Vanishing Point
This month’s rescuee from music’s dead letter office: proto dream-pop for spies.
A.C. Marias
One Of Our Girls (Has Gone Missing)
MUTE, 1989
IN 1975, at Watford College of Art & Design in Hertfordshire, 18-year-old foundation course student Angela Conway attended a lecture given by guest speaker Brian Eno, former Roxy Music synth sage turned self-generated alt-pop star and imminent godfather of ambient music. “The part I took on board most,” she now recalls, “was Eno saying, ‘I’m not a musician. And you don’t need to be a musician to make music, to make sound.’”
Armed with this reassurance, and finding herself amongst a group of friends that included fellow student Colin Newman and the college’s audiovisual aids technician Bruce Gilbert – soon to become the respective singer and guitarist of punk outliers Wire – Conway embarked on a path that would eventually lead to a debut album recorded with Gilbert, under the name A.C. Marias, pairing the initials from her first and last names with the Latin spelling of her middle name, Maria.
Released by Mute in 1989, One Of Our Girls
(Has Gone Missing) is as enigmatic and alluring as its title; a haunted, filmic, post-punk brand of dream-pop just before that genre was recognised, steeped in equal parts beauty and tension. The album still doesn’t sound quite like any other record of its era, or even since, which is arguably down to singer Conway’s intuitive approach to sound and Gilbert’s equally unrestricted facility on guitar. Aptly for its title, it vanished into the ether.
The day MOJO calls, Conway is in her London studio, where she might paint, draw, write, or return to the film short she has been developing for 10 years. “It’s about a woman in a shopping mall,” she says. “It’s not a spoof, more a take on Dante’s Inferno. I’m just playing, like most art that comes into being. As A.C. Marias was.”
Growing up in Hertfordshire 12 miles down the road from Watford, Conway admits “music was all around” (Bowie was her primary love), and she could “pick out tunes on a piano, but my musicality came out more in dance. I never considered myself a musician;
I was just doing my version.”
Gilbert was already experimenting with tape loops, whilst Conway “fiddled around” with the analogue equipment at hand, including the Eno-approved EMS VCS 3 synthesizer. After Wire’s initial run of albums, Gilbert and Wire bassist Graham Lewis turned left together, creating primitive electronica under various names (Cupol, Dome, P’o, Duet Emmo) that occasionally featured Conway’s suitably angelic vocal. In 1980, Gilbert and Lewis’s label Dome released A.C. Marias’ debut single, the sombre electronic madrigal of Drop.
“I still didn’t have musical ambitions,” she maintains. “I thought I was a visual artist – film was my main interest – but that fed into the music.”
It would be another six years before A.C. Marias returned with Just Talk, an airier, rhythmic creation that Mute founder (and Gilbert/Lewis collaborator) Daniel Miller offered to release. “I’m unsure why we started again,” Conway says. “But then Daniel asked if we’d make an album. That was a bit daunting.”
Two more years passed before a third single: an unexpected cover of Canned Heat’s Time Was, featuring bassist Barry Adamson and Birthday Party guitarist Rowland S. Howard. Back to the core duo, Conway and Gilbert hunkered down to make an album, which covered an experimental, broad spectrum: suspenseful ballads (Trilby’s Couch), crepuscular ambience (There’s A Scent Of Rain In The Air), discord (Give Me) and ethereal pop (the title track, and A.C. Marias’ third single). One online fan’s comment is worth repeating: “I’m pretty sure that David Lynch had listened to A.C. Marias quite a bit in the late ’80s.”
“It all happened organically, out of my head,” says Conway. “But also, because Bruce is a great guitarist.” She points to the influence of Eno-affiliated kosmische duo Cluster’s album Grosses Wasser (“I listened to it over and over”) and Can keyboardist Irmin Schmidt’s film music, and adds, “I also had a penchant for teenage girl pop, often derided at the time. Songs developed because of the lyrics.” The album title, “arrived early on, after something I’d overheard. I was reading a lot of [espionage grandmaster] John Le Carré at the time, but the [title] track has no narrative, though people kept giving it one, which is a good way to respond.”
The title song closed the album, departing with a repeated echo of “She’s gone!” It’s a sentiment that Conway took literally, given she has never released another piece of music. Having directed all A.C. Marias’ videos, she worked as a video director, (with over 70 commissions, including Erasure, Smashing Pumpkins, Maria McKee, Nick Cave and Wire), affirming her self-image as a visual artist.
“There was talk about a second record, but it didn’t happen,” Conway says. “I have no regrets. I never wanted to play live, and I think more music would have entailed that. And better one good record than two or three not so good. The internet has given the record its own afterlife, and there is agency there: I got to do what I wanted – with credit to Bruce and to Mute – in my own way and my own voice, which harks back to the 18-year-old me at art school. And One Of Our Girls… was my moment.”
“I was reading a lot of John Le Carré at the time.” ANGELA CONWAY