IF IT ain t Stiff, it ain t worth a fuck. Thus spoke the self-proclaimed Undertakers Of The Industry as they issued a worthy two-fingered salute to the UK s stuffy major record labels and, for a while at least, beat the shit out of them.
Founded 20 years ago, Stiff Records, the creation of Dave Robinson and Jake Riviera was fuelled by the frustration then being experienced by a wealth of acts found largely on London s pub scene. In search of the elusive contract, many could get no further than the plush reception rooms of labels, who were too busy lavishing private planes on glam rockers and saccharine soul singers, to give a second thought to such scruffy undesirables.
On August 14, 1976, Nick Lowe s double A-side So It Goes/Heart Of The City became Stiff Buy1 and set in motion a phenomenon which breathed fresh life into the business. The two-and-a-half-minute single was recorded for #45, just 11.5% of the company s assets. It made single of the week in two music papers, despite the fact that the label had almost no distribution and operated from two rooms at 32 Alexander Street, W2. Other releases followed thick and fast from the Pink Fairies, Roogalator, Tyla Gang, Lew Lewis, The Damned, Richard Hell and Plummet Airlines, as Stiff unveiled the motley crew of artists within its stable. Soon to follow were Ian Dury, Wreckless Eric and Elvis Costello a songwriter Robinson had stumbled upon while running the Hope And Anchor venue.
Elvis Is King it read on the chequered sleeve of My Aim Is True, its release coinciding with the death of his revered namesake. Clutter your home with Stiff Records suggested the Hits Greatest Stiffs compilation, while other mottoes included If They re Dead We ll Sign Em , I m Bored Stiff and The Shape Of Things That Win . Wacky art designer Barney Bubbles, meanwhile, made Stiff the envy of other labels with his picture sleeves and logos.
In 1978 Jake Riviera split from Stiff to form Radar Records, taking with him Costello and Lowe. But Stiff was about to unleash a fresh raggle-taggle roster of artists including Lene Lovich, Jona Lewie, Mickey Jupp and Rachel Sweet. Lovich repaid them the following year with Lucky Number while Lewie later celebrated with his number one Christmas hit Stop The Cavalry .
Other acts however failed to make such an impact, until Madness arrived in 1980, saving the day with a string of top ten singles and albums. At the end of 1983, Dave Robinson was made MD at Island Records and the label went with him. One year later Madness departed for Virgin. Despite some success with the Belle Stars, Tracy Ullman and later The Pogues, Stiff stumbled from Island in 1985 to Trevor Horn s ZTT, before finally becoming dormant. A five CD box set was just released, marking the 20th anniversary of The world s most flexible record label.
What follows is the story of Stiff s glory days as told by some of the people who made it all possible.
Dave Robinson (co-founder): It was Jake Riviera who had the idea for an independent record label. At the time I was managing xm Parker, Ian Dury and various other people, and getting frustrated trying to deal with the major record companies and thinking that maybe I should start some kind of label. Then Jake came back from America having looked at a lot of indie record labels over there and also I had a lot of tapes from the Hope And Anchor and earlier managing situations with all those kind of bands from the dreadfully named pub rock scene. I was thinking of starting a semi-record company/management company. So our two ideas came together. We borrowed #100 from Lee Brilleaux, #100 from a photographer, and maybe also from the manager of Dr Feelgood. They got their money back, I can tell you.
Rat Scabies (drummer, The Damned): I think that (NME journalist) Nick Kent told us about Jake and the whole thing. We knew about their reputation and we went to play at a punk rock festival in the south of France and Jake was there. It was very much a Stiff event with the Tyla Gang, Roogalator, Nick Lowe and the Pink Fairies, and we just met them and Jake offered us a deal then and there.
Alexander Street was two rooms and it was an old shop, so it used to have this giant front window and this secretary used to sit in the window and they would have posters up. In the back room Jake and Dave sat at desks opposite each other. It had a good vibe about it. We d had our first review in Sounds and it was very bad, they really slated the band, and Jake had it blown up to six feet high, poster size and stuck it on the wall. Some places would turn anything into a cardboard cut-out for a fiver and so he used to get odd things made up to giant size.
Stiff always had great ideas to promote/exploit things. They did this EP with the name Richard Hell written in broken razor blades and Jake got the artist to put Gillette on them and then rang Gillette and got a year s free supply of razor blades. A lot of the ideas came from Jake sitting around drinking cider.
