Rough Trade book coming!

Looks like some sort of historical tome on the Rough Trade Records shop and label is on it's way shortly in the UK. From Will Hodgkinson at the Guardian:

In 1977, Geoff Travis returned to London from America with 150 records by cult artists including the New York Dolls, the Stooges and Tim Buckley. Not knowing what to do with them, and penurious after his US adventure, Travis opened up a shop to sell them, at 202 Kensington Park Road, Notting Hill Gate, London. Rough Trade, which has since become the key champion of alternative music as a shop, record label and distribution network, was born. In this 1978 photograph, Travis talks to Genesis P Orridge - busy pushing a record by his own band, Throbbing Gristle - while Richard Scott, who set up Rough Trade's distribution arm, gets on with business.

"I had been to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights bookshop in San Francisco," says Travis, who now runs Rough Trade with Jeanette Lee, formerly the guitarist in Public Image Limited. "It was the kind of place where you could stay all day whether you bought anything or not, and as such it was part of the community. That was our idea - and, being in an area where a lot of musicians lived, we had Joe Strummer dropping by, Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols coming in to flog the records he had stolen that day, and David Bowie getting his assistant to buy records for him."

Rough Trade began just as punk was nurturing a climate that encouraged bands to release their own records, quickly and cheaply, and Travis saw it as his job to provide a chance for these bedroom creations to get out in the world, so he set up a label, too. He recalls how he discovered one of Rough Trade's most important bands in 1983: "Johnny Marr drove down from Manchester with a tape of Hand in Glove that he and the Smiths had recorded the night before. I was in my kitchen making a cup of tea when he played it to me - that was a Friday. On Monday we had the record cut. I grew up listening to bands like the Kinks and the Who - bands who would cut four singles a year. We aimed for a similarly immediate approach, and the Smiths liked that."

A revived Rough Trade has won plaudits with acts such as the Strokes, Arcade Fire, the Libertines and Antony and the Johnsons in recent years. But the struggle to stay independent, find good music and survive in a hostile financial climate continues. "We strive to be a great label like Motown or Island, but we have a long way to go," Travis says. "The goal is to have a band like the Long Blondes become a household name. Maybe we just need a different type of household."

Rough Trade by Rob Young is published next month by Black Dog Publishing. Order it here.