by Alex; Ogg
Geoff Travis saw the Blanco ‘mistakes’ at first hand, but maintains that the label was an incredibly successful venture – just not, perhaps, for Mike Alway. “We signed Everything But The Girl, and that was the jewel in the crown, and Mike had Ben doing a solo thing and Tracey doing a solo thing. He knew them. I went up to visit them at university in Hull and talked about our new grand venture and talked them into signing to us. So that was a great beginning. Eden – you couldn’t start the label with a better record. It was a big success. It wasn’t like, ‘Mike, you can’t do that. What do you want to do? We’ll do it.’ But of course Mike wanted to do The Monochrome Set and Subway Sect, all these things that I’d done and I thought their best was past. But I didn’t say a murmur, I didn’t say you can’t do it. But he spent a huge amount of money doing those things, in the scheme of things. I don’t think I ever berated him and said, ‘No, you can’t do this, Mike’. Because it was his idea. I knew that we had to have some success pretty quickly, otherwise we weren’t going to have this label much longer. I don’t know if that occurred to him or not. When I signed Dream Academy, I don’t think he liked that. Fair enough. But we had a number four hit in America and a big hit in the UK. And I love that record, ‘Life In A Northern Town’. Otherwise I wouldn’t do it. I don’t think he was particularly interested in Jesus & Mary Chain. Fair enough. But Mike is a very odd, eccentric character. He would say, ‘I can’t go out.’ ‘Why Mike?’ ‘Because there are these people …’ Strange things like that. I don’t know what he meant by that – I don’t know if he meant he had agoraphobia.”
Certainly, Alway has never been a fan of crowds, and increasingly shunned gigs. “The environment was not appealing to me; darkness, strange people and unrelenting noise. I chose instead to stay home and plan a label based on Steed and Mrs Peel with a dash of Keith Floyd.” “I didn’t really understand,” reflects Travis. “I thought it was some strange paranoia, or some strange adding to the legend. I always really liked Mike, but it became obvious we weren’t on the same wavelength, and I think he just stopped. I accepted Mike’s eccentricities. I wouldn’t have expected him to have been in the office from nine to seven. But I did find it strange that he wouldn’t go to gigs. I do kind of regret it didn’t work out. I saw it as Mike’s thing, really. It would have been great to have signed The Pet Shop Boys, that would have been a good artist for Blanco. I think Bid was very disappointed when it didn’t happen. I don’t know what Mike had promised him. There were moments when it nearly happened. Mike had a fantasy that The Monochrome Set were the greatest band in the world. But unfortunately there’s a huge difference between believing a band’s the greatest band in the world and them selling lots of records. Sometimes it happens, not always. I suppose Mike was at the top of his game, and he had signed lots of very good bands, you can see why that might make you think you can make anything happen.”
Alway maintains a slightly different theory in regard to Blanco. “I’m sitting there with Geoff Travis, and I finally realised at some point, the dismal truth – which is that these people are talking to us because of The Smiths. They’re not talking to us because of anything I’ve done. Even Everything But The Girl – it’s about The Smiths. They’re just not interested. They’d take these other things on, and they might even get hits with them, but I began to see there was no empathy there. It just struck me that all the pleasures involved in, if you like, the cottage industry side of it, were being denied by the corporate structure. They’re just different people. It’s not that the people at Cherry Red were better people than the ones at Warners, they’re just different people, as they are today. It’s like trying to compare yourself with a bank manager.” Travis doesn’t buy the Smiths theory. “They bought the Smiths catalogue separately – we sold millions of records with Everything But The Girl. Blanco was a very successful label for Warners.”
