Chapter 5— July, 1983
We arrived in London with a strong sense of entitlement but what we had above all else was a sense of, right let’s get the job done — Cathal Coughlan
Sean O’Hagan — Garreth’s [Ryan] in Rough Trade by now and he puts the first two singles out through his label Kabuki. We initially came over to London because John Peel asked us to record a session, we thought that’s our cue to go to London and give it a go. So that’s what we did. The two of us went to London and we carried all of our gear and we paid Ricky Dineen [Nun Attax, Five Go Down to the Sea?] to carry the amps, [laughing] I think we made him wear a hat. We carried an SK-10 keyboard [Yamaha SK-10] and a little guitar and a bass. We went and stayed with all the guys from Kissed Air, or KA in Cricklewood.
Cathal Coughlan — So we all ended up in London within about six months of each other. Me and Sean went first and Ricky acted as our porter for our equipment [laughing]. I think we got the Inisfallen from Ringaskiddy. It was horrible, Ricky and Sean got really drunk on the boat on the way over, for some reason I stayed sober, why I’ve no idea, and I ended up having to nurse maid the other two who were violently hungover on the train. We had to get the local train from the port to the mainline; we were in this thing that was like a tin can in a blazing heatwave, we had never seen heat like this really. Both of them were nauseous with their hangovers. It was hell; we ended up in Paddington Station in the middle of July 1983, seeking fame and fortune. We just paid Ricky’s ticket because Ricky fancied coming over and he was supposed to help with the amp.
Ricky Dineen — When Micro Disney played in the Arc for the first time as a five piece I can remember being amazed and jealous at the same time. The duo format just didn’t do it for me. I remember a piece of graffiti on South Main Street, which was probably penned by themselves, which said [laughing] ‘Microdisney — Unpopular Support Band’. I thought it was funny and appropriate. I had good time for both of them personally though, Sean was the funny one you’d always like to go for a pint with, Cathal was the more serious of the two, but he could be darkly funny as well.
Cathal Coughlan — The Peel Sessions had an inestimable effect.* I suppose it’s fairly commonly spoken about but there is no equivalent these days, and there hasn’t been for a long time, the fact that there was only one cool DJ on Radio 1 who seemingly could do exactly what he wanted meant that you were guaranteed this platform if he took an interest. It really changed my life. Nothing would have happened for us if it wasn’t for the fact that he played ‘Pink Skinned Man’, ‘The Helicopter of the Holy Ghost’ and gave us those sessions.
*Microdisney recorded six Peel Sessions. In 1989 Strange Fruit Records released the compilation The Peel Sessions Album. Full details of Microdisney’s Peel Sessions are available on the BBC’s Keeping it Peel archive.
Cathal Coughlan — It was a fairly desperate existence. I’ll never forget me and Sean had to look for a flat, we were staying with friends but they didn’t have room to accommodate us longterm. I’d been phoning about places and having the phone put down on me. [Laughing] Ricky said, “Why don’t you put on a cockney accent, all you’ve got to say is, ‘Come ‘ere give us a flat. Cor Blimey!’” That was his solution; he stayed for a few days. [Laughing] But that was emblematic of what happened when they [Five Go Down to the Sea?] came over. They had made an EP at that point and really had nothing more or less going for them than what we had. I don’t think we’d have gone back to Cork, but we’d have been on people’s couches in Willesden for an indefinite amount of time and that would have been really unbearable for them.
Sean O’Hagan — I remember getting the money for a deposit on a flat. The two singles weren’t published. We said if we could get them published we’d have a bit of money. I can remember getting on the phone to Cherry Red Publishing. The songs were already getting radio play, so there was already money to collect. We said, “Do you want to publish them?” They said they’d be absolutely delighted to. This was before the days of lawyers and all that. We needed a deposit for a flat, so I had gotten an agreement from Cherry Red on the phone, in a payphone.
“You’re going to do it?”
“Yeah OK, we’ll give you £100 up front.”
“Fine, OK, [laughing] I’m coming for it now!”
“What, what?”
I didn’t have any bus fare, I had no money, I was in Kensal Rise and I ran from Kensal Rise to Kensington Gardens. There was torrential rain, I ran through the rain. I needed to get there in time to get the cheque to get it into the bank. I managed to do it. I ran in and there was just shock at Cherry Red. I said, “Well you said you’d do it, I need the money now for the deposit, so we can get a flat and stay and make this happen in London.” They were just in shock, so they just wrote me a cheque. I got it into the bank, we got the deposit and we got the flat. It’s so funny now when I think of the complete and utter naivety and ignorance that just completely drives you and makes something happen.
Cathal Coughlan — [Laughing] Signing over those few songs has cost us both quite a lot of annoyance over the ensuing decades, but it had to be done, it was the only means. We arrived in London with a strong sense of entitlement but what we had above all else was a sense of, right let’s get the job done. “They said ‘this is going to happen,’ it’s going to happen, we’ve got to get the job done.” Once we had a place to live where we could make noise, we embarked on a fairly intense period of about a month where we essentially rewrote all the songs we had. In some cases radically, from the ground up, different time signatures everything. Some of that was fine, some of it did create some of the weaknesses of the first record that need not have been there.
Garreth Ryan — There was interest from Cherry Red Records. Mike Alway had been friendly with Dave Clifford and he had been doing A&R at Cherry Red. Cherry Red was quite an ordinary label but Mike Alway upped the ante somewhat around about ’80, ’81 and ’82. As a label they had grown in stature and he pioneered the cheap label sampler for the independent sector. There had been famous samplers in the 70s with Island and labels like that but he did a series called Pillows & Prayers, 99p for a full album.
Garreth Ryan — Pillows & Prayers really put Cherry Red on the map: Marine Girls; Everything But the Girl; The Nightingales and people like that, showcasing people who had already signed to Cherry Red. The idea was to get that music from being successful in the UK and making it successful in Europe and around the world where the independent markets wouldn’t necessarily have been established at all at that point.
Garreth Ryan — More exciting for Microdisney was that Mike was going to start a label with Geoff Travis — Blanco Y Negro. There was probably a degree of expedience for both of them about starting the label. Rough Trade wasn’t in a great financial shape in the early 80s and Blanco Y Negro was going to be run by two well respected A&R men of the time, but it was going to be a Warners-funded label. Microdisney were going to sign to Blanco Y Negro.
Geoff Travis — When we started Blanco, it was really prompted by Mike. He wanted to make records with Vic Goddard and The Monochrome Set, who had been earlier Rough Trade projects obviously. I can’t remember Mike Alway ever mentioning the word Microdisney.
Sean O’Hagan — Cathal and I had gone to London on several trips before this to meet Mike Alway from Cherry Red and we played him demos and there’s a long standing promise from Mike Alway that he’ll sign the band. So he set up Blanco Y Negro with Geoff Travis and wanted to release Microdisney on Blanco. At no point did we think that this would be a failure. Everything But the Girl and The Jesus and the Mary Chain were on Blanco.
Cathal Coughlan — We were totally wrapped up in that and Mike Alway got us some money for a rehearsal room in Camberwell and we worked there religiously for a week, it was supposed to be pre-production with Steve Parker, who eventually produced the record, but he wasn’t able to make it so it was just the two of us doing our intensity thing, that carried on right the way through the whole of the recording, which was only about a mile away from where we lived.
Sean O’Hagan — But the Blanco thing never really emerges and in the end Mike Alway can’t or doesn’t sign us and I don’t know how or why but he was very apologetic.
Garreth Ryan — They started recording the first album, Everybody is Fantastic for Blanco Y Negro and as I recall, Mike Alway thought [laughing] it was too rocky, there were too many guitar solos. You’d struggle to find any rocky guitar solos in there but Mike Alway was going in a different direction.
Sean O’Hagan — Geoff realises that we were here and we have a fistful of songs and he basically said, it will happen on Rough Trade, so suddenly we were on Rough Trade. I remember that at the time we were moaning a lot because we thought we were going to be on super-duper Blanco Y Negro with Warner Brothers distribution and [laughing] it was just going to be a breeze but it was great being on Rough Trade. Now people say, “You were on Rough Trade?” [Laughing] “Yeah.” At the time we thought it was second best but of course it wasn’t, it was great.
