Origin Story · Volume 18

POST-PUNK & NEW WAVE

The Permission Kept, the Sound Thrown Away, 1978–1984

Where it sits on the century

19151978–19842030

$14.99Paperback
about 122 pages

$13.49 each from three copies, $11.49 from sixteen, and $299.00 for all thirty-one with every ebook and audiobook included. Postage is free on every order over $79.

It is also about the strangest inversion in pop history: the people who had just won the right to make loud fast guitar records almost immediately stopped wanting to. The permission was kept; the sound was thrown away. Dub engineering arrived through the wall from the reggae shops. The synthesiser, a rich man’s toy in 1975, became the poverty option. Drum machines were chosen because they sounded dead. One of the era’s great albums is quieter than most conversations.

The money is taken seriously throughout, because the people in it took it seriously: the fifty-fifty profit split and what it actually paid against a major’s royalty; the economics of a label with no advance to offer, and the state subsidies that quietly stood in; sale-or-return, and why in this economy success was more dangerous than failure; the independent chart whose eligibility rule was the pipes, not the politics; the majors’ patient response — buy the acts, license the labels — and the failure mode built in from the first invoice, when a distributor’s collapse takes its labels down with it.

It ends in 1984: the network in its first full crisis, the sound absorbed into the mainstream through a television channel that needed videos, and the word indie completing its drift from a description of plumbing to the name of a guitar sound.

Contains no song lyrics. Not one line. That is a deliberate rule, explained on the first page, and what replaces it is a description of what these records actually sound like — the bass carrying the melody while the guitar interjects, the silence used as an instrument, the drum machine’s deadness chosen on purpose.

Format: Paperback
Trim: 5.5 × 8.5 in
Pages: about 122
Chapters: 25 in five movements
Period: 1978–1984
Audiobook: 2h 58m

The playlist

ORIGIN STORY: Post-Punk & New Wave — public, and sequenced to the order the records appear in Movement Three. The book describes them; the playlist plays them.

Volume 17
PUNKthe demonstration this book inherits: the doors were never locked→Volume 20
SYNTH-POPwhere the absorbed half of this story went: the cheap synthesiser, the video, and America by television→Volume 21
HOUSE & TECHNOwhere the dance floor half went: Chicago and Detroit build the method again from parts, and a half-empty club in Manchester finally fills→

Free to read · the opening

How volume 18 starts.

Origin Story · Volume 18 · POST-PUNK & NEW WAVEIntroduction

The Unfinished Machine

Somewhere in Britain in the summer of 1978 there is a room with several thousand seven-inch singles in it, in boxes, and no way of getting them to anybody.

Nobody photographed it, because it is the least romantic object in the history of British popular music, and every account of the period walks straight past it on the way to the clothes. It is where this book starts, because it is the problem the next six years were spent solving, and solving it produced a machine that outlasted every band in these pages.

How the room filled up is quickly told. Punk had been a demonstration rather than a genre: proof, in the form of objects you could hold, that a band could record itself for a few hundred pounds, press its own single, and reach listeners without a record company approving anything. By 1978 the demonstration was over and it had worked too well. Britain had hundreds of independent labels and thousands of self-released singles, and almost no way to move them. A record shop in Newcastle had no mechanism for stocking a single pressed in Bristol. The distributors who supplied the nation’s shops worked for the major companies, dealt in volume, and had no interest in a box of two hundred records from a label that might not exist next month. The permission to make a record had been won. The plumbing to deliver one had not been built.

A thousand singles nobody can find is not a revolution. It is a storage cost.

The introduction runs on for another 9 paragraphs, and then the book starts. 25 chapters · about 122 pages · $14.99

Contents

25 chapters, five movements.

Every volume in the series runs the same five, in this order. What each movement is for.

01The Room4 chapters

1The Club Night That Lost Money
2The City That Skipped Punk
3The Shop Becomes the Post Office
4A Federation of Provinces

02The Machine5 chapters

5What Distribution Actually Is
6The Cartel
7The Manufacture-and-Distribution Deal
8Sale-or-Return, or The Cash-Flow Machine
9The New Instruments Were Cheap

03The Records6 chapters

101978. The Sound Thrown Away
111979. Space Instead of Speed
121980. The Quiet Turn
131981–1984. What the Network Carried
14The Canon Dropped
15Three Records That Failed

04The Money6 chapters

16Fifty-Fifty, and What It Actually Paid
17The Economics of No Advance
18The Chart That Measured the Pipes
19The Majors’ Response. Buy the Acts
20What a Post-Punk Record Actually Earned
21When the Bank Fails

05The Ending4 chapters

22What Exhausted It
23Where It Went
24What the Story Leaves Out
25The Pipes Held

Free to read · reference

POST-PUNK & NEW WAVE: the dates.

The book’s own timeline, in full and free to quote. 27 entries, 1978–1984. Where a date is contested the book says so at the point it appears; these are the ones that are not in serious dispute. All thirty-one timelines on one page.

