Issue 44 / May 2014

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16 Bido Lito! May 2014 100 CUTS FROM THE VIPER Words: Edgar Jones Sleeves courtesy of The Viper Label bidolito.co.uk THE VIPER LABEL have been issuing unique cuts of rock ‘n’ roll, early US garage and Liverpool’s cult underground for the past fifteen years. Founded by two former La’s – Mike Badger and Paul Hemmings – the label acts as a distillation of Liverpool at its most oddball, obsessive, idiosyncratic best. This month, the label spawns Viper 100, a compilation featuring some of the standout moments taken from their amassed century of releases. So, we asked the fantastic EDGAR JONES, one of the imprint’s most prodigious and prolific talents, to interview Mike and Paul about the label and their journey through a ton of records... Edgar Jones: Why did you start the label then? Mike Badger: Well, I had some acoustic songs. I was just playing and Paul said ‘Why don't we release them?’ and it was as easy as that, really. Paul Hemmings: Yeah, in about 1985 or 1986 I had the idea of doing a label. I always liked the Postcard [Records] label, the Scottish thing. I liked the original La's recordings and I was actually thinking of releasing them. I'm glad I didn't. EJ: That could have been a complete fork in the road and everything could have changed at that time, couldn't it? PH: I'm glad I didn't because I probably would have been in and out of studios for the next fifteen years; instead I got sidetracked by joining the band and then, after that, doing the Lightning Seeds. It reached the point where I'd probably achieved what I really wanted to with that band and I thought that I'd really like to form a label, so I asked Mike if he had any acoustic songs. We went into the studio and recorded them. I put the idea round to a few people who I knew and they said they'd love to do it and I thought 'Well, why not do it ourselves?' EJ: Ah, OK. I didn't realise the beginning of it myself. This was Viper 001, the Mike Badger record? PH: The Mike Badger album [Volume], which got called a sort of ‘happy Leonard Cohen record’, which is what I like to think it was. From there, we thought 'Well, that's OK' and it was reviewed everywhere, like The Guardian… MB: It was also helpful that it was the first thing that I'd done as a solo thing. When it's your first thing you've done since your band, people are more interested in it because it's like 'Oh, well this is what this guy's been up to', you know? After that, once we'd done one, that was a template. Once we understood design, distribution, mastering and production, you can let the music drive it. After that, I had all The La's original tapes. I didn't want to release the stuff that Lee [Mavers] had essentially written and that I'd worked on with him; they were Lee's songs, you know? But there was all this other stuff that was a bit more experimental, a bit more punk, a bit more rock and roll-y. EJ: It was generally a bit earlier as well, wasn't it? MB: Well, going from 1984 to 1986, some of it was in the set. We were always doing Break Loose and Open Your Heart and all that kind of stuff, so there was a whole body of work there that had never been out. PH: You're missing an important point there: there was six months with Lee working on that as well. MB: Well, the thing is we were like 'Let's do the right thing', but we may as well have said 'Let's cause a fucking big problem for ourselves, how big's the spanner you've got to stick in the fucking machine?' 'cos obviously, y'know, with Lee's fucking psychosis… PH: But then afterwards when it was done properly and it was all analogue, Lee actually loved it. MB: He hated it at the time because somebody actually dared to do something, but you can't apply logic to psychosis, you know? PH: The next one, which was Shack Accompany Arthur Lee Live In Liverpool, that was interesting because I read about Arthur Lee being in prison and then going down to HMV in Liverpool and seeing a bootleg and thinking it wasn't right. I suddenly realised I had a map of America and I found out the prison he was in, so I looked up the state zip code and I wrote him a letter not expecting to get a reply. MB: What's more, the day the record was going to manufacture we got his sleeve notes, and if it had have been one day later we wouldn't have been able to include his sleeve notes for it. EJ: Was it written on prison paper and all that? That would have been a nice touch. MB: [Laughs] I don't think so, it was typed on a big old typewriter. Arthur wrote the introduction and he said it was the best gig of his life because he loves Liverpool. When he was in prison, they gave him the booklet but they didn't give him the record, so he was poring over the Viper booklet in California or wherever he was, but he didn't get to hear it until he after was released. PH: It then just carried on from there and, if my memory's correct, up until Viper 10, a lot of them were Liverpool releases but then we realised we were listening to other music and it couldn't just be Liverpool releases, it had to diversify a bit, and it was then we were talking to the designer Steve Hardstaff about all the rockabilly and the blues. A lot of German labels had done this stuff but they'd forgotten that people had to listen to it. EJ: They were very pragmatic as well, you know, all the tracks were in order or they wouldn’t be a compilation of artists, they'll just be one and it'll be a bit soulless to listen to and that sort
Bido Lito! May 2014 17 of thing... PH: Yeah, and you know what it's like, you listen to different types of music: blues, soul, jazz. It was great putting that all together with Steve Hardstaff and those amazing ink-drawn covers. MB: That goes back to the Jukebox at Eric's album in 1981, which was loved by big massive music lovers. It's just brilliant because it's full of crazy off-its-head sci-fi western swing, dirty garage and r'n'b from the early-60s and late-50s, which was all crazy rock and roll and all that kind of stuff, and Steve's exquisite drawing. That, really, was a template in many ways for the first compilation which was The Ultimate 50s Rockin’ Sci-Fi Disc. There was an awful lot of sci-fi-related rockabilly and rhythm and blues because it was all in the 50s, which coincided with the space race. We themed it, instead of just banging out a compilation with loads of stuff on. If we wouldn't listen to it, how could we expect anybody else to listen to it? No fillers. EJ: That's kind of where I came on board, wasn't it? I gave you that song