Free Johnny Marr by Richard Carman Page A

including the later version with Sandy Shaw on vocals) it was actually a remix of this recording that made its way onto the band’s first album.
    Fired up, the foursome travelled down to London later in March to play their first gig in the capital, accompanied by a coterie of friends and fans from the north-west, who supported the band at The Rock Garden in Covent Garden. Within days, Johnny took control of the band’s future, travelling back to London to present a cassette of ‘Hand In Glove’ into the hands of the man who would secure their future. The Smiths were getting nearer

CHAPTER THREE
NOT ROUGH, BUT TRADING
    R ough Trade began life as a record store in 1977, soon becoming one of the UK’s most influential independent record labels. Independence was not a new thing in the record business – right back to the early Sun releases in the USA, rock music had relied upon selective independents to find and represent some of the most influential and interesting of bands. At the end of the Seventies, recording companies were beginning the drift towards conglomeration that meant perhaps half a dozen or so labels ran almost the entire business. The fact that The Sex Pistols had courted EMI and A&M so fiercely, illustrated the fact that the so-called independence of punk was in fact often merely an attempt to extricate as big an advance as possible from one of the majors. Punk’s self-help ethic, however, was instrumental in people like Geoff Travis forming Rough Trade, and the companyconsistently maintained extremely high aesthetic standards. The bands that joined the young label – and indeed went on be a part of its future – were almost without exception interesting and entertaining. Aztec Camera, Stiff Little Fingers, Cabaret Voltaire, Scritti Politti and The Fall were typical examples of bands moving from very small or self-run labels into the Rough Trade stable, where they could attract the attention of the media and develop a consistent fan base, and that the latter were on Rough Trade attracted Morrissey and Maher. As the music revolution that was MTV began to take a grip on the industry, it was harder and harder for bands that didn’t have the pop sheen and lip-gloss look to find a home that would give them a major profile: Rough Trade was ideal for The Smiths.
    Johnny travelled to London and introduced himself to Travis with immense charm and unlimited enthusiasm for the featureless little cassette tape containing such a gem. “I remember Johnny glowing with pride, saying ‘This is it! Just listen to this,’” Travis recalled of their meeting in the Rough Trade canteen, when speaking to The Face . “I knew inside me that no-one had ever heard music like this before,” says Johnny. During the trip, Johnny kipped with Matt Johnson, and this was the period for The The when Johnson was writing Soul Mining . The whole trip was enlightening for Maher – a glimpse into Matt Johnson’s creative work cementing the friendship that was already well-established, and an inherent knowledge that the time had come for his own band too.
    For Travis’ part, unlike many label bosses in a similar situation, the Rough Trade supremo gave the tape an unbiased listen. “I was helplessly won over,” he glowed afterwards. Deciding to release ‘Hand In Glove’ as a single, the label boss made one of the mostimportant decisions on behalf of Rough Trade that he could have made. “I listened to it all weekend,” he told Q in 1994, “and absolutely loved it.” Travis called Johnny on the Monday, and – according to his account of 1994 – the band were in the Rough Trade offices on the Tuesday.
    For Morrissey, the decision to take The Smiths on board was the label’s “best-ever deal.” Ultimately achieving the status as Rough Trade’s most successful band, future income from The Smiths allowed Travis to invest in more bands that would otherwise perhaps have been outside of the label’s grasp, such as Pere Ubu,