Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  Dead Kennedys’ immediate success masked some less notable endeavours. Neither Emotion Pictures nor Alan Burnham’s records sold in any quantity, though the latter was interesting for being Daniel Miller’s first non-Mute production. “I went for a meeting with Alan and Iain McNay and it was somewhere in West London,” Miller recalls, “and my car broke down, and Iain had to come and pick me up. That was a pre-production meeting. It was either the first or second thing I’d produced that wasn’t on Mute, and even then, I hadn’t produced very much. I wasn’t a record producer by any stretch of the imagination. I guess it was Iain’s idea to bring me in. It was definitely an approach. It was before Depeche Mode, and I’d done some of my own stuff and started working with Fad Gadget, but I was extremely inexperienced as a producer, because that’s really not what I was. Anyway, I remember doing it at Blackwing Studios, I’d been working there quite a lot at that time, with an engineer called Eric Radcliffe, who owned the studio, who I got on very well with and he ended up producing Yazoo and many other things. I can see the session quite clearly in my mind – I can see Alan crouched over his mellotron, trying to get it to work. I was trying to push it to be a bit more electro and less prog, but we got on fine and we agreed to differ. But as I said, I wasn’t really a producer, so it was an interesting experience.”

  Fresh Fruit’s success meant the label now had a reasonable level of stability. Sitting in his apartment in Kingston Road, Wimbledon, McNay considered his options. “I had the opportunity, if I wanted, to expand the company. But to do so I would need more people, and to have more people, I needed to keep the income coming in. Theo Chalmers had been running the publishing one day a week without getting paid. I took him on as a full-time employee to carry on with the publishing, and partly to help me on the label side. Because we were selling more records there was a lot more work to do. I also wanted to get a proper A&R man in, as Richard Jones had long since stopped doing that. I was never going to be a proper A&R man. I didn’t have the aptitude. Theo and I had a short list of people we’d both met, and we thought of Michael Alway at that point.” McNay had been taking regular calls from the young promoter from West London, involved with a band called Scissor Fits. He would present them to McNay as the next Beatles; though it’s doubtful that the Beatles would ever have recorded a song called ‘I Don’t Want To Work For British Airways No More’. McNay didn’t share his enthusiasm for the band, but he did take on Alway. “He had the drive and enthusiasm. He ran a venue called Snoopy’s in Richmond, which was in the basement of a hotel there. He knew the scene well and people seemed to like it, so we offered him the A&R job which he was happy to accept.” Alway took a £50 a week commission and all but moved into the Cherry Red offices in Bayswater – he was between girlfriends, whose houses he generally made his residence, and set about reshaping the label’s future.

  The Cherry Red roster at that point did not look auspicious. Despite successful licensed American releases (Runaways, Destroy All Monsters), Dead Kennedys apart, their ‘new’ artists had failed to deliver. Alway had a vision in mind. But while he set about establishing it, he would work with what was available. The first example being ‘Hungry, So Angry’ by Medium Medium. Occupying similar territory to the Pop Group, Gang Of Four, etc, operating out of Nottingham meant Medium Medium never quite registered on the post-punk radar to the same extent as those peers. Yet their ‘extreme dance music’ shared similar roots and produced one bona fide era classic, ‘Hungry, So Angry’. They made their debut in 1979 with ‘Them Or Me’ on the London independent Apt Records, a song which later transferred to the hip (not least with John Peel) regional compilation Hicks From The Sticks.

  “I still don’t understand why Mike Alway wanted to sign us,” says the band’s Andy Ryder. “But at that point, I think Cherry Red were still looking to find out which direction they were going in.” That’s probably true. For McNay’s part, he believes Alway sees Medium Medium as “something he wouldn’t have signed if things had been different. Having said that, Medium Medium has had definite legs over the years, and when it came out, I thought it was good, and the single did OK.” Alway concurs. “The Medium Medium thing was a different type of contractual situation. I did not discourage the situation, but I did not bring Medium Medium to the label. Chris Garland [then the band’s manager] approached Iain, and Iain may have asked my opinion, and I wasn’t in any way against it. It seemed to me that they were worthwhile – it was something we could do immediately and it seemed the right thing to do in order to be a bit of an antidote to some of what had preceded it. But I didn’t have anything like the emotional investment in Medium Medium that I did in Eyeless In Gaza or Five Or Six. Medium Medium was not my initiative, but they had my support.”

