Cult heroes: Mike Alway invented a parallel England with perfect eccentricity

To fully “get” él Records, the label founded by Londoner Mike Alway in 1985, it probably helps to be British, which I’m not. I’ve always loved él’s dreamworld of carousing viscounts and sardonic schoolgirls, brought to life by artists who were often signed just because they shared Alway’s quirky aesthetic. But even years after the original él folded (it returned in 2005 as a reissue label), I suspect I only grasp half the picture.

The roster was packed with singers and groups whose very names – Anthony Adverse, the Would-Be-Goods, Marden Hill – evoked garden parties where the only drink is Pimm’s. And the songs! The Hanging Gardens of Reigate, Cecil Beaton’s Scrapbook, Whoops! What a Palaver!: the titles were pointedly English, despite the music itself often inclining toward a south-of-France sunniness. (French in-house writer/producer Louis Philippe was responsible for a good deal of that.) If I were English, I’d probably understand why Alway decided that Choirboys Gas would be the title of the debut album by female duo Bad Dream Fancy Dress. Was “choirboys gas” a Brit pun, or a reference to a forgotten moment on kids’ TV? I’ll never know.

The label wasn’t so much a record company as a manifestation of Alway’s passion for hazy corners of Englishness. The corners, as Alway saw them, were inhabited by eligible rakes, sharp-witted debutantes and British cinema antiheroes such as Jack Carter, the gangster played by Michael Caine in Get Carter. Having worked in the A&R departments of the cornerstone indie label Cherry Red and then the major label-funded Blanco Y Negro, Alway knew what he didn’t want when he founded él. His dream was a company that valued intelligence and flair over profit – and, true to his word, Alway consistently took on projects that didn’t have a hope of hitting the charts.

There was, for instance, 1988’s The Red Shoes by solo singer Anthony Adverse. Based on the 1948 Powell and Pressburger film of the same name, it was dreamed up by Alway and Philippe as a tribute to director Emeric Pressburger, who had died a few months before. Philippe wrote an albumful of dreamy bossa nova tracks, and Alway enlisted an actor called Julia Gilbert (renamed Anthony Adverse for the album) to sing them. The sleeve is a soft-focus shot of Gilbert holding a fencer’s rapier; at the bottom left are the words “featuring songs specially written by Louis Philippe”. In the parallel universe in which él existed, a songwriter of Philippe’s quality didn’t just get props, he got his name on the album cover, along with the artist.

Bad Dream Fancy Dress were another of Alway’s home-made concoctions. Two young women from Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, called Cally Davis and Catrin Rees, they got signed simply by turning up at the él office and demanding a record deal. Alway saw in them a raw indie version of Pepsi and Shirlie, and styled them as 60s shopgirls, with chiffon headscarves and fluffy jumpers, then set them up with another él act, The King of Luxembourg. The King (aka Simon Fisher Turner) wrote and produced Choirboys Gas; Bad Dream Fancy Dress’s role was singing the songs and playing cheeky pop forcefields. “We love the whole thing being so plastic, you know, that’s why we don’t really want to play live,” Davis told the Leigh-on-Sea Echo in 1988. They weren’t great vocalists, but had in spades what the NME called “brilliant incompetence”.

For a while in the late 80s, él released treasure after treasure of this sort, with Alway’s stamp evident throughout. In the flesh, he was bespectacled and surprisingly diffident. He once told me (I think it was while refusing my invitation to lunch after I’d interviewed an él band): “My head is full of dreams.” It sounds deeply precious, but it sums up the boy-in-a-bubble aesthetic that made él what it was.