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BEGGARS BANQUET/BEGGARS GROUP HISTORY PART
2
So were Beggars Banquet one of the first independent
punk labels to emerge?
Yes definitely. In fact we ended up putting out our first single by The
Lurkers around the same time as Stiff put out "Buy 1" with Nick
Lowe and Chiswick put out their first single. So the three of us started
at pretty much the same time. It was a lot of fun and a piece of cake
to be honest because there were so few punk singles around that everyone
bought everything there was. So there was this completely captive market
who bought everything we did. So we did another Lurkers single which was
as much fun. Then we just thought, let's put out an album, and we did.
Which was "Streets", a punk compilation album of all the independent
labels that were suddenly now springing up. After this we put out a Lurkers
album which went top twenty."
Of course you quickly gained huge success with Gary
Numan and within a year he had scored a number one single. This period
must have been strange.
"It was bizarre at the time because Gary was marginal to the punk
scene - he didn't even like punk very much - but he worked with it and
then quickly moved to the electronic side of things, quickly following
Ultravox - well as quickly as our finances would allow! Every time we
made a few quid in the record shops he'd want to spend it on a synthesiser.
And his progress was only limited by the amount of money we could give
to buy the equipment. All of this was happening at a time when we were
financially pretty precarious. We were funding the whole record company
out of the cash flow of the record shops and there was a point when we
were bouncing salary cheques and were at the point of almost going bust."
So what saved you?
"We had changed our distribution deal to Island which was fine until
they got into one of their perennial financial binds, so they themselves
did a license deal with EMI which meant that they were unable to help
us any more. So we were left high and dry until Warners did a license
deal with us, giving us a cheque for a £100,000, which was an unprecedented
amount of money. Most of which went to pay unprecedented bills."
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Going to number one with "Are Friends Electric"
must have helped as well though, didn't it?
"Of course. In retrospect "Are Friends Electric" is still
an amazing record. Five and a half minutes long, it's got no obvious
tune and no one knows what it's about, but it's an absolutely fabulous
piece of music. It literally changed our lives. It was a number one
single, the album it came from went to number one, the follow up album
with "Cars" on it - "Pleasure Principle" - went
to number one. Suddenly in 1979 we had three Gary Numan albums in the
top 20 and two number one singles, four number one's in the same year,
and it took A&M like 15 years to have their first number one hit single.
So it all came in a big rush, it was all very disorientating but it
was a lot of fun."
In 1982 you put out the "Southern Freeez"
album by British jazz funk outfit Freeez. Was this an attempt to alter
people's perspective of Beggars Banquet being synonymous with Gary Numan?
"Obviously that wasn't a situation that we wanted so we did start
doing some bizarre things to alter that perspective. But Freeez I thought
represented an interesting phase because it came from the new wave of
British jazz funk and, although it was very different from the punk
that we'd been dealing with, it came from the same place. The motivations
and the market and the promotion where the same. That was an important
record for us to release.
Was it around this time that you set up 4AD?
"Yes it was. Basically Ivo Watts-Russell, who was managing one
of our record shops, came to us and said "I would like to start
a record company with Peter Kent (who was running another one of our
record shops). We fancied a new record company which was a bit more
like what we used to be. The whole point to 4AD was that it would be
small and doing what Beggars had done when we first started. The original
concept was that as acts became successful they would then move onto
Beggars, the parent company. But the only act that actually did that
was Bauhaus. After that point 4AD developed such a strong identity as
to what it was with artists like The Birthday Party, The Cocteau Twins,
Dead Can Dance and so on, that it no longer needed to be a part of Beggars,
but just grew in parallel.
A year later in 1983 you launched the Situation 2 label. What was the
reasoning behind this?
Because Beggars was distributed by Warners it had a major impact on
our ability to get into the independent charts. So we set up Situation
2 as the kind of little brother of Beggars, to be distributed independently
through Rough Trade and Pinnacle. It was here where The Cult started.
And The Associates, which people don't associate with us because they
ended up being more Warners than us.
How did The Associates end up on Warners?
There came a point where our growth became incompatible with Warners
and we reached an amicable arrangement whereby they kept the Associates
and we went on our own way. So although we were responsible for The
Associates - and I think "Sulk" is one of the great records
of all time - it's not really on our CV which is a shame.
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| Peter Murphy in the Beggars Banquet original office
at Earls Court |
With Bauhaus, Beggars became known for its Gothic
artists.
"Bauhaus opened all kinds of doors for us. I suppose for the whole
of the mid 80s we thrived with bands who followed Bauhaus, and indeed
largely bands that actually supported Bauhaus, like The Birthday Party,
Gene Loves Jezebel, The Cult, all those bands who became that kind of
dark gothic thing. The whole goth movement - and Fields of Nephilim
who we also signed were a big part of that - became our passport to
the waves we caught in the mid 80s and established us really."
go to part 3
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