Mute Records: Artists, Business, History 9781501340604, 9781501340635, 9781501340628

Citation preview

Mute Records

Mute Records Artists, Business, History Edited by Zuleika Beaven, Marcus O’Dair and Richard Osborne

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Zuleika Beaven, Marcus O’Dair, Richard Osborne and Contributors, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii–x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Adrian Cartwright Cover image © Adrian Cartwright All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Whilst every effort has been made to locate copyright holders the publishers would be grateful to hear from any person(s) not here acknowledged. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Beaven, Zuleika. | O’Dair, Marcus. | Osborne, Richard, 1967Title: Mute Records : artists, business, history / edited by Zuleika Beaven, Marcus O’Dair and Richard Osborne. Description: New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018038547 | ISBN 9781501340604 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501340628 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Mute (Record label) | Electronica (Music)–History and criticism. | Noise music–History and criticism. | Alternative rockmusic–History and criticism. Classification: LCC ML3792.M87 M87 2019 | DDC 384–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038547 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4060-4 PB:978-1-5013-6547-8 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4062-8 eBook: 978-1-5013-4061-1 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Plates and Figures Acknowledgements List of Contributors Introduction: Mute Records Richard Osborne and Zuleika Beaven

vii viii xi

1

1 ‘Let’s Make Love Before You Die’: ‘Warm Leatherette’, Boredom and the Invention of the 1980s S. Alexander Reed

15

2 ‘One Man’s Meat’: Fad Gadget’s Social Commentary and Post-Punk Giuseppe Zevolli

31

3 Depeche Mode and Soft Cell: Redefining the Synth-Pop Prologue Leon Clowes

47

4 Fans of Faith and Devotion: Obsession, Nostalgia and Depeche Mode Andy Pope

59

5 Throbbing Gristle’s Early Records: Post-Hippie/Pre-Punk/ Post-Punk John Encarnacao

71

6 ‘Join That Troubled Chorus’: Nick Cave, the Bad Seeds and the Blues Ross Cole

87

7 Mark Stewart, ‘Somewhere’ Edward George

101

8 ‘Sometimes, Always’: Erasure, Mute and the Value of Independence Brenda Kelly

113

9 Outside Mute? Ut, No Wave and Blast First Ieuan Franklin

127

10 The Mash-Up of Aesthetics, Theory and Politics in Laibach’ s Meta-Sound Aténé Mendelyté

141

11 The Blessed Glow of Labour: Independence, Style and Process in the Music of Swans Dean Lockwood

155

vi

Contents

12 Moby, Minstrelsy and Melville Richard Osborne

169

13 Country Girl: Rural Feminism in the Performance of Alison Goldfrapp Lucy O’Brien

183

14 Twist: Goldfrapp’s Genre Perversion Glyn Davis

197

15 Arca: Mute’s Mutant Michael Waugh

209

16 Composing in Circuitry: Sonic Artist Dirty Electronics Lourdes Nicole Crosby Garcí a

223

Index

235

List of Plates and Figures Plates Plate 1 Untitled (1996A) from the series Country Girls. Courtesy of Anna Fox and Alison Goldfrapp Plate 2 Untitled (1996B) from the series Country Girls. Courtesy of Anna Fox and Alison Goldfrapp Plate 3 Untitled (1997A) from the series Country Girls. Courtesy of Anna Fox and Alison Goldfrapp Plate 4 Untitled (1997B) from the series Country Girls. Courtesy of Anna Fox and Alison Goldfrapp Plate 5 Untitled (2000) from the series Country Girls. Courtesy of Anna Fox and Alison Goldfrapp Plate 6 Untitled (1999) from the series Country Girls. Courtesy of Anna Fox and Alison Goldfrapp

Figures Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2 Figure 1.3 Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2 Figure 2.3 Figure 2.4 Figure 2.5 Figure 6.1

Structure of the title hook in ‘Warm Leatherette’, S. Alexander Reed Google Books incidence graph of the phrase ‘boredom’ Sex Pistols, ‘Pretty Vacant’ (Virgin 1977). Designed by Jamie Reid Front sleeve of Fad Gadget, ‘Back to Nature’ (Mute 1979) Front sleeve of Fad Gadget, ‘Ricky’s Hand’ (Mute 1980). Courtesy of Simone Grant Back sleeve of Fad Gadget, ‘Ricky’s Hand’ (Mute 1980). Courtesy of Simone Grant Front sleeve of Fad Gadget, Gag (Mute 1994). Photograph by Anton Corbijn Inner sleeve for Frank Tovey, Snakes and Ladders (Mute 1986). Courtesy of Paul White Front cover of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ ‘Tupelo’ 7” single (Mute 1985)

15 20 23 32 35 36 39 44 95

Acknowledgements Thanks to Daniel Miller, David McGinnis, Sinead McCloskey and all at Mute; Zoe Miller at Zopf; Nadia Coppelman at Middlesex University; and Leah BabbRosenfeld at Bloomsbury. The editors and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the following copyright material in this book: ‘Anglia’ written by M. Fras, D. Knez and I. Novak, courtesy Mute Song Limited. ‘Blind Eyes’ written by F. Tovey and P. Balmer, courtesy Mute Song Limited. ‘Blind Lemon Jefferson’ written by N. Cave, B. Bargeld, B. Adamson and M. Harvey, courtesy Mute Song Limited. ‘Caravan Girl’ written by A. Goldfrapp and W. Gregory, courtesy Warner/ Chappell Music Publishing Limited. ‘The Circus’ written by A. Bell and V. Clarke, courtesy SM Publishing (UK) Ltd). ‘Collapsing New People’ written by F. Tovey, D. Simmonds, D. Rogers, N. Cash and B. Frost, courtesy Mute Song Limited. ‘Cologne Cerrone Houdini’ written by A. Goldfrapp and W. Gregory, courtesy Warner/Chappell Music Publishing Limited. ‘Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!’ written by N. Cave, courtesy Mute Song Limited. ‘Faith Healer’ lyrics by M. Stewart, courtesy Mute Song Limited. ‘Fireside Favourite’ written by F. Tovey, courtesy Mute Song Limited. ‘Hideaway’ written by A. Bell and V. Clarke, courtesy SM Publishing (UK) Ltd). ‘Higgs Boson Blues’ written by N. Cave and W. Ellis, courtesy Mute Song Limited. ‘Hypnotized’ written by M. Stewart, courtesy Mute Song Limited. ‘I Discover Love’ written by F. Tovey, courtesy Mute Song Limited. ‘Ideal World’ written by F. Tovey, B. Frost and N. Cash, courtesy Mute Song Limited.

Acknowledgements

ix

‘Lady Shave’ written by F. Tovey and D. Miller, courtesy Mute Song Limited. ‘Little Bird’, written by A. Goldfrapp and W. Gregory, courtesy Warner/Chappell Music Publishing Limited. ‘A Lousy Sum of Nothing’ written by A. Bell and V. Clarke, courtesy SM Publishing (UK) Ltd. ‘Mammon’ lyrics by M. Stewart, courtesy Mute Song Limited. ‘One Man’s Meat’ written by F. Tovey, D. Simmonds and J. Sackett, courtesy Mute Song Limited. ‘Ooh La La’ written by A. Goldfrapp and W. Gregory, courtesy Warner/Chappell Music Publishing Limited. ‘Ride a White Horse’ written by A. Goldfrapp, W. Gregory and N. Batt, courtesy Warner/Chappell Music Publishing Limited / Wixen Music UK Ltd. ‘Stand Up’ written by F. Tovey, D. Rogers and D. Simmonds, courtesy Mute Song Limited. ‘State of the Nation’ written by F. Tovey, courtesy Mute Song Limited. ‘Stranger’ written by A. Goldfrapp and W. Gregory, courtesy Warner/Chappell Music Publishing Limited. ‘Stranger’ written by M. Stewart, courtesy Mute Song Limited. ‘Strict Machine’ written by A. Goldfrapp, W. Gregory and N. Batt, courtesy Warner/Chappell Music Publishing Limited / Wixen Music UK Ltd. ‘Swallow It’ written by F. Tovey, D. Simmonds and P. Balmer, courtesy Mute Song Limited. ‘Train’ written by A. Goldfrapp and W. Gregory, courtesy Warner/Chappell Music Publishing Limited. ‘Tupelo’ written by N. Cave, M. Harvey and B. Adamson, courtesy Mute Song Limited. ‘T.V.O.D’ written by D. Miller, courtesy Mute Song Limited. ‘Twist’ written by A. Goldfrapp and W. Gregory, courtesy Warner/Chappell Music Publishing Limited.

x

Acknowledgements

‘We Are Time’ written by M. Stewart, S. Underwood, G. Sager and B. Smith, courtesy TSM UK Publishing. ‘Words Disobey Me’ written by M. Stewart, S. Underwood, G. Sager and B. Smith, courtesy TSM UK Publishing. ‘Whistleblowers’ written by S. Avsenik, M. Kolenc and I. Novak, courtesy Mute Song Limited. Richard Osborne’s chapter ‘Moby, minstrelsy and Melville’ is an adapted and updated version of ‘“Blackface” Minstrelsy from Melville to Moby’, first published in Critical Quarterly, 48(1) (Spring 2006): 14–25, and is published here with the permission of John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

List of Contributors Zuleika Beaven is Senior Lecturer in Music Business and Arts Management at Middlesex University, where she runs the MA Arts Management and teaches on the undergraduate popular music and music business degrees. Her research focuses on musician work and identity in the commercial space, and the impact on it of emerging technologies. Leon Clowes is a PhD candidate at the University of Huddersfield; his research topic is ‘Burt Bacharach’s (Un)easy Listening: A Model for Musicians from the Middlebrow’. The chapter ‘Got Any Gay Music? London’s Anti-Gay queer clubs 1995–2000’ is part of Nocturnes: Popular Music and the Night due to be published in 2018. ‘How can you sing a song if you have no voice?’ was included in Riffs: Experimental writing on popular music in 2017. Ross Cole is a research fellow at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, where he works on popular and avant-garde music of the twentieth century. Prior to this, he held a temporary lectureship at Cambridge and was awarded the Faculty of Music’s Teaching prize in 2016. He studied at Cambridge (PhD 2015), the University of York (MRes 2010) and the University of Oxford (BA 2009), where he received the Gibbs Prize. His work appears in a number of leading international journals including Ethnomusicology, Popular Music and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association. Lourdes Nicole Crosby García is Associate Course Director teaching popular music history at Full Sail University, Florida, in the Music Production Department. She has published in the Popular Music Journal. Her research interests focus on how different cultures develop their own aesthetics in popular music, and how cultures appropriate and acculturate other peoples’ musical styles. Glyn Davis is Reader in Screen Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author and editor of a number of books; most recently, he was one of the co-authors of Film Studies: A Global Introduction (2015). His writing has appeared in journals including Aniki, Cinema Journal, MIRAJ and Screen. Glyn

xii

List of Contributors

is the Project Leader of ‘Cruising the 1970s: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures’, a three-year European queer history project funded by HERA. John Encarnacao lectures in music at Western Sydney University, Australia, and is a guitarist, singer-songwriter, composer and improviser. Recent releases include Tinderbox (2018), music composed for a play, and Beetle Bones (2017), by the group the Nature Strip in which he is one of two singer-songwriters. His book Punk Aesthetics and New Folk (2016) bases an alternative history of popular music on punk aesthetics. Research and supervision interests include the history of popular music, particularly practices on its margins, recording, the album as artefact, composition and songwriting. Ieuan Franklin teaches at Bournemouth University and Wiltshire College. Between 2010 and 2014 he was a postdoctoral research assistant on the AHRC-funded Channel 4 and British Film Culture project at the University of Portsmouth. He was lead editor (with Hugh Chignell and Kristin Skoog) of Regional Aesthetics: Mapping UK Media Cultures (2015). He has published book chapters and articles on media history, rock music and youth culture. Edward George is a writer and artist and a visiting fellow at Goldsmiths University of London’s Department of Media and Communications. He co-founded the cross-disciplinary multimedia installation and sound art group Flow Motion (1996–present) and the dub-based electronic music group Hallucinator (1998– present) with Anna Piva, and was a founder of Black Audio Film Collective (1982–98). George received his PhD from Middlesex University in 2015. Brenda Kelly was active in the thriving British independent music scene from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. She established The Catalogue magazine in the pre-digital era as a crucial trade-oriented resource for the independent music sector internationally. She went on to co-found the acclaimed independent music series SNUB TV (BBC Television, 1989–91). After an adventurous career as a filmmaker in the genres of music, arts and documentary, she began lecturing in media in 2013. Dean Lockwood is a senior lecturer in Media Theory in the School of Film and Media at the University of Lincoln. He researches and publishes in the fields of digital culture, sonic culture and media ecologies, with a particular interest in

List of Contributors

xiii

horror and dark media. He is the author, with Rob Coley, of Cloud Time (2012) and Photography in the Middle: Dispatches on Media Ecologies and Aesthetics (2016). Aténé Mendelyté is a film scholar whose research focuses on interdisciplinarity within the humanities and various intersections among philosophy, theory, film, television, literature, theatre and music. She has published a number of anthology chapters on television series and film-philosophy as well as numerous articles on multiple subjects in such journals as Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, Film-Philosophy, Short Film Studies, Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Film and Media Studies, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts and Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics, among others. Lucy O’Brien leads BA Music Journalism and BA Music Marketing & Promotion at University for the Creative Arts. She is the author of She Bop: The Definitive History of Women in Popular Music (2013), Madonna: Like An Icon (2018), biographies of Dusty Springfield and Annie Lennox and, as music writer since the 1980s, contributions to NME, Q, Mojo, The Sunday Times, The Guardian and The Quietus. She co-produced the BBC Radio 2 series She Bop (2002) and Righteous Babes (1998), a Channel 4 film. She is completing a PhD: Express Yourself: Reframing women’s participation, agency and power in popular music. In 1979/80 she played in all-girl punk band the Catholic Girls. Marcus O’Dair is Associate Professor in Music and Innovation at Middlesex University. His work has appeared in academic journals and in numerous newspapers and magazines. Different Every Time, his authorized biography of Robert Wyatt, was shortlisted for the Penderyn music book prize and was a book of the week on Radio 4. Formerly a session musician with Passenger, he has released three albums, and performed across Europe, as one half of Grasscut. Richard Osborne is Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at Middlesex University. Prior to becoming a lecturer he worked in record shops, held various posts at PRS for Music and co-managed a pub. He is the author of Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record (2012). He publishes widely in the field of popular music studies, including his blog ‘Pop Bothering Me’: http://richardosbornevinyl.blogspot.co.uk/. Andy Pope is an independent scholar predominantly researching recent cultural history. His thesis, The History Boys?: Memory, Masculinity and the 1980s in

xiv

List of Contributors

British Cinema 2005 – 2010, examines the phenomenon of contemporary British cinema’s fascination with the 1980s and argues that these films focus on a personal, masculine youth. His subsequent work has continued the theme of masculinity in cinema with the article ‘Thatcher’s Sons: 1980s Boyhood in British Cinema, 2005–2010’ in the journal Boyhood Studies (2015). His latest case study (2017) focuses on ‘Ryan Gosling and Hollywood Masculinity’ in the second edition of Understanding Film Theory (Etherington-Wright and Doughty). S. Alexander Reed is Associate Professor of Music at Ithaca College. He is the author of Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music and co-author of a 33 1/3 volume on They Might Be Giants’ Flood. He has published in many journals and anthologies on punk and avant-garde musics as they relate to gender, race, technology and modernism. He has taught at New York University, the University of Florida, College of William & Mary, and Ithaca College. With his bands Seeming and ThouShaltNot he has recorded many albums and toured internationally. He is working on a book-length project about Laurie Anderson’s Big Science LP. Michael Waugh is an associate lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Newcastle University, with a doctorate from Anglia Ruskin University. His research combines digital media and popular music. He has published in Popular Music, and is contributing a chapter comparing representations of Kendrick Lamar and Drake to an anthology in 2019. He co-organized the 2017 Somerset House series ‘Sound Salon’ alongside Jennifer Walshe and Adam Harper. He was a keynote speaker at Berlin’s 2016 3hd Festival, while Arca invited him to co-author the press release for 2015 album Mutant (Mute Records). Giuseppe Zevolli is a music journalist and researcher. He gained a PhD in Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College, London, with a thesis on alternative music culture and subcultural capital in the digital era. His research interests and publications focus on popular music, performance, the study of taste and digital culture.

Introduction: Mute Records Richard Osborne and Zuleika Beaven

Enjoy the silence Does any other label have a more pertinent foundation story than Mute? It has been recounted many times and is touched upon by several of the authors in this collection. With good reason, we shall also tell it here. This story resonates because it is epochal. Mute was founded in 1978; its beginnings have come to symbolize a key period in the history of independent music in Britain. The story is also auspicious. This book was compiled in 2018, Mute’s fortieth anniversary. The first release on Mute set the template for the label, outlining an attitude to business and a distinct sense of style. The details are straightforward. Daniel Miller purchased a Korg 700s synthesizer and a TEAC 2340 quarter-inch tape recorder and recorded two songs in his bedroom at his mother’s house: ‘Warm Leatherette’, his take on J. G. Ballad’s sexual fetish novel Crash (1973), and ‘T.V.O.D.’, which manages to fuse intravenous drug taking and self-broadcast within its four-line lyric. Miller billed himself as ‘the Normal’. Inspired by the punk group Desperate Bicycles, who proselytized about independent record production, he decided to selfrelease his two songs (Gates 2015). Touting test pressings of the disc around London’s independent record shops, he reached Rough Trade who urged him to manufacture ‘at least 2,000’ copies and offered to distribute the record on his behalf (Gates 2015). He called his label Mute. The single was a critical and commercial success, selling 10,000–15,000 copies within a few months (Gates 2015). Miller started to receive demo tapes, posted to his mother’s address, which he had unthinkingly put on the sleeve of the record. Yet there are many reasons why this release is both symbolic and prescient. First, there is Miller’s timing. He started recording in 1977, the year of punk’s breakthrough. He issued his single in 1978, the year in which punk-inspired DIY record production took hold. In the mid-1970s there were only about a

2

Mute Records

dozen independent record companies in Britain, most of which called upon the major record labels for manufacturing, distribution and marketing services (Do it Yourself 2009). The impetus towards more resolutely do-it-yourself record production came from pioneering punk releases, such as the Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch (New Hormones 1977) and the Desperate Bicycles ‘The Medium was Tedium’ (Refill 1977). These acts were fully independent, using pressing plants that were not controlled by the majors and establishing their own means of distributing records. Their movement was self-publicizing and self-generating. ZigZag magazine documented the growth in business. In 1978 they published a Small Labels Catalogue, which listed 231 new independent labels. Two years later there were four times as many (Young 2006: 10). ‘The Medium was Tedium’ addressed the situation head on, informing purchasers ‘it was easy, it was cheap – go and do it’ (Osborne 2012: 74). The single by the Normal was one of the most notable responses. Second, there is the instrument that Miller employed. He had bought one of the first affordable synthesizers. Just as it can be argued that DIY labels provided the major business innovation of punk, Miller has suggested that synthesizers offered the musical revolution of the period: ‘I thought that was the future of where exciting music was going to come from and I wanted to be part of promoting that’ (Synth Britannia 2009). He was at the forefront of a new movement, as electronic music by Throbbing Gristle, the Human League, Thomas Leer and Robert Rental emerged at the same time as the Normal’s release. Miller has spoken of the confluence of ‘punk, cheap synthesizers, the timing. It was an historic inevitability!’ (Shaughnessy 2007: 6). Third, there are Miller’s partners in this release. Although he undertook much of the work himself, he did have notable help. His distribution deal with Rough Trade brought him into contact with the most important independent music company of the punk and post-punk era. The Rough Trade team were ethically driven. Their record shop operated on an equal pay–equal say structure and was a key hub for alternative music. In their capacity as a distributor they had even greater impact. They helped to spread DIY releases across Britain. In 1982 they instigated the Cartel, bringing together various regional record shops to act as hubs for the distribution of independent recordings. In doing so, they set up a viable alternative to major label distribution. Mute Records was one of the most prominent members of the Cartel, remaining loyal to this system until its demise in the early 1990s. Fourth, there is the name of the label. In calling his company Mute Records, Miller was again channelling the spirit of his time. Some DIY labels highlighted

Introduction: Mute Records

3

the rudimentary nature of their releases, giving themselves names such as Bent Records, Duff Records, Bust Records or Scratchy Records. Others liked to parade their lack of business acumen; the late 1970s brought us Boring Records and Flaccid Records (Osborne 2012: 79). While the name Mute Records chimed with both tendencies, it also indicated an art school bent. On the one hand, Miller gained inspiration from his own background in film production: he liked the word ‘mute’ having seen it ‘everywhere’ in the cutting room (Gates 2015). On the other hand, the term Mute Records was conceptually rich: recordings are full of sound, yet are silent when they are inert. In this respect, the company name overlaps with the work of the artist Christian Marclay, who has played upon this tension, notably with ‘Sound of Silence’ (1988), which consists merely of a photograph of the Simon and Garfunkel record of the same name. From its beginnings, Mute was a music label that engaged with wider artistic practices and thought. For Miller, the Normal’s music ‘was supposed to be visual’ (Synth Britannia 2009). Fifth, there is his subject matter. In 1978 there was a tendency to associate electronic music with outer space, the distant future and isolation. Phil Oakey of the Human League has recalled a movement of ‘alienated synthesists’ (ibid.). Gary Numan was representative. He stated, ‘I don’t speak for the people because I don’t even know them’ (ibid.). Miller’s songs were different. They had a sci-fi element but were set ‘five minutes into the future’ rather than some far-off time (ibid.). On display was a dark sense of humour, which Miller has maintained is the unifying aesthetic of Mute (Shaughnessy 2007: 12). That said, these songs introduce other themes that have persisted throughout the label’s history. They are bodily and full of sex. In response, Mute artists have not been alienated. Their music has prompted intense acts of fan devotion. Sixth, there is the name of the act. Miller chose to bill himself as ‘the Normal’ rather than use his own name. The band name is indicative of the Mute sense of humour: there is little that is normal about the subject matter of the songs, and the deadpan delivery of the lyrics is quietly unsettling.1 There are aspects here that are of their time: lack of affect was a strain within punk (‘psycho killer, qu’est-ce que c’est?’).2 There are also harbingers of the future. By adopting a pseudonym, Miller was able to operate at one remove. He could immerse 1

2

Miller has noted, however, ‘It was almost Normal Records, and the artist pseudonym was Mute, but I thought it was better the other way around’ (Shaughnessy 2007: 8). Talking Heads, ‘Psycho Killer’ (Sire 1977) written by D. Byrne, C. Frantz and T. Weymouth (Warner/ Chappell North America Limited).

4

Mute Records

himself in the personality of another; he could also mask personality. This has been a recurring theme among his artists. Time and again they have explored representational boundaries. Seventh, there is the success of the record. While hundreds of DIY recordings were released in Britain in the late 1970s, few were as popular as ‘T.V.O.D’ / ‘Warm Leatherette’. It gained critical plaudits. As one of our contributors observes, Miller’s record was reviewed as being ‘single of the century’ in Sounds. In addition, it sales performance vastly outpaced most independent releases. The success of the single was transformative in a number of ways. Miller was now poised between the mainstream and the underground, which is something that he welcomed. He was interested in the manner in which pop music and the avant-garde ‘feed each other’ (Shaughnessy 2007: 11). Moreover, as a result of his single’s popularity, Mute became an ongoing record label as likeminded artists began to contact Miller in the hope of similar success. He has stated, ‘I started to receive demos, which freaked me out a bit, because I didn’t really want to start judging other people’s music’ (‘Classic Album Sundays’ 2017). Nevertheless, some work did manage to attract his attention and he began to sign artists to his company. In the process of moving from artist to label manager, Miller was no longer doing things for himself. He was acting on behalf of others, or ‘doing it together’ to use a phrase from the last chapter of this book. This list could go on – there is so much that spins out of this single release. What we have highlighted here, however, are some of the aspects of Mute Records that prompted us to compile our book. We have also introduced themes that resurface among our authors’ contributions. In the final section of our introduction we shall return to their work. Before then we offer a brief outline of the development of Mute.

Double heart This book includes chapters that address all phases of the first forty years of Mute Records, from its accidental formation, through to its successful 1980s years as an independent record company, to its more difficult years in the 1990s and the partnership with the major label EMI, and on to its revival as an independent label in the present decade. Among the numerous demo tapes that were sent to Miller in the wake of ‘Warm Leatherette’ / ‘T.V.O.D.’, the first to chime with his tastes was made by

Introduction: Mute Records

5

Frank Tovey, whose 1979 single ‘Back to Nature’ was Mute’s second release. Like Miller, Tovey was a solo electronic artist who adopted a nom de plume; he operated as Fad Gadget. This role-playing sensibility was taken further with the label’s third single, ‘Memphis Tennessee’. Miller played all the instruments and sang the vocals on this record but reasoned, ‘It doesn’t fit in under the Normal kind of name. And then I thought, what about if there was a group that were all teenagers and their first choice of instrument was a synthesizer rather than a guitar because that hadn’t happened yet’ (Synth Britannia 2009). He named his fictional group the Silicon Teens. Tovey was cast as the lead singer, Daryl, but did not perform on the record. It is notable that this single is a cover of a Chuck Berry song: Miller was the first Mute artist to cross-racial and cultural lines, merging the white, European sensibility of electronic music with the blackness of rock ‘n’ roll. Thereafter, Mute began to widen its roster and entered a phase of seminal, challenging but niche releases. Non, DAF (Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft), Smegma and Robert Rental had all released records by the end of 1980. At this point Mute was developing into a well-respected label doing moderate business and contributing, alongside peers at Rough Trade, Industrial Records, Factory and others, to a coalescing national scene of aesthetic and entrepreneurial importance. The output was relatively small, however, and as DAF’s Robert Gorl noted there was ‘very little money’ (Spence 2011: 155). The next phase of Mute Records was set in motion in November 1980 when Miller caught the support act for a Fad Gadget show at the Bridgehouse in Canning Town. He had earlier come across Depeche Mode – a real life Silicon Teens – in the Rough Trade shop, but this was the first time he witnessed them in action (Shaughnessy 2007: 9). Within a year they had released ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ and Mute was running its first internationally successful act. On one reading, we have a second great ‘accident’ of the Mute story. Except in so many ways this was far from accidental: from the apparently unlikely decision of Depeche Mode to sign to Mute when Virgin and other labels had courted them, to the fact that they remained so long with label through worldwide success and the drawing around them of a body of cutting edge musical collaborators, all this was predicated on the reputation of the label and the standing Miller had swiftly built. From the first, then, the commercial pop success of Depeche Mode for Mute was inextricably linked to the avant-garde side of the label. As so often with the history Mute, contradiction was woven into its fabric. In this respect it can be argued that the release, over the course of just few days in February 1981,

6

Mute Records

of such varied artistic output as ‘Dreaming of Me’ by Depeche Mode and Boyd Rice’s eponymous album is central to the ‘double heart’ of the Mute story.3 For the remainder of the 1980s, Mute had a string of commercial successes, including releases by Depeche Mode, Yazoo, the Assembly, Erasure, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Having long outgrown the backroom at Mrs Miller’s home, the label moved to its Harrow Road headquarters in 1986. This would be its base for twenty-one years until the partnership with EMI. During the heights of commercial success, Mute held true to its experimental tendencies with further releases from Boyd Rice and the addition of artists such as Einstürzende Neubauten, Diamanda Galás and Laibach to its roster. During this period the label also began experimenting with imprints and sub-labels, such as Rhythm King and Novamute, which nurtured the careers of techno artists Richie Hawtin and Speedy J, and Blast First, which brought Sonic Youth and the Butthole Surfers to the UK. Although Blast First was rock- and guitar-orientated and a less clear fit than other sub-labels (‘I wanted to work with people who were starting to put out records that I liked but didn’t quite understand’, Miller recalls (2018)), the imprint was the original home of long-time Mute artists Liars. Long-term collaboration, all the more notable when coupled with the label’s single-album deals, is a particular feature of the relationship between Mute and its artists. During a commercially difficult period for the label in the mid1990s, this included supporting Moby while he experimented with a range of genres and released a punk album that might have been commercial suicide. Mirroring the time and space given to the nascent Erasure more than a decade earlier, Mute kept faith with Moby and was rewarded with the international hit Play in 1999. Miller had sought an international distribution deal in the late 1990s but it was the success of Play that enabled him to partner with EMI in 2002. During Mute’s EMI years, the label built a reputation as a repository for work by a number of seminal artists. Mute remastered and released classic back catalogue work by Kraftwerk, the Residents and Throbbing Gristle (for a second time). These releases brought the music of the latter two bands to a wider audience and are notable for high-quality artwork that is sensitive to original aesthetics. With EMI in turmoil and the departure of key contacts at the label, Miller sought an exit. In 2010, he negotiated a deal that saw Mute emerge as an independent company once more. This ushered in a new period for the label 3

Robert Rental’s ‘Double Heart’ was released by Mute in 1980.

Introduction: Mute Records

7

and more new music. Recent years have seen the signing and development of artists such as Arca. Since 2010 Miller has revived his DJ career and has gone back into the studio as a producer, including work on the 2012 album WIXIW by long-term signing Liars, which, with its extensive use of analogue synthesizers, is perhaps the most recognizably ‘Mute’ album of their career. As we complete work on this text in 2018, the newly re-established Novamute is releasing its first batch of 12” singles, showcasing a selection of emerging techno DJs such as Charlotte De Witte.

Construction time again One of the distinctive aspects of Mute is that, while the output of the label reflects Miller’s singular vision, his artists are given a great deal of leeway. They have been free to experiment in accordance with their own artistic inclinations. Reflecting this, we sourced the chapters for this book on an artist-centred basis. Authors were requested to provide a case study of a chosen Mute act and to explore a theme related to the impact of the label. We have presented the responses in a chronological manner, sequenced according to the date at which the artist first released music with the company. (The final chapter, which addresses a different form of partnership with Mute, is the one exception to this rule.) To a certain extent the results have been fortuitous. We have received chapters relating to the majority of Mute’s most popular acts. Yazoo is the most significant omission, but Depeche Mode, Nick Cave, Erasure, Moby and Goldfrapp are all present. We have also received work on important leftfield artists, including Throbbing Gristle, Mark Stewart, Laibach, Ut and Swans. Reflecting the label’s pop–avant-garde split, we have eight chapters from each side of this division (as long as you consider the Normal’s music to be a commercial success, which we do). We also have key aspects of Mute’s history covered. The first two chapters address the first two releases on the label, while the last two examine two of the most interesting Mute artists of recent years. In between there are chapters that explore significant business developments, including the determined independence of the early years, the expansion of the label in the 1980s, and Mute’s relationship with EMI in the current century. There are also chapters that discuss Mute’s sub-labels, The Grey Area, Blast First and Rhythm King. In addition, there are conceptual themes that resurface throughout the collection. In this respect, though, the results are less fortuitous: unity was expected. As we

8

Mute Records

have been stressing in this introduction, throughout its forty-year history Mute Records has maintained a distinct approach to business and art. Our book begins with the Normal. In the opening chapter S. Alexander Reed explores ‘Warm Leatherette’, foregrounding ideas of boredom. As part of his close analysis of the recording, he demonstrates how the song pits two conflicting philosophies of boredom against each other. The first of these imagines boredom as productive and as giving rise to action (aligned with Heidegger, John Cage, the avant-garde and self-expression); the other sees boredom as oppressive and dehumanizing (aligned with Situationism and punk). Reed suggests that it was because of an unresolved tension between these ideas that ‘Warm Leatherette’ resonated with subcultural audiences of its day, and that this tension is key to its continuing importance with a wider audience. He also introduces subjects that resurface in this book. Reed argues that this merging of boredoms is a mirror of Mute’s merging of styles. For him, the genesis of the label is ‘the avant-garde crashing into punk’. Furthermore, his two boredoms reflect the polarities of the commercial and underground: one is ‘jittery and bland’; the other is ‘patient and strange’. Reed also notes Miller’s confluence of artistic forms. As well as the literary inspiration of Ballard’s novel, ‘Warm Leatherette’ was inspired by a visual aesthetic. It emerged from an aborted film script that Miller had based on Crash. While Chapter 1 concerns MUTE001, Chapter 2 looks at MUTE002. Giuseppe Zevolli focuses on the work of Frank Tovey, the first artist to be signed to Mute. Concentrating on key works in his discography and engaging with their reception at the time of release, here we see Mute’s commercial and underground tendencies played out across one artist’s career. Zevolli explores a conflict between anti-commercialism and anti-culturalism. He believes that, ultimately, this was a productive dialectic, characterized in the contrariness and in-betweenness of Fad Gadget’s work. With Tovey’s roots in performance art and his adoption of electronic instrumentation, he balanced accusations of artifice with an environmental concern. His first single, ‘Back to Nature’, is synthesizer music at its most unalienated. It is also redolent of the Mute sense of humour. The label’s deadpan mix of the commercial and the leftfield is captured in Zevolli’s description of this recording: ‘Although ultimately portraying a love encounter, Tovey depicts a post-apocalyptic scenario where bodies are left burning in the sun and a “capitalist aircraft” hovers above the protagonists, polluting the air.’ Leon Clowes’s chapter on Depeche Mode looks at the advent of Mute’s most successful act and the transformation of the company into a rival to Britain’s major record labels. Clowes contrasts Mute’s situation with the parallel case of

Introduction: Mute Records

9

Some Bizzare records, who were contemporaneously enjoying success with Soft Cell. Where Mute retained complete independence, the latter label entered into licensing deals with major labels. Moreover, where Depeche Mode appeared comfortable with the mainstream and found it relatively easy to explore queer themes, Soft Cell struggled to maintain artistic integrity and were subject to homophobia. A second chapter on chapter Depeche Mode trains its sights on fans of the group, as witnessed in the films Depeche Mode: 101 (1989) and Our Hobby is Depeche Mode (2007). Here Andy Pope explores differences in presentation, recounted via the framework of fandom studies. He demonstrates how the cinema verité style of the first film implies an authentic and symbiotic relationship between Depeche Mode and their followers, whereas in the latter film the band is almost entirely absent and is presented in iconographic terms. He argues that the relationship between fan and band has shifted to one that is predominantly nostalgic. Depeche Mode and Throbbing Gristle represent inversions of each other. The former are a synth-pop group who went on to explore outré themes; the latter are a provocative art project who, as author John Encarnacao argues, became canonized within the history of popular music. His chapter looks at the group’s first four albums, which have twice been reissued by Mute. There are good reasons why the electronic music of Throbbing Gristle fits with the label. First, there is instability of character. Encarnacao notes the lack of a unified persona or perspective in the vocals of Genesis P-Orridge. Second, there is the productive dynamic between the establishment and the underground. Encarnacao argues that oppositional art is inextricably bound up with the mainstream to which it is opposed: it owes its very existence to an established ‘institutional and discursive context’. In this sense, the tension within Throbbing Gristle’s work mirrors the wider tensions of the supposedly ‘independent’ music sector, not least because ‘creative work that receives attention and infamy becomes subsumed into the canon from which it initially wished to distinguish itself ’. With the arrival of Nick Cave at Mute in 1983 the label moved away from synthesizers and embraced traditional rock music instrumentation. Still present, however, were a dark sense of humour, cross-cultural immersion and a preoccupation with sex. Ross Cole’s chapter addresses Cave’s engagement with blues mythology. He demonstrates how this genre affords Cave access to a performative space in which he animates a series of malevolent alter egos, associating blues sonority with violence, masculinity, sex and iniquity. In doing so, Cave is offering his own take on the authenticity-artifice dichotomy. As Cole

10

Mute Records

argues, he ‘uses blues as a way to signify difference from the mainstream by simulating the guise of an exotic outsider’. With this racial role-playing we have moved far beyond the playful cover versions of the Silicon Teens. Cole demonstrates how Cave’s blues-inspired work trades ‘on the wounds sustained by those stifled within the black Atlantic’s racialized logic’. At the same time, however, he is able to view the blues as a positive source of identity and inspiration, seeing it is as evidence of Cave’s ‘unbounded creative imagination that ransacks history in the service of song’. Mark Stewart, the subject of Edward George’s chapter, is another Mute artist who has embraced black cultural forms. However, while Cave employs the blues as a route to exotic outsiderdom, Stewart has utilized dub for a politicized project. George finds a conceptual unity in the quartet of albums that he recorded for Mute Records between 1985 and 1996: ‘an envisioning, through song and sound, of capitalism’s rapacity and its dehumanizing effects on subjectivity and thus the body and the psyche’. This chapter also demonstrates how, at the same time that Mute was enjoying its greatest commercial success, with hit albums by Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure, it was also the ‘solitary outpost of major league postpunk expression and experimentation’. Stewart claims that Miller used the money from his hit artists and ‘invested it into cutting edge stuff, really out there shit’. He also notes the importance of the fact that Miller is an artist, believing that it is this sensibility that accounts for his commitment to alternative music. These ongoing links between out there shit and pop music are present in the transition to the next Mute act. George’s chapter addresses Stewart’s use of ‘dub’s law of erasure to produce and prohibit the clarity of meaning’. Brenda Kelly’s chapter is about Erasure. This link goes beyond mere coincidence of words, however. Vince Clarke is another of Mute’s shape-shifters; he has achieved success only to disappear and then resurface as a member of another group. He left Depeche Mode and then formed Yazoo, who he left to form the Assembly, who he left to form the aptly named Erasure. Accompanied by singer Andy Bell, his final group has gone on to have a thirty-year career with Mute Records. In her chapter, Kelly argues that this relationship is indicative of defining commitments for band and label, both to creative freedom and to the importance of independence in the music business. She usefully situates Erasure’s progress within the wider history of Mute Records, exploring the downturn in fortunes in the 1990s, the absorption within EMI in the 2000s, and the return to independence in the 2010s. She also demonstrates how Erasure are one of Mute’s acts who manage to be transgressive at the same time as they are popular.

Introduction: Mute Records

11

For Kelly, the band’s gay sensibility and theatrical subversiveness simultaneously challenge and encapsulate the conventions of pop music. There are nevertheless varying degrees of marginality. The following three chapters explore artists who operate at the furthest reaches of Mute. First up is Ieuan Franklin, who writes about Ut, a no wave act who were linked with Miller’s company via the sub-label Blast First, with whom they were signed between 1986 and 1989. His chapter illustrates the sidelining of Ut in the UK during this period. The band suffered from record label disinterest (from Blast First) and a weekly music press that frequently belittled or objectified female musicians. Franklin offers a timely reappraisal of the group, given the resurgence of interest in the contributions of female artists to the post-punk and no wave scenes. As well as exploring the relationship between Blast First and Mute, his chapter illustrates the different approaches of Mute and Rough Trade. Miller was willing to accommodate the provocative work that was produced by some of the Blast First Bands, whereas it had been objected to in their original Rough Trade home. This willingness is on display in the following chapter, in which Aténé Mendelyté addresses the work of the Slovenian/Yugoslav music collective Laibach, who have released records with Mute since 1987. She explores the manner in which the group deconstructs sound, making overt the covert mechanisms of desire, power and control that underlie the modus operandi of popular music. Through a close reading of two songs, Mendelyté discusses Laibach’s ‘meta-sound’, the group’s ability to draw upon and yet separate themselves from their sources in popular and political culture. And so, while Encarnacao posits oppositional art as being wedded to the mainstream, Mendelyté argues that meta discourse is one way in which outsiders can make outsider art. Laibach are nevertheless not entirely alone; Mendelyté contextualizes them within Millerʼs larger Kunstkammer of artists. She suggests that the Mute founder ‘has always thoroughly complicated such binaries as aesthetics/politics and experimentation/conformism’. In addition, Laibach offer more of the dark and provocative humour that Mute Records has foregrounded throughout its history. Michael Gira’s Swans, meanwhile, are arguably one of the least funny bands to have signed with Mute. They first joined the label in 1987 and have made two further albums for the company in the wake of its divorce from EMI. Swans do have Mute tendencies, however. In his chapter on the group, Dean Lockwood notes how the label ‘has consistently embraced diversity, refusing to be limited to any one style, aesthetic or ideological viewpoint’. They thus offer the ideal home

12

Mute Records

for Swans, whose project has been one of ceaseless mutation. Lockwood focuses on Gira’s belief in musical labour, which the artist regards as a utopian, even spiritual, endeavour. Gira shares a kinship with other Mute artists in that his work critiques popular music. However, while most artists offer discourses upon the commodity form, Swans seek to escape it. Their songs are never finished; they evolve out of each other in concert. Mute release albums by a group who value performance over recording. Although Moby has sought to derail his career at various points, he has always been one of Mute’s more commercial artists. The musician arrived at the company in the early 1990s via its sub-label Rhythm King. In 1999 he released the album Play, one of Mute’s major successes. Richard Osborne’s chapter explores Moby’s sampling of African American singers on this record. He situates this practice within traditions of minstrelsy, whereby white performers appropriate black cultural traditions and in the process perpetuate racial stereotypes. Moby’s work is also contrasted with the writings of his distant relation, Herman Melville, who examined minstrelsy and warned against its pernicious influences. The themes of this chapter return us to Cole’s work on Nick Cave, another artist who has drawn upon and channelled black musical sources. Moby is different, however, in that he adopts his black masks as a signifier of both identification and difference. Moby plays upon the idea that synthesizers are indicative of the future and alienation by layering his electronic compositions with black musical samples that represent the body and the past. Performance and personae are also central to the work of Goldfrapp, who signed with Mute in the year that Play was released. Our book includes two chapters on the group, exploring issues that they raise about gender and sexuality. In the first of these chapters Lucy O’Brien focuses on Country Girls, an art project that Alison Goldfrapp undertook with photographer Anna Fox between 1996 and 2002. Fox’s portraits display Goldfrapp in a series of ‘darkly humorous’ and violent images, far removed from the traditional realm of the female pop performer. Like other artists on Mute’s roster, Goldfrapp explore binary tensions: nature and artifice; glamour and violence; male and female; straight and queer. Glyn Davis’s chapter offers an overview of Goldfrapp’s career, framed through a queer perspective. He examines the three genres that Goldfrapp have engaged with most frequently: disco, glam and folk. Davis demonstrates how the group queers these forms. Disco’s historical links to gay culture are reiterated in a carnal register, glam’s questionable gender politics are probed, and folk is introduced to novel ideas of desire and politics.

