5 things to know about Rough Trade

While we continue to enjoy our 75th anniversary, much-loved independent  music label Rough Trade marks 50 years since they welcomed their first crowd of crate diggers through the doors of their original West London record shop.

In July, these two celebrations fuse together with Rough Trade 50, three days of events embracing music, live performance, film and the written word here at the Southbank Centre. And ahead of which, for the uninitiated, we thought we’d offer a little bit of background to this long-standing independent platform for eclectic talent. 

Rough Trade was born out of the spirit of San Francisco

London in 1976; a sweltering summer, a changing skyline, another new prime minister. Some things don’t change. The culture of the capital however is always evolving and in West London two men recently returned from the US were about to have a notable impact on the British music scene. One was Malcom McLaren, back from a stint managing the New York Dolls and co-running the Chelsea boutique SEX with his then girlfriend Vivienne Westwood and about to catapult the Sex Pistols and the surrounding punk scene into public consciousness.

The other was a Cambridge graduate called Geoff Travis, who’d given up his career as school teacher in Mill Hill to travel to America, and had returned with hundreds of records and an idea. Travis decided to sell his imports – along with a host of other records acquired from the less glamorous surrounds of a warehouse in Willesden – and duly opened a shop on Kensington Park Road. Rough Trade was born. Taking its name from a Canadian new wave band, and its inspiration from San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore, this was to be more than just a record shop. It was to be, as Travis explained to Johnny Marr in a 2009 Guardian interview, ‘a community-based environment where hopefully people could discover good and interesting music that perhaps they would not find in a mainstream shop’.

The first record on the Rough Trade label was in French

It didn’t take long for Rough Trade to match Travis’ ambitions, becoming a hang out for musicians both established – Billy Idol, Joe Strummer and David Bowie were all customers –  and emerging, as much as it was a shop. Having sold many records by several of his clientele, when French punk group Metal Urbain came into the shop and asked for help with a new track they had put together Travis then took the next step, cut out the middle men, and released one. Thus the first record on Rough Trade the label was the 1977 Métal Urbain single ‘Paris Maque’.

Other records followed in 1978; ‘Pablo Meets Mr. Bassie’, a single by the Jamaican reggae musician Augustus Pablo was Rough Trade’s second release, followed by ‘Extended Play’ the debut EP by Sheffield’s Cabaret Voltaire and then Stiff Little Fingers’ second single ‘Alternative User’. And from there the label never looked back.

Rough Trade has never had a signature sound

While other independent labels are perhaps known or associated with a particular type of music, Rough Trade’s output, just like its first four releases, has always been eclectic; driven by Travis own tastes, rather than any kind of broader commercial appeal. The label may have broken ground through its platforming of punk – its first LP, Stiff Little Fingers’ Inflammable Material, became the first independent album to sell over 100,000 copies – but at the same time its reggae and ska output helped it connect with the shop’s local Caribbean community.

The list of artists that have been signed to Rough Trade over is rich and varied, taking in leftfield rock and pop, punk and post-punk, electronica and reggae. From Scritti Politti and Stiff Little Fingers to The Smiths and The Strokes; from Augustus Pablo and Aztec Camera to Alabama Shakes and Amyl & The Sniffers; Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry to Pulp; The Detroit Cobras to The Fall; Warpaint to Robert Wyatt; Rough Trade has platformed a little bit of everything that floats their boat.

It’s been an up and down half century for Rough Trade

Even those with the best intentions have to face harsh realities, and Rough Trade hasn’t had it all its own way over the last five decades. In 1988 the label – by then run by Travis in partnership with former Public Image Ltd member Jeannette Lee – hit financial problems brought on largely by problems with their distribution arm. They proved insurmountable and in 1991 the label went bankrupt. Travis and Lee continued in band management, looking after a number of groups including Pulp and The Cranberries, before eventually resurrecting the label in 2000.

Rough Trade’s shops and label went their separate ways in 1982, when three of the shop’s employees bought the stock for £7,000 and moved the shop round the corner to Talbot Road. It’s still there, now as Rough Trade West, but beyond its racks the Rough Trade retail fortunes have also ebbed and flowed. They opened a branch in Covent Garden’s Neal’s Yard in 1988, and branches in Paris, Tokyo and the shop’s spiritual home of San Francisco. But the change in shopping habits brought about by the rise of the internet, saw these other branches close in the 2000s. 

However, like the label, Rough Trade’s retail wing has also enjoyed a 21st century revival as people have returned to ‘physical’ music. In 2007 Rough Trade East opened on London’s Brick Lane, followed by stores in New York (2013), Nottingham (2014), Bristol (2017), Liverpool (2024), Berlin (2024) and a third store in London on Denmark Street in 2024. 

These days it’s not just about the music

In 2018 Rough Trade expanded from music into literature with the launch of Rough Trade Books, a venture very much in the same spirit of the initial music shop and record label, which, as The London Magazine put it, ‘seeks to give a home to a number of voices and talents whose shared independent spirit ties together the disparate mediums of the artists’.

The first publications from Rough Trade Books was a series of 12 pamphlets, or Rough Trade Editions, that were just as eclectic as Rough Trade’s musical foundations featuring poetry, short fiction, photography, illustration, and an experimental novella about the occult. The Rough Trade Editions have continued – the most recent one was number 58 – but they’ve been joined by a breadth of other publications too including photography collections, poetry, novels and non-fiction works, from a range of voices including Musa Okongwa, Sheena Patel, Cold War Steve, Linder, Salena Godden, Ella Frears and our own current Associate Artist Max Porter. The last two of which you can enjoy as part of our Rough Trade 50 celebration.