Geoff Travis — It was because of Garreth’s enthusiasm for them, that’s what brought them to my attention, obviously through the Kabuki singles. After that we asked them to record for Rough Trade. It would have been all down to Garreth in the warehouse bringing them to my attention totally, totally yeah.
Garreth Ryan — Cathal and Sean had a flat in Kensal Rise originally. They wanted to preserve their creative co-operation so at some point they decided to split up which is where I ended up moving with Sean to Rotherhithe. We moved into a squat the next block along from Five Go Down to the Sea? Those times were extraordinary in themselves. Keith, or Smelly as we called him, from Five Go Down to the Sea? was the most active, he would have said, “Get yourselves down here, I’ll open ye up one [squat]”. True to his word he opened one up. There would be police cars in the area as soon as anyone was trying to open one up, these were all effectively blocks of dockers’ houses which had all been emptied, some were decanted for refurbishment ultimately as private blocks and some because they were getting moved to new properties. It was an extraordinary time because you were still only three or four miles from central London but you were on this peninsula — the peninsula sticks up in the middle of the map when the Eastenders theme music runs. It was opposite the Isle of Dogs which is now all skyscrapers, the heart of the financial district. At the time we were all living a fairly exciting life on zero money on the banks of the Thames in amongst the docks and the warehouses. By London standards it was an odd area. It was known at the time as the largest squat in Europe. There was all sorts there and it was a very difficult place to actually get a job from an address around there, because you had to run the gauntlet getting out of the place even if you were getting a bus to somewhere like Peckham, you ran the risk of getting attacked by local youths, who themselves were no angels. There was a big heroin problem round there amongst the regular youths never mind the squatters. It was a difficult place, obviously Five Go Down to the Sea? would have carried on as if that was part of the plan.*
*For the full story of Five Go Down to the Sea?’s time in London read…
Cathal Coughlan — The squat in Rotherhithe was a bit difficult because it entailed Sean coming all the way to my place in the Northwest, which even now with proper public transport would be a shlep, but then you couldn’t be sure from one hour to the next whether there was going to be a Tube, it was really something, an inhibitor.
Garreth Ryan — Sean would have been leaving the squat and effectively going to work as a musician or doing whatever was required. It was an incredible time, that area had its own pub which was a dockers’ pub [The Ship (latterly renamed The Clipper), Silver Walk, Rotherhithe] when we moved in and within two years it had become a squatters’ pub. There were members of Exile in the Kingdom, lads from Drogheda and Dundalk, there were friends of mine from Gorey, there were all sorts living there. Word got around pretty quickly and anybody else coming over, once they knew you had a flat, and I mean this in the best possible way, you were happy to provide that foothold at the very start. Once Five Go Down to the Sea? showed us the way [laughing] that you could have all this for free that was it. It was an extraordinary period which in many ways suited the Five Go Down to the Sea? story very well but less so the Microdisney story. We reveled in it to be honest.
Chapter 6 — Everything is Fantastic
So during part of the summer of ’83, as they were two unemployed Irish navvies in London, whenever records needed stickers applied to them, they’d come in and do piecework — Richard Boon
Geoff Travis — I can remember seeing them play, they were fantastic, they were so singular, Cathal obviously is such a great character. They were one of those great conglomerates of people that are so unlikely that they are just marvellous. The thing that you have to know is that everything that ever came out on Rough Trade is something that I absolutely loved, otherwise it wouldn’t have come out. That’s the criterion. So I held them in very, very high regard. A lot of people think that’s the best period for Rough Trade, those few years, I don’t think that myself, but it certainly was a good period.
Sean O’Hagan — We rehearsed the album in Walworth Road. We’d go down to a place called Crockwell Rehearsal Studios every day. It’s Cathal and me and our work ethic is: get up and get down to the rehearsal studio and rehearse the songs diligently. Cathal was very good at saying, “I think this could be better.” There was a piano there so Cathal was delighted that he could get his piano experience back. I’m playing the bass as well as the guitar, so I’m exploring lots of different ideas. Then we go into the studio and we have a week. We go in with a guy called Steve Parker, he had worked with Mike Thorne and he had also worked with Wire. I loved being in that studio in Kensal Rise which was very near where we lived. It was a converted church near the Narrow Boat pub, near the canal in Ladbrooke Groove.
Garreth Ryan — What Sean and Cathal had in common was they both believed in timeless pop music — I do remember that word being used a lot in relation to Microdisney at the time. It’s extraordinary to think that that needed to be explained to people who were listening to The Birthday Party or whatever post-punk thing it was. The notion that people were actually writing songs and were less concerned with credibility amongst London gig-goers was something that needed to be explained to people at the time.
Sean O’Hagan — It was a regular studio but it seemed salubrious and I remember going in beforehand for a look and I seem to remember that The Clash were in there, or Paul Simonon. I loved it, I remember the smell of coffee and it was the first time in my life that I had ever smelt real coffee, thinking, “Wow, that’s what real coffee smells like.” There was a video player and I used to watch Midnight Cowboy every single day. We were very diligent about putting the stuff down, rough backing tracks and then the drum machine was being programmed. We had an 808 [Roland TR-808] but Steve Parker said, no it should be a Linn, so it became a LinnDrum. Everyday we’d get basics down: piano; bass and guitar. We must have worked very, very hard, but we worked very systematically. The alterations that we had made the week before in rehearsals were all put in place and then the real possibility of overdubbing suddenly became obvious: “Oh my God, I can add another guitar, and another guitar, wow fantastic.” I was pushed quite a bit by Steve on that, things like ‘I’ll Be a Gentleman’, there’s all sorts of ideas going on there. “I’ve got another idea.” “Well, we can do it.” Cathal’s really able to explore different ideas for the first time. Cathal was running all the vocals, he knew what to do, double tracking his own voice for the first time. He was very relaxed about playing the piano, even though he’ll probably think not, I think he was. We had a DX7 [Yamaha DX7] and he knew how to programme it. Now you’d think, [Laughing] “Why would we use a DX7?”
Cathal Coughlan — It was not a particularly easy session, it was the most time that either of us had ever spent in a studio. There was such intensity: “This has to be absolutely right.” [Laughing] Given that it was put together in such an idiosyncratic way that it sounds ridiculous that somebody would be that intense but those were the times that we came out of.
Sean O’Hagan — ‘Dolly’ was done completely separately, those sessions were very difficult. Rough Trade brought in John Porter because he had just had success with The Smiths. So it was to try and get a hit, it was ridiculous the idea that any of us knew what a hit was. We went to Blackwing for that session. I spent aeons in Blackwing in the 90s with Stereolab and The High Llamas. We were in Blackwing in the small studio because the main studio is a rehearsal space and Dexys Midnight Runners are rehearsing for a tour, the Too-Rye-Ay days. John Porter brings in Terry Stannard on drums and John McKenzie on bass and they had been with Kokomo [70s British soul band]. That was odd, having these fellows in, meeting session men for the first time. The recording doesn’t go brilliantly and the mix happened somewhere in Bloomsbury, I remember the first mix was terrible so we remixed it in Willesden in Power Plant Studios a few weeks later. ‘Everybody’s Dead’ the other song we recorded with them was remixed in The Sound Suite in Camden. They end up on the album and are audibly different to the rest of the record. So we made this record which kind of sounds unlike any other record because it has a real AOR feel to it. There are caveats: my guitar sound is awful; the drum machine is ridiculous but I love Everything is Fantastic.
Cathal Coughlan — It was Year Zero +3. It was not acceptable to lean back and be a muso about things, even though we did those two songs with John Porter where he brought in the session guys. One of which is kind of the most heinous piece of studio muso stuff you can imagine. ‘Dolly’ is fine but ‘Everybody is Dead’ was a perversion of everything.