  The ‘Mike Alway era’ started in earnest with CHERRY 19, Five Or Six’s debut release, ‘Another Reason’ c/w ‘The Trial’. “They were the outstanding character group of the scene that I was running in Richmond,” Alway says, “which in those days involved a great many local groups of a considerable standard. It’s unthinkable now, but then we were running clubs and putting on shows five nights a week, three bands a night, and Five Or Six were one of those groups. I was always aware that they had a certain amount of local bias. I think if Five Or Six had been a demo tape that arrived in the post from somewhere else, I don’t know if I’d have carried the flag in that way.”

  It wasn’t just about the music with Five Or Six, but also “the type of people” they were. “They were very much on my wavelength,” Alway continues. “They were very enquiring and very interested, very positive people. They had a great attitude – they were a little bit Wire, a bit Vic Godard, a bit Monochrome Set at their strangest. I think their role was to be obtuse. I think Five Or Six were our This Heat. They used to bash about – they weren’t good enough musicians at that time, in a way, to make the type of records that Ben and Tracey were about to make, or certainly that the Monochrome Set could make. But they had a good attitude and a role to play in the machine of it all. They were very much an inspiration, very good people to work with. I was able to bounce some of the things I was doing on the label off them, and I knew I would always get critical and honest reactions. They weren’t in any way fawning. After Five Or Six they all went on to do something within the entertainment industry. One of them managed Goldfrapp, one of them is the international manager of 4AD Records. One, John Yorke, became head of drama at the BBC. They had a much more eclectic spread of sensibilities than any normal group would have, that’s what set them apart for me. As with so many things, they were moving a little bit fast for the public possibly. It was as much as they could possibly do with the very limited resources that a very young Cherry Red could provide. They had very little to work with, as did all the groups at that time.”

  The liaison with 2nd Layer – essentially Adrian Borland and Graham Bailey of The Sound – grew out of the label’s friendship with Borland. “I first met Adrian probably around 1979, when the first Outsiders album [his original band] came out,” recalls McNay. “He’d formed his own label with his father, and they were, in a way, also trying to make it as an independent label in the early days. I loved The Sound, and was very happy to put out 2nd Layer on Cherry Red. Adrian and I both supported Wimbledon FC. I used to see him now and again on the terraces there.” “We considered The Sound was work, and 2nd Layer was fun,” remembers Graham Bailey. “That sounds ridiculous, because The Sound was fun too, but it was something where we could really let ourselves go. It didn’t matter what anyone thought or what was said or anything else, it was a censorship-free us.” Alway remembers that “The Sound at the time were looking to get a contract with a much bigger label and ended up with Warners, We had become friends with Adrian, and he was someone that we all liked. And he liked us as well. But because he knew Cherry Red was the wrong context for The Sound, he signed with Warners/Korova. So he created 2nd Layer as a side project, as something for us to have.”

  Another release, this time a retros
pective one, came from a referral by Richard Jones, in the form of 60s psychedelic mavericks The Misunderstood. “I’d heard them on the John Peel show [Peel managed the band for a time and was a fierce advocate] and he used to play both ‘Children Of The Sun’, and in particular ‘I Can Take You To The Sun’,” Jones remembers. “It was obviously something he really liked – you could just tell when he was introducing it. It felt special at the time and even now I think both songs stand up well, and that caught my attention. Many years after that, I was talking to Iain, and he was saying, there must be some older things worth releasing. I said, you ought to seriously consider this. And all I did was give him the name and title of the record – out of which he managed to find it and negotiate its re-release. He brought out [Misunderstood compilation] Before The Dream Faded, which had those two tracks on it, and also released it as a single.”

