![]() ![]() ![]() All they had in CBS and Warner Brothers were huge posters of their artists in reception."įactory Records is celebrated, perhaps at times overcelebrated, for its mixture of regional pride, entrepreneurial elan and seductive brand of quasi-situationist hedonism. On the few occasions that I'd been in the Factory flat, and certainly when I'd been around Rough Trade, they were like record companies trying to operate under mounds and mounds of vinyl. "As someone who was a record freak, it made me want to get back to Rough Trade. "I was immediately struck by the lack of records in these buildings," Marr says. The Smiths had been courted by the majors and after the release of Hand In Glove were invited for an exploratory meeting with CBS, Warners and EMI, a process that placed the difference between the two sectors in sharp relief. Such is the genre's listless omnipresence, so well characterised by the phrase "landfill indie", that it is often counteracted with an equally single-minded response, an assertion tantamount to Pop: There Is No Alternative. A more critical assessment would be that indie is the pinnacle of disengaged, querulous solipsism. ![]() A sympathetic understanding of indie music is to see it as a morass of signifiers: guitars, fringes, young or youngish groups of mainly white people connecting the highlights of their music collection in an ever-shifting reconfiguration of the past. In music, it serves as the masthead of a vast genre, or sometimes as a modifier: indie rock, indie folk, indie-tronica or indie pop to pick just a handful. At its most self-absorbed, which is often, indie suggests a carefully curated daydream life, the kind that might be enacted, with just the right degree of ennui, on the set of a Wes Anderson film. Whether to describe a film, a coffee house or, as I once overheard in Brooklyn, a property, it covers a patchwork of tropes and influences. Since then the word "indie" has been appropriated for other uses, and often employed pejoratively. Independence meant self-financing the recording and distribution of music, operating on hand-to–mouth budgets and trading with like-minded partners in independent record shops and the scratchy network of fanzine editors and concert promoters that, along with the paternal figure of John Peel, represented an alternative media. These labels flourished in the aftershock of punk, embracing the incipient DIY ethos and building their own space alongside the established corporate music business. What differentiated Mute, Factory, Rough Trade and their contemporaries from other indies that came before and after was their ability to sustain a position in the mainstream – to populate it with a catalogue of releases that reflected whatever had captivated their imagination. Their names were Daniel Miller, Geoff Travis, Tony Wilson, Rob Gretton, Alan McGee and Ivo Watts-Russell – and if they were embarking on a career in today's streamlined multi-platform music industry, they would each struggle to make it past reception. Throughout the 1980s such labels were regularly challenging the majors in the Top 20, particularly in the album charts.Įach company was run by an individual or individuals with a singular vision and passion, an untutored approach to business and a devil-may-care attitude to the conventions of the record industry. The company had been founded along with its label namesake on the principles of access and mutualism and serviced the sector's most iconic record companies: Mute, Creation, Factory (who both later went to Pinnacle) and 4AD. At its peak, Rough Trade Distribution, along with its rival Pinnacle, was responsible for almost 30% of the music market. Until its messy unravelling in 1991, Rough Trade and its distribution wing were the independent sector's conscience, shop floor and corn market. ![]()
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