Sean O’Hagan — A few weeks later we were mixing it in Warren Street in a studio below Capital Radio. Weirdly enough Scott Walker had been there a few weeks beforehand producing John Walker for Geoff Travis.* Those things really meant a lot to us.
*Scott Walker was producing songs for John Walker and his wife Brandy. Geoff Tarvis wasn’t interested in John’s MOR rock but was interested in signing Scott to Blanco Y Negro [Woods, Paul (2013) Scott: The Curious Life & Work of Scott Walker. London: Omnibus Press].
Cathal Coughlan — The fact that we were going about it in such an odd way did not cross our minds at all and so getting into a big strop about where somebody was going to hit a floor tom that was being overdubbed on top of a drum machine assumed this titanic proportion and the long and the short of it for me, and this is just my opinion, we would have been so much better off if we had just done it in some cheap studio somewhere slightly better than we had worked in before but not like as much better as that place was, with a crap drum machine and just the parts that we came to London with. We felt there was so much at stake, and of course then we hand the thing in and nothing happens for a long, long time.
Richard Boon — When I was running New Hormones in Manchester people started sending us things and I’m sure Garreth Ryan sent me one of the two Kabuki singles.* Later on I moved to work at Rough Trade Distribution and record label as production manager. The first time I met Sean and Cathal was through Garreth Ryan who by then was working in stock control in the warehouse at Blenheim Crescent. Rough Trade Records was expressing an interest in their work but nothing had been confirmed at the time so during part of the summer of ’83, as they were two unemployed Irish navvies in London, whenever records needed stickers applied to them, they’d come in and do piecework. Then of course the label made an agreement with them and they started releasing records.
*New Hormones was the Manchester independent record label founded by Boon that released records between 1977 and 1982 for amongst others: Buzzcocks and Ludus.
Sean O’Hagan — It [Everything is Fantastic] was probably finished in December 1983 and then the release of the record was delayed and delayed and delayed for different reasons.
Richard Boon — There was a strike in late ’83 at the CBS pressing plant, which we’d been using, which held up lots of things actually and I started looking for other pressing plants to use, there’s a certain irony in the fact that Rough Trade was using pressing plants owned by majors but that’s possibly not relevant.
Cathal Coughlan—We counted the days, you know — a certain amount of menial labour, quite a lot of sloth, frustration, long walks, drink, acid, speed. We worked in Rough Trade re-sleeving Smiths’ records when they couldn’t get the right to use Terence Stamp’s picture on the cover of ‘What Difference Does it Make?’.* [Laughing] Richard saw us alright on that elite activity.
*The original cover of ‘What Difference Does it Make?’ featured Terence Stamp holding a chloraform pad in a still from William Wyler’s 1965 thriller The Collector. Stamp didn’t approve of the still being used so Morrissey famously recreated the scene holding a pint of milk. When Stamp conceded to the use of the still, pressings had to be re-sleeved [Brown, L (2008) Meetings with Morrissey. London: Omnibus Press].
Sean O’Hagan — Then it gets released in June 1984 and it just disappears because there’s a media strike on and all the music papers go on strike and the record is released into a vacuum.* We had a six month hiatus before its release where we were touring a little bit and doing Peel Sessions.
*During 1984 a series of industrial disputes affected a whole plethora of IPC (publisher of NME and Melody Maker) magazines and comics. Talks broke down between IPC’s printers and their union of workers. By the time the six week dispute was finally ended in late-July/early-August 1984, a number of IPC titles had been either sold or closed [Cox, H. and Mowatt, S. (2015) Revolutions from Grub Street: A History of Magazine Publishing in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press].
Cathal Coughlan — The thing that really changed things was the sessions that we were able to do after we came to London. The money from the Peel Sessions kept the wolf from the door. The fact that people in Leeds would know your material that hadn’t been on a record yet, and it didn’t matter that there hadn’t been a record because they would probably buy the record when it came out anyway. They just knew who you were and they would come and see you at the Warehouse or the Uni or whatever. That was why we were able to go and do all those gigs after Everybody is Fantastic because the record itself hadn’t really lit things up. The Peel Sessions I guess kind of had in the way that mattered to the section of the audience that would be interested.
Garreth Ryan — There’s some great songs on there but some would argue that the Peel Session versions of some of the tracks are better. The Microdisney Peel Sessions Album is pretty decent, a great listen. I think the drum sound is the only thing that gives the first album away.
Sean O’Hagan — By this time we have met Tom Fenner and Jon Fell. We met Tom and Jon at Rough Trade where Cathal and I were working in the Warehouse with Richard Boon and Garreth Ryan, we were making a little bit of money.
Sean O’Hagan — Rough Trade were the template for the independent industry, they were obsessed at that moment with Strike Force. Strike Force were the guys who would go around and make the hit, making sure that chart return shops are well stocked. This was regarded as the way to break into the market. Rough Trade realised that they were very lucky to hang onto The Smiths and they were going to make the hits happen. ‘Hand in Glove’ came out and got ‘Single of the Week’ in Sounds but we weirdly get ‘Single of the Week’ as well. We end up in Rough Trade working with Richard Boon boxing up The Smiths album for Strike Force. So, bizarrely we are part of The Smiths machine, we become part of it.
Richard Boon — They didn’t box up anybody’s albums. Albums came from the pressing plant in boxes, but they did do some stickering.
Sean O’Hagan — Tom Fenner was an A&R guy and he wanted to sign our publishing to ATV Music. We became very, very close to Tom, very good friends, it became fairly obvious that Tom was so into the project that we should be working with him, so he basically joins the band.
Tom Fenner — Like a lot of people in the early 80s, I first heard of Microdisney from John Peel. The first time I met Sean and Cathal was in my office at a music publishers. I was a talent scout employed by the company to go out and find new talent and sign them up and [laughing] help them become superstars obviously. I consumed everything in those days at that age and I had a pretty good eye about what was going on and after I heard the first Peel Session I got in contact with Sean and Cathal. I can’t remember exactly how we did that but it was ostensibly to invite them in and see how they were fixed publishing wise and what have you. I can’t remember exactly what was happening but they were in London at the time finishing off Everybody is Fantastic and we met up and chatted but nothing really came of it. ATV were the publishers I was working for, and they were not hugely interested I don’t think.
ATV was a publishing company founded by Lew Grade to buy The Beatles’ back catalogue, Northern Songs which had come up for sale in 1968. He spend £5 million buying it and he thought, well I better start a publishing company around that, so that’s how it came to be.* I was in my early 20s around this time when I first met Sean and Cathal. But all I ever wanted to do was to be in a band and I tried to sign Microdisney and that didn’t work out. I wasn’t really one for the corporate life particularly and I wanted to be a drummer so I was talking to Sean and Cathal and saying, if you’re looking for a drummer would you consider me, so we started playing and I think I ended my job on Christmas Eve 1983. It was fantastic, it was all I ever wanted to do and I loved the stuff that they did. I left the job, left the company car and signed on the dole, hey presto we were off, three Peel Sessions in one year.
*In 1985 Michael Jackson famously bought ATV for $47.5m. ‘How Michael Jackson Bought the Publishing Rights to The Beatles Catalogue’ by Suzanne Raga details what many believe was the publishing deal of the 20th century.
Jon Fell — I had been living in Manchester and Richard [Boon] was from Manchester where he had run his record label, New Hormones, where he released the first Buzzcocks’ record [Spiral Scratch EP, 1977] I knew him because I played in a band in Manchester that was first called The Glass Animals, then it was called The Gay Animals, sometime in 1983 we decided that we were going to go to London. None of us had any contacts in London but we hitched down and found a squat in Rotherhithe. Richard was working at Rough Trade at that time, he had moved down a little bit before.
Jon Fell —The two other members of The Gay Animals were Cath Carroll and Liz Naylor, two women from Manchester who ran City Fun, a fantastic fanzine in Manchester. City Fun had been going since the early days of punk. The pressures of being in London were a bit too much for us and we started to fall out with each other, we weren’t really doing any gigs or anything. Living in the squat in Rotherhithe, we were finding it a bit hard to survive really.
