Bright Young Things

Adrift in a Sea of Mediocrity

'The really great managers are the eccentrics who contributed to what pop has become . anyone who created a group in that way must be important.' - Simon Napier-Bell

'It was a dream, and anything could happen.' - Alan McGee

The period in the mid 1980s when él records emerged was a somewhat muddled time for pop music. Characterised by the explosion of electronic musical acts, US punk bands, industrial and Goth music, and what Simon Reynolds calls 'the return of rock',3 there was little space for music of sophistication and beauty. At the same time this epoch witnessed the reinvention of 'art rock' as 'art pop' with the collage antics of ZTT and Malcolm McLaren's post-Sex Pistols larks. The increasingly synthetic sound of this era was interesting but cold, lacking a sense of 'lightness' a dimension that Italo Calvino argued in his book Six Memos for the Next Millennium was to be one of the key dimensions of twenty-first century life. New pop, and New Romanticism, such as it was, had become bloated and overly commercialised, 'decadent'4 even. The 'alternative' music scene's response to all this, according to Reynolds, was woeful and the situation felt 'grim' . The 'heroic phase had passed'.5

This pessimistic tone is recognisable and has some legitimacy (certainly in terms of the way 'independent', a revolutionary concept, became simply 'indie', a style) but Reynolds' overview leaves Mike Alway and él records out of the picture, the label presumably not registering enough on his wavelength to warrant a mention. The 'lightness' that él supplied was something Alway had been developing for some time inspired by the late 1970s work of Vic Godard, Durutti Column and Young Marble Giants, a shift in direction where the sounds became far removed from the ugly noise of punk and the darkness of industrial music.

The extravagant complexity of the prog rock bands was being replaced with an art sensibility and an experimental approach epitomised by groups like Wire and Tuxedo Moon, manifest on the Alway-curated 1981 Cherry Red post-punk compilation Perspectives and Distortion.6 This record displayed the eclecticism that was to inspire the él vision, incorporating as it did talents as diverse as Virgin Prunes, Ben Watt, Kevin Coyne and future él records contributors such as Karl Blake, Ashley Wales and David Knight (Lemon Kittens; Five or Six).

Alway's own band A Tent, led by Gavin Povey, also made an appearance. As David Illic's sleeve notes make clear 'It (the LP) makes no claim to embrace accepted guidelines in order to adhere itself to any particular audience.' Perspectives and Distortion was shipped in a dour 'industrial' sleeve design with a grey solarized image of concrete structures and contained ethereal ambient vocal works such as 'Bright Waves' by Claire Thomas and Susan Vezey (actually Snatch tapes founder Philip Sanderson); industrial electronica by Thomas Leer and a pre The The Matt Johnson; Fourth World experimentation by Two Daughters; neo-classical jazz by Lol Coxhill; sound art by David Jackman (Organum) and spoken word performance by punk pioneer Mark Perry. A 'tribute' box set aiming to capture the avant-garde spirit of the original LP, Further Perspectives & Distortion was issued by Cherry Red in 2019 but this retrospective lacked the individuality and eccentricity of the original. While the avant-gardism of Perspectives and Distortion would be somewhat played down on subsequent él releases, the drive towards alternative perspectives and the pushing at boundaries continued and informed Alway's vision for the new label.

In retrospect, él was perhaps also more in tune with the 1980s resurgence of psychedelic music exemplified by the likes of Liverpool groups Echo and the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes where the aesthetics of the 1960s - chiming guitars, melodic singing, surrealism - were updated for a new wave generation. That said, the return to the psychedelic was viewed cautiously by Alway: 'It's a very emotional word 'psychedelic'. I learned not to mention it because people thought either it was rock or an ill-disciplined mess. McLaren had blown open the side of the edifice and very strange, different people got into something that was very unhealthy and masonic (drugs, the 1970s indulgence). I think more of something like Liberace Now! jumping on the bandwagon with the best psychedelic record cover that was not reflected in the music at all!'

