Vanishing Point
This month’s rescuee from music’s dead letter office: proto dream-pop for spies.
Missing in action: A.C. Marias’ Angela Conway – “I got to do what I wanted.”
Mute Records
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.