VINYL AGE, PART FIVE: CORPORATE ROCK
In the late 70s there was a drastic demarcation starting to take effect. The story of the 80s is that of the stratification of the record business. The late 70s punk movement was a seismic blast whose impact would only trickle down or rather trickle up over the next decade, but would ultimately, with its fundamental anti-corporate DIY ethic, change so much.
The Australian record companies were not ready for punk. It was forced underground, or into exile. Australia’s twin prophets of punk, the Saints and Radio Birdman, had both broken up in England by 1979. Astor inadvertently played a seminal role when in late 1976, it custom-pressed Brisbane band the Saints’ first single, “Stranded,” on their own one-off Fatal label. As a result, the band was signed by EMI in Australia if only on the instruction of head office in London. But DIY was a blessing and a curse for music. |
The majors were interested in pub rock. For good reason – because it was likely to sell. The narrower margins in Australia due to our small population provide an economic basis for the safer aesthetic option. But there was a longer view too, that the majors couldn’t see. Mushroom’s Michael Gudinski was quite prepared to dabble in punk, so long as it wasn’t at his expense. Forming the prophetically-named Suicide label, he put the risk on RCA. Suicide put out one compilation album (1978’s Lethal Weapons) and folded and Gudinski took the Boys Next Door, Nick Cave’s first band and the best of this bunch, over to Mushroom. Mushroom dropped them after one album. It is another legendary gaffe. It’s true that at that time Cave’s band was typical of the cream of Australian post-punk in selling merely a few thousand copies of each of their releases, but that glass ceiling was no reflection on the quality of the music, and of course Cave has subsequently proved to be perhaps the Australian artist of his generation with the longest legs, both in time and space, in terms of his artistic durability and international reach. To think that at one point in the early 80s, Melbourne indy Missing Link’s roster numbered the Birthday Party, the GoBetweens and the Laughing Clowns – any music venture wouldn’t mind a piece of that action now. But the established Australian majors and major-independents couldn’t see past the next hit. Couldn’t afford or weren’t prepared to.
But the music led the way. Even pub rock was profoundly impacted upon by what became known more politely as the new wave. The roots-influences of bands like the Sports and the Mentals prefigured punk anyway. Midnight Oil gave up on the Jethro Tull covers and the Angels raced to razor cut their hair and don leather jackets and more old hippies Mi-Sex traded their guitars for synthesizers. Split Enz were totally revitalised by the power pop ethic. Only Cold Chisel held fast with their long hair and flares. Some boundaries were blurry, others more distinct. The biggest distinction was probably between the acts the majors thought could possibly sell records, and those they thought couldn’t. The bands that couldn’t, didn’t – but only because they were restricted to independence? Certainly, some of those bands like the GoBetweens, Laughing Clowns, Triffids and Scientists who followed Nick Cave into exile have proved, like him, to at the very least have legs as long as their post-punk counterparts in Australia who crossed over to pub rock success, acts like the Church, the Models, the Hoodoo Gurus and Hunters & Collectors. |
The problem for independents was breaking the agency stranglehold on suburban gigs, breaking down the resistance of an audience force-fed mono-cultural media, and getting decent distribution for their records. It did find support thanks to yet another couple of 80s’ booms, in community or multi-cultural radio and an alternative press that extended from free local street papers and fanzines to glossy national magazines. Indy labels proliferated in a whirl looking for coherent distribution. M7/Powderworks did various deals but it could do only so much. Larrikin Records had by now built up its own distribution network too, but again, it could only do so much. It was to CBS’s credit that it tried with Missing Link and Hot, Australia’s most seminal post-punk indy labels along with Phantom, but both ventures were ill-fated, if not due to a lack of talent on their books but a lack of grounded administration. New independent distributors like Musicland and Didgeridoo came and went bust. ABC Music, a wing of the national broadcaster, was always a player on the fringes, strangely like an indy label channelled through a major distributor.
