LINER NOTES

Over the course of a few weekends in the fall of 1987, Miaow, a British indie band led by singer and songwriter Cath Carroll, holed up in a Victorian building in the South London district of Elephant and Castle to record a set of 8-track demos of songs intended for its debut album on Factory Records. The working title for the album was Priceless Innuendo, a phrase drawn from the broadly slapstick Carry On movies of the 1950s and ’60s, which in turn borrowed their humor from classic English music hall comedy. Listen to When It All Comes Down, a compilation of the band’s singles and radio sessions released in 2003, and you can hear echoes of music hall acts, torch songs, film noir soundtracks, Northern soul, and punk. Cath and the band—bassist Ron Caine, drummer Chris Fenner, and keyboardist Joe Korner —handily drew from a century of English culture, incorporating long-forgotten musical elements into their own unique pop constructions.

Miaow’s final single, “Break the Code”—produced by Paul Kendall, who had collaborated with such synth-pop artists as Depeche Mode and Erasure—pointed the group in a new direction. “I was so very happy with the way that song came out,” says Cath. “At the time I really liked Kraftwerk and bands like that, and the idea of going into electronic music was appealing, partly because I’d always had such a hard time singing live and competing with proper drums.” During the Priceless Innuendo sessions, the band programmed a drum machine, adding a cool, synthetic patter to their multi layered sound. “I thought, if Factory will let us go into the studio again with Paul, we could do a really good album that sounds poppy but European—European in the Teutonic sense.”

The demos for Priceless Innuendo, recorded in Korner’s living room, were submitted to Factory. The label’s response was lukewarm. “They said, ‘Let’s hear some more and see what we have,’” says Cath. “It was somewhat disheartening.” By this time, Miaow was falling apart. The members of the band were each following different musical paths. Cath had become interested in the music of South America. “That really couldn’t express itself in Miaow, or at least I didn’t think it could. And I realized that I perhaps wanted to make a different album to the one that I had been making.” By the end of the year, Miaow had called it quits.

“We were split between several worlds,” says Cath, “and people could never pin us down. I don’t blame them for that. You do have to know where a band is coming from before you can know what to do with them. And I was never really able to articulate that what I wanted was to make a lot of records that sounded like ‘Break the Code.’ I think if I’d said that, people would have understood—‘Oh, that’s what you are.’” Meanwhile, the British pop landscape was shifting, and many of Miaow’s C86 compatriots were breaking up or changing their sound to suit the times. “If I thought we really didn’t fit in with C86, I was in store for some even more interesting not-fitting-in,” says Cath. “We weren’t rock enough when things started to toughen up in 1987, and by 1988 dance music became where it was at. Miaow was too folky-sounding to fit into the trance and acid scene that was developing.”

Nevertheless, the Priceless Innuendo demos reveal a group of gifted musicians brimming over with ideas. “Viva Che” is exuberant and romantic. The polyrhythms of “Angel Spit” reflect the interest in Latin music that Cath would pursue the following year as she began recording England Made Me, her first solo album. “Angel Spit,” she says, is her tribute to the Pet Shop Boys. “If I could have been in the Pet Shop Boys, I would have been happy until the end of time. To me Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe were the best songwriters of the pop format.”

A few of the songs the band recorded for the album are autobiographical, as Cath looked back to her late teens and early twenties growing up in Manchester. “Marry Me Dusty” recalls evenings spent at the Union, a seedy pub sympathetic to outsiders. On Friday nights Cath and her friend and fellow Gay Animals bandmate Liz Naylor walked into the city center from their council estate flat in Harpurhey. “In the summer it would occasionally be quite magical. The sun would be out and you’d be walking through these streets that probably hadn’t changed in a hundred years.” The Union had existed for nearly as long, relatively unchanged. Cath remembers one patron who performed a Dusty Springfield drag act. “I think he was about ninety years old and wore this awful blond beehive, but we all loved him.” (The demo of “Marry Me Dusty” included here was actually recorded by Cath, Ron, and Chris a year before the Priceless Innuendo sessions.) On weekends, Cath and Liz hitchhiked into London to look for jobs and a place to live. “Jumping Lorries Again” salutes the friendly truck drivers who brought them there safely. “They just wanted some company,” Cath says. “They’d give us cigarettes. Sometimes they’d buy us tea and talk to us about their jobs. It was actually a really nice experience.”

“Fear of the Sun” and “Carnal Drag” were, says Cath, “my two favorites,” although the latter, about physical abuse, is “not a pretty song. But even if you can’t have your own way in the real world you can have your own way in a song.” “Inglorious Miltons” was satirically aimed at music-industry advice-givers, while “Calling Colorado” was inspired by a Village Voice article that reported on a Brooklyn woman struck and killed by a falling flower pot. “Blue Confetti,” about being jilted, curled the hair of Miaow’s managers. “They said, ‘You cannot do any more songs like this,’” Cath says. “Secretly and to this day, I think, why not? Apparently it was just too campy.”

Miaow worked at the height of the Thatcher years, and “Nothing To Be Proud Of” is the band’s most overtly political song, a response to the jingoistic sentiments of the era. Finally, “She’s In Our Bed,” which Cath describes as “vaudeville-disco,” has a spoken-word rap about a ménage a trois. The Pet Shop Boys would have been proud.

Over the years, the demo tape for Priceless Innuendo—which Cath kept after the recording sessions ended, and which lived for a while at the bottom of a suitcase after she relocated to Chicago in 1990—attained a kind of mythical status. Did it exist? What did the songs sound like? Would they ever come to light? Miaow fans were tantalized when “Carnal Drag” and “Fear of the Sun” appeared on the When It All Comes Down compilation. Those songs had been pulled from the aging, brittle tape and restored by Kerry Kelekovich, Cath’s husband and present-day collaborator. New technology has allowed him to rescue the rest of the material on the cassette as well.

How do the songs on Priceless Innuendo sound to Cath now? “Some of them, lyrically—I want to stuff myself in a box. Others are quite funny. I’m surprised at how free we were to just start playing and actually have the audacity to put out whatever came out without considering what people would think of it. I wish that we had had the chance to elaborate on them and actually put them down properly.”

We can only conjecture as to what the finished version of the album would have sounded like had it come to fruition. But the blueprints that remain capture a band creating and performing at its peak. Nearly a quarter of a century later, Miaow’s debut sounds fresh and vital. It turns out that Priceless Innuendo was worth the wait. -Peter Terzian