Richard Boon — Liz and Cath both moved to London, Liz to work in PR for a bit and Cath to form Miaow. Their first single [‘Belle Vue’, Venus Records, 1985] had a great sleeve by Liz Naylor’s sister Pat. Jon had come down with them and he was just like a resting musician — [laughing] aren’t they all. So I put them together, I guess, or Cath and I put them together.
Jon Fell — I got a message from Richard that said, these two guys are looking for a bass player. I didn’t know anything about them, I hadn’t heard the early records that they’d made in Ireland. Richard introduced us and at that point they were just finishing off the first Microdisney album which they’d recorded in a studio in Kensal Rise, on a pretty small budget. But it sounded really, really unique and distinctive straight away. It had great songs and fantastic melodies and lots and lots of great hooks and it had this very distinctive sound, which was arrived at by mixing an organ, really strong vocals, and finger-picked guitar.
Sean O’Hagan — Richard Boon said, “I know just the fellow,” and so we were introduced to Jon Fell. It turned out that Jon I were squatting in Rotherhithe at the time so that was handy and there we were, a little four piece.
Jon Fell — The coincidence was that I was living in a squat in Rotherhithe and it turned out that Sean was living in a squat around the corner from me with various friends and musicians from Ireland. Five Go Down to the Sea?, who of course were also from Cork, were also living around there at the time.
Sean O’Hagan — A little four piece. Cathal’s playing organ, I’m playing guitar, with Jon and Tom so there was a new little nucleus Microdisney. So there was the first Micro Disney five piece, then there’s the two-piece and then there’s this new little four piece. I think we might have performed once or twice as a two-piece in London. We did a gig as a two-piece at the Rock Garden.
Tom Fenner — The first time we played live was a gig in a restaurant in Piccadilly Circus. [Laughing] I really can’t remember how it was, but it was playing in this sort of takeaway restaurant just off Coventry Street, [laughing] people were actually eating in front of us while we were playing, [laughing] I’m not sure what anyone made of it, but that was the very first gig and I guess that would have been quite soon into 1984.
Sean O’Hagan — A burger joint where everybody came, all the Rough Trade people came, and the Evening Standard wrote about it wildly, they previewed it [laughing] and it was in a burger joint for some reason, in Piccadilly. How about that? That happened.
Jon Fell — Nobody else was doing anything else like that, it was just really, really distinctive. It was a really nice production, a very musical production but it sounded really cheap as well, but that added to the limitation of it. As soon as I heard it, I said yeah, I really like that, it’s a great record. I think they were just still mixing it. There was bits of it that they weren’t happy with bass wise so I recorded bass on ‘This Liberal Love’ and a few other tracks. They had done a couple of gigs in London with a couple of friends from Ireland, from a band called Kissed Air, who were friends of theirs who lived in the same part of London. They had done a couple of gigs with a guy called John [Watt] playing bass. He was the guitarist in Kissed Air, but they hadn’t found anybody permanent.
Sean O’Hagan — We were really happy. We’ve recorded Everybody Is Fantastic, the boys learn the songs and we’re writing The Clock Comes Down the Stairs. We’re beginning to tour, we’re touring the UK, we’re going to Europe, we’re going to Holland and Germany.
Tom Fenner — I think Jon and I were cognisant and respectful enough of what Sean and Cathal wanted not to overplay. We certainly fitted in to their vision of things, they were the songwriters so there was never the urge to throw party pieces in there too much. I think when we played live it was really good, one of the distinct things about Microdisney, certainly at this stage and I’m sure it was before they came over from Cork, live was a completely different proposition compared to actually what was recorded. I really liked that distinction as well, often it was a lot rougher a lot of the time and we went in different directions, we didn’t try to replicate too much what went on in the studio.
Cathal Coughlan — We were quite prolific at that point. We were gigging quite a bit, we did a lot of up and down the motorway stuff, coming back the same night because there was no money for hotels and of course there was nobody in charge of where the cash was being put and it wasn’t that any of it was disappearing or anything but when you don’t write down the fact that you just spent £25 on petrol sooner or later somebody’s going to come back, and that’s what happened a couple of years after that.
Tom Fenner — Going into a studio for the first time to record with people that you think are really great, making a song that you think is fantastic, having it pressed into a record — you can retire at that stage, then and there, happy really. This was followed by the album and then tours and then you go out and play and my word, people actually paid to come and see you. Everything was a complete wonder and a novelty, and then you hear yourself on the radio and then you do your first Peel Session. It was just accelerated rates of delights in that respect really, it was really good.
Cathal Coughlan — You would hear that someone, a particular journalist, had heard it [Everybody is Fantastic] and liked it and you’d be thinking, this is it, this is it, this is it, and of course it wasn’t. There was a bit too much chemical stuff going on by this point — as in anything you could get your mitts on, and I’m not talking anything posh. The comedowns from chemicals and the sarcasm and the whole irony, and the fact that the record came out but it didn’t really do a whole lot, all kind of combined into something rather destructive but we managed to start writing again and the new writing had advanced quite a lot without having done much work for most of a year.
Chapter 7 — We Hate You South African Bastards!
Profanity on a record cover was still a big deal at that point — Cathal Coughlan
Garreth Ryan — The two singles had sold out, there was still demand for them but they weren’t available. 7"s never exported well in the early 80s and they still don’t really export well now, they’re not high enough value items for distributors to be motivated to get involved with. The idea was usually that if you have singles that sell out then you stick them onto a compilation. Microdisney had four early tracks that came from a soundtrack to a film called [laughing] Do You Need Drugs. These were recorded in the Divine World Missionaries in Maynooth. We were used to these tracks and I thought that they were good enough to release alongside the first two singles as a second filler release. So that came out as a mini-album on Rough Trade with a sleeve by John Langford and it was called, We Hate You South African Bastards! [Laughing] Cathal came up with that on a long night when we were down in a house in Hampshire, we were up all night and that title came up and it stuck.
Richard Boon — Rough Trade Records was very artist led, especially when it came to packaging. We’d have Morrissey sending us Xeroxed pictures of his favourite TV or film stars from that Noir-Northern period of film and television with colour suggestions. Microdisney came up with We Hate You South African Bastards!, which was a great title at the time and they met Jon Langford from The Mekons and he did a fantastic drawing for that. I seem to remember a gig where Langford played with them as well, he’s a hero.
Cathal Coughlan — With Jon Langford’s masterpiece — to me, I still love that. It did get more attention because of the name then it would have done just on its own merits and I kind of feel a bit bad about that really. I don’t recall there being any backlash from any anti-apartheid people or anything but I think profanity on a record cover was still a big deal at that point. It was just after the Flux of Pink Indians thing.* There were people who would become interested in you, like the NF [National Front] and stuff like that, just on the back of something like that. Nobody put anything through anybody’s letterbox, no vinyl was destroyed that I can recall. It was an attempt at doing a kind of flippant thing, “Oh yeah, we all know that this is a really serious thing, but we’re going to make a joke about it.” To be honest, with hindsight that’s a bit up itself really.
*In 1983 Flux of Pink Indians released The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks [Spiderleg Records], the album was banned by several major retailers due to its sexually explicit title and cover art.
Garreth Ryan — What was remarkable was that when it was reviewed in the NME and when it appeared in the NME chart they unilaterally changed the title to [laughing] We Hate You White South African Bastards! Nobody has ever explained it to me, I don’t know if they were pulled up on it. It’s possibly a unique scenario — the NME were omnipresent at the time as quite agreeably a left-wing organisation — that they felt that it was within their power to alter the title [laughing] so that people wouldn’t misunderstand Cathal. It’s unbelievable, he had to explain it on the original sleeve, the idea that the marketplace or the record buying public or NME buying public can’t cope with a title and that somehow there’d be uproar so they had to explain it themselves, [laughing] so they changed the title, it’s extraordinary.
