Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  Indeed, the one band to fit Alway’s template for Cherry Red most snugly were The Monochrome Set, whose early singles for Rough Trade had led to an unhappy berth at Virgin. “Those initial records [on Rough Trade] are so startlingly original in their vernacular, the use of language, and the sensuousness and the quality of the phrasing of the vocal, is so magnificent,” eulogises Alway. “I thought, this guy Bid, this is pop’s Mel Tormé; almost Sinatra, in a curious way. The Monochrome Set were going to be enormous. I thought Bid was in a different class completely. He had absolutely everything – the intelligence, the looks, the attitude, the humour, he had the right background. He was tough and able to be charming. He had everything going for him completely. And he produced those absolutely astonishing records. What I did become aware of was that the two albums they made for Virgin, The Monochrome Set may have had a problem with their attitude. It was to do with their humour, it wasn’t because they had a poor attitude. They’re very nice and decent people. But you could see how people might be intimidated by them. A record company executive at Virgin would be intimidated at how clever – in a whimsical way – Bid and Andy Warren were. Andy Warren has a very, very particular sense of humour that it’s easy to get pissed off with. He tried winding Iain up on no end of occasions. He would get up to all sorts. But they were, for me, a composite of everything that my musical history amounted to. They were twangy, poppy, film soundtracks and psychedelia – it was a bit of everything in just about the right proportions.”

  When Virgin dropped the band, The Monochrome Set were without a deal, and minus a drummer, as JD Haney moved to America to become an academic. Lexington Crane was recruited in his stead. “’Jet Set Junta’ was a demo we did for Do-It Records [the Ants’ original label], and we used that demo to get the Cherry Red deal,” states Bid. “I don’t know really why Do-It didn’t take it up. The story that you may have read is that Andy and I sat down with an A-Z of independent record labels, and by the time we got to C-H we got a deal. That’s actually true. We skipped out a few people, obviously. And yes, the next page was Cunt Records. It just so happened that Mike was already a fan.” He certainly was. “One day I got a phone call from Andy Warren out of the blue,” he recalls. “He said, ‘I’m Andy Warren from The Monochrome Set, would you be interested in hearing this demo?’ I said, ‘Bring it in. If it’s anything like as good as what you’ve done, we’ll work with you.’”

  Alway has gone so far as to say that he modelled the whole ethic of [his subsequent label] él Records on the band. “It’s not completely true,” Bid affirms. “He sort of modelled the Monochrome Set slightly too. The Monochrome Set were the closest to what he thought his ideal band was. It wasn’t that he thought his ideal band was The Monochrome Set. [We] weren’t exactly like that. I think the Monochrome Set fulfilled one of his ideals. We certainly influenced each other. Mike influenced us as well. But it wasn’t quite as definite as that.”

  The Monochrome Set’s association with Cherry Red was announced with the release of the hilarious ‘The Mating Game’. While the subject matter pulled no punches on the joys of animal mechanics, it was conveyed with Bid’s own brand of spectacularly detached nonchalance. “What a bizarre thing to release as a single!” Bid acknowledges. “It got reviewed in Smash Hits, which I still have, with a picture of this 13-year-old grinning at the camera having done a review – which is just, ‘Well, I like it, but it’s dirty’.” But it was also wonderfully clever; as filthy as a rugby song, but politely so. That said, it was never going to get any airplay. Did anyone ever question its release? Bid can’t remember. “They left us to it because that was the way it was run. We didn’t take singles seriously at all. We never thought any of our singles were going to sell or get airplay. So we always felt it was a real irritation that a record company would ask us – ‘What will you put on the b-side?’ We’d say, ‘B-side of what?’ That was our attitude. It was only [later] with Warners that changed, and even when we did the album with Cherry Red, we didn’t think there was any point in putting out any of those singles at all. We’re not like that, we’re not a singles band.”

