el records - where have you been all my life.

illumination please.

Search out the two-disc Legendary B-Sides comp if you can find it -- not only cheap, but possessed of some of the most enjoyable obscurities around. A few misfires, but comparatively little. Beyond that I'm not sure myself and would like more info, though I definitely dig that Louis Phillippe character.

i know relevantly little about el records, though the interview disk with mike alway and alan mcgee is more informative than not. they seemed to have been ten years too early for the japan core scene but it is odd, i can't seem to figure that the majority of this stuff came out in the eighties.

I first met Mike Alway when I was signed to 4AD in 1982. Mike came along to a pub near 4AD / Beggar's Banquet's office on Hogarth Road in Earl's Court. In fact I now suspect that Ivo wanted to shuffle my band The Happy Family across to Cherry Red rather than keep us on 4AD, and the introduction to Mike was the way to do it.

Mike was just starting Blanco e Negro, a label through Warners curated by himself, Alan Horne (of Postcard Records) and Dave McCullogh, a journalist from Sounds. They had Everything But The Girl and some other bands. But this all ended in tears, allegedly because Mike's packaging and promotion strategies were way too lush and expensive.

I really got close to Mike when he had no label, having fallen out with Blanco and Cherry Red. He had this idea for el Records in 1984 and wanted me to be part of it. Together, we settled on the name Momus. I think the only other artists he had at that point were the Shockheaded Peters, a sort of gay goth band very untypical of what el became.

Anyway, Mike scraped together some money with the help of Crepuscule's Michel Duval. I was sent to Brussells to make a record financed by a clothing company called Himalaya. There I met Louis Philippe, who was working as a chef at Crepuscule's very cool Interference Club in the Grand Place, Brussells. I spent the summer of 85 on Louis Philippe's family's fruit farm in Normandy, listening to the very Beach Boysy demos he'd made with his 'group' The Arcadians.

Louis moved to London, Mike signed Simon Turner, one of the coolest people on the planet (he used to hang out with Bowie at Haddon Hall, was a child actor star, knew Salvador Dali and Amanda Lear, scored most of Derek Jarman's films), and Bid from The Monochrome Set. Together we set about confecting this label that was based on a kind of import/export model of Englishness: the England of Powell and Pressburger, made for consumption abroad.

There were lots of other el groups: Always, Bad Dream Fancy Dress, The Would Be Goods, Marden Hill. I'd say the label invented both ironic loungecore and The Divine Comedy, but about eight years too soon for the public. We had some music press support at first, mostly from the Morrissey-loving writers, but it fizzled when we failed to sell any records. That's when I quit for Creation.

el did have success in Japan, though, where, thanks to endless endorsement from Keigo Oyamada and Konishi of Pizzicato 5, it became a building block for the Shibuya Kei scene. So you could say this was a label which sold no records, yet spawned three styles!

thanks for the info momus. i'm really digging el sounds at the moment.

Louis Philippe's - he's very beach boys. very cool. what is he doing now? what happened to any of them?

i hear saint etienne, high llamas, it's fantastic stuff.

Louis Philippe is still around - www.louisphilippe.co.uk - and still making extraordinary and beautiful records. So are the Would be Goods who released a new LP on Matinee/Fortuna Pop recently.

Doomie, if you're into M. Philippe check out his LP "Sunshine" on Cherry Red - it'll knock you for six - a pop masterpiece on a par with the Left Banke / Zombies.

Everything by the Would-Be-Goods is too impossibly exquisite to be real. Surely, "The Camera Loves Me" is universally revered in some alternate paradise. Very nice record covers, too.

el managed to create a sound that seems to be outside of everything else, neither current or retro, i.e. "timeless", but not really in the sense that people usually use that word. There is actually a fairly broad range of sounds on the label, but remarkably this otherly aspect pretty much informs all the releases.

If you need a discography I'm sure they are out there on the web, or i can post one. Oh yeah, only strike against the label is the seemingly endless re-issue compilations shuffling the same tracks, but this isn't really a problem with the original El label.

The great Louis Philippe is alive, well, lives in West London and works for the BBC World Service and France Football. That is true, by the way. There's a feature thing I did on him on my website (I haven't updated it since 2000 so don't expect too much about what's happening now) http://darrenpop.tripod.com/ - just follow the links.

you can find out about louis philippe at his website: http://www.louisphilippe.co.uk/

Just recently two new compilations of el records had been released in Japan. L'APPAREIL-PHOTO http://www.dd.iij4u.or.jp/~photo/ VICTOR ENTERTAINMENT JAPAN http://www.jvcmusic.co.jp/rcommnd/check/cp61787.html

Kahimi Karie sung 'Mike Alway's Diary' for her debut single in 1992. It was written by Keigo Oyamada aka Cornelius and Kenji Takimi, the owner of crue-l records(he was an influential music writer of pre Shibuya-kei scene). http://www.crue-l.com/ I guess newer generations are starting to discover el records. I recommend'London Pavilion1-3'.