Cathal Coughlan — We continued having mishaps in the studio, we went to record an EP with ‘Loftholdingswood’ and stuff we went [laughing] totally once again the wrong way about it. It ended up having three songs on it because we spent too much on one of them.
Sean O’Hagan — In The World was recorded in the Roundhouse but by then we had done a lot of Peel Sessions and we were learning a little bit about recording during the Peel Sessions.
Cathal Coughlan — We’d worked with an engineer at the BBC that we’d really liked, Martin Colley. He was a very nice man above all, but he was a BBC-lifer and he was used to using BBC kit. He couldn’t do it at the BBC, but he could do the job freelance. He wrote the requisite five affidavits of application and was given clearance to do it as a freelance. We thought that he’d work much quicker of we got him the sort of kit that he was used to. So we had to go to an SSL studio [a studio with a Solid State Logic console], which meant a variety of things and we happened to coincide one of the sessions with a transport strike which meant that he wasn’t able to get in from his home which was out in the home counties somewhere, [laughing] in even as far as Wimbledon which is where the studio was. [Laughing] What the hell were we doing working in a place in Wimbledon? One thing just led to another thing and another thing, yeah a three song EP for the money that we did end up [laughing] doing most of an album for much better later on.
Jon Fell — In some ways that era, before the first band album proper, it was a golden era live for the band. Sean and Cathal were writing songs at a very fast rate. Whereas before they had been writing songs knowing that they were pretty much going to record them as a duo now they were writing thinking about what the songs sounded like with bass and drums and guitar. I can’t really define it, but there was a difference, a lot of the songs, a sketch of the song would come to rehearsal or a rough demo and then we’d gradually work it up. It was a really exciting time because we did a bunch of gigs, great gigs, and we had new songs at every gig. The set changed really quickly, and to me all the songs that they came out with were amazing. In retrospect that EP is slightly disappointing in a way really because when we first heard ‘Loftholdingswood’ and ‘464’ in the rehearsal studio they were brilliant amazing songs and they were total live highlights, but for whatever reason and it’s really hard to pinpoint the exact reason, I think that they could have been better recorded and produced. It’s just one of those things really, it was what people were capable of at the time. People that I know who went to see the band live at that era were slightly disappointed by that record. I listen to it now and all I can listen to is the songs, it isn’t as good as how we did it live, to this day I don’t know really why?
Sean O’Hagan — Nick Montgomery has joined the band because Cathal was slightly nervous about keeping keyboards and the vocals together. So suddenly Cathal was released from the keyboards and he’s centre stage again, which was amazing.
Jon Fell — There was a good few months when Cathal was standing behind the keyboards. On stage it looked like a really cheap flimsy keyboard stand. Cathal would bang the keyboards pretty hard, stamp his foot and sing and it just became quite frustrating for him to try and sing and project the songs and play these complicated songs at the same time.
Sean O’Hagan — Cathal’s very close to his keyboard parts and he wants them exactly as he’s written them, but that exists to now with me and The High Llamas. How poor old Marcus [Holdaway] has stayed and worked with me for all these years when I’ll say, “I really want that little finger to sort of slightly delay on the chord.” [Laughing] So that would have gone on without a doubt, for good or bad. All I can say is that the musicians that we were with had amazing patience with us, completely amazing.
Jon Fell — Nick was someone that I vaguely knew from my hometown, I didn’t know him that well. I knew his family, his sister and his older brother. I knew he was a really great musician. Somehow I came into contact with him, right at the time we were looking for a new keyboard player. We tried it and Nick was an incredibly easy going guy, a nice guy to get on with and he was a good player so that was it he just slotted straight in.
Cathal Coughlan — My playing had become too erratic and I suppose it was a relief not to have to use that side of my brain on every song. That was a period where I was not sober on stage enough actually, and that was a bit crap really. Having played and sung [laughing] sober many, many times since I can say that I function better where I don’t have to play at the same time, I sing better when I’m not playing at the same time, that’s just the way of it. Not all drummers can play like Tony Allen where every limb is moving separately, do you know what I mean?
Sean O’Hagan — We’re done a bunch of gigs, Manchester University, a little pub here, some place down on the South coast, here, there and everywhere and then [laughing] we go to Communist Poland!
Cathal Coughlan — Poland was one of the many absurdities. All Trade Booking was a group of bookers that had basically spawned out of Rough Trade originally but they’d gone independent and the main guy was this very charismatic West 11 native, called Mike Hincks. He was a bit of a mentor to us, but we were uncontrollable in many ways and putting alcohol around us was really the wrong policy.
Sean O’Hagan — Mike Hincks from All Trade Booking is a kind of day to day manager. We’re drinking a lot, no money, drunk all the time. Just about holding it together for the gigs, but the weird thing is that we didn’t realise that we were supposed to hold it together for the gigs. We were so excited and able to absorb so much booze without it over-effecting us that the difference between sober and drunk is kind of blurred.
Cathal Coughlan — There was another person in All Trade who had been the booking agent for all the people who had been in Henry Cow and Art Bears and Beefheart, the fringes of Beefheart and things like that and so he had all these contacts up and down the Eastern Bloc. Through his contacts it was proposed:
“Well if you’re going to Germany anyway do you want to go to Poland? Fred Frith was there last year”
And from me only, [laughing] “Obviously yes. Martial law, yeah let’s have it. Yeah, I’m doing that, if Fred Frith has done it, I’m doing it.”
Everyone else was a little bit more sanguine about it. I still have an awful lot of time for Fred Frith and Chris Cutler, Dagmar Krause, Peter Blegvad — all those people, major inspiration for me, but that’s just me.
Sean O’Hagan — Poland: Gdańsk, Wrocław and Łódź. It’s bizarre because we have to travel through Eastern Europe, we had to travel through East Germany in transit, all the strangeness of having to go through checks and being checked by the East German police.
Cathal Coughlan — It’s important to appreciate just how awful it was to say goodbye in the afternoon to one lot of Germans, affluent people who looked not that different to us, possibly slightly more affluent, that was all and by evening to stop on a motorway services in another part of Germany and have people come up in these insane looking clothes trying to change money with you who were essentially coming out of 40 years of pauperisation. This can happen and it’s important to know that it can happen.
Sean O’Hagan — Then onto Poland and into bizarreness and cherry vodka, long drives, witnessing fatal road accidents and the absolute bleakness of Poland. The bleakness of the Eastern Bloc. Telephones that didn’t work, hotels that could be from the 1940s. A Chair: OK there’s a chair, you’d pull the chair and and a leg would fall off. Scrambled eggs: Oh, there’re not real eggs, it’s powder. All this stuff, empty streets, the Russians are clamping down on Solidarity. It really came to a head in Gdańsk where we meet these guys who are shaven-headed and grey-suited, chaps who’d read about English musical austerity, Joy Division, the Grey Organisation, the beginning of warehouse parties. They were hearing about this and they wanted to create that themselves, so they were walking around with grey suits and shaven heads and saying that the Russians are going to come and destroy us. They must have hated our music. I remember a guy saying, “So you from London, have you met Morrissey, do you know Peter Hook?” It was important to them.
Cahal Coughlan — The kind of people who would go and see an event were pretty cultured actually and they were very much into literature and film and if they wanted to shell out quite a lot of money they could hear whatever they wanted to hear by going to the weekend market, it would cost an arm and a leg, you’d need to really want it, but they were sophisticated. They weren’t really bowled over by the sight of amplifiers or any of these kind of trappings you know. You could have interesting conversations because a lot of people spoke English. The one thing you didn’t do was drink very much, which was good, because it was either vodka or nothing. There was some scrap of sense in the situation we weren’t going to just drink Bison Grass.
Sean O’Hagan — I do remember going into palatial hotels in Gdańsk where the security would be saying to these guys, “It’s International you must not come in,” and the guys were saying back, “You are enemies of the people and the state.” There were weird standoffs between security guards and these guys. I don’t know what they were — they were pro-Solidarity, but also basically guys who want to join the West and enjoy freedom of expression. So you had Joy Division who had become New Order and by 1984 there was this whole thing about austerity in music. Bleakness, black and white, and there was a kind of celebration of Russian Structuralism and Brutalism but we were actually in it. The Polish guys were saying, “We want to be like the guys in Manchester.” [Laughing] “But the guys in Manchester want to be like you.” It was really confusing, really odd.