  Alway’s notoriety, meanwhile, had spread. Urbane and articulate, he had a charisma that drew many into his circle. One of those was future Creation Records head Alan McGee, who spotted him at an Eyeless In Gaza show at the Moonlight in 1981 and immediately realised that he was the ‘most likely to’ figure in the nascent independent music story. Combining both the label’s A&R and press functions, Alway pushed as well as stuffed envelopes, often spurred on by Andy Warren and Bid. Press releases became less items of advertorial as exercises in the surreal. One priceless example included the assertion that Bid had been approached by Indian cricket hero Sunil Gavaskar – for advice on preparing a wicket in Bangalore.

  Alway’s tenure at the label reached its apotheosis with the budget compilation album, Pillows & Prayers. “Mike was usually an early starter, and was always full of bright new ideas on Monday mornings,” McNay recalls. “‘Iain, I’ve got to talk to you,’ he insisted as I walked into the office one beautiful autumn day in 1982. ‘I’ve got a great idea. I think we should put out a compilation album of all the acts we are currently working on. That’s Ben, Tracey, The Monochrome Set, Eyeless, Felt and all the others. It’ll be a really good album. But Iain, it MUST sell for less than £1. I’d like to make it 99p.’ Mike had a habit of doing this first thing in the morning. The following morning Mike had a title, and an image for the sleeve. Pillows & Prayers was born and the young girl blowing the bubble was to become quite famous. Mike had found the picture in an old encyclopaedia that had been given to him by his grandparents, so she was almost certainly not around to enjoy her fame. The name Pillows & Prayers had come from an old Victorian children’s book he had found in a junk shop.” The album was released a few weeks later, on 25 December 1982. McNay: “What better day to release it than Christmas Day? We pressed up 10,000 to start with, little knowing that within a year it would sell 120,000 copies. It entered the independent album chart at number one, and stayed in the independent Top 30 chart for nearly a year. We had great reviews everywhere, and the compilation really did help to make people much more aware of the other acts on the label. In particular, Everything But The Girl, Felt and The Monochrome Set received a big boost to their profiles.”

  But Cherry Red’s moment in the sun at the vanguard of the independent movement was not to last. And Pillows & Prayers was partly to blame. Relationships changed, as artists queried why their new press profile had not resulted in greater promotional support and increased recording budgets. There were also money issues. McNay paid Alway’s rent and bills as well as providing an expense account. But there was frustration at the limited recompense he was otherwise receiving. Arguments became more frequent as Alway increasingly found himself the buttress between artist and label. McNay, for his part, considered himself a buffer between Alway and the financial responsibilities and logistics of running a business. “Mike had set things up that way,” he says. “He wanted to deal directly with the artists, and be the front person for the creative side of Cherry Red. That was fine. Where something needs support, I’m there – and that was the case at the time. But he was the buttress because he chose to be.”

  Alway began to envisage a second label, a feeder mechanism between Cherry Red and the majors, licensed by the latter, where acts who had achieved a certain degree of prominence could be, effectively, promoted; thus to enjoy all the concomitant delights of major label backing and distribution. Cherry Red’s independence, meanwhile, would be safeguarded – at least as far as Alway was concerned. It was an idea that fell on stony ground. “I think he may actually have said ‘over my dead body,”’ Alway recalls. McNay’s insistence on independence had become a defining mantra. While he relished the role of ‘outsider’, he had also become one of the fiercest advocates of the benefits of collaboration within the emerging independent sector. In both 1982 and 1983 he stood for election to the British Phonographic Industry o
n a platform of widescale reform. On the second occasion he was successful, encouraging other independents to join the board of the BPI as part of his campaign. It was the first of a series of commitments to the independent ideal he has maintained to this day, helping to develop trade organisations that deliver a level playing field. At the time Alway approached him about the possibility of linking with a major, he was intractably welded to the ethos of independence.

  So Alway was greeted with an emphatic refusal, and the chain of events that would lead to the end of his A&R watch at Cherry Red was set in motion. There were other factors at play. McNay had long since developed an interest in meditation and spirituality, to the extent that they’d become passions equivalent to Alway’s devotional immersion in music. Prompted by the interest shown by old friend Morgan Fisher in the teachings of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, in the summer of 1983 he visited the Oregon ranch the guru had made his base. “I was away for a couple of weeks at the New Music Seminar,” McNay recalls. “I was meant to go to San Francisco, but I thought I’d visit Morgan in Oregon to see how he was getting on. So I changed my flight and went to Oregon, spent ten days there, and then came back as planned.” Later he would eventually convert to the cause, becoming a sannyasin and taking the new name Aukash.

