"They seemed homesick by the time I met them," Ward says, "but Mark is a historian, with a particular fondness for the ancient Romans, so he was in his element. He showed us the baths themselves, the colon- nades and the newer Georgian architecture like the Royal Crescent, which is known as 'the finest street in England.'

Wilder, hairier, rock stars might have taken the opportunity to jump on a train and tear into London, which is only an hour away, but it's typical of Mark and Martha's gentle disposition that they preferred to stroll about this little, lulling, honey-coloured city. In fact, so contentedly did they roll up in it that they won - get this, rock fans - the Tenants of the Year Award from the Bath Holiday Homes Association. The new album has benefitted from being recorded both in Toronto and in Bath, for its contrasts of full-steam funk and dreamy atmospheres make it the group's most sophisticated record to date.

But Mark emphasizes that what the two cities have really done is reinforce a style he and Martha have been developinq for years. "Everyone was so shocked by 'Black Stations/White Stations'," he says with some impatience. "People said, 'This sounds like Chic in the openinq bars, and then Martha Johnson starts singing,' as if we were sort of - "He hesitates, curbing a remark that, even unspoken, betrays his irritation with rock critics who make thoughtless comparisons. "Well, our music has lonq occupied two extremes. Since 'This Is The Ice Age' we've split off into a rhythmical thinq and an ambient thing. This record seems particularly schizophrenic. You'll hear ironic juxtapositions. You're thrown from one thing to another. That and the title, 'The Worid Is A Ball', are meant to exemplify the kind of life we have in the 20th century: we're bombarded by so many different and violently conflicting elements."

'The Worid is A Ball' is also M+M's most exuberant album yet. Martha's voice has an urgent and soaring quality that makes her earlier recordings sound almost listless by comparison. But liveliness alone would not have made the record as compelling as it is. There are darker moments as well, a song about Bernard Goetz in particular, and one called "By The Waters Of Babylon", based an a novel by Steven Vincent Benet. Martha says, "was written in the thirties, before atomic bombs were conceived, yet it depicts the world after a nuclear-type war. after a nuclear war, people are wandering about the earth: They're devastated and lonely, and they want to reach out to each other, but when you touch they disappear. Turn to dust. I always wake up quite upset."

With Daniel Lanois (Brian Eno's collaborator) M+M had built that distinctive contrast of rhythms and atmospheres, with striking success in the funky department. "Black Stations/White Stations" hit #4 on the UK dance charts, and #2 on the Billboard dance charts in the US (holding fast for four weeks, but unable to budqe Prince's "When Doves Cry"). By 1985 Mark and Martha felt so confident of their own abilities to make a dance record that they turned to a producer whose expertise lay in orchestration and layered vocal arrangements. David Lord fit the bill; he had a classical backqround and had produced such eclectic records as Peter Gabriel's Shock the Monkey, XTC's Pretty Girls, Jean-Michel Jarre's 'Zoolook', and contributed enormously to Tears For Fears' success. "We were a first for David," says Mark. "He didn't really know anything about groove. Of course, every kind of music has an internal rhythmic structure, but classical music is completely divorced from dance, funk, and reggae. It made for some creative disagreements between us, which Martha and I knew could be hazardous - it worked fine, but a compromise of sensibilities in the studio is always a potential disaster. Like 'Martha and the Muffins' second album."

The chaos that besieged the making of 'Trance and Dance' with producer Mike Howlett was actually typical of the early days of the Muffins' career. Adored in Canada for being the first Canadian new musical export since Anne Murray, the Muffins suffered extraordinary pressures abroad that ultimately caused the group to break up. "Echo Beach" was a worldwide success, #1 in Australia, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands and elsewhere, gold in Canada at a time when gold signified 75,000 copies (now, because so few groups achieve the former fiqure, it's only worth 50,000), #3 on the British charts, and the younq Muffins were taken completely by surprise.

"Besides a couple of interviews for Toronto magazines, we were inexperienced," Martha recalls. "We were eaten alive by the British press. The reporters would focus on how we dressed or crossed our legs - they were out to get you. We were naive and couldn't deal with being made to feel so self-conscious." "We were having to constantly justify our existence on inane grounds," says Mark. "Plus, we didn't have management, and the record company (DinDisc, a subsidiary of Virgin) tried to manipulate and divide us. They wanted the girls out front and' Martha Ladly would be the featured picture because she was the cute blonde." It was an especially cruel fate, since Martha and the Muffins had been founded partly on the basis of a reaction against the flashy posturers and guitar heroes of the age of dinosaur rock.

By the time Virgin/DinDisc had signed the Muffins and sales of "Echo Beach" hit almost a quarter of a million in the UK alone, the band was still uncomfortable on staqe. "In the beginning we used to emulate the Dishes, and dress up in weird outfits," Mark remembers. "The Marthas would wear nurses' uniforms and we'd be in surgeons' outfits. It was all very art school. Just fun. I used to have fits with my guitar - I liked lying on the stage, fightinq with it - but I eventually grew bored of that. A band can either develop their theatrical side, like Bowie, or leave it behind, which is what we did."

