Late 1981 saw the release of the third Martha and the Muffins album , the rather wonderful ‘This Is The Ice Age’, which managed to navigate an elegantly confident path between finely crafted commercial pop and an increasingly experimental edge, with a far more gentler, introspective air to a good many of the tracks. I was familiar with the single released in the UK, ‘Women Around The World At Work’, which as well as being rather fine piece of music also came housed in one of my all time favourite Peter Saville related sleeve designs. This single was also released in a handful of other territories, including the band’s native Canada. However, in mainland Europe, with a West German pressing, the single that was lifted from the album instead was ‘One Day In Paris’.
‘One Day In Paris’ is a brave choice of single for the A side, though as it happens, ‘Women Around The World At Work’ is on the B side (though misspelt on the label copy). I have no idea how well it fared as a single release, its certainly a long way away from ‘Echo Beach’.
‘One Day In Paris’, a Martha Johnson penned song, is quite the minimal piece centred around a low background drone with piano, guitar and very pretty vocal melodies carrying it. There is a complete absence of drums and percussion to the piece.
The sleeve design is far away as you could get from the elegant minimalism that Peter Saville and Brett Wickens (working under their 1981 collaborative name ‘15% D/R Institut (Saville-Wickens)’, which also saw credits for fellow DinDisc label mates Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s ‘Souvenir’ single and Ultravox’s ‘The Thin Wall’) brought to the parent LP and (presumably, since there is no credit, but certainly the signature style) UK choice of single. Think Paris, think Eiffel Tower and then slap an old band photo on top! (The line up had changed by the time of their their LP, with Jocelyne Lanois replacing Carl Finkle on bass guitar (and more) and the second Martha, Martha Ladly, having departed in 1980.
Martha and the Muffins released three album on Dindisc with the space of roughly a year and a half or so, but by the sounds of it, it was far from an easy period. The website ‘The story of DinDisc Records’ by Leonard Nevarez, is a fascinatingly detailed behind the scenes look at the workings of the DinDisc label – and in particular the entry ‘“a bunch of Canadians from the colonies”: Martha and the Muffins, Martha Ladly, Nash the Slash‘, where Gane and Johnson reveal the extremely exploitative ‘cross-collateralized’ deal they had with Virgin (parent label of DinDisc) that meant despite the long-term success of ‘Echo Beach’ in particular, it was not until 1989 that they would start to see any profit at all from their work for DinDisc.