Your Heart Out 36 - Diversion

with the band or the record company. As far as I know the band were very happy with it. At that time I was working from a studio I rented in Soho. Funnily enough Ben and I started sharing a studio shortly afterwards, and still do to this day. We're now in a studio in Borough Market, London Bridge, where we've been for about 20 or so years. In those days I was working as an illustrator and animation artist but for the last ten years I've been painting for myself. Since then I've been elected into the Royal Watercolour Society.”

At the heart of ACR circa Sextet was a series of great contradictions. For example, the group in its approach was simultaneously loosening up and tightening up. As Phil Ault has said, part of the excitement in making the record was the group experimenting in the studio, having the courage to try out different ideas and see what happens, developing the confidence to swap instruments around between themselves. Mark E. Smith may have been urging The Fall not to start improvising, but at the heart of Sextet there is a sense of jamming. While this can have negative connotations, there is a wonderful tradition in jazz, Brazilian, Cuban music of the jam session, the descarga. And in the case of ACR this loose approach led to some very tight, very smart pop songs.

It is in this sense that Sextet remains an incredibly ambitious record: the willingness to stretch themselves as a group. It is this focus, this concentration, which has been interpreted as a certain arrogance or aloofness when they were really just absorbed. ACR could seem like a very hermetically-sealed unit, but they were far more outward-looking than most of their contemporaries. They just happened to be looking in different directions than most of their immediate contemporaries.

And yet ACR were not ambitious in the traditional marketing sense of the independent sector. At the time ACR chose not to speak with the music press.

Paul Morley had written a lengthy cover feature on the group for the NME in September 1980 where he teased members of ACR about superficial similarities with Dexys Midnight Runners. After that the group chose not to get involved with all the palaver of promoting product. This was ironic because so many of the groups ACR may have shared bills with in the past were queuing up to court Smash Hits as if favourable coverage in that publication meant something significant. The irony is that most of the people behind Smash Hits have since been exposed as sneering, sarcastic enemies of progress.

If it seems ACR circa Sextet were out of step with the new populism, then that is fair enough. They didn‟t go out of their way to come up with glossy product.

But in many ways ACR were far more in tune with the times than has been acknowledged. They were not exactly acting in isolation. There were links to other records being released by labels like Ze, Fetish, 99, and Y. There was common ground shared with off-shoots of Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club‟s Wordy Rappinghood and the Byrne/Eno project My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

But most significantly ACR were creating a form of dance music directly related to many of the singles that were propelled into the national charts from the underground, the network of clubs that was playing funk, jazz, and