Peter Stoneman – Freelance Writer and Researcher

In Search of Hardcore. A Book about Bonkers. Chapter 1.

Outside my window, the tree line is peppered with bright-coloured parakeets, picked out against the grey sky like watercolour splashes. They’re illegal aliens, I’m told. Someone on the 555 bus through Walton told me as me much. Some old Hersham boy who caught me looking out the window. Legend has it, he tells me, they’re descended from a mating pair, released by Jimi Hendrix (a fellow émigré) back in the days when London was swinging the first time over. The pair interbred with a few pet shop escapees from a couple of generations ago. Over the years, they’ve been naturalised, acclimatised to the bitter Surrey winters, I guess.

The only hardcore here lies in the foundations of the building. We’re strictly 128 bpm here. House music is our daily bread and butter. The office itself is a 1950s wreck that leans against the bare skies like a derelict British Legion building. Appearances can be deceptive of course. English heritage do not have us on a short-list for a blue plaque just yet, but make no mistake, this is hallowed ground; the HQ of one of the UK’s leading dance music sales distribution offices. It sounds lofty but believe me, leading such a
slender field was as low a bar then, as it probably is today. Like the rest of us, the building is a relic from a more prosperous era. A converted factory, resting in the middle of a winding, unremarkable lane, half a mile upwind from a coriander field, that casts its sweet and bitter aroma for a mile in every direction. It’s a fragrance that is dispelled the moment we cross the threshold. Here inside, the smell is pure cigarette smoke and toilet duck from the never clean lavatories. Occasionally you can catch a whiff of cocaine, sometimes desperation. Always, always it is cold here. The export team wear puffy coats
and woolly hats, six solid months of the year like Swedish kids in one of those dark murder series on BBC4. When you breathe out, you see your breath before your face as it mingles with the mildewed dust on the air. Nothing has changed here, I would guess in thirty years. The floorboards creak, the carpet is a kind of green/grey algae colour and texture and the exposed brick walls are decked out with a couple of forlorn (dubious) gold records and awards from a bygone time. From my vantage at the arse end of the office – under a grey window with no view to speak of – I get to survey the team. Laid out
on a hydra of Reggie Perrin desks: there’s the indie stores account manager and the label manager-cum-IT guy and, beyond them, the three export staff. For the record, only the better days stereo and the indie stores kid make any noise. Every twenty minutes or so he flogs a dozen records on SOR to Fat Bastard Records in Deptford and you see him kinda punch the air before preparing himself a celebratory coffee or Pot Noodle. The export team, on the other hand, don’t need to bother selling anything, so I don’t hear too much
from them. They tell, they don’t sell, I was told from day one and they stay forever true to that edict. The only occasional evidence of their labours comes when the fax machine springs sporadically to life and spews out an order from some continent or another and the export posse pat themselves on the back for their skillz. At the end of the sales cycle the French and the Spanish and the Italians take what they want on consignment (a pallet of this and a couple of pallets of that) and either pay up or return half the stock six months
down the line. You might get to speak to someone called Claude every couple of months, but don’t let anyone tell you otherwise – exports is a well-oiled, distinctly unglamorous but inexplicably low-maintenance machine.

Two metres over yonder, beyond the export crew stands a Formica door and a vast picture window with another office on the other side of the glass. A soundproof aquarium that houses the two bosses – one each for exports and UK. Beyond the glass, they act out like silent movie stars or convicts on the wrong side of a two-way mirror in a copshop. Exports chain smokes Marlboro reds 9-5 while the UK sales guy is on the golf course working on his handicap. He’s rarely, if ever missed. Despite his being right in the Yewtree victim catchment, either through sheer ugliness – he has a face even a mother
would struggle to love – or through his boundless high self-esteem, he managed to survive the horrors of the Walton Hop-era unscathed. No Fab FM DJ ever made a play for him in the back of their Roller after plying him with fizzy pop and Bensons and free promo records and you have the feeling this is a constant source of annoyance to him. As for the smoking exports manager, I’ve heard tell he keeps a baseball bat behind his desk. I haven’t seen it with my own eyes, but I’m told West End club geezers and hoods have been known to drive up in fleets of black Range Rovers and to demand their overdue label
payments with menaces. You can’t blame them. We’re dead shady, so they’re on constant high alert whenever the 90 day payment terms are up and their remittance is a day

