Trading on a name

RECORD label Rough Trade is 25 years old. Founded as a small, poster-covered record shop in February 1976, and as its own record label in 1978, it was one of the first shrines of British and American punk rock. The shop and its name became iconic almost as soon as it opened, as much as Seditionaries in the King's Road or the Roxy club in Neal Street.

Twenty-five years on, Rough Trade has managed to maintain its reputation for slick, innovative and risk taking new music. In fact, you could say that Rough Trade pretty much invented the current high fashion of spiky, guitar-driven retro-punk and the boom in filmic and funky industrial electronica. Separated from the shops in 1980, the label keeps the flame alight with new signings, including today's hottest guitar bands, the Strokes and the Libertines.

Now there are two Rough Trade shops - one in Talbot Road and the other in Neal's Yard - but when Geoff Travis opened the original, 202 Kensington Park Road, the surrounding streets still had the air of an urban backwater. Years before the district acquired its opulent ambience of gentrified white stucco mansions and fashionable restaurants, the walk to Rough Trade from Notting Hill Tube station was a trek through bedsit bohemia - alternately dreamlike and slightly threatening. It was an atmosphere which seemed to inform the whole experience of going to Rough Trade, and it gave the records on display a sense of heightened rarity, making them seem even more edgy, vital and new.

It made them feel dangerous.

Towards the end of the 1970s, you would find squads of pale young men with interesting haircuts - an early post-punk generation whom Jon Savage described so memorably as " angular, asymmetrical and herky-jerky" - flicking their way through racks of vinyl albums and 12-inch singles, the covers of which ranged from the impressively photomontaged and Situationist to the even more impressively completely blank. In terms of pop style it was a golden age of anklelength, Kafka-reader raincoats, Neurotic Boy Outsider cheekbones, and tiny lapel badges - the miniaturised codes of which you had to know how to read. I still possess a pair of Pop Group badges that read "We Are All Prostitutes" and "Everyone Has Their Price". On the Tube back to the suburbs they were as good as a frosty glare to the world, trumpeting the cause of avant-garde punk.

In retrospect, it was also a brief era of intelligent confrontation, when the sharp end of punk and post-punk was operating at a highly sophisticated musical and conceptual level.

Even the name, Rough Trade - pinched by Travis from a Canadian rock band - doubled as street slang for "cheap male prostitute". This fitted perfectly with the first wave of punk's ambivalence towards the concept of record shops and labels.

"Rough Trade" seemed to flirt with both the idea of an arcane, underground, volatile scene, and the notion that the relationship between groups and record labels was that of whore and pimp. Above all, Rough Trade stood for a genuinely alternative musical culture: a sensibility which championed artistic, social and cultural "otherness", less interested in the banality of simply being shocking than in the excitement of questioning the frontiers of music.

Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant has pointed out that the years immediately following punk, between 1977 and 1980, were a time when the overt intellectualism and critical acuity of the music press was matched by a burst of richly eclectic and audacious musical creativity. Rough Trade was both a focal point - an actual venue and forum - for this new, radical eclecticism, and, when the shop launched its own label, a vital catalyst in its development.

When you went to the original Rough Trade shop in, say, 1979, you would find yourself in a smallish space, but one which appeared to contain not just its own world but its own entire universe: a world view defined by musical culture. For here was everything from metal- bashing industrial folk music to eerie primitive electronica; from imported dub reggae with bass so deep that you felt it through your sternum before you actually heard it, to American twochord punk thrash. You would find Cabaret Voltaire, Augustus Pablo and Stiff Little Fingers (all Rough Trade artists), and Tuxedomoon and Throbbing Gristle, a double 12-inch single, The Seduction, by feminists Ludus, or The Pop Group's terrifying Beyond Good and Evil.

Rough Trade always felt like, and has remained, a name which signifies a choice not only of musical taste, but of lifestyle. But however synonymous with punk, there was always a faintly hippy whiff to the enterprise as well.

When the young Phil Oakey of the Sheffield electropop group The Human League visited the Rough Trade offices, he reportedly complained that there were too many kids and too much brown rice around the place for his liking.

EVEN in its association with Sanctuary (which owns a small percentage of the label), Rough Trade has not lost its cottageindustry feel, and retains complete artistic control. On Monday, marking its quarter century, it releases a commemorative CD, "25", with cover versions by current Rough Trade groups of some of the label's original artists, taking the listener on a tour of the musical cutting edge, from Young Marble Giants to the Veils and the Strokes. The common denominator of these tracks, whether young or old, is their freshness and agility - their eccentricity, even. To young groups, it is like signing up to a legend, joining the glorious mythology of Pop Outsiders which has included, perhaps most notably, The Smiths, who signed up in 1982.

In many ways, Rough Trade's enduring cultural identity - that mixture of punk speed and bohemianism - has come full circle, with current artists such as The Libertines, British Sea Power and The Strokes reflecting both the sound and attitude of some of their venerable ancestors on the label. In this, Rough Trade has always been, paradoxically, the height of musical fashion precisely by being the enemy of musical fashion. This was a position quite brilliantly described by a recent young contestant on the BBC's Fame Academy: not only did he perform a song by The Strokes, but when asked what label he would sign to if he could pick any, he immediately answered "Rough Trade".

To quote the novelist EM Forster: "On such does England rely."

. Michael Bracewell's essay, Suburban Punk, will be published in London: From Punk To Blair by Reaktion Books next month.

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