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| Beggars Group founder and
director, Martin Mills |
It's almost twenty five years since Beggars Banquet unleashed its first
7" single, the three chord buzzsaw rush of The Lurkers' "Shadow/
Love Story". In that time the south west London label has consistently
released groundbreaking records while also establishing a group of equally
groundbreaking labels. They've experienced the lows of near bankruptcy
and the highs of hitting number one all over the world. They've been
at the forefront of every major change in distribution for independent
record labels, from deals with majors to helping to establish a truly
independent distribution network, and on to today when they are seizing
the opportunities and changes brought about by the increasing influence
of the World Wide Web.
Where hundreds have failed, Beggars has continued to grow proving in
the process that an independent doesn't have to adopt the same values
as a major in order to succeed. For today, just as always, the main
motivation behind the entire Beggars Group is quite simply to put out
great music. And if commercial success happens along the way (as it
so often has - to a startling degree) then that's just an added bonus.
Here label founder Martin Mills discusses the history of Beggars Banquet
and the subsequent Beggars Group. And shows exactly why Beggars will
remain an inspirational independent force for the next twenty five years...
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| Original
BB Earls Court Office, early 1980s |
So where did it all start Martin?
"I suppose it originally started when myself and a friend were
running a mobile discotheque in London. It was originally called Giant
Elf (bizarrely), but we merged with some friends who were running one
called Beggars Banquet. So we kind of inherited the name at that point.
At the time I was actually working for the Office of Population, Census
and Surveys, writing reports on reforming the Abortion Law. My friend
was an apprentice in his father's contract furnishing business. We were
both big fans of music, its what mattered to us, so when I finished
my OPCS job I decided to try the commercial world for a bit and tie
that in with music, and got a job working in the Record and Tape Exchange
in Shepherds Bush which is an extremely well known second hand record
shop run along fairly bizarre lines. At the time my partner's father
had died and he was very frustrated with his father's partner and we
just thought we could take what the Record and Tape Exchange did but
create a newer kind of record shop which sold new and second hand records
side by side. So we got ourselves a shop in Earl's Court and it worked
really well. This was 1972 and in the course of the next few years we
opened a bunch of other shops."
In 1975 you became promoters. How did this come
about?
"We knew someone who worked at a booking agency and this idea came
about because we believed we had a market that was being ignored by
the mainstream music business. So we brought in people like The Crusaders,
Southside Johnny and Dory Previn. The very first gig we promoted was
by Tangerine Dream in the Royal Albert Hall which was very much in the
deep end."
A year later in 1976 punk exploded in London. How did Beggars Banquet
react to this?
"The record shops had been mainly selling albums by American west
coast and funk artists and so on. Then suddenly one night the world
wasn't interested in albums anymore, they were interested in singles.
Suddenly the same people who had been listening to Deodato were buying
the first single by the Sex Pistols. And it turned what we did upside
down. We all started being interested in a completely different style
of music. The kind of concerts we had been promoting suddenly became
completely irrelevant because nobody was going to the concert halls
anymore. So we started promoting punk gigs instead. It was an amazing,
incredibly exciting sea change.
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From here you launched a record company, why?
"Underneath our Fulham shop we had a basement which we turned into
a rehearsal room where punk bands like Generation X went to rehearse.
One of the bands who rehearsed down there was a band called The Lurkers
who were one of the great three chord punk bands. The manager of the
shop started to manage the band because they needed help. Then he needed
help so we started managing them and we started trying to get them a
deal but we couldn't. This was 1976 and at that point there weren't
very many labels, and each one had already signed their one punk band
- and that was it. So we set about doing the record ourselves in a way
that is now second nature to almost anyone in a band. But then it was
such an unusual thing to do. Then there was no roadmap. There were no
small independent record companies. So we worked out how to put a record
out ourselves. We pressed it and got a very old fashioned distributor
called President."
go to part 2
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