High times at Heavenly: meet Jeff Barrett, the 'nice boy' who wrangled indie's wildest stars

Heavenly signings Saint Etienne - Joe Dilworth
Heavenly signings Saint Etienne - Joe Dilworth

Even before he was the Hustler-in-Chief for Manic Street Preachers, Saint Etienne, The Chemical Brothers, Primal Scream, Happy Mondays and a rag-tag bunch of Madchester-adjacent ragamuffins called Flowered Up, Jeff Barrett had long experience of playing the angles.

The founder of Heavenly Recordings – the ever-discerning London-based indie record label which this month celebrates its 30th anniversary – was, pre-1990, already a promoter, publicist and (his word) “manipulator” par excellence.

Born in Nottingham in 1962, by early 1985 he was living in, and putting on gigs, in Plymouth. One of those was by The Jesus and Mary Chain, the amphetamine-fuelled Scottish aggro-punks whose line-up at the time included Primal Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie on drums.

Barrett desperately needed to sell some tickets (“my previous four or five gigs had tanked, I was absolutely in debt”), so he resorted to tactics familiar from his ill-starred time at school (“I was… a mischievous little f_____”). “The tabloid papers had cottoned on to early gigs that had ended in rucks and they’d christened [the Mary Chain] a ‘blasphemous rock band,’” Barrett writes in the foreword to Believe In Magic – Heavenly Recordings: The First 30 Years. It's a beautifully researched and sumptuously designed new book written by longstanding Heavenly associate and Barrett wingman Robin Turner.

“With that in mind,” he goes on, “I called up BBC South-West as a concerned, outraged punter saying: ‘Have you heard this blasphemous riot band are coming to town?’ I added ‘riot’ just to up the ante.”

The trick worked. “The local press had gone overboard as hoped” and, come the night of the duly sold-out gig, “there were tons of people desperate to get in and a policeman on horseback turned up to try to control the crowd. It was mental.”

Jeff Barrett, founder of Heavenly Recordings - M Kelly
Jeff Barrett, founder of Heavenly Recordings - M Kelly

Mental with a silver lining. In attendance that night was Alan McGee, boss of the Mary Chain’s record label, Creation. In short order he hired Barrett. When Barrett followed the job to London, he became Creation’s first employee. As such he was taxed with everything, including PR and, a month or so later, tour managing the ever-fractious Jesus and Mary Chain on a tour of the Benelux countries.

The first problem with that: Barrett had never been abroad so didn’t own a passport. Secondly: “what’s a Benelux?” Thirdly: Barrett had no idea what a tour manager was or did. All of which, in McGee’s eyes, made him eminently qualified to shepherd round Europe a group centred on constantly warring brothers Jim and William Reid.

But that, notes Barrett, was McGee – future discoverer of Oasis – all over. “He was moving very fast then, and he was great to be around. His energy and passion were insanely inspiring. I didn’t learn a lot, necessarily, but I fed off it.” Even so, “making me tour manager was such a bizarre thing to do!”

So, how was it? “Awful!” Barrett exclaims. “I remember stopping for chips one night after a gig one night in, um, Benelux! I’d by then kinda figured out what a [sic] Benelux was. I think it was maybe Brussels because there was mayo on top of the chips.

“And I got back in the van and William took one look at this and said [guttural, consonant-lite Scottish accent]: ‘Ah-didnae-want-the-f___in’- sauce-Barrett.’ ‘You what, William?’”

After asking the elder Reid three times to repeat what he was saying, the guitarist responded in time-honoured back-of-the-transit-van fashion: “He launched the chips at me, I ducked, the chips hit Jim, and a fight kicked off. So me, Bobby and Douglas [Hart, bass] just went off for a walk. We’d often have to do that.”

Jeff Barrett, 23, was having the time of his life. Looking back now, Barrett, 58 now and a happily married father of two adult sons, says he was only copying his elders and betters. Or, you might say, if it was a word, his worsers.

As an avid student of the weekly “inky” music press, then in their mid-to-late Eighties indie peak, he could tell that McGee “was manipulating the truth with the Mary Chain. I just followed suit. I thought that’s what you did when you promoted one of their gigs,” he laughs a throaty laugh.

“Although I have mixed feelings about Malcolm McLaren, I live under a punk influence. Being 15 in 1977, how could you not be? It overriding-ly allowed me to do what I do, because it gave me confidence. It said: you can do it. Not that everybody can do it, but have a go. That’s how I still operate.

“It’s the same with Tony Wilson,” he says of the late impresario and Factory Records co-founder, for whom Barrett, wearing his PR’s fedora, did publicity for the early-days Happy Mondays. “One minute he’s a wanker, the next minute he’s a genius. I think that’s part and parcel of it.

