THE OLD BOYS' NETWORK

Record Collector
Issue # 298, June 2004
Written by Terry Staunton.

This article examines some of the new independent UK-based labels which have become home to a number of former major-label stalwarts. The selected excerpts reproduced here relate specifically to XTC.

THE OLD BOYS' NETWORK

Yesterday's heroes are finding there's life after big-label death

When your band have been riding fast and loose on the gravy train, a lowly flunky keeping a close eye on the designer luggage, it can be quite a shock when the express comes to a grinding halt and a booming voice cries out “all change!”

Your record sales aren't what they were, you notice the venues are no longer the cavernous, acoustical nightmares of old, and the music press can't stop laughing at your PR's demands for a front cover to go with the interview - which itself fails to command the column inches of old. It's time to face facts. As Ian Faith, erstwhile manager of Spinal Tap, so succinctly put it, your appeal is becoming more selective.

The pages of history are littered with the corpses of fine acts who've waved a white flag at the first sign of diminishing returns, especially when the majors lose faith not so much in the talent but in its ability to make them money.

Welcome to the Old Boys' Network, thriving pockets of the biz where chart regulars of ten, 20, even 30 years ago can continue to work with dignity, and still reach the diehard fans who've been there since Day One.

Self-sufficiency is the route of many artists, and the more business-minded among them, like . . . XTC's Andy Partridge, today find themselves as the heads of mini-empires.

XTC is a peculiar case, however, because while the majority of acts find themselves out of favour and swiftly dropped by a major, Partridge's band had the opposite problem - Virgin wouldn't let them go.

“We'd been trying to leave Virgin for ages, and during that time they had a massive cull and got rid of, I think, 93 acts - an apocalyptically huge number. Obviously, we were still making a few bob for them and they held on”.

Finding themselves at the epicentre of a complex legal wrangle, XTC did the only thing they thought they could. They went on strike.

“We just stopped working for Virgin, they didn't get anything out of us for the last five years. There was no other way to get free other than by making ourselves difficult. Eventually, they had no choice but to turf us out.

“When we did get off the label, our first thought was what can we do to protect ourselves from getting into the same mess again. The obvious thing was to set up our own imprint to shield ourselves from the vagaries of the majors”.

The result was the band's own Idea Records, and two XTC albums in a little over a year (Apple Venus and Wasp Star), licensed to different labels across the globe, Cooking Vinyl doing the honours in the UK. Partridge found himself learning the nuts and bolts of the industry very quickly, useful both in his current dealings with Virgin and the setting up of a second self-run label, Ape Records.

“We have an extent of control over our Virgin back catalogue. At the moment we'd like to put out a DVD of all our old videos. We know there's a market for it, but Virgin don't want to give us anything more than our pretty awful original deal, which started the trouble in the first place. We can't accept that, we're our own businessmen these days and we know what a penny means.

“They also can't repackage anything without our consent, but I wish we had been more involved in the remasters of our back catalogue. They sound great, but the artwork is appalling. I counted something like 85 mistakes across the various albums, it was as if they'd hired David Blunkett. Or his dog”.

Partridge now relishes being able to cross every “i” and dot every “t” with Ape Records (“It's a proper label, although there's no plans for an Ape Airways”), mainly because his heart and soul is in it - not to mention his cash.

“I'm not what you'd call a rich man, but I put 40,000 pounds of my own money into Ape, which is twice as much as I paid for the house I live in. I had to make it work; to go cap in hand to someone to top things up would have been tantamount to failure”.

Ape's first releases were the Fuzzy Warbles CDs, four volumes of home recordings of early XTC demos and other songs rejected by either Virgin or band members themselves. They also include several numbers written by Partridge for the movie James And The Giant Peach - unused because the soundtrack gig eventually went to Oscar-winner Randy Newman. Four more Fuzzy volumes are due in the coming months.

“The money started to trickle in and we were in the black within a year”, he says with a slight note of astonishment. “I got the whole thing off the ground with a bunch of rejects!”

Partridge has also teamed up with musician Peter Blegvad for the ‘beat concept’ album Orpheus, and he has high hopes for a release by pop outfit The Milk And Honey Band (“tremendous stuff, I haven't felt like this about a band since I heard The La's album”). He's also sifting his way through dozens of demo tapes, following an appeal on his website. “The Internet plays a big part these days, and I'm pretty lucky that I've got a bit of a musical track record and people out there are searching cyberspace for news of what I'm up to”, he says.

“I can't imagine being 18 and starting from scratch, I don't think I'd know what to do. The Internet is the biggest jumble sale in the world. You get to set up your own stall, but whether people come along to browse is another matter”.

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