  In the interim, however, he would have to deal with Alway’s resignation, who had decided to set up his ‘second tier’ label, Blanco y Negro, with Geoff Travis, under the supervision of Rob Dickins at Warners. And he was taking Everything But The Girl, The Monochrome Set and Felt with him – the jewels in Cherry Red’s crown. “When he wrote his letter of resignation,” McNay says, “he put it on my desk and told the girls in the office. One of them called me to say he’d resigned. Another thing happened on that day too. I’d flown overnight from New York, had a quick shower and come into the office. And there was Mike’s resignation letter, which I’d been mentally prepared for. But I also had to deal with another situation. Phil Langham, who ran Anagram Records, had been using drugs in the office. So I had to fire him that day. I always liked Phil, but I couldn’t have that in the office. Someone had complained about this going on in my absence. The Mike thing got to me a bit. I rang Geoff Travis, and demanded he came round to see me. To give Geoff his due, he came round that evening. I told him what I thought. I think we both felt better afterwards. He didn’t apologise and he stood his ground, but at least we had that face to face meeting. And I was disappointed I never got that face to face with Mike until much later.”

  The hurt was keen, and to an extent, justified. McNay had imagined that great things lay ahead of the pair, believing their relationship capable of withstanding the fractious outbursts that had characterised it of late. While Alway had become “a dab hand at repairing telephone handsets” that would occasionally be bounced off the office furniture by his employer, he had now reached the end of his fuse. Had McNay not been absent from the office, things may have been different. Almost certainly, one surmises, in person McNay and Alway might have reconciled their differences. “I only ever remember breaking one telephone,” McNay protests. “I had my moments of volatility, but so did Mike. And actually, I think I coped with the adversity reasonably well. I’m good at regrouping and moving forward. Mike’s resignation was a shock and surprise. I just wished I’d had the chance to talk to him. The whole thing could have collapsed, but it didn’t.”

  “At the time, things were running for us,” he continues. “I’d agreed a budget of £10,000 for the Everything But The Girl album that became Eden. We’d already agreed to get Robin Millar as producer. I felt we could do it on our own, in a similar way to how Beggars Banquet and Graduate had. I wanted to see if we could do it without involving a major record company. If the first Everything But The Girl album had come out on Cherry Red and not charted, which we expected it to do, I would possibly have looked again at Mike’s suggestion. Around that time as well, we had the Fantastic Something single out. We’d got some nice airplay on Capital, and there was a lot of interest. Seymour Stein and a couple of people from Warners in America came round to hang out with us for a day. And Mike felt that, because we weren’t a bigger company, we weren’t building on the Capital airplay. But we did have a decent plugger, we got Capital on board, and the sales response simply wasn’t there. I got Pinnacle to monitor it in the London area, because of the Capital plays, and there wasn’t the response despite the airplay. I didn’t feel we’d lost out simply because we were a smaller company. So I disputed Mike’s analysis on that.”

  The artists’ sympathies lay squarely with Alway, and that was especially true of Everything But The Girl. Despite a statement to the press that he would not allow the duo to leave under any circumstances, eventually McNay retracted, and Watt and Thorn moved to WEA in exchange for a one-point percentage on the profits of their first eight albums, plus ownership of their Japanese masters. “I took a firm line originally, but they hadn’t told me 100% they wanted to leave,” McNay says. “Ben called me one day and said, ‘Iain, we really want to talk to you about this. We’re not happy.’ We met at a McDonald’s in Queensway – I was a vegetarian then! I remember vividly, on my walk there, there was a torrential hailstorm. And I got absolutely drenched. The three of us sat down, and they basically said they wanted to leave Cherry Red and go to Blanco. I was very disappointed and sad, but I accepted it. I never get into fights with artists like that. It would have been futile. They’d made their mind up, and I decided I was going to make it as easy for them to leave as I could. So I spoke to Rob Dickins and I let them go without an advance. I could have asked for one. I just got the 1% override and the Japanese masters, because Ben and Tracey’s solo albums had come out in Japan and I thought there was something there of value. But I actually made it easy for them to get out of the deal. I liked them, I liked their music, and I didn’t want to end up with a big legal tussle.” “We ONLY went cos Mike did,” Thorn states. “And don‘t forget, we never felt we were ‘going to Warners’ – we were going to Blanco y Negro, with Mike Alway and Geoff Travis. Somewhat foolishly we paid no mind to the major label behind it all – we just thought they were a chequebook, and that we’d have a fabulous time being indie and imaginative and they’d just pay. It didn’t quite turn out like that of course, and I think there were losses as well as gains. But we couldn’t have stayed at Cherry Red without Mike, it was as simple as that.”