Introduction: Mute Records

13

Arca, who released albums on Mute in 2014 and 2015, offers further explorations of these themes. Michael Waugh posits the performer as being the latest Mute artist to explore transgressive ideas of non-heteronormative genders and sexualities. He is another electronic musician who ‘celebrates the personal and the organic’. However, while other Mute acts have explored the tension of binaries, Arca moves beyond them. In his chapter, Waugh draws upon the theories of Judith Butler and demonstrates how the fluidities of gender and sex are reflected in Arca’s music. And so, while this book begins with Reed’s exploration of the tight musical framework of ‘Warm Leatherette’, it comes towards its close with an artist whose music escapes rigid musical structures. Yet this fluidity is in keeping with Mute. Arca is an artist who adopts ‘mutable performativity’. The story of Mute is one of continuity and change. Reflecting this, the final chapter in this collection brings us full circle and also moves us forward. Here Lourdes Nicole Crosby García explores the work of John Richards (aka Dirty Electronics). Richards has similarities to Miller. He is a product of the British art school system. He is an electronic musician who seeks independence from mainstream music. He is interested in the bodily nature of electronics – in his music-making he wants to get his hands ‘dirty’. Moreover, he has returned Miller to the world of analogue synthesizers, constructing the Mute Synth and Mute Synth II in conjunction with the company. However, whereas Miller’s first release was an exemplar of the punk DIY movement (he performed, sang and recorded the Normal’s songs on his own, as well as being responsible for the artwork for the single and arranging its manufacture), Richards’s philosophy is one ‘doing it together’. He abandoned solitary home recording in favour of communitybased, participatory music. In some respects, his work has similarities with the recent output of Swans. Richards is interested in process rather than product. He takes this one stage further, though. His Dirty Electronics events are not tied to ‘product’. What they create instead are ‘temporary moments in space that are based on communal involvement and cannot be reproduced again’. Our final Mute Records collaborator does not make records at all. This brings us to one further point of genesis for our book. In 2014, Daniel Miller was awarded an honorary doctorate by Middlesex University. Subsequently he has undertaken a role as visiting professor. In this capacity he has practised a doing-it-together ethos beyond the day-to-day running of his label. He has worked with our students, inviting them to the Mute studios in Hammersmith, guiding them through the recording process of some of the label’s

14

Mute Records

most significant releases, building a modular synth and providing workshops for how to use it, and so much more. For all of this, and for his inspirational spirit, we are extremely grateful.

References Ballard, J. G. (1973), Crash, London: Jonathan Cape. ‘Classic Album Sundays with Daniel Miller founder of Mute Records’ (2017), Classic Album Sundays, 11 December. Available online: http://classicalbumsundays.com/ interview-with-daniel-miller-founder-of-mute-records/ (accessed 26 April 2018). Depeche Mode: 101 (1989), [Film] Dir. David Dawkins, Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker, US: Mute Film, Pennebaker Associates. Do It Yourself: The Story of Rough Trade (2009), [TV programme] BBC4, 13 March. Gates, K. (2015), ‘Daniel Miller: “I Was Determined to Make Mute a Success”’. Available online: http://www.pias.com/blog/daniel-miller-determined-make-mute-success/ (accessed 26 April 2018). Miller, D. (2018), Communication with authors, 30 April. Osborne, R. (2012), Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record, Farnham: Ashgate. Our Hobby is Depeche Mode (2006), [Film] Dir. Jeremy Deller and Nick Abrahams, UK: Hudson Pictures. Shaughnessy, A. (2007), ‘Some Questions, Some Answers: An Interview with Daniel Miller’, Mute Audio Documents 1978–1984: Documentary Evidence, 4–12, London: Mute Records. Spence, S. (2011), Just Can’t Get Enough: The Making of Depeche Mode, London: Jawbone. Synth Britannia (2009), [TV programme] BBC4, 16 October. Young, R. (2006), Rough Trade, London: Black Dog Publishing.

1

‘Let’s Make Love Before You Die’: ‘Warm Leatherette’, Boredom and the Invention of the 1980s S. Alexander Reed

Anatomy The Normal’s ‘Warm Leatherette’, released in November 1978 as the AA-side of MUTE 001, is anatomical. Breaking glass, steering wheel, handbrake: unsentimental parts. A voice. A low drilling sound and a high one. Two octaves of a Korg 700s’s D natural. Noise sculpted to resemble a kick and snare. Exactly 128 words, 44 unique. Twenty-eight statements of ‘Warm Leatherette’. Ten sentences. Two hundred seconds of 4/4 across 167 measures, changelessly looping, played by hand at tempos drifting between 195 and 207 BPM. Repetition. The hook works like this:

Figure 1.1 Structure of the title hook in ‘Warm Leatherette’, S. Alexander Reed.

16

Mute Records

The snare’s two-beat cycle delineates quarter notes. The kick’s cycle is four beats. Synthesizer octaves repeat every eight. The drill sounds and the ‘Warm Leatherette’ lyric return every sixteen. Daniel Miller, the Normal’s sole member and founding kingpin of Mute Records, explains, ‘The best punk rock … is very tightly structured’ (‘Classic Album Sundays’ 2017). The song is a grid. Powers of two. There’s no harmony. D simply repeats. Flip the record to hear the Normal’s only other studio creation ‘T.V.O.D.’ and it is also in D minor. Dm. Daniel Miller. Discoverer of Depeche Mode. The Normal’s live album with Robert Rental is an improvisation in D. Five of the first six songs on Miller’s subsequent Silicon Teens album are in D. Timbre, next. In alternating octaves and colours, a single pitch revs with each downbeat – first a sizzle blistering with noise above 6000 Hz, then a bestial gnarl, with bottom-heavy humming below 600 Hz. Listen closer and the sounds play roles. The percussion’s thwap ripples: a meaty gutpunch, the Doppler swoop of something big coming fast. Then and now, analogue synthesizers connote physicality: wood and metal, knobs and plugs, the way sawtooth waves cut jagged while sinusoids undulate, bass notes’ body-rumbling infrasound, visibly pumping loudspeaker membranes, the way timbres are sculpted by adding on and scooping out. Contrast this with the crystalline sounds of computer synthesis and sampling: ‘digital’ and ‘trigger’ are thin words – fingers, not whole bodies. Jonathan Sterne observes of sound playback, ‘critics have written of digital audio recording – in its myriad formats – as less “live” or less “natural” than analogue recording’ (2006: 338). But electronic music audiences understand this extends to sound production too. (When science fiction writers of this era saw our inevitably digital real-world future – Le Guin, Dick, Delaney – they abandoned technological what-ifs in favour of embodied and behavioural ones. Digital is dull.) ‘Warm Leatherette’ is material, then: feel the gear of a speeding V8 shift from high-torque third into smooth-riding fourth, and with every repetition comes the suggestion of ever-higher overdrive. You can also hear sex in these two octaves. A wet-mouthed intake of air through clenched teeth, then a moan on ‘O’. Exhilaration and ecstasy. Gutterminded synth-pop fans might connect that first sonic spurt’s oscillated noise with the climax of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s later ‘Relax’ (ZZT 1983), where it manifests the imperative lyric ‘come’. The sonic upshot is polymorphous perversity, an orgy of robots, people and cars. And that’s before we even hear the words. ‘Warm Leatherette’ is just one in the convoy of car-themed synth-pop records at the turn of the 1980s. Yes, back

‘Let’s Make Love Before You Die’

17

in 1974 Kraftwerk’s ‘Autobahn’ had imagined a serene post-postwar Germany of endless freeways and parallel-universe Beach Boys tunes. But ‘Warm Leatherette’ shares more with Gary Numan’s paranoid ‘Cars’ (Beggar’s Banquet 1979) and John Foxx’s back-to-back crash-themed singles ‘No-One Driving’ (Virgin 1980), ‘Underpass’ (Virgin 1980) and ‘Burning Car’ (Virgin 1980). Bowie’s ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’ (RCA Victor 1977) is cut from the same Naugahyde. These numbers owed a lot to punk, but represented a new perspective – one that looked cagily to a dystopian future. They contrast with the retrospection of songs like the Clash’s ‘Brand New Cadillac’ (CBS 1979) (a remake of Vince Taylor’s original (Parlophone 1959)): ‘Welcome to the spirit of 1956’ bellows ‘Roadrunner’ (recorded by the Modern Lovers (Beserkly 1977) and the Sex Pistols (Virgin 1979)), reminding us of trad-punk’s greaser roots.1 In ‘Warm Leatherette’ and its ilk, driving indicates neither self-actualization (like ‘Roadrunner’) nor bourgeois oppression (like the Jam’s ‘London Traffic’ (Polydor 1977)). Instead, cars are escape capsules from the world and ourselves. (Christoph Döring’s 1979 punk film 3302 Taxi literalizes this: a taxi repeatedly driving into the Berlin Wall.) Even Numan’s insistence that he feels ‘safest of all’ in his car is undermined when the narrator of ‘Cars’ proves unreliable, admitting ‘nothing feels right’.2 Specifically, ‘Warm Leatherette’ highlights the violent power of wrecks to yank us from reality. In glorious freeze-frame, we ‘see the breaking glass’, not the ‘broken glass’: here’s the actual moment of impact, wherein our whole-body disorientation frees us from rationality and self-control.3 As Ben Highmore writes, ‘The crash releases the body from the constraint of a certain attitude’ (2003: 59) – the attitude of being in and of modernity. For an orgasmic instant we are shocked out of a universe designed to pre-empt shock.

Crash I It is fitting that the word ‘leatherette’ originated in bookbinding, because ‘Warm Leatherette’ is literary: a rewrite of J. G. Ballard’s 1973 Crash. Ballard’s plot concerns a fetishistic social circle whose scarred and joylessly wealthy members crash their cars, seeking jouissance in mangled flesh and bent metal.

1 2 3

‘Roadrunner’ written by J. Richman, Hornall Brothers Music Ltd / Wixen Music UK Ltd. ‘Cars’ written by G. Numan, Universal Music Publishing Limited. ‘Warm Leatherette’ written by D. Miller, Blue Mountain Music Ltd.

18

Mute Records

Miller read it in 1977 and was inspired. ‘I’d been working on a film script for Crash with a friend. Nothing came of it, but through working on that, I had a lot of visual ideas, and I condensed what was in my head into that song’ (Majewski and Bernstein 2014: 133). (Bookmark, incidentally, how he uses the word head – it will come up shortly.) For all that Miller’s ideas may have been visual – he was an assistant editor at the independent channel ATV – some key wordings persist across the adaptation from book to script to lyric. Miller sings of the car’s ‘luminescent dash’, and correspondingly, of Ballard’s four uses of ‘luminescent’ in the whole novel, three precede the word ‘dials’, an alliterative synonym for ‘dash’. More forensically, when Miller wrote, ‘The handbrake penetrates your thigh’, he was looking at page 178: ‘I moved my hand from her pubis to the scars on her thighs, feeling the tender causeways driven through her flesh by the handbrake’ (Ballard 1973: 178). Furthermore, in that same paragraph on that same page, the word ‘leatherette’ makes one of three appearances in Crash. Verbal suggestibility is part of Miller’s artistry: even in christening his label, ‘I was working in a cutting room, an editing room, I saw this word Mute everywhere. I liked it’ (Gates 2015). Lyrical genealogy matters here because it underscores a resonance between Miller’s idioms and Crash’s language. Reviewers of the novel consistently note its relentlessly clinical tone (Ballard studied medicine); as Jean Baudrillard writes, ‘all the erotic terms are technical … a functional language’ (1994: 115–16). Feeling lies only in the triangulation of human anatomy and machine parts. So it is remarkable that Miller uses this same code when he describes playing his synthesizer: it affords a ‘direct connection between your head and the tape’ (Dynaudio Professional 2016). Elsewhere he speaks of the ‘very direct[ness] between the brain and the instrument’ (Ableton 2016). Bodily metonyms for musical ideas – ‘head’, ‘brain’ – link with mechanical metonyms for the execution of those ideas – ‘tape’, ‘instrument’. Perhaps more remarkable than Miller’s creative impulse are the countless others then and now who have found the product of this resonance so appealing – those who’ve joined ‘the car crash set’. ‘Warm Leatherette’ is a curious hit. The story: Miller brought a tape to the counter of Rough Trade records, and when Geoff Travis listened to it on the store’s tape deck, journalist Jane Suck, who was standing nearby, ‘just went berserk when she heard it – she thought it was Lou Reed’s new record’, according to punk historian Jon Savage (King 2012: 25). She later called it ‘single of the century’ in Sounds (Majewski and Bernsteein 2014: 133). On the spot, Travis offered Miller a £300 deal to press 2,000 records, which grew to

‘Let’s Make Love Before You Die’

19

10,000, and eventually the song moved 30,000 copies – not including sales of the 60-plus compilations it appears on. ‘Warm Leatherette’ (and its A-side ‘T.V.O.D.’) outpaced comparable 1978 releases by Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle (whom the Normal supported live). Cover versions proliferate – most famously Grace Jones (Island 1980), but also in live performances by Duran Duran, Nine Inch Nails and Mute’s own Laibach. And the Normal spawned countless rip-offs (the best is the Distributors’ ‘TV Me’ (Distributors Records 1979)). The reasons for ‘Warm Leatherette’’s endurance go beyond anatomy and ancestry. This chapter argues that the song locates an attitudinal tipping point in genre, tone and time. In its dance floor cool, it has allowed audiences to make wordless but meaningful claims about their individual and subcultural roles in a changing world. A central concern here is boredom. The song’s structure, topic and posture performatively stage boredom as an experience. Miller’s vocal affect is a good index; his thudding ‘let’s make love’ is the most deadpan romantic overture in pop history. ‘I wanted it to be as dispassionate as possible’, he says (Majewski and Bernstein 2014: 133), and indeed the boredoms circulating in ‘Warm Leatherette’ connect to musical questions of history and style. The song collides two circa – 1978 strains of cultural boredom: an introspective engagement with nothingness (pioneered in mid-century art) and pent-up youthful nihilism – the genesis of Mute Records is the avant-garde crashing into punk. At stake is how young people were adapting to a future both hyper-stimulating and hypnotically dull: the 1980s and everything after.

Boredoms To call something ‘interesting’ situates it near a border: on one side lies the bewildering (too unknown) and on the other, the boring (too known). Experiencing the interesting, we pull it slowly over that border: marvel, appraise, then know and then discard. Over time, we call this learning, living or progress. But occultist Austin Spare was onto something when he wrote, ‘Knowledge is but the excrement of experience’ (2001: 90), because both individually and culturally, as we consume the once-bewildering, digesting it into the now known, we leave behind us an ever-growing pile of boring shit. Worse, our post-enlightenment addiction to meaning and novelty conflicts directly with the normalizing mandates of biology, economics and law, which

20

Mute Records

Figure 1.2 Google Books incidence graph of the phrase ‘boredom’.

minimizes risk. It is easy to imagine a breaking point between these opposing forces, where a systemic need for the known reins in and overtakes our romantic yearning for the unknown: when we surrender to nausea that is equal parts famine of novelty and feast of coprophagia. Ballard saw this in his crystal ball. Facing a moderated future of homogenized materiality, he said, ‘I could sum up the future in one word, and that word is boring. The future is going to be boring’ (Svendsen 2005: 83, my emphasis). And ‘Warm Leatherette’ evinces a time of pronounced boredoms. If Google Books is any indication, 1978–80 occupied a boredom crest, where the word appears more often in print than any years before or after (Figure 1.2). The decades since have produced many studies on boredom, recently including Elizabeth Goodstein’s 2004 Experience Without Qualities, Lars Svendsen’s 2005 A Philosophy of Boredom and Eldritch Priest’s 2013 Boring Formless Nonsense, as well as scholarship probing boredom as it relates to subjects as varied as modern art, Aboriginal metaphysics, Candy Crush and bestiality. Nearly all acknowledge that boredom as such was not identified widely as an experience until about 1780, and that it is not one single state, but a class of them. Prominent among individuating criteria is whether a boredom is productive or non-productive, reframed here as unboring boredom versus boring boredom.

Boredom II: Unboring boredom Martin Heidegger argues for the value of ‘profound boredom’ to incite assessment and governance of our perceptions (1995:74). In Samuel Beckett’s 1949 play Waiting for Godot, characters meditate on passing time, waiting for someone

‘Let’s Make Love Before You Die’

21

who never arrives. More proximal to Miller was avant-garde superstar John Cage, who wrote, ‘In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting’ (1961: 93). Powers of two. Cage’s legendary 1952 work 4’33” confronted audiences with ambience, impelling them to orchestrate their own quiet boredoms. Miller certainly knew of Cage. As a film professional, he would also have known of Andy Warhol, whose unboring boredom this interview reveals: G [Joseph Gelmis]: You’ve said, ‘I like boring things’. How can entertainment be boring? W [Andy Warhol]: When you sit and look out of a window, that’s enjoyable. G: Why, because you can’t figure out what’s going to happen, what’s going to be passing in front of you? W: It takes up time. G: Are you serious? W: Yeah. Really. You see people looking out of their windows all the time. I do. (Goldsmith 2004b: 168–9)

Warhol ventures into relevant territory with 1963’s ‘Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times’, which repeats a photo of an accident, compelling viewers to search for the tiniest variance from print to print, inspecting detail at levels that dehumanize the images’ content, tangling separate crises of perception and empathy. Warhol’s 1963–4 films similarly problematize boredom into action: Eat (1964) is forty minutes of Robert Indiana eating, Sleep (1963) is 321 minutes of John Giorno sleeping, and Empire (1964) is a motionless 8-hour shot of the Empire State Building. All are filmed at twenty-four frames per second, then perversely slowed to sixteen. Warhol quipped, ‘If they can take it for ten minutes, then we play it for fifteen’ (Warhol and Heckett 1980: 154). (Incidentally, the same period places Ballard in the midst of writing his trilogy of variations on the apocalypse: The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), The Crystal World (1966). If they can take it for one novel, then we write it for three.) Viewing Empire, scholar Scott Richmond is ‘bored to tears, bored beyond bearing it. And, once I can no longer bear it, the norms of cinematic engagement dissolve. The film certainly doesn’t live up to them, so why should I?’ (2015: 22). This is part of Warhol’s vision: it induces action that creatively discards routines. We wonder, notice our bodies and minds, and reframe our perceptions. Boredom empowers the strangely productive arbitrary. Stepping into the first-person, I query my pdf library for compelling instances of ‘boredom’.

22

Mute Records

I type ‘BOR’ and behold: choreographer George Balanchine describes being suBORdinated to time; Negativland waxes on musical BORrowing; Carl Jung tests psychology’s BORders; a Zen koan admonishes us not to belaBOR emotional experience; DeBORah Campana analyses John Cage; David Tudor plays the same Stockhausen piece over and over during a concert in GreensBORo. As Dostoevsky cries, ‘What inventions can boredom not lead to!’ ([1864] 1993: 16). Heidegger, Beckett, Cage and Warhol’s belief in boredom’s productivity was threefold: first, it deepens and aestheticizes features we ordinarily overlook. Second, it compels us to structure time and embodiment in the absence of stimulus. Third, as above, it provokes action for action’s sake – not as escape from boredom, but a wandering within it. For these thinkers, professions of faith in boredom came well before their careers were up (all were in their thirties). They came well before the century was up, too. This matters because the fourteen years between 1964’s Empire and 1978’s ‘Warm Leatherette’ are culturally very long ones. The time frame is vital here. Eldritch Priest historicizes: Being bored is not the ride it once was. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, boredom bored so many holes in the body of every genre, every medium, every performance, and every criticism, that it bled its promise of bliss into ever-narrower furrows of distraction. The problem with boredom now is that the rituals of bloodletting that go by the name ‘boring art’ are largely indistinguishable from the practices of everyday life. (2013: 34)

Priest offers no exact turning point, but that shift ‘throughout the second half of the twentieth century’ centralizes the Normal’s position atop the boredom crest: when unboring boredom loses viability. Kenneth Goldsmith affirms this timeline: ‘It’s no wonder people bailed out of boredom in the late 70s and early 80s to go into punk rock or expressionistic painting’ (2004a). Was postmodernism over just as it was beginning? Ballard himself remembered it similarly in 1984: ‘In many ways, time didn’t exist in the sixties, just a set of endlessly proliferating presents. Time returned in the seventies, but not a sense of the future. The hands of the clock now go nowhere’ (Frick 1984). A tear of petrol is in your eye.

Boredom III: Boring boredom Punk, as Goldsmith suggests, rails against boredom with rage unknown to Cage and Warhol. This boredom was youth’s disdain for their inherited world’s

‘Let’s Make Love Before You Die’

23

industrial realism: ashes of 1960s optimism and post-war sermons demanding gratitude for government, old buildings, schools, police, parents and jobs. The Sex Pistols excoriated that suffocation, lyrically – ‘No Future!’ – and visually: the 1977 ‘Pretty Vacant’ sleeve (Figure 1.3) foregrounds city buses to Nowhere and Boredom. Punk declares war on slow and easy death. Daniel Miller’s inspiration was the Desperate Bicycles’ self-explanatory ‘The Medium Was Tedium’ (Rutter 2011: 38). Similarly paving the way for Miller was the Buzzcocks’ 1976 demotape opener ‘Boredom’, which became an early hit of Rough Trade’s distribution. The Adverts’ ‘Bored Teenagers’ followed (Anchor 1977). Far from neutral fascination, boredom was illness and death. Destroy All Monsters’ debut song ‘Bored’ rants of doctors being unable to cure ‘bored-ills’ (IDBI Records 1978). In 1979, GG Allin sneers on his first single ‘Bored to Death’, that he’s sick of you, sick of himself and bored to death (Blood 1979). That same year Iggy Pop declares that he is sick when he goes to sleep and when he wakes, all because – as the titular lyric says, ‘I’m Bored’ (Arista 1979). Greil Marcus elaborates, ‘In modern society, leisure (What do I want to do today?) was replaced by entertainment (What is there to see today?). The potential fact of all possible freedoms was replaced by a fiction of false freedom: … it was boring’ (1990: 47). The boredom punk diagnoses lurked in architecture,

Figure 1.3 Sex Pistols, ‘Pretty Vacant’ (Virgin 1977). Designed by Jamie Reid.

24

Mute Records

politics and media – all ‘practices of everyday life’, to quote Priest (2013: 34). For teens and twenty-somethings, there was no need to meditate on Warholian tedium; it loomed everywhere. Thus Ballard’s prophecy: ‘It’s possible that my children and yours will live in an eventless world, and that the faculty of imagination will die’ (Frick 1984). He continues, ‘die or express itself solely in the realm of psychopathology’, echoing Guy Debord and the Situationists’ faith in lunacy. Craziness emerges as a good alternative to the ubiquity of boring boredom – the kind of craziness, for example, that craves car-crash sex. As Svendsen writes, ‘To transgress this boredom, man goes in for ever more extreme transgressions’ (2005: 84). The most oppressive boredom spawns the most resplendent depravity. For all his landfill nihilism, Ballard saw himself an ethicist: ‘Crash is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape’ (Baxter and Wymer 2012: 5). Far from admonishing the perversions he portrays, he warns against the incipient reality that gives rise to them. His enemy is the dehumanizing glow emanating from every surface – like boredom-as-sickness, emanating even from within. That is literally the subject of ‘T.V.O.D.’: ‘I don’t need a TV screen / I just stick the aerial into my skin / Let the signal run through my veins’.4 This prescience is why, in a world of cell phones and the ‘internet of things’, ‘Warm Leatherette’ and Ballard persist: over a dozen new renditions of the song have materialized since 2010 alone, and responding to the 2016 US presidential election, the Guardian published Bea Ballard’s ‘How My Father, JG Ballard, Foresaw Our Strange Present’ (2016).

Crash II: Coolness When twenty-six-year-old Miller made the song, ‘I was listening to the Ramones and I was listening to Kraftwerk’ (King 2012). Musically, the track is neatly a fifty-fifty hybrid of the two. And as we have seen, it also marks their cultural crossroads: punk’s devil-may-care rage and the 1970s electronic scene’s avantgarde intellectualism. This hybridity – a prototype for Mute Records – is why we hear both boredoms in the song: one is patient and strange (the powers-oftwo structure, the way its repetition draws our attention to timbre), while the 4

‘T.V.O.D’ written by D. Miller, courtesy Mute Song Limited.

‘Let’s Make Love Before You Die’

25

other is jittery and bland (the suffocation of its tempo, the way it can strike us in the wrong mood as annoying). We can map this tension onto two visions for humanity that ‘Warm Leatherette’ suggests. One last time, Crash helps us articulate them. One ostensible tragedy of Ballard’s novel is that even in the double ecstasy of crashsex, the characters remain in a mechanical world of boring boredom. Yet nothing ultimately stops them from at least trying to feel, no matter how disappointing the outcome. Repetition. Accordingly, there is a way to hear each lyric in ‘Warm Leatherette’ as sequentially approaching humanity by approaching the body as the machine drives closer: first we see, then feel, then the car melts on us, enters our eyes (a natural opening) and ultimately bores a hole into us forcibly. In this view, despite being dead and fucked, we centralize our human selves. Even unfulfilled, our willingness to crash again tells us there lies something romantic in the promise. Critics Fred Botting and Scott Wilson write, ‘Jouissance remains postponed, but the recovery of its possibility, its fantasy, constitutes the occasion for the reappearance of desire’, which they align with self-actualization (2003: 87). ‘From being a mechanical failure of diminishing returns’, they continue, ‘sex is transformed by the crash and becomes, again, a liberating experience. Maybe’ (2003: 87). Concerning this pointed ‘maybe’, there exists a radical alternative reading of Crash through the productive lens of unboring boredom. Here we don’t resist, but instead focus on the sensation of reorganizing ourselves and our world from within: not chasing life, but exploring lifelessness. Here, characters aren’t fleeing boredom, but surrendering to the godless world’s decree that they are merely objects. They become cut-ups and anagrams until meaning and identity dissipate: it is the only role available when everything is flattened by late capitalism’s onedimensional measurement – the dollar-sign. The progression of grammatical subjects across the lyric traces this: Person: ‘see’ Person: ‘feel’ Thing: ‘Warm leatherette melts’ Person: ‘can see’ Thing: ‘tear of petrol’ Thing: ‘hand brake’

Beginning to end, the song models a progression away from subjectivity – from person to thing. (This resembles Baudrillard’s take on Crash.) Here the

26

Mute Records

protagonist is not a person, but a worldly state of affairs to which personhood is irrelevant. A few writers (first Ernst Jünger and more recently Diedrich Diederichsen) even suggest that real humans should consider embracing nonsubjectivity: ‘become a thing, an object buffeted to and fro’, says Diederichsen (2012: 34). Enjoy the submissive ride. Crash and ‘Warm Leatherette’ are different artefacts. One is a novel and the other a pop song; one inspires incredulous brooding and the other, dancing; one sublimates the body into the mind and the other subsumes mind into body. In Ballard’s book, content is stretched too thin, repeated too prosaically, and so stripped of attitude that, despite its polysemy, it cannot conjure punk’s brazenness. Thus treatises on technology and boredom usually engage with ‘serious’ art, not seven-inch records. For the length of a pop song, though, audiences can suspend critique in favour of cool. So ‘Warm Leatherette’ doesn’t recap the book so much as flash its cover – reviewers suggest Crash makes for better namedropping than reading. In punk’s grab-and-go symbolism, the song is teenage materiality playing brash with mature tragedies – like Sid Vicious wearing a swastika. The song doesn’t care to tell us which interpretation of Crash it favours. And the dancing hairsprayed kids did not ask whether they were supposed to be romantics or post-human. Yet they answered, in their own way.

Reflection in the luminescent dash Music and literature help us construct our identities subconsciously: we are pulled towards one song but not another; we dance this way but not that. We therein make interpretive decisions, ascribing unspoken meanings that emerge in clothes we wear, friends we choose, drinks we order. The Normal belonged to the electric soundtrack of a dozen subcultures burgeoning at the Blitz Club, F Club, Mudd Club and Danceteria, each barely aware of its distinctive worldview. As Anthony Haden-Guest recalls, ‘Warm Leatherette’ was, with Bauhaus’s ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ (Small Wonder 1979), one of the two songs heralding a new youth era (1997: 98–9). Before anyone invested in words like new romantic, gothic or futurist, the values guiding our varied readings of Crash and ‘Warm Leatherette’ wordlessly congregated nascent tribes. Wanna find post-punk subcultures who heard in ‘Warm Leatherette’ a lastchance bid for individual expression? Look to the kids who saw the Cure’s

‘Let’s Make Love Before You Die’

27

Seventeen Seconds tour a year later. Here ‘Let’s make love before we die’ nears Morrissey’s most Byronic longing. Romantic rage against boring boredom. Wanna find fans who got off on hearing in ‘Warm Leatherette’ an anti-human audacity? Start by asking who bought LPs by Dome and This Heat in 1980. Here unspoken is a trolling challenge to the squares, where the irony of the band name is manifest: sex in car crashes? This is Normal. (Think Ultravox’s ‘I Want to Be a Machine’ (Island 1977), or Ministry’s ‘Everyday (Is Halloween)’ (Wax Trax! 1985)), Remaking the self in response to unboring boredom. Oversimplifications, yes – nobody is quite so deterministic – but the semiotics ring true, and they illustrate how ‘Warm Leatherette’ advertizes through curt coolness several possible valences. Ramones/Kraftwerk. Punk/avant-garde. Debord/Warhol. Crashing to rouse the soul or to kill it. Here coexist all these meanings, all these audiences, and here lies the power of ‘Warm Leatherette’ – on whose shoulders (and with whose funds) Mute Records was built. And just as all these reactions are embodied in the listenership that the Normal and Mute have fostered, the worldly challenges that spawned them have only grown harder to ignore. It was 1978 and the future had already arrived.

References 3302 Taxi (1979), [Film] Dir. Christoph Döring. Ableton (2016), ‘Daniel Miller on Channeling Creativity: A&R as Creative Practice’. Available online: https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/daniel-miller-channelingcreativity/ (accessed 1 July 2016). Ballard, B. (2016), ‘How My Father, JG Ballard, Foresaw our Strange Present’, Guardian, 20 November. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/ nov/20/how-my-father-jg-ballard-foresaw-our-strange-present (accessed 13 April 2018). Ballard, J. G. (1962), The Drowned World, New York: Berkley. Ballard, J. G. (1964), The Burning World, New York: Berkley. Ballard, J. G. (1966), The Crystal World, London: Jonathan Cape. Ballard, J. G. (1973), Crash, London: Jonathan Cape. Baudrillard, J. (1994), Simulacra and Simulation, trans. S. Faria Glase, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Baxter, J., and R. Wymer (2012), ‘Introduction’, in J. Baxter and R. Wymer (eds), J. G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions, 1–18, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Botting, F., and S. Wilson (2003), ‘Sexcrash’, in J. Arthurs and I. Grant (eds), Crash Cultures: Modernity, Mediation and the Material, 79–90 Portland: Intellect Books.

28

Mute Records

Cage, J. (1961), Silence: Lectures and Writing, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. ‘Classic Album Sundays with Daniel Miller founder of Mute Records’ (2017), Classic Album Sundays, 11 December. Available online: http://classicalbumsundays.com/ interview-with-daniel-miller-founder-of-mute-records/ (accessed 20 April 2018). Diederichsen, D. (2012), ‘Entertainment Through Pain’ in M. Fusco and R. Birkett (eds), Cosey Complex, 25–34, Köln: Koenig Books. Dostoevsky, F. ([1864] 1993), Notes From Underground, trans. R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky, New York: Vintage Classics. Dynaudio Professional (2016), ‘Studio Masters: Daniel Miller’. Available online: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLrYLk1eYCk#t=76 (accessed 10 July 2016). Eat (1964), [Film] Dir. Andy Warhol, USA: Warhol Films. Empire (1964), [Film] Dir. Andy Warhol and John Palmer, USA: Warhol Films. Frick, T. (1984), ‘J. G. Ballard, The Art of Fiction No. 85’, Paris Review. Available online: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2929/the-art-of-fiction-no-85-j-g-ballard (accessed 10 July 2016). Gates, K. (2015), ‘Daniel Miller: “I Was Determined to Make Mute a Success”’. Available online: http://www.pias.com/blog/daniel-miller-determined-make-mute-success/ (accessed 1 July 2016). Goldsmith, K. (2004a), ‘Being Boring’ paper presented at The First Séance for Experimental Literature, Disney REDCAT Theatre, Los Angeles. Available online: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/goldsmith_boring.html (accessed 1 July 2016). Goldsmith, K., ed. (2004b), I’ll Be Your Mirror, New York: Da Capo Press. Goodstein, E. S. (2004), Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Haden-Guest, A. (1997), The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night, New York: William Morrow. Heidegger, M. (1995). The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Highmore, B. (2003), ‘Crashed-Out: Laundry Vans, Photographs and a Question of Consciousness’ in J. Arthurs and I. Grant (eds), Crash Cultures: Modernity, Mediation and the Material, 53–62, Portland: Intellect Books. King, R. (2012), How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975–2005, London: Faber & Faber. Majewski, L., and J. Bernstein (2014), Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs that Defined the 1980s, New York: Abrams Image. Marcus, G. (1990), Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Priest, E. (2013), Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure, New York: Bloomsbury.

‘Let’s Make Love Before You Die’

29

Richmond, S. C. (2015), ‘Vulgar Boredom, or What Andy Warhol Can Teach Us about Candy Crush’, Journal of Visual Culture, 14 (1): 21–39. Rutter, P. (2011), The Music Industry Handbook, New York: Routledge. Sleep (1963), [Film] Dir. Andy Warhol, USA: Warhol Films. Spare, A. O. (2001), Ethos, Thame: I-H-O Books. Sterne, J. (2006), ‘The Death and Life of Digital Audio’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 31 (4): 338–48. Svendsen, L. (2005), A Philosophy of Boredom, London: Reaktion Books. Warhol, A., and P. Heckett (1980), Popism: The Warhol Sixties, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

2

‘One Man’s Meat’: Fad Gadget’s Social Commentary and Post-Punk Giuseppe Zevolli

In December 1982 NME asked Alison Moyet of synth-pop duo Yazoo to reflect on the music released that year. In her column, titled ‘Commerciality, Once Scorned, is now Embraced’, Moyet touched on the role played by the synthesizer. ‘It became a featured instrument as opposed to a fad gadget or a versatile effects unit’, she wrote, ‘causing much controversy among Musicians’ Union members and musos alike’ (1982: 37). From a ‘fad gadget’ to the instrument of choice, the pervasiveness of the synthesizer was partly explained with the newfound hipness of commercial appeal. Synthesizers were easy to mess around with: for many musicians this was enough to claim a continuity with the DIY spirit of punk. Nevertheless synth-based pop became the battlefield for old and new discourses of authenticity. In the new technologies, detractors saw the threat of fakery, an anti-communitarian individualism removed from the connection with nature idealized by the folk tradition (Frith 1986). The sound of synthesizers, paired with a rejection of the guitar-based canon of the British alternative, made Mute synonymous from the start with a futurepositive deconstruction of inherited ideals of authenticity. The first artist to appear on Mute in the wake of Miller’s success with his ‘T.V.O.D.’ single as the Normal – Frank Tovey, using the name ‘Fad Gadget’ – helped to lay the foundations of the Mute sensibility: deadpan humour, stark minimalism and an initial rejection of guitar rock. Released in September 1979, Tovey’s first single ‘Back to Nature’ carried the MUTE002 catalogue number and crystallized his place in the canon of pioneers of electronic music. On the black-and-white picture sleeve Tovey, then aged twenty-three, appeared in the nude, sat with his back to the listener, a literal play on the song’s title (Figure 2.1). In light of the debates on the inauthenticity of synth-based music, the track could be read as a statement of intent: no turning back, the future was synth.

32

Mute Records

Figure 2.1 Front sleeve of Fad Gadget, ‘Back to Nature’ (Mute 1979).

Tovey’s career, while being crucial to the development and critical success of Mute, was also peculiarly positioned within the broader spectrum of postpunk. Concentrating on key works in his discography and engaging with their contemporary reception, this chapter shines a light on those moments in Tovey’s career as Fad Gadget where one of the crucial tensions of the post-punk era materialized: the tension between its ‘culturalist’ and ‘anti-culturalist’ tendencies (Wilkinson 2016: 19). Whereas the culturalist voices in post-punk claimed a space for popular music devoted to experimentation and ideally uncompromized by the logics of the market, anti-culturalists pointed at ‘the weakness of the culturalist distinction of culture from commerce’ (Wilkinson 2016: 19). Best exemplified by the work of artists associated with ‘new pop’, some of whom, like the Human League and Scritti Politti, transitioned from one position to the other (Reynolds 2005: 366), the anti-culturalist stance manifested itself in the ambition to gain mainstream visibility, the celebration of stardom and the impatience for overly serious, socially conscious music. The futuristic drive of Tovey’s early electronic work and his commitment to question ideas of rock authenticity came to be accompanied over time by a sense of contrariness. Fad Gadget was always too dance-oriented in sound and eccentric in presentation to fit with the rockier element of leftist post-punk; at the same

‘One Man’s Meat’

33

time, as the 1980s unfolded and synth-based pop started to dominate the charts, Tovey, who never achieved commercial success outside of the independent circuit,1 slowly transitioned towards a recuperation of non-synthetic sounds; his music too gloomy and politically engaged to fit with the hedonistic landscape of new pop. ‘One minute I want to make a really commercial disco record and the next I want to use feedback guitar and go wild. Maybe that’s where I’m going wrong’, he said promoting Gag, his last record as Fad Gadget (Lake 1984: 27). In 1986 he decided to drop the moniker and adopt his own name, a reversal process that inaugurated a new phase in his career, one where his songwriting became overly committed to socialist themes and a recuperation of roots music. Concentrating on the Fad Gadget years allows us to recognize the peculiarity of Tovey’s work in the post-punk era and to appreciate the complexity of his commitment to merge fun with social commentary. ‘No one is allowed to have FUN anymore’, wrote Ian Penman lamenting the self-seriousness of most socially conscious post-punk acts (1981: 21). With his minimalistic uptempo tracks and stage theatrics, Fad Gadget did not fit that description. At the same time, Tovey was quick to distance himself from the disengaged fun of the most avowedly anticulturalist new pop acts. In that year of 1982 when ‘commerciality, once scorned, was now embraced’, Tovey revealed his plan to ‘become more commercial and more weird at the same time’ (Page 1982), while stating ‘I think music should reflect social and cultural concerns. People are actually bragging that their music doesn’t mean anything’ (Pye 1982a). The dialectic between anti-commercialism and anti-culturalism, I argue, can be read as a critical, but ultimately productive tension in Tovey’s work.

Dance music for post-apocalyptic times ‘Secretly I feel that Frank’s happy being on the outside of the chart circus.’ With these words Edwin Pouncey concluded his Fad Gadget profile for Sounds (1983: 28). It was Pouncey, the cartoonist known as Savage Pencil, who introduced Miller to his then flatmate Tovey in the late 1970s. Tovey had graduated in performance from what was then Leeds Polytechnic, but decided to focus on music, finding it frustrating to land gigs in the London theatre circuit (Bohn 1

Only in 1984 did Fad Gadget enter the main UK chart, with the singles ‘Collapsing New People’ and ‘One Man’s Meat’ reaching numbers 85 and 92.

