First releases on Rough Trade Records

Two full years elapsed between the opening of the first Rough Trade store and the label's debut release in February 1978: Metal Urbain's "Paris Maquis". "We thought they were the French Sex Pistols", says Geoff Travis (Rough Trade's founder). Next came an Augustus Pablo single. But it was ROUGH 3 - the Extended Play EP by Sheffield experimental trio Cabaret Voltaire - that really tapped the emergent postpunk gestalt.

Metal Urbain - Paris Maquis 1978


Cabaret Voltaire - Here She Comes Now (Velvet Underground cover) 1978


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.

Stiff Little Fingers - Wasted Life 1979

Swell Maps

Teenagers growing up in Solihull -  a middle class suburb on the edge of the Midlands industrial city Birmingham - Swell Maps were a gang of friends centered around two brothers who hated their given surname (Godfrey) so much they renamed themselves Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks.

Pooling their savings and borrowing some from the Godfreys' parents, Swell Maps pressed two thousand copies of their debut, "Read About Seymour". Released on the group's own label, Rather, the single is often said to be about Seymour Stein, founder of the New Wave-friendly U.S. label Sire, who'd signed Talking Heads and the Ramones. 

Actually, the title refers to a totally different Seymour Stein, this one known as "the king of mods" in 1960s England. The lyrics, though, were composed in cut-up fashion.

Swell Maps - Read About Seymour - 1977

Swell Maps were obsessed with war, but in a whimsical and boyishly innocuous way. "Then Poland", "Midget Submarines" and "Ammunition Train" drew on military history (especially the Spanish succession wars of the early eighteenth century) and the boys' adventure story character Biggles, also a fighter pilot.

Swell Maps - Midget Submarines - 1979


Swell Maps - Ammunition Train - 1978

The Maps also loved Gerry Anderson's marionette TV shows of the sixties, Thunderbirds and Stingray. A Stingray episode provided the title for Swell Maps' debut album, A Trip to Marineville.

Along with their pals the Television Personalities, Swell Maps invented a whole strand of postpunk that made a fetish of naiveté, characterized by weak vocals, shaky rhythms, rudimentary droning basslines and fast-strummed discords. For believers, much more than the "sped-up heavy metal" that was first-wave punk, this was the true realization of the here's-three-chords-now-start-a-band ethos - except some of the groups didn't even have three chords. 

"It took me two years to learn two chords", Sudden told NME. "I can't even see ourselves becoming polished, note perfect and all that. We hardly ever rehearse - about once every six months".

Fervent amateurists, Swell Maps believed bands got ruined when they depended on playing gigs and releasing records in order to make a living. One of the reasons the group split, shortly before the release of their second album Jane From Occupied Europe, was that they were becoming too successful, with a tour of America looming.

Many of the groups in Swell Maps' wake, though, went a step further and equated amateurism with amateurishness, the deliberate avoidance of anything that smacked of professionalism or slickness. From the liberating declaration that "anyone can do it", DIY became a confining injunction to sound like anyone can do it.

Swell Maps were always more expansive and experimental than this: for every frantic racket such as "Let's Build a Car", there was an eerie metallic instrumental, such as "Big Empty Field", clangorous and full of cavernous hollows, the missing link between Neu! and Sonic Youth.

Swell Maps - Let's Build a Car - 1979


Swell Maps - Big Empty Field - 1980

Lo-fi electronic music

In mid-1978, a curious spate of cultural synchronicity found "Warm Leatherette" being released at around the same time as several other lo-fi electronic singles, all put out on indie labels: Throbbing Gristle's "United", Cabatet Voltaire's Extended Play EP, Human League's "Being Boiled", Robert Rental's "Paralysis" and Thomas Leer's "Private Plane".
"There was this period when they all came out, one after the other", recalls Leer. "And it was like, 'Where are all these weird records coming from?' None of us knew each other. There was obviously something brewing."
Actually, Thomas Leer and Robert Rental did know each other. Two Scottish friends who'd moved down to London at the height of punk, Leer and Rental, like Miller, were inspired to put out their own records by the Desperate Bicycles' example.