Nonetheless, Alway felt that there was a particularly creative atmosphere in the 1960s (epitomized by songs like 'Excerpt from a Teenage Opera') that made a resurgence after punk. 'I just love records that seem to be in a space of their own, that couldn't be explained, that had charm and character and were unrepeatable. The 'cleared space' that occurs at certain times. Occasionally an él record might hint at that.' Johnny Rogan, writing about the pop Svengali notes that by the late 1980s: 'The great visionaries, eccentrics, romantics and opportunists of the mid-sixties beat boom 1960s had been replaced by economic mechanics, anonymous agencies and management companies, which offered professional service but little in the way of innovation.'7 Rogan was writing in 1988 and it has only got worse. It was this 'creative nadir' that Alway fought against.

Mike Alway began his musical career proper as a manager and songwriter for the short-lived band Scissor Fits (Colin Roxborough, the guitarist from the group, would later create Gol Gappas for él), and guitarist with the experimental art rock group A Tent. Alway was also a promoter (with Red Flame founder Dave Kitson) and scene creator at the nightclub Snoopys in Richmond, South London a location that at that time, in Alway's own words, was 'teeming with bands'. He also manged The Soft Boys the Cambridge outfit led by Robin Hitchcock. He remembers it thus:

'I'm sure I bought hundreds of records through 1978-80. One of them was the Soft Boys 'Wading Through a Ventilator' EP on the Cambridge based label, Raw. The record is magical. It's beyond classification and genuinely psychedelic in the way that I understood the term; namely the poetic Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd, the LS Bumble Bee, or early Soft Machine; The Prisoner; The Diana Rigg Avengers. That particular fantasy quality so eloquently expressed by Jonathan Miller's television production of Alice In Wonderland. To me, psychedelia is not rock music.'

'I worked with the Soft Boys for a short time, helping promote the A Can of Bees LP. I was a helper, not a manager. I brought enthusiasm and energy. I was peripheral but I was pleased to be involved. In my youthful innocence I thought everything was possible. I was made to feel that my efforts (however modest) were appreciated and I am grateful for that. A brave, singular work, A Can of Bees was a victim of a self-conscious era. Drawing on an eclectic range of cultural sources, largely foreign to both contemporaries and audiences, The Soft Boys were both of the time, and yet nothing to do with it. They co-existed (strikingly) with what's going on.'

'The post-punk era was every bit as creatively fertile as the underground sixties. The ground had been cleared and now the whole panorama of 20th century music was in play. Artists were now free to draw on disparate influences from the free jazz helter-skelter of Ornette Coleman to the sound explorations of Berio or Stockhausen and to import language from almost anywhere. 'Art Music' would, I suppose, be a reasonable collective term for this marvellous but short-lived era'.

The post Alway was offered as an A&R man for the independent record label Cherry Red was his opportunity to develop a tangible modus operandi out of his own tastes and sensibilities. Alway, put simply, completely transformed the direction of Cherry Red from a distributor type outfit to a label in its own right with its own sensibilities and style, something that became in effect the 'Mike Alway era'.8 Alway's aim was to make Cherry Red a rival to the likes of Factory and Rough Trade and his key desire, from the very early days, was for a musical act to possess a distinct 'character'. This 'one work' concept, where all the artists were different but somehow formed a coherent whole, was epitomised by the ground-breaking 1982 Pillows and Prayers compilation.

The él groups were never conceived as being 'touring' bands. Alway hoped that the freshness of the acts and the energetic spirt of the music would be enough. Ambition, in the traditional music industry sense was to be side-lined. 'There was no careerism' Alway told me. 'It wasn't about doing a tour. I was trying to unencumber them of all that baggage. If it sounds rough, who cares?'

It was intended that good press and radio was enough the spread the word about the excellence of the él project. Alway recalls: 'as the él records came out a pattern emerged. We had very good press, which I had to work on, to cultivate it. We were making progress in the credibility stakes of the print media. There was support there but not with radio at all.' The traditional first stop for indie acts was the BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel. However, as Alway notes, 'we were far too pretentious for John Peel. We were completely ignored by him and also by the mid evening show hosted by Janice...