34

Mute Records

1980b: 7). A Grundig tape recorder and a Crumar Compac electric piano were all he had, until he decided to invest in a Korg drum machine and synthesizer. Tovey sent a demo of ‘Back to Nature’ to Miller. ‘We had really similar ideas’, remembered Miller. ‘So we did the single together, a hand-shake deal, 50–50 profit-share, no commitment to further product’ (Ogg 2009: 268). Recorded at the London RMS Studios, ‘Back To Nature’ officially welcomed Tovey as the first new artist on Mute, while inaugurating Miller’s career as a producer of other artists. For the studio recording, the song was considerably shortened from its demo version, Tovey’s original experiments with highpitched, whistling sounds disseminated throughout the track, but lower in the mix. Propelled by a steady, galloping drum machine, the song is swathed in noisy, distorted synths, making for a rather foggy and dystopian descent to the dance floor. Tovey’s vocal delivery oscillates between the unperturbed and the dejected. Although ultimately portraying a love encounter, Tovey depicts a postapocalyptic scenario where bodies are left burning in the sun and a ‘capitalist aircraft’ hovers above the protagonists, polluting the air. B-side ‘The Box’ continues this preoccupation with environmental decay, this time watched through the TV screen. Tovey’s lyrics describe the movements of the camera as the protagonist in the scene gets choked to death. Similarly to the Normal’s ‘T.V.O.D.’, in ‘The Box’ the lines between body and screen are blurred. An instant favourite in the zine circuit surrounding the industrial underground (Sheffield’s NMX in particular), the bleak undertones of ‘Back To Nature’ did not convince the NME: ‘Why do artists who dabble in abstract industrial electro art rock seemingly all have dead eyes and even deader voices?’ (Carr 1979: 28). Little did NME know at the time about Tovey’s future career as an energetic performer, and the music press do not appear to have received accurate information about Darryl, the faux frontman of Miller’s Silicon Teens, played by Tovey in the promotional materials circulated between 1979 and 1980. The stunt behind Silicon Teens gave Tovey an opportunity to bridge his background in performance with his newborn career as a musician, subverting notions of rock authenticity in the process. A continuity between Silicon Teens and Fad Gadget is also traceable in the presentation of Tovey’s second single ‘Ricky’s Hand’ (Mute 1980). The sleeve was inspired by anti-drink and drive adverts, and was designed by Simone Grant, employing the same graphic style she had utilized for the first two Silicon Teens singles. In the song the protagonist Ricky overindulges in alcohol, and loses control and eventually the titular hand in a car accident. Two drops of beer

‘One Man’s Meat’

35

dissolve Ricky’s hand on the front cover (Figure 2.2), while on the back sleeve a hand is inserted into a blender in three steps (Figure 2.3). A possible allusion to the deconstruction of the track on the B-side (‘Handshake’), the sequence reads as a recipe for self-destruction. A signal at the bottom of the back sleeve warns: ‘IMPORTANT. Only synthetic sound sources have been used in the making of this disc’. This warning, paired with the idea of the ‘passing fad’ alluded to in the Fad Gadget nom de plume, spoke volumes of Tovey’s stand on the rockist stigmatization of synths as inauthentic. Furthermore, it resonated with similar provocations that appeared on Silicon Teens releases such as ‘Mute Records: for that really up-to-date sound’ (‘Judy in Disguise’ (1980)). Despite its bleak narrative of addiction and self-destruction, ‘Ricky’s Hand’, hovering around the 90 BPM mark, is quintessentially dance-oriented. Its propulsive rhythm comes with a twist: a Black and Decker V8 double speed electric drill pierces through the synth lines at any mention of the song’s title. The track ends with Tovey’s wife Barbara Frost’s ascendant vocals, ultimately quashed under the weight of a spiralling modulation. ‘We recorded a synth under it at a very low level’, said Tovey, ‘and all that happens at the end is that the voice is faded out and the synth sound breaks underneath. It was very

Figure 2.2 Front sleeve of Fad Gadget, ‘Ricky’s Hand’ (Mute 1980). Courtesy of Simone Grant.

36

Mute Records

Figure 2.3 Back sleeve of Fad Gadget, ‘Ricky’s Hand’ (Mute 1980). Courtesy of Simone Grant.

effective’ (Goldstein 1984: 29). ‘Ricky’s Hand’ was released to positive reviews and remained in the independent charts for twelve weeks,2 peaking at number eleven. Tovey immediately felt the pressure to stick to the formula: ‘Everyone expected me to do another “Ricky’s Hand”’, he recalled (Page 1982). The commercial potential of the early Fad Gadget singles was not lost on major label representatives: ‘There was interest in Frank’, remembered Miller. ‘We went together to see CBS … but … we wanted to keep it so that it wasn’t driven by commercial considerations’ (Ogg 2009: 169). Tovey ultimately decided to stay with Mute. Tovey’s new songs reflected his everyday life as an unemployed artist, tucked away in his Fulham flat, immersed in books and TV. ‘It’s about me sitting here, watching telly’, said Tovey of his first LP Fireside Favourites (Mute 1980) (Bohn 1980b: 7). In interviews Tovey was critical of the way the news

2

Iain McNay of Cherry Red Records conceived the idea of a separate UK chart for records released by independent labels. The first of these charts was published in the trade journal Record Business in January 1980 and they were quickly picked up by other publications including NME, Sounds, Melody Maker and Smash Hits. To qualify for these charts, records had to be distributed and marketed ‘without recourse to the machinery of the majors’ (Ogg 2009: 396).

‘One Man’s Meat’

37

prioritized scandals and shocking details, confessing his fascination for the reality-twisting potential of the media. Consumerism emerges as one of the main targets of his sardonic commentary: subverting the dominant ideal of emancipation through consumption, the characters on Fireside Favourites are all destined to fail. The near impossibility to fully go ‘back to nature’ is echoed in the opener track ‘Pedestrian’, which depicts a landscape of concrete and cars, consumerism being the only illusory form of escape. ‘Coitus Interruptus’ shifts the anxiety to the bedroom, in a non-autobiographical disco-epic of missed sexual opportunities. In the title track two lovers are being affectionate in front of the fireplace. As the song unfolds, their bodies start decaying under the effect of a ‘mushroom cloud up in the sky’, an image conjuring the anxiety of nuclear war.3 Surveying the semiotics of punk in its transition to post punk, Worley observed: Where Britain in the mid-to-late 1970s could be characterised as a country in the midst of a severe economic crisis and apparent political paralysis, then the early 1980s were defined by socioeconomic convulsions that accompanied Margaret Thatcher’s monetarist shock therapy and the resurgent tension of the Cold War … The postindustrial signifiers of the 1970s were thus transformed into the post-apocalyptic. (2011: 70–1)

This is certainly true of Fad Gadget. Despite Tovey’s commitment to make danceable, fun music, images of decay and destruction populate his early work. Thatcher’s ‘monetarist shock therapy’ sounds particularly post-apocalyptic on ‘State of The Nation’. Drums lead Tovey’s austere considerations on the state of the country, while abrasions, noises and the occasional shriek boil lower in the mix. Consumer guides feed everyone’s obsession with the accumulation of superfluous goods; a price is put on everyone’s potential. In the chorus, drums suddenly halt, leaving Tovey to conclude: ‘Life begins when you’re ready to face it / I’ve changed my mind because I’m stuck on / The state of the nation’.4 Too ‘cold and dreary’ an affair for Melody Maker (Strange 1980), Fireside Favourites was favourably received by NME’s Chris Bohn, who found that with his debut Tovey had tapped ‘further his grotesque humour and capacity for sardonic observation’ (1980a). Tovey’s social commentary was there to stay.

3 4

‘Fireside Favourite’ written by F. Tovey, courtesy Mute Song Limited. ‘State of the Nation’ written by F. Tovey, courtesy Mute Song Limited.

38

Mute Records

Bodies and masks In 1981 Tovey told ZigZag: ‘I’d like to bring more danger into the music. When you’re playing with other musicians things can go wrong or things can happen that you didn’t expect to happen. Sound becomes very flat with drum machines’ (Hada 1981: 34). His next single for Mute, however, would turn out to be a bipolar affair: while the blithe ‘Make Room’ (Mute 1981) was all about Pete Balmer’s funky bass and Robert Gotobed on live drums, ‘Lady Shave’ (Mute 1981), co-written with Miller, boasted one of Tovey’s most manic interpretations over a bed of splintering synths. An obsessively protracted tune, ‘Lady Shave’ restored, and perhaps surpassed, the synth minimalism of his early singles. The music seems to expand under the weight of Tovey’s shrieks and admonitions; it is quintessential body music at the intersection of fun and discipline. In the lyrics Tovey deplores the ideals of femininity imposed on girls by the media: ‘Stupid magazines / spread a social disease’.5 Tovey reassures the lady with a hysterical shout (‘You don’t have to shave it!’), but also alludes to razors as potential instruments of self-harm to dramatize his point. Emblematic of Tovey’s imaginative critique, ‘Lady Shave’ is only one of his many songs confronting gender norms. What makes it stand out among them is its fine balance between commentary and horror, enrapturing rhythm and staged expressionism. Tovey explored these nuances in his concerts. Towards the end of ‘Lady Shave’ he would remain shirtless, reach for his pubic hair and flick some on the audience. As one reviewer put it: ‘There’s a parody of the haunted artist, the possessed rock‘n’roller, and the fascinating pervert in the famous hair-pulling sequence’ (Kiley 1983). Thanks to a photo shoot by Anton Corbijn that depicted Tovey fully covered in shaving foam, ‘Lady Shave’ became synonymous with Fad Gadget. Tovey came to regard performance and presentation as crucial components of his critique. If mocking the puritanical, anti-image tendencies of post-punk was one of the core elements of new pop (Wilkinson 2016: 56–7), then Fad Gadget at least in part shared its penchant for onstage mystification. Yet Tovey’s performances were always too ‘self-degrading’, as he put it (Lake 1984: 26), to ever approximate the glamour and ‘cleanliness’ of new pop stardom (Reynolds 2005: 364). It could be argued that Tovey was more interested in challenging, or degrading the pop star ideal, rather than embodying a pop cool. Of the Gag album cover by Corbijn (Mute 1984), portraying him in tar and feather with his tongue stuck up in the air (Figure 2.4), Tovey said: ‘I suppose I should have 5

‘Lady Shave’ written by F. Tovey and D. Miller, courtesy Mute Song Limited.

‘One Man’s Meat’

39

Figure 2.4 Front sleeve of Fad Gadget, Gag (Mute 1994). Photograph by Anton Corbijn.

a picture of myself looking pretty … but I always end up doing something like this. It’s commercial suicide really’ (‘Knocked by’ 1984). If on the one hand Tovey interpreted the shock value of his presentation as ‘commercial suicide’, on the other hand he remained committed to exploring the link between his role as a performer and the power of media to influence their audiences. On the cover of his second LP Incontinent (Mute 1981) he appeared wearing a Punch costume. ‘It was the spectacle of the world itself ’, he said recalling the hours spent watching Punch and Judy shows as a child, ‘which … presented itself to me in an infinitely simplified and caricatured form, as if to underline its grotesque and brutal truth’ (Morley 1982: 11). Choosing the role of Punch for himself, Tovey aspired to have an eye-opening impact on his audiences. In the Incontinent cut ‘Swallow it’ stomping percussions sustain the most Adornian verses in his discography: ‘Watch the mass be served more trash / and the content stays the same’.6 Singing ‘swallow it, like the fools you are’, Tovey was clearly interpolating his listeners as consumers. In ‘Blind Eyes’ Tovey 6

‘Swallow It’ written by F. Tovey, D. Simmonds and P. Balmer, courtesy Mute Song Limited.

40

Mute Records

attacks the escapism of entertainment while reflecting on his double role as Fad Gadget the performer and Punch the eye-opener: ‘Waste your money on some Fad Gadget / A novelty toy for the family / Let’s all play at feeling concerned / It doesn’t really make any difference to me’.7 As reviewers pointed out, with its mixture of dance and noise Incontinent consolidated the sound of Fireside Favourites (Tickell 1981). By the time of the album’s release, Mute was in the midst of its first wave of international success, thanks to the release of Depeche Mode’s debut Speak & Spell (Mute 1981). Tovey was observing. ‘There’s no route for us, unless I start turning out stuff like Depeche Mode and I don’t want to do that’ (Morley 1982: 10).

State of the nation Tovey’s third Fad Gadget LP Under The Flag (Mute 1982) turned out to be a retreat into the bleakest synth-pop he had ever produced. The album, released in September 1982, reflected Tovey’s disappointment in UK politics. The Falkland Islands war was the backdrop to his bitter reflections on the manifestations of patriotism during the Thatcher era. ‘That whole period was very traumatic. Racing through my head were visions of my wife giving birth and soldiers getting their guts blown away’, he said referring to Frost’s pregnancy (Pye 1982c). On the cover, once again by Corbijn, there is a silhouette of Tovey holding a flag, stylized as three brush strokes. Although Tovey refuted the ‘concept album’ label, it is impossible not to see Under The Flag as a cohesive work, both for its sound and narrative arc. The title track, split into ‘Part I’ and ‘Part II’, opens and seals the record. In between a fictional ‘anti-hero’, who has opted for a job in the government ‘in a time of world recession’, becomes a father and resorts to alcohol, religion and patriotism to find hope and meaning. A plan destined to fail. Musically the record is understated, almost entirely dominated by cold synth lines and percussion that remains unaltered for the whole duration of a song. ‘The reason I wanted the music to be relatively uneventful was that the lyrics on that album were very intense, and I wanted the vocals to stand out’, said Tovey (Goldstein 1984: 30). Eight vocalists are credited on the record, including labelmate Alison Moyet, who also plays sax on ‘Wheels of Fortune’. Choruses bring soul to ‘Love Parasite’, a rare moment of cheerfulness inspired by Frost’s pregnancy. ‘Plainsong’, one of Tovey’s most disquieting tracks, takes issue with the glorification 7

‘Blind Eyes’ written by F. Tovey and P. Balmer, courtesy Mute Song Limited.

‘One Man’s Meat’

41

of patriotic messages through an a cappella tour de force where a swarm of processed vocals and the singing choir chase each other and find, at last, a moment of unison. Despite the catchiness of the singles ‘Life On The Line’ and ‘For Whom The Bells Toll’, the true character of the record lies in its sense of hopelessness. ‘The Sheep Look Up’ is where it reaches its zenith. Accompanied by a resonant grand piano, sleigh bells and an arpeggiating synth, Tovey concludes: people want the war to quench their thirst for realness. Tovey did not consider Under The Flag a defeatist record, but admitted that the feelings he expressed on the album were pessimistic in nature. Compared to, say, Scritti Politti’s gospel of disillusionment, ‘Faithless’ (Rough Trade 1982), released in April of the same year, Tovey’s epic sounded ultimately sad, even mournful. Whereas Green Gartside could turn a song ‘about not having any belief in a cast-iron guarantee to your own beliefs’ into a sultry hit, Tovey released music that matched his own internal battles (Barber 1982: 20). ‘I did believe in hope – maybe some kind of socialism. But when I saw how many people jumped on the war bandwagon … it altered my views about the masses’ (Pye 1982c). ‘GLOOMY GADGETRY’, recited the title of the NME in bold red lettering. Reviewer Dave Hill empathized with Tovey’s struggle, but ultimately could not bear its weight (1982). Melody Maker criticized the record’s hopelessness (Pye 1982b). Surely Tovey knew that humour, however dark, was by now expected to temper the social preoccupations in his work: the lack of levity in Under The Flag makes for a significant change in his career, perhaps the one where Tovey’s sense of contrariness manifested itself most vehemently. ‘I’m tired of trying to be funny’, he said at the time (Pye 1982c). While Mute was orchestrating the ascent of Yazoo and Depeche Mode and new pop was reaching its peak of popularity, Tovey became increasingly frustrated with the lack of radio play and commercial success of his songs, opening up in interviews about the struggles to make a living as a musician. Despite the topicality of its subject matter, his most synthesizer-oriented record ended up being his least à la page.

Exit Fad ‘What can I write?  /  What can I sing?  /  How can I fight?’, sang Tovey in ‘I Discover Love’, his one-off offering from 1983.8 The single, a brassy cabaret 8

‘I Discover Love’ written by F. Tovey, courtesy Mute Song Limited.

42

Mute Records

hymn to love and resilience, featured Birthday Party member Rowland S. Howard on guitar and purposefully lacked synthetic sounds. His last album as Fad Gadget, Gag, released in February 1984, would not sever his relationship with synth-pop once and for all, but certainly inaugurated a new phase in his songwriting. ‘When I first started using synths they were incredibly unfashionable. I don’t think I’ll ever do anything just because everybody else is doing it’, he said as if to update his own commitment to contrariness (Goldstein 1984: 30). In addition, Tovey welcomed the idea of making Gag a collective effort. Members of his band, from guitar and double bass player Dave Rodgers to viola player Joni Sackett, are credited as writers. The group recorded in Berlin at Hansa Tonstudios, where some of Tovey’s favourite records had been made, the Birthday Party’s Bad Seed EP (4AD 1983) being one (Pouncey 1983). Making the most of the natural echo properties of the studio, the group aimed for a dynamic, rock band feel, rendered more unpredictable through the use of digital reverb and delays. The contrast with Under The Flag could not be more apparent: here even the bitter undertones are uplifted by a renewed sense of belief and trust in the future. On opener ‘Ideal World’ Tovey emerges from a mantle of drums singing ‘As I dream I live’, depicting an utopian scenario of ‘no stress, no pain’.9 On ‘Sleep’ comes hope for the next generation, reflecting Tovey’s personal journey into fatherhood. The song opens with his daughter Morgan’s voice and proceeds as a folky nursery rhyme, embellished by Sackett’s viola and Simmonds’s touches on the celesta. In the joyous ‘Stand Up’ Tovey tells his daughter to reach for the stars and contemplates: ‘Look at me I’m always complaining, seems I got it wrong / But now I’m sick of hearing that same sad song’.10 The Gag cut ‘Collapsing New People’ (Mute 1984), his sardonic manifesto against subcultural conformism, ended up being his most successful single. While in Berlin to record Gag, Tovey shared the stage with industrial behemoths Einstürzende Neubauten (German for ‘collapsing new buildings’). The next day he went into the studio and wrote about their audience: ‘Takes hours of preparation / to get that wasted look’.11 Neubauten visited the studio, liked the

9 10 11

‘Ideal World’ written by F. Tovey, B. Frost and N. Cash, courtesy Mute Song Limited. ‘Stand Up’ written by F. Tovey, D. Rogers and D. Simmonds, courtesy Mute Song Limited. ‘Collapsing New People’ written by F. Tovey, D. Simmonds, D. Rogers, N. Cash and B. Frost, courtesy Mute Song Limited.

‘One Man’s Meat’

43

song, and contributed percussion to an impromptu ‘Berlin Mix’ featured on the 12" version of the single.12 Though not as commercially successful as ‘Collapsing’, Tovey’s last single as Fad Gadget, the Gag cut ‘One Man’s Meat’ (Mute 1984), entered the UK singles chart. In the lyrics, Tovey subverts the ultimate relativist proverb (‘One man’s meat is another man’s poison’) to depict a scenario where the protagonist’s destiny is not to fit anywhere. The identity crisis is total: he cannot even trust his own taste (‘But I could not taste the poison’).13 Whether the lyrics were autobiographical or not, they matched the profound sense of disillusionment emerged during the Gag promotional cycle. ‘I’ve scraped by the last few years’, he told Melody Maker, ‘I have honestly tried to write a hit record … it’s like trying to eat something that makes you sick’ (Lake 1984: 27). When the Gag tour came to an end, Tovey consigned the Fad Gadget name to history and slowly abandoned electronics in favour of a recuperation of roots music. Snakes and Ladders (Mute 1985), with tracks like ‘Luxury’ and ‘Luddite Joe’ nodding to the muscular pop of Gag, was the soundtrack of this transition. It was Tyranny and the Hired Hand (Mute 1989) that sealed the deal with folk: Tovey’s systematic study of traditional war songs was paired with Dylanesque reflections on class and social inequalities. With the exception of Paul White’s inner sleeve for Snakes, which imagined Tovey as a sort of steel-plated working class hero (Figure 2.5), Fad’s eccentric presentation progressively disappeared too. Whether it was dictated by an intentional repudiation of the past, or by a disillusionment in the music business and the power of pop to shake minds, Tovey abandoned the restlessness of the shape-shifter for the composure of the folk songwriter. Putting Fad Gadget behind him, Tovey seemed relieved of the prospect of success and fashionability. In one of the last interviews he gave as Fad Gadget for Melody Maker, Tovey’s struggle between the anti-commercialist and the anti-culturalist tendencies of post-punk emerged with particular force. While he laments the moderate success of Gag (‘My daughter, who’s two, she sings along to most of the songs on Gag, so the record can’t be that heavy or difficult’), he defends himself from accusations of commerciality, situating

12

13

Tovey would return the favour contributing vocals to the Concerto for Voice and Machinery staged by members of Einstürzende Neubauten at the ICA, London in January 1984. The performance, which included pneumatic drills and cement mixers, turned to mayhem and ended after twenty-five minutes (Bohn 1984). ‘One Man’s Meat’ written by F. Tovey, D. Simmonds and J. Sackett, courtesy Mute Song Limited.

44

Mute Records

Figure 2.5 Inner sleeve for Frank Tovey, Snakes and Ladders (Mute 1986). Courtesy of Paul White.

himself in the Mute roster in the process: ‘I got one review that said I just jump on bandwagons, pick on the people that are more fashionable at the time. But if I wanted to do that, I wouldn’t pick Neubauten. I’d make an album with Depeche Mode or Yazoo’ (Lake 1984: 26). Alluding to his own in-betweenness, Tovey was clearly distinguishing between what he saw as the most experimental side of Mute and its most commercially viable acts at the time. As this chapter demonstrates, Tovey’s dedication to question the status quo permeated his work as Fad Gadget, accompanied by a restless self-interrogation. He started out as ‘the archetypal Mute artist’ (Reynolds 2007), questioning ideas of rock authenticity and pioneering synthetic pop in his early work, and continued to find in Mute a reliable home for his many experiments. He tested the limits of the post-punk belief in ‘the possibility that culture could be at once popular, experimental and intellectually-driven’ (Butt, Eshun and Fisher 2016:  7). Most strongly characterized by its contrariness and in-betweenness, Tovey’s work asked questions of his audience and himself: What am I doing to try and change things? That’s the nagging doubt all the time. Is what I do having any effect at all? I believe that people need a kick up the arse

‘One Man’s Meat’

45

because a lot of them hardly ever think about the way they live … and I write things that I believe passionately about, but am I going to alter ideas or just get lost? (Morley 1982: 10–11)

Ultimately, Tovey trusted the power of music to simultaneously entertain and engage. In this respect, his work reflects the double entanglement of the postpunk moment (and of Mute Records): a commitment to step away from stale notions of rock authenticity on the one hand, and a belief in the meaningfulness and political resonance of pop music on the other.

References Barber, L. (1982), ‘The Sweetest Groove’, Melody Maker, 29 May: 20. Bohn, C. (1980a), ‘It’s a Fad, Fad, Fad, Fad World’, NME, 1 November: 44. Bohn, C. (1980b), ‘Art of Work but Not Redundant’, NME, 6 December: 6–7. Bohn, C. (1984), ‘Driller Thriller: Metal Marauders in the Mall’, NME, 14 January: 12. Butt, G., K. Eshun and M. Fisher, eds (2016), Post Punk Then And Now, London: Repeater Books. Carr, R. (1979), ‘Singles’, NME, 20 October: 27–8. Frith, S. (1986), ‘Art Versus Technology: The Strange Case of Popular Music’, Media, Culture and Society, 8 (3): 263–79. Goldstein, D. (1984), ‘Fad Gadget’, Electronics and Music Maker, April: 28–31. Hada, A. (1981), ‘Fad Gadget’, ZigZag, June: 34–5. Hill, D. (1982). ‘Gloomy Gadgetry’, NME, 23 October: 31. Kiley, P. (1983), ‘Fad Gadget: Liverpool Warehouse’, Melody Maker, 12 February: 25. ‘Knocked by a Featherweight’ (1984), NME, 4 February: 3. Lake, S. (1984), ‘New-fangled Gadget’, Melody Maker, 28 April: 26–7. Morley, P. (1982), ‘Fadfoolery and Frank Confessions’, NME, 23 January: 10–11, 39. Moyet, A. (1982), ‘Commerciality, Once Scorned, is now Embraced’, NME, 25 December: 37. Ogg, A. (2009), Independence Days: The Story of UK Independent Labels, London: Cherry Red. Page, B. (1982), ‘Fad Gadget: I’m a Born again Pagan’, Sounds, 23 January: 13. Penman, I. (1981). ‘Political Conscience Every Now and Then, Pub Every Night’, NME, 27 June: 21–2. Pouncey, E. (1983), ‘The Good the Fad and the Ugly: The Art of (Not) Falling Apart. Edwin Pouncey Assembles Fad Gadget’, Sounds, 10 December: 29. Pye. I. (1982a), ‘The Spirit in the Punch’, Melody Maker, 2 January: 13. Pye, I. (1982b), ‘Down on the Line’, Melody Maker, 30 October: 22.

46

Mute Records

Pye, I. (1982c), ‘Life on the Line’, Melody Maker, 20 November: 17. Reynolds, S. (2005), Rip It Up and Start Again. Postpunk 1978–1984, London: Faber and Faber. Reynolds. S. (2007), ‘Various: Mute Audio Documents 1978–1984’, The Wire, 279, May: 54. Strange, P. (1980), ‘Fad is not Fab’, Melody Maker, 15 November: 20. Tickell, P. (1981), ‘It’s Fad Dad!’, NME, 14 November: 40. Wilkinson, D. (2016), Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Worley, M. (2011), ‘One Nation Under the Bomb: The Cold War and British Punk to 1984’, Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 5 (2): 65–83.

3

Depeche Mode and Soft Cell: Redefining the Synth-Pop Prologue Leon Clowes

The Mute record label turned forty years old in 2018 and so did Soft Cell, the synth-pop duo, who marked this milestone with a reunion/farewell performance in London. While these two anniversaries may initially seem unconnected, the early history of the label and the duo proves otherwise. Daniel Miller was the producer behind ‘Memorabilia’, ‘A Man Can Get Lost’ and ‘Persuasion’, the three tracks that formulated Soft Cell’s first 7" and 12" singles released in March 1981 on Some Bizzare via the major label Phonogram. There was an interrelated evolution of the record labels Mute and Some Bizzare at a key juncture in the early 1980s when electronic popular music was becoming increasingly prominent in the UK’s commercial charts. Miller’s Mute and Stephen ‘Stevø’ Pearce’s Some Bizzare experienced major commercial success as Depeche Mode and Soft Cell were the first acts from their respective labels to achieve high chart positions in the UK Top Forty. Perhaps the more significant year to consider here for these bands, however, is 1981. January of that year saw the release of the Some Bizzare Album, a sampler of mostly unsigned artists that included the Daniel Miller-produced ‘Photographic’ by Depeche Mode (who were already working with Mute) and Soft Cell. In the same year both bands first had hit singles. But while this chapter will focus on the first half of the 1980s, this being the period of Depeche Mode and Soft Cell’s ascension as pop stars, it takes its title from the name of a Some Bizzare compilation released to celebrate the label’s twenty-fifth anniversary: Some Bizzare Artists Redefining the Prologue 1981–2006. The idea of redefining the prologue is apt, as this work attempts to provide new insights into the early years of Mute Records by addressing correspondences and divergences with Some Bizzare. The most commercially successful acts on the labels – Depeche

48

Mute Records

Mode and Soft Cell – were intrinsic to popular music developments that would eventually redefine the rules of cultural production via the instrumentation used (synths over guitars), the methods of distribution (collaborations between independent and major labels) and promotion (the convergence of the existing rock press with the new glossy pop magazines and promotional videos). The two labels and bands operated from within, beyond and sometimes against both the independent and major label networks and the attendant popular music media routes to audiences. Embracing new and affordable technologies, Depeche Mode and Soft Cell would subvert and dominate pop, combining mainstream appeal while also assimilating queer aesthetics. This chapter utilizes primary source interviews I undertook in 2016 with Some Bizzare artists regarding the time period under examination. This is balanced with research into historical and recent journalistic and academic writings about Miller, Depeche Mode and Marc Almond, and by addressing the recorded music and promotional videos they produced. Firstly, I examine the socio-economic backgrounds and education of the two bands. Secondly, I address the managerial approaches of Miller and Pearce. Thirdly, I address the manner in which Depeche Mode and Soft Cell negotiated mainstream popularity and critical reception. Finally, I examine how queer identities impacted on the visual aesthetics of, and public reactions to, the two bands.

New town, art school While both Depeche Mode and Soft Cell would achieve considerable UK pop chart success from 1981 onwards, the bands originated in and from modest but contrasting circumstances, which I suggest fundamentally influenced their careers as pop musicians. The original members of Depeche Mode – Vince Clarke, Andy Fletcher, Martin Gore and Dave Gahan – coalesced via the schools, religious youth groups and local cultural activities of Basildon, a southern English town. This urban centre was redeveloped as a result of the New Towns Act 1946, which sought to expand designated towns in order to accommodate people who were living in deprived or bombed-out areas following the Second World War. In contrast, Soft Cell’s Marc Almond and Dave Ball are both northerners, the former hailing from Stockport and the latter from Blackpool. Contemporaries of Frank Tovey (Fad Gadget), they founded Soft Cell while studying BA Fine Arts at Leeds Polytechnic, a college renowned for its art school pedagogy. From early on,

Depeche Mode and Soft Cell

49

the new town band wrote upbeat pop songs and delivered enthralling live shows. Meanwhile, the art school duo created electronic soundtracks for Almond’s outré college performances, their songs lyrically exploring dark and sexualized themes. Thus the patterns were set for the two groups, precipitating how, in divergent ways, they would initially present themselves and/or be perceived. The social milieu of Depeche Mode appears to have been inspiring, both because it provided live performance opportunities and because it was somewhere that the artistically inclined were driven to escape. In his book on the group, Simon Spence depicts young Basildon residents such as Gore and Fletcher expecting to leave school for work rather than university; similarly, their local contemporary Alison Moyet (who would go on to work with Clarke in Yazoo) outlines how creative impetus arose from the lack of cultural interest in the area (2011: 73–4, 77). Initially using traditional rock instrumentation, Clarke, Fletcher and Gore formed and performed in various local bands and Gore suggests that the removal of guitar players from the embryonic group ‘was mainly because we didn’t have any transport’ (Doerschuk [1982] 2011: 21). In contrast, Gahan’s social circles in Essex and London exposed him to wider musical subcultures, from soul boy to new electro sounds (Spence 2011: 92–5, 102). Clarke has indicated that the singer’s social and cultural capital was the primary reason he was invited to join the embryonic group (Miller 2008: 40). As their audience increased, the band had a platform to test their pop songs and develop their performance techniques, much like any gigging band, albeit using electronic instrumentation. In the case of Soft Cell, the experimentation encouraged through Leeds Polytechnic’s pedagogy was to become an inherent feature of their style. Writing in 1987 about the impact of British art schools on pop music, Simon Frith and Howard Horne pinpointed the discipline required as well as the distinctiveness of this type of education, which embraced students from all socio-economic backgrounds (1987: 27–30). Ball has concurred that his educational training demanded self-discipline, but equally important it made his artistic exploration economically viable (2016). Full grants were available to British higher education students until 1989. Without this financial support, Ball may have not become an artist: I was on a grant and I used to work every summer. Because I grew up in Blackpool, it was quite easy to get seasonal jobs. I used to save up a load of money, so I never had an overdraft. But I think I can’t imagine what it’s like now trying to be an art student, when you’ve got a great big debt to pay at the end of it. It’s not like you’re going to find a normal job. (2016)

50

Mute Records

The polytechnic offered Ball limited music and recording technologies that helped develop his creative collaborations with Almond. The duo made approximately 200 recordings using this equipment, which were whittled down to material for some fifteen songs, indicating a high level of productivity and of artistic self-refinement. During their art school period they created ‘Say Hello, Wave Goodbye’, which would go on to become one of their most well-known and loved songs (the early version is available on Demo Non Stop (Some Bizzare 2006)). Although the two groups honed their song-craft in different ways – Depeche Mode tested material via audience reception, Soft Cell through maximizing the potential of recording technologies – they both embraced electronic instrumentation. In parallel, their record labels, Mute and Some Bizarre, were founded on the technological revolution made possible by affordable synthesizers. Miller has stated: In my head electronic music was the ultimate punk music especially as much cheaper synths came on the market – you didn’t even need to learn three chords. So right from the beginning I wanted to communicate that electronic music could be homemade, anti-elitist – that was the message I was sending out when I released that first single [The Normal’s ‘T.V.O.D.’ / ‘Warm Leatherette’] and I’d like to think that I went some way to achieving that. (Gates 2015)

Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire supplements this view, claiming that affordable technologies allowed artists like him to ‘transcend your space and your class and where you were’; he offers ‘class-futurism’ as a term for electronic music originating from working class and industrial areas (2016). Depeche Mode are perhaps the greatest example of his concept. The band originated from modest backgrounds but would achieve global fame playing synthesized music. Following their UK pop chart success, it was first Germany and then the rest of Europe that would begin to embrace the group. Later, as Holly Kruse notes, it was American college radio that would put Depeche Mode on the path to becoming global stadium superstars (1993: 33).

Mediator, maverick Soft Cell, an art school group, were signed by Pearce, a label boss who left school with no academic qualifications (Neal 1987: 112; Almond 2000: 99). Conversely, Depeche Mode, a working class band, were signed by Miller, who had trained in filmmaking at Guildford Art School (Malins 2013: 19–20). This

Depeche Mode and Soft Cell

51

combining of opposites was perhaps deliberate on Miller’s part. He was struck by the ‘incredibly unpretentious’ songwriting of Depeche Mode, which he viewed as being distinct from the majority of electronic music artists, who tended to operate from a ‘slightly arty background’ (Malins 2013: 19–20). However, while Depeche Mode appeared comfortable carving out a pop career via Mute Records, Soft Cell were uneasy chart stars. This, I propose, was due to their wish to achieve artistic integrity over commercial success (as well as due to the public reception of Almond’s queer visual presentation, which shall be considered later in this chapter). The most significant and symbiotic aspects of Mute and Some Bizzare are that, unlike most of the other UK independent and major labels of the time, their early signings represented a wilful abandonment of traditional rock instrumentation. Pearce outlined his vision in an interview with Charles Neal in 1987: ‘“Rock and roll” is not just a style, it’s an indoctrinated, instinctual thing which is bred into people … as soon as you smash down that instrumentation, that bass guitar, lead guitar, drums and vocals, the whole perspective gets a lot wider’ (1987: 108). Nonetheless, even if Miller’s and Pearce’s commitment to popular music lay beyond traditional rock formats, the two men still had to navigate the mainstream music business and develop necessary networks in order to ensure the cultural production and dissemination of the outsider music they championed. Although Miller’s and Pearce’s musical visions intertwined and overlapped, they had divergent business approaches. David Hesmondhalgh has described how, in the late 1970s, London’s Rough Trade shop attracted ‘committed subcultural record-buyers’, some of whom would go on to set up their own record labels inspired by the punk DIY ethos (1997: 258). Provided with office space in the shop, Miller was part of this independent music scene, and it was where he first met future Mute acts DAF, Boyd Rice and Depeche Mode (Malins 2013: 18–19). Pearce, on the other hand, was a club promoter, a runner for Phonogram records, and a DJ who compiled the Futurist Charts (the term from which Mallinder builds his ‘class-futurist’ moniker) for Sounds. Through his involvement in the music industry, he received demo cassette tapes, which led him to curate 1981’s Some Bizzare Album. All the artists included on this compilation were unsigned or relatively unknown. As well as featuring Soft Cell and Depeche Mode, this sampler LP includes The The and Blancmange, two more acts who would breakthrough to achieve mainstream success in the early 1980s, indicating Pearce’s visionary foresight for future pop sounds.

52

Mute Records

Despite an interconnected early history, and the label founders’ correlating tastes for pop as well as more challenging electronic and industrial music, Mute and Some Bizzare were independent record labels with different operational models. Whenever possible, Pearce would broker collaborative deals with UK major labels for distribution and marketing purposes for releases by his artists, including records by Soft Cell, The The, Psychic TV and Cabaret Voltaire. However, although Miller helped secure Depeche Mode an international deal with Sire in the United States, Mute’s UK distribution was via the independent companies Rough Trade and Spartan, and the marketing of the label’s artists was undertaken in-house. Mute hired a small staff team early on and Richard King defines Miller’s business practice as ‘lean and streamlined’ (2012: 254), suggesting an economy of approach. Depeche Mode’s advance, if anything, was modest (2012: 69–70) and the choice of the band recording in Berlin’s Hansa studios was due to this costing less than a London studio (2012: 257; Malins 2013: 69, 80). Conversely, Soft Cell were flown to New York four times during 1981 and 1982 to record their music, implying a more extravagant method of cultural production (Ball 2016). Pearce’s standing within the music industry enabled him to attract major label backing; it also encouraged acts to sign with his label, including Matt Johnson (The The) who left 4AD to join Some Bizzare in 1981 (Aston 2013: 83). As well as being perceived to have an antenna for the pop music zeitgeist, Pearce was prepared to back more leftfield acts. Ball regards him as a ‘visionary’ for signing Swans and procuring major label investment in Psychic TV and Cabaret Voltaire (2016). However, while Pearce may have been keen to invest money from his successes into underground music he was passionate about, his methods of securing investment for artistic ends did not always sit well with major label objectives. Pearce and Miller both had a commitment to experimental popular music, but history confirms that the latter offered the business model that could best sustain it. Australian musician and producer Jim ‘Foetus’ Thirlwell has drawn parallels between Mute and Some Bizzare, underlining the uncompromising commitment to radical artists at both labels; he notes that the diversification and climate of long-term nurturing at Mute were possible contributors to the label’s longevity (2016). That Cabaret Voltaire recordings made possible by Some Bizzare and Rough Trade Records have now been re-released on Mute indicates two things: that Pearce could not convince major labels to provide continued support for his less commercial artists; and that over the longer term Miller developed a business practice that could support alternative music.

Depeche Mode and Soft Cell

53

Credibility, commerciality Given the art school background of Ball and Almond, and the fully independent nature of Mute Records in its early years, it is possible that Soft Cell and Depeche Mode would both have remained outsider, underground acts. The two groups achieved chart success quickly, however. Soft Cell’s second Some Bizzare/ Phonogram single, their cover of Gloria Jones’ ‘Tainted Love’ (1981), was an international hit. It reached number one in seventeen countries and remained in the American Billboard Hot 100 Chart for forty-three weeks. When Ball says, ‘We never saw ourselves as being a pop band as our interests and sympathies weren’t with Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet. We were much more interested in the underground’, he indicates a distinction between pop and the underground, or ‘electro-punk’, the term by which he describes his own creative partnership with Almond (2016). For his group, pop success was problematic. The major label partner in their deal put pressure on them to come up with a follow-up hit. More generally, the imbalance between commercial interests and artistic integrity was to manifest itself in an ongoing battle between Soft Cell and Some Bizzare against Phonogram. The peak of this conflict came when Almond and Pearce trashed Phonogram’s office in a dispute regarding free copies of ‘Tainted Love’ that were being given away to purchasers of the Soft Cell single ‘Numbers’ (Some Bizzare 1983). Almond has acknowledged that this incident jeopardized relations with Phonogram but he has also expressed frustration at how the major label had overridden Soft Cell’s wish for artistic freedom and control (Tebbutt 1984: 126). This demonstration of their electro-punk roots shows how Soft Cell rejected commercial values and had a provocative attitude towards their major label. Despite offers from major labels, Depeche Mode remained steadfastly on Mute during this period and beyond (Malins 2013: 26). They also appeared to be more at ease with being a pop group than Soft Cell. Their 1982 ‘Leave in Silence’ video (directed by Julien Temple) features the band on space hoppers with brightly coloured faces. Meanwhile, a promotional photo shoot from the same year has the group dressed up in cricket outfits. This visual identity was ideal for British pop music magazine Smash Hits and for Saturday morning children’s television. Conversely, the group were able to achieve major success without the support of Britain’s influential rock press – Sounds, NME, Melody Maker – who posited themselves as arbiters on all things ‘independent’ during this period. Their relationship with these journals displays a degree of ambivalence, however. On the one hand, they included negative reviews of each of their hit singles

54

Mute Records

on the inner sleeve of the Singles 81 → 85 compilation (Mute 1985), proudly proclaiming their ability to achieve success without widespread critical support. On the other hand, Mute hired public relations expert Chris Carr in the hope of improving Depeche Mode’s image with the rock press, suggesting that critical reception was important to the label (Spence 2011: 193–6).

