Bright Young Things: The Art and Philosophy of él records

by Mark Goodall

él records was created in 1984 by Mike Alway. Alway was A&R man for Cherry Red signing artists such as Everything But the Girl, Monochrome Set, Felt etc. He left Cherry Red to help run Blanco Y Negro but soon felt constrained about the conservativism of the commercial music sector and left to set up his own label. él was described as »the most innately English record label there has ever been«.

Alway's mercurial approach was to take complete control of the repertoire, the philosophy of the releases and the titles of the songs in the manner of pop impresarios of the past. Alway became a curator, selecting, shaping and overseeing the records issued on él.

él had a unique flavour eschewing the traditions of indie music of the mid 1980s, exhibiting instead a taste for 1960s bubbelgum and chamber pop, the european chanson tradition, Latin rhythms and filmscores. The ethos of the label was decidedly un-macho and many of él's artists were female. Alway saw él as a celebration of elegance and beauty, »a pop world beyond leather jackets and jeans«.

»Bright Young Things« is the first book to tell the fascinating story of él.

»Britain's great musical secret of the 1980s.« – Jonathan Coe

»él was a three-year statement of intent.« – Alan McGee

248 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 12, 2025

Reviews

[Alex Sarll]

Reading band bios? Anyone can do that. To be a proper insufferable indie dad, you need label bios. And within that, Factory, Postcard or – shudder – Creation is strictly for rookies. No, for full insufferability you need books about labels like él, a gossamer confection entirely at right angles to the rest of the eighties alternative scene, in which the eccentric Mike Alway was determined to create a bright, light world, more indebted to Steed, Peel and Orson Welles than the Velvet Underground. A curiously gentle sort of svengali, he'd insist the acts pick aliases and song titles from lists he'd prepared, tell them not to have bassists, probably make them cover a Louis Phillipe song, but otherwise largely leave them to it, except when he was trying to manufacture pop bands, in so far as those terms apply when it's less a production line than banging something together in the shed, and none of the acts were ever remotely popular except, inevitably, in Japan. It's a delightfully quixotic story, and Goodall has tracked down most of the key players, as well as digging into enough of the existing material that we learn, for instance, that the first Would-Be-Goods album sounds that perfectly poised despite a dismissive producer who had no idea what he was working with. The influences, the practicalities, the personalities and those wonderful photo shoots – it's all here. Occasionally, though, he does fail to pull a thread quite far enough; we learn that Anthony Adverse reverted to the name Julia Gilbert and became a screenwriter – but I had to do my own digging to establish that she's a frequent contributor to Midsomer Murders, whose determinedly eccentric Englishness is surely close enough to the él touchstones for that to be worth mentioning. And more broadly, a firmer editorial hand would have been welcome; the text is rife with missing and duplicated letters and words, erratic punctuation, homophones, the lot (with the sole exception that Mike Alway and the band Always were correctly distinguished every time, so I guess well done there). Still, it was a story well worth telling, and if nobody else was prepared to put in the legwork, I'll absolutely take a version that needs some red pen over no version at all. I'm particularly taken with Kevin Wright's ambivalent summary of the whole lunatic project: "The Mike Alway/él view of the world doesn't exist, but that's what makes it all the more beguiling."

[Chris Browning · Rating 5 out of 5]

El is my favourite record label that doesn’t come from New Zealand, a three year burst of mystery, elegance, eccentricity and beauty. It was like discovering a whole musical world in microcosm and promised mysteries and connections that I would mentally piece together the more records I discovered. Well. Goodall blows a lot of that out of the water but also somehow reinforces that reading perfectly because El Records was less a record label than one man’s dream of what the perfect label would be. Driven by image, by style, by sleeve art, by bands with exotic names and a general sense of mystery - hardly ever playing live, no videos as such - they were all essentially created to perpetuate that sense of mystery. What’s the most perfect record label in the world? One that can never let you down because it doesn’t really exist. It’s just a group of willing collaborators, and a few wayward auteurs, being directed by Mike Alway, an even more wayward genius who wanted to make records that felt like the products of a lost world and time. They’re literally half remembered dreams of a lost era

What a wonderful job Goodall does of stringing together the clues and giving us a sense of how these things were created. The brilliance of the book is that you don’t feel cheated to discover that all those apparent El Record rarities on compilations were nothing of the sort and instead recorded just for those records, but instead just admire the kaleidoscopic vision of Alway and the myriad geniuses he discovered to help create it. It’s a glorious history but also brilliant as an academic text, with Goodall approaching so much of it like a dissertation (as an aside, it’s rather lovely he teaches at Bradford because that’s where I found my first El Records in the wild in long since gone record shops in 2001/ 2002). It’s a celebration of this wayward and beautiful vision that still holds so much beauty to this day, despite that lesser artists have mined it for lesser and more derivative works (although plenty of great artists, as interviewed here, have also been inspired). On one level it’s a shame Alway isn’t creating new musical visions any more, but the new El is him playing around in his inspiration box for a very different purpose, like the most wonderfully curated mix tapes imaginable by a friend whose brilliance entertains and sometimes confounds you on a regular basis. A singular book on a singular label and frankly a masterpiece