Alan Cowderov (General Manager): I was working at Phonogram at the time running the Vertigo label and Dave was managing Graham Parker and The Rumour and I was looking after them. He kept leaving in these singles that Stiff were putting out the Pink Fairies and Nick Lowe and I really liked the whole style of the thing. They were getting ready to put out the first album and said We really need somebody to come and help us, why don t you come over. So I gave up my company car, my pension plan and my expenses, and went over there and sat on a hard wooden seat and worked off an old trestle table.
I remember someone saying that they didn t have any seats and Dave said I ve got an idea and he rushed off to some recycling place at the airport and came back with four aircraft seats attached to each other and shoved them in the corner and said people could sit there. I think he picked them up for a fiver or something. After that, people could sit in business class in the office.
Rat Scabies: Where Stiff had the edge over everybody else was that they had a suss about them. It was like a band. It got together this really cool image which went for a collectors market. It deliberately made mistakes on record sleeves. Like on ours, they put a picture of Eddie and the Hot Rods on the back cover instead of us. They did that for the first 2,000 knowing that after it sold out it would be recouped. So they did it specifically as a marketing ploy to pretty much cover the cost of making the album (Damned, Damned, Damned), probably about #600 or something.
We suddenly found ourselves in the charts with New Rose and Stiff couldn t keep up with the distribution and the orders and so they had to do a one-off deal with United Artists to release it. It was a classic Damned mistake really, because it then meant that all our sales of course vanished. Nobody could buy the record and by the time they had it in the shops it was a bit too late. But it was also the point where everybody went: perhaps these blokes have got something .
Ian Dury: Stiff started downstairs from Blackhill Enterprises who were managing me and I knew Dave anyway for years and years. His overcoat is probably still hanging in my wardrobe. He always talked of starting a record company with Jake, because he knew that him and Jake would be able to do that, but I think Jake always intended it to be a year s thing and then take Elvis away to a bigger record company. I had finished making New Boots And Panties and Andrew King my manager took it to every major record company and they all said no. So I said Well take it downstairs then, because at least those guys have got some life.
The first Stiff tour was based on another tour involving Jake Riviera called the Naughty Rhythms Tour about three years before that with Dr Feelgood, Kokomo and Chili Willi and The Red Hot Pepper, which was Jake s band. The idea was that we alternated, we went on first and then went on last and so on, but after about a fortnight of that it was more that Elvis or me that went on last or second to last and Eric or Nick went on first or second. If me and the Blockheads went on before Wreckless Eric, we d wipe him out. That was Nick Lowe s idea. It used to end up with everybody on stage for Sex And Drugs And Rock N Roll , with certain reluctance in certain areas. There was a bit of friction, but there weren t any fights. There were various kind of lifestyles being represented.
I ve got a home movie of it actually Robinson got it filmed. It s never come out and it never will come out. There are some very funny scenes in it. I have got fond memories of it for lots of reasons. If there was a power cut or the PA didn t work, there were three drum sets lined up on the stage and all three drummers from the different groups went out and did this massive three-part drum solo.

Dave Robinson: The idea of Stiff was to be a conduit for people who could not find a way into the music business any other way. My theory was that there s an Elvis Presley out there, but he s working in a factory in Coventry and he doesn t know how to get in touch with me. The best artists are out there, but they don t know how to connect with the music business, because it doesn t tell you how.
My particular theory is that songwriters are the key. If you look at all the people we signed for various reasons, you will find songwriters whose songs were covered. An awful lot of Lene Lovich s songs were covered and Wreckless has had several covers. Jona Lewie, being the oddest bloke on the block, had like 56 covers of Stop The Cavalry in Germany alone. It must be in the Guinness Book Of Records. That song is still supporting him.
Elvis Costello went to every single major in town before he came to us, but he was on my list anyway so it didn t really matter in my book. He was Declan MacManus then and he was in a band called Flip City . I booked them at the Hope And Anchor and recorded, I think, 26 tracks with him personally singing. I found the tapes and gave them to Elvis after he made his third album. He had left Stiff by then so I gave them to him as a present and I noticed that on the next few albums some of the songs turned up.

Norman Watt-Rov (The Blockheads): The hardest time was when Wreckless was directly on before the Blockheads and Ian, who drummed for Wreckless, had to rush off, change and come back on again to front the Blockheads.
Dave Robinson: Everyone at Stiff was connected in certain ways, but Wreckless Eric was not. He fell in the door drunk one day. He had come from the suburbs somewhere with a tape, but he was very nervous and got pissed and literally fell over the doorstep into the room. It was kind of bizarre. He was incoherent and he s got a funny accent anyway. So when he left we said Oh my God, what was that? . But then Nick Lowe took the tape and put it on and heard Whole Wild World and we all went Good song, where s he gone? .
