As famous for its zany marketing campaigns as its records, it pioneered the DIY spirit of punk and put it into practice. And, living up to the rock’n’roll ethos of “live fast, die young”, Stiff shone brightly for a decade, releasing 250 singles and 60 albums, before collapsing under a pile of debt to leave a bruised, battered but beautiful corpse — a stiff.
The revolution began on August 14, 1976, when Stiff released its first single: Nick Lowe’s So It Goes b/w Heart of the City (catalogue number BUY1). It was recorded for £45, lasted a minute and a half and did not dent the charts. But the label’s sixth release, two months later, made history. A cultural and social explosion was brewing in Britain, and New Rose, by the Damned, became its first recorded soundtrack. What punk was to music, Stiff Records was to a complacent, corporate music industry — a short, sharp shock.
Stiff never meant to be a punk label. It was started by two men with a background in pub rock and an instinct for breaking rules. Jake Riviera was tour manager for Dr Feelgood, whose singer, Lee Brilleaux, lent him the £400 to set up the label, and Dave Robinson, a former roadie, managed Graham Parker and the Rumour. Their first artist, Nick Lowe, was a stalwart of the pub-rock scene, from the band Brinsley Schwarz, who had been gigging since the 1960s. Dury was 36, and had been slogging round the pub-rock circuit for years. Wreckless Eric, a former art student, sang some songs into a cassette recorder and took the tape to the Stiff office, kicking the door open and announcing himself as “one of those c***s who brings tapes into record companies”. Days later, he was in a studio.
“We were very anti-major,” recalls Robinson, “and a lot of our roster was their flotsam and jetsam.” Riviera takes up the theme: “We were just trying to give the majors a fright. We would sign the unsignable. From that point of view, it was a blast.”
Stiff went on to build up a roster of misfits and mavericks, most of whom had tried and failed to get record deals with major labels. “Stiff was a home for people nobody else wanted,” says the former Damned drummer Rat Scabies. “It took something to recognise Ian Dury’s talent — a scruffy East Ender whose songs were about nicking things in Essex.”
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Stiff set up shop at 32 Alexander Street, in west London, an “office” that also served as a squat for the homeless Robinson. Business meetings were conducted in the nearby Dublin Castle pub. With an edgy visual identity forged by the graphic artist Barney Bubbles, Stiff set out to put the fun back into record-buying. The modus operandi was to make records quickly and cheaply. Early recordings took place in a primitive north London studio, with Nick Lowe producing and playing most of the instruments. They would be released, usually within weeks, in picture sleeves (rare at the time). You never knew what the next Stiff single would be like — but it wouldn’t be boring.
“Ian Dury’s manager had taken his album around all the major labels,” says Robinson, “but nobody wanted to know. Elvis Costello (under his real name, DP MacManus) had been trying to get a deal for almost as long.” A change of image did the trick: Riviera dubbed the newcomer “Elvis”, and Robinson came up with “Costello”. The final piece in the jigsaw was the big Buddy Holly glasses. He became the first Stiff artist to appear on Top of the Pops, in March 1977 (with Red Shoes), and the first to crack the Top 20 (Watching the Detectives).
The infamous Stiff package tour of Britain in 1977 featured five acts and made stars of Costello and Dury. “It was horrific, a descent into the underworld,” recalls Wreckless Eric. “I have never been on such a debauched tour before or since.” In its wake, Dury scored the label’s first Top 5 hit (What a Waste) and his debut album, New Boots and Panties, took up residence in the charts, staying there for two years. Finally, in January 1979, he claimed Stiff’s first No 1 (Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick). By then, though, Riviera had left the company to set up Radar.
Robinson maintained Stiff’s wacky image over the next few years and enjoyed even greater commercial success. The Pogues started out on Stiff, and Madness embarked on a run of 15 Top 10 hits that made them the most successful British singles band of the 1980s. There followed a string of novelty hits by the likes of Jona Lewie (Stop the Cavalry), Tenpole Tudor (Swords of a Thousand Men), Alvin Stardust (Pretend), and Tracey Ullman (Breakaway, They Don’t Know). But a second Be Stiff tour lost the label a fortune. A third Son of Stiff tour, in Europe, was even more financially disastrous.
Robinson’s ideas ranged from the inspired to the simply daft, such as a compilation of unknown bands from Akron, Ohio, in a rubber-scented scratch’n’sniff sleeve. Another expensive joke was an album entitled The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan, containing a completely blank disc. Little wonder that some Stiff artists say they never made money from their days with the label.
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“I never got royalty statements from three albums and a compilation,” says Wreckless Eric.
“I never got any money from the gigs, either. They just gave me £50 a week.” Scabies tells a similar story. “I remember when we did finally get a statement, it was a piece of paper, hand-scrawled with numbers saying ‘£150,000 miscellaneous damages’. They claimed we owed them that on equipment we had broken.”
When Stiff collapsed in 1986 under the weight of a reported £3.5m debt (a figure Robinson contests), it left a legacy that changed the industry. The indie sector was flourishing and the seeds of rave culture, with its punk-like DIY ethos, had been sown. The indie ethic lives on today with labels such as Domino, home to Franz Ferdinand and Arctic Monkeys.
Many of Stiff’s staff went on to work for major labels. Their general manager, Paul Conroy, moved to Warners, Chrysalis and Virgin. It was another world: “At Warners, I got the biggest shock when I first sat in a budget meeting with spreadsheets,” he recalls. “We never had spreadsheets at Stiff. We never had budgets.”
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BBC4 hosts a Stiff Weekend on Sept 15 and 16, including a two-part documentary, If It Ain’t Stiff... (10pm on both nights)