Bid, meanwhile, saw The Monochrome Set dissipate through bodged promotion on their ‘sure-fire’ hit single, ‘Jacob’s Ladder’. He, too, realised that the Blanco set-up was not for him. “Mike blew a whole load of money on a really class recording, have you heard Anthony Adverse? That was a cover version done with a band called Working Week, and it was for Kenneth Williams! And after we recorded it, Mike told me ‘I’ll ring Kenneth Williams now.’ (LAUGHS) He’d just blown five or six thousand on one recording, and then he asked George Melly to do it. Eventually he got this nice but bland singer to do it. It lost loads of money and that was it. For our part, we’d just been to America and lost loads of money on the tour. And for us there was no question now we were offered loads of money to go with it. And then of course Warners completely screwed up ‘Jacob’s Ladder’. For about two or three weeks it had massive airplay, but that was before it was released. By the time it came out, the DJs were saying, I don’t think this will get anywhere. It was so badly fucked up! Then four weeks after it was released, they started recording the video for it!”
“How Bid could not have ‘made it’ in some way is extremely unfortunate,” opines Alway. Bid isn’t convinced for a moment. “But we could never have been big! It’s blindingly obvious, to me, personally, we could never have been a Top Ten band. It’s just not possible. We were never commercial entertainers.” Despite that, Alway’s enduring love of The Monochrome Set helped to form the ethos behind a new label – where his aforementioned love of Messrs Steel, Peel and Floyd could come into play. It was started at Warners before the end of his tenure there. “The original inspiration for él Records was Rough Trade-era Monochrome Set,” he says. “They had the attitude of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton – the way you want stars to be. It was superior and it was better. I suddenly thought, Christ, everything’s possible here. Richard Ingrams described Peter Cook as a conservative anarchist and that is what I saw él as, as a manifestation of conservative anarchy. People that inspired me were people like Richard Briers. I had this conversation with Alan McGee who said Malcolm McLaren inspired him, and I said, for me, it was Richard Briers. He thought I was off my head. And there are other sitcoms like Reggie Perrin – I really loved that slightly bonkers, straight Englishman in the suburbs idea. Those fragments all added up to a greater force of motivation and ambition.” For él to proceed, however, he needed a backer. Which is when he made a painful return to the Cherry Red fold. “Going back to the bosom of Cherry Red seemed to me inexplicable when Theo Chalmers advanced the idea to me. And, to Iain’s credit, he accepted my return – though there were some very hard things said.”
For a certain cadre of observers, although sadly one extremely limited in size, él would become the most artistically vital independent label of them all. Certainly it released a number of quite extraordinary records, and Alway takes deep pride in the depth of its original roster. “There were all those people who really should have been on Warners itself but for one reason or another weren’t. I had writers like Nick Currie (Momus), Vic Godard, Bid (Monochrome Set) and Karl Blake (Shock-Headed Peters). But there were other people on the periphery of él, such as Phillipe Auclair (aka Louis Phillipe). The start of the label was to do with taking things that already existed by their own virtue, and then there was a change in approach That came with ‘Valleri’ [by the King Of Luxembourg, aka Simon Morgan].”
Alway saw él, to a much greater extent than he did with Cherry Red, as an opportunity to carve something in his own image. “The new way was to idealise popular music on a conceptual and physical level. It depends on all the parts harmonising together; the artist, the producer and myself. I wanted to take off on an adventure that had a uniqueness and unity to it. I didn’t want to spend all my time arguing with artists about artwork, basically being a part of the service industry. It was about putting out records that had their own fabulous character as an antidote to the utter crap around, which was ruining British pop music for me. I wanted to make records that had no apparent market. I thought the groups I want to work with don’t exist, so I’m going to make them exist. Then we’re going to go to the t
op of the charts and then the world will change.” Or, as Rob Fitzpatrick would eulogise in his 2008 Guardian retrospective, “él revelled in its thrillingly sly upper-class style. His artists weren’t knuckle-dragging gangs from rough backstreets: they were presented as languorous Vogue models, archbishops’ daughters, royalty. There were songs about the British Empire, soufflés, choirboys and stately homes, but there was never the merest whiff of snobbery, just the crisp, lemony cologne of a delicious privilege shared.” From the titular lower-case, accented opening vowel and beyond, él petitioned for otherness and grandeur and scale and majesty in an increasingly narrowing and dour pop world.
