by Alex; Ogg
“I think Eyeless should have stayed closer to the pop side and got the balance a bit better,” Alway suggests, with hindsight. “I was not guilty of allowing Eyeless In Gaza to indulge themselves. On the contrary, my attitude to them became more professional. I would say to them, you’ve got to do ‘that’ to qualify ‘this’. Martyn is a very good person, somebody that brought a tremendous amount of knowledge to the label – he really knew a lot about modern music, he was ahead of most people in that respect. And he had tremendous enthusiasm for different things. You would think to yourself, this person can only go on to do good things, really.”
Ben Watt was, like Five Or Six, signed on the basis of local knowledge. “He was also to do with the clubs we were running in Richmond,” says Alway. “He knew Five Or Six. He was a friend who was making music that had something of Vinni Reilly [Durutti Column], and a bit of Nick Drake, certainly. I played him things like Can and Quicksilver Messenger Service, and he seemed to appreciate those sorts of things. He just fitted into where we were going, really. I remember Iain did not want to sign him at the beginning, and he was quite right, because he saw a folk singer, basically. There was nobody like that in the scene at all at the time. But somehow the initial single ‘Cant’ got made. There was no great reaction, though it was a nicely crafted record. But we were able to resolve all the problems by pairing him with Tracey [Thorn], really.”
“Ben came from a jazz background,” recalls Alway. “His father was a bandleader and very successful. His mother was a writer; a very middle-class background. Ben was better equipped to deal with everything. He’d been to St Paul’s, a private school. He was very smart and very determined. I don’t know how far he could have gone as a solo artist. I think he could have made artistically significant records, and possibly even sold well, but we were always thinking about John Martyn at that time. That’s what I saw in him in the beginning – more John Martyn than Nick Drake. I didn’t really see a folk person, I saw something modern, with that element of ‘strangeness’ that John Martyn had, and, to some extent, that Robert Wyatt had.”
Indeed, for his second single, the ‘Summer Into Winter’ EP, Watt worked with Soft Machine legend Wyatt. “Robert lived here in Twickenham,” Alway continues. “We attempted to contact him, just before the Tracey thing had started really – somebody for Ben to collaborate with on the second single. Ben picked up the phone one day, called him and went round there. They got to a studio in Kensington, and Robert contributed to the record. It gives it a certain richness; the voices work very well together. It was part of the learning curve, to use a hideous phrase, so it was useful for Ben at that time. For us, it was one step at a time as far as Iain was concerned, but at least we were making records now with Ben, and moving forward.” “Of course I remember working with Ben,” Wyatt told me in 2007. “‘Walter And John’ was my first gay love song! It was sweet. I was really honoured to be trusted to do that properly, I really liked it. I think Ben Watt just got in touch with me and phoned me up, sent me a cassette or something.”
As Alway suggests, the label would eventually get the best out of Watt by pairing him with Tracey Thorn, at that time signed to the label as part of The Marine Girls. John Acock, Cherry Red’s first producer, recalls an evening spent in Iain McNay’s company. “If we could turn the clock back! I came back to Iain’s place and he said he had some tapes sent in, just before Mike Alway joined. One of them was The Marine Girls and Tracey Thorn. Iain said, ‘Listen to this, see what you think’. And her voice then wasn’t bad and The Marine Girls had something, but I didn’t recognise she was going to be the voice of the 80s, so I passed on it!”
The Marine Girls were formed in 1980 in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, by school-friends Thorn and Gina Hartman; eventually joined by sisters Jane and Alice Fox. “Like lots of bands made up of school friends, in The Marine Girls we had somewhat diverse tastes,” Thorn recalls. “Jane was always quite interested in jazz, while Alice used to traipse around after Spear of Destiny. But we all converged with the Young Marble Giants, and they were something of a touchstone for us. It would take another 20 years or so for the Kings of Convenience to spell it out, but it was that ‘quiet is the new loud’ kind of belief. Then, when I met Ben, we had two records in common – the Vic Godard album What’s The Matter Boy and Return of the Durutti Column. Our motto became that line taken from the b-side of [Subway Sect’s] ‘Ambition’, which goes: ‘We oppose all rock n roll’. Mike Alway, I think, really understood that stance, and that it was coming from somewhere progressive, not reactionary.”