in Dovedale playground and I'd just like to add at this moment that Yoko Ono had nothing to do with it… MB: [Laughs] I'll never forget, because you gave us a tape and I took it back and put it in the tape machine, because it was still tapes then, and I just thought 'Alright, this must be a track to go on a compilation' and then I realised it was you. It was so authentic and so fucking real. There was about five tracks and we absolutely loved it and then you came on board and that was the start of how many, five or six albums? PH: Considering Liverpool is such a musical city I don't understand why people haven't done this before: documented some of the label stuff like the older Merseybeat recordings, to the 70s, 80s and 90s. It was Spencer Leigh who suggested doing the Merseybeat stuff, which should have been done a long time ago. We found the earliest known Merseybeat recording, I think about 1957, which was Johnny Guitar doing a Little Richard song. A lot of those tapes that we listened to from the 60s sounded very similar, in ways, to a lot of the stuff that bands like The Coral were doing. You can see the similarities. Liverpool punk scene and the post-punk scene and then Spencer Leigh called about the Merseybeat, but I was quite dismissive of Spencer. He said ‘Oh, I've got the biggest Merseybeat collection’ and I scoffed a bit at it thinking, you know, old fellas singing rock and roll classics and that, but when we went up and he started playing the stuff I had a revelation. It made you think what a shadow The Beatles cast over Merseybeat. It's never changed, Liverpool, there's always been brilliant stuff going on below the radar. Spencer, God bless him, had all of it, which was brilliant. EJ: What are the fondest things you have looking back then? PH: I think mine is obviously the first [album]: it was a magical album to make and just everything clicked. It was learning, but it was new and it was fresh. They're all special in a way or else we wouldn't have put them out. MB: They're like your babies, you know. You know yourself what it's like putting out records, they're like a mark of that time, really. PH: They're so intense doing them sometimes; it can take years to put them together and you can spend years listening to them and then can't listen to them for another few years after that. Then you pick them off the shelf and go 'That's great, I'd forgotten all about that'. MB: You get lost in a fog of what it is; you need the clarity and clean ears to hear what was there. fog. EJ: I was going to say, hundreds of them must be lost in the PH: Absolutely. You just forget and then you have to flick through them all again. It's great and it's good fun putting that together. MB: We're completely 100% independent and we've never had the financial backing within the company to chuck money at it for advertising and pluggers and all that. Even when we have done, to tell you the truth, it's never worked anyway. So we just thought 'Fuck it' and let it have its own momentum and hope that some of it catches on. PH: A lot of the champions of that radio stuff have all gone, you know like John Peel, and it’s all playlisted so a lot of that stuff is dying out. Andy Kershaw's gone; all that is left is something on BBC Radio 6, maybe at two o'clock in the morning. so who knows? MB: The great thing about music is that it's cyclical and keeps coming round, you can never predict what's going to happen, like the vinyl resurgence. I wish we had a bit more financial security, I suppose, so we could do more vinyl as it does sound better. I think it sounds better, do you? EJ: I think CDs and everything are too clean and don't sound natural. Now kids are getting back into the stuff we were into when we were kids; coloured vinyl and limited-edition picture sleeves and that sort of thing. MB: You cherish them almost like artefacts. I can really see that's the way things are gonna go. CDs are even redundant now. People just put everything on their iPod, you know? PH: Even now, there's probably another five or six releases that we're working on, whether they're going to happen or not, who knows? Probably 50% of them will, so even if we wanted to stop we can't. You just kind of constantly record, write songs and make music. You're always going to have ideas. MB: You do the typical artist thing where you think 'I'll do one more and then I'll stop' and next thing you know you're doing the whole Status Quo 'Last Tour' thing again, because you might kid yourself that you're something else. If it's in you then you ignore it at your peril because it'll damage your health. As long as you just carry on being honest and it means something to you, that's a great thing to do. Viper 100 is released on 12th May. Mellowtone presents The Viper One Hundred Spectacular, Thursday 15th May at The Palm House, Liverpool. Tickets are £10 and include a copy of the Viper 100 release. theviperlabel.co.uk EJ: I saw The Coral at a battle of the bands. I'd heard all about them and went to see them; apparently something had happened and it wasn't a good night for them, and I remember thinking 'this is just like the swing and blues tunes', they weren't being very psychedelic that night for some reason. I remember Tramp Attack won that battle of the bands. MB: Was that at the Empire? EJ: The Royal Court Theatre. MB: Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about that. We'd done the Liverpool Cult Classics, post-Eric's music and then went through the EJ: Can you envisage doing 200? Can you imagine posting some promos from your Zimmer frame? MB: [Laughs] Who knows? PH: I would probably say 'maybe'. MB: If anybody had said to us fifteen years ago that we'd release 100 albums, I'd have thought it was fucking impossible. PH: But it was only fifteen years ago, bidolito.co.uk
Page 1: FREE Issue 44 May 2014 We Came Out
Page 4 and 5: News LightNight Switches On Proving
Page 6 and 7: Words: Will Fitzpatrick / @willfitz
Page 8 and 9: 8 Bido Lito! May 2014 HOOTON TENNIS
Page 10 and 11: 10 Lose Yourself In... LIVERPOOL SO
Page 12 and 13: 12 Bido Lito! May 2014 First Glosso
Page 14: 14 Bido Lito! May 2014 A Day In The
Page 19 and 20: KICK START YOUR MUSIC PRODUCTION SK
Page 21 and 22: 1 HESKETH ST AIGBURTH, LIVERPOOL L1
Page 23 and 24: Liverpool ad 142 x 207 B_Layout 1 2
Page 25 and 26: Making Liverpool sound great ... ca
Page 27 and 28: Reviews Bido Lito! May 2014 27 seem
Page 29 and 30: $ $ !2 !2 ! ! ! "
Page 31: LIVERPOOL INTERNATIONAl FESTIVAL OF

Issue 44 / May 2014

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