Cathal Coughlan — Financially it was catastrophic, it cleaned us out. We had to continue from Poland to do some dates in Italy, that was the idea all along. Was it worth getting cleaned out for? I’m not certain. But was it a valuable experience? Yeah, absolutely, to go all through Poland, Czechoslovakia, as it then was, especially crossing the border into Austria and then onto Rome. We hardly saw daylight between the Polish-Chechoslovak border and Rome, until the Autostrada in Northern Italy. It was a privilege to have witnessed that time, a painful time for many people, but important to know what it was like because frankly we may be heading back to something quite closely resembling it now, [laughing] this can happen and it’s important to know that it can happen
Chapter 8 — The Clock Comes Down the Stairs
We were immigrants and I think that was something that pulled us together. We were both struggling and we were both doing good music — Robert Forster
Stan Erraught — I can remember when Sean and Cathal went to London and I started hearing tapes of what they were up to I thought this is a strange change of direction. It took me a while to get it. The first two singles they did for Kabuki don’t really capture it, they were still sort of feeling their way around how to record this music and they were done quite cheaply. I thought the first Rough Trade record, Everybody is Fantastic was a bit tentative, so when The Clock Comes Down the Stairs came out it just blew me away.
Sean O’Hagan —We’d been doing a lot of playing, we’d become a bit punky because we’d played a lot. We were doing a lot of miner’s support gigs at the time. The first real venture into The Clock Comes Down the Stairs was when we record ‘Harmony Time’ and ‘Money for the Trams’ and that came after the trip to Poland.* We record ‘Harmony Time’ which is OK, a bit trashy, but I’m just really proud of ‘Money for the Trams’, I think it’s amazing, I love it. I remember doing it. A brilliant, brilliant story unravels and Cathal brilliantly had it all from the Polish trip, which was fantastic. ‘Money for the Trams’ was actually recorded in Hoxton Square in Wave which became The Bass Clef and The Tenor Clef. Before Hoxton Square becomes the trendiest part of London.
*Both ‘Harmony Time’ and ‘Money for the Trams’ would appear as B-sides on the 12" of ‘Birthday Girl’ released in October 1985.
Cathal Coughlan — There was a deep paranoia attached to being Irish in London at the time. The armed struggle was still in full swing and was prone to bigger flare-ups from time to time. Thatcher paranoia was still in full effect, it was at its zenith: there was the miner’s strike; and the print dispute; the privatisations; and the whole sense of confrontation. As an Irish person you certainly felt that you were in as dicey a position as you could be in really once you actually opened your mouth. Other people got it in the neck without even opening their mouths, you were certainly acutely aware of that if you had half a brain — we didn’t get the worst of it. There was quite a lot of stop and search and if you happened to be off your head, or just drunk or something it was edgy. We all knew about the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four and from time to time you would meet someone who was even on the fringes of that, somebody I got to know quite well had been an alibi witness on the Guildford thing. You knew what could happen, people like Crass were going — now they weren’t in Rough Trade but it was a related scene — those people were under surveillance the whole time. We knew people from the whole island of Ireland, so you got a lot less blasé about the National question, I wouldn’t say that I ever had it in me to go the whole 32 county solution but certainly you appreciated much more that there was a human rights problem in the North of Ireland. In a way, after ’74 in the South’s allowable discourse, this had been swept under the carpet a lot.
Jon Fell — The Clock Comes Down the Stairs contains all the songs that were written during the early period when we were doing lots and lots of gigs. We were very focused, Sean and Cathal were writing at a ferocious rate and working together really well, everybody was incredibly enthusiastic and that’s the record that has those songs on it. It was the first record that had a budget to record a band. There was no worrying about what kind of record should it be, it was just to try and get those songs down, so I think it was the easiest record to do. In a way the band had become something different, it probably wasn’t what Cathal and Sean were thinking of when they first started playing gigs in Cork as a duo, but the thing it had become was very exciting to everybody and we had a great run of really intense live performances.
Cathal Coughlan — Things were beginning to kind of fall together lyrically for me because instead of just churning out asides and stringing them together as strikingly as I could, I was thinking outside of that and actually coming to have some facility with it. The personal aspect of being an exile was inspiring as well, it was painful. It was painful but it changed everything and it brought a focus to everything much more than the internal exile of what Cork became for me. Sean had his own take on things but he obviously had a more complex relationship with Britain because of his much longer history here.
Lindy Morrison — The interesting thing about them, and it’s what made us like each other, was that both groups were on the margins. Cathal, coming from Cork, was an angry political man. Us coming from Brisbane — [laughing] Robert and Grant of course really had no politics — but I was particularly an angry political woman. Both The Go-Betweens and Microdisney had come through the punk movement, and we really appreciated what punk music did which was allow everyone access to the stage. They were a political band but sometimes Microdisney’s politics was so local, that I didn’t understand it but the politics that I’d come from in Brisbane was pretty damn local too — no one could understand that. You could understand in Cathal a sense of frustration at the over-riding political system. Culturally I think we had so much in common. [Laughing] There were no women in the band which is always disappointing but all of them were really nice men.
Robert Forster — We were immigrants and I think that was something that pulled us together. We were both struggling and we were both doing good music — both bands, and in a way we were up against the music scene of that time. We had no support system, it wasn’t as if Microdisney had moved up to Dublin — you know you can go and see Auntie Rosie and she’s got a fridge full of food, you know Uncle Seamus will put you up for a couple of nights. Neither band had that in London, there was no fall back, and so you just had to get money for the next meal. You were in the game and there was a certain amount of great enjoyment and opportunity and both bands made really good music but it was very, very tough. Very tough.
Jon Fell — There was no pressure, the only pressure was to deliver the best album that we could, there was no pressure to think about how many records it would sell to break this band at this particular point, or anything like that.
Robert Forster — There was a set of practice rooms just outside of Camden, you could walk to Camden quite easily, but I’ve forgotten the name of them, there was probably about five or six practice rooms there and it was quite professionally run, you know it wasn’t like they were in a squat or anything like that, they weren’t super luxurious but they were decent practice rooms. They practiced next door to us. From what I can remember we got to know them through the practice room. We’d hear them next door, so it must have been just coming out outside the rooms and meeting them like that. I’ve never known a band that rehearsed so much. They rehearsed meticulously, I don’t know if that was more Sean, I can’t tell but they were sort of very, very tight.
Lindy Morrison — The guy who ran the rehearsal rooms was a short hyper ball of energy, he was such a pothead, he might have been using cocaine as well [laughing] so the place was really hypey. Microdisney used to rehearse next to us but the only time we’d see them was afterwards in the local pub where they would stop for a pint. We’d stop for a pint, but I wasn’t a drinker, I was a pot smoker, they used to just sit there drinking pint after pint, it was just so amazing and the only way you could get on was to drink a pint with them. This was the mid-80s in Camden Town, in the pub — I could walk you to these places but I can’t remember the names of them. I would have been introduced to the “pint”. It’s not something I would have ever drunk before, I was used to something they call beer but was actually warm and unflavoured. To hang out with Microdisney that was what you did after rehearsal. They were extraordinary men, boys — they were boys then.
Geoff Travis — Musicians who have aspirations to do great work sometimes don’t know the difference between commercial and non-commercial. The Go-Betweens were deeply upset by The Smiths’ success and Mark E. Smith more or less walked out [of Rough Trade Records] as soon as Steven Patrick arrived because he felt threatened by another Mancunian upstart. The thing is Microdisney are marvellous but they are not commercial. The Go-Betweens were marvellous but ‘Cattle and Cane’ was the closest they came to a commercial single. It’s very difficult for a musician to accept the fact that they are doing something that’s really, really good and everyone acclaims them but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it has any resonance in the commercial world. But The Smiths were a rare band where all those things came together. It’s very hard for musicians to accept that. I think it’s remarkable that Virgin signed Microdisney. Maybe I’m completely wrong, but I think of Microdisney as being marvellous but completely un-commercial.
