Music for Stowaways is the debut album by English electronic act British Electric Foundation (B.E.F.), formed by musicians Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh. The album released in the United Kingdom as a limited edition cassette in March 1981 by Virgin Records, who also released an LP version of the album titled Music for Listening To later in the year with a different track list and cover art, aiming its release for export markets. The Stowaways version was originally released concurrently with Ware and Marsh's first single with Heaven 17, "(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang", itself a developed version of the Music for Stowaways track "Groove Thang".
As B.E.F.'s first 'minor project', Music for Stowaways was inspired by the Sony Walkman (at the time known in the UK as the Sony Stowaway). Fascinated with how the portable cassette player made users feel like what they described as film characters, they conceived Music for Stowaways as a "soundtrack for your life" designed specifically for play on the Sony Stowaway, and incorporated portable recording equipment into the album's production to maximise the effect. The album is instrumental and electronic, incorporating styles of synth-pop, ambient, funk, avant-garde and minimalist music. Largely ignored upon release, the music has been praised in retrospect, with critics crediting both the cassette and LP versions of the album as being prophetic of later musical styles.
Background
Sheffield musicians Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh had formed the synthesiser-only band The Human League (originally named The Future) in 1977, originally as a duo before gradually adding further members and signing to Virgin Records. After recording several singles and the albums Reproduction (1979) and Travelogue (1980), Ware and Marsh left the band, frustrated with bandmate Philip Oakey and the group's musical direction. Hoping to avoid the mistakes they felt their former group were making, Marsh and Ware formed British Electric Foundation (B.E.F.) as both a company and a production team. Simon Reynolds cites B.E.F. as the first example of a new pop group "[talking] about rejecting the staid structures of the band in favour of the dynamic and flexible 'production company'," and noted it fashioned itself as "a mini-corporation that negotiated with record companies as their equal." The company had one non-musical partner, Bob Last.
As a 'production company', the group could hire and fire vocalists session musicians while on a no-royalty, flat-fee basis and work with unpaid machines. Though still in debt from their Human League days, Ware and Marsh signed a new contract with Virgin for British Electric Foundation. Ware recalled: "It was really an unusual deal. We had to deliver one major act to Virgin every year, and each year we had to provide albums for every act signed in previous years." The first 'major act' signed as part of the deal was Heaven 17, a group featuring Ware and Marsh with their friend Glenn Gregory as vocalist, though B.E.F. were allowed to deliver as many as twelve minor album projects to Virgin each year, which the label was then obliged to distribute. Marsh described these projects as "essentially art projects – instrumental works, like Eno's Ambient series." The act conceived Music for Stowaways, a project for the cassette format, as the first of these minor projects.
Production
Concept and influences
Music for Stowaways was inspired by the band's love for the then-new Sony Walkman, at the time called the Sony Stowaway in the United Kingdom, and was intended to be played on the device. The group's concept behind the album, described by Ware as the album's "theory," was based on part of their fascination with the Stowaway, as they found that the device allowed owners to "design a soundtrack for your everyday life for the first time and have it playing while you walked around or whatever." Ware later explained: "[That] became the theory behind [Music for Stowaways]. It was about how you could play your music and change your mood wherever you were. Basically, the Walkman liberated music. And there we were at the sharp end with this cassette-only release."