Identity, perversity In the early 1980s, popular music was to play a fundamental role in changing public attitudes to gay men in Britain (Hesmondhalgh 2013: 144). It is important to remember, however, that male homosexuality was only partially decriminalized at this time and it was considered by many to be deviant. Significant progress towards equal rights for LGBT+ citizens would not be achieved in Britain for at least another decade. Indicatively, Phonogram attempted to publicize Soft Cell’s Almond as having girlfriends (Almond 2000: 121). Nevertheless, his ‘skinny poof in a black dress’ image and sleazy lyrical themes were soon understood to be indicative of his homosexuality (Almond’s introduction, Tebbutt 1984: 7). His queerness was unpalatable for some audiences. In contrast, when Gore from Depeche Mode took to cross-dressing and wearing fetish gear a few years later, there was a less extreme reaction. So, when Lucas Hilderbrand’s queer music interpretation pinpoints both Depeche Mode and Soft Cell as crystallizing the coded signifiers of 1981, this might be evident of the visual identities of the bands. However, there was a queer authenticity that resonated much more deeply with the public image and reception of Soft Cell. Hilderbrand is correct in claiming that the latter’s ‘Sex Dwarf ’ (Some Bizzare 1981) is exuberant with ‘kink corruption rather than gay respectability’ (2013: 417). He is on less sure ground, however, in placing a queer focus on the ‘black leatherman outfits’ in Depeche’s Mode’s ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ video (directed by Clive Richardson in 1981) (2013: 427). This ‘gay’ image is countered by the fact that band are seen interacting with cocktail-drinking, dancing girls. Moreover, the band had already established a visual aesthetic that sat comfortably with a youth audience. In contrast, Soft Cell were more knowing, ‘more gutter’ (2013: 428) and ‘seedy and pervy’ (Kallioniemi 2016: 163). As Ball has observed, after their ‘Tainted Love’ appearance on the television chart show Top of the Pops, ‘BBC switchboards were jammed, and bangle sales in Britain went through the roof,

Depeche Mode and Soft Cell

55

because every teenager who wanted to piss their parents off wanted bangles and black eyeliner’ (2016). Why, then, was there a less pronounced reaction when Gore adopted a crossdressing image in the mid-1980s? Steve Malins believes that he was viewed as ‘sweet and camp, rather than threatening or genuinely deviant’ (2013: 88). Nevertheless, with his leather skirts, make-up and chains, Gore was presenting a more overtly ‘queer’ image than that of Almond in 1981. One difference in the reception of the two performers could be that Gore was a straight man (as identified through earlier Depeche Mode imagery) adopting a queer identity, whereas Almond was an outré gay man. Another reason is the difference that Almond had made: he was a pioneer in proudly presenting queerness to a straight pop audience. By the time that Gore was wearing dresses, the pop world had also witnessed Boy George (‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me’ (Virgin) was a hit in late 1982) as well as the outspoken queer pop of Bronski Beat (‘Smalltown Boy’ was released by London Records in early 1984).

Conclusion: The redefined prologue of Mute and Some Bizzare In the early 1980s, pop music made almost entirely of electronic sounds was only just beginning to disrupt the dominance of traditional rock band instrumentation. What was significant about Daniel Miller and Stevø Pearce at this time was that they both successfully operated within and outside of pop and independent music industry infrastructures. The two label founders, as tastemakers and cultural producers, played key roles in shaping the prologue of synth-pop. Depeche Mode and Soft Cell were made possible because of new and cheap sound technologies. They created successful pop music while demonstrating the performativity of male sexualities through their visual aesthetics. These two synth-pop bands epitomized how class-futurists could transform their circumstances, and they were able to do so because of the visionary business and aesthetic practices of Pearce and Miller. Both Mute and Some Bizzare deserve recognition for championing the avantgarde alongside pop. Yet regarding both the commercial and the underground, it is Mute that has been the most consistently successful. During the early 1980s, Pearce was a friendly competitor of Miller. His visionary outlook, as a pop Svengali, and avant-garde tastemaker, is unquestionable. Soft Cell’s initial Top of the Pops performances sparked playground conversations on a par with

56

Mute Records

David Bowie and Mick Ronson’s famous ‘Starman’ appearance of 1972. But Pearce was not able to maintain success for either his commercial or avant-garde artists. Soft Cell split in 1984 and The The left his label in the early 1990s. Major label investment in any artist is ultimately judged on material returns and if these are not forthcoming there is a finite life for the experimental in the commercial world of the music industry. Almond laments that ‘Stevø had the vision, and Some Bizzare should have been a rival to Daniel Miller’s Mute’ (2015: 39). Beyond the period under examination here, Miller continued to sign commercially viable artists to Mute’s roster, from Erasure and Nick Cave through to Goldfrapp and Moby. In so doing, and by remaining an independent label for the remainder of the twentieth century, he was able to maintain his commitment to releasing the music of more experimental artists alongside his commercial successes. These included several former Some Bizzare artists, such as Einstürzende Neubauten, Cabaret Voltaire and Swans. When Mute was sold to EMI in 2002, the founder insisted on remaining in artistic control, and through a mediated and considered approach, he has retained Mute’s vision through both difficult and successful times (Gates 2015).

References Almond, M. (2000), Tainted Life: The autobiography, 2nd edn, London: Pan. Almond, M. (2015), Marc Almond, Paris: First Third. Aston, M. (2013), Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD, London: Friday Project. Ball, D. (2016), Interview with the author, Soho, London, 28 January. Doerschuk, R. ([1982] 2011), ‘Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, the Units, Wall of Voodoo, Japan, Our Daughters Wedding: New Synthesizer Rock’, in P. Kirn (ed.), Keyboard Presents the Evolution of Electronic Dance Music, 14–31, Milwaukee: Backbeat Books. Frith, S., and H. Horne (1987), Art into Pop, London, Methuen. Gates, K. (2015), ‘Daniel Miller: “I Was Determined to make Mute a Success”’, [PIAS], 27 September. Available online: https://www.pias.com/blog/daniel-millerdetermined-make-mute-success/ (accessed 1 December 2017). Hesmondhalgh, D. (1997), ‘Post-Punk’s Attempt to Democratise the Music Industry: The Success and Failure of Rough Trade’, Popular Music, 16 (3): 255–74. Hesmondhalgh, D. (2013), Why Music Matters, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Hilderbrand, L. (2013), ‘“Luring Disco Dollies to a Life of Vice”: Queer Pop Music’s Moment’, Journal of Popular Music Studies, 25 (4): 415–38. Kallioniemi, K. (2016), Englishness, Pop and Post-War Britain, Bristol: Intellect.

Depeche Mode and Soft Cell

57

King, R. (2012), How Soon Is Now? The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975–2015, London: Faber & Faber. Kruse, H. (1993), ‘Subcultural Identity in Alternative Music Culture’, Popular Music, 12 (1): 33–41. Malins, S. (2013), Depeche Mode: The Biography, 4th edn, London: Carlton. Mallinder, S. (2016), interview with the author, via Skype, 22 June. Miller, J. (2008), Stripped: Depeche Mode, 2nd edn, London: Omnibus. Neal, C. (1987), Tape Delay: Confessions from the Eighties Underground, London: SAF. Spence, S. (2011), Just Can’t Get Enough: The Making of Depeche Mode, London: Jawbone. Tebbutt, S. (1984), Soft Cell: The Authorised Biography, London: Sidgwick and Jackson. Thirlwell, J. (2016), interview with the author via Skype, 15 June.

4

Fans of Faith and Devotion: Obsession, Nostalgia and Depeche Mode Andy Pope

Introduction Depeche Mode are now, for many, synonymous with the successful rock star archetype: stadium-filling tours, luxurious lifestyles and millions of adoring fans. Their roots however, are much more humble. As an awkward synth quartet from Basildon, emerging at the end of punk in the 1970s, they have struggled for critical acceptance in some aspects of the UK music scene, while their international appeal has brought them global acclaim. During this time their fanbase has grown, but, as the documentaries Depeche Mode: 101 (Dawkins, Hegedus and Pennebaker 1989) and Our Hobby is Depeche Mode (originally known as The Posters Came from the Walls) (Deller and Abrahams 2006) demonstrate, the reputation of Depeche Mode fans is as polarized as the band itself. This chapter will trace the evolution of Depeche Mode fans through recourse to these two films. While Depeche Mode: 101 is essentially a concert film, its innovative use of narrative and reality TV-style structure builds in a fan-centred plot to what is in fact a documentary. By tracing a group of fans following the band across the United States, the film captures Depeche Mode fandom at a crucial moment, just as the band was becoming globally popular. Made nearly twenty years later, Our Hobby is Depeche Mode takes a more unorthodox look at fandom, interviewing fans across the world and depicting their most extreme behaviour, while essentially ignoring the band. But the film acts as an interesting counterpoint to Depeche Mode: 101 not only in its depiction of the evolution of Depeche Mode fandom but also through the image of the band. By removing them from the film, but ensuring their presence is in every frame, the viewer is reminded of their status, particularly from a nostalgic point of view, with most fans fixated on an image of the past.

60

Mute Records

Since the first Depeche Mode film was made the academic study of fans evolved a great deal, allowing us to analyse more succinctly the motivations for some of these behaviours. A key text here is Mark Duffett’s Understanding Fandom (2013), which traces stages of fandom and highlights its hierarchical status, factors that I argue are evident in both of these films. Both Duffett and Henry Jenkins (1992) argue against the presentation of fan stereotypes, which I view as being apparent in both films, with Our Hobby is Depeche Mode in particular portraying more extreme Depeche Mode fans in an unflattering light. Further application of fan studies theory highlights Gray, Sandvoss and Harrington’s argument in their analysis of the second-wave of fan studies that cultural capital is used by fans to elevate their status within a subculture (2007: 6). How nostalgia, cultural capital, as demonstrated through fan hierarchies, and band image combine to produce the extreme fan as seen in Our Hobby is Depeche Mode are key aims that this chapter will explore.

Nostalgia, memory and Depeche Mode in 101 Depeche Mode’s 101st gig, which took place at the Pasadena Rose Bowl on 18 June 1988, was a defining moment for the young band. The concert cemented the group’s reputation as bona fide rock stars, conquering the United States and filling stadia. For the band’s fans the gig is symbolic in much the way the punk community of 1976 views the Sex Pistols’ famous Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall performance, which catapulted the band to notoriety. Famously, huge numbers of people have professed to attend that gig, far more than the venue could comfortably hold, because of an emotional, nostalgic connection to what has become a landmark event in popular culture. In the case of Pasadena, the gig was helpfully enshrined into mediated cultural history through the documentary film and a live album. Its later significance has then been filtered through a combination of secondhand and cultural nostalgia, fuelled by repeat viewings of the documentary, enhancing the mythic status of the concert. This is demonstrated in Our Hobby is Depeche Mode, which includes a sequence that clearly betrays the reverence fans bestow on Depeche Mode: 101. These scenes depict two young fans on a pilgrimage to the Rose Bowl. Although Our Hobby is Depeche Mode has a strong nostalgic impulse in its presentation of its subject, there is no pretence that this sequence offers a direct memorializing of the event of the 101st Depeche Mode gig – the two fans are too young for

Fans of Faith and Devotion

61

any personal memory of it. It is the role of cultural memory that is explored here and, specifically, how the film of 101 inspires and influences contemporary Depeche Mode fans. The two fans dance outside the venue’s distinctive entrance, re-enacting moments of the film, wearing their 101 T-shirts, acknowledging that their relationship with the event is a ‘secondhand’, mediated one. The girl (the film does not name these fans) states she was six days old at the time of the concert while the boy acknowledges it was Depehce Mode: 101 that provided the source of his obsession with the group. Such events, because of their status within the band’s history, and aided by their easy recall through video and digital means, emphasize the strong relationship between nostalgia and fandom. Whether the memories are real or informed through media, nostalgia is a vital aspect of fan studies and, according to Duffett, can often be a gateway to the early stages of fandom (2013: 154). For many fans the relationship with their subject, particularly those relating to bands, or music in general, often centres on a specific moment: a tour, an artefact or a record. These events are often recalled in religious terms – an epiphany where the moment is frozen in the memory, allowing recall of even the most trivial of details. In Simon Spence’s comprehensive account of the band’s early years, Just Can’t Get Enough: The Making of Depeche Mode, he painstakingly recounts the exact clothing he wore when he first saw the band live on their 1986 Black Celebration tour, highlighting the experience at which his fandom was sparked (2011: 17). As with Spence, the passionate fan will then share their experience within the fan community, often generating a culture of nostalgia (Duffett 2013: 154). Such discussions not only emphasize that nostalgia acts as a currency within fandom, but also call attention to an inherent hierarchy within that community, where the best story and often the most extreme experiences are used in competitive terms to determine the most devout or passionate follower. Duffett argues that the importance of these events, whether experienced or mediated, is driven by a need for fans to ‘periodise their lives around autobiographic turning points when “everything changed” and they became interested’ (Duffett 2013: 154). For the two subjects in the sequence in Our Hobby is Depeche Mode their affinity for the 101 concert is clearly evident even though they were only young when it occurred. For these fans it is the mediated version of Depeche Mode that ignited their fandom. Depeche Mode: 101 captures a band that, while at the pinnacle of major success, appears to be struggling with their response to it. Although the subsequent problems that individual Depeche Mode band members have encountered have

62

Mute Records

been widely reported, early signs of these fractures are visible in Depeche Mode: 101. The film is bookended by scenes in which the group are transported to the door of their private jet in limousines, in archetypal rock star fashion. But this picture of a traditional rock star is muddied during the documentary. At one point lead singer Dave Gahan appears to have a diva moment following a chastisement by a crew member. His response, which appears to be delivered with a heavy dose of irony – ‘If you talk to a member of the band like that again you’re finished’ – references a star status that, he seems to be indicating, is devoid of self-consciousness. Such incidents litter Depeche Mode: 101 and can be read in several ways. A band that has embraced the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle or one that is happy to send that status up, ironically portraying a life that others assume they enjoy. With this growing success, of course, came a larger, and more diverse, fanbase. The directors of Depeche Mode: 101 perhaps foresaw Depeche Mode’s growing appeal to music fans. Pennebaker professes to have had no prior knowledge of the group, but while researching the film he became fascinated with the devotion of their fans. Depeche Mode: 101 includes several of what we would now see as stereotypes of fandom. These stereotypes of fans, and their role in characterizing fan behaviour, are controversial areas of fan studies and ones that scholars have been distancing themselves from for some years. In making this case, Duffett recalls Jenkins’s (1992: 40) close analysis of a television comedy sketch that lampoons Star Trek fans (2013: 37). Jenkins produced a list of the negative fan stereotypes that the sketch employed, arguing that these were outdated and often untrue. Duffett nevertheless argues this list is still a relevant methodology for exploring ‘representations of fandom’ (2013: 37). Our Hobby is Depeche Mode, for instance, has a number of examples of fans who, according to Jenkins’s list, are ‘unable to separate fantasy from reality’ (1992: 40). While Our Hobby is Depeche Mode focuses on the obsessional fans, Depeche Mode: 101 presents fans operating in a disconnected, youth-dominated world, where they unselfconsciously ‘entertain’ diners in restaurants and argue about fashion while dying their hair. The energy of Depeche Mode: 101 is, I argue, filtered through a youthful enthusiasm that the filmmakers present through a focus on the mundane. This is, in part, a product of the film’s methodology, which involved keeping the cameras rolling even through intimate and personal moments. In its characterization of fans, Depeche Mode: 101 is perhaps the most mature film of the two under discussion. As Jasmin Chang argues, the attraction for the directors was with ‘the kids, with their hair spray, hats and exceptionally

Fans of Faith and Devotion

63

outlandish outfits, (that) bring the epic fandom that Depeche Mode inspired to an adorably accessible level as they navigate their way through a kind of boozy synth-pop summer camp’ (2014). While, from Jenkins’s perspective, the fans can be seen as, ‘infantile (and) emotionally and intellectually immature’ (1992: 40), from our contemporary perspective this assessment of Depeche Mode fans as being ‘adorably accessible’ seems naïve compared to the image of the extreme fan portrayed in Our Hobby is Depeche Mode. Depeche Mode: 101 is therefore a quaint bookmark in the group’s career, a time when fandom shifted from adorable to anomalous. The fans in Depeche Mode: 101 are portrayed as having the freedom of youth with the film capturing the innocence of their adventure. This contrasts with the earnestness of the subjects of Our Hobby is Depeche Mode, where pleasure is replaced by obsession. Joanne Hollows argues that subjects of extreme fandom often operate in this area because they want to ‘ward off “outsiders” and maintain a sense of exclusiveness’, something that a ‘cult’ band, operating outside the mainstream, can offer (2003: 45). As I discuss later in this chapter such bands inevitably attract more unorthodox fans. Depeche Mode: 101 captures the group on the threshold of superstardom and the changes that come with it. It also presents a positive view of Depeche Mode fandom. As Duffett argues, this state of sedate fandom is often a temporary one. In fandom studies, he argues, ‘The next step (is) the “slippery slope” schema’ and it is this stage where ‘some fans start to pursue mediated relationships in preference to real ones. In effect, their fandom insulates them to the extent that they become isolated from ordinary relationships; they supposedly lose their moral compass’ (2013: 92). It is these fans who are controversially the focus of Our Hobby is Depeche Mode.

The cultural capital of extreme fandom in Our Hobby is Depeche Mode The evolution of Depeche Mode fandom continues with the release nearly thirty years later of the documentary Our Hobby is Depeche Mode. As stated, the film does not feature the band at all, preferring instead to focus on extreme examples of Depeche Mode fandom across the world. Abrahams’s rationale for the film, as discussed with this author, was ‘to look at a band whose status is lesser in their home country and try to see why they were so much bigger elsewhere

64

Mute Records

in the world’ (Abrahams 2016). However, in following this path, the directors emphasized, perhaps unfairly, the extreme nature of the devotion of fans in Eastern Europe. Since 1988 Depeche Mode had become increasingly popular in this region, selling out tours much more quickly there than in their home country. Subsequently a subculture of fans started to emerge, specifically in Germany and Russia. In deference to the band, this group of fans usually wear gothic-style clothing, reflecting the darkness that can be found in some of Depeche Mode’s music. They call themselves the ‘Black Swarm’ and have a discernible visible presence at Depeche Mode gigs in these countries. Sophia Deboick argues that the roots of this fandom are to be found within the social conditions forced on the Eastern Bloc through the communist regimes up to the late 1980s (2014). For the youth of these areas such conditions resulted in ‘a yearning for material goods which were not available on the state-controlled market – posters, records, magazines – that were the physical markers of allegiance to the Depeche Mode cult’ (Abrahams 2016). While collecting such items is a widespread activity within pop culture, the specific fascination with Depeche Mode for these fans is based on a relationship cultivated by the band over several years, beginning in the early 1980s (Reynolds 2012: 101). In a period when communist Europe was seen as culturally regressive, Depeche Mode were one of the few bands to play in East Germany and the band members even lived in West Berlin during the mid-1980s, further developing these links. While Our Hobby is Depeche Mode is not purely concerned with fans from Eastern Europe (it looks at fans in the United Kingdom and United States as well), it is followers from these countries that present the most extreme behaviour and complex relationships with Depeche Mode. Additionally, it is this behaviour – the obsessive, extreme end of fandom – that seems to interest the directors. The obsessive, geeky fan is, of course, a stereotype of fandom and one which fan studies has tried to distance itself from in recent years. Using Jenkins’s model, Kedrick, one of the fans featured in Our Hobby is Depeche Mode, can be seen as a ‘brainless consumer’ (1992: 40). He is nevertheless self-aware enough to deflect such criticism arguing, perhaps misguidedly, that his extensive Depeche Mode T-shirt collection is no different to a woman buying shoes. The collecting of memorabilia connected to the object of fandom is a behaviour often associated with obsessive fans, whether it is all the mixes of a particular song or album or, as with Kedrick, a collection of 500-plus T-shirts.

Fans of Faith and Devotion

65

Kedrick proudly states that his shirts were collected from various concerts he has attended, highlighting their nostalgic value. He acknowledges his hobby is a bit obsessive, but it is apparent that he craves the affiliation his fandom brings. As if to underline this, his interview goes into more extreme territory, from the relatively safe grounds of T-shirt collecting to his referencing the band in proprietorial language – ‘my boys’ – before asserting a relationship with the band, through meeting them on more than one occasion. Kedrick is a relatively low-level fan obsessive (the film deals with more extreme examples) but he does highlight the thin line between ‘normal’ and ‘extreme’ fandom. Although he is arguably teetering on the brink of Duffett’s ‘slippery slope schema’ in his behaviour, his possessive fandom does serve a purpose. Kedrick’s enthusiasm to forge a more extreme link to the object of his fandom is, I suggest, an attempt to elicit cultural capital out of the relationship. This, in turn, emphasizes the role of hierarchy in fandom, where those like Kedrick have greater cultural power because of an enhanced relationship with the band (Duffett 2013: 92). Pierre Bourdieu’s theory (1984) that people seek knowledge and affiliations that are inaccessible to others in order to elevate their cultural standing in society is an important component of fandom (Willis 1995: 184). It is one that I argue is vital to understanding the evolution of Depeche Mode fans displayed in the two films discussed here, as the relationship between cultural capital, the social eliteness of fan activity, and the fans’ position in the hierarchy of their subculture is a key attraction for them. As demonstrated in Our Hobby is Depeche Mode, extreme behaviour is often worn as a badge of honour for the fans, demonstrating their devotion. There is an indication that some of the behaviours on display in Our Hobby is Depeche Mode, particularly Ronny and Claudia Schniep, who recreate the ‘Enjoy the Silence’ video (directed by Anton Corbijn 1990) with their young son, go beyond the ‘hierarchy of acceptance’ for normal fandom. In my discussions with Abrahams he acknowledges that even within the Depeche Mode fan community there was a feeling that the depiction of fans in the film was too extreme. He argues that ‘German devotees are quite a strong voice’, with the German fanbase ultimately complaining online that the Schniep family were, ‘an embarrassment, and not “proper fans”’ (2016). In her article about the film, Suzy Prince concurs with this, arguing that many online fans objected to the film’s portrayal of Depeche Mode fandom because it was inconsistent with the image of the subculture they wanted to project (2009: 42). But why is the

66

Mute Records

behaviour of followers such as the Schieps and of Masha in St. Petersburg (who creates graphic art about her fantasy life with the band) being shunned by others within the fan community? The answer may lie within fan studies. The driver of the more extreme behaviour is not, perhaps, determined solely by the need to be a better or more extreme fan, but instead by what Lincoln Geraghty claims is the ‘cult’ status of the fandom (2014). For some it seems, the more niche and inaccessible your form of fandom, the better. As Geraghty states, the aim of fans as ‘the one true image of a fan/nerd/geek is that they are a minority’ (2014: 14). In the Depeche Mode: 101 reunion in 2014 there are clear elements of this. For the male fans, like Kedrick in Our Hobby is Depeche Mode, the standout moments of the Depeche Mode: 101 experience were those where they got close to their heroes, the band. As the men talk, over twenty years later, it is clear that there is an element of competition in their memories, highlighting how the hierarchy of memories informs the hierarchy of fandom. In fan subcultures, meeting or even befriending the object of your fandom elevates the status of the fan within their group, and its use as cultural capital, mixed with nostalgia is clearly evident here. Ultimately the fan behaviour we see in both these documentaries is an effort to achieve cultural acceptance within a fan community. Jennie in Our Hobby is Depeche Mode, for instance, talks wistfully of the night that crowds waiting for the band caused riots in West Hollywood in March 1990. Although she briefly discusses how meaningful the group’s music is to her – a recurring theme among Depeche Mode fans – she is most nostalgic about the event, the drama and most of all the camaraderie it created. She says it helped to shape the person she is now but seems to be talking about an abstract event rather than anything that the band did. Abrahams defends fans like Jennie: ‘If [the fans] are a bit peculiar, they are often rather proud of being a bit different. I suspect this is what drew them into the world of Depeche in the first place’ (2009). The portrayal of the obsessive fan is the most controversial aspect of Our Hobby is Depeche Mode. Some, like the ex-Depeche Mode band member, Alan Wilder, have argued the film lacks insight into band fandom (Lai 2014). Wilder’s comments appear defensive, and while he may be right that the film distorts the idea of Depeche Mode fandom because it is ‘not about ordinary fans’, his argument highlights an unease within the more orthodox fan community about depictions of ‘extreme’ behaviour within band fandom (Lai 2014). Abrahams goes further, suggesting that Wilder’s views are shared by many the wider Depeche Mode fan community, and that this may be the reason for the film’s

Fans of Faith and Devotion

67

lack of a formal release (2016). Prince agrees, stating that ‘Depeche Mode are slightly embarrassed by some of their fans’ (2009).

Conclusion Our Hobby is Depeche Mode depicts an evolution among the Depeche Mode fanbase since Depeche Mode: 101 was made in 1988. While nostalgia is an important component of the fans’ relationship with the band, the extreme nature of what is displayed indicates the complexity of that evolution as well as a problematic focus on fan stereotypes. Reflecting on Depeche Mode: 101 twenty-five years after its release, Wilder expressed disappointment with the documentary, feeling ‘short-changed’ because he ‘wanted the band itself to be explored more profoundly’ (Lai 2014). Abrahams acknowledges this was a consideration when making Our Hobby is Depeche Mode, as he was ‘aware that a lot of devotees wished 101 had not had the “fan element” to it’. Despite this, Abrahams and Deller wanted to make ‘a sequel to 101, continuing the story of the devotion of Depeche Mode followers’ (2016). It is interesting therefore, and perhaps unsurprising, that this film was poorly received by the band’s record company. Deller’s observation that ‘the fans’ behaviour sometimes disrupts [the band’s] carefully crafted image’ is perhaps relevant but ignores the film’s focus on extreme fandom (2006). Reinforcing the ‘obsessive geek’ of fan stereotypes, Our Hobby is Depeche Mode appears in some ways to be more outdated than Depeche Mode: 101, which presents its fans as less focused on the band than they are on youthful exuberance. I have argued that nostalgia is a key aspect of the relationship between fans and Depeche Mode. This is informed, in part, by the band’s ambiguous status as one part ‘cult’ band and one part mainstream stadium rockers. Depeche Mode devotees are attracted to this division because within the hierarchies of fandom as it provides the band with an ambiguity that elevates the fan’s cultural capital. This evokes more extreme fan behaviour, as portrayed in Our Hobby is Depeche Mode. However, the relationship with nostalgia is one that is now hardwired into the fan. Geraghty suggests that ‘fandom is about the search for authenticity, the establishment of meaning and the construction of identity’ (2014: 33). Arguably the way Depeche Mode have struggled to embrace their status as rock stars informs the average fan’s perspective here. As Jean Baudrillard states, it is only

68

Mute Records

when, ‘the real is no longer what it used to be [that] nostalgia assumes its full meaning’ (Poster 1988: 171). For both Depeche Mode and their fans, perhaps that line is now irretrievably blurred.

References Abrahams, N. (2009), ‘Music for the Masses’, Clash Magazine, 11 November. Available online: http://theposterscamefromthewalls.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/ Clash-Magazine-Article11.jpg (accessed 29 September 2016). Abrahams, N. (2016), Interview with the author via email. Bourdieu, P. (1984), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chang, J. (2014), ‘Revisiting 101 with Depeche Mode Superfans’, Stranger Than Fiction, 24 October. Available online: http://stfdocs.com/qa/revisiting-101-with-depechemode-superfans/ (accessed 15 November 2016). Deboick, S. (2014), ‘Western Pop in the Eastern Bloc: Depeche Mode – Monument’, The Quietus, 16 March. Available online: http://thequietus.com/articles/14746-depechemode-monument-book-east-germany (accessed 12 September 2016). Deller, J. (2006), ‘Our Hobby Is Depeche Mode, 2006 (with Nick Abrahams)’. Available online: http://www.jeremydeller.org/OurHobbyIsDepecheMode/ OurHobbyIsDepecheMode_Video.php (accessed 12 April 2016). Depeche Mode: 101 (1989), [Film] Dir. David Dawkins, Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker, US: Mute Film, Pennebaker Associates. Duffett, M. (2013), Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the study of Media Fanculture, New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic. Geraghty, L. (2014), Cult Collectors: Nostalgia, Fandom and Collecting Popular Culture, Abingdon: Routledge. Gray, J., C. Sandvoss and C. L. Harrington (2007), ‘Introduction: Why Study Fans?’, in J. Gray, C. Sandvoss and C. L. Harrington (eds), Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, 1–15, New York: New York University Press. Hollows, J. (2003), ‘The Masculinity of Cult’, in M. Jancovich, A. Lazaro Reboll, J. Stringer and A. Willis (eds), Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste, 35–53, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jenkins, H. (1992), Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture: Studies in Culture and Communication, New York: Routledge. Lai, C. M. (2014), ‘Depeche Mode 101 25 Years On: A Short Conversation with Alan Wilder’, Electricity Club. Available online: http://www.electricity-club.co.uk/depechemode-101-25-years-on/ (accessed 19 October 2016).

Fans of Faith and Devotion

69

Our Hobby is Depeche Mode (2006), [Film] Dir. Jeremy Deller and Nick Abrahams, UK: Hudson Pictures. Poster, M., ed. (1988), Jean Baudrillard – Selected Writings, Cambridge: Polity Press. Prince, S. (2009), ‘In the Mode’, Nude Magazine, Summer 2009. Available online: http:// theposterscamefromthewalls.com/2009/08/ (accessed 15 July 2016). Reynolds, S. (2012), Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its own Past, London: Faber. Spence, S. (2011), Just Can’t Get Enough: The Making of Depeche Mode, London: Jawbonepress. Willis, A. (1995), ‘Cultural Studies and Popular Film’, in J. Hollows and M. Jancovich (eds), Approaches to Popular Film, 173–91, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

5

Throbbing Gristle’s Early Records: Post-Hippie/Pre-Punk/Post-Punk John Encarnacao

The set-up Throbbing Gristle made a unique intervention into popular culture that bridged confrontational performance art (and more generally a cross-disciplinary approach) with the zeitgeist of punk and post-punk. This chapter seeks to situate Throbbing Gristle as a phenomenon that could only have emerged in the mid1970s. They fit a generational profile, as David Thomas puts it referring to his group Pere Ubu, that is ‘post-hippie and pre-punk, a very narrow period of time’ (Encarnacao 1999: 27). This generation also includes Patti Smith, the Residents, Devo and Suicide, with Kraftwerk just out of the frame. Like Throbbing Gristle, many of these artists distinguish(ed) themselves through engagements beyond music – Smith as a poet, the Residents and Devo through film and video, and conceptual and theatrical presentations that go beyond the usual rock band fare. Perhaps most significantly Throbbing Gristle, like the Residents, Devo and Kraftwerk, were conceptual artists whose philosophy or worldview is an essential part of their appeal. The work of these artists is an articulation of a specific mode of critique of culture and society. All of these artists were old enough to have been affected by the freethinking and political struggles of the late 1960s, and they took that freethinking to eccentric corners of cultural expression in the 1970s. As Drew Daniel puts it, riffing on Simon Reynolds’s reading that ‘late Seventies industrial music was the second flowering of an authentic psychedelia’ (Reynolds 2005: 224), psychedelia itself might be viewed from a late 1970s context as ‘an unfinished revolutionary project rendered taboo by punk aesthetics’ (Daniel 2008: 150). In fact these artists, all active well before the advent of punk (we might use the release of

72

Mute Records

the first Ramones album by Sire in April 1976 as a marker), achieved various levels of fame or notoriety on the back of the phenomenon of punk rock that had not been previously available to them. The energy of punk and the media attention it generated allowed them to enjoy careers they might not otherwise have had. Or looking at it another way, it was the work of artists such as these, releasing independent records and fusing elements of rock and pop with the avant-garde, that contributed greatly to a cultural movement later referred to as punk. Applying Reynolds’s and Daniel’s ideas more broadly to this handful of groups, we might see a continuum between the counterculture of the late 1960s at one end, and punk and post-punk at the other; a kind of cultural resistance interested in using the language, structures and artifice of popular music. This chapter will also reposition Throbbing Gristle with respect to a number of interconnected canons. Beyond the specific cultural formation of industrial music (more of which below), Throbbing Gristle can be appreciated as not just part of late 1970s independent music practices, but more broadly as part of the pop/rock canon, despite the fact that little of what they produced can be considered pop or rock music. Most crucially, I will examine the four albums Throbbing Gristle released during their initial incarnation of 1975–81: The Second Annual Report of Throbbing Gristle (Industrial 1977), D.O.A. The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle (Industrial 1978), 20 Jazz Funk Greats (Industrial 1979) and Heathen Earth (Industrial 1980). These albums remain the basis of their reputation as recording artists and so will be the main focus here. The marketplace into which they were released was the independent scene in the United Kingdom (including the nascent Mute Records), and by extension Europe, the United States and independent networks globally, and so I believe it is appropriate to think of them in the context of the peers I have already mentioned, as well as earlier artists to whom the work may bear some resemblance or debt. In previous work, I have proposed that much insight into recordings can be gained by close consideration of vocal disposition, structure (including album structure) and sound/timbre (including recording quality) (Encarnacao 2016: 14–23). These attributes are particularly appropriate in discussing Throbbing Gristle, where each of these four albums performs a different kind of intervention into album structure; the abrasiveness of the group’s timbres and their unorthodox approach to sound quality is fundamental; and the use of voices, P-Orridge’s and found voices primarily, is central to the unease and sense of dislocation imparted by listening to these recordings.

Throbbing Gristle’s Early Records

73

Roni Sarig and S. Alexander Reed represent the consensus on Throbbing Gristle: their ‘reputation … is based less on compelling music than the power of its ideas’, writes Sarig (1998: 183); Reed’s variant is that ‘the band is less often evaluated on the strength of its recordings than on the music’s conceptual groundwork and execution’ (2013: 73). One might receive these as damning indictments; the question of Throbbing Gristle’s legacy is indeed a vexed one. What is Throbbing Gristle’s core musical contribution and how does it work? Do these initial albums stand up to scrutiny away from the propaganda, Throbbing Gristle’s own brand of provocation and manufactured outrage as marketing strategy? Is it necessary to know the group’s intentions, their critical agenda, in order to get something from their records? Does their work stand on its own merits if such a significant degree of subcultural capital is required to be ‘in’ enough to appreciate it? Both Throbbing Gristle and the Residents have their origins in the late 1960s; Throbbing Gristle in the performance art troupe Coum Transmissions, active from 1969 (Ford 1999: 1.15–1.16).1 The Residents’ exploratory recordings began at about the same time, their first official release being 1972’s Santa Dog EP. Each flaunted their lack of technique in a way that prefigured the rhetoric and aesthetics of punk and Mute Records. Both also operated from a home base that combined a rehearsal/recording space with other artistic and industrial activities, such as producing artwork for record sleeves and other promotional materials, and running record labels (the Residents had Ralph Records, Throbbing Gristle had Industrial Records). Both projects were also interested in the possibilities of film, and the Residents had a soundstage as part of their complex (Reynolds 2005: 248). However, while the Residents forwent traditional publicity opportunities in favour of mystique, Throbbing Gristle, especially in the form of de facto spokesperson Genesis P-Orridge,2 were always ready to lay their agendas out for the press and public. We really aren’t primarily concerned with music or musical technique or the future of music or the history of music. We happen at the moment to be using organised recorded sound as a medium for our propaganda and that means that we get referred to and regarded and analysed within the context of music. But 1

2

Ford’s book observes an unorthodox page numbering scheme, with each chapter restarting the numbering. Thus 10.6 indicates the sixth page of chapter ten. Cosey Fanni Tutti’s memoir posits that P-Orridge’s dominance of media opportunities on behalf of the band was a source of conflict within Throbbing Gristle. The other members saw it as a deliberate strategy to position himself as the leader of a group that was in fact democratic (2017: 208, 221–3, 241–2).

74

Mute Records that could be very misleading for people, because we’ve used other media and we still do … there are other priorities far above whether we progress musically. (P-Orridge 1980, quoted in Ford 1999: 10.6)

Drew Daniel asserts that Throbbing Gristle ‘were both less than music and more than music at the same time … low on form, but high on content; each record was a virus of subcultural info animating a musical host’ (2008: 13). At stake is what is considered ‘content’. Daniel seems to infer that ‘content’ is extramusical, that there’s ‘more to it’ than the music. Similarly, Gregory Steirer writes of Throbbing Gristle’s use of noise: The band’s sounds … were what sound technicians would readily label noise: excessive or undesired audio information that obscures the primary or desired musical message … where punk rock’s noise stemmed from a DIY amateurism that one could ignore in appreciation of the rock music behind it (and which vanished as the bands improved over time), Throbbing Gristle’s noise frequently came off as alarming sonic information behind which no music or meaning could be discerned. (Steirer 2012)

My argument is that to consider any recording as containing a ‘primary musical message’ enhanced or obscured by the manner of presentation or articulation (i.e. recording quality or clarity) is to miss the point. The sound is the content. The lyrics or stories of Throbbing Gristle’s recordings are imparted at various levels of comprehensibility, can only be received as such, and are parts of larger sonic assemblages (tracks and albums). Mute’s association with Throbbing Gristle is unsurprising. Since its inception in 1978, the identity of the label was defined through its DIY nature and its association with artists interested in the development and deployment of synthesizers and drum machines. We see this in very early releases, from the noise experimentation of Non to the synth-pop of Depeche Mode, and one might say that these poles were brought together in the label’s first release – the single ‘T.V.O.D.’/‘Warm Leatherette’ (1978) by the Normal. Further to this, through the 1980s and 1990s, Mute (often through its The Grey Area imprint) curated for re-release influential, and usually in some form electronic, music from pop’s avant-garde. In doing so the label helped to disseminate marginal but often very influential music, and asserted itself as a pillar of innovative practice. Mute became involved with Throbbing Gristle two years after the initial demise of the group, reissuing the first four albums in 1983 along with Mission

Throbbing Gristle’s Early Records

75

of Dead Souls, a recording of the group’s final live show in 1981. The Grey Area’s reissue programme of these albums in 1991 incorporated distribution through Warner Communications in the United States, while a further two posthumously released studio albums as well as four chronologically representative collections of live material were also released by the label in the UK and continental Europe in 1993. It is no accident that these odd and confronting albums received mainstream distribution in the United States in the wake of the success of Nine Inch Nails, who in a sense brought industrial music to the masses but also articulated a very different idea of the genre. Fifteen years had passed since the early Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire releases, during which acts like Ministry and Skinny Puppy emphasized the beat-oriented elements of the genre. Also through The Grey Area in the early 1990s, Mute reissued the early Cabaret Voltaire albums, as well as back catalogue by Can and SPK. Mute’s association with Einstürzende Neubauten began with a compilation of their early work in 1984. In the 2000s, Mute became the Residents’ UK/European label. Through their long association with Mute, Throbbing Gristle are also linked with acts that blur boundaries between electronic dance music and industrial music such as Laibach and Nitzer Ebb. Thus, through their curation, Mute and its offshoot The Grey Area propagated the industrial virus far beyond its initial manifestations and made explicit various continuums between strains of edge-dwelling music (Can and the Residents would never, of course, be considered ‘industrial’ acts) and their signings of the last thirty years.