Richard Boon — Most of the dealings between the label and bands were almost written on the back of an envelope. It was one of those classic Indie things: the artist owns the recordings, the deal is 50/50 after the production costs have been recovered. The Smiths was slightly different because by the summer of ’83 Rough Trade was hitting one of its regular cycles of losing money. ‘Hand In Glove’ — RT 131, the first single was just like a one off but then as The Smiths’ momentum grew they became the band with the first actual long term contract with deliverables and so many singles and so many albums over such and such a period. The Smiths did become vital to the ongoing nonsense of Rough Trade Records and Distribution. Maybe bands like The Go-Betweens did feel ignored, they had kind of drifted off a little after Before Hollywood [Rough Trade, 1983] and Microdisney came in as the focus did definitely switch to The Smiths. The Fall had just come back to Rough Trade with ‘Kicker Conspiracy’ and ‘Eat Y’self Fitter’ and Rough 63 — Perverted by Language [Rough Trade, 1983]. Mark E. Smith, bless him, definitely resented the attention shifting to fellow Mancunian, Morrissey. But it was not a deliberate lack of attention, people got the same attention it was a very artist-focused, musician-focused label, as I believe it still remains.
Robert Forster — Before Hollywood had ‘Cattle and Cane’, it was reviewed to the heavens and the one thing that was good was that it got us into Europe. Which was something that we were very interested in. German Rough Trade were very good, we were interested in getting into Europe if only because we were fed. Life was easier on the road in Europe than sitting still in London. Rough Trade made a lot of great records, and I’m sure that Geoff sort of realises this now, or he probably did at the time, he was a great A&R guy but as far as money goes and the running of a company that was not Geoff’s strength.
Jon Fell — There was a couple of years when we played together really telepathically. Sometimes we had terrible audiences, we’d play places where the gigs were terrible and it wouldn’t make that much difference, we’d still be able to reach that level of intensity. I guess it was a rare thing because live it was quite raw and very emotional but at the same time it was very satisfying to record because there was a lot of thought going into how you arrange and produce and all these influences you take. We were listening to loads and loads of country music and soul music and Suicide and disco and The Beach Boys and Van Dyke Parks and 60s American music and people like Buck Owens. It all got thrown together.
Robert Forster — Cathal was a singer of great integrity, he had an amazing stage presence and a great voice. He was very authentic at a time in London where, well you know there was always a shortage of authentic people in London because, especially in the pop business especially in the 80s, there was a lot of affectation. Cathal cut through that I thought. I found him a very inspiring person because he just had a moral gravity that not many people in that scene had. His stage presence was quite commanding and in no way effected. There was no unnecessary theatrics with him although he did put on a performance. His voice and his lyrics, which were quite pertinent to the band and pertinent to obviously where he had come from — there was a political edge to them and he put all of that across quite forcefully and really well.
Cathal Coughlan — What we were not doing though was pure guitar-based Americana. There was always a little bit of a strain of that in what we did and it was kind of partly to do with the fact that we were Irish, and Irish in our outlook. Sean and I had both grown up hearing Country & Irish dilutions of things, like Johnny Cash or Hank Williams or whatever. So hearing things in the early 80s like Gram Parsons and The Flying Burrito Brothers — Stan Erraught from The Stars of Heaven one time made me this mixtape that completely changed my way of hearing all that stuff — it was one of the building bricks of getting beyond Year Zero +2 into +3 and the other thing was hearing The Walker Brothers’ Nite Flights [GTO Records, 1978], which I also borrowed from Stan. ‘The Electrician’ single with ‘Den Haague’ on the b-side, so the world of that music didn’t end with David Bowie’s ‘Warszawa’.
Jon Fell — Obviously it was Rough Trade, the budget was pretty small so everything was cut down to the basics, but that was fine. We were pretty hard to market compared with The Smiths. When we were on stage, we were a very disparate and unfashionable looking group of people as a whole, The Smiths were relatively easy to market compared to us and their music was very strong, but it was not something that we were particularly worried about.
Geoff Travis — Cathal’s a great writer in the great tradition of Irish wordplay. His usage of language is fantastic and obviously Sean has proven himself to be a quite remarkable arranger, he’s done so many great projects. They very definitely had something special going on. Contrariness, you know, spikiness, being unafraid, being adventurous, being bloodyminded, all the great things about making good music.
Tom Fenner — By the time we did The Clock… we had done the Peel Sessions. You must remember that Sean and Cathal were extraordinarily prolific, we would get tapes sent round on a real regular basis with new songs that they had just been working on. They did not want for material. We did four albums over a four year period which isn’t a bad hit rate. With Sean and Cathal it was really important that they did things in a certain way, they had a certain idea and they absolutely, religiously stuck to it — whether that was going off in a tangent or mixing stuff up, they couldn’t really be false in that way.
Sean O’Hagan: We’d work, we’d go to the Kensington Park Hotel and play pool and [laughing] drink a lot of beer and we’d be writing these tunes for The Clock Comes Down the Stairs, coming up with ideas and all those songs are absolutely pouring out of us. I don’t think we were that miserable because creatively it was really working.
Tom Fenner — When I was working at ATV Publishing I’d signed four bands at a very early stage and one of them was a group called Hot House featuring Heather Small. They ended up being signed to RCA, they were sort of song-based, Bobby Womack-sort-of-soul, aficionados of British soul, they had one album out and a near hit with ‘Don’t Come to Stay’. Mark Pringle was in Hot House, he was the mainstay of the band and the main songwriter. Mark actually played keyboards with Microdisney when we did The Old Grey Whistle Test.
Cathal Coughlan — Mark Pringle from Hot House had been at college with Jamie Lane. Jamie had been in a lot of bands including The Movies. He had a studio in his house and we knew we could work stuff up to a certain point there with very little pressure. He saw the promise in what we were doing, he could see beyond what we currently were. Meeting Jamie was terrific.
Jon Fell — Rough Trade had some choices for producer and they were trendier, at the time more fashionable choices, but we weren’t that impressed by their track record. Jamie had a track record, even if it was music that not everyone was into. He was very good with guitar, bass and drum sounds. Because he had just made this really great sounding record with Hot House, it was the right time for him. He was great to work with, we met him and just got on really well with him and realised that it would be a fairly easy process.
Jamie Lane — The studio was in my house in Balham, I had a studio in the big bedroom. Balham was an unfashionable area of South London in those days now it’s become extremely fashionable, in those days it was a fairly grim place still slightly inner city but not a terribly pleasant place, but it was great for us. I was familiar with the name Microdisney but I wasn’t that familiar with their music, but obviously I became so. I listened to what they had recorded so far and I was persuaded to work with them because of their characters and the fact that they had a sort of intelligence [laughing] that you don’t often find in the music industry and that was very appealing. We were fairly kindred spirits in that regard and Sean was a very wide ranging musician.
Sean O’Hagan — We were really organised and we recorded with Jamie and a guy called Bill Gill was engineering. Great sessions and we really were ambitious about getting it right. Jamie was blown away by the songs as was Bill. We were pretty excited.
Cathal Coughlan — The best record making experiences are those where you do learn. I learnt a lot about actually constructing a record as opposed to recording the songs that you’d been playing.
Jamie Lane — We had great fun, it was quite hard work but they were young and enthusiastic, the spirit was always really there, everyone was pulling in the same direction, there were no moodies being pulled. It was a very positive experience really.
Tom Fenner — I programmed all the drum machine parts and everyone overdubbed on top of that and then the last thing to go on the album was the drums, they were overdubbed last, it was just easier to do it that way because of the minute budget, it worked out quite well.