Throbbing Gristle - United - 1978


Cabaret Voltaire - Do the Mussolini - 1978


The Human League - Being Boiled - 1978


Robert Rental - Paralysis - 1978


"Private Plane" sounded electronic, but Leer didn't actually own a synth. Instead he processed his guitar and bass using various gadgets and played Rental's stylophone (a gimmicky electronic keyboard played with a pen) through an echo effect. All these gauzy silverswirl textures gave "Private Plane" an ethereal feel perfect for its mood of remote serenity tinged with wistfulness, loosely inspired by a recent TV program about the reclusive multimillionaire Howard Hughes. Leer's fey voice is equally perfect, but owed something to contingency: he had to whisper the vocal because the recording took place at night in his one-room apartment and he didn't want to wake his girlfriend.

Thomas Leer - Private Plane - 1978

The Desperate Bicycles

DIY's most fervent evangelists, the Desps chanted "it was easy, it was cheap - go and do it" at the end of their early 1977 debut "Smokescreen". That slogan then became the chorus of "The Medium Was Tedium", the follow-up released later that same year. "No more time for spectating", they declared on "Don't Back the Front", an antifascist anthem on the flip side of "Medium", adding the listener-inciting battle cry "cut it, press it, distribute it/Xerox music's here at last". A sleeve note revealed that "Smokescreen had cost only £ 153 and said the band "would really like to know why you haven't made your single yet".
As for the Desps' actual music, it was almost puritan in its unadorned simplicity, its guitar sound frugal to the point of emaciation. For the Desperate Bicycles, it was as though sloppiness and scrawniness became signs of membership in the true punk elect. The very deficiency of traditional rock virtues (tightness, feel) stood as tokens of the group's authenticity and purity of intent.

The Desperate Bicycles - Smokescreen - 1977


The Desperate Bicycles - The Medium Was Tedium - 1977


The Desperate Bicycles - Don't Back the Front - 1977

Factory Records

The label's first release, A Factory Sample, was a double EP packaged in glistening silver. "It just seemed so special", says Paul Morley, who was NME's Manchester correspondent at the time. "The fact that it was so beautiful looking showed the possibilities of what could be done, and it showed up the London record industry for being so boring".

Soon Factory was outdoing Fast Product's collectible Earcom samplers and bizarre packages like Quality of Life by bringing a Marcel Duchamp-like absurdism to their catalog. Numbers were assigned to anything and everything: pipe dreams, whims, unrealized projects, movies that were never finished or never started.
Fac 8 was a menstrual egg timer proposed by Linder but never actually constructed. Fac 99 was a dental bill for Factory codirector Rob Gretton, who'd had his molars reconstructed. Fac 61 was a lawsuit from the label's former house producer Martin Hannett.

The Secret Public - 1977

Released at the very end of 1977, almost a full year after Spiral Scratch, ORG-2 wasn't even a record, but a booklet of collages by Linder (singer in the band Ludus) and Jon Savage (journalist for Sounds magazine). "It didn't have a cover price, so it didn't sell very well. Nobody knew what to sell it for!" laughs Boon. "But it did its job. The title The Secret Public was all about that other side of the DIY thing - trying to locate kindred spirits who would 'get it' and respond".

(Scans taken from: www.goldminetrash.blog.co.uk)

The Buzzcocks - Spiral Scratch EP

There are people who will say in all earnestness that the Buzzcocks EP Spiral Scratch was a more epochal punk single than "Anarchy in the UK". Released in January 1977 on the Buzzcocks' own New Hormones label, the EP wasn't the first independently released record, not by a long stretch, but it was the first to make a real polemical point about independence. In the process, Spiral Scratch inspired thousands of people to play the do-it-yourself/release-it-yourself game.
Spiral Scratch was simultaneously a regionalist blow against the capital (Manchester versus London) and a conceptual exercise in demystification ("spiral scratch", because that's what a record materially is, a spiral groove scratched into vinyl).

The back cover itemized details of the recording process, such as which take of the songs they'd used and the number of overdubs. The EP's catalog number, ORG-1, was a Left-leaning bookworm's wisecrack: ORG-1 = ORG ONE = orgone, Wilhelm Reich's neurolibidinous life force.
"Spiral Scratch was playful", says Buzzcocks manager Richard Boon. "Play was very important". That spirit came through in the EP's most famous song, "Boredom", which was simultaneously an expression of real ennui ("I'm living in this movie/but it doesn't move me") and a metapop comment on boredom as a prescribed subject for punk songs and punk-related media discourse - a topic that was predictable to the point of being, well, a bit boring.
Pete Shelley's deliberately inane two-note guitar solo sealed the conceptual deal: a "boring" solo that was actually thrillingly tension inducing in its fixated refusal to go anywhere melodically.

The Buzzcocks - Boredom - 1977