Birth and death Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire are credited with founding a musical, perhaps even cultural, genre known as industrial, predicated on electronics, confrontation and the rejection of rock music as being redundant. Implicit in this is the judgement that punk rock is merely rock music with a torn shirt. Industrial music sought a different year zero, one disconnected from the history of rock music. Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire sums up some of industrial’s attributes: ‘We made music that was often sonically brutal, we challenged ideas of authority and control, we toyed with moody and often taboo imagery, we were simultaneously intellectual and anti-intellectual, we thought ourselves iconoclastic, and we wore raincoats sometimes’ (2013: ix). Industrial

76

Mute Records

music is rightly seen as the product of a set of attitudes towards society, art and technology that reaches back as far as the Futurists of the early twentieth century, and forward to myriad styles of popular music with machine-like rhythms (Reed 2013). In Throbbing Gristle specifically we can see and hear traces of many artistic traditions, some acknowledged by the group, others not so, including various trajectories of experimental art, the non-linear techniques of William Burroughs, the ‘any sound can be music’ philosophy of John Cage, and the immersive sensory experience of progressive rock groups such as Pink Floyd and Hawkwind. The importance of confrontation, amateurism and disruption to Throbbing Gristle’s work meant that some alignment with punk was achieved, or at least perceived by a portion of their audience. Their music featured primitive electronics, and it was also largely improvised, which contributed to a distinctive sonic signature. Throbbing Gristle’s emphasis on process was a deliberate strategy that aligned them with some of the freer proponents of improvisation. In this they often achieved a complete break from known structures, although they did occasionally indulge in song forms, such as in their independent chart hit ‘United’ (Industrial 1978). David Toop writes here of AMM’s work in the mid-late 1960s, but his words as easily apply to Throbbing Gristle: The abnegation of individualistic control gave release to an almost delirious rejection of European music and its axioms: equal temperament, the conceptual division of audible time into barlines and mathematical values … any system of intervallic relationships, the tuning of instruments to common accord, ‘correct’ intonation and instrumental technique. (Toop 2016: 210)

This description contains many elements important to the provocative fringes of popular music in the 1970s and early 1980s, where electronic music technology was primitive enough and aesthetics anarchic enough that harmonic and rhythmic grids were yet to dominate. At least two sources (Ford 1999: 5.16–5.18; Reed 2013: 73) report that Throbbing Gristle emerged as a distinct entity from Coum Transmissions on 3 September 1975. This seems to be P-Orridge-created propaganda, as the date is ‘the 36th anniversary of Britain’s entry into the Second World War’ (Ford 1999: 5.16). In her recent memoir, the group’s Cosey Fanni Tutti is less specific, saying that ‘Throbbing Gristle took some years to finally arrive, and in a workable format’ (Tutti 2017: 184), the chronology of the writing suggesting the first half of 1976. By this time P-Orridge and Tutti, who had been working as Coum with a revolving cast of co-conspirators, had been joined by Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson and

Throbbing Gristle’s Early Records

77

Chris Carter. P-Orridge was the main vocalist of the group and contributed bass guitar and violin. Tutti played the guitar unconventionally – her lack of interest in learning to play the instrument a potent illustration of the group’s overall approach – as well as cornet. All members played synthesizers and other electronics at times but Carter had special expertise here, creating, building and customizing instruments, as well as playing them. He also tended to be responsible for what drum programming there is on the early records, and had experience in lighting design and operation for rock concerts. Christopherson’s input included the use of both found and procured tape recordings – anything from TV transmissions to surreptitiously recorded private conversations. He also brought his experience as a designer and partner at Hipgnosis, a company that produced album artwork, as well as a decent salary – according to Ford, he effectively bankrolled the pressing of the group’s first album (1999: 7.20). The gradual accretion of members resulted in formidable creative resources and an array of complementary skills that allowed the group to work with uncommon autonomy. Throbbing Gristle’s initial ‘mission’ was ‘terminated’ in 1981, but the four original members regrouped for more work together from 2004–10; Christopherson died on 24 November of that year. This crystallization of Throbbing Gristle as four distinct characters is a distinctly rockist move – think the Beatles or Kiss. It enabled them, like any other group, to promote themselves with band photos of identifiable persons. That electronics took the place of drums, or perhaps the fact that the idea of drums is irrelevant to the concept of the band, makes Throbbing Gristle’s band structure less traditionally ‘rock’ than contemporaries like Devo or Pere Ubu, however. So: performance art group or rock band? Not that they had to, or we have to, choose, but commentators from either side like to put them in the opposite basket. As Steirer writes, ‘Even more cautious critics such as Neil Mulholland, who concedes the importance of art-world concerns to Throbbing Gristle, persist in identifying Throbbing Gristle primarily as a commercial music endeavour, thereby placing it outside the bounds of their discipline’ (2012). On the contrary, I see Throbbing Gristle as more a performance art project that manifested itself in the context of the commercial world of the music industry, their success made possible by the incursions of punk rock into that industry. The group’s first public performance was not until July 1976, and early performances took place in art galleries rather than the pub scene in London that nurtured punk (Ford 1999: 6.16–7.8).3 3

The Clash’s performance at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London on 23 October 1976 was an exception rather than the rule. Punk groups would play at arts colleges, presumably at their bars; performances at art galleries were comparatively rare.

78

Mute Records

The cut-up The Second Annual Report is clearly divided into two halves as per its initial release as an LP: a first side of ‘noise’ and a second side of more ambient sound (more on this later). The next two albums are each comprised of song-sized chunks of the group’s sonic research, though this is not to say that traditional song forms are much in evidence. As Mallinder writes of Cabaret Voltaire’s early practice, ‘Song structures and linear arrangements were abandoned; the logocentric norm of most contemporary music was dismissed for a sonic democracy’ (2013: xi). Second album D.O.A. is a clear articulation of the cut-up approach of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs. As understood by P-Orridge: William and Brion had a really deep belief the Cut-Up was a way of revealing the nature of reality. That if you consciously structured something you were influencing it with your own particular life and prejudice and it couldn’t be pure and wouldn’t necessarily tell you anything new. They leave it to the material itself to explain or reveal connections and collisions that otherwise would never occur. (Grey 2011)

D.O.A. seems to be structured randomly, starting with an authentically industrial sound that is an artefact of a computer process (the opening track is called ‘I.B.M.’). There are pieces that align somewhat with expectations of ‘song’; that is, a lead vocal with musical accompaniment comprises ‘Hit by a Rock’, ‘Weeping’ and ‘Blood on the Floor’. ‘AB/7A’ is an electronic, beat-driven solo piece by Chris Carter while ‘Valley of the Shadow of Death’, ‘E-Coli’ and ‘Hometime’ are found voice pieces, by which I mean the identities of those whose voices are used are unknown and sourced from outside the group and recording sessions. There is no discernible pattern to the scattering of these types; neither do they reconcile to a cohesive whole. 20 Jazz Funk Greats is Throbbing Gristle’s experiment with cohesive form, seemingly only able to be attempted once a rejection of the album form was established by D.O.A. Its structure is of two intersecting halves, rather than the clear division of The Second Annual Report. The first half alternates ambient and/or instrumental pieces (2. ‘Beachy Head’, 4. ‘Tanith’, 6. ‘Exotica’) with other gambits: disembodied, queasy approximations of, or unsettling satires on, funk (1. ‘20 Jazz Funk Greats’) and Eurodisco (3. ‘Still Walking’ and 7. ‘Hot on the Heels of Love’). As the album progresses we get more and more of P-Orridge’s vocals (5. ‘Convincing People’, 8. ‘Persuasion’, 10. ‘What a Day’, 11. ‘Six Six Sixties’). Despite the variety, this gives us two poles of style or delivery – the

Throbbing Gristle’s Early Records

79

early tendency to the instrumental and ambient, and the encroaching presence of P-Orridge’s vocality and with it a more vibrant and abrasive palette of timbres. This creates an arc through the album in terms of mood. There is a third pervasive element that helps to unite the album, and this is the use of electronic rhythms in straightforward 4/4 time (though ‘Hot on the Heels of Love’ is in 3/4, a kind of robotic disco waltz). These permeate all the tracks except 2, 4 and 6 (the ambient tracks) and so suffuse the album with, for Throbbing Gristle, an unlikely, digestible musicality. Of the four albums, 20 Jazz Funk Greats is the only one that resembles, somewhat, the expectations we have of a rock album. Though balanced in its yin/yang division into two clear halves, The Second Annual Report blindsides the listener with its wholesale rejection of musical values, at least with the confrontational noise and ‘content’ of its first side. Heathen Earth was the last album released by Throbbing Gristle during its initial phase. Recorded live in a single hour-long performance, attended by intimates of the group, it (perhaps inadvertently) gives something of a summary of their musical activities to that date. Though improvised, there was a structure planned around the entry and exit of various instruments and sound sources (Ford 1999: 10.6). The album was originally released without separating the audio of each side into individual tracks or supplying titles. It is worth noting also that, while the first two albums were collated from available tapes and so contained a mixture of live and home studio recordings, 20 Jazz Funk Greats and Heathen Earth were both recorded with an album release in mind. We can also expect some refinement in the group’s studio equipment and practice from album to album, so it is no surprise that for this reason also the third and fourth albums sound more cohesive. Still, it was a creative and aesthetic choice of the band to release albums (The Second Annual Report and D.O.A.) that felt disjunct in terms of their sequencing and range of sound quality from track to track. This was in keeping with both the accent on process that was central to Throbbing Gristle’s approach and the ethos that ‘the primary reason for making any record at all was to document and preserve what [we] considered to be the most effective and functional pieces of sound research’ (P-Orridge 1984, quoted in Ford 1999: 7.17).

Voices A powerful and insidious weapon in Throbbing Gristle’s arsenal is the banality, the artlessness of P-Orridge’s voice: its nasal taunting, not far removed from

80

Mute Records

the schoolyard; the capacity to introduce gruesome subject matter completely dispassionately. He rarely sings,4 instead favouring a kind of pitched recitation that can traverse the limits of his range suddenly and dramatically, as on ‘Convincing People’ (from 20 Jazz Funk Greats), though even here there is a kind of startling naturalness in contrast to the veneer of style and performance in most pop and rock. P-Orridge’s performances are anti-performance, just as Throbbing Gristle produce anti-music (Reynolds 2005: 230), particularly on the first two albums. Throughout these albums, P-Orridge’s voice is processed through various effects – distorted, chopped up by tremolo as on ‘Maggot Death – Live at Rat Club’ on The Second Annual Report, and often looped through a delay to repeat. Most pop and rock create a connection to an audience through a number of devices, and perhaps the most important is the construction of a consistent vocal persona across releases. This may be a multi-voiced approach (see Animal Collective or mid-1970s Fleetwood Mac), but nonetheless a consistent vocal persona allows for a navigable continuum between releases and across a career (Encarnacao 2016: 125–6). On D.O.A., Throbbing Gristle’s obfuscation of vocal persona is created through a disorienting multiplicity of voices. Although P-Orridge provides what we recognize as ‘lead vocals’ on four tracks (even a kind of regulation punk rock sneer on ‘Blood On The Floor’), many of the tracks feature found voices. These range from indecipherable conversations between men on ‘Valley of the Shadow of Death’,5 to children talking and laughing on ‘Playtime’, simultaneous medical or scientific reports in ‘E-Coli’, and material from an answering machine on ‘Death Threats’. Found voices are often utilized in lo-fi and outsider recordings and have many different connotations, from surveillance to a clash of contexts, from a repurposing of the domestic to the disruption of a track’s narrative (Encarnacao 2016: 143–5). If this plethora of voices wasn’t enough, even P-Orridge’s vocal performances vary widely: from a gruesome narration on ‘Hamburger Lady’ to the literally pathetic moaning of ‘Weeping’, and the yelping and screaming of ‘Hit By A Rock’. There is no consistent vocal persona to relate to, just as there is little consistency of sound. 4

5

With respect to the use of pronoun here, and out of respect to Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s Pandrogyne project, I will follow Reed and use the ‘previous name Genesis P-Orridge and a corresponding male pronoun when discussing the artist’s pre-2003 work’ (2013: 11). According to Ford this track features a covert recording of ‘negotiations between a young male prostitute and his client’ (1999: 8.25). I can make very little out of what the voices on this track are saying, and so to my ears it sounds predominantly like a few young blokes having a laugh. I question the relevance of the ‘content’ of a track like this if I have to read what it is from a secondary source.

Throbbing Gristle’s Early Records

81

Both Christopherson and Tutti contribute ‘lead’ vocals on 20 Jazz Funk Greats (the occasional spoken elements of ‘20 Jazz Funk Greats’ and ‘Hot on the Heels of Love’ respectively), further multiplying, or fracturing, the sense of vocal persona. P-Orridge’s vocals dominate four tracks and generally adhere to what we might call a non-melodic approach – pitchless recitations, exhortations, murmurings and the like. The exception is ‘Persuasion’, where a limited vocal range contributes to a sung performance that is closely controlled and, as the lyric would intend, controlling. ‘What a Day’ and ‘Convincing People’ have P-Orridge in delay mode, where every phrase is repeated at a volume that at least matches its initial iteration. Daniel’s reading of this approach is that it ‘upset[s] the standard figure/ground distinction between “lead” and “backup” vocals with a sonic experience of multiple personality disorder’ (2008: 73). Crucially, this is also a demonstration of process, as the vocals are recorded live with the delay and so, coupled with an improvisatory practice, the technology here influences the performance greatly – in fact, P-Orridge remembers that ‘it was the delay on the voice that inspired the way the song was constructed’ (2008: 75). While D.O.A. and 20 Jazz Funk Greats toy with the rock/pop album form, and so prompt an expectation of vocal persona in the bite-sized chunks of audio, Heathen Earth presents itself as long-form improvisation/art music. Found voices are not much present here; P-Orridge’s (spoken) vocals are largely buried in the first half of the album, but three quarters of the way through there is an exposed, spoken word duet between Christopherson and Tutti. As Reed describes it, ‘Christopherson and Tutti’s lines are never in response to one another, but they instead overlap; they are two simultaneous monologues. The suggested world of the speakers is not contiguous in time or perception, but is cut up’ (2013: 37). This cuts across our expectations of the vocal in recordings in several ways. It represents neither a coherent conversation nor story, yet we get the sense of a failed pickup attempt. The fragment of relationship here is relayed as an actual failure of communication, but not in a profound, artistic or aesthetic sense. As with some of P-Orridge’s monologues, a vocal ordinariness becomes extraordinary through its presentation as creative work. As a kind of postscript to this consideration of vocal persona, in what seems out of character for a Throbbing Gristle release, P-Orridge sings very tunefully in what is almost a torch song in ‘Rabbit Snare’ from Part Two: The Endless Not (Mute 2007). But of course, confounding expectations (‘guaranteeing disappointment’ as the Coum Transmissions/Throbbing Gristle byline goes) is a Throbbing Gristle trademark.

82

Mute Records

Persuasion (timbre) The most recent Throbbing Gristle reissue campaign, in 2011 on the group’s own Industrial label, comprises the four albums under discussion here and so cements their centrality to the group’s legacy. Each is in the ‘classic rock’ reissue configuration of a double CD featuring the original album on disc one with complementary contemporaneous material on disc two (non-album singles, live recordings), and each features the following note: The quality and content of this album should not be compared to conventional commercial live or studio recordings. The Throbbing Gristle repertoire consisted of a diverse range of intentional (and unintentional) tonalities, timbres including: tape hiss, phase errors, white noise, distortion, clicks, pops, extreme high and low frequencies and occasional silence. Please bear this in mind when listening to these recordings.

Through this disclaimer, or perhaps statement of purpose, we can receive the message once again that the quality of sound and nature of the timbres we hear on these recordings are not the package that the content is delivered in, but part and parcel of the content itself. I will finish with a brief consideration of timbre and noise in Throbbing Gristle’s work, though this has already been touched upon briefly in other contexts above. The textures of side one of The Second Annual Report (several versions each of two titles, ‘Slug Bait’ and ‘Maggot Death’) manage to be both gelatinous and spiky. There is a prevailing lack of timbral definition, which is important to the feeling of unease the record imparts. It is almost impossible to avoid pitch content in matter that sounds (listen next time you close a gate or get something from the cutlery drawer) but the pitches here rarely if ever coalesce into melody or harmony. There are noises that throb, but aside from the rate of delay on the guitar in the first version of ‘Maggot Death’ and the sequenced synthesizer patch in the third, recognizable rhythms are scarce. And timbrally, things tend to be indistinct. After all, timbral definition is essential to the articulation of recognizable rhythmic patterns. These characteristics are also definitive of side two of the album, “‘After Cease To Exist”’. There are similarities here to 1970s German groups (for example ‘Genesis’ from Tangerine Dream’s Electronic Meditation (Ohr1970)) and to early electronic art music such as Pierre Schaeffer’s ‘Pathetique’ (from his Cinq etudes de bruits 1948). What sets this track apart is Throbbing Gristle’s avoidance of conventional rhythm and harmony, and, with

Throbbing Gristle’s Early Records

83

respect to electronic art music, the generation of much of the sonic landscape from improvisation with conventional instruments rather than an exclusive focus on magnetic tape and/or electronic generation. The use of, and contrasts between, malevolent, murky timbres that refuse definition and piercing timbral assaults resonate across Throbbing Gristle’s discography, both between tracks and within them. To my mind one of the group’s most effective tracks is ‘Persuasion’. P-Orridge’s voice is clear – slightly muddied by a short delay, but present and loud in the mix. The only consistent accompaniment is a trudging bass that alternates, every four notes or so, between two pitches. This grim circling imparts a feeling of being locked in, of time slowing and stretching. There are two active elements that punctuate the mix unpredictably. One is found voices – a location recording chopped into short fragments that bubble and explode. Are the voices laughing or screaming? The other is Tutti’s guitar, distorted and played with slide, as is her custom. Deliberately harsh, at times it so resembles a human scream that it is hard to tell what is guitar and what is found voices. We have three types of utterances – the methodical, sinister persuader (P-Orridge) and the two unhinged wildcards. The contrast in timbres, with the bass at one extreme, the guitar and found voices at the other, and P-Orridge’s voice somewhat in the middle, is what makes the track so powerful.

Canon fodder Any creative work that receives attention and infamy becomes subsumed into the canon from which it initially wished to distinguish itself, and so it is with Throbbing Gristle. As Atton puts it, drawing on Mann, ‘The avant-garde is at once the vanguard of the “main cultural body” and its opposition … “caught in a strange ideological crossfire”’ (2012: 349). Mann points out that art cannot exist without an institutional and discursive context; art itself is by definition discursive (1991: 5–6). Despite the fact that Throbbing Gristle emerged from practices enmeshed with performance art and gallery/exhibition/public art infrastructure, their intervention as a band only has meaning in as far as it is read in relation to other bands – to the broader culture of rock music. Though the group insisted on their combative relationship with the music industry, this itself is a well-worn trope that is foundational to the stories of many artists. Given the questions that Throbbing Gristle’s early releases ask about what constitutes

84

Mute Records

music, the group has better anti-establishment credentials than most. However, the numerous editions and variations over the last forty years of their most celebrated albums support an argument that Throbbing Gristle has become a canonical band. In fact they have become a kind of intersection of canons: electronic music, popular music’s avant-garde, industrial music (of course) and, I would argue, part of the canon of the ‘main cultural body’ – popular music itself. Ultimately, their status as founders of a new musical style or cultural movement notwithstanding, Throbbing Gristle’s sense of documenting process, and technological and timbral play is what claims them a particular niche in popular music history. That is, these elements are the musical corollary, the aural manifestation of the other aspects of challenge (rhetorical, philosophical) in their work. We can see a generational tendency towards dystopian visions and the use of the noise of synthesizers and the coldness of early drum machines across the music Cabaret Voltaire, Devo, Pere Ubu and Throbbing Gristle made in the mid-to-late 1970s. In this there are resonances between the fading industrial centres of northern England and those of the American Midwest. To ground our understanding of Throbbing Gristle’s practice as indicative of a broader cultural formation – that small window between hippie and punk that productively engages with aspects of both – is not to forget the uniqueness of their intervention. The question of the value of the early recorded works of Throbbing Gristle must be addressed directly here. 20 Jazz Funk Greats is without doubt the most satisfying and enduring of these four albums. Daniel writes of what a disappointment he (as a teenager) found the record after The Second Annual Report: ‘I felt betrayed. What happened to the darkness and evil? This sounded like the work of … people who might be growing up and feeling a bit bored by serial-killer trivia’ (2008: 20). This is, of course entirely the point. The grisly crimes and abject human misery, and fascination in the gory details of the likes of ‘Hamburger Lady’ (D.O.A.) and ‘Slug Bait’ (The Second Annual Report) have not dated well. What might have been a visceral thrill or a confrontation with the darkest aspects of human experience are, forty years on, rather puerile. Similarly, P-Orridge’s lines, such as ‘Do you love me with my knife against your throat?’(from ‘The Old Man Smiled’, Heathen Earth),6 would qualify as empty shock posturing if not for the revelations/accusations in Tutti’s memoir

6

‘The Old Man Smiled’ written by G. P-Orridge, C. F. Tutti, C. Carter and P. Chistopherson, Peermusic Ltd.

Throbbing Gristle’s Early Records

85

of P-Orridge’s ongoing physical and psychological abuse of her, including instances where she might have been killed (2017: 254–5). Musically speaking, even if, as Daniel asserts, 20 Jazz Funk Greats indulges in parodies of established genres, its tracks are much more engrossing and successful (in part because of their economy) than the relatively dull two-chord tricks of Heathen Earth’s ‘Something Came over Me’ and ‘Don’t Do as You’re Told, Do as You Think’, the latter additionally weighed down by the manner in which the self-contradictory dogma of its title is intoned bluntly by P-Orridge. To my mind, the other major musical success of this early period is ‘“After Cease To Exist”’, a kind of scorchedearth, atonal ambience that could only come from Throbbing Gristle. The stature of Throbbing Gristle demands a reckoning with more than just other industrial and experimental bands. Like the Beatles or the Velvet Underground, they made an influential body of work and then disbanded before their message could be diluted. With deluxe reissues replete with bonus tracks, Throbbing Gristle seem to have tacitly admitted that, aside from the overlapping canons of performance art, noise music, industrial music and avant-garde music, they are now also part of popular music history.

References Atton, C. (2012), ‘Listening to “Difficult Albums”: Specialist Music Fans and the Popular Avant-garde’, Popular Music, 31 (3): 347–61. Daniel, D. (2008), 20 Jazz Funk Greats, New York and London: Continuum. Encarnacao, J. (1999), ‘Logic need not Apply’, Metro supplement of Sydney Morning Herald, 22 January: 27. Encarnacao, J. (2016), Punk Aesthetics and New Folk: Way Down the Old Plank Road, London and New York: Routledge. Ford, S. (1999), Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of Coum Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle, London: Black Dog Publishing. Grey, C. (2011), ‘Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Ghosts#9’, Dazed. Available online: http:// www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/9684/1/genesis-breyer-p-orridgeghosts9 (accessed 4 December 2016). Mallinder, S. (2013), ‘Foreword’ in S. Alexander Reed, Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music, ix–xiv, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Mann, P. (1991), The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Reed, S. A. (2013), Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

86

Mute Records

Reynolds, S. (2005), Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984, London: Faber and Faber. Sarig, R. (1998), The Secret History of Rock: The Most Influential Bands You’ve Never Heard, New York: Billboard Books. Steirer, G. (2012), ‘The Art of Everyday Life and Death: Throbbing Gristle and the Aesthetics of Neoliberalism’, Postmodern Culture, 22 (2): no page numbers. Toop, D. (2016), Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation and the Dream of Freedom, New York and London: Bloomsbury. Tutti, C. F. (2017), Art Sex Music, London: Faber and Faber.

6

‘Join That Troubled Chorus’: Nick Cave, the Bad Seeds and the Blues Ross Cole

In the summer of 1930, young Mississippi bluesman Eddie James ‘Son’ House, Jr. travelled with his friends Charley Patton and Willie Brown to Grafton, Wisconsin, for a recording session with Paramount Records. Patton, some eleven years older than House, was already an established recording star in the industry’s all but segregated African American ‘race’ category, having released the hit songs ‘Pony Blues’ and ‘High Water Everywhere’ via Paramount in 1929. Within four years he would be dead. House, then an obscure figure in the Delta, would go on to become the teacher of the legendary Robert Johnson, outliving him to see his own music venerated during the transatlantic blues revival of the 1960s. Driven in a Buick by a teetotal gospel singer and joined by a woman named Louise Johnson (a barrelhouse piano player and one of Patton’s many paramours), the group had stopped off and used their $100 advance to purchase new Stella guitars and bootleg whisky for the long ride north. The trip was anything but smooth: an inebriated Patton lost balance during a quarrel with Brown and fell onto his own brand new guitar, smashing it to pieces by the roadside. Having met with Patton’s ire, Johnson climbed into the back seat with House and in the ensuing hours decided to switch romantic loyalties. On arrival, the group was put up in a boarding house with their expenses covered by the Wisconsin Chair Company – like several others at the time, an enterprise that had founded a record label as an extension of its role in the phonograph business. These sessions were House’s first time in front of a microphone. Given the Wall Street Crash and looming Depression, his recordings sold so poorly that only single copies have since been found. Among this material was a song entitled ‘Preachin’ the Blues’ (Paramount 1930) – divided, as with his other songs ‘My Black Mama’ (Paramount 1930) and ‘Dry Spell Blues’ (Paramount

88

Mute Records

1930), into two parts. Accompanied in a slide guitar style, ‘Preachin’ the Blues’ Part I contains the following couplets in characteristic blues form: Oh, in my room, I bowed down to pray (x 2), then the blues come along and blowed my spirit away Oh, I’d’a had religion, Lord, this very day (x 2), but the womens and whiskey, well, they would not let me pray.1

Such plainspoken lyrics seem to represent, as his biographer Daniel Beaumont points out, ‘a remarkable portrait of House’s psyche’ (2011: 69). Indeed, the aptly named singer was an exemplary (if impenitent) prodigal son: born in 1902, House had been brought up as a Christian to detest lowdown ‘devil’s music’ like the blues and had begun preaching in public aged only fifteen. Having experienced first-hand the brutality of Jim Crow and a sharecropping system designed to ensure black southerners remained in economic servitude, House had sought escape by becoming a pastor, first as a Baptist and then in the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. Attracted by hard liquor and sex, House nevertheless found it increasingly difficult to stay on the path of righteousness – compounded by an incident at a house party where, armed with a .32 automatic pistol, he shot and killed a man named Leroy Lee. House’s epiphany, as Beaumont points out, was hence more of an apostasy. Upon hearing the sound of a bottleneck guitar player, he had quickly taken up the instrument himself and begun performing for parties and a travelling medicine show – drawing on the vocal and literary skills he acquired in the pulpit while struggling with two irreconcilable careers. It was the spiritual conflicts arising from this fall from grace that gave birth to the anguished soul-searching of his 1930 recordings. This lyrical introspection is found most poignantly in the following stanzas, the first from ‘Preachin’ the Blues Part II’ and the second from ‘My Black Mama Part I’: Now I met the blues this morning, walking just like a man Oh, walking just like a man I said ‘good morning blues, now give me your right hand’2 Say, ain’t no heaven; there ain’t no burnin’ hell Say, where I’m going when I die, can’t nobody tell3

The broken form of the first verse seems to echo the broken and troubled persona of the lyrics. It is as if the blues – equivocally implored to shepherd

1 2 3

‘Preachin’ the Blues Part I’ written by Son House, BMG Rights Management (UK) Limited. ‘Preachin’ the Blues Part II’ written by Son House, BMG Rights Management (UK). ‘My Black Mama Part I’ written by Son House, BMG Rights Management (UK) Limited.

‘Join that Troubled Chorus’

89

the lost singer like God walking in the Garden of Eden or literally to lead him astray – is the singer’s only source of guidance. This patronage, however, results only in mystification within a bleakly profane realm cut off from theology and metaphysics. In House’s life we thus find the essential ingredients of blues mythology: personal suffering, acts of outlaw violence, spiritual desolation, wild living, womanizing and sin. This blues mythos has inspired and continues to inspire much of Nick Cave’s work with the Bad Seeds and his side project Grinderman – named, tellingly, after Memphis Slim’s swaggering 1940 ‘Grinder Man Blues’ (Bluebird 1940). Much like House, Cave negotiates the convoluted relationship between the sacred and the profane, morality and depravity, punishment and redemption, the carnal and the spiritual in a tradition that draws its affective and emotional power from the blues; the difference being that House was an insider to this culture of African American self-expression, whereas Cave is not. Entwined with his insistent return to tropes pertaining to the southern United States, the blues has been a recurring theme in Cave’s work: director John Hillcoat recalls that as early as the Birthday Party’s Prayers on Fire (4AD 1981) Cave would come round to make tapes of blues records from his collection (Johnson 1996: 70). Looking back, Cave himself remembers being drawn to ‘a certain voice that worked through a lot of blues music [and] some of those murder ballads’ that he found shocking and exhilarating (Snow 2011: 211). Musicians such as John Lee Hooker, Lead Belly and Blind Willie Johnson haunt Cave’s oeuvre, grounding his work in the diasporic traditions of black music that Paul Gilroy describes as a ‘counterculture of modernity’ (1993: 1). Despite compilation albums of Cave’s southern Gothic influences accompanying articles in Mojo and Uncut, such connections have gone largely unremarked in the academic sphere (see, for instance, the index to Welberry and Dalziell 2009). House’s ‘Preachin’ the Blues’, I want to suggest, holds a key to Cave’s aesthetics: the title refers not only to preaching about the blues, but also to blues performance itself being a form of ritual or preaching, with the blues singer taking on the role of a secular shaman. Cave’s work echoes this deliberate ambiguity: in live performance his idiosyncratic hand gestures and commanding stage presence frequently make him appear, in the words of one critic, to be a ‘crazed preacher in the throes of zealous rapture’ (Hewitt 2014). Evinced by Bessie Smith’s 1927 recording on Parlophone also entitled ‘Preachin’ the Blues’, there is a defiantly blasphemous intent in such signifyin’ (Gates 1988) on religiosity in blues songs – juxtaposing the church’s sexually repressive piety with the illicit alcohol

90

Mute Records

consumption and raucous bodily liberation of juke joints with ‘pianos playing ‘til the break of day’ and spuriously pious women doing ‘a shimmy you ain’t never seen’.4 Smith’s lyrics use religious conversion to the ‘spirit of the blues’ as a metaphor for worldly empowerment, culminating in the singer’s proclamation of some pragmatic advice: ‘Let me tell you, girls, that your man ain’t treating you right … I ain’t here to try to save your soul / Just want to teach you how to save your good jelly roll’ (African American slang for female genitalia). Although rather more concerned with the illustration of male desire and dominance than the promotion of a feminist agenda, Cave’s work similarly draws together the language of gospel salvation with an audacious exploration into the darker regions of what we might describe as outlaw culture. Before delving into Cave’s intersections with black music, it is worth pausing to sketch out how blues accrued the ideals we associate with the genre. This ideology is less a result of the period 1920–40 when classic blues queens such as Smith and guitarists such as Robert Johnson made their recordings than it is of the 1960s, the decade of a mass revival. In short, these ideals are the result of reception occurring across cultural, temporal and racial boundaries. In the postwar era, a young generation of white fans driven by a quest for realism had turned to old African American race records – products believed to be the antithesis of vapid mainstream pop. One of the many ironies of this process was that the music favoured by African American listeners themselves was downplayed or ignored: it is clear, for example, that Smith was a far more popular performer than Johnson ever was, yet blues mythology elevates Johnson’s depictions of rural despair over Smith’s playful urban licentiousness. Bolstered by books such as Samuel Charters’ The Country Blues (1959), the 1960s revival instituted an aesthetic valourization of the introverted, enigmatic bluesman at odds with society (Cole 2018). This value system not only misconstrued blues history, skewing it towards autonomous masculine archetypes, it also misrepresented the musical compass of those very figures. Johnson, for example, was a populist performer whose expansive repertoire encompassed all manner of styles. As R. A. Lawson notes, blues songs were ‘conceived, inherited, and reshaped by aspiring professional musicians who saw music as a countercultural escape from economic and social subservience’ (2010: xi). Revivalists, in contrast, valued such material as an epitome of folk music – raw, primitive, uncontaminated by industry and intriguingly exotic. 4

‘Preachin’ the Blues’ written by Bessie Smith, public domain.

‘Join that Troubled Chorus’

91

Cave shares in this folkloric interpretation of the blues. As Blixa Bargeld of Einstürzende Neubauten and the Bad Seeds recalls, during the mid-1980s just after Cave signed with Mute Records and was at work on his 1989 novel And the Ass Saw the Angel, he ‘was getting quite genuinely interested in blues, gospel, black music in general … maybe not so much the music but the mythology and symbolism of it’ (Johnson 1996: 163). In order to grasp Cave’s use of blues motifs, therefore, we must avoid disenchanting the genre through persistent historicization – bracketing, for the moment, the more disquieting aspects of this appropriation. Cave’s consciously allegorical employment of Christian spirituality provides a template: according to Cave, not only are doubt and scepticism integral to faith, but ‘there are times when the truth is necessary and times when myth-making is necessary. When you’re talking about rock‘n’roll, myth-making is what it’s all about’ (Snow 2011: 187). ‘Mythology’, as he confesses in The Sick Bag Song, ‘bubbles up within me, and all about me’ (2015: 41). As Simon Frith reminds us (1981), the significance of such myths is that they are myths: our task, he argues, is not simply to ‘expose’ them, but to recognize why they are so tenacious. As a fabrication, myth holds power precisely because it can be tailored to serve imaginative ends, enriching or even enabling the act of performance. To quote Carolyn Abbate, this wild and difficult to convey ‘drastic’ quality of music – attesting to its ability to transfix and its ‘resemblance to magic shows and circuses’ – is realized by performers who, like Cave, are able to ‘inspire worship or hysteria’ (2004: 508). Mythologies, as Adorno and Horkheimer (1997) famously claimed, are already a form of enlightenment and have much to offer in the way of human understanding. Indeed, African American writers such as Amiri Baraka, Zora Neale Hurston and Houston A. Baker, Jr. have employed the blues as a means of social affirmation. The perspective I foreground here consequently aims to acknowledge the genre as a positive source of identity and inspiration. Cave’s short story ‘Bline Lemon Jefferson’ published in his 1988 anthology King Ink distils his vision of the blues. Inspired by the eponymous singerguitarist, this tale spins an escape narrative around a plantation in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Born in 1914, the story’s protagonist pitches hay under the whip of a merciless ‘Boss-driver’ with a ‘Smith + Wessen cockt in his saddle bag’ (1988: 105). Having furtively crafted a guitar ‘in the dark of the slavery-stable’, Jefferson bludgeons this irksome overseer, grabs his gun, and races through a swamp landscape in which – pursued by ‘all the blud-dogs and pro-trackers and pick-ups fulla dusty men’ – he sees the charred victims of lynching still

92

Mute Records

hanging from trees (1988: 107–8). Forced into the muddy water, Jefferson’s sight is washed away and in return he receives ‘bran new cataracts small n white n round like the body of Christ’ (1988: 106). As with mute Euchrid Eucrow of And the Ass Saw the Angel, Jefferson is lacking in one key faculty that in Cave’s world allows him to become a vessel for divine inspiration: rather than scales falling from his eyes, the singer believes his blindness to be a sign of sanctity and redemption. Via Memphis he reaches Buffalo Springs, where he meets Lightnin’ Hopkins, Sunnyland Slim and Snooks Eaglin. Despite referencing these musicians by name, Cave’s historical purview is deeply anachronistic. The real Jefferson was born in Couchman, Texas, in 1897 and was neither chattel nor murderer; Weldon ‘Juke Boy’ Bonner, portrayed as a casualty of lynching, was born several years after Jefferson’s untimely demise and passed away in Texas in 1978. The strange world of Cave’s story, moreover, alludes less to the 1920s than to the antebellum era. Or rather, Cave is conflating a number of historical moments for dramatic effect: plantation slavery, the Ku Klux Klan and the Great Migration. What seems to fascinate Cave most is the south rendered as a pre-modern land of barbarism and lawless struggles for survival populated by humans thrown back on primitive ingenuity and mysticism. At the centre of his story is the ‘dark cry’ of Jefferson’s singing as he sits perched in reminiscence of his youthful escape: Low an limply strummin forth, a gagging melody that strains for a moment and is gone, from tin-pot geetar, airborn like the prodigal son an what colour murder then? A moaning threnody unsung in veils of purple, plum an bruise and floods of claret, cochineal an pewce. (Cave 1988: 104)

Metaphors of violence suffuse this vignette: Jefferson’s ‘stranglin-hand’ becomes a noose around the guitar’s neck while his ‘black-fist … mauled its hollow body’ (Cave 1988: 104). His own body mimics both the naked root of the sycamore tree on which he sits as well as the ‘oily black crows’ surrounding him (Cave 1988: 104, 104–5). Giving voice to ‘all the tribulations of his past’, in other words, the blind bluesman – ‘this creature of grief ’ – is equated with brute nature: he is blues incarnate, the voice of the mythic Delta itself made flesh (Cave 1988: 104, 105). We hear unmistakable echoes of southern Gothic literature, particularly William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor (blindness being central to O’Connor’s 1952 novel Wise Blood) – an influence Cave admits, along with his attraction to ‘big, heavy-duty prose stylists’ (Snow 2011: 218). Indeed, the story

‘Join that Troubled Chorus’

93

unfolds through an idiosyncratic blend of modernist stream of consciousness and southern vernacular familiar from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930). For Cave, however, Jefferson the bluesman is not only an object of narrative intrigue, but also an ideal to be emulated: the gesture of prosopopoeia (face- or person-making) via which he is brought to life as a speaking presence in the text also gives Cave a distinctive mask to speak through. It is this same gesture of personification that Cave relishes in songs such as ‘Wanted Man’ (Mute 1985), ‘I’m Gonna Kill that Woman’ (Mute 1986) and ‘City of Refuge’ (Mute 1988) – a performative disguise that he uses to animate an array of malevolent alter egos. Together, these alter egos bleed into the performing persona we know as ‘Nick Cave’, an identity that, as Philip Auslander notes, is the product of negotiations between artist and audience ‘within the constraints of genre framing’ (2006: 114). The blues, in short, frames Cave’s output while affording him access to a vocal and lyrical style through which he can ventriloquize drifters, religious zealots and criminal outcasts. Jefferson’s story appears as the final track on the 1985 album The Firstborn is Dead – the second LP Cave released with the Bad Seeds on Mute, having been sought out while performing in the Birthday Party by Daniel Miller, who admired the band’s non-conformist approach (Johnson 1996: 13–14).5 On The Firstborn is Dead, this tale is a terse blues lyric utilizing the familiar AAB structure, Jefferson’s cane echoing the ‘Ghastly grim and ancient Raven’ of Edgar Allan Poe’s eponymous 1845 poem (lines 8.4): Bline Lemon Jefferson is a-comin, tap tap tappin with his cane Bline Lemon Jefferson is a-comin, tap tap tappin with his cane His last ditch lies down the road of trials half filled with rain … O his road is dark and lonely; he don’t drive no Cadillac O his road is dark and lonely; he don’t drive no Cadillac If that sky serves as his eyes, then that moon is a cataract6

5

6

Miller has spoken of the Birthday Party as the one act that he regretted not signing. He was not able to do so in the early 1980s because he was ‘completely broke’ prior to the success of Depeche Mode (‘Classic Album Sundays’ 2017). Instead, he recommended the group to Ivo Watts-Russell of 4AD. Miller kept in touch with the Birthday Party and they ‘came back’ to him for their final EP, Mutiny! (Mute 1983) (ibid.). Mute released subsequent recordings by Cave, from the first Bad Seeds album From Her to Eternity (1984) to Grinderman 2 (2010). Mute also released records by the Birthday Party’s other remnant groups, These Immortal Souls and Crime & the City Solution. ‘Blind Lemon Jefferson’ written by N. Cave, B. Bargeld, B. Adamson and M. Harvey, courtesy Mute Song Limited.

94

Mute Records

Pairing the dactyls Cadillac and cataract through assonance, this second stanza gives us both a poignant image of blindness – lending Jefferson a Homeric or Miltonic quality while recalling Coleridge’s ‘Old Man with a steady Look sublime’ with ‘eyeless Face all Eye’ from the 1811 poem ‘Limbo’ (lines 10 and 16) – coupled with an allusion to the type of vehicle commercially successful blues musicians such as Muddy Waters drove in Chicago during the 1950s. Jefferson, in contrast, remains an unalloyed embodiment of southern folklore, waiting at his final station for the ‘Judgement train’ – a vital theme in black consciousness from the gospel train of the spirituals to the Underground Railroad. Dwelling on Jefferson’s racial difference and disability, Cave’s portraits in prose and song shadow a familiar revivalist trope in which suffering, loneliness, vice, old age and rural obscurity become the signifiers of authenticity. One of the artists most successfully navigating this enforced paradigm was John Lee Hooker – marketed during the revival via a series of records including The Country Blues Of John Lee Hooker (Riverside 1959), The Folk Lore Of John Lee Hooker (Vee Jay 1961), and The Real Folk Blues (Chess 1966). Cave’s first encounter with Hooker’s music had been a highly significant event: the confluence of his vocal tone, guitar playing and laconic phrasing, Cave states, ‘redefined all my ideas that I’d had up to that time’ (The Songwriting World of Nick Cave 2003). The Firstborn is Dead opens with an explicit homage to the bluesman – the sound of a deluge giving way to a song entitled ‘Tupelo’, also the title of a chilling recording Hooker made for Riverside in 1959 that recounts devastation following the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. The flood in Hooker’s ballad takes on Biblical proportions, with women and children crying out ‘Lord have mercy on the great disaster; who can we turn to now but you?’7 The reply is silence, implying that this horror is perhaps an act of Divine judgement or an indication that God is powerless, merciless or dead. Depicted on the cover photograph of the single with arms folded over a resonator guitar (Figure 6.1), Cave consciously positions himself in this bardic Delta lineage stretching back to Patton’s ‘High Water Everywhere’ (Paramount 1929). Cave’s lyrics rewrite the Mississippi flood as an eschatological sign, wrung as if from the mouth of a feverish pastor and accompanied by an unrelenting punk riff reminiscent of Tracy Pew’s work with the Birthday Party. Amid the rumble of thunder ‘hungry

7

‘Tupelo’ written by J. L. Hooker, Sparta-Florida Music Group Ltd.

‘Join that Troubled Chorus’

95

Figure 6.1 Front cover of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ ‘Tupelo’ 7” single (Mute 1985).

like the Beast’ and ‘black rain’ turning streets to rivers a bathetic vision of salvation emerges: a King is born, the second twin to a deceased firstborn in ‘a cradle of straw’ who will ‘carry the burden of Tupelo’.8 This twinless twin is the infant Elvis Presley. Such lyrics revive the legends of pop culture in a way neither satirical nor wholly serious. Cut from the same cloth, Robert Johnson turns up in the midst of ‘Higgs Boson Blues’ from Cave’s album Push the Sky Away (Bad Seed Ltd 2013): Black road long and I drove and drove Came upon a crossroad The night was hot and black I see Robert Johnson With a ten dollar guitar Strapped to his back Looking for a tune Ah, well here comes Lucifer with his canon law And a hundred black babies running from his genocidal jaw 8

‘Tupelo’ written by N. Cave, M. Harvey and B. Adamson, courtesy Mute Song Limited.

