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

sense of its own identity, some critiqued them for encouraging bands and labels to aim low, in the process creating a sort of neohippie ghetto. “I don’t believe in dropping out or alternative cultures or any of this nonsense,” Bob Last told NME . “I think the New Wave is about dropping in , fighting your way in. You’ve got to get in there and struggle.” Accordingly, Last encouraged Fast Product’s four major bands—the Mekons, Gang of Four, the Scars, and the Human League—to sign to the London-based majors at the earliest opportunity. Eventually, he sold the entire Fast Product back catalog to EMI and closed down the label, feeling its “intervention” had been completed.
    This question of independence versus infiltration, regionalism versus centralization, was one area where Fast Product and Factory strongly disagreed. Tony Wilson had watched how the first indies in Manchester, New Hormones and Rabid, had capitulated to the capital. He recalls asking Rabid’s Tosh Ryan in the fall of 1977 why they’d let London-based major labels take their biggest artists, Jilted John and John Cooper Clarke. “I can remember him saying, ‘Oh being independent was just a little period we went through of idealism.’ It was as if the only point of indie labels was to exist for a few months so that managers could get their bands signed to majors.” Wilson was determined to resist the centripetal pull of London and build up a power base in Manchester, the city he loved. His fervent pro-provinces stance was echoed by other indie labels throughout Britain, especially those in the North and Scotland. For a period, the independent album chart invariably featured a couple of regional or city-based compilations each week, such as Cardiff’s Is the War Over? and Sheffield’s Bouquet of Steel .
    From style-conscious conceptualists like Fast Product and Factory to the more earnest, businesslike operations like Rough Trade and Cherry Red, the U.K.’s postpunk independents often disagreed about music, packaging, politics, you name it. But for a brief golden age, a five-year stretch from 1977 to 1981, they were all in the same boat. “The thing that united us,” says Daniel Miller, “was that none of us knew what we were doing! We were huge music enthusiasts, though, with a strong idea of what we liked and what we wanted. I had no grounding in business whatsoever. But all of a sudden you realized you could have access to this industry that had always seemed very mysterious. The record industry went from being pretty closed, which it was even during the first wave of punk, to totally open. And that encouraged a lot of people like me and Tony Wilson—not obvious record company people by any means—to get involved and make our dreams come true.”

CHAPTER 3
     

TRIBAL REVIVAL:
    THE POP GROUP AND THE SLITS
     
    THE SLITS AND THE POP GROUP founded their own independent label, Y Records, which went through Rough Trade. But before the two groups joined up to form a kind of postpunk tribe, they both made separate stabs at the infiltrate-from-within strategy. Signed to major labels and releasing debut albums in 1979, the Pop Group and the Slits were regarded as two of the most exciting and innovative bands of postpunk’s first wave.
    The genius of the Pop Group lay in the way they were pulled every which way by their passion for black music. They couldn’t settle on just reggae, or just funk, or just jazz, so they went full throttle for all three simultaneously. This identity crisis caused their ultimate downfall, but along the way the Pop Group’s chaotic gigs and flawed but compelling records served as a blazing beacon for countless other bands looking for the way forward.
    Funk was one of the things that sustained the future members of the Pop Group during the midseventies prepunk lull. “We were the Bristol Funk Army,” says the group’s singer, Mark Stewart. “We’d go to clubs and dance to heavy bassline imports from