“It was a bit more by luck than judgement, but the first Damned album still stands up today It was a memorable record. We were putting together what I consider to be the best songwriters of the period.”Starting with “So it Goes” by Nick Lowe, issued in August 1976, the world’s most flexible label issued singles by pub-rock acts Roogalator, Lew Lewis, and The Tyla Gang (featuring Sean Tyla of Ducks Deluxe fame) before hitting its stride and signing The Damned, who swiftly became the first English punk band to release a single, “New Rose”, in October 1976 – an album, Damned Damned Damned, in March 1977, and to tour the US, beating The Sex Pistols, Clash and Stranglers on all three fronts. “All the raw material from Stiff came from the pub circuit and the studio at the Hope & Anchor,” he recalls. “I did have a bit of a masterplan and a list of people we wanted to sign: Ian Dury, Elvis Costello, or rather Declan McManus as he was then, Mickey Jupp, who we eventually signed, and Nick Lowe kind of came with Jake. It’s always a pain in the arse when somebody’s doing a documentary about work you did,” he adds. At least Robinson was a consultant on the project, and agreed to be filmed either at the race track or at the helm of a boat on the Thames.

“It was the BBC’s idea but I thought it was better than sitting in the pub,” he explains.Of course, pub-rock is where it all came from for Robinson, a former tour manager for Jimi Hendrix and for the Animals who went on to look after Brinsley Schwarz in the early Seventies. They mention this very large figure – £3.5m – and they said it came from a newspaper article, but the figure we owed was more like £1.4m. And I was the biggest creditor,” claims the buccaneering Robinson, who always kept a baseball bat by his desk, and not just for show.
“Anyway, that’s just a small thing I thought I got treated pretty good. Dave Robinson, the pub-rock-manager-turned-entrepreneur who started the original British indie label in August 1976 with his business partner Jake Riviera and a £400 loan from the Dr Feelgood singer Lee Brilleaux, only to see it collapse all around him with huge debts 11 years later, has already seen the documentary “It was good but, at the end, they got their figures wrong. Don’t get me wrong, you’ll enjoy the Stiff Weekend on BBC4, and especially the two-part documentary If it Ain’t Stiff…, which attempts to tell the story of the label that gave us The Damned, Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Madness, the Belle Stars and The Pogues, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.

The accompanying video, more disturbing than the song itself, showed Yorke pursued by a petrol-leaking car which he ends up torching. Unpicking the metaphors and meanings embedded in the song’s brief lyrics and accompanying imagery might keep the chatrooms busy, but Yorke has made it quite clear: “It’s for someone who has to work for a large company This is a song against bosses Fuck the middle management!”Robert Webb. The OK Computer track “Exit Music (For a Film)” was taped in the stone entrance hall. The eerie siren closing “Karma Police” was created by the band’s second guitarist, Ed O’Brien, by feeding sound through a digital delay machine. “He made weird noises, and we taped that a few times,” Yorke said.On release as the second single from the album, “Karma Police” proceeded in a northerly direction up the charts.