  Other deals were cut as McNay, in the final analysis always the pragmatist, rescued what he could from the embers of Cherry Red’s first incarnation. Felt didn’t make the jump. Both Alway and Lawrence were keen, but Rob Dickins wasn’t convinced of their viability. McNay did, however, take a compensatory sum for terminating his contractual claim on The Monochrome Set. And they, like Everything But The Girl, would soon discover the greener grass at Blanco wasn’t all they’d supposed. “Cherry Red was a fantastic label at the time,” Bid laments. “And probably the happiest time I’ve ever had. In early 1983, in music, it was the happiest time; the atmosphere at Cherry Red’s old office was fantastic. Mike was not mad yet. Everyone was still hopeful, and then it kind of all went sour. Everything was working up to the point where everyone left for Blanco y Negro and Warners. And I was certainly partly to blame. When you get loads of money waved at you, and you’re not used to it… We should have stayed at Cherry Red. We were right to move from Rough Trade to DinDisc at the time – well, probably not DinDisc, but we were right to move from Rough Trade. But we weren’t right to move from Cherry Red, we shouldn’t have done it. But pretty much as soon as Mike had gone, Cherry Red started to collapse. I think Iain became – although he hid it – extremely bitter for a few years about all that. I think in retrospect what should have happened was everyone should have said, listen, they’re offering us loads of money, let’s go do it for a year. I mean, Iain made some money out of it. He got a cut of the deal. We should have just said to Iain, can we come back here after they drop us? So it would have been a mutual money-making exercise. Had we all said that, half of the b
ands would have come back to Cherry Red, because they all got dropped! There was no maturity at the time. We were in a situation none of us really knew anything about. We didn’t know how to handle it.”

  “The fact that Blanco didn’t work out, I take full responsibility for,” says Alway now. “In truth, I’m far from the only person to blame but I made a few ill-considered choices. When the records by Sudden Sway and Monochrome Set came out on Warners, the nature of their failure disturbed me. When a record fails independently it remains its charm. But when a record fails on Warner Brothers, it somehow loses its mystique. The worst thing about the days with Blanco was everyone ringing all the time, saying, ‘What’s going on?’ ‘When are we getting our cheque?’ And I had to deal with this machine that had the turning circle of the bloody Spanish Armada.”

  Alway sensed the gravity of his mistake with sickening haste. “It was an ill-fated and ill-planned thing. Had Cherry Red done what I’d hoped was going to happen – if Iain had done another label, a two-tiered label with a major – who knows? But philosophically, that was not possible for Iain at the time. Back then he couldn’t do it. But we would have been able to have the best of both worlds. He would have been able to have spent other people’s money making the Monochrome Set enormous, and being able to maximise all that potential, without having to risk anything of his own. The Monochrome Set would have got what they wanted, and Iain would have got what he wanted. That was all it was, really. My theory about Blanco y Negro and what I wanted it to be was right in principle, but we did it in the wrong way. I don’t know if there’s a record to be put straight. My behaviour before and during might seem strange to people, and I’m always willing to set down why that was. Because it doesn’t come out of any evil intent.” McNay wasn’t interested in spending other people’s money. “I wanted to make it work, simply, on our own terms. Remember, I’d been around the music business for some time now, and I knew what would happen. If you take someone else’s money, you lose control, both creatively and on the business side – those providing the money get the say.”