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company in my mind anyway. Nowadays I’d like to think I would have turned him down a second time and that would have been the end of it, but I took it on. What I didn’t do was I didn’t do any due diligence. Cos Island was a bigger record label than Stiff, on the cards anyway. And it turned out they were totally broke. And I didn’t know that.” Robinson soon discovered that he’d have to lend Island £1 million from Stiff’s coffers to cover the deal. “At that time I really should have said, ‘Look, you’ve sold me a bit of a pup,’ and that’s the end of it. But I stayed with it, and they had their most successful year ever with the Legend album, which was something I really wanted to do. That was part of the reason I went there, I’m a big Bob Marley fan. And U2 – an Irish band whom I originally sent to Island in the first place – there was an opportunity. The thing about Island at the time was they didn’t follow up. They didn’t have the money and they didn’t have the attitude. They were kind of like a flaccid major, and they didn’t promote anything. They had a big staff. They had a lot of potted plants in the place that I got rid of pretty damned quick. So that year, we did £56 million. They’d never seen that type of money. They paid all their debts off. But in order to do that, I had to concentrate on that label big time. “ By the time Madness departed the scene to sign with Virgin they had scored 18 Top 20 hits as well as six Top Ten albums. Stiff was left with Tracey Ulman and Kirsty MacColl (who would soon depart to Polydor) and little else. “Having had a run of singles in the Top 40, there was a time when we weren’t notching up the same success rate,” recalls Cowderoy. “I don’t think Dave’s eye was on the ball at that point.” Robinson would re-establish full control of Stiff in 1985, piloting its return to independent status. At which time he signed the last of the ‘great’ Stiff acts, The Pogues. “Oh, Shane is phenomenal,” he recounts. “There’s no doubt that he was fantastic. But, unfortunately, I led him to Frank Murray to be his manager, which was really a bad decision. Frank
was out of work and I knew his wife, and he needed something to do. And he did add musically to the band, I think getting [former Steeleye Span multi-instrumentalist] Terry Woods in was a very inspired idea. But Frank, generally, I don’t think was the right kind of person. I’d kind of forgotten he was Phil Lynott’s tour manager – and that should have spoken volumes to me. But with Shane being such a delicate little flower – early on we were kind of controlling his drinking. He wasn’t NOT drinking, but he was doing it in a controlled way, we had a grip on it. But as soon as Frank took over, he wanted to get between the record company and the artist, like a true idiot manager. And taking Shane down to the pub was now in some way a managerial duty, and that was really fatal.” Despite significant success with The Pogues over the next 18 months, and a breakthrough with Furniture’s ‘Brilliant Mind’ that they were unable to capitalise on it. The Mint Juleps’ ‘Girl to the Power of 6’ (BUY263) closed an illustrious era and Stiff collapsed in 1987 with debts of £1.4 million (that figure varies with different accounts). The label’s masters were purchased by ZTT, one of the labels Robinson had helped establish at Island. “It was unfortunate,” laments Cowderoy, “we tried to make things happen in a different way. But it did survive and we carried on and we had The Pogues. The ship kept sailing but in the end it sank. It ended up in the arms of Trevor Horn and Jill Sinclair. I wasn’t there at the time, but he continued to spend money. And at a certain point Jill just said, ‘I don’t want to spend any more money’ and they took over the company and Dave was gone.” Stiff was revived in 2006 (without Robinson or Riviera’s involvement) with the signing of The Enemy. “We’ve managed the catalogue for quite a long time,” reveals Pete Gardiner. “It was acquired by Trevor Horn and Jill Sinclair at the end of the eighties because of a tie-up they had with Stiff at the time. We just ran it as a catalogue concern. But at the beginning of 2006 I met someone from the BBC and I pitched the idea of a documentary, just to give us a bit of catalogue profile, to be
honest. The BBC ended up producing that documentary [If It Ain’t Stiff]. As we were doing it, we realised there was still interest and quite a lot of awareness of the brand. So we thought, why don’t we do some lowkey bits and pieces, in the original manner of the label? We had an A&R guy that worked on the publishing side that went to Warners and came up with this band, The Enemy. So we did the first couple of singles. Suddenly we had more and more interest and people contacting us. So we just thought, ‘this is a good chance now. And it’s something we can manage.’ It’s being run as a relative cottage industry, if you like – we’re not heading for the big time with this one, unless something gathers its own momentum.” The four-CD Big Stiff Box Set provides you with an excellent soundtrack and overview for the story outlined above. I have a bunch of personal favourites, aside from the obvious (singalong-a-Costello/Dury/ Wreckless Eric etc). There’s Ruefrex’s mighty ‘Wild Colonial Boy’ – a fantastically brave denunciation of US-sponsored terrorism in the Troubles, ‘The Lost Platoon’ by the Dancing Did (the greatest ‘lost’ band ever?). Kirsty MacColl’s voice still carries more emotive power than just about any other female vocalist on the block. Department S’s genius ‘Going Left Right’ sits alongside reggae and music hall – the latter two traditions neatly embraced by Madness’s still stellar ‘One Step Beyond’. I must confess, also, to soft spots for Jona Lewie’s quirky pop and the exuberance of both Tenpole Tudor and even the Plasmatics (for services to gaffer tape alone). But really, this is a pick ‘n’ mix job and wherever you find yourself amid the near 100 tracks on offer, you won’t be that far away from a classic.