Don’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of the group Spelt Like This before, they were a male trio who released two singles back in the mid-80s neither of which troubled the charts with their presence and then they broke up never to be seen again. It wasn’t through lack of effort by their record company either, they were given a massive promo push with lots of big ads in all the music weeklies for their 1985 debut single “Contract of The Heart” which I noticed at the time because they were very “designery” with the same sophisticated and enigmatic minimalism used by Pet Shop Boys and New Order in their marketing.
The ads must have worked on me though because when I saw a copy of the 12″ going cheap in a sale at Our Price I bought it without having heard it before. Being a designer (or design student as I was at the time) makes me far more likely to buy a record (or book) if it has a good-looking sleeve and it almost physically pains me to buy one that looks ugly. Call me superficial but I’d walk a million miles for some good typography and nice paper stock and the sleeve of “Contract of The Heart” really lays on the designer effects with a trowel: yards of white space, obscure icons, trendily spaced-out lettering, a tiny duotone photo of the band on the back, and on the inner sleeve some arty photos of pubes, a man on one side and a woman on the other.
They must have spent quite a few bob on this (the 7″ had an even more expensive die-cut), and with such sophisticated packaging you might expect the record to be another “West End Girls” or “Temptation” but “Contract of The Heart” isn’t much more than half-decent Scritti-esque pop that probably should have done better that the lowly #91 it struggled to reach but doesn’t really live up to the promise of its sleeve and marketing. When I first listened to it I felt as if I had been lied to by the graphics, rather than being another Pet Shop Boys, Spelt Like This were in reality basically a boy band managed by pop svengali Tom Watkins (who was actually also managing PSB too at the time) who later gave the world Bros and East 17. So I’ve always seen this record as a 1980s “designer decade” triumph of style over substance and the belief (which was rampant back then) that trendy design could sell anything from a beer to a bank to a pop group no matter what the actual product was like.
The most interesting thing about “Contract of The Heart” now is that it’s an early Stock, Aitken and Waterman production done before they became the producers that ate the pop world and they do quite nice job with this, it’s a whole lot better and more inventive than the tinny Hi-NRG beats of their later work.
So, did it flop because the marketing was all wrong or because the record wasn’t good enough? You decide.
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I do remember ‘Spelt like this’, there was also another band around the same time called ‘Roaring Boys’, and both were getting slammed for being record company marketing hypes, even by magazines like Smash Hits, which is where I probably heard about them. At the end of the day, all pop music has some element of marketing and images from Elvis onwards, but around the mid-80’s, I think that there was a bit of a mini-reaction against ‘image’ bands, and a swing towards ‘can they cut it live bands’, hence the sudden rise of stadium fillers like U2 and Dire Straites (!). I think people are quite happy to go along with a marketing hype or rip off, as long as they don’t have it rubbed in their face that it’s a rip off (see: Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Ratners).
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