96

Mute Records He got the real killer groove Robert Johnson and the devil, man Don’t know who’s gonna rip off who9

This stanza reworks the legend of Johnson’s barter with diabolic forces at a southern crossroads – a Faustian pact (loosely derived from African diasporic cosmology) in which he supposedly exchanged his soul for awe-inspiring virtuosity. Yet the undercurrents of the song are ironic: Johnson and Lucifer both appear to be tricksters with a ‘real killer groove’ and the implication is that the devil might come off worse in a resulting encounter. Carrying his guitar like the scars of slavery, this wily bluesman appears to be beyond good and evil – a prototypical rock musician in command of a medium that, as Cave repeatedly affirms, has an elemental capacity to affect us despite being considered by some to be a lowly art form. Such figures become talismanic for Cave, nostalgic symptoms of an era before censorship when ‘dirty blues’ were rife – songs, it should be noted, not just sung by men (a particularly explicit example being Lucille Bogan’s ‘Shave ‘Em Dry’ (Melotone 1935)). Much like the 1960s revival, however, Cave’s vision of the blues is exclusively masculine, indicated by his fondness for old ‘blues guys in their suits’ (Snow 2011: 214). In his most famous extant portrait, Johnson is indeed depicted wearing a sharp suit – attire that would not be out of place in a Bad Seeds photo shoot. Cave, in other words, has come to style himself as a modern day bluesman, inheritor of the genre’s aura and mystique. Fittingly, the Bad Seeds employ a matrix of sounds indebted to the history of black music, drawing on the genre less as a formal structure than as the basis for ominous grooves or a tool for moments of heightened expressivity. As Mick Harvey recalls, ‘We were making this bizarre music related to the blues, trying to reach its deepest feeling, rather than using the form per se’ (Johnson 1996: 183). The distinctive sound of the blues – epitomized by ‘blue notes’ or deviations from the conventional fabric of diatonic music – bears the imprint of a complex history. As the unwaged engines of capitalism, African captives forced into the brutal conditions of chattel slavery had been a feature of the American landscape since the sixteenth century on plantations of lucrative crops such as tobacco and cotton. Through the Middle Passage, African culture, memory and material objects gradually permeated the south, encountering repressive social environments that in turn exercised a selective influence on musical custom. 9

‘Higgs Boson Blues’ written by N. Cave and W. Ellis, courtesy Mute Song Limited.

‘Join that Troubled Chorus’

97

The traditions that later flourished were those that could escape suppression by white authorities – field hollers and solo performances deriving from the west central Sudanic region of Africa. Characterized by long-necked lutes, ostinati, pentatonic modality, syncopation, mutable intonation, a declamatory vocal style and an absence of polyrhythms, the music of this area provides the rudiments of the blues. In technical terms, such traditions carried a tonal system and flexibility impossible to fully reconcile with the constraints of Western equal temperament particularly noticeable at the third and seventh scale degrees. As Gerhard Kubik demonstrates, what blues presents us with is thus the ‘centuriesold impact of transculturation processes’ between ‘the Arab-Islamic world of North Africa and the autochthonous cultures of the Sudanic belt relocated to the New World (1999: 94). In Cave’s oeuvre blues sonority is generally reserved for establishing a particular atmosphere – that of menace and rapacious male sexuality. Aligning with the prevalence of minor key songs, Bad Seeds albums contain an abundance of blues elements, whether in Cave’s vocal line, the surrounding musical textures, or (more recently) in passages featuring Warren Ellis. On The Firstborn is Dead, for instance, Cave plays harmonica on several tracks (as he does on Tender Prey (Mute 1988)), while Bargeld’s wiry interjections on bottleneck slide guitar reoccur like the spectre of a departed bluesman – a technique long associated with the genre also employed on ‘Wings Off Flies’ (Mute 1984). As the Bad Seeds’ style matures through the 1990s, blues is used to accompany the appearance of notorious outlaw figures: ‘Jack the Ripper’ (Mute 1992), the baleful protagonist of ‘Loverman’ (Mute 1994), and the archetypal African American hustler ‘Stagger Lee’ (Mute 1996) (particularly noticeable in Martyn P. Casey’s bass line, which continues unperturbed imitating Lee’s obstinate footsteps along a blackly comic path of bile and senseless malevolence). Likewise, a driving blues riff pervades ‘DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!!’ (Mute 2008), cycling unremittingly as the reluctantly resurrected Larry feasts upon women’s bodies ‘like a lunatic’ before ending up ‘in a soup queue / a dope fiend (a slave) / then prison / then the madhouse / then the grave’ (again).10 Cave and the Bad Seeds tend to associate blues sonority, in short, with sex and iniquity – not as a form of emotional catharsis, but as a way to resound a long history of subaltern expression, a kind of temporary blackface mask they are able to don as part of an eclectic punk bricolage of swastikas, Paradise Lost and Leonard Cohen. Such ‘stylistic excess’, 10

‘Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!’ written by N. Cave, courtesy Mute Song Limited.

98

Mute Records

as Isabella van Elferen argues, is fundamental to Cave’s transgressive Gothicism in which human revenants exist alongside musical ghosts such as the blues, creating an uncanny ‘conflation of multiple times and spaces’ (2013: 179–80). But a positive reading of Cave’s engagement with blues mythology can only take us so far. Bassist Barry Adamson recalls, for example, that ‘being in the Bad Seeds I was sometimes very threatened because I’d never addressed being black’ (Johnson 1996: 173). Songs such as ‘Blind Lemon Jefferson’ confronted Adamson with the trauma of cultural memory: ‘Nick was using those images to express himself and it pushed a lot of stuff up inside me’ (Johnson 1996: 173). Much like the white revivalists of the 1960s, Cave uses blues as a way to signify difference from the mainstream by simulating the guise of an exotic outsider. Indeed, his relationship with African American music follows a well-trodden path of creative annexation in which white artists have taken ‘everything but the burden’ from black culture (Tate 2003). As George Lipsitz notes, an ‘aestheticization of social pain’ inherent in the Johnson legend masks an agonizing history of subjugation and resilient white skin privilege: such stories maintain ‘the illusion that individual whites can appropriate aspects of African American experience for their own benefit without having to acknowledge their structural relationships with actual African Americans’ (1997: 40). Similarly, writers such as bell hooks (2004) and Michelle Alexander (2010) have vehemently contested the longstanding associations between black men and misconduct. At best, Cave perpetuates this trope; at worst, he uncritically celebrates it, trading on the wounds sustained by those stifled within the black Atlantic’s racialized logic. Despite never having spent time in the Deep South, Cave’s engagement with this locality through what he describes as ‘received information’ has been a vital element in his work (Snow 2011: 177). For all its flaws, Cave’s mythological vision of the blues is another indication of an unbounded creative imagination that ransacks history in the service of song.

References Abbate, C. (2004), ‘Music – Drastic or Gnostic?’, Critical Inquiry, 30 (3): 505–36. Adorno, T. W., and M. Horkheimer (1997), Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, London: Verso. Alexander, M. (2010), The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, New York: The New Press.

‘Join that Troubled Chorus’

99

Auslander, P. (2006), ‘Musical Personae’, The Drama Review, 50 (1): 100–19. Beaumont, D. (2011), Preachin’ the Blues: The Life and Times of Son House, New York: Oxford University Press. Cave, N. (1988), King Ink, London: Black Spring. Cave, N. (1989), And the Ass Saw the Angel, London: Black Spring. Cave, N. (2015), The Sick Bag Song, Edinburgh: Canongate. Charters, S. B. (1959), The Country Blues, New York: Rinehart & Company. ‘Classic Album Sundays with Daniel Miller founder of Mute Records’ (2017), Classic Album Sundays, 11 December. Available online: http://classicalbumsundays.com/ interview-with-daniel-miller-founder-of-mute-records/ (accessed 20 April 2018). Cole, R. (2018), ‘Mastery and Masquerade in the Transatlantic Blues Revival’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 143 (1): 171–208. Elferen, I. van (2013), ‘Nick Cave and Gothic: Ghost Stories, Fucked Organs, Spectral Liturgy’, in John H. Baker (ed.), The Art of Nick Cave: New Critical Essays, 177–88, Bristol: Intellect. Faulkner, W. (1930), As I Lay Dying, London: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith. Frith, S. (1981), ‘“The Magic That Can Set You Free”: The Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock Community’, Popular Music, 1: 159–68. Gates, Jr., H. L. (1988), The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism, New York: Oxford University Press. Gilroy, P. (1993), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso. Hewitt, B. (2014), ‘Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: 10 of the Best’, Guardian Music Blog, 25 June. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/ jun/25/nick-cave-and-the-bad-seeds-10-of-the-best (accessed 4 July 2016). hooks, b. (2004), We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, New York: Routledge. Johnson, I. (1996), Bad Seed: The Biography of Nick Cave, London: Abacus. Kubik, G. (1999), Africa and the Blues, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Lawson, R. A. (2010), Jim Crow’s Counterculture: The Blues and Black Southerners, 1890–1945, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Lipsitz, G. (1997), ‘Remembering Robert Johnson: Romance and Reality’, Popular Music and Society, 21 (4): 39–50. O’Connor, F. (1952), Wise Blood, San Diego: Harcourt, Brace & Company. Snow, M., ed. (2011), Nick Cave, Sinner Saint: The True Confessions, London: Plexus. Tate, G., ed. (2003), Everything But the Burden: What White People are Taking From Black Culture, New York: Broadway Books. The Songwriting World of Nick Cave (2003), [TV programme] ITV, 10 August. Welberry, K., and T. Dalziell, eds (2009), Cultural Seeds: Essays on the Work of Nick Cave, Farnham: Ashgate.

7

Mark Stewart, ‘Somewhere’ Edward George

Mark Stewart was born in Bristol in 1960. In 1976 he co-founded the postpunk, funk, dub, free jazz ensemble, the Pop Group, with Gareth Sager, Simon Underwood, John Waddington, Dan Katsis and Bruce Smith. The Pop Group called the B-side of their second single ‘Amnesty International Report on British Army Torture of Irish Prisoners’ (Rough Trade 1979). They called the A-side ‘We are all Prostitutes’. They called their first single ‘She is Beyond Good and Evil’ (Radar 1979). The Pop Group played as though they had ingested huge amounts of James Brown, Ornette Coleman and Roland Kirk and were still treetop high. They offered a musically credible interconnection of genre mixing, through which they affirmed anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle and some unidentifiable, homegrown mystical mood. Stewart’s vocals were the Pop Group’s wild card. Agonized and apocalyptic, channelling the righteous anger of reggae and punk, but also articulating the shame of political apathy and cultural complicity, Stewart sang as if he feared that but for counter-intervention the world, of empire and capital, would never end, but he also sang as if capitalism’s appetite for destruction might be the end of us all. When the Pop Group folded in 1981, Stewart began working with reggae producer Adrian Sherwood, owner of the independent label On-U Sound. Sherwood produced, mixed and released Stewart’s first solo album, Learning to Cope with Cowardice (On-U Sound 1983). Sherwood and Stewart’s demolition dub of William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ was the album’s finest moment. Between 1985 and 1996, Stewart recorded four albums for Mute: As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade (1985), Mark Stewart (1987), Metatron (1990) and Control Data (1996). I am going to use one word, ‘somewhere’, from the song ‘Stranger’, in Mark Stewart, to argue that these albums comprise a conceptual unity, an envisioning, through song and sound, of capitalism’s rapacity and its

102

Mute Records

dehumanizing effects on subjectivity and thus the body and the psyche – a unity whose overriding sensibility is one of melancholia borne of a quest for a space of belonging within and beyond the besieged spaces of capitalism. I am going to do this through a close listening to these albums, interviews that I conducted with Stewart in London in 2016 and 2017 (which are the source of the quotations used in this chapter), and through ideas from critical theory which are present in Stewart’s work: in his singing and his approach to songs, an engagement with language and citationality; in his writing, a concern with fragments; in the sound of his music, a concern with trace and presence; and in his thinking on music, a concern with belonging, space and emptiness, questing and questioning. I asked Stewart how these albums came to be on Mute. Stewart told me that Daniel Miller, who had once suggested making a dub album with Sherwood (Test Pressing 2014), liked Learning to Cope with Cowardice: ‘It turned out that Daniel was really into my stuff, he was really into “Jerusalem” and all that sort of stuff.’ Stewart and Miller were part of the community of self-starters that made up London’s late 1970s formative post-punk underground: ‘There was a little room in the shop above Westbourne Grove, in the first Rough Trade Shop, and a few different people had tables, and Dan had a little table in this tiny little room, and he was starting to get Mute going.’ Stewart maintains that by 1985, when Mute released As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade, post-punk’s independent label and distribution scene was in ruins. Mute had become a solitary outpost of major league post-punk expression and experimentation. ‘Without Daniel Miller there wouldn’t be an alternative during the 80s, because a lot of the indie things had collapsed or gone bankrupt.’ For Stewart, Mute’s significance and durability resided in Miller having an ear as finely tuned for pop’s mainstream as it was for pop’s margins. Because Daniel was so good at judging the top ground, he was making so much money from Depeche Mode, from Erasure, from Moby later on, he used that money and invested it into cutting edge stuff, really out there shit, because he was the main beacon of independent music then. People don’t realise this because they write off Mute as this kind of [and here, Stewart adopts the sneer of an indie purist] Depeche Mode. But he was playing both cards of the thing, which was great. It wasn’t hide away and be like holier than thou. Daniel could have concentrated on the pop things and made himself a multi-millionaire a lot earlier on, like a Simon Cowell, because he had the nuance to find huge pop acts very early on. But because of his artistic bent and his love for weird sounds, he

Mark Stewart, ‘Somewhere’

103

invested in people like me, Nick Cave, Boyd Rice, Laibach. Amazing. He had no reason to spend that money on people like us.

Stewart makes a slight yet incisive elaboration on this last point which helps to explain Miller’s ongoing commitment to alternative music, and also suggests what made Miller stand out from other record label bosses and would be auteurproducers: ‘He doesn’t have to do that’, Stewart says, ‘but he’s an artist himself ’. Stewart’s albums for Mute are characterized by a consistency of dub induced sonic experimentation. It was Miller who ensured the collaboration with Sherwood. ‘We kind of got it together under Daniel’s auspices. Daniel was the patron.’ What was Daniel’s involvement in the making of your music? ‘None whatsoever. There was complete carte blanche, which is crucial to me.’ So it was complete artistic freedom. ‘Yeah, even down to the covers, even down to the videos, the artwork.’

Miller’s hands-off approach allowed Stewart to develop his artistic sensibility. Ask him about the conceptual unity that takes place through the sound of these albums, and he will tell you that from the twisted boom-bap of Veneer’s take on hip-hop, to Mark Stewart’s mutilated cover versions, through Metatron’s squalling rock hybridity, to Control Data’s warped, acidic house and techno, this unity comes down to rhythm. ‘They’re part of the same unit’, he says; a unit that has its roots in hip-hop. I made an effort to track down (drummer) Keith LeBlanc, (bassist) Doug Wimbish and (guitarist) Skip McDonald, who were the powerhouse of New York hip-hop label Sugar Hill Records. They also played on Mustique and Sylvester’s records. But they were cutting the early Tommy Boy records, and Keith’s track that he did with Malcolm X’s widow, of Malcolm’s speech, the ‘No Sell Out’ track [credited to Malcolm X (Tommy Boy 1984)], completely blew my mind, because I was into [William] Burroughs and cut-ups, we all were, back in the day; Throbbing Gristle, but with rhythm as well. It was … . I could have rolled up and died because they were doing exactly what I dreamed of doing. ‘No Sell Out’ was putting a very interesting, cool sentiment over a very uplifting dance beat. It was truth with rhythm. So I really wanted to work with these guys.

Across Stewart’s Mute albums, it is LeBlanc’s use of the snare drum that holds the rhythm together. On Metatron, in ‘These Things Happen’, his snare drum motif replicates, cites and relocates in rock, master reggae drummer Sly Dunbar’s snare driven Bogle drum pattern, the endlessly pliable percussive motif of 1990s

104

Mute Records

dance hall reggae, ubiquitous at the time of Metatron’s release. It is the snare drum, whether played or programmed by LeBlanc or, on Control Data, by Simon Mundey or Lincoln ‘Style’ Scott or, on ‘Stranger’, by Rob Smith and Ray Mighty, that Stewart works with, around, against. We talked about drums and singing and Stewart’s approach to rhythm. What you ride, vocally, is the snare. And the snare drum, historically, in the military, you lead the soldiers with the snare. That’s what gives the music ‘– Its uplift.’ Its uplift and its warrior kind of – ‘– Yes, its warrior code. That comes from the rim-shot in reggae as well. Stepping on the one. Steppers.’ And it’s not what you get even in post-punk. ‘They sit back on the two or the three or something.’

Stewart was one among a small number of white, post-punk singers whose nuanced way with rhythm lent itself to a fluid interplay with the drum and bass dynamics of black music. I asked him how he developed his relationship to the drum, and he cast a line that carried his vocalizing style back to Jamaican music, to the art of the deejay, aka the toaster, aka the MC. Getting into things like, getting into (reggae MC) I Roy, early on. And the toasters, they went before the beat. They took the space. If you’re hearing a rhythm go – I was saying to our drummer, there’s a way of getting, if you step in before the thing, you claim that space, you claim the imperative. So if you step before the one, you’re like, ‘I’m here!’ It’s the (reggae) MCs: it’s I Roy, it’s Dennis Alcapone – ‘Don’t mess. You can’t touch me. I’m ’capone. My name is Alcapone!’ You see that before you hear the melody, or anything. He’s claiming the throne. It’s a bit like Ari Up [vocalist with the Slits and the London Underground]. You’re stepping in before the one. You come before anybody else. It’s before the delay. It’s a pre-emptive strike. It’s Kung Fu. Attack is the best form of defence. So it’s like a mastery of space. ‘Yes. It’s a pre-emptive arrogance of owning – yeah. It’s controlling the rhythm, really. Deejay style. Toasting.’

To know how to control rhythm is to know how to dart and rock and skip between and across beats. For Stewart, that knowledge resided in the voices of politicized black poets.

Mark Stewart, ‘Somewhere’

105

‘Mutubaruka, Michael Smith, Linton Kwesi Johnson, this guy called Archie [Poole], he was from Radical [Alliance of] Poets & Players. The way that they could talk, and own the rhythm, and use the words to move in between the bass drum, and twirl and swirl, poetically, inside the reggae rhythm, they’re the people. And the Last Poets, the Watts Prophets, the Caribbean Situationists, those are the people that gave me the confidence to put longer words into songs, that talk-jay sort of thing of being able to say something quite big inside a rhythm, and push your way into the fucking space.’ On the title track of As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade, Stewart pushes his way into space through a wordless exhalation. He emits a long, drawn out gasp, a sonically treated death rattle that goes on for so long it sounds like he’s cheating death, despairing at the existence under militarized governance that the song describes, and refusing to die. But if Stewart’s vocal presence is his music’s signature, that signature, a kind of writing in sonic space, is the mark of two people, Stewart and Sherwood, and has jazz producer Teo Macero’s use of montage as its referent. What I did, specifically on Veneer, was that we’d do multiple takes of a song, and this is influenced by what Miles Davis did on On the Corner with Teo Macero [Columbia 1972], when they used to cut jams and make something out of them. So we’d do multiple takes, and me and Adrian would have like 80 pieces of quarter inch tape stuck on the walls, this is before Pro Tools, and then reassemble. So if we’re doing a mix, the first run, maybe there’s a crescendo of a scream that’s really good for a split second, on the second one you can concentrate on something else.

The Stewart we hear throughout these albums is a kind of pieced together fiction of space and time and sound, authored by Stewart and Sherwood. But the emotional force that compels these fragments into a whole is Stewart’s politicized rage, given voice through sonic experimentation and turned into uplift. I wake up in the morning, the fridge is buzzing. Like really loud. There’s something dripping over there. John Pilger’s report on Cambodia has just come into the Daily Mirror; these people are being genocided and nobody’s covering this. The drip drips a little louder. Why is nobody paying attention to what’s happening in this world, why is the world being governed by psychopaths? Make it out of the house, cussing. Cussing the system, cussing everybody that they’re not looking at what’s going on, they’re turning their eyes away, turning a blind eye to the obscene inequalities in this world. They’re zombies. Get to the studio. Adrian puts on some shitty beat. Right. Let’s record the fridge. In the kitchen. ‘Why d’you wanna do that?’ ‘Cause I do. I’m paying for the fucking

106

Mute Records

session. Put loads of microphones around the fridge like Joe Meek. Overload the microphones. Take the thing back in. Put the fridge through a bass amp. Detune the bass amp. Turn it upside down. Play it through the washing machine, and create a sub-pulse that nobody’s ever heard before, backwards. Just for spite. The fucking fridge has been annoying me. I’d like to head-butt the fridge, when in fact I’d like to head-butt the psychopaths that are controlling the world.

I thought the function of Stewart’s rage was to articulate a sense of melancholia and mourning borne of a recognition of capitalism’s territorializing of space and the body, when actually it’s a springboard into music’s powers of enervation. And melancholia? Stewart said he liked the word. It was a way towards a space of critical thinking. There are these poets, the Maldeen. For me, when they say melancholy it’s like nihilism and doubt. It’s when you think. And for me, the Romantics, who were yearning for a better society at the time, it’s a kind of utopian … [it’s] when you’re melancholy that you start to think about things. You move away from the now. Again, I gotta say that thing; faith is the room for doubt. This questioning of things is important.

I asked Stewart, ‘How do you actually write?’ He said, ‘I don’t’. But in a way, he does. He gathers fragments from a range of sources. ‘I just collect all these bits, shuffle them up a bit and reprocess and then use them again, as building blocks, or found objects, and use them in my own thing.’ Through fragments, through researching the state’s acquisition of power through military intelligence, technologies of commodification, control and force, through alliances with radical journalists, a poetically charged continuity of political engagement unfolds in Stewart’s writing. ‘When John Pilger reported on Cambodia it blew my mind. I was surrounded by radical journalists constantly feeding me this radical information, and I check it, double check it, triple check it, and I say it.’ The structuring theme of Stewart’s writing is capitalism stripped of its claims to civility. The human cost of capitalism’s greed, its barbarism and its power of illusion is foregrounded in Metatron’s ‘Mammon’: The financial priests of Mammon Sold his eyeballs for whiskey And his bones for souvenirs And … fool all the people into believing people money was real fool all the people into believing people money was real1 1

‘Mammon’ lyrics by M. Stewart, courtesy Mute Song Limited.

Mark Stewart, ‘Somewhere’

107

In Veneer’s ‘Hypnotized’ there is the melding of eroticism, the gaze and militarism, and there is the damning chant at the heart of the song: 7 per cent of the population Own 84 per cent of the wealth Pay it all back You’ve got to pay it all Pay it all back2

Also on Veneer, in ‘Passivication Program’, there is the denunciation of state proscription and policing of mental illness as a means of social control through the British government’s 1983 Mental Health Bill. And there are the descriptions of solitary, alienated experiences of urban and domestic space, in ‘Survival’ and ‘Hell is Empty’ in Mark Stewart, in ‘My Possession’ in Metatron, and ‘Dream Kitchen’ in Control Data. There is the corruption of political struggle into relations of commodification in Metatron’s ‘Hysteria’. There is the commodification of affect in Control Data’s ‘Consumed’. There are the technologies of war and surveillance that pervade the songs, from references to Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defensive Initiative in Mark Stewart’s ‘Hell is Empty’, to the international arms trade in Control Data’s ‘Blood Money’. There is the impossibility of love, of a place where being for another can take place, in Mark Stewart’s ‘Stranger’ and ‘Forbidden Colours/ Forbidden Dub’, and in Control Data’s ‘Forbidden Love’ and ‘Red Zone’. There is, in this body of work, no space in which love can be sustained because every space has been covered, rendered, claimed. Every space but a nameless place beyond the geographical and psychic borders delineated by capitalism’s cartographies of power, designated, in ‘Stranger’, by the word ‘somewhere’. I thought ‘somewhere’ was a word you cited and made your own and offered to the listener, and that when you say it, it feels like an offering of uncertainty and love at the same time. ‘I like that. “An offering of love and uncertainty at the same time.”’ You say it and you sing it in a tone that’s different to all your other songs. ‘Again, Eddie, it’s that question mark, and maybe even I don’t know, you know what I mean? It’s that space, it’s that question mark, it’s what life’s about.’ So the ‘somewhere’ is an opening. ‘Completely.’ 2

‘Hypnotized’ written by M. Stewart, courtesy Mute Song Limited.

108

Mute Records

It’s a question mark. ‘It’s a question mark. Question Mark.’ So it’s an asking, to yourself and the listener. But it’s not giving an answer. ‘No. It’s just a question mark. It’s one of those. I can’t define it. It’s a portal.’

An opening and a portal made of citations and traces of songs composed by others, who shall remain nameless, as well as songs written by himself and his friends, the Pop Group. An opening which is also a conjugation, through song, of time, the present and past of his own writing, the passing here and now of the song, ‘Stranger’, in which is also present the always and forever present past, in the songs of the Pop Group, for example, ‘We Are Time’ (Radar 1979), in which Stewart sings, perhaps to those crushed by capital, Time is within you Shines through your eyes We’ll kill the word Black letter lies Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies3

and in which he says to capitalism, Your world is built on lies

In ‘Stranger’, the space of the question mark is a location beyond the limits (‘over the border line’)4 of the crippling power of words, in which a kind of redemptive murder of the oppressive force of words takes place, from a distance, there, somewhere, or on the way to somewhere: he croons, to you, the listener, to himself, the singer, exemplifying the power of song as a spatializing force of liberation through which the body of the oppressed is redeemed as the bearer of the cosmos, embodiment of the space-time continuum: Time is within you, shines through your eyes we’ll kill the word, black letter lies

and then, against capitalism’s spatializing force, he insists, or hopes: There must be somewhere 3

4

‘We Are Time’ written by M. Stewart, S. Underwood, G. Sager and B. Smith, courtesy TSM UK Publishing. ‘Stranger’ written by M. Stewart, courtesy Mute Song Limited.

Mark Stewart, ‘Somewhere’

109

In doing so, he makes of his proper name, Mark Stewart, more than one mark, a set of idiomatic marks comprising himself, the singer and sonic signature, as acoustic space, as an effect of his songwriting’s capacity for becoming space, becoming time (‘We are time’, he insisted, in song, with the Pop Group, to himself and the listener), becoming a circle (he said to me, ‘Time, to me, is more of a circle than a straight line’) and thus a hole, within a pictographic hole, in photography (he said, speaking about acoustic space and belonging, ‘I always belong in music. For me music is a temporary autonomous zone. I belong inside music; I dream into it. And what sums this up, I’ve realized recently, there’s this semiotics magazine called Zone, and I saw a picture in there and what happened was there was a picture of Aleppo, a war zone. But the main figure at the front of the picture had been cut out so there was just a hole, and that hole has lived with me, and I would like, go into that hole more than anything else. It’s this hole or space in reality that gives you – faith is the room for doubt, it gives you room to dream. If everything is all perfect and symmetrical, but these spaces, your mind kind of, it slightly destabilizes your reality and you either fall or move through it’), and also within a phonographic hole, in sound (later, when we were talking about dub, and Jah Shaka Sound System, he spoke of his admiration for Jah Shaka’s ability to create holes in sound through extreme equalization of frequencies: ‘I used to do that with Adrian, go ‘‘cut the fucking EQ!’’ take out all the treble, and you get to this cliff edge, the voice is gone as well, and what I’m doing now is I’m dealing with silence. Silence is the space, so you cut everything, and you’ve got a hole. A silent hole. Not even a wobble, and you can clean everything up in Pro Tools so there’s no coughs or anything, a silent hole. So you’re right on the cliff, and you can do whatever you want. You can do the unexpected’). ‘Somewhere’, an opening onto a murderous separation of words from their claims to truth, through which truth is redeemed as non-verbal, pre-verbal affect, nonetheless takes place through words, his own and those of others, through his versionings, in Mark Stewart, and later, in Metatron, through his (re)citation of the Pop Group’s ambivalence towards alphabetical language and the refusal of words to do as they are told. ‘Words disobey me’, he sings, twice. First, in the Pop Group’s ‘Words Disobey Me’ (The Pop Group 1979), he offers, as consolation to the voiceless, as corrective to the babble of power, the claim that ‘Truth is a feeling it’s not a sound’.5

5

‘Words Disobey Me’ written by M. Stewart, S. Underwood, G. Sager and B. Smith, courtesy TSM UK Publishing.

110

Mute Records

He sings the phrase again, in Metatron’s ‘Faith Healer’. Sherwood’s mix renders his voice mottled, aqueous and remote, with the effect that something is purposefully drowned beneath Maffia’s rhythm and is lost to sound. I think, but can’t be sure, that he is saying ‘some things change, but the –’, and then for one word I can’t make him out until the line ‘… remains the same’.6 I have to rewind and listen again: Stewart’s voice is present and so are his words and meaning, both as recorded signal and as the signal produced by sound effects, but at times the sound of the effects overwhelms the recorded source signal, so that what I hear in place of meaning is an atonal liquid shimmer of delicately balanced, murkily textured treble. ‘Words disobey me’; the song ‘Faith Healer’ disobeys the listener, gives itself to listening but keeps something of its meaning for silence by impressing a silencing of meaning through distortion and a sinking of voice and words and meaning in sound, submerging the voice in the mix, so that another meaning of the song, which is an effect of the song, Stewart’s performance and Sherwood’s mix, become present, the idea that something of the song and its melody, its sound, meaning and performer, resists full recuperation as cultural commodity, but offers itself as the memory of a space, an acoustic environment in which presence both struggles against and is present as erasure, is a trace of itself. The portal conjured under cover of versioning, through the word ‘somewhere’, present throughout Mark Stewart, designates an archive of fragments, of pop and the Pop Group, and renders Stewart an archivizing, archival voice, an archive and an effect of his own archive of songs, in which what he calls ‘a mutilation’ of songs is orchestrated through his collaborative production with Sherwood. Here and elsewhere in these four albums, Sherwood and Stewart use dub’s law of erasure to produce and prohibit the clarity of meaning, in order to create a songwriterly signature of distortion. ‘These songs are like little boats, going on the waves, like the Pilgrim Fathers going to another land. Maybe in history these songs are bobbing along about and things are happening to these songs but they’re surviving.’ The songs open up these spaces ‘Temporary autonomous zones. Hakim Bey [aka anarchist Peter Lamborn Wilson].’

6

‘Faith Healer’ lyrics by M. Stewart, courtesy Mute Song Limited.

Mark Stewart, ‘Somewhere’

111

The spaces are part of a tomorrow that the songs envision. ‘Yes. “The spaces are part of a tomorrow.” I like that.’

‘Somewhere’, then, is a question mark and a question addressed by Stewart to himself, which locates the here and now and tomorrow, present under cover, hidden in plain view, in a contestation of power waged in acoustic space through sound and visioning. ‘The question mark is the most important thing.’ Stewart continues to work on new material. A tracing of his influence, as a solo artist and with the Pop Group, as a presence and as more than one kind of trace, on the broad canon of post-war political songwriting, on Bristol’s post post-punk, urban music culture, on American and British industrial music, on dub, awaits comprehensive documentation. Not that Stewart is waiting for this to happen. His past is making its own way into the present. His solo back catalogue will be reissued in the near future, as will the work of the recently reanimated the Pop Group, with whom Stewart still records and performs. Stewart, in his present and past articulations, thus continues to use music as a means of critical inquiry, a medium for voicing the voiceless and speaking truth to power, a space of questing for an alternative to capitalism, and questioning power’s claims to truth. In lieu of such exegesis as his work and its traces no doubt warrants, I have in this chapter argued that Stewart’s Mute albums comprise a conceptual unity of song, sound, and political engagement whose structuring concern and thematic core is a critique of capitalism and its effects on space and subjectivity. I have shown how this conceptual unity also consists of and is informed by Stewart’s artistic sensibility of politicized rage and melancholia, borne of both a quest for a space of belonging within and beyond the besieged spaces of capitalism, and a desire to convey a sense of enervation and possibility, hope and space, to those downtrodden by capitalism. I have described this unity through examples of Stewart’s music, as a solo artist and in relation to his work in the Pop Group, through dialogue with Stewart on his creative process and influences, his thoughts on the significance of Mute for pop culture and the nature of Daniel Miller’s relationship to mainstream and alternative pop, and also through a fragment, a word in a song on one of Stewart’s four albums for Mute, ‘somewhere’.

112

Mute Records

Acknowledgement Special thanks to Shirin Koohyar at Freaks-R-Us.

Reference ‘Interview/Adrian Sherwood/On-U Sound’ (2014), Test Pressing. Available online: http:// testpressing.org/feature/adrian-sherwood-on-u-sound/ (accessed 3 February 2018).

8

‘Sometimes, Always’: Erasure, Mute and the Value of Independence Brenda Kelly

Erasure and Mute have had an intertwined history for over thirty years. The relationship between band and label is emblematic of the way both approach music-making and this shared history also reflects the changing nature of the music business itself. Indeed Erasure’s career tracks some of the key artistic and business decisions made by Mute: from early label independence to deciding to seek refuge inside a major label in the 1990s and, finally, to regaining their independent status in the 2000s. Band and label alike have had to adapt to changing industry and artistic circumstances, while attempting to stay true to their shared vision of creative freedom and artistic longevity. Erasure – as pop artists – are sometimes seen as atypical for Mute. This chapter will argue that to see them in this light is to not only misunderstand Daniel Miller’s vision of Mute, but misconstrue Erasure’s significance to the label. What unites Mute artists? It may be as simple as the fact that they all exist outside the usually ephemeral nature of the pop music business: the development and longevity of careers appears to be a key value. Long-term Mute media promoter Nicki Kefalas observes, I don’t think there’s a common thread stylistically, but there is something special about each artist on Mute. They are all unique musically and do not fit easily into neat boxes, making getting them on the radio more difficult in the early stages of a band/artist’s career. I find once you do cross-over a unique and interesting artist they tend to ‘stick’ more and develop real fans within the media. (2016)

Mute artists, even those considered ‘pop’ like Erasure, tend to operate beyond the usual conventions of the music mainstream, even when having major sales success. In fact success, defined as fame, does not seem to be uppermost in many

114

Mute Records

Mute artists’ minds. The career of Vince Clarke, from almost immediate chart success as a co-founder of Depeche Mode to leaving and eventually forming Erasure with an unknown frontman with a penchant for high camp, perhaps illustrates this most tellingly. This is not the trajectory of one simply in search of pop stardom. Mute artists are notable for their longevity and commitment to the label. The year 2017 saw Erasure release their seventeenth studio album. World Be Gone showcases the enduring pop pleasures of Vince Clarke and Andy Bell’s musical partnership, but finds the band in a thoughtful, even dark, frame of mind, not a mood usually associated with Erasure. From ‘A Lousy Sum of Nothing’: And I don’t know what we’ve become. Don’t recognise the world as one. Reads like a sordid affair, where people don’t how to care, They make it up, they call it true, Like hating others is something new1

Like all Erasure’s music, World Be Gone is on Mute. The album saw the band enjoy something of a musical and popular renaissance, reaching number six in the UK charts, their highest place since 1994’s I Say I Say I Say. Of all Mute artists, Erasure have had the longest continuous relationship with the label. When Mute first started in 1978 the DIY spirit and ethos was ascendant. Those clustered around the independent music scene – labels, artists, distributors, shops – were convinced they could do things differently to the mainstream music sector. They wanted to create structures and ways of working that reflected different, more artist-centred values and new attitudes to the way that business should be done. Conversely, the major labels were considered by some independents to be about making money rather than music. Embodying this attitude, long-time Mute European partner, licensee and independent distributor Kenny Gates of PIAS observes, ‘As independents we are at the service of the artists, and majors consider that the artists are at their service. And that is the big difference between majors and independents’ (2016). This philosophy of the independents’ business was taken seriously as a principle across the sector, though labels’ musical visions often differed radically. For Daniel Miller electronic music was the future; it both worked with and challenged the largely punk rock aesthetic that was foundational to the independent 1

‘A Lousy Sum of Nothing’ written by A. Bell and V. Clarke, courtesy SM Publishing (UK) Ltd.

Erasure, Mute and the Value of Independence

115

music scene of the late 1970s/early 1980s. In my head electronic music was the ultimate punk music, especially as much cheaper synths came on the market … So right from the beginning I wanted to communicate that electronic music could be homemade, anti-elitist – that was the message I was sending out when I released that first single (as The Normal), and I’d like to think that I went some way to achieving that’ (Miller 2015). This was the punk ethos to a T, even if the music was not the more usual guitar-based sound of punk and post-punk. Electronic music had not been much heard in this punk context, so this was pioneering territory. Clarke agrees ‘Indie was rock really, back then in the 1980s, clangy rock’ (2016). Mute’s early artists were all electronic and synth-based: the Normal, Fad Gadget and Depeche Mode. In 1980, at the age of nineteen, Clarke first recorded for Mute, as songwriter and keyboard player for Depeche Mode. The band had been inspired by Miller’s own first releases and the contemporary synth sound of the Human League. Not only that, for the young musicians money was an issue, as Clarke explains, ‘Synths were cheaper than other instruments and a van’ (Gates 2015). From the beginning the relationship with Miller was pivotal, says Clarke: ‘In the early Depeche days Daniel was the record company, the driver, the soundman and also the supplier of burgers, so he was everything to us. He was like your dad really’ (Gates 2015). Miller has forged personal and creative bonds with his artists, which explains something of the closeness and loyalty that Mute seems to engender, especially in the case of Erasure and Clarke. The fact that Miller himself was an artist, founding Mute with his own debut single in 1978, and one with an ongoing interest in technology and the recording process, appears to be formative in his fostering of his artists’ creative independence and his continuing input into their musical development. Despite early success for Depeche Mode – whose debut album Speak & Spell (Mute 1981) went to number ten in the British album charts – Clarke decided that the band’s musical direction was not his own. He left the group he had helped create: ‘I was just thinking about myself and I didn’t want to do it anymore. Daniel didn’t seem overly upset . … I thought I will just go off and start again, you know’ (Gates 2015). Clarke was intent on making music that reflected his own artistic sensibility; for him the lure of fame was not enough. Miller, he says, accommodated his decision, despite Clarke having been the major songwriter for Depeche Mode and the group having just having signed to Sire in the United States. This was an idealistic and potentially risky decision for Mute and Clarke. Fellow synth luminary and sometime collaborator, Paul Humphries

116

Mute Records

of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, adds of Clarke: ‘It was about the music, it wasn’t about being a celebrity, being a star, he just followed his dream of what he wanted to do and kept doing it. If you did that now you’d be called completely nuts’ (Erasure – A Little Respect 2016). Clarke experimented. After Depeche Mode came two hugely successful albums with Alison Moyet as Yazoo, followed by a brief stint as the Assembly with Feargal Sharkey of the Undertones. Neither of these Mute projects lasted. In their aftermath, Clarke discovered that he missed the continuity of being in a band, something these record-to-record relationships could not offer. He advertised for a singer in Melody Maker and Andy Bell – a total unknown with no professional experience – auditioned. Clarke heard a new and distinctive voice. Bell, like Clarke, was a working class lad from small-town England; from the start there was musical chemistry and understanding at work. They began recording as Erasure in 1985. Despite Clarke’s early golden touch, Erasure’s first three singles, ‘Who Needs Love Like That’ (Mute 1985), ‘Heavenly Action’ (Mute 1985), ‘Oh L’Amour’ (Mute 1986) and their debut album Wonderland (Mute 1986) fell flat. Neither Clarke nor Bell wanted to give up on Erasure, and Miller, though surprised at the lack of public interest, was prepared to keep going too. Larger labels may well have let Clarke and Erasure go at this point. As Miller explains: ‘Erasure started really badly. … I felt an incredible weight of responsibility, firstly because it was a great record, but also because Vince had been incredibly loyal to me. I hate it when a record doesn’t do as well as it should do’ (Gates 2015). Loyalty, and a belief in Clarke, seemed to be enough to keep supporting Erasure after this inauspicious start. This mutual fidelity, according to Clarke, is central to the Mute approach: ‘Daniel was – and is – incredibly loyal to his artists so his artists feel incredibly loyal to him’ (2016). Miller himself remarks, ‘If a band is making great records but losing a bit of money, I’m not going to drop them’ (Bruce 1998). There are however, some expectations; Miller points out, ‘Artists also need faith in themselves.  …  There’s nothing more frustrating than when a band makes a great record, but doesn't want to promote it or seem to want to succeed’ (Bruce 1998). Mute required artists to prove themselves motivated; both label and artists needed to commit to the joint venture. The will to succeed was strong in Erasure’s case. They bought themselves some financial and musical space by going on the road; playing small venues, travelling in a hired van and using a negligible budget. This could have been considered a let-down for Clarke after the star treatment offered to Depeche Mode, but there were compensations.