But the rock biz being what it is, Mark and Martha have found themselves under unrelenting pressure ever since to perform in more extravagant ways than makes them feel easy. Since the start of the Muffins, however, they have resisted the cosmetic circus - faces on album covers, exaggerated performances, trumpeted tours - an attitude that they were lucky enough to be able to defend only because their first single was so freakishly successful. "But we were naive," says Martha. "We thought that if you write a good song it'll get airplay, just like "Echo Beach". Eventually you realize it takes a lot of money and managerial support to get your record heard."

The Muffins' career foundering, it became necessary to find a hard- hitting manager. In 1980, they found Gerry Young in Toronto, who now also takes care of the Parachute Club, but who had never managed a group at the time. Since then, Mark and Martha have never felt so safe. "He walks into a skyscraper on the Avenue of the Americas," Mark chuckles," and the building empties out throuqh the fire escape. 'Look out! It's Gerry Young!"

Young himself is loyal and pragmatic: "I just tell those execs, look, we're dealing with human beings here, with good music and livelihoods at stake. Now people are startinq to take M+M seriously in the States, as the originators of new music in Canada. Mark and Martha are too gentle to have had to deal with those snakes at Virgin or any other record company that tries to intimidate them or fracture their headspace." (M+M are currently distributed by RCA worldwide).

The decision to record the new album with David Lord was not just a romantic matter of the marriage of musical sensibilities. Young and M+M realized that a project engineered in a place that's seen as influential and glamourous as the UK would ensure more energetic support on the part of the North American promotional squad.

Martha says, "You must build up enough things that make it an important record in the eyes of the reps who go out and sell it to radio and the record stores. You want them to say to themselves, 'hey, it's got all this, and we spent all this money. We better go out and promote it".

Recording at Crescent Studios brought M+M more than just the prestige of working with David Lord. Tony Levin, bassist and stick player for Peter Gabriel and King Crimson dropped by and contributed, as did Jerry Moroda (drummer with Peter Gabriel, though he sang for Mark and Martha) and Ruby Turner (who took over from Helen Terry in Culture Club and sang on Bryan Ferry's Boys and Girls). Dick Smith, also a Gabriel alumnus, brought in a vanload of third world instruments: a bass marimba, a marimbula, talking drums, bells, a rainmaker (which sends seeds cascading through a spiral an the interior of a bamboo tube) and a set of drums neither Mark nor Martha could name, but described as being tuned to the normal notes on a piano and resonating with a papery texture.

As on Mystery Walk several of the new songs sound as if they incorporate African rhythms, but Mark says that the resemblance is accidental. "A lot of those rhythm loops were done on a little effects box we have at home that came out before all those computerized samplers. It's an Electro-Harmonix with a 16-second delay. It does overdubbinq onto a click track, then you can make it go backwards or change octaves.. We've been using it for years. Often you don't know what time signature it's making or anything. It does sound evocative, but I wouldn't know how to make an African rhythm if I tried."

In search of unfamiliar sounds and textures, Mark and Martha are in the habit of torturinq conventional instruments. "We have a Yamaha DX7, but we have to run it throuqh a lot of stuff - little speakers, distortions - before we're happy. That's why we and David Lord were so compatible."

In fact, Lord's perfectionist approach took even Mark and Martha by surprise. Mark says they should have known. "The Brits are reputed to spend more time and money on their records ('The World Is A Ball' cost over $100,000 more than twice the price of earlier M+M albums) and we had heard that David spent a year and a half on Peter Gabriel's last record. He finds it hard to change the way he works. I did a lot of guitar playing. For four days, I'd be playing the same figure, it seemed like ten hours at a time, and he'd be shoving microphones down garbage cans (to achieve the creepy effect of violent urban heat on "Jump The Gun", the song about Goetz), running it through everything in the racks, tweaking thing's. From a musician's paint of view, that's not the best way to work, but the record sounds spontaneous and alive even so.

"Actually, much of what we laid down at home on our demo - we use a Tascam 58 tape recorder and a Yamaha RN 1608 mixing board - remained in the final mix. And all my guitar solos - I have a Gibson Les Paul Custom with a Kahler tremolo, a Fender Strat with Seymour Duncan pickups, and a Hofner Beatle bass - were performed in a biq rush in our living room, because the guy we live with was about to come home from work and we had to take down the amp stacks. "For the brassy sounds on some of the tracks we used a PPG 2.3 Synth with Waveterm. We also have a Mirage samplinq keyboard and an EMU Systems Emulator 2."

Despite their dislike or, at best, indiference to touring (Mark says that playing concerts becomes a routine, like eating dinner, only more fun), M+M will be hitting the road next year, aiming first at markets that respond the fastest to the new record.'The World Is A Ball' is likely to be released in the U.S. first, a deliberate move designed in part to illustrate for Canada's blase audience that M+M are a world- class act.