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

Author:King, Richard [King, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571278329
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2012-04-02T23:00:00+00:00

The European festival circuit in the mid- to late Eighties was in its infancy, consisting of little more than two weekends bookending the summer. The first was in June, around the longest day, when Glastonbury and its Danish equivalent, Roskilde, ran simultaneously and the second was at the end of August when Reading, Pukkelpop in Belgium and the Pink Pop Festival in Holland all took place. The proximity of the festivals allowed an American band to fly in for a whistle-stop whirl around northern Europe and return home having been handsomely rewarded. For Smith’s Blast First roster, after years of playing to empty clubs, there was now an audience hungry for a loud and raucous festival experience.

‘The Buttholes started climbing up the bills,’ says Smith. ‘At Reading in ’89 you could see the same people who were jumping around to the Wonder Stuff or whatever the fuck it was were struck with terror going, “What the fuck is this?” They weren’t really even getting Sonic Youth, but the Butthole Surfers they would vaguely get on a kind of spectacle basis.’

Smith’s timing was propitious. The generation of bands he had signed had started their careers with a sporadic and hand-to-mouth sequence of scattershot EPs, live tracks and mini-LP releases, allowing a slow progress across the USA via the network of fanzines and punk club drop-in houses that made up the American underground infrastructure. By the time Smith got to work with the bands, they had reached the peak of their powers. Butthole Surfers finally found a way to replicate the onslaught of their live show in a studio and released the startlingly heavy Hairway to Steven in 1988. Both Sonic Youth and Big Black were also turning in an album a year. The music weeklies became smitten, having found a garrulous set of characters with complex and contradictory personalities and stories from hard yards on the road. Distinctly not intimidated by the British press, they were excellent copy.

‘It wasn’t that considered,’ says Smith, ‘but we certainly sank a generation of English squat bands. Bogshed and all those guys sank pretty swiftly. I still run into those people and they still do bear a bit of a grudge, which I can understand; they were on the dole and they could get by and there was three newspapers a fucking week that had to get filled, so they got written about. But if you deal with the vast expanses of America, and the vast gap between any kind of media, then that wrought certain kinds of characters, Sonic Youth in particular. Thurston was always very outgoing and interested in [them] and wanted to see that kind of music come through. It was a disparate bunch that vaguely crossed paths and they’d done all their playing to literally two people and a dog and then driven 600 miles to do it again. Here you’d have been to Scotland and back. It produced a level of performance that, to be honest, sad Britons at that time could not pull off.

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