1978

January, the Sex Pistols end in San Francisco. Within months, Public Image Ltd forms around John Lydon, Keith Levene and Jah Wobble.
Early in the year. Daniel Miller records and self-releases the Normal’s only single, founding Mute in the process. The Human League’s first single, their demo in effect, appears on Fast Product in June.
May, the Factory club nights begin at the Russell Club, Hulme; Peter Saville’s poster is famously late.
October, the Public Image single reaches the British top ten. Gang of Four’s Damaged Goods EP appears on Fast Product. Scritti Politti’s itemised-sleeve debut follows on St Pancras/Rough Trade.
December. Factory’s first record, a double seven-inch sampler, with Martin Hannett producing Joy Division’s contributions.

1979

June, Unknown Pleasures, recorded in April at Strawberry Studios for a sum Wilson always gave as around eight and a half thousand pounds.
August, Bela Lugosi’s Dead, on Small Wonder: nine and a half minutes, recorded in one session by the band’s account.
September, Entertainment!, on EMI, by explicit argument. Cut, carried over from the previous volume, is in the shops.
November, Metal Box, three twelve-inch discs in a film canister. The Raincoats and Delta 5’s Mind Your Own Business on Rough Trade.

1980

January, the trade press begins publishing a weekly independent chart; the first number one is usually given as Spizzenergi’s science-fiction novelty.
February, Colossal Youth, Young Marble Giants, on Rough Trade. Postcard Records begins in a Glasgow flat with Orange Juice’s first single.
18 May. Ian Curtis takes his own life, aged twenty-three, on the eve of Joy Division’s American tour.
July, Closer reaches the British top ten. The surviving members will become New Order.
October, Remain in Light. The Human League split; the founders leave to form Heaven 17, and the remade band recruits two teenagers from a Sheffield disco.

1981

June, Ghost Town reaches number one as English cities burn; the Specials split at their peak within weeks.
August. MTV launches in America with a library disproportionately full of British videos. ESG’s Hannett-recorded EP moves between 99 Records and Factory’s orbit.
September, Just Can’t Get Enough and then Speak & Spell go top ten on Mute, on a handshake. Soft Cell’s northern-soul cover reaches number one. Dare follows in October and wins Christmas.

1982

May, the Haçienda, FAC 51, opens in Manchester, funded by Factory and New Order’s royalties, and begins losing money with historic consistency.
Through the year. Rough Trade hits its cash crisis: layoffs, the shop separated, the collective structure giving way to management. Postcard Records closes; Orange Juice are already on Polydor.

1983

March, Blue Monday, FAC 73, in the die-cut sleeve; it stays on the chart most of the year and becomes, by the industry’s unaudited custom, the best-selling twelve-inch of all time.
April. R.E.M.'s Murmur: college radio’s economy has its flagship. The Enterprise Allowance Scheme goes national at forty pounds a week and begins quietly funding British bands and labels.
May, the Smiths’ first single on Rough Trade; a written contract, the handshake era closing as the sums grow.
November, This Charming Man and the gladioli on television.

1984

January. Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s banned debut single reaches number one for ZTT: the anti-rockist argument, now a marketing campaign, owns the year.
February, The Smiths reaches number two: the network’s chart high-water mark, and the season the word indie completes its drift from plumbing to sound.
Summer. Pinnacle, the network’s biggest commercial distributor, goes into receivership; its labels learn what unsecured credit means. The absorption is general: the trade press is full of British synthesiser pop conquering America by video.
By year’s end, in Chicago, the first house records are being pressed on labels that did not exist a year earlier. The machine is about to get its second life.

Free to read · where it comes from

The sources.

This series is written from published material and its byline claims method rather than credentials, so the sources are listed. They are given as books and categories of material rather than page citations; where a claim in the text is contested, the text says so at the point of the claim.

The period’s standard history. Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984, Simon Reynolds, the fullest account of the period and the book that consolidated its name and its dates; this volume’s span matches its subtitle because the periodisation has become standard, and the debt is acknowledged here rather than disguised. Its interview companion, Totally Wired, carries the participants’ own tellings at length, including Bob Last, Green Gartside and the Sheffield circle.

The independent economy. Document and Eyewitness: An Intimate History of Rough Trade, Neil Taylor, and Rough Trade (Labels Unlimited), Rob Young, the shop, the label, the collective, the 1982 crisis. How Soon Is Now? The Madmen and Mavericks Who Made Independent Music 1975–2005, Richard King, the fullest published account of the Cartel, the distribution deals and the cash-flow mechanics, and the source most relied on for the machine movement’s trade detail. Independence Days: The Story of UK Independent Record Labels, Alex Ogg, for the label ecology.

Factory and Manchester. Peter Hook, Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division and The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club; Bernard Sumner, Chapter and Verse; Deborah Curtis, Touching from a Distance, all interested accounts, read as such. Tony Wilson’s own book 24 Hour Party People is a self-mythologising entertainment and is used here only as evidence of what Wilson liked to claim, a category this book has been careful to label.