The worldwide chart domination didn’t quite happen, though él did achieve a cult following and impressive sales in Japan, where the label proved a big influence on the J-Pop phenomenon. Eventually Alway lost control of the label as Cherry Red’s Martin Costello attempted to turn it into a commercial proposition – which, of course, was beyond impossible. Alway, once again, felt “utterly helpless”, but simply couldn’t win an argument on the basis of sales alone. He feels the under-cooked albums released against his wishes in this period, by Anthony Adverse, Felt and The James Dean Driving Experience, are blots on his discographical landscape, carbuncles that he would never have tolerated had the situation been different. él’s adventure ended in 1988.
Yet él would rise again with Alway at the helm in 2005. It continues under the Cherry Red umbrella as one of several specialist reissue labels. “This is not me giving up on my ideal of él Records to go straight as a back catalogue dustman,” Always states. “I’m releasing records that mean something to me. As with él being different to Mute, Factory, 4AD etc, I’m trying to make the new él different from any other reissue label. The way I try to do that is bringing people like Edgar Varèse into this world, and people from the jazz field. I want to take months conceptually, so this will be a month of Brazilian music, next month Indian music, then a month of guitar music, etc. Or vocal music or soundtracks. I’m listening to people like William Byrd and thinking about how to do choral music from the 16th century on él – and I think I’m going to get away with it. It all draws on an audience that’s interested in learning and enquiring. I’m ready to feed that audience. That’s what I enjoy doing.”
Cherry Red, meanwhile, never really replaced Alway. “Mike’s assistant in A&R and press was John Hollingsworth,” McNay recalls, “and he took over. And then we worked with bands like Red Box and Laibach. But around ‘86, my interest was drifting off somewhere else, to my spiritual adventures. I pretty much left Cherry Red from 1987 to 1991, for four years I had nothing to do with it, really. And I travelled. Martin Costello, who ran the publishing, ended up also running the label.”
McNay would become active with the label again in 1991, repositioning Cherry Red as a catalogue specialist, placing it in good stead to benefit from the CD boom of the early 90s. Initially he bolstered the catalogue by careful acquisitions, often buying bombed out independents. “That was when I started coming into the office more, and I saw that if I was going to get more involved in Cherry Red, which I quite fancied doing, that the whole picture with new bands was very difficult. We had Prolapse and Tse Tse Fly and other bands, and we were still making records with Alien Sex Fiend. We’d got the records into the independent charts OK, but it didn’t generate very much in terms of sales. That’s when I realised that the only way get it back on a firm business footing was to go down the catalogue route. So I bought Flicknife Records, I bought No Future, which had been started by my original A&R guy Richard Jones. We bought Red Rhino and Midnight Music. The old formula wasn’t working. If you wanted to break a new band, you had to get success and that cost a lot of money. It was a risky business. I’m never one not to take a risk, but it could have bankrupted the company if you’d got it wrong and backed two or three bands that didn’t happen. We still did some new recordings, but the basis of it was catalogue. And we were well ahead of the game there. Other independent companies that are around have done that and made a good business out of it, but we were probably the first. And we started a series of collectors’ labels, for Punk, Psychobilly and Goth, which was Mark Brennan’s idea. We also started almost a whole new genre, by releasing football related compact discs, which we compiled.”
Cherry Red, in what was effectively its third phase from the 90s onwards, developed into an umbrella network for a number of labels run by enthusiasts with particular fields of expertise. The most prominent among these are Joe Foster’s Rev-Ola (the former Creation subsidiary), Mark Stratford’s RPM label, Mark Brennan’s 7T’s, Mark Powell’s Esoteric and, of course, él. Each of these are quality-focused entities with fairly exact niches. On an average month, Cherry Red releases up to 40 compact discs on up to two dozen discrete imprints. There is also a burgeoning video archive, a book publishing arm and a dedicated internet TV channel.