overdue, a week or maybe longer, just like it is every other month. The smoker likes to hold the funds and the bookkeepers like to make as many deductions as they can before sending out the cheques; second class, second post all the way. Let the money sit in our account a bit longer, like Ted Crilly or a mob attorney. 18 months from now, our chickens will come home to roost. The liquidators will arrive en masse and we’ll all be given our marching orders. For now though, I’m too dumb to put two and two together, but sometimes you see these furrow-browed suits or delegations from the bank run the numbers, checking their Sekondas and wondering whether the golfer will ever arrive back from the 19th. Hint: he never has and never will. The smoker meanwhile, mills around, shrugging his shoulders like a truant whenever the bankers and suits ask him a question, before taking his Marlboros into the car park. There, he guards the double doors, talking frantically on his cell phone, running through the seven stages of grief; dodging puddles, constantly dealing, bargaining, sometimes pleading, putting in an order for a briquette of Columbian or arranging wine bar hook-ups – he has as many notches on his bedpost as you have blades of grass on your lawn. Occasionally he drifts out of the smoke-filled aquarium, out into the main drag of the office and through to the warehouse to whisper something in an ear. Hold an order. Lose some paperwork. The Ibiza order got cancelled send it and bill them anyway. That kind of thing. The surly attack dog on the forklift in the warehouse will nod or shake his head, depending on his mood – which is always bad. I find that if you catch his eye he’ll give you a look that says, I will fucking kill you, just
you see. I’ve been here a year now and he’s spoken maybe ten words to me in that time. Eight of them were cunt.

So it’s June, but still cold in here somehow and one of the export team puts a white label on the stereo, drops the needle and heads back to his desk. He slurps his tea and bangs the desk appreciatively as the four-four beat fills the room, reminding everyone that he is a tastemaker. In a month he’ll be in Ibiza, guest of honour somewhere, if he’s to be believed, but most likely just a punter. As to the song (the choon,) personally I can’t tell whether it’s good or bad, so I have to take him at his word. I’m the outsider here – a gamekeeper turned poacher – plucked from the chorus at a music chain store. I have an
idea of what might sell, having spent a little time with the great unwashed – the music buying public. Unlike everyone else present – save the forklift attack dog – I didn’t go to MIDEM and hang out with Dimitri From Paris and Osunlade and all that mob beyond the velvet rope. I’m like the parakeets in the trees outside. I’m an interloper. I haven’t yet been naturalised. Put a gun to my head and I couldn’t tell you funky house from your mum’s council house. I do notice that as the tune rises and falls, the tastemaker peers out the metal framed window to check his new Mercedes on the gravel outside. The tune is
in full flight now, but as he looks at the car he seems suddenly wistful. The Merc is one of those little blue ones the shape of a Smart Car and he’s been catching grief for it since he bought it. The warehouse guys taunt him that he’s bought a fucking Playmobil car. He’s had it maybe a week but I get the sense he already has major buyer’s remorse. Like an oligarch with too much money and a fifty foot yacht, the two happiest days of his ownership of the Merc will be the day he bought it and the day he sells it finally.

Meanwhile, I’m on the blower to the guy who buys chart for Woolworths. This is
immediately weird. The guy who buys chart for Woolworths never takes my calls. I don’t take it personally. His predecessor, the woman who used to buy chart for Woolies never took my calls either. Not once. Not ever. So he’s taking my call and It feels pretty momentous, if I’m honest – which I am, to a fault. I try to take as many meetings as I can, lunches on Wardour Street or in the pizzerias of West London, trying to grease the wheels, but no one really wants to see me, so my current MO is to send a weekly mailout of chillout CDs and funky house monstrosities out into the world and hope for the best. At
Woolies, they land in the waste paper bin within a minute of mail call. Maybe the buyer hands out the promos to some of the office girls to ingratiate himself with them but the fact of the matter is, our stuff is never in serious contention to take up space in a Woolworths music dept. I can see their point. Still, Virgin, MVC, HMV and some of my other accounts are more forgiving. Usually they can be relied upon to throw me some crumbs down from their table and get an order in before deadline. Average ship on most of this compilation landfill is a couple of thousand bits – maybe five thousand if there’s a bit of DJ/brand/name recognition and you’ve pulled a favour somewhere. We’re twenty years into the past and already you can see that the end is in sight for the luckless CD compilation. Fortunately for me, the exports fax machine picks up the slack and does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of sheer numbers and helps pad out the sales. I’m not suggesting that everyone’s happy, because they are not. The people who run the company are nice folk, but they’re greedy and lazy and stuck in the habits that kept them in boozy
lunch luxury a decade before. Even so, no one gets shouted at more than maybe once a week, so we’re on a sliding scale of happiness here.