  Other oddities of this nature included a Marc Bolan album. “Michael was trying to trace the rights to the John’s Children records we later put out,” McNay recalls. “He tracked down Simon Napier-Bell, whom he got on well with. Simon offered us the Marc Bolan album, which was basically old tracks that had been re-done with contemporary musicians. The album charted in the Top 100, the single went in the Top 75 and we sold quite a few albums.” The tracks had been recorded by Napier-Bell on the first evening he’d met Bolan. “Later, when he died, I decided to dig them out and re-record them as I thought he might have recorded them at that time,” Napier-Bell recalls. “It was very difficult because they were just him and an acoustic and the tempos were wildly out. But I edited the tapes as far into tempo as I could, then got Clem Cattini – for me, always the very best session drummer – to come in and play to them. He was brilliant at upping and downing the tempo with Marc’s original guitar and vocal. I then dubbed on a bass guitar and the other instruments, instrument by instrument, until we had what was the finished album I gave to Iain.”

  The meeting with Simon Napier-Bell was ‘fascinating’, Alway recalls. “Simon attempted at that meeting to sell me a record called ‘I Like Boys’ by Quentin Crisp, which I foolishly didn’t licence from him. So I came back with the Bolan album, and there was definitely a sense of cobbling together some sort of album from bits and pieces and giving them to us, but what the hell. Iain seemed happy to accept that and plough on. I think Iain’s position was, ‘Mike, I know this is not ideally what you would want to do at the label at this point, but we’ve got to pay the wages.’ That was certainly his mantra when we did [hugely successful punk compilation] Burning Ambitions. And he even came in to me and apologised and said, ‘look, I know you’ll think it’s shit, but we’ve got to do it, and I said, ‘all right’.”

  The deal was done. “We were both at Kensington Garden Square at the time.” Alway adds. “Memorably, there was a studio downstairs run by the guy who worked with Abba, Marcus Osterdahl. We were upstairs at the top of the building in the Cherry Red office. I remember Simon Napier-Bell threw a party in Marcus Studios one winter afternoon. They phoned Iain and said, ‘look, we’ve got a party going on down here, get your arse down here.’ And Iain told him to go fuck himself – we were all upstairs working hard on his behalf, and we weren’t going to make an appearance at the party. It was a mid-air collision between the old ideas and the new wave ideas. Iain will probably remember that. But Iain did get on pretty well with Simon; there was a recognition that they were fundamentally different people, but there were ways in which they could help each other.”

  There was also a deal with Adrian Sherwood’s Creation Rebel that Alway had misgivings about. “I don’t know anything about that type of music,” he says, “it’s not my field. I don’t understand it. I liked Adrian and we could get on, but we had no real common ground there. He brought Mark Stewart [ex-Pop Group] into the office and I was pleased to meet him, and I could have worked with Mark Stewart, but Adrian was the definitive producer – it was all Adrian. We ended up at the studio at somewhere like Basing Street. It was very late at night, and he had a room full of Rastas, and they were all smoking, and the volume of the music was – a runway at Heathrow. The music was incredible, and he was a fantastic technician – a remarkable individual, a real one-off was Adrian, but I just had no empathy with his music whatsoever.”

  The Sherwood connection came about via an unlikely source. At the time, Alway was trying to court The Fall. “Mark E Smith was a friend of Adrian’s,” McNay recalls. “I remember spending a couple of evenings in Adrian’s flat off the Finchley Road with Mark and Adrian. I understood that Adrian’s work wasn’t necessarily something that Mike was personally enamoured of, but I thought what Adrian was doing was very interesting, and I’d really liked the first New Age Steppers album that came out. We worked out a deal whereby I pretty much left the creative side entirely up to Adrian, and he delivered finished albums and artwork.” Like Burning Ambitions, it was hardly Alway’s cup of tea. “Not at all. But I had to accept it because we were building the company up, and Iain was entitled to do these things. I completely accepted that situation – especially because Iain was honest and aware of it. He would say, really, this doesn’t fit with what we’re doing, but… But it didn’t work. It’s not without artistic merit, it’s just a different world. But I didn’t find it an impediment. I didn’t think like that at the time. Mainly because Iain wasn’t heavy with me about it, and because Adrian Sherwood was so likeable.”

