Free How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 by Richard King

two-dimensional, very dull, very boring music, but fucking live, it just seemed to just forget about everything else. When punk did finally happen, I just thought I was too old to even contemplate thinking I was going to be part of it. I turned twenty-four in 1977. Then the Pistols announced they were making an album and I’m thinking. ‘What the fuck are they doing that for?’
    Liverpool’s night-time musical life centred around the immaculate taste and hustler know-how of Roger Eagle, who had promoted the Dr. Feelgood shows, as well as countinghimself a friend to the likes of Screaming Jay Hawkins and Captain Beefheart (who had allegedly entrusted Eagle with his master tapes, in the midst of continuing litigation from record companies). A former DJ at the Twisted Wheel and with an intimate working knowledge of dub and its medicinal benefits, Eagle would filter his tastes into Eric’s, a few doors down from the Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun in Mathew Street. Eagle and Eric’s embraced and fine-tuned Liverpool’s romantic sense of itself as a city of free spirits. To Drummond and his contemporaries at Aunt Twacky’s, Liverpool’s dreaminess was self-evident. ‘The difference between Liverpool and Manchester is,’ he says, ‘one has a Celtic thing that’s kind of looking out to the new world and has a yearning, whereas Manchester is far more Anglo-Saxon. Just before punk, people on the estate where I lived were into Van der Graaf Generator and Nick Drake. It was a deeply musical environment, the John Peel show was on in every house.’
    The impact of punk, together with Eric’s self-confidence meant that gathering in Mathew Street was a flamboyant, self-intoxicated crowd ready to spread their message of unorthodoxy over, if not the world, then at least one another. ‘There was one punk band, Spitfire Boys,’ Drummond says, ‘Paul Rutherford, who was the singer in Spitfire Boys, and Budgie, who was the drummer, were big friends of mine, but they weren’t convinced by it at all. They’d have band arguments saying, “What the fuck do you want to do that London racket for, there’s a whole world out there, what do you want to do that thing for?”’
    Drummond was by now playing guitar in his own band, Big in Japan. Featuring such future Liverpool cultural luminaries as Jayne Casey and Ian Broudie, Big in Japan were the bitchy, flamboyant Liverpool version of punk in all its peacock glory. Drummond and the band’s keyboard player, Dave Balfe,sensing the momentum starting to build around Big in Japan’s performances, realised they needed an outlet for all this artiness.
    ‘I thought, well now, actually having got myself involved in music,’ says Drummond, ‘I may as well do the bit that I really wanted to do. I wasn’t that bothered about being in a band; it was actually having one of these labels that was like the ones my sister had brought back. It was, basically, cut a record and make a sleeve and put the record in.’
    Whatever the opportunities opened by Spiral Scratch and the burgeoning energies being organised in Rough Trade, the intentions and inspirations of Balfe and Drummond lay elsewhere. ‘As much as I think nobody can deny the iconic position that Spiral Scratch has,’ says Drummond, ‘that was not my inspiration at all. I had a whole great love of American music and those tiny labels, I wouldn’t have even known they were called ‘independent’ labels but they were independent, they were local labels, just trying to make money.’
    They were thinking more in the abstract, calling their prospective project The Zoo. ‘It was called The Zoo – it wasn’t called Zoo records, and we wanted to do all sorts of things that were nothing to do with actually making records. Most of the stuff we never realised because what happened, by putting it out to a bunch of friends, “OK, do you want to put a record, we’re doing this label,” they say, “OK, yeah, we’ll do