Free Rip It Up and Start Again by Simon Reynolds Page A

network built around an alliance of London-based Rough Trade and Small Wonder and their regional counterparts Probe, Revolver, and Red Rhino. Nationwide distribution for small labels and self-released records held out the possibility for real communication, reaching a scattered audience of like minds. It also meant one had a better chance of recouping costs and carrying on. Unglamorous but absolutely vital, the Cartel network provided the infrastructure for a genuinely alternative culture. Today Travis talks about independent distribution as being “based on a sound political principle—if you control the means of distribution, you have a great deal of power. It was obvious that the channels of culture were being controlled. It made me angry you couldn’t buy decent left-wing literature or the feminist magazine Spare Rib in retail chains like WHSmith. So there was a very clear political imperative to build a network of outlets for things we liked.”
    “Things we liked” included not just records but fanzines, the print media version of do-it-yourself. “ Sniffin’ Glue was so important,” says Travis of the pioneering punkzine. “We bought loads off its founder, Mark Perry, and also let him use our office as somewhere to staple it together.” By 1980, Rough Trade received an average of twelve new zines each week, and distributed nationwide the ones that passed its rigorous scrutiny for ideological soundness. “Rough Trade would actually tell fanzine editors, ‘We will read your zine and if there’s anything racist or sexist in it, we’ll return it,’” recalls Jamming ’s Tony Fletcher. There were also unofficial interventions: “I remember getting some returned copies of Jamming and someone from Swell Maps had scrawled on it because they disagreed with my review of them! It was a very argumentative culture.”
    A few blocks from Rough Trade’s Ladbroke Grove base stood a company called Better Badges, the market leader in New Wave badges (a crucial way of emblazoning your allegiances on your lapel in those heady days). Now the company “became the clearinghouse for zines,” says Fletcher. Better Badges’s owner, an idealistic hippie turned postpunker called Joly, offered fanzines something similar to Rough Trade’s P&D deals, a print-now/pay-later service to help fledgling zines get off the ground. Rough Trade, meanwhile, was becoming more and more businesslike and ambitious, diversifying into music publishing, organizing Rough Trade tour packages, and even talking about starting its own alternative culture magazine.
    The idea of the independent label and the DIY movement was so new and exciting then, says Travis, “that people would rush out and buy anything that was part of it. This is what people forget. Back then, the records used to sell . Nowadays, you’d shift maybe two thousand if you were lucky, but back then anything halfway decent sold from six to ten thousand.” Certain epochal singles—“Warm Leatherette” being a good example—could sell thirty thousand plus. But what really put the label on the map and made the majors sit up and take apprehensive notice was when Inflammable Material, the Rough Trade album by Belfast punk band Stiff Little Fingers, went straight onto the U.K.’s national pop charts at number fourteen in February 1979.
    By then alternative groups had their own target to aim for—the Independent Singles and Albums Charts, conceived by Cherry Red boss Iain McNay at the end of 1979 and initially published by the trade magazine Record Business . “Independent” was defined as independently produced, manufactured, marketed, distributed, and retailed. The weekly music papers had published indie charts before, but they’d been based on what was flying over the counter in a single record shop, whereas the Record Business charts used sales data from a host of small record stores across the country.
    But although the independent charts hugely strengthened the scene’s