Free Rip It Up and Start Again by Simon Reynolds

profits between band and label. “We fronted all the money for recording, promotion, whatever,” says Travis. “The artists provided their labor, inspiration, and genius. The fifty/fifty split has since been adopted by countless indie labels—Joy Division at Factory, Depeche Mode at Mute, they were all on that arrangement.”
    One advantage to these one-off deals, typically based around verbal agreement and personal trust rather than lawyers and contracts, was their rapid-response nature, so much more suited to the speedy stylistic fluctuations of the postpunk universe. “It meant you could see an amazing band and say ‘let’s make a record’ that very night, and in four weeks, the record’s out,” says Travis. “You could get on with it.” Travis also believes the 50/50, one-record-at-a-time deals helped create a nurturing environment for bands. “It creates the psychological conditions for musicians to do their best work if they are in control but they have a partner who is not weak, who can help them.” In contrast, the major-label system seduced bands with large advances against future royalties, in return for signing away their lives, and then put them under immense pressure to achieve sales. “It doesn’t matter how much ‘creative control’ a band is given,” Travis told Rolling Stone . “You’re still indentured. Long-term contracts will put a band in debt from recording and touring costs. Then you have to produce when you’re not ready. You have to write songs when you have nothing to say.” Few bands survive to the sixth or eighth album designated in their contracts.
    There was a downside to the 50/50 split, though, according to Nikki Sudden. “You make a lot of money if you sell a lot of records, but if you don’t sell many or any, you don’t get anything .” With no advance to cover living expenses, bands were unable to give up their day jobs. Still, they could always work at Rough Trade, as many of the label’s artists did. “Me and Epic both worked in the shop for about a year,” says Sudden. “I got sacked for being rude to the Rasta customers. They would come in and want to hear all the reggae prereleases, each six minutes long, all the way through, and you knew they were never going to buy anything. After a while I got fed up and put everything on for half a second!”
    Having the musicians get their hands dirty as sales assistants or packing records up for distribution fit Rough Trade’s philosophy. It had a faintly Maoist air, getting the intelligentsia to labor in the paddy fields. Certainly, Travis liked to think of the musicians less as artists or stars than as cultural workers. He talked of how Rough Trade was neither the record business nor art but a space of cultural production, involving collaboration and mutual support. It was this pragmatic, slightly dowdy vision that gave the label something of a “brown rice” image.
    But then Rough Trade weren’t into romanticizing things or preserving the mystique of rock ’n’ roll. They believed in demystification. “People exert control through mystification,” says Travis. “They like to make you think it’s all over your head. Recording engineers can be like that in the studio. I’d got no studio background at all, but I produced ‘Nag Nag Nag’ by Cabaret Voltaire and coproduced records by the Raincoats, Stiff Little Fingers, the Fall. We didn’t really know what we were doing, but at that point in history, you had the confidence to just go ahead and do it.”
    Without effective distribution, the do-it-yourself ethos was just shouting into the void. But Travis adamantly opposed the idea of infiltrating the mainstream and signing to majors in order to use their distribution muscle. “Changing things from the inside is nonsense,” he declared. Where were the historical examples of anyone who’d actually done this? Rough Trade’s greatest achievement was organizing the Cartel, an independent distribution