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Then in 1982, CBS hit out of the blue all round the world with Men At Work. “Downunder,” before it was only recently exposed as a ripoff of Australia’s old “Kookaburra Laughs” folk tune, became the anthem Bob Hawke had to have. This was the big boom before the bust. Further to CBS’s credit, it made a hit out of bush band Redgum’s “I Was Only 19,” and developed the talents of Kiwi singer-songwriter Sharon O’Neill, who redefined the female performer in Australia.
In April 1984, INXS’s The Swing, their first album for WEA, debuted at Number One. It was knocked from the top spot by Cold Chisel’s posthumous Twentieth Century album. WEA released a cassette-only album of INXS remixes called Dekadance. This was another indication of an even bigger change to come, the formal challenge to rock as a genre by electronic, later better-still digital dance music. Synth-pop acts like Real Life (RCA), Psuedo Echo (EMI) and Kids in the Kitchen (Mushroom) would prove one or two hit wonders. RAM magazine, which shared journal-of-record title with Australian Rolling Stone, introduced an indy chart. New RBT and fire/safety regulations were putting pressure on the suburban beer barns and inner city clubs alike. EMI went into a joint venture with Japanese electronics manufacturer Sony to form a distribution business out of a warehouse at Eastern Creek in western Sydney, Sony with its eyes on bigger prizes in the world music industry. After Philips had developed the cassette format, which grew so enormously as a market sector from the 70s into the 80s, it was Sony who launched the Walkman portable player. And it was Sony and Philips who jointly developed the next format technology that would wipe out both vinyl and tapes, the CD, and would revive sales. |
It was another telling event when Crowded House formed out of the ashes of Split Enz and struck a deal that was actually a joint venture between EMI in Australia and Capitol in LA. In the wake of the DIY revolution, even if the pub circuit was supposed to be shrinking, recording studios, record shops and suburban bedrooms kept throwing up new labels and acts, whether their base was regional or generic or a bit of both or neither. Labels like Hot, Waterfront, Phantom, Missing Link, Au-Go-Go, Rampant, M-Squared, Basilisk, Cleopatra, Green, Citadel, Rampant, Gap, Method, Aberrant, Timberyard. Big Time, Trafalgar, Survival, Reactor, many others, all existed at different degrees of independence, and contributed to the on-going 80s boom in a grass roots way that made the majors’ blockbuster successes possible.
In 1986, RCA signed John(ny) Farnham on the comeback trail and as the legend goes had so little confidence in him that they pressed only 5,000 copies of his album Whispering Jack. It would go on to become one of the biggest hits in Australian music history, the first local album to sell a million copies in Australia alone, and it would also become one of Australia’s first CD releases at a time before most people even knew what a CD was. This was the beginning of the Barnsey and Farnsey Show that’s still going strong today, the twin axis of our apparently most beloved solo singers, Jimmy Barnes and John Farnham. But it was the exception to the rule. Sales were starting to flatten out in the mid-80s. For one thing, music was becoming more expensive. It was becoming more expensive to produce, and more expensive to consume. Part of the reason for the growth of record sales in the 60s and 70s was that retail prices relatively dropped. In 1975, albums were still $5.99, or around the same price they were when they first came in during the 50s! – meaning that instead of an album costing a quarter of the average wage as it did in the 50s, it was now worth only a twentieth. But prices started to rise in the late 70s, and by the early 80s had cracked the taboo ten-dollar mark. By the late 80s, they were approaching triple that - which, of course, was what attracted the interest of the PSA in the first place. The fact was that the record companies were getting fat without offering anything more for it. And then the big game of musical chairs started again, the first stirrings of the biggest wave of changes since the mid-50s, which started out as an attempt to reconfigure the record business on an even more truly global basis and ended up just trying to hold together what shattered fragments of it remained. |
In 1986, RCA was bought by General Electric and in turn sold on to the German Bertelsmann Group, and so re-named BMG. In ’87, Sony bought CBS, and WEA began merging with Time to become Time-Warner.