“I’m not gonna say the same about Alan McGee, because if I call him a wanker, it’s gonna cause me untold grief. And in all fairness, he’s not really a wanker. I certainly didn’t think Tony was either, but I did walk down the street with him several times when it was shouted at him by the people of Manchester. “They were great days,” Barrett sighs over a pub lunch in Farringdon, east London, a short walk from that first Creation office. “Unexpected days.”

One such instance was the day Barrett received a call from a contact at vinyl distributors Revolver. They wanted to start an in-house record label. Would Barrett run it? He could name it, Revolver would finance it, they’d share profits and Revolver would swallow any losses.

“I mean, come on!” this lifelong music obsessive exclaims, positively yelping at the memory, still, of his good fortune. “I’ve been very lucky to have some nice offers in my life, but that’s one of the best without a doubt.”

The timing – of Madchester or “baggy” bands like Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses and The Charlatans, when club culture was noising up guitar music, and vice versa – was perfect.

Pin-ups: merchandise from the Believe In Magic – Heavenly Recordings: The First 30 Years - P Kelly
Pin-ups: merchandise from the Believe In Magic – Heavenly Recordings: The First 30 Years - P Kelly

An enthused Barrett was constantly out and about in London’s pubs, clubs and venues, seeing and hearing lots of different new music, “having been spending a lot of time listening to Sixties folk-rock or Seventies punk. What Acid House meant was I was buying lots more new releases. And it wasn’t just about dancing, or about drugs. It was about meeting people for me, that scene. And I met Andrew early doors.”

Released in summer 1990, Heavenly’s first release was The World According to Sly and Lovechild, a single by London house duo Sly and and Lovechild which was remixed by Andrew Weatherall. Then an up-and-coming DJ, Weatherall (who died in February) was subsequently one of the most influential British musical figures of the last three decades – the reinvention of Primal Scream with Screamadelica (a chapter in which Barrett, as the Scream’s publicist and sometime A&R man, had a hand) was largely down to him.

But the first band with whom Heavenly made a splash were a troupe of mascara’d unknowns from Wales. Barrett recounts the phone call he took from his office concerning a group who’d just arrived to be shot by someone on his team who had a side-gig as a photographer.

“Jeff, this band that have just walked in are amazing. Four teenage kids from South Wales, they look great, all stencilled up and pure attitude. All four of them are just staring at everything on our walls, taking in all the details. There’s a vibe there – we have to go see them.”

Like Barrett, Manic Street Preachers were also students of the music press and the indie music industry. When he eventually met them, it was clear they’d done their homework, “and they knew who we were and they were looking for a record deal. Whether they were peacocking, or just these curious kids, they had a style, and a swagger, and a charm – and a great sense of humour, it must be said. People don’t get that with the Manics: they could be really sarcastically hilarious! They’d take the piss quite brutally.”

He also loved their brazen ambition, stating their goals and parameters from the off: “Yeah, we’ll sign with you, but it’s only gonna be for a couple of singles.” Barrett was fine with that.

The band’s two singles for the label were Motown Junk and You Love Us. The former – lean, explosive, snotty, brilliant – was released in January 1991 and is one of the 30 Heavenly releases to which Turner devotes a chapter each in Believe in Magic. What did Barrett think when he first heard it?

“Oh, what I think now: it’s an incredible, great British punk rock single. They didn’t capture that with You Love Us, no way, but they did with Motown Junk.”

On 15th May 1991, the week after the release of You Love Us, Manic Street Preachers were interviewed for NME at a gig in Norwich Arts Centre by Steve Lamacq (now of BBC 6 Music). The next day Lamacq called Barrett. He explained how, in the middle of the interview, guitarist Richey Edwards, to prove how serious he was about the band and what they stood for, carved the words “4 REAL” into his left forearm. The wounds required needed 18 stitches. The bloody pictures, taken by NME photographer Ed Sirrs, shocked the music world when they appeared in the following week’s magazine.

“It didn’t surprise me,” Barrett reflects. “It was a very Richey thing to do. It was considered. It was thought through. It was done in front of a camera. And… what a statement,” he marvels, his old PR man’s instincts as engaged as ever. “I thought it was a bit random, but a bit brilliant.

“Did it spell an alert to me of what was to come?” he adds, foreshadowing the still-unsolved disappearance of Edwards four years later. “No, not really.” In any case, “I wasn’t close enough to them, like I’m close to most groups I work with, to have spotted any of that. And after that, I’d only see them intermittently.”

Just as they are in British culture, Manic Street Preachers remain a totemic band in the life of Heavenly. Not only did they give Barrett’s fledgling label its first truly indispensable single, they also copper-bottomed his immediate financial future: when they left, as promised, for a major label deal with Sony, they (literally) paid homage to Barrett.