Erasure, Mute and the Value of Independence

117

He says, ‘That’s what really cemented the band. We spent a year playing shitty little clubs, getting to know each other basically. It was us against the world, including the record company [laughs]. They were supportive, but. … Everything we did we managed to either break even or make money on. We did everything’ (2016). Mute felt little need to exercise control: they were happy to let Erasure find their own feet. For Erasure this lack of early success turned out to be a crucial factor in their long and successful career. They forged an equal relationship in adversity; Clarke was no longer an infallible hit-maker and Bell had time to develop his performing and songwriting skills, becoming Clarke’s equal. The success they later found belonged to them both, reinforcing their partnership. When it came to Erasure’s second album Circus (Mute 1987) much had changed. They were developing into one of pop music’s most dynamic songwriting partnerships; and their creative relationship was developing, too. Clarke: ‘When we started writing together Andy was pushing the boundaries more. I had been writing songs for a while and there are rules that you follow, and Andy didn’t have any of those. It was really refreshing having someone come in from a completely different perspective’ (2016). Circus was released against the backdrop of the re-election of Margaret Thatcher as British prime minister. In the UK this was a time of renewed homophobia and gay activism, sparked by the AIDS epidemic. Circus was Erasure’s response. Bell: ‘I remember on that album, we had two subjects for songs, which was what was going on at the time politically, people losing their jobs, and the other one was somebody coming out to their parents’ (2016). Clarke and Bell are often assumed to be apolitical, perhaps because of their camp pop sensibility. Circus should have dispelled this idea. From ‘Circus’: Father worked in industry Now the work has moved on And the factories gone See them sell your history Where once you were strong There was once a future For a working man There was once a lifetime For a skilful hand Yesterday2 2

‘The Circus’ written by A. Bell and V. Clarke, courtesy SM Publishing (UK) Ltd).

118

Mute Records

From ‘Hideaway’: The boy he was rejected By the people that he cared for It’s not what they expected But he could not keep it secret anymore3

Circus went to number six in the British album charts and stayed there for over a year, eventually going platinum with sales of over 300,000. One of the first songs from the writing partnership was ‘Sometimes’, Erasure’s first UK Top Ten hit, which peaked in the British charts at number two. ‘Sometimes’ was to be an important signpost: it would mark the beginning of twenty-plus years of chart hits. Erasure’s pop success, along with that of Depeche Mode, gave Mute financial buoyancy, which turned out to be useful in later years as it provided the label with some resilience. Mute continued to support a growing roster of diverse artists including the German electronica of DAF, the gothic lyricism of Nick Cave and the operatic avant-garde artist Diamanda Galás, along with Laibach, Mark Stewart, Throbbing Gristle and others. These artists were pushing experimental frontiers and even Depeche Mode were heading in a darker direction. Erasure were the pop face of Mute during this period, and consequently were often viewed – by the independent scene, at least – as the label’s uncool exceptions. In truth the band always had another dimension beyond their pop-facing, dance-oriented sounds. From the start Erasure had a playful attitude towards gender fluidity, sexual identity and the Clarke/Bell relationship. With Andy Bell, they were one of the few mainstream UK pop bands to have an openly gay frontman, and as Bell’s confidence grew, this sensibility became integral to Erasure’s identity. Gay bravado gave them an edge, but as Daniel Miller recalls, did not endear them to a conservative music press or to critics. Erasure were enjoying commercial success, but not critical recognition, a kind of erasure of Erasure. Miller: ‘Of course the gay issues in those days were very different to how they are now, especially with AIDS. The fact that you played onstage and were openly gay was a very political statement, even if it wasn’t intended to be, it just was. The media was still really sketchy about that, the tabloid press especially was very homophobic’ (Turner 2015). Bell contends ‘We have never really been included in the rock fraternity … either in the US or the UK and it’s all do with that campy being “out”, which is threatening to rock-and-roll – whatever that’s supposed to be’ (2016). 3

‘Hideaway’ written by A. Bell and V. Clarke, courtesy SM Publishing (UK) Ltd).

Erasure, Mute and the Value of Independence

119

Erasure’s camp was seen to full effect in their live performances. These shows were never just gigs; Erasure concerts became increasingly elaborate theatrical events. Singers, dancers, outlandish and revealing costumes (at least for Bell, with Clarke preferring to sparkle in a more low-key fashion) created a unique pop atmosphere. As one reviewer said of 1992’s The Tank, The Swan and The Balloon tour, ‘It was where synth pop meets Broadway’ (MacIntosh 2004). Bell himself says of that time, ‘I was taking all my stagecraft from drag queens in pubs’ (2016). Perhaps surprisingly, this overt gayness was part of their appeal to straight audiences. An Erasure gig offered a transformative, even magical, experience; demanding the audience let go – just for a night – drop their guard and party. Early fan and later Erasure fan club manager, Janet Gordon says, ‘It was totally positive, up, and the atmosphere of inclusiveness was the fact that Andy was so camp on stage and so flamboyant, and yet there was a massive straight audience that absolutely loved it’ (2016). She remembers ‘talking to a few of the boys and them slightly struggling with that, they were fans of Vince and Depeche Mode, and they weren’t quite sure about Andy but they were won over by him’ (MacIntosh 2004). Bell is convinced that his freedom on stage is directly related to the freedom offered by Erasure’s relationship with Mute: ‘I love performing, I love being onstage, and to me you are naked when you are on there, I do feel very free … I can’t imagine being with another label because I was allowed to be myself, to do whatever we wanted to do’ (2016). Recognition of Erasure’s pioneering attitude to sexual openness – at least from the queer press, came in 2017 when gay magazine Attitude gave the pair their Icon Award, saying: ‘During the height of hysteria surrounding AIDS in the 1980s, Andy was getting up on stage in a tutu and fetish wear to proudly declare his sexuality to huge crowds of people around the world … Long may they reign’ (‘Erasure win Icon’ 2017). Erasure’s third studio album, The Innocents (Mute 1988), went to number one, with triple platinum sales in the United Kingdom and platinum sales in the United States. The three singles released off the album became chart hits: ‘Ship of Fools’, ‘Chains of Love’ and ‘A Little Respect’. The Innocents was the first of Erasure’s five consecutive number one UK chart albums. Wild! (Mute 1989) followed, with its successful singles ‘Drama’, ‘You Surround Me’, ‘Blue Savannah’ and ‘Star’. Chorus (Mute 1991) contains the chart singles ‘Chorus’, ‘Love to Hate You’, ‘Am I Right’ and ‘Breath of Life’. With the Abba-esque EP (Mute 1992), the band finally had their, and Mute’s, first UK number one single. At the time of its release, there was no sense of

120

Mute Records

ABBA’s hip rehabilitation; arguably it was Erasure who set that train in motion. The campy playfulness of the record, not to mention the accompanying video for ‘Take a Chance on Me’, featuring Clarke and Bell dragged up as ABBA members Agnetha and Anni-Frid, did not enhance Erasure’s already shaky reputation with the critics, who seemed determined not to get the gag. Erasure’s I Say I Say I Say (Mute 1994) went into the UK charts at number one and spawned another three Top Forty singles, including ‘Always’ which became the band’s third Top Twenty hit in the United States. The album’s tongue-incheek title, referencing bawdy British humour, reinforced Erasure’s engagement with a theatrical, even music hall, sensibility. Mute’s Paul A. Taylor says the importance of the live experience may be another thread in Mute artists’ diverse commonalities: ‘One of the things that ties everything together with Mute – particularly live – is the flamboyance of the live show … if you look at what Diamanda [Galás] does, what Nick [Cave] does, what Depeche [Mode] do, Richard Hawley does, what Goldfrapp do, it has that theatre, they all have that theatre, that entertainment with what they’re doing’ (2016). Neither arch nor knowing, Erasure’s lack of cynicism and their openhearted and celebratory approach to their music has led them to be dismissed as lightweight, not deserving of serious critical attention. Certainly they were seen to be outside the rock and indie fraternity, so for some critics were of no significance. Reviewing Chorus when the album was number one in the British charts, Q magazine displayed little enthusiasm: ‘Erasure have stuck to a testmarketed formula which supplies instant familiarity and few surprises … The outcome is plastic, and not in the arty sense’ (Sutcliffe 1991). Unable to see below the pop surface perhaps, even the usually generous popular culture critic Simon Frith dismissed the band as ‘boy boffins in their bedrooms’ (1996: 6). Clarke reflects, ‘Oh we were never cool’ (2016). Yet sitting inside cleverly constructed hits, Erasure’s music contains a depth and emotional intensity. Tender, yearning, upbeat and often unabashedly romantic, Erasure aren’t afraid to do big emotions. Bell’s soaring tenor, the warmth and clarity of his vocals and Clarke’s inventive synthesizer parts subverted pop with their emotional openness, gay sensibility and disregard for convention. As online music magazine the Quietus (one of the band’s only consistent music press champions) puts it, ‘Faced with a steady stream of rockist sneers and elitist dismissals that would have compelled weaker or more reasonable artists to dive headfirst into a woodchipper, the boys just kept on dancing … Erasure played the long game, pressing towards a future indirectly influenced, yet undeniably informed by them’ (Suarez 2014).

Erasure, Mute and the Value of Independence

121

The eponymous Erasure album (Mute 1995) revealed a more introspective and experimental approach, its longer songs showcasing the full range of Bell’s voice and giving Clarke a chance to flex his musicality beyond three-minute songs. Cited by Erasure as one of their own favourite albums, it yielded two Top Twenty hits, ‘Fingers and Thumbs’ and ‘Stay with Me’, but nevertheless marked the beginning of a slowdown in sales. In the independent sector, meantime, there had been a crisis, the seeds of which, ironically, had been sown during the time of the most successful sales periods for artists and labels in the late 1980s. The Cartel (a network of regional independent distributors instigated by Rough Trade Distribution in 1982) had been struggling to cope with the financial and logistical pressures of servicing a constant stream of hits, including those of New Order, the Smiths, Depeche Mode, Cocteau Twins and Erasure. Financial undercapitalization in this network was part of the problem. In 1990 it came crashing down with calamitous consequences for the independent music sector, threatening bankruptcy for some labels and artists. In response key players, including Mute, set about finding a rescue plan. While part of the national distribution network, including Rough Trade Distribution, did go bust, an alternative network – Rough Trade Marketing – was eventually set-up, and labels saw some of their assets reimbursed. There still operated, even at this disastrously low point, a sense of collective responsibility, as Taylor remembers, ‘It wasn’t about how do we get our money back, it was about how do we support everybody else. That may not be a great business decision to a traditional businessman but overall it was a great business decision, because when you’re going through hard times they’ll look after you, when they’re going through hard times you’ll look after them’ (2016). For many independent labels business was still being seen in a broader and more collective context, beyond individual bottom lines. This idealism is part of what defines Mute, and other independents. But serious financial damage had been inflicted and, as the 1990s progressed, many independent labels, including Mute, were in jeopardy. To add to these troubles, Britpop had arrived. Musical tastes seemed to change, with financial consequences for Mute in particular. As Miller recalls, ‘We had some years in the mid-to-late Nineties which were very poor, very light. Depeche were making records less frequently, Erasure’s sales had started to go down … Britpop represented everything I hated – the antithesis to why I started Mute. It was very retrograde [and] non-progressive yet all-pervasive, especially in the mainstream media’ (Gates 2015). As Miller explains, Mute was searching for

122

Mute Records

a survival strategy: ‘I needed some cash. I thought maybe if I did a worldwide distribution deal I could get more money. Mute was not very highly regarded in those days, a lot of people felt it was over. I had staff, artists, and I was being offered not-very-good deals’ (Gates 2015). In 1999 Mute made a significant investment in Moby’s Play album, but the first three singles released from it flatlined. Trusting instincts and acumen, and against record industry conventions, Miller insisted on a fourth single from Play. It went straight into the UK Top Twenty but more significantly, almost a year after it was released, the album went to number one and stayed in the UK charts for over 100 weeks, becoming a massive worldwide hit. Having a hugely successful artist and album on his hands meant Miller now had the leverage he needed to secure a distribution deal for Mute: the label again appeared economically as well as artistically desirable. With no realizable independent alternative at hand, in 2002 Miller decided that the major label EMI might work as a home for the label; it appeared to offer creative freedom. An innovating executive, Emmanuel de Buretel – who Miller knew and trusted from Mute’s earliest days – had become head of EMI Continental Europe and was prepared to guarantee the terms Mute was demanding. Miller became Executive Chairman of Mute inside EMI, with Mute’s artistic independence assured. Says Miller: ‘It gave Mute stability and for quite a few years we had real autonomy’ (Gates 2015). He personally called all Mute artists to explain the EMI deal and reassure them that it would not affect their relationship with the label. Nonetheless, Clarke especially felt the blow, ‘It was quite shocking. I mean I had no idea – still have no idea – how the finances of Mute worked, so if he tells me this is what we got to do then this is what we gotta do’ (2016). Looking back at this moment, Bell reflects, ‘The industry was completely going tits ups anyway, you know he had to do it. It was either that or lose it really … With the Erasure album in 1995 which I love, and I stand by, but we took six months at least in the studio. I’m sure the budget was skyhigh. We’d had million-pound videos and things. So you have to take some fiscal responsibility ‘cause you know you’re not selling these huge numbers. It’s like anything, you’ve got to rein it in’ (2016). Yet turmoil at EMI meant that before long, key sympathetic executives at the major were replaced and Mute’s protected zone was under siege. Gates explains, ‘At that time Emmanuel de Buretel’s vision was to build an independent solution alongside EMI called Labels, and Mute was meant to be a stronghold independent to nurture and drive labels to that department. However when the

Erasure, Mute and the Value of Independence

123

new regime came in that whole plan was killed’ (2015). Inevitably Mute’s systems became enmeshed in those of the much bigger EMI, and the major’s approach was that of any large music corporation. Gates observes, ‘It’s always the same story when a major acquires an independent and it doesn’t understand what it buys. There’s an understanding that the success of the company it’s buying is also based on the company culture and relationships and a network. When you buy a catalogue you destroy the company culture and you destroy the network’ (Gates 2015). For Mute, their long-established and strong international network had always been a key part of their strategy. Most of the label’s artists had significant European and global audiences, and both artists and label depended on these markets to be financially viable. From this perspective being inside EMI was becoming problematic, says Miller: ‘I felt that you couldn’t just break artists in the UK, you have to do it over a number of territories for them to have longevity. That became impossible at EMI. They wouldn’t release anything internationally unless it had become a hit in the UK. It wasn’t that they wouldn’t let me sign anything, it was that I didn’t want to sign anything. The kind of artists I wanted to sign wouldn’t survive in that system. So I decided to leave and start again’ (Gates 2015). It seemed Mute could only be the label Miller envisioned by being independent. The label’s artistic freedom and that of its artists could only be guaranteed by operating within a different set of business values than those of the more monolithic and hierarchical systems of major labels, who were struggling to maintain profitability themselves in the increasingly difficult market conditions created in the wake of the MP3 and streaming revolution. In 2010 Mute negotiated an exit deal with EMI and regained its independent status. The related issues of nurturing talent, signing new artists and developing international sales had finally proved impossible in the Mute/EMI relationship. However, in the process of extricating itself from this relationship, Mute did not regain its most commercially successful artists’ back catalogue, including the work of Erasure, Depeche Mode, Nick Cave, Goldfrapp, Moby, Wire and Inspiral Carpets. Amid the major label mergers and acquisitions of the 2010s, it looked like the label might be able to regain these recordings when Universal Music bought EMI and then had to divest themselves of assets to comply with competition laws. Miller put in a bid for Mute’s catalogue but much to his shock was outbid to the power of three by the BMG group. Ultimately, Mute’s newfound independence was both a liberating and difficult moment, with the loss of key artists’ back catalogues bringing unwelcome financial repercussions.

124

Mute Records

Taylor recalls, ‘Basically, we were running a company of a reasonable size and we had bunch of debut albums we were putting out … There was no back catalogue there to give you buoyancy like companies need. It helps any label tick over, so very much it felt like starting again’ (2016). Mute regained its brand but had fewer resources. Miller set about rebuilding the label with new signings, an international distribution network that supported all his artists, and a deal that at least saw Mute consulting on a lot of the decisions about back catalogue releases. For Gates, Miller is ‘building his company back with the same philosophy as he had before, which is, don’t take into consideration any trends, do what the fuck you want … but his market is not confined to Britain or America, it’s the world’ (2016). During the ‘EMI decade’ the music business changed irrevocably; physical sales plummeted and realizing returns on costs was problematic for independents as well as the majors. Streaming and downloads of single tracks do not tend to favour mature artists who make albums rather than singles, and the need to promote across so many new platforms can stretch marketing budgets. Although Mute has many artists that have global careers and streaming has a global reach, the new industry landscape is nonetheless a more financially difficult one. Taylor explains, ‘Now it’s so fractured, with so many different areas of exposure and so little money coming back from all those areas of exposure. That’s really difficult to get that to work’ (2016). Yet as this chapter has been asserting there is much more to being an independent label than being profitable, though clearly that is crucial to survival. There remains a sense of collectivity and shared values, says Miller: ‘I never thought of the other independents – Factory, 4AD, Rough Trade, Cherry Red – as competitors. I felt we were collaborators working together to build something special. That’s still the case, really. Music is emotional. I can’t separate the human from the business side’ (Gates 2015). Those who know Miller well claim he combines his idealism with financial acumen. Nicki Kefalas comments, ‘Having worked with Factory, 4AD, Creation and Mute [and many other indie labels], I would say that Mute has been run better as a business and that Daniel Miller is extremely creative as well as being an astute businessman’ (2016). Regaining their independent status proved essential to the internationally focused and creative label that is Mute. For both Erasure and Mute circumstances have changed, in terms of sales and chart success, but their commitment to creative output seems unaffected by the vicissitudes of the marketplace. In Erasure’s case, as Clarke explains,

Erasure, Mute and the Value of Independence

125

Well yeah, the recording process is completely different than twenty years ago, in as much as there is no budget anymore, so that’s much easier for certain [laughs] … but the writing process is the same, you know. … The magic is the fact that when we start working on a project we have no idea what we are going to be doing. We have no plan or concept. Songwriting is pretty raw. As I say, we just sit in a room and see what happens, and something usually happens. It’s been happening for thirty years. (2016)

There remains an optimism and positivity about Erasure’s approach to musicmaking, and 2017’s World Be Gone reveals a band still looking to create original and inventive music. As argued here, the longevity and creative freedom that comes from being signed to a once-again-independently-owned Mute, is reckoned by both Clarke and Bell to have been essential. The label’s commitment to their artists – and Miller’s belief that commerce and creativity not only can, but must coexist – make Mute much more than just a business.

References Bell, A. (2016), interview with the author, London, 8 July. Bruce, B. (1998), ‘Daniel Miller: Mute Records, Depeche Mode and Home Studio’, SOS Magazine, December. Available online: https://web.archive.org/ web/20150609080137/http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/dec98/articles/ daniel.624.htm (accessed 1 January 2018). Clarke, V. (2016), interview with the author, London, 8 July. Erasure – A Little Respect: 30 Years On (2016), [Radio Programme], 2 May. Available online: http://www.pledgemusic.com/blog/a-little-respect-30-years-of-erasurepart-1 (accessed 18 April 2018). ‘Erasure win Icon Award’ (2017), Attitude Magazine, 12 October. Available online: https://attitude.co.uk/article/15959/attitude-icon-award-erasure-1/ (accessed 7 November 2016). Frith, S. (1996), Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, London: Oxford University Press. Gates, K. (2015), ‘Daniel Miller: “I Was Determined to Make Mute a Success”’. Available online: http://www.pias.com/blog/daniel-miller-determined-make-mute-success/ (accessed 30 August 2016). Gates, K. (2016), interview with the author, London, 3 November. Gordon, J. (2016), interview with the author, London, 11 November. Kefalas, N. (2016), interview with the author, London, 14 October.

126

Mute Records

MacIntosh, D. (2004), ‘Erasure, the Tank, the Swan and the Balloon Live!’, Audio Video Revolution, 7 December. Available online: http://www.avrev.com/dvd-movie-discreviews/music-concert/erasure-the-tank-the-swan-and-the-balloon-live-.html (accessed 1 October 2016). Suarez, G. (2014), ‘Erasure: The Violet Flame’, The Quietus, 26 September. Available online: http://thequietus.com/articles/16337-erasure-the-violet-flame-review (accessed 13 March 2017). Sutcliffe, P. (1991), ‘Erasure: Chorus’, Q, November. Available online: https://www. rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/erasure-chorus (accessed online 2 February 2018). Taylor, P. A. (2016), interview with the author, London, 11 October. Turner L. (2015), ‘Interview with Clarke, Bell, Miller’, The Quietus, 21 October. Available online: http://thequietus.com/articles/19051-erasure-interviewdiscography (accessed 27 November 2016).

9

Outside Mute? Ut, No Wave and Blast First Ieuan Franklin

Introduction: Margins This chapter focuses on the all-female no wave band Ut – founded in New York in 1978 by Jacqui Ham, Nina Canal and Sally Young and relocated to London in 1980 – and the similarly uncompromising British independent label Blast First (a sub-label of Mute), to which Ut were signed between 1986 and 1989. Firstly, a proviso – it does not promise to be a comprehensive biography or profile of either the band or label, although I hope to offer some new insights about both. I will not have much scope to discuss the band’s recorded output – here I defer to those fanzine writers and music critics, such as Elizabeth Johnson, who have brilliantly articulated the unusual nature of the band’s sound, both in concert and on record: For me, Ut represent one of the most intense musical experiences in the known universe. Are you ready to have your head trip with infinite velocity, sheer and primal ferocity? … To consider their music a random clang of guitars, erratic rhythms, and screamingly abstract vocals is to commit exorcism on their cohesive dark-sided collage. (‘50,000 Reasons’ n.d.)

This chapter will instead seek to give a detailed sense of the marginality of Ut in the UK context of being caught between record label disinterest, and a weekly music press that was sometimes guilty of belittling or objectifying female musicians (Reddington 2012: 53). It will explore the relationships of Ut, the band’s own label Out Records and Blast First with their ‘parent’ labels Rough Trade and Mute. It will suggest that Ut had an ‘elective affinity’ with Mute which was to a limited extent realized when the band signed to Blast First, and also that Ut and Blast First – both having roots in the no wave scene – were too outré for Rough Trade. In the spirit of the recent compilation Sharon Signs to Cherry

128

Mute Records

Red: Independent Women 1979-1985 (RPM 2016), documentaries such as Here to Be Heard: The Story of the Slits (2017) and events such as ‘Women in Punk and No Wave Film and Music’ (held at the Brunswick Club in Bristol on 20 January 2018 and organized by Bristol Experimental Expanded Film), this chapter is also intended as a contribution to the correction of the masculinist narratives often spun around the post-punk scene. Rhian E. Jones has identified a resurgence of interest in post-punk and no wave, and the contribution of women and girls to these scenes in particular. This includes her own writing (2015), which examines Ut, as well as more well-known all-girl bands such as the Slits and the Raincoats. At the time of writing Ut are celebrating the first in a planned series of releases from their remastered back catalogue, through their own (relaunched) record label Out, in partnership with Forte Distribution. This is heartening for fans of the band, and their revival means that Ut are the only band from the original no wave scene still active. The reformation of Ut (c. 2010) and the launch of Paul Smith’s Blast First Petite around 2004 (for titles that Smith likes but that Mute chooses not to release) make this an ideal time to reconsider their unique histories and contributions to noise/art rock. Ut are a quintessentially marginal band. Byron Coley, who has long recognized their importance, wrote an elegiac entry for Trouser Press magazine after Ut disbanded, noting that the band were ‘relatively unknown in the States’ and ‘deserved far more hep attention than they got’ (Coley n.d.). Even their relationship to the no wave scene from which they emerged seems to have been characterized as peripheral, with the fanzine Blog to Comm citing their inclusion in a history of no wave (Masters 2007) as evidence of the book’s exhaustive scope, referring to the band as ‘outta-the-loopers’ (‘Three for’ 2008). Masters notes, ‘Their music bore the mark of New York No Wave but it always felt slightly set apart, and they are rarely cited as an influence in the way peers like Mars and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks have often been’ (2007: 153). When considering their marginal status we must, of course, acknowledge the marginalization of women in rock music (Whiteley 2000; Reddington 2012), as well as the difficulties for an uncompromising band like Ut in finding a label that accepted their identity and ethos. As this chapter will demonstrate, Ut eventually benefitted from what might be termed the cultural ‘aftershock’ of no wave in the UK by signing to Blast First, yet were still fairly marginal even within their label’s roster, due to being crowded out by label and fan interest in fellow US bands associated with the hardcore punk scene, like Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Butthole Surfers and Big Black. As Jacqui Ham recently recalled, ‘We were always sort of last in line’ (Ham and Young 2016).

Outside Mute? Ut, No Wave and Blast First

129

This chapter posits that Ut may have been marginalized not just because they were sonically abrasive and avant-garde, but because of wider musical and political trends. The no wave music and film scene had offered a significant degree of gender equality. All four bands included on what became the defining document of no wave – the Brian Eno produced compilation album No New York (Antilles 1978) – included women, as did ESG, the Static, the Gynecologists and Ut. Furthermore Nina Canal (a member of the Gynecologists and Ut) played a key role in introducing Eno to the New York art and music scene that year, and can be seen as an unacknowledged midwife to the album. But the UK independent music scene – to which Ut migrated – had not experienced this degree of gender equality, and advances that were made during the punk and post-punk era(s) were quickly undermined and eroded. As Helen Reddington has noted, After 1979, the whole punk scene fragmented into a ‘second wave’ of protoskinhead punk … art-punk bands such as The Raincoats, Gang of Four and Scritti Politti; overtly feminist bands such as Jam Today; and the more mainstream ‘new wave’ bands such as Elvis Costello and the Attractions and Squeeze. This fragmentation of subcultures had happened before – [Dick] Hebdige documents the breakdown of the Mod subculture into smaller scenes with different taste characteristics. In the case of punk, the separation of the different elements later allowed the ‘rock’ part to be reclaimed by adolescent males. (2012: 52)

As Mavis Bayton has demonstrated through her analysis of interviews conducted with female musicians during the period 1982–5, loud amplified music was often labelled as ‘male’ by feminist musicians. Paradoxically, and in stark contrast to the later (early 1990s) riot grrrl subculture in the United States, ‘the feminist challenge looked likely to result in retreat from rock and amplified music altogether’ in favour of folk, which was considered ideologically safe (Bayton 1993: 185). This meant a narrowing of the already small contingent of women taking up electric instruments. Like other no wave musicians who rejected conventional musical technique, Ut held no truck with such ideological strictures, attempting to break free of ideology and the rigid boundaries and essentialist definitions of gender, genre and discipline altogether.

No wave and Ut Ut formed in 1978 when Nina Canal was introduced to Jacqui Ham and Sally Young, who had grown up together in Connecticut and developed a musical partnership. A formative experience for Ham and Young was seeing Patti Smith

130

Mute Records

play with Lenny Kaye at one of their Rock ’n’ Rimbaud performances in 1973. Although inspired by Smith and her debut Horses (Arista 1975), Ham and Young came to distance themselves from her perceived reverence for rock – Ham states that ‘we were trying to blow it [rock] apart’ (Ham and Young 2016). No wave was built upon these impulses of rejection and resistance to commodification; it literally and rhetorically negated ‘new wave’, which was generally felt to be a bogus label invented by the music industry to sanitize punk. Like ‘punk’ itself, it was a convenient umbrella term or label for a gaggle of disparate bands and artists, many of whom chafed at the imposition of the label, despite the interconnected and incestuous nature of the scene. One thing that set Ut apart from their peers was the fluidity of roles within the group: they all swapped instruments and vocal duties during live performances and recordings. Canal recalls: None of us were particularly interested in being just the guitarist or just the drummer or just this or that … each of us felt we wanted to encompass as much as possible, as much possibility and variation as could be imagined. No limits, no restrictions. We wanted it all, we were bold, we reached beyond. … Maybe we were just greedy about it, in a good way. We decided that we were each going to have turns being dustbin collector and dictator. We would each get to dictate. If we wrote a song and wanted to say how this would be and that would be, we would get that opportunity, but then we would also have to follow everyone else’s orders at other times. So that’s how we figured we would have the most fun and create the most challenging environment. We had nicknames for each other’s dictator personalities, which was hilarious. (Canal n.d.)

As a band that did not self-identify as feminist, but which did reject intra-band hierarchies, Ut’s ‘rotating dictatorship’ represents an interesting alternative to the tendency for feminist bands to embrace ‘collectivism and co-operation instead of competitive individualism; participative democracy and equality instead of hierarchy’ (Bayton 1993: 179). Musically, it meant that their interplay locked together in unique combinations, giving their work a variety and a heightened quality often missing from that of their peers. Each musician could play from multiple perspectives in a way that enriched the song. Ut developed a certain reputation for intriguing and intense live shows, also characterized by the longeurs of instrument-swapping during which they refused to connote ‘to-belooked-at-ness’, to allude to Laura Mulvey’s concept of ‘the male gaze’ (1989): There is an alchemy in electric guitars played in a certain way by those who know how: it is connected to a kind of physics in which harmonics clash and squeeze

Outside Mute? Ut, No Wave and Blast First

131

one another under pressure. … When a song ends, they chafe against the state of being caught in light, of being watched, of having no way of saying, No, it’s not us that are the object of attention. So we share with them the burden of that other claustrophobia, the smog of light in which society touches and retouches itself. Until they start again. (Hodgkinson 2016: 152, emphasis in original)

The no wave scene of the late 1970s was a prime example of artistic crossfertilization and communal living, in which bands formed in the blink of an eye and which saw a real fluidity in roles as filmmakers, musicians and artists ‘swapped places’, as Young explains: ‘It came from that attitude that we could do anything, it was almost like a new renaissance … there’s no reason why you should have to [just] be a musician or an artist’ (Ham and Young 2016). Many no wave bands found New York alternative arts institutions such as Artists Space or White Columns more accommodating venues than punkoriented nightclubs, while at the same time many art school graduates ‘turned to music because galleries and museums seemed impenetrable and stale, whereas the music scene was open to newcomers experimenting with form’ (Halasz 2015: 97). Numerous visual artists based in the downtown and East Village actively participated in this scene, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat (who founded the group Gray), Barbara Ess, Nina Canal, Robert Longo (who was in the band Menthol Wars and designed sleeves for Theoretical Girls) and Robert Appleton (who was in the Gynaecologists with Canal) (Molon and Diederichsen 2007: 14). One common factor between the United Kingdom and the United States was the influence of art colleges on the post-punk scene. Sarah Lowndes notes that Canal had attended Hornsey College of Art, as had Graham Lewis (who later formed the band Wire) and Raincoats bassist Gina Birch (2016: 96). The availability of squats and cheap accommodation (loft-spaces in the case of New York) was also a common factor, as was social deprivation and urban decay. Ham observed of New York during the late 1970s: Rent was so cheap that you didn’t have to work … I think it was one of the Bush Tetras who said, ‘No-one worked …’ You did, but you hardly worked at all … and some people just stayed on people’s floors. We had a rehearsal place for $25 a month, in a back room off a landscape architect’s [house], really in the ghetto, there were transom windows and you could see the rats go by. But it was a fantastic place to play … we’d roll our amps in there. And we rehearsed in a loft at the end of the street, looking at the World Trade Center. … But the atmosphere in New York was changing – by ’81. There were only three clubs

132

Mute Records

you could play, unless you could pass as a normal rock band, which we couldn’t. (Ham and Young 2016)

Ut recorded a single in New York’s Sorcerer Sound studio, produced by the late Charles Ball and intended for release on his Lust/Unlust label. But, sadly, the single was aborted: Unfortunately with us, our record was made, our cover was made, we had a release party, and he [Ball] went AWOL and it never came out. It was really tragic for us – that was July 1980. (Ham and Young 2016)

On the promise of a support slot with the Fall, a band Ut strongly identified with, and the opportunity of recording time with John Loder (best known for founding Southern Studios and working for Crass Records), Ut decamped to London. The aforementioned No New York had been compiled and produced by an Englishman, Brian Eno. Yet the no wave scene never really seemed to take root in the UK, despite the best efforts of tiny labels like Fetish.1 Richard King has noted that the Rough Trade shop was buying in all the new hip no wave releases from 99 Records and Lust/Unlust in the post-punk period and he ventures the opinion that ‘if Rough Trade had an equivalent anywhere in the world it was 99, a record and badge shop that under the direction of its owner Ed Bahlman started releasing records by Liquid Liquid, ESG, Bush Tetras and Glenn Branca’ (2012: 126). However, it is worth noting that Rough Trade certainly did not seek to sign no wave bands or exponents, passing up the opportunity to sign Ut (in fact, as 99 Records had done previously). Instead Ut started their own Out label, selfreleasing their material through a manufacturing and distribution (M&D) deal with Rough Trade, which gave bands a set period of time to sell records to recover the costs of pressing records and artwork. After a live mini-album (Ut Live, Out 1982), Ut released their studio debut album Conviction (Out 1985). Thereafter, they signed with Blast First, who created another pressing of the album and released Early Live Life in 1987, a live retrospective recorded at various shows in New York and England between 1979 and 1985. Why did it take so long for Ut to release a full-length album? According to Ham they had always been ‘a difficult proposition’ for a label, with their uncompromisingly discordant sound and their refusal to adopt a marketable 1

Fetish released records by 8-Eyed Spy (a group formed by Lydia Lunch), Bush Tetras and Snatch (Patti Palladin and Judy Nylon) in 1980 and 1981.

Outside Mute? Ut, No Wave and Blast First

133

band image or identity (Ham and Young 2016). Canal has acknowledged that Rough Trade’s M&D deals were a ‘fantastic opportunity’ for those bands deemed by Rough Trade as worthy of taking a punt on (Canal n.d.). But it is also interesting to consider whether bands were held at one remove through this process, which may shed light on the disjuncture between the types of music sold in the Rough Trade shop or enjoyed by the warehouse staff, and the types of music signed to the label. By contrast, Mute had always maintained an interesting balance between the indigenous electro-pop of Depeche Mode and Erasure, and ear-splitting German noise brutalists like Einstürzende Neubauten and DAF, with the commercial success of the former funding more experimental – and often archival – releases. Moreover, as the 1970s drew to a close some no wave musicians had already begun to gravitate towards the more gothic and electronic sound (sometimes referred to as ‘dark wave’) of Mute artists and bands such as the Normal, Robert Rental and Throbbing Gristle.2 On a personal level, Miller had a genial and casual air, which belied the extreme nature of some of the music released on his label. The typically forthright view of Blast First’s press officer Liz Naylor, who had been a prolific contributor to Manchester punk fanzines and a Rough Trade staffer, was that ‘Daniel was nice: he wasn’t intimidating in that kind of Cambridge way that Geoff [Travis, founder of Rough Trade] had’ (King 2012: 290). According to Ham, Rough Trade ‘did not get New York, they did not get the [urban aesthetic] or Nick Cave’s thing. And … Daniel, with his “Warm Leatherette” [single], he was into [the] urban and strange. He got the … Velvet Underground, the Birthday Party, Iggy Pop … Daniel was open to outsiders, he was the home for our kind, you know’ (Ham and Young 2016). Ut had encountered Miller and Mute soon after arriving in London in August 1981 through the close friendships they had already struck up with Rough Trade’s Scott Piering and Richard Scott. Piering, a sociology graduate from the University of California who headed up Rough Trade’s promotions department, had brokered Ut’s connection with the Fall by passing on a tape of their music to singer Mark E. Smith when on tour with them in America. Ut actually rehearsed in the basement of Mute’s early home, in Seymour Place, as well as at Rough Trade’s original premises on Ladbroke Grove. But as they didn’t really fit in 2

This is particularly evident on Dark Day’s 1979 Lust/Unlust single ‘Hands in the Dark’ / ‘Invisible Man’, a group that at that time comprised Robin Crutchfield (ex-DNA), Nancy Arlen (ex-Mars) and Nina Canal.

134

Mute Records

musically with Mute’s roster at the time they assumed that Mute would never sign them. When Paul Smith later brought his Blast First imprint to Mute in 1986, Ut were given an opportunity to become a member (albeit again ‘once removed’) of the Mute family.

Nothing short of total war In 1985, after his partners in the video/record label Doublevision (Stephen Mallinder and Richard H. Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire) vetoed a release on their label of Sonic Youth’s Bad Moon Rising for the same reason that Ut assumed Mute would reject them (too rock‘n’roll), Smith shopped around the tape to a multitude of labels. Eventually Peter Walmsley of Rough Trade, half in exasperation due to Smith’s relentless proselytizing, offered to release it if Smith obtained the rights, which King has termed ‘among the last of the offthe-street Rough Trade deals’ (2012: 284). To do so Smith needed to establish an imprint/label, hence Blast First was born. Sonic Youth biographer Stevie Chick summarized the contribution that Blast First would ultimately make to the UK independent music scene: ‘In the years that followed, the label would build a formidable roster of groups from the American underground, sating British audiences unmoved by their country’s more tepid local produce, hungering for the profane avant chaos the Blast First label reliably offered’ (2009: 99). Blast First’s roster, which included the Butthole Surfers, Big Black and Band of Susans, was the ‘vortex for trans-Atlantic energies’ (Stubbs 2009) which would provide an anarchic corrective to some of the anaemic excesses of British indie music during the mid-1980s (King 2012: 297–8). In fact, Blast First soon developed a reputation for subversion and provocation that mirrored many of the bands on their roster. To coincide with their UK tour in 1985, Sonic Youth sought to release ‘Halloween’ b/w ‘Flower’ as a 12” single in the UK on Blast First, but soon ran into trouble with Rough Trade regarding the artwork, supplied by the band. The sleeve featured a Xeroxed image of a topless woman from a Puerto Rican calendar, and some staff working in the Rough Trade Distribution, wholesale and export sections initially refused to handle the single (King 2012: 285). Although this issue was eventually resolved after a meeting with the band, the incident did cause friction between Blast First and Rough Trade, and it was no coincidence that in 1986 Blast First parted ways with Rough Trade (this

Outside Mute? Ut, No Wave and Blast First

135

relationship had been established less than a year previously) and made its home in Harrow Road as a sub-label of Mute.3 Rough Trade’s internal debate and action over the Sonic Youth artwork was interpreted by some as evidence of how it differed from mainstream record labels due to its internal democracy (Hesmondhalgh 1997: 268), while others regarded the label as having flirted with censorship over its initial handling of the issue. The controversy provoked Claude Bessy, an iconoclastic French fanzine writer who worked in Rough Trade’s promotions department, to clamber onstage moments before Sonic Youth’s performance at the University of London on 30 October 1985, and issue an impassioned tirade: In these days of AIDS and Ethiopia … you would think a major alternative record company would have better things to do than worry about the shape of our bodies. So, I thought I’d let you know, next time you go and buy a record, and you think you’re really alternative and groovy, remember it’s just like the other side, except it’s a bit stranger. There’s no fucking culture there, you know. There’s just as much censorship. (Chick 2009: 111)

Listeners who tolerated the relentless racket of the vinyl edition of the 1988 Blast First compilation Nothing Short of Total War right until the end were rewarded with a looped extract from Bessy’s tirade, endlessly repeating on the locked groove. Many fans of Ut would discover the band due to the inclusion of two of their tracks (‘Fire in Philly’ and ‘Evangelist’) on this compilation. To quote from Pat Naylor’s press release (reproduced on the album’s inner sleeve), ‘Hands up who bought it for the Ut tracks? Let’s face it, most will shell out for the likes of Sonic Youth, Buttholes or Big Black … and in the process you get to hear stuff you were too ignorant to open your ears to.’ Nothing Short of Total War, as the title suggests, is perhaps the closest thing to an anti-compilation (of anti-music), denying the listener an easily identifiable position or identity, to paraphrase Dave Laing (Street 1992: 315). The CD version is encoded as a single track, so that there is no option to skip between songs. The LP version features no track listing or liner credits, in favour of showcasing the Savage Pencil (the nom de plume of the artist and music journalist Edwin Pouncey) cover art. The inner sleeve features a text and image collage including extracts from the Wyndham Lewis magazine Blast, the short-lived literary magazine of the Vorticist movement in Britain from which the label took 3

Daniel Miller had expressed an interest in the British ‘noise rock’ band Head of David, signed to Blast First, after hearing them on John Peel’s radio show.