The Australian majors in the late 80s reduced themselves to gorging on what became dismissively known as corporate rock, and corporate rock would fall just as surely as the Berlin Wall and Wall St were both about to fall too. Now it was finally PolyGram’s turn to shine, with its backing of Michael Crawley’s True-Tone Records, which rewarded it with a rich roster including the GoBetweens, the Rockmelons, GangGajang, Peter Blakeley, Ed Kuepper, Steve Cummings, the Celibate Rifles and Wendy Matthews. In 1989, EMI closed its vinyl pressing plant in Sydney. Overseas, A&M and Island were bought up by PolyGram. This left Festival without two of its long-standing cash-cows, and it was the beginning of the end for Murdoch’s Australian major. License deals are great for turnover, but don’t deliver what a record company really needs, which is copyright ownership, or deep catalogue. The turn into the 90s was defined by two new labels, rooART and Red Eye, both from Sydney and both, like TrueTone, fostered by PolyGram. rooART was founded by INXS manager Chris Murphy in 1988. It poached power pop merchants the Hummingbirds from Phantom and bubble-grunge trio Ratcat from Waterfront, and by 1991, Ratcat was straddling the top of the singles and albums charts alike. Ratcat co-headlined with Nirvana and Mushroom Aboriginal act Yothu Yindi at the first Big Day Out in Sydney in January 1992. This point in rock history, the dawn of so-called grunge, is sometimes seen as the belated commercial consummation of the punk revolution begun some two decades earlier in the late 70s. PolyGram, with its publishing wing now headed up by Roger Grierson, who’d been in the punk band the Thought Criminals and headed Doubelthink and Green Records, forged a deal with John Foy’s Red Eye too, and Red Eye delivered the Cruel Sea; PolyGram also signed Dave Graney, Powderfinger and other acts. Nearly all these acts started out cutting 45s in the 80s indy underground, and ended up making CDs for the majors in the 90s. And though Dave Graney’s star would fade, Brisbane’s Powderfinger would go on to become and remain one of Australia’s best-loved and biggest-selling rock bands. Sydney’s Volition Records was perhaps unique as the label that put Australian electronic music on the map and also, perhaps for this reason, as one of the few 80s indies that actually survived into the 90s. Starting life as Gap Records with a license deal to locally release material from seminal English indies Rough Trade and Factory, in 1988 Volition released Severed Heads’ 12” single “Greater Reward,” which became the first Australian record to place on the Billboard dance chart in the US. Volition utilised major label support, going from CBS to EMI, to produce 90s techno hits like Itch-E & Scratch-E and Southend’s 1994 Sydney Olympics anthem “The Winner is…” Perhaps the only other 80s’ indy to sustain even beyond the 90s is Shock Records, this because Shock evolved into a viable distributor for the ever-increasing number of smaller labels. In 1991/’92, Sony (nee CBS) phased out its Australian pressing plant for vinyl and cassettes, and opened a CD plant. Two of the most stalwart indy rock labels, Melbourne’s Au-Go-Go and Sydney’s Waterfront, were stuttering to a last gasp, Waterfront through an ill-fated liason with Festival. Overseas in ’91, EMI bought Chrysalis – and so Festival lost another of its long-standing cash cows. In ’92, EMI and Warners in Australia went into a joint venture on the DATA (Digital Audio Technology Australia) CD pressing plant. No-one lamented the passing of vinyl as no-one ever seems to lament the superseding of apparently redundant technology with something that looks so much shinier and so much better. Certainly, almost straight away, the CD made a decadence of the old album form. In retrospect, there seems something perfect about the 40-minute album, with its two 20-minute sides. Now that CDs could fit 80 minutes of music, they started filling up with the additional 40 minutes of music that wouldn’t have made the grade on an LP. It was really only DJs who kept vinyl alive, with the 12” dance-mix single still a staple. |