“They rewarded us beyond generously when they did go, and they didn’t need to. I didn’t understand what a point on a record meant, but they gave us one.”

Meaning: Heavenly got a percentage point of revenue on every sale of the band’s debut double album, 1992’s Generation Terrorists. “And they gave us a 10 grand advance. I mean, it was all French to me,” shrugs Barrett, who admits he’s never been the greatest businessman, “and it wasn’t in the contract. So it was a just nice thing. They gave it to us as a thankyou.”

A collection of Heavenly singles - P Kelly
A collection of Heavenly singles - P Kelly

But it wasn’t enough to stave off financial peril when Revolver, Heavenly’s initial backers, pulled out barely one year into the label’s existence. Doom, as he recalls it (“I’m never good with years”), was averted when Warner Bros in America wanted to sign Saint Etienne. They were the pop-minded, nostalgic-futurist trio whose Balearic-flavoured cover of Neil Young’s Only Love Can Break Your Heart lit the touch paper for Heavenly, and who also made the label’s first album, 1991’s Mercury-nominated Foxbase Alpha.

He was also bailed out by McGee, who signed Saint Etienne to Creation in the UK “and brought me in on a 50/50 basis, which was kind and generous and helped. It was a lifeline and it kept me involved.”

Then, London Records wanted to sign another foundational Heavenly discovery.

“I believed in Flowered Up,” begins Barrett of a band with their own chaotic, drugged-up mythos. He first met singer Liam Maher in an Acid House club “and he looked so brilliant. He had a Cockney face, he was London, of that time, and the clothes were right. And when I heard he had a group, and they were called Flowered Up, that was it, I was fit to burst with joy.”

As if in a scene from a time-honoured, fairy-tale, star-is-born music biz biopic (although, given this was the early Nineties, it was less Lady Gaga than gaga on Ecstasy), Barrett was sold. “I was in. I didn’t need to hear any music!” he cackles. “And then I asked Liam if anybody else was in the group. And kind of unfortunately the answer was ‘yes – and they like Rush. And they practice every day.’ Oh God!”

But that reminded him of another group he’d worked with previously, who also practiced every day. But Happy Mondays – a huge influence on Flowered Up – practiced every day because they “operated as a retail outlet. People who wanted weed knew where the Mondays were every day. And it was basically the same thing with Flowered Up.”

Did he know the extent of their drug abuse? “No. But the hardcore drug use wasn’t that extensive at that point.”

When it was, though, it wasn’t “just” Ecstasy or cocaine, “it was heroin. I had no idea. I was quite naïve to heroin, to be honest. I’d never seen anybody take it, it’s not a drug that’s ever interested me. I even find the mythology boring. I like the Velvets, I like Jim Carroll, I like a bit of Burroughs, but hey-ho, never to the point where I was gonna join in and see what happened.

“But they didn’t behave like I thought people who did heroin behaved! But then I didn’t see them late at night, or early in the morning. I’d see them when they did brilliant gigs. Their gigs were insane. And they had no idea that this was going to happen to them either, and they were let loose.”

London Records paid £250,000 to sign Flowered Up from Heavenly. “Unfortunately, their manager didn’t understand that that quarter-of-a-million included recording costs. Which of course they’d spent by the time they left Pete Townsend’s Eel Pie Studios after several abortive attempts at making a decent record. They’d accepted they’d never make a decent f______ record, and then someone said: ‘Here’s your bill.’”

To cut a mazy story short, Flowered Up ended up back on Heavenly, with help from Sony (like the Manics, Heavenly were now also in bed with the major label) just in time to release their greatest statement: Weekender, the 13-minute single and the 18-minute short film. This was the sound, and look, and buzz, of early Nineties Britain’s drug-fuelled weekend rave culture.

“It’s a masterpiece, that record,” says Barrett, speaking the real truth rather than PR-man truth. “Everything about it, perfect. I saw it as salvation,” he says, evincing, still the messianic feel any of us out there back then felt about this music and that time. Weekender is indulgent, epic, captivating, over-the-top and all-or-nothing, which is just how that corner of British youth culture felt.

The film, shot by then red-hot music video director Wiz and bankrolled by Sony to the tune of £38,000, captures all of that perfectly.  “Right!” echoes Barrett of a cult classic that, early next year, is issued on DVD for the first time by Heavenly Films. “And my imagination was running.” He was thinking an Acid House-era version of Quadrophenia. “We were breaking the mould. That doesn’t come along so often. Mad things like that don’t happen enough.”

