Shantell was released in September 1983. We were pleased with it, it was a simple song but had depth, it was well recorded and produced and it didn’t sound like anyone else. One of the British music papers gave it a review that was neither good nor bad, it wasn’t played on the radio and it didn’t enter the indie charts let alone the national charts. In a typical example of his humour Justin likened it to us lighting a firework that shot up into the sky and as we waited for the explosion nothing happened.
We had hoped for but hadn’t really expected anything more, despite Chris Berry’s outrageously optimistic predictions. This determined positivity of his was totally alien to us, particularly us Jones boys who have a tendency to gravitate the other way, but we played along and when Chris insisted that we write and release another, more radio friendly single straight away we were happy to give it a try.
So for one of the very few times in our existence we set out to try and write a commercially viable song. Musical ideas came quickly and we settled on another based around a twelve string acoustic guitar piece. The most problematic thing was finding a good vocal melody, arguably the most important ingredient.
I’d started to learn that as a lyricist I needed to be on the lookout for inspiration anywhere and everywhere, all the time. As a result, a cover of the Sunday Times magazine I had recently seen with the heading ‘Swimmer in a secret sea’ resurfaced as an idea for the title. It was actually an article accompanying groundbreaking microphotography of the human embryo but as our song ‘Midnight Garden’ had already touched on that subject my eventual lyrics revolved around adolescent dreamscapes.
I worked hard at finding a vocal melody and found many… mostly terrible, some of which still haunt me. In the end it was Steven who found the best tune so I worked my words around that. We wrote and re-wrote that song again and again throughout the autumn under a strip light in The Dairy with it’s bricked up windows hiding the changing leaves blowing across the big, overgrown garden and finally went down to London to record it at Southern Studios, where the renowned anarchist punk band ‘Crass’ and other bands on their label recorded.
The studio was in a terraced house in Wood Green in the North of the city. We recorded in a room at the front of the house, the control room was in a large soundproofed shed in the garden. Lol Tolhurst was with us again to produce and it was our first meeting and work with a very talented young sound engineer/producer with short, neat, blond hair and steel rimmed spectacles called David Motion who would go on to produce some well known singles and albums.
Once Lol had added some keyboards and he and David had worked on the mix and production ’The Secret Sea’ sounded like quite a catchy 7 inch single. The B side was a kind of cut up, experimental scratch mix of the A side… fashionable at the time but I have rarely played it since then so have no idea if it’s even listenable. We insisted on doing the sleeve artwork ourselves and used a black and white photograph of me in silhouette looking for shells on a beach in Wales.
We were also at the height of the 12 inch extended mix era, so later we went back into the studio and did one - which was fun. I’m not sure how I feel about such mixes now, many were done just because it was the done thing and in the hope they would get played in clubs. I have a feeling it became formulaic and over indulgent but some were unquestionably masterpieces in themselves - my personal favourites were ‘Bela Lugosi’s dead’ by Bauhaus, ‘Headache’ by the Au Pairs and ‘I feel love’ by Donna Summer. New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ was a huge hit and without doubt a classic but it wasn’t what I wanted from the remains of Joy Division.
Once, when we picked up Lol for a recording session he invited us into his apartment to see The Cure’s video for their new single called ‘Love Cats’ - it wasn’t exactly what I wanted or expected from them either, but it made us laugh and was a brilliant pop song. ‘The Secret sea’ was certainly not a brilliant pop song but it was a decent effort. People liked it, we liked it. It was ignored by the British music press and wasn’t played on the radio but this didn’t really bother us as things were moving fast now.
At the end of October we went back to Southern Studios to record an album which we would eventually decided to simply call ‘and also the trees’. We stayed at a run down hotel on the Seven Sisters road and each morning met up with Lol and David Motion who worked brilliantly together. We were full of energy, it was a good studio and they were exciting times.
I hadn’t thought about the link when I started writing this chapter but funnily enough my strongest memory of Lol is of a moment when we’d decided to take a break after a long session recording some extra sounds for the song ‘The Tease the Tear’ which involved violently shaking a suitcase full of cymbal stands.
It was just after dusk and we’d wandered out into a back alley and were standing around smoking and feeling like something between a group of mobsters and a bunch of truant schoolboys when Lol came walking back towards us from the newsagents where, being close to Guy Fawkes night, he’d bought a small box of fireworks. I can see him now, taking out the rocket and laughing as he held it up, lit the blue touchpaper and sent it up into the orange tinted London night. This firework did, modestly, explode.