summer to visit my distant relatives, and I spent some time on a kibbutz. There was a lot of idealism in the early days of the movement. The impetus was quite pure. I liked the way they were organized—people having breakfast together, living communally, making decisions in a relatively rational way. Everyone knows what’s going on. It seemed a more sensible way to run things—semiutopian, but not impossible.”
As with other record shops turned labels, the Rough Trade staff’s day-by-day activity—sifting through releases and judging which ones were good, the innumerable small decisions about how many of a particular record to stock and whether to reorder—soon evolved into an A&R–like intuition about what was “hot” musically and where postpunk as a whole was heading. Still, two full years elapsed between the opening of the store and the label’s debut release in February 1978: Metal Urbain’s “Paris Maquis.” “We thought they were the French Sex Pistols,” says Travis. Next came an Augustus Pablo single. But it was ROUGH 3—the Extended Play EP by Sheffield experimental trio Cabaret Voltaire—that really tapped the emergent postpunk gestalt.
The same egalitarian idealism that informed the workaday operations of Rough Trade governed its dealings with artists. Contracts were for one record at a time and based around a 50/50 split of the
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