Gracias a Federica Pulla me entero que The Guardian publicó este excelente artículo sobre Mike Alway el pasado 28-11-2008 (anonadado me he quedado con lo de Belter...)
Music to watch soufflés by
El Records is probably the most English label there has ever been. It never made any money, but it had a thrillingly sly, subversive style. Rob Fitzpatrick welcomes its return
Mike Alway is an exemplary pop theorist because he really, really cares. He will talk about the Archies' Sugar Sugar as passionately as he talks about the records of Jean Cocteau and Peter Cook. In Alway's mind, a good record is a good record is a good record. El, the record label he founded from within the Cherry Red indie empire in the mid-1980s, had a style, an aesthetic and an attitude that one can barely imagine anyone else even daring to attempt. Probably the most innately English record label there has ever been, it was as devoted to great British film-makers and satirists as it was to anything as workaday as pop groups. It never made Alway (or anyone else) much money, but more than 20 years after its first wave of releases were selling just a few hundred copies each in Britain, its sharply delineated pop projects still provoke interest from around the world. And now Alway has reinvented El, turning it into a daring and stylish reissue label that is driven by his desires to save and promote great forgotten music.
"I originally came to the record industry as an enthusiast," says Alway, sitting in his sunny front room in Richmond, south-west London. "And part of what enthused me was mystery. I imagined in my green innocence that other people felt the same way."
Alway came to Cherry Red in 1980, when label founder Iain McNay hired him as an A&R man. Within a couple of years he'd signed indie royalty in the form of Felt, the Monochrome Set and the Marine Girls (Tracey Thorn's first group) and put together the ground-breaking Pillows and Prayers compilation. Alway's signings dominated the UK indie scene for three years before was tempted away to set up the the first indie-within-a-major, the Warner offshoot Blanco y Negro, with Rough Trade's Geoff Travis, taking Thorn's newly formed Everything But the Girl with him. But he soon realised he didn't have the patience to work for a company that took so long to make any sort of decision, and that being at his bands' beck and call held little or no appeal.
Alway left Blanco and started planning a new label. Much time was spent listening to classical music and watching Powell and Pressburger films. "I sensed a way of applying what they did to music. In Powell's books he describes a production team with someone firmly at the helm. I began to see that you could cast a musical project like you would a film or a play."
The label began in a fairly conventional manner. Alway signed Nick Currie in his Momus guise, and Bid from the Monochrome Set, but when Currie left to sign to Creation, Alway changed direction and began to look for the artists who would become the characters that would populate the label. It was less A&R work than a casting process.
One of Alway's first castings was Simon Fisher Turner, a man whose life story includes child stardom in Tom Brown's Schooldays, taking Robert Mitchum to see Siouxsie and the Banshees, being "the new David Cassidy" on Jonathan King's record label and playing bass for Adam and the Ants. "I was making music in gallery spaces," says Turner, now a respected soundtrack composer. "But no one was really interested in a guy bagging up handmade cassettes with small bits of art and one-off collections of sweets and postcards and cheap toys. I wrote Mike a letter and sent him a cassette. He returned one to me fairly promptly and I went up to their office. He offered me a job [recording] as the King of Luxembourg there and then - I liked that. Instant. Very Jarman."
They agreed that Alway could manipulate the work musically and aesthetically as he saw fit and the "King" was dressed by Berman's & Nathan's, costumiers to the London stage for more than 200 years. "He also banned any use of the bass guitar," says Turner. "But having been through a humiliating musical experience with Jonathan King as a kid, it was a delight to have a second chance with Mike. He was a complete control freak, but this control was actually very broad and, perversely, adventurous. There was a lot of fun to be had on El - dressing up's always a gas."
The artists weren't the only thing that was dressed up: the look of El was developed through hours spent in junk shops looking at hundreds of old LPs. "These were all the records that people didn't want any more, despite them looking fucking incredible," Alway says. "Everything El was came from a Spanish record label called Belter - if you look at their sleeves you will see El. The only thing I added was this late 50s, early 60s classical music aesthetic. I darkened the atmosphere slightly, to make everything seem more complex."
El 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.
As Momus would later say of El: "Although it sounds like 'pa-pa-pa' and songs about 'high tea on my country estate', it's actually a blast against almost everybody in Britain."
"I used to buy lots of anachronistic magazines and trawl them for song titles," Always says. "I got the King's Turban Disturbance from a column in the Spectator. Cookbooks were good, too. People hadn't written songs about trivial things like soufflés, everything was drowned in this awful bombast. I wanted to move pop music's vernacular on a bit. We were anticipating a Britain yet to come, a more stylish place in line with the Italian and Spanish culture I loved."
In 1987, Time Out put El in the list of things that were going to be big in 1988 - "Us and Tottenham Hotspur!" laughs Alway - but press interest didn't add up to any sales in Britain. However, in Japan, El releases were selling between 8,000 and 15,000 each. El was as pretty and as disposable as Japan's own pop culture - everything the UK press and radio disliked was precisely what Japan loved. The influence El had on "J-pop" and musicians such as Cornelius and Pizzicato 5 was enormous, while Kahimi Karie would have a hit in 1992 with a song called Mike Alway's Diary. But time was running out for the first incarnation of El. The losses were too great to sustain, and the label was closed.
In the mid-90s, Alway started to get letters from America about El, and plans were hatched to revive the imprint. He knew Cherry Red wouldn't want to invest heavily in new, untested music, so he went back to the LPs that inspired him in the first place. The new incarnation of El means near-forgotten recordings by Sabu ("The Elephant Boy") and Orson Welles, Roy Budd and Al "Jazzbo" Collins, Stravinsky and the Ink Spots. The majority of these artefacts date from a time when it seemed perfectly reasonable to lavish skill and money on an LP of questionable commercial appeal, and each one feeds neatly into Always' master vision of a better world where people dress more tastefully, read more widely, think more deeply and take an interest in the world outside their immediate environs. Four wonderfully odd CDs are released every month, each selling between 1,000 and 3,000 copies. Each is a gem.
"We put a lot of effort in the packaging and the sound quality," says McNay. "We do things properly, we pay the publishing, the MCPS to the writers, we make payments to a charity that helps ageing musicians. We're sensitive to where we get the sound from. Ultimately, we just want to put out interesting records."
"There is a definite correlation between the original El and where we are now," Alway says, making another cup of tea. "These records informed the original El - we are somewhere between beat, meaning beat poetry, and the hipsters, jazz and the embryonic pop of the late 50s. For me, and for El, there is a future based on the glorious failures of the past. All these amazing records that are so close to being forgotten and there are so many of them. It's not easy, there are economic difficulties to face, but walking on thin ice keeps a man on his toes."
