One afternoon in September 1983 we went to the ‘Future Records’ office in Malvern and signed a record contract. The office was in a long line of Victorian houses built along the side of the hills with windows that looked out across what seemed like the whole of Worcestershire.
It was a low key but significant moment for us. Chris Berry did most of the talking while Joanne, his business partner, looked on, occasionally reigning him in with coughs and other noises when his optimism got the better of him. They weren’t obliged to pay us anything in advance but they gave us a cheque for £100 to split between the four of us. Justin remembers that he went out and bought a coat, a black Crombie. I don’t know what I did with mine. Beer cost £0.67p a pint in 1983 and a pack of cigarettes £0.93p.
More impressive than our advance was how quickly things moved from that point. Chris was highly motivated and said we should record and release a single as soon as possible, so he booked us into ‘Cargo studios’ in Rochdale in the North of England. He’d been there with other bands on the label but we knew about the studio because some bands on ‘Factory Records’ had recorded there.
For our first single we decided to record ’Shantell’ with ‘Wallpaper dying’ as the B side. Robert Smith was busy in this period, The Cure were becoming very popular and he was also working on ‘The Glove’, an album with Steven Severin, so when it was clear he couldn’t get involved The Cure’s drummer, Laurence Tolhurst, offered to produce it for us. Apparently Justin had written to Robin Guthrie of The Cocteau Twins and he had shown an interest in working with us but ‘Future Records’ pushed things through with Laurence. We called him Lol, as did everyone else.
Lol was extremely good company and could be very funny but he was serious and professional in his work. He had an astute understanding of our music and added some nice keyboard touches and sounds as well as overseeing the production.
We were there for a day, maybe two. Cargo was just an ordinary, functional recording studio - there wasn’t anything special about it. From time to time I thought about Joy Division and Ian Curtis being there… they hadn’t reached the mythical status that they have these days but still, it was something I thought about and I suppose the others did too.
For the mixing session Chris booked us into ‘Britannia row’, Pink Floyd’s studio in London. It was big and bright, had a full sized snooker table and felt expensive. It was during the mixing session that the engineer heard the sound of a bump or low thud in the second verse. What was particularly unusual was that this bump went across all 16 tracks. No one understood how this was possible, how it could have happened or what it was - but there was nothing much we could do about it except to edit out the second verse and chorus. It turned out that this wasn’t a bad thing as it made the song a better length for a single.
We didn’t trust anyone to do the artwork for the sleeve so we did it ourselves. My older brother Mark is a sculptor, he’s quite prolific and there were pieces of his work all over the place, in the house, in the cellar and around the garden - gargoyles and terracotta figures, heads of ancient monarchs and saints, so we gathered some together and photographed them.
We developed the films and made the solarised prints in a kind of walk-in cupboard at the top of the house I’d turned into a very cramped darkroom. Nick did the typography and layout. We did everything, so when a few thousand copies of it arrived in Malvern and we went to collect a box of them it felt to me like something we had made, rather than an official record company release… but that’s what it was, finally, an official record company release with a catalogue number, distributed by Rough Trade.
Written by SHJ