“I don’t remember The Marine Girls being all that central,” Alway recalls. “It was something we were just cultivating. That’s not to say we didn’t have the attention on it, but it was moving at its own pace. And then Tracey’s [solo] album came along and suddenly that changed everything. I thought The Marine Girls was OK, it certainly had its moments of originality and poetry and beauty, but I think to some extent we did see what was there with Tracey, and we were beginning to think in that direction. The Marine Girls was always a question of catching it, really. Live, they were incredibly charming. That was where they were really good, if they were live and jangling around and bashing about on charming songs, it was fantastic. They didn’t know what they were doing and they didn’t care, it was all very artless and natural. That’s a very precious thing. You have a lot of responsibility, you’re doing something that is very gentle, and I wasn’t about to destroy it, but Tracey ended it herself by going to Hull University. That dictated the way the things were going to be.”
“Our gigs were certainly fairly shambolic,” Thorn confirms. “We were totally artless, but not without attitude. It took a certain amount of guts to get up at gigs and be quiet and un-show-offy. Alice was fantastically confrontational though, and would invite anyone out for a fight if she thought they were being disrespectful. It’s not quite true that it ended when I went up to Hull. I went there in 1981, and the second Marine Girls album Lazy Ways was made in 1983. The trouble really was that by then I had met Ben, and formed Everything But The Girl, and also made a solo record. I was being torn in different directions. And realising I wanted to be the lead singer, which I just wasn’t in The Marine Girls.”
“At some point they all came to the office,” Alway recalls. “I remember saying to Tracey, you should meet Ben Watt. I don’t know why I said that, I think it was because I was aware I had played him her voice, and it appealed to him strongly. And she said, ‘I’m not going to… blah blah blah’. She was just a kid, and it was all said in good humour. But it was just a complete coincidence that there were these parallel careers, both on Cherry Red Records. The remarkable coincidence was that they both ended up, quite separately, attending Hull University. They didn’t know each other at the time. And Ben became aware of the fact that she was there, and put a message out for the two of them to meet.” “I think Mike played me Ben’s first single, ‘Cant’,” Thorn confirms, “but I didn’t get it at all – it’s a bit avant-garde-folky. I would surely love it now, but in those days I was narrow-minded in the way of most 19-year-olds. It was a coincidence us both going to Hull, I wanted to go to East Anglia but failed my interview.”
“They took the name Everything But The Girl from a furniture shop in Hull,” Alway continues. “And the first single was done as a sideline. It was still The Marine Girls, or, by then, Tracey Thorn’s solo album, and Ben’s solo album. It just ran in parallel really. Tracey’s solo album wasn’t meant to bring an end to The Marine Girls by any means. It was there to complement The Marine Girls. We couldn’t make The Marine Girls into something other than what they were. What they were was fabulous, but they were at a certain technical level. Tracey, we could see, without it being rocket science, could go somewhere else. Because of the voice, but also because of the willingness to go somewhere else. She may have come from Hatfield and been very young, but she wanted to go forward. So when that was set up it wasn’t to replace The Marine Girls in any shape or form.
But she was in Hull with Ben, she could more easily work with Ben than with The Marine Girls back in Hatfield. So anyway, they made ‘Night And Day’ as a bit of fun on the side, and we were doing it to see what would happen. But I did think the two voices together might create something special.”
The satisfying ‘fit’ between the two voices was just as much of a revelation to Thorn. “It was a complete surprise. I had Ben pegged as a bit of an oddball. I think it was true, and still is to a degree, that he was more naturally experimental than me, very forward-looking always. But at the same time, he has always respected my more poppy sensibility. That was what made the collaboration interesting for both of us.”
