Forty Years Ago Today - Announcement Of Tie-Up Between The Sisters of Mercy and CNT Productions

 Exactly forty years ago today, on 30th May 1981,  well-respected UK trade magazine Music Week (named Music and Video Week at that time, to reflect the growing influence of the video medium in those pre-MTV days) published a small news item in the regular Tracking column on the recently instituted Independent Labels page of the magazine. Nothing unusual about that, as each week news items about minor and largely unknown bands were published in the column, but this particular item is fascinating as it suggests that the link between The Sisters of Mercy and the CNT label goes back further than previously thought.

The Sisters were mentioned almost en passant in the snippet, as the news item really concerned The Mekons, already established Independent Chart regulars whose earliest releases had featured on the seminal Fast Product label from Edinburgh, alongside records by the likes of Scars, The Human League and Gang Of Four, who would all go on to sign for major labels. The Music Week article informed readers that The Mekons had signed with “newly-launched York label CNT Productions”, and had recorded a new single, Sporting Life. In fact, it was not until October of that year that the now renamed This Sporting Life was the first release on the CNT label and given the catalogue number CNT 1, simultaneously also released in Germany on Dusseldorf punk label Pure Freude. The sleeve for the 12” CNT edition reveals that the song had been recorded at Spaceward Studios in Cambridge in April 1981, i.e. one month before the Music Week article.

The following year, This Sporting Life would get a re-release on CNT as a 7”, with the catalogue number CNT 008, but curiously the A side was described on the sleeve as “edited by Bob Worby at K.G. Music Studios, Bridlington”, a recording studio which is of course synonymous with TSOM singles from Body Electric to The Reptile House EP. The sleeve of the 1982 version also contained the information that “In October 1981, a limited edition of one thousand copies of This Sporting Life was released by CNT Productions of Leeds in a 12 inch format”, revealing that the base of the label had seemingly moved along the A64 at some point in the year which followed the original Music Week news snippet.

When stating that “CNT’s only other act at the moment are [sic] Sisters of Mercy” (is this the earliest example of the omission of the definite article in the band’s name?), the press release seemed to imply that TSOM was the first band signed to the new label, albeit with releases coming out “via their own Merciful Release label”. The final phrase, “who have recorded an EP called Lights” further implies that the Lights EP was scheduled to become the band’s first release on CNT (via MR), whereas it would be over nine months before the one and only CNT The Sisters of Mercy release, the Body Electric/Adrenochrome double A side, would see the light of day.

By the time of the Music Week article, what is referred to here as the Lights EP (featuring the Teachers/Adrenochrome segue and an early, less grungy version of Floorshow in addition to the title track which would ultimately surface on The Reptile House EP) was already doing the rounds on cassette and touted there as a "demo for projected Floorshow EP", on the demo tape (featured on an earlier blog post here) which also featured the tracks of the first TSOM single (The Damage Done/Watch/Home Of The Hit-Men) and which was referred to by Eldritch in the band’s first interview (again, covered in this earlier blog post here), with Leeds fanzine Whippings And Apologies, which had taken place in mid-March 1981, i.e. six weeks before the Music Week mention. Although it was never officially released on vinyl, and (with the exception of the band’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s Teachers) the songs did ultimately appear on future singles in significantly re-recorded form, the tracks for what CNT would term the Lights EP (presumably because they felt that Lights was the better track) did subsequently feature on many bootlegs, most notably as the Floorshow EP.

Not much was widely known about the CNT label itself until 1985 when a compilation album, They Shall Not Pass was produced, cashing in on TSOM’s new-found fame by featuring both sides of the then (as now) hard-to-find CNT single Body Electric/Adrenochrome (similar to the re-release of Fast Product’s The First Year Plan compilation which featured The Mekons when The Human League topped the charts) with all profits going to support the striking miners. Such a political gesture would come as little surprise to those who knew that CNT was the name of a Spanish Trade Union, Confederacion Nacional de Trabajo, with the label’s revolutionary slogan slogan hijos del pueblo a las barricadas, en discos, appeared on all releases. When the They Shall Not Pass (a translation of the communist Spanish Civil War dictum No Pasaran) compilation appeared, the NME published an article by Paul Du Noyer tracing the label’s history, and explaining that the men behind the label were Mekon Jon Langford, who would famously filled in for Craig Adams at a widely-covered TSOM gig in York in early February 1982, and two non-musicians called Colin Stewart and Adrian Collins. Intriguingly, the NME piece suggests that the Sisters were signed because “Collins had prior involvement with the Leeds band.” Quite what that “prior involvement” was, the article did not say, but it did trace Collins’ connection to the music scene back to his work with Red Rhino in York, who had put up the money for (and distributed) The Sisters’ debut single The Damage Done. Collins went on to become manager and producer of the band Redskins, who opened the York Rock Festival in September 1984 at which also TSOM famously played, staying with the band after they left CNT having been responsible for the label's final single in August 1983.

Langford was asked about his Sisters links in an interview with CLRVYNT recently, and he gave this account: “We formed CNT, a record label with one of the guys from Red Rhino [one of the bigger distributors in Northern England at the time], Adrian Collins. We put out some Mekons stuff … a single from the Redskins, and a bunch of other bands. Adrian was working on The Sisters of Mercy, so we went and recorded them in KGM, a small 8-track studio in a guy called Ken Giles' garage in Bridlington, Yorkshire that we had a long relationship with. Two of the guys from the label and the guys from the band in a confined space. So, I knew [Andy] socially and Craig [Adams, then-bassist of Sisters of Mercy] was also a friend of mine. The Body Electric / Adrenochrome single came out on CNT. I heard at those sessions that Craig would be going away and they had some gigs. We were their record label, so … if memory serves, Craig was working in the Canary Islands as a photo shoot assistant.” 

It has always been assumed that TSOM’s association with CNT was as short-lived as Langford’s own stint in the band, but the new re-discovery of this Music Week cutting suggests that it was longer and more significant than previously believed, whilst the NME article suggests that the main link between TSOM and CNT was not Langford, but Red Rhino man Adrian Collins.

Hopefully Mark Andrews' forthcoming book on the early days of The Sisters of Mercy will shed more light on this key phase of the band's development.