The slogan If It Ain t Stiff, It Ain t Worth A Fuck came from a drunken drummer from one of the bands and I think we gave him quite a bit of money at some point. It happened in the Kennington bar and Jake and I were both arguing at the bar and this drunken drummer came up to us and said This Stiff thing isn t worth a fuck , so we wrote it down. It was very important. We spent a lot of money on promoting, but the idea was attitude.
Marketing meetings in record companies used to happen on Tuesdays and you wouldn t get anyone in the majors from 10am until 3pm. All they were talking about was What are Stiff doing this week? What are they up to? I mean, they can t do this? It s ridiculous how can they spend this money? But every week we were doing something. We were saying Give up smoking, give us your money . We were saying Fuck you really. And the groups were asking why couldn t they have advertising like that, so everybody was irritated. Why haven t we got picture bags on our singles, we re selling thousands of records?
Charlie Gillet (disc jockey): I wanted to start a label, because there was quite a lot of stuff I was playing on the radio which you couldn t get hold of. The whole idea was to form this collective called the Oval Exiles and to take them around to three or four companies. Dave Robinson, who had rung me and said he liked the stuff I was playing on the show, listened politely to all the stuff on the tape, but only did he light up when he heard Lene Lovich s I Think We re Alone Now he said: We want to put it out next month . But I told him that we didn t even have a B-side. He told us to get it done and we had to call Lene up and she wrote Lucky Number overnight as the B-side. Even before it came out Dave said he wanted an album and he wanted her on the tour and the whole thing was instant. Within a year we were in the charts with Lucky Number which was completely re-recorded for the album.
Jona Lewie: One of the gigs that we did was in Wick, which is like the northernmost town of Scotland, ten miles from nowhere and we played in Wick Town Hall with about 15 of the local inhabitants there, from a village of about 40 people, and it went down really well. Some of the gigs were quite large. I mean the last gig in London was the Lyceum, and after the same tour we finished up at the Bottom Line in New York and did about five nights, playing twice each night.
Stop The Cavalry was one of many songs in the bag, because I had started writing some years before I had joined Stiff. I was doling lots and lots of demos and I came into Dave s office with a demo of it, along with lots of other tracks. Initially the response was slightly lukewarm, because it was seen as an anti-war song.
So I went away and did a proper demo of it on my eight-track, because the first one was just vocal and piano. I had cashed in my endowment insurance, because I was desperate for some gear to do decent demos. When I went back in he said That s good, let s do it and then I asked Stiff Records if we could use a brass band as well and that s how it came about.

Lene Lovich: Myself and my partner Les Chappell, who played guitar, did a few demos and I think we did a version of I Think We re Alone Now . That was taken to Stiff Records by Charlie and fortunately once again Stiff Records were in a state of reforming, having just had a big shake-up with Jake Riviera going off to form Radar. I think they were looking for artists and I seem to remember they were specifically looking for girls. So I just walked through the door at the right time.
It was an overwhelmingly good feeling to be involved in the train tour, which was the second Stiff tour. It was a unique experience to travel in luxury and stay at these big old railway hotels. To suddenly arrive at these hotels with at least 60 other people, it was completely your world and you overtook these places. There was a feeling of solidarity among all the artists because it was a great experience. I had never been a front singer, I played the saxophone. There were about six bands on the tour, each of whom had a record. We only had to play for about 20 minutes, so we could put all our best songs forward, and at first Dave Robinson would not let anyone close the show except for Mickey Jupp and Wreckless Eric and there was a lot of whisky around. So we found out that there was nothing to be gained by closing the show, because you either got completely pissed or got the last bus home, so it tended to be quite a heavy evening.
Lee Thompson (saxophone player, Madness): At the time we were going around these big record companies like Magnet and Virgin and getting big meals off them and they were offering us this and that. But there was something smarmy about it, they wanted us to just sign here, now, whereas Dave Robinson wouldn t take us out for a big meal, he took us out for a packet of crisps and a bottle of Guinness and he said: It s quite simple, you re going to go in, make records, I m going to pay for it and you ll have artistic control and so it was very easy-going.
We had played at Dave s wedding at the Clarendon Ballroom in Hammersmith. All the boys were there, the Blockheads, Costello, Lene Lovich, Nick Lowe, Wreckless and all, and we were asked to go along and get up on stage. I remember a few of the boys grabbing hold of Elvis Costello in a bumps-type position and dragging him up on stage to have a sing-song and he was very embarrassed. By the way, Dave still hasn t paid us for the wedding. He just gave us a bit of cake. n