Another cornerstone act of the house that Alway built were Birmingham art mavericks Felt, led by the inimitable Lawrence [Hayward]. “Felt I knew about because I’d read about them,” Alway says. “I made a call, and Lawrence sent me some music to listen to. I’d read about them in the music press. It was very early on. It was probably the review of [debut single] ‘Index’, which likened them to Manuel from Fawlty Towers. I thought, I’ve got to hear this. And it [a review written by Alway’s later collaborator Dave McCullough] seriously did liken Lawrence’s guitar sound to Manuel and it was single of the week. It was great really, because you could procure that record and hear the madness of that record, and see the potential in it for you, in full knowledge that no other label would touch it with a barge pole. It’s interesting that what Felt actually played me was quite different to ‘Index’. ‘Index’ is a barrage of de-tuned and atonal guitars. What they eventually gave me was much more musical. It related, but it was quite different. Lawrence had quite cleverly built around Maurice Deebank’s melodic ability as a guitarist. He was almost a Spanish guitarist, Maurice. Felt we also saw live a couple of times, and they were hopeless. They just couldn’t sing, they couldn’t start, they were embarrassed, they had red faces.”
Alway had invited McNay along to one gig, and instantly regretted it. “I’ll tell you the honest truth. We went to see them at the King’s Head in Acton. And they started their set, and I think I got two numbers in and thought, they are just so weak. Iain is going to get me in the morning and say, ‘what the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ Funnily enough, he knew – intelligently – that the live context wasn’t really their world. And what magic needed to occur, was going to occur in the studio. And that’s all that really mattered. A lot of people have made great records and been hopeless live. I felt for Lawrence, because he was such a perfectionist even then, and he didn’t have the technical ability or the equipment, all those frustrations really. They were charming kids, they turned up all dressed in the right shirts, straight off the train from Birmingham. They were very, very young at the time, and Lawrence was an idealist from a provincial background who was intelligent, definitely a poet, and a vulnerable person. He didn’t have any business sophistication. I think what’s undone Lawrence through the years is the fact that he’s never been prepared to entrust someone with those responsibilities. That’s your death warrant, really. It’s quite a tough world, there are lots of wounds in it, and you need the right representation, you can’t live in a vacuum.”
It is significant that Felt, like so many artists on the label, had been picked up after they’d self-released their debut record. The fact that Cherry Red nurtured or schooled talent more often than making the initial discovery reflects two things. First, it was indicative of Alway’s ambition to get ‘quality’ on the label as soon as possible to gain and preserve momentum. But it was also, in part, a result of McNay’s cautious business approach. Unlike other heads of independent labels, he was never one to bet the farm on a favoured son or daughter, preferring to spread liabilities and mitigate potential losses. Another artist who had demonstrated the ambition and capacity to release his own record was Thomas Leer, one of the architects of the electronic revolution of the late 70s, when a cluster of artists on independent labels augmented the DIY rhetoric of punk with newly affordable synthesizers.
Leer’s association with Cherry Red produced a rich, but ultimately brief catalogue; 1981’s ‘4 Movements’ 12-inch EP, 1982’s double 12-inch ‘album’ Contradictions, and the 1982 single ‘All About You’ (which later graced Cherry Red’s state of the nation address Pillows & Prayers). It’s a body of work that traces Leer’s love not only of Krautrock and the avant garde, but also soul music and Frank Zappa. The results were critically acclaimed – both ‘4 Movements’ and ‘All About You’ were, like debut single ‘Private Plane’ before them, accorded single of the week status. Yet Leer’s objectives were defiantly non-commercial and less exhibitionist. “After my first single, I wanted to free myself up from the actual mechanical process of putting a record out,” says Leer, “so the obvious thing was to look for a label I could work with. Cherry Red just happened to be the friendliest bunch I came across with a real enthusiasm for the music. A good mix of people, too. Sort of eccentric and level headed at the same time.”
