Stiff Records

She changed her name a lot, but it was always the same person doing the designing.

She had started working with Barney Bubbles, who was the designer of all the stiff records, logos and labels and record covers and slogans.

And if you go and look at like the Elvis Costello records or the Ian Dury records, the ones with wallpaper on them and the Riding on a Crest of a New Wave, stiff things.

You can see the designs are really brilliant.

When the Sex Pistols designer Jamie Reid used stamps and pictures of the Queen and put a safety pin in her cheek on the front of posters, The single cover of God Save the Queen, that's Détournement.

At my very first meeting with a record company person before I'd met Caramel, Dave Robinson asked me what I would like the Religious Persuasion cover to look like and I had an Edna O'Brien book.

with me a 60s copy of the country girls and he said okay that's what we're going to do you don't look as good as Edna O'Brien so draw me a logo and I'll put that on the front and on the back of it I remember the designer at Island Records slash Stiff Records just wrote EP on the back of it and I thought that's cool the way you can just do things and they happen right away.

Well, Caramel did things just like that.

working as a computer operator there, writing songs at night, made a tape, a home tape, very quietly while his wife and young son were sleeping.

Wound up sending it into a new upstart label called Stiff Records that had come out from a couple of guys that managed probably the best known pop rock band, Dr. Feelgood.

basically a forerunner to punk, really.

And people like Paul Weller, Joe Strummer were in the audiences for Dr. Feelgood shows, and the roots are all there.

And then, yeah, winds up getting signed to Stiff Records, has a backing band behind him called Clover to make his first album, which he's making on sick days and weekends from his job.

and gets released, starts selling very well in England, starts selling very well as an import in America, and then eventually he pulls a stunt where he was at a hotel in London where CBS Records or Columbia was having their, it was some kind of sales conference or whatever, and he wound up busking outside, wound up playing for Walter Yetnikoff, who was then the head of Columbia Records, And managed to get a deal out of Columbia with it in America.

And it just all kind of went from there.

That is the sound of the Bell Stars operating at the absolute peak of their powers.

Released by the legendary indie imprint Stiff Records on December 30th 1982, Sign of the Times was the band's seventh single overall and crucially their first single written by the band since 1981's Another Latin Love Song.

The song was co-written across the line-up by Stella Barker, Sarah Jane Owen, Miranda Joyce, Leslie Sean, Jenny Mathias, Judy Parsons and Claire Hurst.

It tackles an unfaithful lover caught between affection and cold ambition, summed up neatly by the biting lyric, you say you love me but want success.

They played their first show on July 6th, 1976, opening for the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club.

Over the next few months, they attracted the attention of an indie label called Stiff Records.

And from there, it was a race with the Pistols to release a record.

The Damned would win that race with the release of this song on October 22nd, 1976, five weeks ahead of the Pistols.

[guitar music] You're listening to a podcast from The Word.

Welcome to this, and an old pal of ours that we first met when he was the motorcycle messenger for Stiff Records [laughs] Oh, Lord, I can't bear to think how many years ago that was, and he went on to be one of the key video directors in the video boom, and he's written very, very entertainingly about it in a book called Music Video Mischief: Ozzy to Britney, Oasis to Guns N' Roses, McCartney to Cher, A Lifetime of Rock and Chaos [laughs].

Nigel T, rock chaos.

We're back in the '70s, aren't we? Nigel, it's lovely to see you.