Ultimately, though, things with Flowered got mad in a bad way. “I’d go to the gigs, but the band were too naughty for me, to be honest. They’d get up to real bad mischief, and not just the drugs. Criminal stuff went with the territory, to a degreeThey thought I was a nice boy, and kept a lot from me. Some of the hangers-on took advantage of me being a nice boy, occasionally, but they never did, not really. Not till the habit really kicked in for Liam, after the group broke up. He took me a for few hundred quid – twice,” a smiling Barrett says without rancour.

In 2009 Liam Maher died of a heroin overdose. Three years later, his brother Joe passed away too.

Jeff Barrett's current favourite band, Working Men's Club
Jeff Barrett's current favourite band, Working Men's Club

The years, and the releases, and the capers, rolled on. In 1994 the label spun itself off into The Heavenly Social. A club night initially held in a bog-standard London pub, The Albany, by Great Portland Street tube station, it became a crucible for the next phase of the label’s existence. The resident DJs were Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands, known at the time as The Dust Brothers, better known now as The Chemical Brothers.

After a 13-week run, the Social eventually moved on to the much bigger Turnmills club in Farringdon and continued to attract the scene’s biggest DJs, including Justin Robertson, Jon Carter, Richard Fearless and an up-and-coming Fatboy Slim. A thrilling, genre-skipping corrective in the monocultural era of Britpop and (cough) Cool Britannia, mid-Nineties nights out dancing didn’t come any cooler, sweatier or more thrilling than those put on by Heavenly.

Heavenly continued to prove there were no limits to what a label could be. They launched bars, The Social, in London and Nottingham. Caught By The River, an offshoot website and community named after a single by Heavenly act Doves, proclaimed the calming balm of fishing and nature long before Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse pulled on their waders. Their Weekender events at Hebden Bridge’s Trades Club in Yorkshire reimagined what a festival could be.

But for Barrett, it always came back to the groups, and his energy for new music is unabated. The Hebden Bridge connection helped introduce him to local lad Syd Minsky-Sargeant of Working Men’s Club, the best young band Britain. Their self-titled debut album, released last month, is followed this month by the debut from differently brilliant Katy J. Pearson, a West Country singer-songwriter.

Who, though, is the one that got away? Barrett grimaces. He prefaces his story with an apology to Robin Turner – around 2000/2001, the Believe In Magic author heard a group, “banged on about them but he wasn’t listened to. And that was The White Stripes.

“By the time I clocked it, I was playing catch up,” Barrett notes of a band who had already made three albums for US indie Sympathy For The Record Industry. “And I loved it, and I had to do it. I put them on at The Social in Nottingham when we had the bar there. I sat with Jack White at the bar, telling him why he should sign to us. And I could see his eyes glazing over a little bit when I mentioned [our then-deal with] EMI. Or maybe I was just boring him.”

Then a former Heavenly employee, now based in New York, tipped off Barrett to a secret White Stripes gig on one of Manhattan’s waterfront piers.

“I flew over, EMI’s money, first class, got to the pier just in time for the gig, met their lawyer, saw their gig and they were brilliant. And I liked them as people too. That night, their lawyer said to me: ‘Jeff, we really, really appreciate you coming, but the deal’s done.’ I said: ‘How done?’ ‘We’re going to sign to Beggars Banquet.’ ‘So it’s not done – you’re going to sign. So, breakfast tomorrow?’”

Barrett’s cheerful tenacity got him meeting. But over breakfast, the lawyer came clean and said the deal was actually with Beggars-affiliated label XL, arguably the best – only – rival indie to Heavenly. Barrett knew the game was up. Kind of. “But I did try one last shot. I said: ‘Before you sign, do me a favour and ask [XL boss] Richard Russell who Loretta Lynn is.’ That’s a real smug-ass, indie-boy thing to do!’ admits Barrett with rueful, guilt-tinged grin. “But I knew I had one shot. And Richard hates me for that.”

But lo, in 2004, Jack White produced Loretta Lynn’s Van Lear Rose album. “And what a record that is.” Still, a smug-ass indie-boy point scored is scant comfort to Barrett.

And what, if push comes to shove, is Barrett’s favourite that he’s released? “I can’t do that,” he shoots back. “No, I can: the Working Men’s Club album!” he says of the last release. “No, the Katy J. Pearson album,” he says of their next. “That’s two fresh, young exciting artists we’ve got there. We’re as valid as we’ve ever been, aren’t we? And we’re still indefinable."

OK. Who’s the most contrary bastard artist he’s worked with? “Do you know how common that is?” Jeff Barrett replies chirpily, rhetorically. “No, it’s probably me. But I’ve been lucky. Really, really lucky.” And, he adds, Covid shutdown of the live music scene notwithstanding, he isn't finished yet. “Like the book’s called, these are just the first 30 years.”

Believe In Magic – Heavenly Recordings: The First 30 Years is out now