  These releases aside, Alway began to shape the roster by bringing aboard a series of artists – Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn, Eyeless In Gaza, Felt, The Passage and ultimately his adored Monochrome Set – that would establish the label’s marque. Not, however, that he wanted a heavily stylised ‘sound’. One of Alway’s inspirations was Verve Records. “Not in the jazz period, but in the mid-60s, when they had the Righteous Brothers, the Mothers Of Invention, the Velvet Underground, Astrid Gilberto and Ella Fitzgerald. It seemed to me that if a record label can have all of that disparate artistry, and make it work classily, they have something going for them. That’s what I wanted Cherry Red to be, I wanted Cherry Red to be the Verve of that generation. Although I knew there was a sound by which Cherry was likely to make it, which is the one most closely connected to the sound we all know and love, I wasn’t certain of that at the time. I have to say that I was also feeling that I wanted the label to be eclectic in the truest sense. Labels at the time always had the same sound. By and large Factory had the same sound, Durutti Column apart, 4AD, etc.”

  A handful of contemporary post-punk records that reflected Alway’s tastes are also pivotal. “The records that had the influence on me to go in a ‘light’ music direction that ran contrary to the way things were going? They were ‘Ambition’ by Vic Godard, the first Durutti Column album on Factory and the Young Marble Giants album on Rough Trade. All those things said to me that ‘light’ music has a place in this revolution.” The roster was built on this predisposition to aesthetic beauty, in an almost neo–classicist vein. “Very much so,” Alway admits. “I saw a role, a place for Cherry Red. What I liked about the fact that it was ‘light’ music was that I knew it would have an international market. Whatever the blasting impact of punk rock, it was never going to translate in terms of overseas and the mainstream. One always realised that punk rock would be the immediate impact, then a couple of aftershocks, but it wouldn’t last forever. It would always be replaced by more sophisticated music.”

  Among his first recruits to that end were synthesizer duo Eyeless In Gaza. “Their tape – it wasn’t a demo, it was a cassette of a master tape – was in the post on the first morning that I worked at Cherry Red,” Alway recalls. “I’m grateful to them because I was able to work my way into Iain’s back room of his house in Wimbledon in those days, and offer him something well worth getting involved in, almost from the minute I walked in his door. Eyeless In Gaza was more connected to the idea of the Scott Walker thing, of a very highly distinctive vocal sound. You could argue that Martyn Bates certainly had a very ‘love it or hate
it’ type of vocal. That type of thing is usually a major plus when you’re looking for groups with what I would call character. Eyeless In Gaza were completely in your face, and a really challenging sound – very fresh, and very vital and very bold. I didn’t know how long this privilege was going to last and I had to get some quality on to the label quickly. It had to be something that would stand out – and they certainly offered that.”

  “We sent out tapes of our first album,” recalls Eyeless In Gaza’s Martyn Bates, “and from the first batch of, I think, five tapes sent out, we had two offers for deals – with 4AD and with Cherry Red. For us, there was absolutely no point in our choosing music as a means of expression if we were being ‘advised’ by anyone. Back then, Cherry Red were entirely happy for us to do exactly what we wanted to do. So, after an initial meeting, we chose to work with them.” It was initially a successful relationship, though some of the mutual enthusiasm petered out. “My feeling back then was that Cherry Red were trying to ‘run’ too quickly, to move faster than they were actually able,” Bates recalls. “From nowhere, it seemed to me then, a sudden pressure was on us to ‘break through’; make short pop singles; to ‘up’ production values and re-record stuff, etc. This at a time when people would continually tell us that they couldn’t get our records in the shops. In Europe we’d be playing packed clubs and halls where often there would be another 200 to 300 souls outside who couldn’t get in. Then people would still tell us – guess what? – we can’t find your records in the shops. Admittedly, it was a turbulent time of exponential growth and change for everyone involved with the job of selling independent music. I just remember resenting the ‘outside interference’ – after all, we signed with Cherry Red and NOT to 4AD precisely because we’d have the total artistic freedom and control that we wanted and required. The feeling from us was, if we are going to be told what to do, then we might as well pack it in and make baked beans instead, not art.”