“When The Passage and Thomas Leer were signed,” Alway states, “I was at the stage of wanting to see what would happen with a lot of different sounds. I didn’t think Thomas Leer owed anything to any particular label. I wanted there to be a different type of connection and a spread of things. I always say that Dick Witts [The Passage] and Thomas Leer would say that they felt outside of the discourse of the label’s evolution. But that was partly geographical. Thomas only lived in South London, but we were never quite able to establish the same empathy. I went over to see him pretty often and he was always very friendly. [But] I think Thomas wanted to be on a major record label being very successful, and he certainly had the ability to do it. There were people like Paul Morley writing very positive things about Thomas in the press, giving him itchy feet. He was entitled to those comments, he deserved them, and the inevitable happened when he joined ZTT. You get that stuff in the press, and you suddenly find people saying ‘We haven’t got enough money to record with’. Then it starts to become a different sort of relationship, less of a pleasure.”
The aforementioned Passage formed out the Manchester Musician’s Collective in March 1978, led by Dick Witts, a presenter on Granada TV and former percussionist with the Hallée Orchestra. With numerous line-up changes but retaining Witts as the key artistic contributor, they recorded two EPs and a debut album, Pindrop, for Object Music, but disputes with the label led to its deletion shortly after release. From there they hooked up with Virgin/DinDisc to distribute their own label Night & Day. By the time they came to Cherry Red they were reduced to a duo of Witts and guitarist Andy Wilson.
“I remember we had a show at Raymond’s Revue Bar with The Passage before we signed them,” says Alway. “I remember Iain coming out of there absolutely thrilled. It was only about half full, but they were absolutely on stonking form.” Yet the problems in their association mounted quickly. “I was unable to get the press to react to them quite as willingly as I was with The Monochrome Set. I don’t know why. It was partly, I think, because they were a Manchester band. I think Dick would have been disappointed at the amount of press reaction. I can’t say exactly why it happened, but it was just cooler. The Passage had already had a hit with Pindrop. They were not to be discovered again. If the record we’d made with The Passage had been their first album, I think we’d have had a better reaction. The history; the fact that they were from Manchester, that they had an attitude – things were already logged long before Cherry Red came on the scene. It may have counted against them to some degree. But I still think they were an outstanding band – musically, very good. And Dick was a much better vocalist than people would give him credit for. It just didn’t quite fit in – lots of things were right about it, but it only took one thing to be wrong for it not to work. It was just a shame. They were just probably on the wrong label. I think Dick really felt that he wanted more prominence; he was probably entitled to it. Dick had a very good album and wanted to get it out on an enthusiastic label. They came to us because we were
enthusiastic. We were, and we did make progress for them, there’s no doubt, but they couldn’t kick on to the next stage.”
“I think it was more the case that we came to them because we wanted to record more work and Cherry Red allowed us to do so after we left Virgin,” maintains Witts. “In fact, Cherry Red had a rather sexist image then, which we didn’t hold with – the very name, the logo at that time of the woman, and so forth. I do remember, though, that Iain McNay did take notice of criticisms and made changes. That would have impressed us more than the age of the people there. We were politically driven, and our failure, perhaps, mirrors the failure at that time of the left. I recall we were touring the USA and the promoter had fucked up on dates and our manager wired to Cherry Red for support money, which was declined. That kind of thing rankled.”
The Nightingales were another staple of the Mike Alway era, and represented the most obvious link to contemporaneous post-punk; they have often been called the Black Country Fall and Alway admits that, had circumstances permitted, he would certainly have signed Mark E Smith to the label. They were abrasive and corrosive in comparison to many of the other bands Alway would champion, but no less literate. “It was Mike who originally approached us about the possibility of signing The Nightingales,” recalls singer and lyricist, Rob Lloyd, “and we met up. He came to Brum to watch us play, and we just talked about the whole thing. I really liked him. He was good to work with. I can’t pretend that I particularly enjoyed all the other acts on Cherry Red – my musical taste is a little different to the things that he just loved, like The Monochrome Set. He loved them. I just don’t get them at all. But when I was dealing with him, it didn’t bother me that we had different musical tastes, I just liked the idea that he thought about things. He was one of the better people I’ve come across in my years making records. He really knew his stuff.”