Anyway, the Woolies chart guy is taking my call and I’m frantically rifling through a sales folder and trying to remember the bullet points. I hear him say something about the whole happy hardcore thing being over and done with. The last album stiffed. This stuff is strictly mid-90s. It’s in the rear-view mirror, he says and I tell him to look again. I’m winging it really. We’ve only been working the React label for a few months so I have no idea.

“You doing TV on the album?” the EUK guy sighs – E(ntertainment) UK were the buying arm of the Woolworths group back in the day. They were the gatekeepers and they kept gate pretty well. No way your album was going within sniffing distance of the pick ‘n’ mix. But there’s something in the air today beyond coriander and toilet duck. This album is different. The album in question, since you ask, is Bonkers 8: The Rezurrection. File under happy hardcore, gabber, UK hard house, hardcore techno.

I tell him yeah, TV. Sure. I cross myself like a matinee priest and scan the sales notes to see if this is true. I pluck a number out of the air and tell him that’s the budget and that Woolworths can have 100% of the TV if they want to get on board but to be careful because HMV are sniffing around. After a minute, he tells me ok. He’ll order maybe 3,000 but he’s not happy. He wants me to know he’s doing me a massive favour but I’m not listening anymore. I’m thinking that’s 3,000 times eight quid. If I make a £100k in sales in a month I score a thousand quid bonus. After the Woolies deal, my heart still pounding to the usual 4/4 beat to which I’ve become sadly accustomed, I have the same conversation with Asda and HMV. Word for word. I give them each 100% of the TV ads
and hope they don’t watch TV or that their marketing people check on this kind of thing. By some miracle, they all come on board. At the end of the sales cycle Woolies take 5,000, HMV take even more than that. They’re so enthusiastic suddenly, they’re angling to get the old albums re-pressed and back on the shelves. In total there are 18,000 or so units of the new release leaving the warehouse in time for release date. For comparison’s sake, 18,000 would comfortably score you a number one album most weeks of the year in 2020. With the represses of the old albums, Bonkers 3 – A Journey into Madness (a stone-cold classic of the hardcore genre, the Sgt Pepper of rave compilations) will stagger across the 100,000 sales line and be awarded a gold record. Suddenly and through no fault of my own, records are haemorrhaging out of the warehouse and the bankers and suits reduce their weekly audits to once a fortnight. Suddenly, I am a hero.

“How the fuck?” the exports guy asks me later, through a blue haze of Marlboro smoke. We’re in the kitchen and he’s modelling his new, strangely elaborate goatee. Like every one here, he gives off a wide boy air, but sometimes, beyond his renowned philandering and geezerish patter I have the idea that he is not as one-dimensional as some of the rest of us. “18 fucking K,” he frowns. “We’ve done maybe 500 for the rest of the world,” he complains and shakes his head. It’s only the second time he’s been impressed by me, I think. The last time he expressed something close to quiet respect was the night he caught
sight of my girlfriend – now my wife – at an Xmas party. Then, as now, he looked me up and down and back to her and was like, “Really? How the fuck?” If I’m honest, I didn’t know then and I don’t know now.

“Who the fuck buys this shit?” he lights another Marlboro and lets smoke out of his nose.

“People,” I tell him. I’m thinking of the extra grand in my pay cheque. “Other people.” I feel like I should bathe in the glory of my master salesmanship for a moment but really I know the numbers have nothing to do with me. I think I know what will sell and what won’t but really I’m like everyone else – sticking a finger in the air and checking the wind. I have a vague memory of Bonkers 2 and 3 going largely unsold in our (Home Counties) shopping mall Our Price back in the day but hearing these tales of them flying off the shelves in the outer reaches. I’m just realising that outside of our funky house, M25
suburban cocaine bubble there is a whole other world. Other people. From Leeds to Kirkcaldy. From Strathclyde all the way to Doncaster. Outside the M25 the UK was dancing all fucking night to a whole other beat. Like 200bpm. A platoon of bedroom DJs. Kids and adults alike. Gurning, taking eccies at the weekend and washing them down with Buckfast tonic wine. Bonkers.