Elektra had been founded in 1950 by Jac Holzman and Paul Rickolt; each invested $300. During the Fifties and early Sixties, the label had concentrated on folk music, but also classical, through its very successful budget Nonesuch imprint, sales of which helped to fund music of a more psychedelic nature, starting with the bluesy Paul Butterfield Band, Love, The Doors and a nascent Tim Buckley. The Nonesuch Explorer Series was a pioneer in releasing what became known in the Eighties as world music. Put simply, Holzman ran the hippest, coolest, trendiest and also the best record label around. But, like Ivo, he too got restless, and in 1970, Holzman sold his controlling share in Elektra, which became part of the Warner Brothers music group. Holzman stayed in charge until 1972, when it merged with Asylum Records, which specialised in west coast singer-songwriters, from Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt to Joni Mitchell and The Eagles. Politics and rivalries under the Warner umbrella made for a bumpy ride, but the quality of the music rarely wavered.
Its very unlikely the Warners corporation would ever have considered housing its record companies in the rabbit warren of rooms and corridors that made up 1519 Alma Road in Wandsworth, south-west London, where Martin Mills Beggars Banquet and associated labels have their offices. A suitably alternative, homespun space for the worlds most successful independent label group, Mills lawyer James Wylie once described the labels operation as, a Madagascar off the continent of Africa that is the music business, part of the same eco-system but with its own microclimate.
Not even the success of Adele, signed to Beggars imprint XL, whose 2011 album 21 is the biggest selling album in the UK since The Beatles Sergeant Pepper in 1967, has encouraged Mills to move nor his half of a recent $27.3 million dividend based on his profit share. Mills also owns half of the Rough Trade and Matador labels, and all of 4AD. Mills and Ivo moved here in 1982, when more than 25 million sales would have been a ridiculous, stoned fantasy.
Born in 1949, Mills was raised in Oxford, and he stayed on to study philosophy, politics and economics at the prestigious Oriel College. Piano lessons had come to nothing when The Beatles and the Brit-beat boom arrived, though Mills says he favoured the rougher axis of The Rolling Stones and The Animals, just as he enjoys live music much more than recordings, making him the opposite of concert-phobe Ivo. I cared about music above anything else, he says, but when he failed to get a positive response to job requests sent to every UK record label he could find an address for, his upbringing demanded common sense. While taking a postgraduate degree in town planning, he shared a flat in west Ealing with Steve Webbon.
But he found he couldnt give up on music. Scaling back his ambitions, Mills then began a mobile disco with a friend from Oxford, Nick Austin, who was then working for his fathers furnishing company. The pair named their enterprise Giant Elf (a riposte to J. R. R. Tolkiens already iconic The Hobbit) before Mills claims they needed a new name after receiving too many hoax calls alluding to Giant Elfs supposed gay connotation. A subsequent team-up with a friends mobile disco, called Beggars Banquet, provided the means.
Mills also drove a van for Austins father while signing on for unemployment benefit a desirable scenario back then, he smiles. But the benefit office forced him into a full-time job, and for two years, Mills worked for The Office
of Population, Census and Surveys (managing the statistics for the Reform of Abortion act) but he landed a job at the Record & Tape Exchange, a well-known record shop trading in second-hand records in Shepherds Bush, not far from Ealing.
Soon, Mills and Austin were discussing running their own second-hand record shop, which would sell new records too. Each borrowed £2,000 from their parents and, in 1974, opened Beggars Banquet in Hogarth Road, Earls Court. It was a buzzing, backpacker type of place, with lots of record shops, says Mills. But wed stay open later than the others, until 9.30pm, selling left-field undergraduate stuff, west coast psychedelia, folk and country, but also soul, R&B and jazz-funk. We brought in Steve Webbon, who knew about record retail. By 1977, we had six shops.
Beggars Banquet had given Ivo a job, and in a reversal of roles, he became Webbons assistant after the latter had moved to the Ealing branch. But so much of music, culture, and record retail was fundamentally shifting. The first real wave of opposition to the stagnating scenes of progressive, hard and west coast rock was the neo-punk of Iggy and The Stooges and the New York Dolls, which soon triggered a new wave of stripped-back guitars, centred around the CBGBs club in the States (Patti Smith, Television) and the wilder exponents of so-called pub rock in the UK (Doctor Feelgood, The 101ers). The first wave of London-based independent labels (Stiff, Chiswick, Small Wonder) sprang up to meet a growing demand, while Jamaican reggae imports were also rising. Not far behind was the new Rough Trade shop in west Londons bohemian enclave of Notting Hill Gate, whose founder Geoff Travis was to bolt on a record label and a distribution arm.