‘If I wanted to go to war, I would have joined the army,” says record industry maverick Stevo, reflecting on his life in the music business and his record label Some Bizzare [sic], home to artists including Soft Cell, Cabaret Voltaire, the The, Psychic TV and Einstürzende Neubauten.
However, looking back on Stevo’s journey, it does sometimes look like a war. He has been stabbed and repeatedly headbutted; he terrorised record labels, even threatening to shoot Seymour Stein of Sire Records in the kneecaps; he was banned from the Sony building after trying to strangle someone from the legal department; and he instructed an office intern to plant a fake bomb under a music executive’s car. For decades, he has also been locked in bitter, and public, financial disagreements with artists from his own label.
“I’ve never met anybody like him,” says Wesley Doyle, author of Conform to Deform: The Weird and Wonderful World of Some Bizzare, a hugely engaging and entertaining new oral history of the label. “It seems like a lost world,” Matt Johnson of the The says in the book. “There was a period when Some Bizzare was the most exciting independent record label in the UK.”
Now 60, Stevo has been quiet in public for a long time. This his first newspaper interview in nearly 20 years – one he makes clear that he will be recording from his end. He isn’t buoyant about the book. “It’s a shame you don’t have control over your own narrative after such a fruitful career,” he says. He is also angry that it has taken this long. “The delay in any kind of recognition is outrageous.”
He brings up Tainted Love, the hugely successful 1981 hit by Soft Cell, a band that Stevo signed and was managing when he was still a teenager – Marc Almond had been impressed by his “gift of the gab” and the fact that he hitchhiked from London to Leeds to see them. That recognition is overdue, he suggests, “when you think that a teenage boy can knock Rock Around the Clock out of the Guinness Book of Records for [what was then] the longest-running record in the history of the American charts”.
Before this, in the late 70s, Stevo was running DJ nights at the Chelsea Drugstore on the King’s Road in London, having persuaded his mum to buy him a mobile disco unit on hire purchase on the promise that he would repay her with his DJing fees. Playing the industrial sounds of Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, he also put on gigs by the likes of Fad Gadget and DAF, then landed his own weekly chart in Sounds magazine, showcasing new electronic music. The quality of these artists spawned an idea for a compilation. He pulled together an impressive bunch of soon-to-be synth-pop behemoths – such as Depeche Mode, the The, Soft Cell, B-Movie and Blancmange – and released Some Bizzare Album in 1981, in many ways setting the tone for the sound of the ensuing decade.
Stevo was an unconventional industry figure. The music writer Beverley Glick described him as “like a bricklayer in new romantic clothes”. Severe dyslexia hindered his ability to read or write, and he was forced into work rather than helped at school. “Education completely failed him,” says Doyle. “From the start, he didn’t feel he had much to lose.” Nevertheless, Stevo clarifies that the label’s misspelling is not down to his dyslexia but more a celebration of ambiguity.
Stevo, real name Stephen Pearce, ditched his surname because his brother, imprisoned twice under the Race Relations Act in the 1980s, was a member of the National Front and creator of Bulldog, the NF’s openly racist newspaper. Stevo’s refusal to follow that route resulted in him being physically attacked; graffiti near his family home in east London read “Kill Stevo” and “Stevo is a traitor”. When Stevie Wonder’s radio station, KJLH, later played Tainted Love, it was a big moment for Stevo: “My brother was incarcerated, I’d lost my surname, but Stevie Wonder thought it was cool.”
Getting Stevo to talk about the heydays of Some Bizzare is tough. He avoids questions, or gives replies that don’t answer them, and we end up in a constant loop talking about lawyers, contracts, accountants and industry grudges. His experiences have clearly soured him and there is an inescapable air of paranoia.
“I feel like I’ve been victimised,” he says at one point, but in relation to what is not entirely clear. “I should have put a chair over his head,” he says at another point, referring to how he felt about Almond’s current manager, when he heard how little Soft Cell were paid to have their music included in Damien Chazelle’s La La Land.
Some Bizzare had a unique model. Stevo signed bands to his label, paid for all the recordings and production, and then sold the finished albums to majors – often landing six-figure advances for bands whose creative process remained intact because the album was already done. “Most independent record labels wanted to be independent of corporations, but I wanted to be independent and work within the corporations,” he says in the book. “My ideology is: exploit them. International companies are there to be used and that’s all they are there for. The people in these companies are sycophantic parasites.”
Yet the experimental groups Einstürzende Neubauten and Coil have been very vocal about their displeasure with Some Bizzare. Coil even went as far as to reissue their album Scatalogy, originally on Some Bizzare, with Stevo, Pay Us What You Owe Us! plastered on the front. Stevo feels this is bootlegging, maintaining that he has watertight contracts, all bands are welcome to an audit and that he has never been sued by any artist.
Before all the fallings out, he had built a reputation for provocative antics and marketing smarts. “Stevo would throw petrol on a fire that shouldn’t have been started in the first place,” Visage founder Rusty Egan says in Conform to Deform. He once sent a record company a teddy bear with a cassette tape strapped to it filled with contractual demands, “because you can’t negotiate with a teddy bear”. He took weekly shipments of jellybeans and, as part of one record deal, demanded that he was sent the flashy personal office chair of the company MD. When trying to secure a deal for Psychic TV, he sent nine-inch brass dildos to record companies with the band’s name etched on them.
“It isn’t about trying to do things for the shock,” he says now. “It was about breaking down this stupid structure and to turn it all around.” Stevo was incredibly successful at this. He got obscure, noisy, weirdo bands huge deals, put them in world-class studios, and often into the charts. He even convinced a record company to fund a groundbreaking feature film – shot in Peru, Bolivia and New York – to accompany the The’s Infected album.
Despite bands ultimately leaving the label one by one and it ending in financial difficulty, Stevo thinks his business model remains a great idea. “Name me one label that’s operating in that template now,” he says. “It doesn’t exist … but it’s of benefit to everyone. If everyone’s got that freedom, then it’s such a wonderful thing.” Releases slowed down significantly in the new millennium, and in 2008 there was a compilation release with artists from the MySpace era, but it failed to have much impact.
The question of cockup or conspiracy hovers over Some Bizzare’s legacy. The book, which features more than 80 interviews, leans more towards the former. “Ripping people off is an extreme term,” says Doyle. “He just didn’t know what he was doing. I don’t think it was malicious. He had the artists’ interest at heart. He came from a troubled background, embraced all this outsider art and put it in the mainstream. It comes from a completely untutored place and I think that’s kind of beautiful.”
When I ask Stevo to reflect on the legacy of Some Bizzare, he takes me down endlessly twisting conversational paths that wind up at his ideas for the NHS. “You could ban gambling and make the ground floor of all hospitals the only place you could gamble,” he says. “All the money goes to the nurses and doctors – they would be so stinking rich.”
It’s one of many wild digressions, but also a little glimpse of the madcap thought processes that once made Some Bizzare such a distinct operation. “For good or bad, he was a larger-than-life character in an industry that’s now so grey, corporate, politically correct and sterile,” says Johnson. “He was one of the last great British record industry eccentrics.”
Stevo is convinced Some Bizzare has a future and there are development plans in place. “I want to create the best online record label that’s ever been created,” he says. “The thing that drives me is to have goose-pimples on my arm and tears in my eyes – to create something amazing. I can get that. I will get it.”
• Conform to Deform, published by Jawbone Press, is out now. Stevo and Wesley Doyle will be in conversation at Rough Trade East on 28 February.
• This article was amended on 23 February 2023. Stevo DJ’d on the King’s Road in London, not in Dagenham, as previously stated.