Jamie Lane — It’s what we did on that album simply so we could spend more time crafting the skeleton of it with the other instruments. The lack of budget meant that we only had a day to record the drums in a “proper studio”, whereas the rest of it was done in my home studio. It was a way of making the budget go much further then it would otherwise have gone — and it worked, I think. I don’t think it sounds incoherent. If you look at the way people record now, everyone records like that, nobody would even bat an eyelid at putting drums on last on a record. It’s completely normal.
Cathal Coughlan — The countryish thing is something that waxed and waned with us throughout the history, though I kind of wish that we hadn’t had pedal steel as the icing on that particular cake further on but you know, [laughing] you live and learn. Some people thought that we were going to make a Green On Red record, because we had toured with them and stuff, not particularly harmoniously, but we had toured with them. But we didn’t go that way, there were quite a few keyboards and acoustic guitars and such like. We achieved what probably was the clearest encapsulation that we ever did of what we were about.
Jamie Lane — The Clock Comes Down the Stairs is the essence of Microdisney. On 39 Minutes we went a bit more glossy and tried to cultivate a bit more mainstream appeal, which I also like but The Clock… is the essence because of the marriage between Sean’s complex and beautiful arrangements and Cathal’s biting lyrics, the incongruity between the two things is stark and that’s what appealed to people but they are a very particular band and inevitably they have a fairly confined sort of appeal. Because we recorded it all in an elaborate, for the time, home studio we were able to spend a lot of time on working on things like the vocal arrangements, the instrumental arrangements, keyboard sounds, vocal harmonies, and guitar parts — way beyond what the budget would normally have allowed like a couple of weeks in a studio, two or three days to mix it. If we had done the record like that it would have been very, very different and probably not as appealing. Because we were able to spend time on minutiae if you like, it makes it into quite a unique record.
Sean O’Hagan — Jamie would give me a nice cup of tea and then we’d start, I’d be excited — I get to do backing vocals today! Now if I was doing backing vocals on something I’d think it was a chore, in those days I was so excited, I couldn’t wait. You’d do the backing vocal and come in and hear the playback and think — wow, let’s do one more, let’s add a harmony. Oh my god. Now of course with computers it’s so easy. But in those days it was brilliant, trying something and then being pushed by Jamie, who’d say, “No we can do it again, we can break that down.” Maybe it’s a good thing or a bad thing — the pursuit of perfection. I have different opinions about that now. I really enjoyed the whole process.
Jamie Lane — The producer’s main job is to provide the means to realise an artist’s ideas, but the thing is as both Cathal and Sean are musicians it was just a matter of allowing them the space to actually explore their ideas. Not just bash them out quickly but to actually mess around a bit and experiment and spend a bit of time on it. I don’t remember any sort of conflict it was always people trying stuff out and trying to achieve something and then thinking they have achieved it, recording it and moving on. I always remember it being very positive, all the time.
Sean O’Hagan — In 1984 my dad died. It was a pretty bad thing for me, I’m on tour and we’re about to go on stage in Birmingham supporting Violent Femmes. I’m just soundchecking and I get a call: “You need to come home, your Dad’s dead.” I was pretty cut up. I can remember at the end of making The Clock… all my emotion for losing my dad comes out. I remember that very, very well. Now when I think of it, it was so intense. I had to go back on tour, finish writing and recording and then at the end of it all I was really sad and I’m thinking — oh yeah, I lost my Dad.
Jamie Lane — Microdisney, even though their melodies and their music was very accessible the inevitable fact is that lyrically they were way above the general public’s head. There is no real way of actually denying that or getting round it. Sooner or later it was going to come to a stop. This is not to blame Cathal because he expressed himself beautifully but it was not necessarily something that people wanted to hear. [Laughing] Therein lies the conflict. Cathal expresses things incredibly well but it goes over people’s heads. I think that’s the truth.
Sean O’Hagan — I remember Jamie’s house and studio and really enjoying the experience. I can see the room where I did the backing vocals with Jamie, I can see the pub where we’d go. “Right, time to finish, 9 o’clock.” We’d all go round the pub and we’d have a couple of pints. Always being happy, I don’t know whether Cathal was happy but I was happy. I think we did know something good was happening.
Richard Boon — For Rough 85 — The Clock Comes Down the Stairs, another great Microdisney record, they’d found their own photographer who’d taken a picture of some railway exchange going out of Clapham Junction of train lines crossing, it was a beautiful image.
Felicia Cohen — The band had commissioned me to shoot them for the album and the brief was pretty open. All I can remember was walking around South London with them, looking for interesting locations. I do remember doing some shots in a cemetery, but I guess those weren’t used. I honestly cannot remember whether the boys were with me when I went to Clapham junction, but it is possible. That album cover was my one and only! I was mostly shooting portraits for magazines, and lots of personal portraits. It is so hard to remember all the details of the day of the shoot, and how it all came together. My sister was visiting me from Toronto, and she remembers walking around fields and cemeteries with the band, but she does not remember the railway station, so maybe that was a separate day. I wish I could come up with the reason I chose Clapham Junction; maybe I heard it was the largest station where several tracks converged. I remember being very impressed with the scale, and loving the patterns created by the tracks. I remember feeling quite pleased with the results of the album cover. I had shot it in square format (my old Rolleiflex, I think), which helped compositionally. I was able to shoot with a very large depth of field, which made everything sharp, into infinity.
Sean O’Hagan — Rough Trade had done a really good little job with the press. I remember we went off to Europe to tour and when we came back the papers were full of all this stuff. The critics were saying these guys are reinventing pop, it was like, “Wow, God.” Even though we always knew that it could or might work it was like, “Oh God, it is working, Jesus it’s working.” Everything that we thought would work was happening. Then suddenly the big labels start taking an interest. The seeds are growing and growing and growing. We’re very tight, now Nick leaves around this time, he had massive health issues and we decide that we need someone to step in and that’s when we meet James — Jimmy [James Compton].*
*Nick Montgomery died in 2011. Something Mortal, The Poetry of Nick Montgomery was published posthumously by Laurel Books.
Cathal Coughlan — That’s how we did The Clock Comes Down the Stairs and the dark clouds of being clueless and having not burned our bridges but strained people’s patience quite a bit in the half a year, or year prior to that, the impact of that was dissipated because we began showing results. We had managed to kind of take this misshapen thing and not really alter its fundamentals very much and actually get to the point where it hung together. It was validation in that sense, being noticed was nice, but that kind of thing can easily go to a person’s head and it kind of did in my case. Not in the predictable way of expecting to have a penthouse in Regent Street but in terms of not needing to deal with the aspects of myself that had been weighing things down and which would continue to weigh things down to the present day.
Lindy Morrison — I know The Clock Comes Down the Stairs so well. I know that album back to front. That was just the most amazing album. There are so many great songs on that album — ‘Begging Bowl’ what a great song.
Lindy Morrison — We did some gigs together and I remember that gig in early 1986, it was the best gig ever, it was huge, absolutely huge, I remember it really well. It was a great, great gig. I don’t remember many gigs, I have no memory, [laughing] which is why there will never be a book from me. But I remember that gig.
Robert Forster — I can remember Microdisney supporting us at the Town and Country [30 April 1986]. I can remember that performance. That suited them and that suited Cathal. I can remember watching him that night and he had a stage — it wasn’t a pub or a small club. I don’t know how many people it held: 1,200 or 1,500 or whatever. It had a balcony and a big floor and it was a big stage, a high stage with curtains and the whole thing. He really took to it. With Microdisney he honestly could have played to 5,000 people because he had that charisma and he had that command. He was sort of wasted on small stages. I vividly remember him roaming that stage and really possessing it. It gave him that space.
Richard Boon — They should have been more than just cult heroes. I don’t really know why they didn’t cross over a bit more given the strength of the material. People who love them, love them and still do. I could appreciate their frustration because The Clock Comes Down the Stairs didn’t make the impact it deserved to make, but it made enough of an impact for other bits of the industry to wake up and pay attention to them, hence Virgin. I loved everything about The Clock Comes Down the Stairs, especially the title, we all get old, we all fall down stairs and that’s our clock ticking.
© Paul McDermott 2018, All Rights Reserved
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