Friday night saw Churchill College, Cambridge invite back one of its more famous graduates in Geoff Travis, founder of the still-going-strong Rough Trade record label. An amiable and approachable fellow, Travis needed little encouragement to divulge over a riveting hour in what made him set up the label and shops in the first place, the fine balance between staying afloat without selling out, and the importance of always looking forward, never back.Having freshly graduated from Churchill, Travis went into teaching, a career he became quickly disillusioned with. One day he made a "roll of the dice" decision whilst he was waiting for the bus: if it didn't arrive on time, he would fly out to Canada to try and track down an old flame. Sure enough, next day he was on the other side of the Atlantic, and over his travels across North America he collected a pile of hard-to-find records. This, along with the records his brother had brought back to the UK from his overseas travels, meant that when Travis returned to London around the break of punk, he was in the right place at the right time and with the right resources to set up a record shop. The rest, as they say, is history.
Travis went on to speak about the importance of which artists he brought onto Rough Trade. "Trophy" artists - those with big hits in the past but had become bereft of creativity- were and remain a no-no. Only artists that Travis and his business partner Jeanette Lee believe have their best days ahead of them get a consideration. Travis stated that nostalgia is generally a bad thing: bands which reform to sell-out gigs are often a shadow of their former selves (he cited a Velvet Underground performance as an example) and ultimately take attention and ticket sales away from up and coming talent.
Even the most sincere independent record label has to have a degree of commercial sensibility, in order to survive and Rough Trade is no exception: let's face it, they've had their ups and downs over the years with losing and subsequently regaining their independent status. Travis recalled how he quickly lost the Go-Betweens from the label when he told them, in the nicest terms possible, that whilst he liked their forthcoming single at the time, he didn't see it being a hit. But he believes that writing hits should be an organic process: the best and most sellable form of art should not be that which you make purely with commercial success in mind, but that which you like so much you find it very hard to part with. He also vented his frustrations over Radio 1, and its failure to serve the nation with the likes of Arcade Fire, Sufjan Stevens and British Sea Power, artists that he quite rightly sees as having serious hit potential.
With regards to the influence of the internet and the days of digital downloading and P2P, Travis feels that ultimately the artist should be allowed to profit from their own work. But far from an industry-killing beast, he said that the internet can only be a good thing for music, giving fresh acts the kind of exposure they would surely have never received a decade ago, even if it now means that labels such as Rough Trade have to be that much quicker off the mark in signing them.
Looking at the Rough Trade roster now, which includes the aforementioned Arcade Fire, BSP and Sufjan Stevens, as well as the Strokes, the Fiery Furnaces, Belle & Sebastian and many more, its pleasing to see an old school independent label still packing a commercial and creative clout, and having seen that Travis has lost none of his vision or his ideals, it provides some hope that the music industry isn't as ailing as it makes itself out to be.
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