Mick Houghton - 2 July

There are secret histories in pop music.

There is one particular secret history that holds that pop music in Liverpool went straight from Billy Fury singing Halfway to Paradise in 1961 to the release on Zoo Records of Sleeping Gas by the Teardrop Explodes in February 1979, with nothing happening in the intervening eighteen years.

This secret history of pop music can only be glanced at from time to time, and then only by those with gifted vision.

There are those who say, What about Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, or the Real Thing, or even Deaf School? It is best not to listen to those people their vision is not to be trusted.

I am pleased to note here that Zoo Records was ours.

The founder of Sire Records was Seymour Stein. He was from New York, and thus had never heard of Billy Fury. But I suspected he shared a parallel secret history of pop music, one in which nothing had happened in American rock between Del Shannons Runaway dropping out of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1961 and the release on Sire Records of Blitzkrieg Bop by the Ramones in February 1976.

Come the summer of 79, Seymour Stein was interested in signing one of our other Zoo Records bands Echo & the Bunnymen to his Sire Records. We sensed Sire Records might be a good place for Echo & the Bunnymen to explore the possibility of developing other channels in future secret histories of pop music.

Stein was over from New York. We headed down from Liverpool to the Sire Records London office. This was round the back of the then derelict Covent Garden market.

One of the people who Stein introduced us to was a man in his late twenties. As in a couple of years older than me. This man so mumbled his name, I wasnt too sure what it was. I was told he was a press officer and we might be working with him. I assumed a press officer would be the person in the record company who oversaw the pressing of the records. As far as I knew, the main job of a record company was to press records. Bands wrote, played and recorded the songs, record companies pressed those recordings into records, record shops sold the records to people who wanted to play the records at home.

But I was wrong on numerous fronts: mainly about how the record industry worked, but more precisely about what a press officer did. It seemed this mans job had nothing to do with the pressing of records. His job was to put one of each of the newly pressed and soon-to-be-released records into an envelope, seal the envelope, write the address of a music paper on the front of the envelope, stick a stamp on the envelope and finally drop the envelope into a pillar box. At the time there were four music papers in the UK: the Melody Maker, New Musical Express, Sounds and Record Mirror . At most, this job would take thirty minutes per newly released record. I did not see how this could amount to a proper full-time job. With the records we had been releasing on Zoo, that is exactly what we did. And a week or so later the record in question would be reviewed as Single of the Week in at least three of those four music papers.

But this man I was introduced to in the Sire office seemed affable enough, and we were soon discussing the merits of the Flying Burrito Brothers version of The Dark End of the Street, compared to the original by James Carr. He then asked me if I had recently listened to The Sound of Fury by Billy Fury. This was code. It was then I knew I was talking with a man who had a gifted vision regarding the secret history of pop music.

This man began to turn up at Echo & the Bunnymen and Teardrop Explodes gigs, always unannounced and usually with some music journalist in tow.

And as I became more aware of what his job was, or what it was supposed to be, I began to question his methods. If he was supposed to be convincing the journalist in tow how great the Teardrop Explodes were, why was he talking to the journalist only about the merits of Gram Parsonss second album?

And when Echo & the Bunnymen released their second album, why would I overhear him telling the journalist in tow that this second album was not as good as their first album?

But then a couple of weeks later there would be a five-star rave review of Echo & the Bunnymens second album by the said journalist in tow.