The bands and scenes. Memoirs and band histories consulted include Viv Albertine’s (carried over from the previous volume), Gina Birch and Ana da Silva’s interviews on the Raincoats, published interviews with Daniel Miller on Mute’s deals, with Jerry Dammers on the 2 Tone arrangement, with Andy Gill and Jon King on the EMI contract, and the extensive interview literature on the Human League’s split and settlement. For New York: Marc Masters, No Wave, and Tim Lawrence, Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–1983, for 99 Records, ESG and Liquid Liquid, including the lawsuit’s course.

The music press of the period (NME, Sounds, Melody Maker and Record Mirror, weekly, 1978–1984) for release dates, reviews, the anti-rockist argument in real time, and the letters pages; the trade papers Music Week and Record Business for the independent chart’s launch, its eligibility rule and the distribution trade’s reporting, including the Pinnacle receivership.

For chart positions and release dates, the Official Charts Company (UK) and Billboard (US) archives.

On the business mechanics, the same foundation as the previous volume (standard music-business texts, Donald Passman’s above all, adjusted for the period) plus the deal descriptions given by participants in the sources above. All specific percentages and worked ledgers in the money movement are illustrative shapes built from participants’ cited figures, and are labelled as such where they appear.

Where figures are disputed (the cost of Unknown Pleasures, the Blue Monday sleeve economics, the Human League settlement’s terms, the size of the Sex Pistols-era advances this book inherits from its predecessor, the sales totals of records the independent sector never fully audited) the text says so rather than choosing. Those disagreements are not gaps in the record. They are the record.

What this book does not do

A page of terms, and then the least glamorous machine in this series.

This book quotes no song lyrics. Not one line, not one phrase, not the famous bit. That is a deliberate rule and it is absolute: lyrics are owned, licensing them is negotiated song by song and publisher by publisher, and there is no safe word count: the copyright office says so in as many words. So this book quotes none, and does the harder and more interesting thing instead, which is to tell you what a record actually sounds like and what its words are about. For the music in this volume that trade is unusually favourable, because post-punk is the period when the sound itself (the space, the bass, the machines, the absences) became the argument.

It reproduces no album art and no photographs, which for this period is a genuine sacrifice, and the book will tell you why at the point it hurts.

And it cannot play you a record. What it can do is point. There is a playlist for this book, on the same app you may well be reading or listening on, sequenced to the order the records appear in these pages. It is called ORIGIN STORY: Post-Punk & New Wave. Search for it by name. Everything described in Movement Three is on it, in order, and the book is substantially better with it running.

One more thing. This is the eighteenth volume of a series, and it is the direct sequel to the seventeenth, which told the story of punk and ended with an argument: that punk’s lasting invention was not a sound or an attitude but a method, and that the method’s unfinished business was distribution. You do not need to have read that book. Everything you need from it is restated here in the places it is needed. But the two books are one story told across ten years, and they are better together.

Where the record is contested, this book says so. Where it does not know, it says that too. Sources are listed at the back.

Shelved under

MUSIC / History & Criticism · MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Rock · MUSIC / Business Aspects

Identifiers

Ebook ISBN: 979-8-90623-907-5
Audiobook ISBN: 979-8-90623-908-2
Paperback ISBN: not yet issued

Buy it

Paperback, $14.99, posted direct. Every ebook and audiobook comes free with the complete set.

Questions

About this volume.

What is Origin Story volume 18 about?

The Permission Kept, the Sound Thrown Away, 1978–1984. Punk proved that anybody could make a record — the previous volume of this series showed the invoices. What punk never solved is how a record gets from a pressing plant in Bristol to a shop in Newcastle without a major label’s sales force. This book is about the people who solved it: the shops that became wholesalers, the wholesalers that became a national network with a joke name — the Cartel — and the manufacture-and-distribution deal that made a label out of anyone with a tape and a telephone.

What years does POST-PUNK & NEW WAVE cover?

1978–1984. The volume is numbered 18 because that is where the genre sits in the chronology of the music, not the order the books were written in — the first three written were volumes 17, 19 and 21.

What made POST-PUNK & NEW WAVE possible?

The independent distribution network. Movement Two of every volume is about the technology that made the genre possible and would not have ten years earlier.

Are there song lyrics in it?

None. Not one line, in this volume or in any of the thirty-one. Lyrics are copyrighted expression, licensing is negotiated song by song and publisher by publisher, and there is no safe quantity — so the rule is zero, and a program checks the manuscript, the EPUB and the narration script against it before the volume ships. What replaces them is a description of what the record actually sounds like, what it cost, and who was paid.

How long is it?

About 29,500 words: 25 chapters across five movements, roughly 125 minutes’ reading, 122 pages in the paperback. The audiobook runs 2h 58m.

What is in the back of the book?

A dated timeline of 27 entries, a source list, and a note on what the volume does not do. All three are reproduced free on this page.

Can I buy POST-PUNK & NEW WAVE in print?

Yes, here. It is a 5.5 × 8.5 in paperback, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, about 122 pages, and it never goes out of print.