Nowadays, a couple of decades after the dance music revolution, and with endless generic permutations - techno, trip-hop, big beat, jungle - having disappeared into history, it's almost old hat for bands to be made up of a couple of faceless studio technocrats. Back in the early '80s, though, such outfits were thin on the ground - and daringly avant-garde.
Colourbox emerged from the diverse mix of musical cultures that formed the post-punk era, almost inevitably incorporating the cutting edge sounds of the time - synth-pop, indie, reggae and funk - into their songs. "We started off playing in little punk bands around London," recalls Martyn Young, "but, coming from south east London, we were also listening to a lot of funk and dub reggae."
And, unlike many of their peers, Colourbox weren't motivated by the New Romantic style warrior urge to be extrovert performers as well as musicians. "We liked making records, but didn't like being performers," says Martyn. "It was a by-product of the fact that we used to programme most of our music. I suppose being a guitarist is a bit of a performance in itself, but programming computers certainly isn't. I could never imagined how we'd be able to play live and get away with it."
It's a mark of their diffidence that they didn't even send their own demo tape to Ivo at 4AD - a friend did it for them. "I think "Breakdown" may have been on there... Anyway, Ivo liked it and we did a one-off deal to put it out - at which point, we starting taking the whole thing a bit more seriously."
"Breakdown" is a pioneering classic of British dance music. Triumphantly reminiscent of the sort of electro-funk that was prevalent in New York at the time (1982), it achieved something that few other British producers had even attempted. "I wish we'd had the equipment that's around today," says Martyn now, "it would've been a lot easier! We used delay units as samplers back then, but there was a real limit to what you could do with them. So, a lot of what people think was achieved with samplers was actually done with quarter-inch tape machines."
Despite this stylistic success, Colourbox were too restless to stay in one place for long, and they demonstrated their expanding musical ambitions over the course of the next two or three years. A four track mini-album (entitled Colourbox) was followed in 1985 by a full-length album (confusingly, also called Colourbox) which presented several possible new models for state-of-the-art pop music. The limpid chamber-pop of "Sleepwalker", for instance, starkly contrasted with the following "Just Give ’Em Whiskey", all easy-riding Route 66 bass riffs, cowboy guitars, and atmospherically collaged movie dialogue.
In 1986, Colourbox further revealed the extent of their palette, by simultaneously releasing two singles. On the first of these, the cavernous dub tones of "Baby I Love You So" - featuring the bewitching voice of Lorita Grahame - were coupled with "Looks Like We're Shy One Horse", an instrumental excursion into Marlboro Country reggae, decked out with samples from half-forgotten Westerns.