McNay is fond of saying that he doesn’t mind being disliked, as long as he is respected. “I prefer to be liked – but you can’t always have that.” The taciturn demeanour is a highly individual mix of zen philosophy and hard-nosed businessman, and a deeply ingrained but similarly idiosyncratic morality. For example, he liked Tony Wilson, but distrusted his more cavalier approach to business, which led to him not paying his artists, suppliers and employees properly. There are few more heinous crimes in McNay’s book.
McNay remains a very astute deal-cutter. He knows that value exists in the unfashionable – or will do in the future. Witness the decision, in particular, to snap up the publishing of former United Artists bands like The Stranglers and Buzzcocks at a time in the late 80s when ‘punk was over’ at a bargain price. In 2006 they were part of a catalogue sold to BMG/Universal for a substantial sum of money. Though McNay credits Martin Costello with putting together those deals, he approved them, and managed to ringfence a large kernel of songs from the label’s heritage acts – The Monochrome Set, Felt, Eyeless In Gaza and others. “It didn’t affect the purchase price, they wanted the bigger stuff,” he says. “We kept about half the copyrights. There were two good reasons. One, they were acts that I felt close to personally. Secondly, I didn’t want those songs getting lost in a huge corporate environment. A lot of the artists were grateful to stay on Cherry Red, because they can always pick up the phone and talk to us, where they could never do that with Universal.” Yet McNay considers the publishing side of his business merely ‘another asset’. He is implacable in discussion of the above coup – in fact, he disputes his actions were anything more than good sense – yet remains most nostalgic for that moment in the early 80s when Cherry Red was at its zenith as an upstart record label. “There’s a good reason for that. I’m a do-er. What I really like doing is putting out records, and most publishers just collect money.”
Alway, meanwhile, remains contrite to the point of being heartbroken about the now distant events of 1983. He is unworried, he says, about the friction discussing such matters might cause in his ongoing relationship with McNay, but argues that it is painful in terms of dealing “with my own conscience”. McNay will express in person that Alway remains one of his favourite people in the world, and that “we both made mistakes”. Beyond that, it is difficult to say truly whether he has taken on board the role his rigid personal outlook played in an exquisitely sad finale. McNay disagrees with that analysis. “It’s what happened at the time. You can’t change things, but I really believe in the flow of life – and what I’ve always tried to do is not fight life, but accept the flow. And that’s what I did. I don’t believe in staying in situations where there’s conflict and a lot of uphill struggle. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the decisions I made all those years ago.”
Whilst it is true that Cherry Red remains a successful independent institution, Alway will maintain that, for a brief period, with his hand on the A&R rudder, allied to McNay’s business savvy and drive, the potential was there for something much greater. He still feels the loss of that moment acutely. “It wa
s the chemistry at Cherry Red that was unique. In 1983 Cherry Red was my life. I had ambition in the best, purest sense, and though sometimes turbulent, the relationship with Iain was the perfect balance. The Blanco y Negro idea was a good concept that I felt certain would have augmented Cherry Red perfectly. But I should have had the sense to wait until Iain felt ready. Had he and I continued to work together, we’d have consolidated our position amongst the leading independent labels, and the history of independent music might have been very different. I will always have that on my conscience.”
But perhaps the fact that such a successful businessman (which McNay definitively is; his decisions having kept Cherry Red ahead of the game at crucial points) could ever co-exist with a man given so wholeheartedly to a singular aesthetic vision is the miracle. And even then, their dynamic was, and is, more complicated than such a surface reading would suggest. “Some people think it’s all about money with Iain,” Alway says. “It really isn’t. It never has been.” That’s doubtless what led David Cavanagh to describe McNay as “perhaps the most sui generis record company owner to have emerged from the punk rock upsurge” in My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize. One of a kind would be the appropriate, though more prosaic, translation.