136

Mute Records

its name. This approach transcended the limitations and hierarchies of the conventional sampler, providing a unique way of getting to know the label and its ethos. Steve Albini, who produced Ut’s Griller (Blast First 1989), has given the following judgement about Nothing Short of Total War: The best thing about this comp was hearing all these great bands presented unannounced, on a single plane with no commentary or critical perspective. Ut … Band of Susans, Head of David … the ‘80s had so many great, distinctive bands that a lot of them were obscured by both the personalization (mini-starmaking I mean) and the obsession with movements and micro-movements. This was one of the only pure-music listening experiences you could have in that environment. (2015)

Conclusion Ut’s contributions stood out as succinct and mature, shorn of the hierarchies, cliques and pigeonholing that Albini refers to. As we have already seen, the period in which Ut formed and developed saw styles that once would have fallen under the large umbrella of punk earn more specific labels like power pop, art rock, no wave, new wave and hardcore. As Mary Wolf has remarked, The proliferation of sub-genres was accompanied by the segmentation of punk audiences. This aesthetic explosion and the codification that accompanied it had important ramifications for women’s role in punk because the various subgenres in punk became increasingly gendered over time. (2007: 288)

This fragmentation is evident when examining Blast First, which had a roster of hardcore bands schooled in the most aggressive strains of psychedelia, industrial music, heavy metal and no wave. Many ‘arty’ punk scenes in which women had hitherto thrived became arenas of aggressive hyper-masculinity with the arrival of hardcore in the 1980s. Yet although in some ways Ut were an atypical act for Blast First, the band also had a hard-edged sound, and felt a kinship with other acts (many of whom were compatriots) on the label. Ham states: We were very happy to be on a label … and, for a while, it was great. The crowd that he [Smith] got – Sonic Youth, us, Head of David, Big Black, Butthole Surfers, Big Stick, I mean it was great. And we really did fit in with that whole scene … it was wonderful. But we had to wait for him to do Sonic Youth, so we were always sort of last in line … he said to us ‘You’re long-term … ’ And the thing is he had problems selling us. (Ham and Young 2016)

Outside Mute? Ut, No Wave and Blast First

137

It is commonly believed that the anti-establishment stance of punk opened up possibilities for female musicians, who had hitherto been treated like outsiders in a male-dominated industry. But in fact even in punk women’s progress was limited, which is something that has only belatedly received acknowledgement (Wolf 2007: 285). By the mid-to-late 1980s – when Ut released the majority of their work – post-punk experimentalism seemed to have run its course. In retrospect, for female musicians this was a fallow period sandwiched between no wave/post-punk and riot grrrl, the highly publicized feminist DIY punk movement that emerged from the North-West of America in the early 1990s. The uncompromising nature of Ut’s sound (influenced by free jazz and the Velvet Underground) would circumscribe their treatment by the UK music press throughout the 1980s. While (predominantly male) critics embraced shepunk innovators like the Slits and the Raincoats, they ignored Ut (Mamone 1999). Perhaps this can partly be explained by the fact that they were constantly attributed the label of no wave, a scene which divided critics, as some regarded the music as downright unlistenable. Nina Canal has suggested that this ambivalence was also a consequence of the intensity of their music and live performances: If you’re a woman … and you show deep emotion, people say you’re neurotic or … hysterical. … And if you’re a guy, you’re ‘cool’. … We didn’t want to dress up as sex kittens to get that attention. That was not where our interest lay. At that time, most girl bands were, in some form or another, trying to use that in an attentiongetting way. We wanted our music to get the attention and we were trying to do something substantial, real, deep. (Canal n.d.)

In addition, as previously mentioned, Ut were not an avowedly feminist band like the similarly pioneering all-female Portland punk group Neo Boys (active from 1978 to 1983). To quote music journalist Jordan Mamone: Ut’s harder, more technical approach had subversively smashed women-in-rock stereotypes without even acknowledging feminism or gender. That the band’s decade-plus lifespan outlasted the brief careers of the Delta 5, the Au Pairs and LiLiPUT proves that girl power is no match for grown-up artistic conviction. (1999)

Byron Coley has opined that the initial riot grrrl bands – such as Bratmobile and Bikini Kill – were ‘more similar to No Wave bands like Ut ... than anything else you could name’ (2014). But Jacqui Ham and Sally Young have felt more kinship with bands that have articulated and exuded urban alienation and unease –

138

Mute Records

Joy Division, Birthday Party, Einstürzende Neubauten, Slint and Nirvana. They regard Kurt Cobain a kindred spirit, who would have been welcome to join their band (Ham and Young 2016). He had been a fan of the riot grrrl bands, and wrote touchingly about how his life had been changed by hearing Ut’s closest UK analogue, the Raincoats. Yet Cobain, who was keen to voice his support for numerous obscure bands, seemingly never heard Ut, despite his close connections with Ut-proselytizers such as Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Steve Albini and Everett True. Despite having a close relationship to such US underground luminaries in art and music, as well as UK industry insiders like Scott Piering, it was Ut – rather than their label-mates, who nearly all moved on from Blast First to major labels – who remained quintessential outsiders, playing ‘outsider music’.

References ‘50,000 Reasons: Ut’ (n.d.), Ut/Music. Available online: http://www.utmusic.net/50000reasons-ut (accessed 17 April 2018). Albini, S. (2015), ‘Nothing Short of Total War’, Electrical Audio, 27 July. Available online: http://www.electricalaudio.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=15433&start=20 (accessed 5 August 2017). Bayton, M. (1993), ‘Feminist Musical Practice: Problems and Contradictions’, in T. Bennett, S. Frith, L. Grossberg, J. Shepherd and G. Turner (eds), Rock and Popular Music: Politics, Policies, Institutions, 177–92, Oxford: Taylor and Francis. Canal, N. (n.d.), ‘Interview with Nina Canal’. Available online: http://web.archive.org/ web/19991105160118/http://www.geocities.com:80/SunsetStrip/Disco/6402/nina2. html (accessed 16 April 2018). Chick, S. (2009), Psychic Confusion: The Sonic Youth Story, London: Omnibus Press. Coley, B. (2014), ‘Iconic Music Critic Byron Coley Looks for Traces of NYC’s No Wave in Contemporary Culture’, Huck Magazine, 14 November. Available online: http:// www.huckmagazine.com/perspectives/opinion-perspectives/byron-coley-no-wave/ (accessed 15 August 2017). Coley, B. (n.d.), ‘Ut’, Trouser Press. Available online: http://www.trouserpress.com/entry. php?a=ut (accessed 16 April 2018). Halasz, J. R. (2015), The Bohemian Ethos: Questioning Work and Making a Scene on the Lower East Side, London: Routledge. Ham, J., and S. Young (2016), Joint interview with the author, London, 24 June. Here to be Heard: The Story of the Slits (2017), [Film] Dir. William E. Badgley, UK: Head Gear Films, Metrol Technology, Molasses Manifesto, Moveihouse Entertainment.

Outside Mute? Ut, No Wave and Blast First

139

Hesmondhalgh, D. (1997), ‘Post-Punk’s Attempt to Democratise the Music Industry: The Success and Failure of Rough Trade’, Popular Music, 16 (3): 255–74. Hodgkinson, T. (2016), Music and the Myth of Wholeness: Toward a New Aesthetic Paradigm, Cambridge: MIT Press. Jones, R. (2015), ‘Post-Punk: Raw, Female Sound’, in J. Downes (ed.), Women Make Noise: Girl Bands from Motown to the Modern, 187–214, London: Aurora Metro Books. King, R. (2012), How Soon Is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks Who Made Independent Music 1975–2005, London: Faber & Faber. Lowndes, S. (2016), The DIY Movement in Art, Music and Publishing: Subjugated Knowledges, London: Routledge. Mamone, J. N. (1999), ‘I’m Your Fan: Ut’, CMJ New Music Report, 25 January. Available online: https://plus.google.com/s/%23UtArchives/posts (accessed 20 April 2018). Masters, M. (2007), No Wave, London: Black Dog. Molon, D., and D. Diederichsen (2007), Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967, London: Yale University Press. Mulvey, L. (1989), ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Visual and Other Pleasures, 14–26, London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. Reddington, H. (2012), The Lost Women of Rock Music: Female Musicians of the Punk Era, 2nd edn, Sheffield: Equinox Publishing Ltd. Street, J. (1992), ‘Shock Waves: The Authoritative Response to Popular Music’, in D. Strinati and S. Wagg (eds), Come on Down?: Popular Media Culture in Post-War Britain, 302–8, London: Routledge. Stubbs, D. (2009), ‘Sonic Youth And the Blast First Axis’, The Wire, 12 February. Available online: http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/sonic-youth-andthe-blast-first-axis (accessed 15 August 2017). ‘Three for the Price of None!’ (2008), Blog to Comm, 13 April. Available online: http:// black2com.blogspot.co.uk/2008_04_01_archive.html (accessed 16 April 2018). Whiteley, S. (2000), Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity, and Subjectivity, London: Psychology Press. Wolf, M. M. (2007), ‘“We Accept You, One of Us?”: Punk Rock, Community, and Individualism in an Uncertain Era, 1974–1985’. Available online: https://cdr.lib.unc. edu/record/uuid:9da5d840-fe83-4988-82ac-5f78a9e73c84 (accessed 5 May 2017).

10

The Mash-Up of Aesthetics, Theory and Politics in Laibach’s Meta-Sound Aténé Mendelyté

Prelude The time is 1983; the place is Ljubljana. Laibach are being interviewed by local television presenter Jure Pengov for the Slovenian/Yugoslav cultural and political television show Tednik. What seems like an example of regular journalism is in fact a dialectic struggle of two giant organisms trying to absorb one another. And it is Laibach that stand victorious. As Barbara Borčić details, the ‘members of Laibach transformed the interview into a performance with manifestos, while the presenter declared them enemies of the state, warning the viewers of “this dangerous group” and asking rhetorically whether we should tolerate them in our environment’ (2003: 513). Laibach were unyielding. They sat in Škuc Gallery – a haven for Slovenian/Yugoslav countercultural artists at the time – with stern expressions on their faces, wearing their military uniforms and surrounded by Laibach posters that simultaneously evoked Nazikunst and socialist realism. The collective incorporated this piece of television into their audiovisual performance art. Pengov attempted to get straight answers regarding the band’s politics, but each time he was met with a reading of pre-prepared statements about creating politicized art, eliminating ideological discourse by sublimating politics and being completely apolitical. Not long after this, Laibach were banned from using their name (German for Ljubljana) and from performing in public (between 1983 and 1987) in their home country. Yet this event was deemed a successful social experiment by Laibach, who attempted to expose the mechanisms of control behind such media industries (Borčić 2003: 513). The vast system of media power that encompasses even run-of-the-mill music journalism was incorporated into Laibach’s system of subversion, ambiguity and meta-sound.

142

Mute Records

Laibach became well-known to Western audiences after signing to Mute Records in 1986. But even prior to that, they were among the most prominent representatives of the post-war Slovenian/Yugoslav avant-garde. The benevolent dictator Josip Broz Tito’s Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1945–92) was politically liminal. It was not a Western capitalist country by any means, but neither was it communist; this was a unique socialist system of self-management (Borčić 2003: 491). Tito died in 1980 – the year Laibach formed – and the following decade consisted of social, political and cultural upheavals, resulting in Yugoslavia’s collapse. A subversive counterculture was thriving in Slovenia, spearheaded by the alternative audiovisual artists Meje Kontrole št. 4, Kolaps, Borghesia, FV 112/15, Goran Devidé, Andrej Lupinc-Keller, among others, and the Marxist–Lacanian critics Rastko Močnik, Brako Rotar and Slavoj Žižek. These interventions explored the link between the social mechanisms of power and the libidinous structure of individuals (Borčić 2003: 511). Laibach provoked controversy by employing politically charged symbolism and totalitarian rhetoric. Their incessant sampling of political speeches, borrowing from national socialist, fascist and soviet aesthetics, military attire, martial instrumentation, issuing of manifestoes and membership within the controversial NSK State in Time have raised the question of the political in music. I am convinced that their political controversies function like the abovementioned television incident; they are absorbed within a postmodern rendering of sound – meta-sound – which exceeds empirical sound properties and the act of listening. This chapter shall define this concept and analyse its principles via two Laibach songs – ‘Anglia’ (Mute 2006) and ‘Whistleblowers’ (Mute 2014).

First movement: Laibach’s meta-sound The Marxist thinker Fredric Jameson identifies ‘theoretical prominence’ as one of the symptoms of postmodernity (1998: 119). According to Jameson, artistic practices no longer take their inspiration from earlier masters and masterpieces, as they used to in the days of modernity, but from such (post)modern theories as feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis. This tendency is most pervasive in visual culture and postmodern conceptual art. For example, deconstructive art tends to draw attention to its own institutional context and redirects the deconstruction of perceptual categories specifically onto the framing institutions themselves (Jameson 1991: 158). Laibach amplify such deconstruction by absorbing popular music, politics and, most importantly, all the diverging

Aesthetics, Theory and Politics in Laibach’s Meta-Sound

143

critical discourses regarding the band’s practice within their meta-sound quality and performance art. This meta-sound is a sound that deconstructs music and culture by mashing up heterogeneous signs, music phenomena and para-musical elements into a qualitatively new whole. Nowadays, the term ‘mash-up’ is likely to evoke a popular mixing praxis of layering, for example, Kanye West’s ‘New Slaves’ (Roc-A-Fella Records, Def Jam Recordings 2013) over Ludwig van Beethoven’s music for Egmont, Opus 84. The term describes combining one song’s chord progression with another song’s melody (usually vocals). Yet this ludic irreverence towards the original can be traced back to early-twentieth century jazz, which borrowed its melodic material from folk and blues and, through free improvisation, produced a jazz quality of sound. Laibach assemble various totalitarian and authoritarian symbols and blend them with popular songs. But how are they harmonized? What is their new quality? Žižek, who comes from the same subcultural background as Laibach, suggests that behind the innocence of popular culture there are complex mechanisms of subjugation at work – pleasure is never innocent. Ian Parker conjectures that Žižek’s theory of popular culture is coextensive with Laibach’s practices: ‘One way into an interpretation of what Žižek is up to is to trace the cultural-political interventions of some fellow travelers [Laibach] still active in the production and disturbance of our ideological enjoyment’ (2005: 105). Žižek’s explanation of Laibach’s mash-up of ideological signs is that the band cannot be seen as embracing fascist or other extremist positions. Like Žižek, they are psychoanalysts exposing the libidinal mechanisms permeating culture and politics; they make us (analysands) face our own libidinal desires. Laibach redirect the question of political identifications onto ourselves – we choose Laibach’s position for Laibach (Žižek 2002). I consider the problem Laibach raise to be bigger than any individual answer and interpretation of their politics or aesthetics. Žižek’s nuanced explanation of Laibach’s cathartic function is ultimately unsatisfying. The reductions of Laibach’s practice to either post-punk leftism or neoclassical/martial crypto-fascism by some critics, fans and musical disciples alike are even less satisfying. Laibach’s meta-sound encompasses all of these positions and functions by spreading this ambiguity, multiplying radically diverging interpretations. This chapter is thus complicit with Laibach’s project because exegesis is a form of discursive control, which their politico-theoretical aesthetics is designed to escape. That is to say, all the theorizing is always already co-opted, much like the journalism of the unwitting Pengov, and effectuates Laibach’s meta-sound. This is why Laibach represent Mute Records perfectly. They joined its roster when the label was nearing its tenth anniversary. During this time Mute was

144

Mute Records

characterized by both the countercultural experimentation of, say, Boyd Rice and the continuing commercial success of Depeche Mode. Daniel Miller’s Kunstkammer of artists has always thoroughly complicated such binaries as aesthetics/politics and experimentation/conformism. One may argue that the punk scene of the 1970s and 1980s paved the way for such post-punk interventions by already decontextualizing controversial symbols; the Ramones named one of their songs ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ (Sire 1976) and Sid Vicious from the Sex Pistols sported a swastika as a regular fashion accessory. But as soon as one is able to identify a political position (or a lack thereof) based on the lyrics or the personal views of the artists, meta-sound evaporates. Notably, post-punk encompasses industrial, new wave and gothic rock and it was actually contemporaneous with punk. Throbbing Gristle established their Industrial Records in 1976, which can be viewed as inaugurating the post-punk era. The difference between punk and post-punk is that the former exudes a raw countercultural affect whereas the latter unites this drive with a violence that is more conceptual than physical in terms of music and on-/off-stage antics. Cabaret Voltaire (UK), Throbbing Gristle (UK), Test Dept. (UK), Nurse with Wound (UK), Autopsia (UK/Yugoslavia/Czech Republic), Boyd Rice (US), Swans (US), Einstürzende Neubauten (West Berlin/Germany), along with Laibach, are some of industrial’s pioneers. Their sound is distinguished by playing non-musical objects, synthesizers, sampling, a focus on rhythm, monotony, speech, shouting and a defiance of melody, variation and singing. Laibach started off as a martial industrial band in Slovenia/Yugoslavia and their compositions prior to joining Mute Records tended to have a pronounced anti-music quality. Upon joining Mute, they released Opus Dei (1987), which layered that harsh industrial sound over famous pop songs. My theorizing about Laibach’s meta-sound would seem far less convincing if one would consider this earlier, strictly avant-garde, phase to be Laibach’s sonic homeland, abandoned in the process of exploration or, worse, ‘selling out’. I suggest that this raw industrial music was not a signature sound because Laibach’s politics-art-theory is something that happens on top of sounds, as it were. This is essentially a band that plays ideas, signs and concepts, not instruments. The instruments that do get used are a necessary evil and I suspect that if they could do away with them, they would. This industrial sound was therefore simply the best way for Laibach’s meta-sound to come into being as it was a relatively popular countercultural phenomenon in Yugoslavia (and the UK, for that matter) – an artefact of the present. This avant-garde sound was also rebelliously non-musical and often conceptual – a soundscape ripe for a mash-up of politics, aesthetics and theory.

Aesthetics, Theory and Politics in Laibach’s Meta-Sound

145

The main distinctive feature of meta-sound is that it makes controversial political symbols and popular music sources co-optable by contradictory ideologies. They become extremely evocative and absolutely empty – a truly postmodern noise of signification. This quality encompasses individual songs, albums, live performances, TV appearances, manifestoes, documentaries, theorizing about Laibach and other related artistic practices. Laibach’s meta-sound provokes exegesis and yet exists only as an extrapolation of other sounds – as an inherently hypothetical and thus virtual sound. This absorption effect is best observable in the virtuality of the NSK State in Time, of which Laibach is a constituent project. This is the prodigal brainchild of the Neue Slowenische Kunst (New Slovenian Art) collective, founded in 1992 in Slovenia, mimicking the Yugoslav principle of states within states. This concept-state is an extension of the NSK organization, which was formed back in 1984 by the ‘merger’ of Laibach (music), Irwin (visual art), New Collectivism (design) and Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre/Noordung (performance). The state is a long-duration performance piece, which has a material side too as it produces and distributes such empirical objects as ‘passports, ID badges, flags, maps, constitutional and genealogical documents, and so forth [which] actually [bring] this fictitious state into existence in a real sense’ (Chazkel and Serlin 2011: 10). It even gained a political function in 1995, during the Bosnian War, when individuals holding these fake passports were able to flee the Bosnian territory. Just like Laibach’s meta-sound, this surplus state exists by deconstructing the politics and geography it latches onto. And it contributes to the collective’s meta-sound by spreading politico-aesthetic ambiguity. How such para-musical activities are interpreted affects sound; to listen to music is to listen to ideologically embellished notes. Laibach simply have a way of masterfully manipulating these notes. The quality of meta-sound is subsequently not to be found in Laibach’s assembled phenomena but in the paranoid and schizophrenic discursive effects they produce – what is one listening to? The following analysis explores these effects in two songs that at once invoke and escape exegesis.

Second movement: ‘Anglia’ I shall first examine a song from Laibach’s critically acclaimed album Volk (Mute 2006). The album title means ‘people’ in German, ‘wolf ’ in Slovenian and the album cover art valourizes both meanings by representing sheep. Laibach collaborated

146

Mute Records

with the Slovenian electronic duo Silence and on the album deconstructed fourteen national anthems. Laibachian deconstruction involves translating original anthem lyrics into English, adding some commentary and sometimes mashing up different anthem versions. The melodies are mostly preserved so that the sound unmistakably signifies its origins. The accompaniment is changed into Laibach’s blend of industrial timbre, ‘authoritarian’ vocals and electronic dance beats. The effect is daunting because when one listens to these anthems one realizes how antagonistic they can be. Laibach are unveiling the problematics implicit in the preexisting musical phenomena and bringing to the surface their contradictions. I shall focus on ‘Anglia’, a deconstruction of the British national anthem, which refers to the English imagining that ‘all other nations are inferior’, any ‘sedition hushed, rebellious Scots crushed’.1 Parker notes that the ‘references to crushing the Scots are actually still there in the rarely sung fourth verse of the real English national anthem’ (2015: 103). The same goes for ‘Francia’; despite protests, the official version still includes references to ‘savage forces’, whose blood should soak the fields of France. Spain has only highlighted the controversy by eliminating it – its anthem has no official lyrics because, after abandoning the version approved by Francisco Franco, the newly chosen lyrics received criticism for being too nationalist and were subsequently also abandoned. So, of course, Laibach mash-up different versions, including that of Francoist Spain. And while Germany’s anthem now excludes the notorious ‘Germany above all’ stanza that was used by the Nazis, its anthem contains the third stanza from the same poem, preserving the deconstructive trace. Laibach’s meta-sound encompasses multiple forms of expression and it is analytically unreasonable to separate the song from its video (directed by Sašo Podgoršek 2006). The video emphasizes the contradiction between an ideal image and the reality it represses. It shows a dishevelled and oblivious elderly lady dressed in Elizabethan clothes – a symbol for the queen and governmental power. The lady is going about in her small and dirty kitchen, which is symbolic of the queen taking care of state affairs. This tableau introduces a theme of ideological anachronism, underscored by a classical string music intro – an instrumentally stripped down national anthem. These audiovisuals create a dissonance between the air of aristocracy and the decaying surroundings. On the kitchen cabinet doors there is a red cross, reminiscent of Laibach’s black cross, seen on armbands, album covers, posters and in videos. It is Kazimir Malevich’s 1

‘Anglia’ written by M. Fras, D. Knez and I. Novak, courtesy Mute Song Limited.

Aesthetics, Theory and Politics in Laibach’s Meta-Sound

147

Black Cross (1923); the artist belonged to the suprematist art movement aiming to depict forms and feelings that escape representation. Laibach wearing this cross on their armbands in a manner evocative of Nazi/fascist use of symbols is ingenious – the sign is perfectly co-optable because it is perfectly empty. The cross recalls the English flag – a red cross on a white background – superimposing the totalitarianism of NSK onto the supposed imperialism of England. A similar strategy was at work when New Collectivism produced a poster for the contest organized by the socialist youth organization to commemorate Tito’s birthday in 1987, which was announced a clear winner by the federal jury that even included a few Yugoslav People’s Army generals. But when the authorities found out that the poster was a copy of a Nazi artwork, Richard Klein’s The Third Reich (1936) – the swastika was replaced by socialist symbols – the state unsuccessfully tried to imprison the collective (Gržinić 2003: 254). The meta-sound aspect, that is, this audiovisual artwork acting as an extrapolation and a deconstruction of its source, is intensified by the narrative implicit in the video imagery. One sees several naked and chained prisoners, some of whom have their heads in metal torture devices, the so-called ‘scold’s bridles’ – a throwback to medieval prison system. As the camera continues to explore the enclosed surroundings throughout the rest of the video, one recognizes the place to be a slaughterhouse. The lyrics shed some light on the significance of this symbolism: ‘So, you still believe you are ruling the World, / Using all your tricks to keep the picture blurred, / Scatter your enemies, / Confound their politics, / So you still believe you are ruling the World!’. These lines are spoken in the Laibachian vocal style, marked by its highly accented English and its resemblance to political speeches. By using blurry vision in some shots, the video enacts the aforementioned gesture of obscuring reality by means of ideological power. Just as the camera focuses on the queen graciously bringing the food to the prisoners, the chorus, a slightly altered stanza from the British national anthem, is sung in its original melodic arrangement: ‘God save your gracious Queen / Long live your noble Queen / God save your gracious Queen / God save you all’. By changing ‘our Queen’ to ‘your Queen’ and adding the line ‘God save you all’, which is not present in the original, the song establishes its outsider perspective (its metaposition), introducing an element of threat. This alterity is also visible in such instances as the two vocalists peeking through the small openings in the prisonslaughterhouse walls and so invisibly invading this grotesque space. The salient feature of Laibach’s meta-sound is that it is not localizable in terms of purely musical qualities. Much like the virtual NSK State in Time, it

148

Mute Records

only exists as an added layer to preexisting phenomena and does not have its own musical geography, as it were. The music that Laibach combine the British national anthem with is a generic industrial sound indistinguishable from the industrial elements adopted by popular music (cf. Marilyn Manson, Rammstein or Skinny Puppy). The anthem, which provides the main melody and refrain for the track, is the epitome of popular music in a sense of populus (nation) and ‘known to all’ – this music is so ingrained in cultural consciousness that it escapes analysis, becoming background noise. One could accuse Laibach of anti-English sentiments, but these are not localizable within Laibach; the ideas are shown to come from the source, from the leftover traces of England’s imperialist history. This may initially resemble parodying – taking a preexisting phenomenon and turning it against itself. By way of comparison, in the early 1980s, the British anarchists Chumbawamba made the so-called Scab Aid campaign and by changing the lyrics of the Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’ (Apple 1970) parodied charity singles for their thinly disguised self-promotion and non-humanitarian interests. Chumbawamba made an unambiguous social commentary; it is obvious what Scab Aid signifies. Yet one could grow old trying to decipher whether Laibach are critical of or nostalgic about imperialism. And the same goes for Laibach’s Let It Be (Mute 1988), which provides cover versions of the Beatles’ album of the same name, excepting the title track and replacing ‘Maggie Mae’ with a German folk song. Laibach’s ‘totalitarianization’ of the Beatles extrapolates the source’s unique ability to affectively turn individuals into blindly adoring masses, much to the envy of any dictator.

Third movement: ‘Whistleblowers’ Laibach are just as capable of deconstructing their own modus operandi. A perfect example is ‘Whistleblowers’, which comes from the album Spectre (Mute 2014). The song and its video (directed by Morten Traavik 2014) offer the ultimate Laibach experience by unveiling Laibach’s mechanisms of co-option. The electronic beats are combined with the sound of whistling and snare drums, which harken back to Laibach’s overtly martial sonic trademarks from the early 1980s. Since Laibach’s instrumentation tends to be minimal, any other instruments (or samples) besides the electronic beats gain a symbolic meaning. For instance, in ‘Anglia’ the strings sonically inscribe aristocracy and in ‘Whistleblowers’ the snare drums allude to Laibach’s militant image.

Aesthetics, Theory and Politics in Laibach’s Meta-Sound

149

The video shows a school, mostly its physical activity room, where a group of students are performing physical endurance exercises. Such physical education and prowess were emphasized in the Second World War era propaganda (the so-called ‘educational’) films of many totalitarian states. The song is uplifting in timbre and melody and the video is cheerful in its mise-en-scène; bright pastel walls and a flowery pattern surround a photograph meaningfully placed at the centre of the room. This interior design is notably reminiscent of the schools in the USSR. The photograph depicts Laibach’s frontman, Milan Fras, wearing his iconic headgear, inspired by the nineteenth-century Slovenian coal miner’s hat (a black leather skullcap with a neck curtain). It visually echoes the Arab Legion’s helmet, a nun’s veil, the headdresses of pharaohs and Eastern Orthodox priests. Fras looks just as authoritative framed by those pastels and flowers as a Stalin or a Lenin would and provides a collage of power symbolism, drawing attention to the staging of this power and to its framing institutions. But what lies behind these symbols? That is the question raised by this audiovisual assemblage – this jarring harmony – of dissonant signs. This audiovisual artwork signifies optimism and threat, a mixture characteristic of Laibach (and Mute Records) throughout their career. Laibach’s meta-sound offers a contradiction without ever resolving its ambiguities. A resolved contradiction is less powerful because once the message becomes decoded the issue no longer concerns the problem of the ideological as such. The spirit of futurity and militancy permeates the audiovisuals, conveying the implication that Laibach are training a new generation of warriors to blow the whistle on power structures. The schoolchildren learn to hold their breath under water, to fight and to shoot targets (flower pots). Their training includes listening to ‘Whistleblowers’, learning its melody and singing it to the sound of military drums – the image is evocative of Laibach’s performances and presentation style. The most explicit symbolism is invoked when a boy stands in front of the Fras photograph to imply succession to power. The lyrics, too, speak about the coming future in an agitprop tone, calling to mind the inspirational songs used by totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. R. Serge Denisoff classifies songs of persuasion into two groups. The magnetic song ‘appeals to the listener and attracts him [sic] to a specific movement or ideology within the ranks of adherents by creating solidarity in terms of the goals expressed in the propaganda song’ (1972: 60–1). The rhetorical song is ‘designed to point to some social condition, describe the condition, but offers no ideological or organizational solution such as affiliating with a social movement; the rhetorical song poses a question or a

150

Mute Records

dissent’ (1972: 60–1). ‘Whistleblowers’ fits the magnetic song type perfectly in its rhetoric. Nevertheless, it remains ambivalent in regard to political content like the rhetorical song. The song exudes militancy and propaganda but evades becoming such propaganda because it is presented in such a generalized sense so as to be co-optable by a number of contradictory and even diametrically opposed political positions, entirely defeating the purpose of a magnetic propaganda song. The recipe for this agitation could be amusingly defined as ‘maximum signification, zero signifieds’. The issue is sound’s ability to be militant, to affect, and not the cause behind this affect. To illustrate, the lyrics invoke guerilla warfare: ‘We never stop / Whistling our chant’; ‘The spirit is clean / From north and south / We come from east and west / Breathing as one / Living in fame / Or dying in flame / We laugh / Our mission is blessed / We fight for you / For freedom unforeseen’.2 But what is the spirit? The mention of a ‘blessed mission’ at this historical moment echoes religious fundamentalism, but the wording avoids specifying any religious dogma and presents the most general notion possible, ‘freedom unforeseen’, as the ultimate aim. This is not freedom from power structures, a utopian state when whistleblowing is no longer demonized or needed, since a world free from ideology is a world without Laibach. The following lines are key: ‘Thinking as one / Rolling along / To the beat of the drum / We march / The black cross machine … We stand alone / But soon the day will come / When freedom rings’. The rhetoric is again pregnant with militancy and agitation without proposing any actual politics – only the affect of politics. As mentioned earlier, Malevich’s cross is an ideal symbol for such power because it is void of referentiality. Laibach’s mash-up of political and ideological signs, witnessed even in Fras’s attire – from east to west – reveals the affective sound machine, not its aim. Whereas ‘Anglia’ lays bare the ideological contradictions of the British national anthem, ‘Whistleblowers’ blows the whistle on Laibach and, by extension, Mute Records. The 1980s post-punk, industrial and electronic music Miller nurtured has sometimes been understood to be a breeding ground for extreme politics. Boyd Rice’s constant flirtation with social Darwinism, fascism and white supremacism is unsettling to this day. Even Kraftwerk’s ‘nationalistic comments in the press, coupled with their cold mannequin and later robotic public image, added an eerie, edgy innuendo of fascism to their new synthpop sound’ (Peraino 2015: 307). From the beginning of their career, Laibach were plagued by accusations 2

‘Whistleblowers’ written by S. Avsenik, M. Kolenc and I. Novak, courtesy Mute Song Limited.

Aesthetics, Theory and Politics in Laibach’s Meta-Sound

151

of supporting politically radical positions, as evidenced by the notorious TV incident, and equally adamantly defended by critics and theorists for doing the very opposite (Žižek 2002). After all, besides using totalitarian symbolism, Laibach incorporated an anti-Nazi and anti-fascist artist John Heartfield’s fouraxe swastika as their insignia, which, for instance, can be found on the sleeve of Opus Dei. Žižek’s psychoanalytic interpretation has critically set the standard for understanding Laibach’s strategy; it ‘“frustrates” the system (the ruling ideology) precisely in so far as it is not its ironic imitation, but overidentification with it – by bringing to light the obscene superego underside of the system, overidentification suspends its efficiency’ (2005: 72, emphasis in original). By foregrounding the problem of power mechanisms while denying a utopian solution to this problem, one instigates an ongoing dialogue regarding the ideological co-option of cultural phenomena and properties of sound. But Laibach’s meta-sound is more than such an exposé; it haunts sound waves like a spectre – it is not a genre or a signature sound. It does not criticize its source but finds elements that are already Laibachian. ‘Whistleblowers’ reveals that whistleblowing – exposing an institution one works for – is a Laibachian conception.

Postlude Jameson (1998: 119) identifies the tendency of postmodern art to draw inspiration from theory, which, I argue, is best encapsulated by Laibach’s creation of a theoretical sound that functions by deconstructing (haunting) aesthetic phenomena – be it popular or industrial music. The distinguishing feature of this sound is never its melody, rhythm, timbre, instrumentation, vocal or performance style – all of which are consciously borrowed from preexisting musical and cultural phenomena and mashed up to the point of becoming an inherently contradictory bricolage. This is not pastiche – an uncritical, genuine imitation – or parodic critique. Laibach’s meta-sound lays bare certain mechanisms of power, control and affect that permeate music, which, much like all deconstructive art, forces one to contemplate these structures during one’s aesthetic encounter. Deena Weinstein’s stereophony describes a similarly postmodern listening ‘experience constituted by the play of differences between the original and the cover’ (2010: 246). The poststructuralist dictum states that differences (not semblances) generate meaning and a cover ‘can provide a different mood, another emotional tone, and can alter the meaning

152

Mute Records

of a composition, inverting it or merely providing a new understanding of the subject’ (2010: 249). However, Laibach’s meta-sound is not only this intertextual play of differences. The band’s creative event does not reside in a set of empirical sound qualities. It dwells in that meta-layer, which makes sound self-reflexive and encourages one to intellectualize one’s musical affect. It tears the musical phenomena apart, dissects them into a dissonance of matter and spirit – of sounds, signifying processes and affects. Just as Tito’s Yugoslavia was both a friend and ‘non-aligned’ to the Eastern and the Western blocs, Laibach’s ultimate project is to be everywhere and nowhere in particular. It is not about reinterpreting culture but about making one recognize Laibach in the Beatles or the national anthems they co-opt. The formula is not ‘Laibach do X’ but ‘Laibach were here’ – much like Woody Allen’s Leonard Zelig. The band’s thirty-plus years at Mute Records are not coincidental either, since Laibach are an expression of the label’s own trends and practices. From the sound experiments of Throbbing Gristle to the popular appeal of Erasure, Laibach’s blend of industrial anti-music, electronic beats, politics, theory and popular songs is a conceptual snapshot of what Miller has been up to. As Alex Ogg puts it, that ‘Mute was able to have … hits while being simultaneously responsible for some of the most ambitious, challenging and commercially repellent art was the neatest trick of all’ (2009: 292). And there is even more trickery! As stated earlier, Pengov’s journalism, Žižek’s theorizing and even my own chapter are absorbed by this Laibach organism, whose meta-sound spreads not only by ‘infecting’ cultural artefacts but also by provoking paranoid and schizophrenic discursive effects (contradictory identifications) and their exegeses. Even NSK’s chart of organization revealingly includes ‘external collaborators (without the authority of decision)’ (Groys 2002: 293). The phrasing means that the collaborators have no say in NSK’s affairs. It also ludically implies (un)witting collaborators. Mute Records, by providing a platform for Laibach’s meta-sound, is inevitably a component of this longduration performance piece, the NSK State, and constitutes a meta-label – a record label deconstructing the music industry.

References Borčić, B. (2003), ‘Video Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism’, in D. Djurić and M. Šuvaković (eds), Impossible Histories – Historical Avant-gardes, Neo-avant-gardes, and Post-avant-gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918–1991, 490–524, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Aesthetics, Theory and Politics in Laibach’s Meta-Sound

153

Chazkel, A., and D. Serlin (2011), ‘Editor’s Introduction’, Radical History Review, 2011 (109): 1–12. Denisoff, R. S. (1972), Sing a Song of Social Significance, Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Press. Groys, B. (2002), ‘The IRWIN Group: More than Totalitarianism’, in L. J. Hoptman and T. Pospiszyl (eds), Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, 288–93, New York: MoMA. Gržinić, M. (2003), ‘Neue Slowenische Kunst’, in D. Djurić and M. Šuvaković (eds), Impossible Histories – Historical Avant-gardes, Neo-avant-gardes, and Post-avantgardes in Yugoslavia, 1918–1991, 246–69, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jameson, F. (1991), Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham: Duke University Press. Jameson, F. (1998), The Cultural Turn – Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998, London, New York: Verso. Ogg, A. (2009), Independence Days – The Story of UK Independent Record Labels, London: Cherry Red Books. Parker, I. (2005), ‘Laibach and Enjoy: Slovenian Theory and Practice’, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 10 (1): 105–12. Parker, I. (2015), Psychology after Discourse Analysis – Concepts, Methods, Critique, London and New York: Routledge. Peraino, J. A. (2015), ‘Synthesizing Difference: The Queer Circuits of Early Synthpop’, in O. Bloechl, M. Lowe and J. Kallberg (eds), Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship, 287–314, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weinstein, D. (2010), ‘Appreciating Cover Songs: Stereophony’, in G. Plasketes (ed.), Play it Again: Cover Songs in Popular Music, 243–52, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited. Žižek, S. (2002), ‘Why are Laibach and NSK not Fascists?’, in L. J. Hoptman and T. Pospiszyl (eds), Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, 285–7, New York: MoMA. Žižek, S. (2005), The Metastases of Enjoyment – Six Essays on Women and Causality, London and New York: Verso.

11

The Blessed Glow of Labour: Independence, Style and Process in the Music of Swans Dean Lockwood

The experimental American band Swans, formed in 1982, have twice signed to Mute Records. In 1987, they signed with Mute imprint Product Inc. to release an album entitled Children of God. More recently, they signed to the label once again for the release of To Be Kind (2014) and The Glowing Man (2016). Mute has consistently embraced diversity, refusing to be limited to any one style, aesthetic or ideological viewpoint. In this chapter, I suggest that Swans have developed an ethos in which their music is identified with a work of ceaseless mutation. I draw out their ethical and political sensibility of musical labour as a utopian endeavour. Mute has accommodated this sensibility, finding space alongside its more commercially successful acts for Swans’s less lucrative, speculative attitude towards independent music, which places the premium on performance as much as, if not more, than record production.

Following the sound Michael Gira has been the constant driving force of Swans, directing and channelling the music in self-confessedly dictatorial fashion. He strives for a quasi-cinematic live experience, hoping to ‘make a world where the listener can fall into it and lose themselves. At the highest points live that’s what the music does, it creates this environment where the audience can levitate for one moment and that’s the most gratifying thing for me’ (Robb 2013). In recent years, Swans have developed a modus operandi in which pieces are conceived as ongoing processual phenomena rather than ‘songs’ with a definitive finished form. Works exist in flux, reshaped across performances. For example,

156

Mute Records

‘The Glowing Man’, from the album of the same name, takes the form of a sublime half-hour soundscape unrolled in several parts, by turns incorporeal and tenuous, abrasively discordant and, finally, rhythmically stirring, which has evolved during live experimentation with sections of earlier material. This process is designed to elicit a transport of performers and listeners together in a collaborative exploration of the song as a space of possibility. As Gira comments, it is ‘like following the sound and finding more pathways in this world we’re creating’ (Soulsby 2016). This conception of performance as an exploratory, world-making activity resonates with Suzanne Langer’s bid to propose an alternative to linguistic models of music such as are found in Deryck Cooke’s influential argument (1959) that meaning arises from music by virtue of its possession of a systematic language or, more recently, in David Machin’s call to ‘look for the kinds of semiotic resources and patterns available for communication in the sounds, images and worlds of popular music’ (2010: 3). According to Langer, ‘Music is not a kind of language. Its significance is really something different from what is traditionally and properly called “meaning”’ (1953: 29). It expresses ‘forms of vital experience which language is peculiarly unfit to convey. Feeling, life, motion and emotion constitute its import’ (1953: 32). Music here names a power of abstraction, a capacity to depart from the actual in order to affectively probe and draw out the possibility of another world. The ‘very nature of art’, Langer insists, is to create a ‘semblance’ of the world which estranges it, which embodies and makes perceptible affects virtual in it but hitherto unrecognized (1953: 46). We might say that the changefulness of music is also the changefulness of life. What appears to have permanence is only a contingent stabilization, a temporary pattern of changes (1953: 66). Musical semblance, or world-making, has the power ‘to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before’ (1953: 22). This is to liberate perception from the world as it has been habitually engaged. As Brian Massumi has written, ‘Art is the technique of living life in – experiencing the virtuality of it more fully. Living it more intensely. Technique of existence’ (2011: 45). The idea of music as an experience of the world in its virtual difference finds an echo in Christopher Small’s concept of ‘musicking’ (1998). It is also implicit in Gira’s notion of performance as ‘following the sound’, a process with regard to which the band’s records seem to constitute way stations rather than definite destinations. For Small, musicking – encompassing both performing and listening – is the process by which a collective gathers to body forth an

The Blessed Glow of Labour

157

affective sonic figure, a ‘pattern which connects’ (2011: 57). Participating in it is an ‘act of central importance to our very humanness’ (2011: 8). In musicking, people model relationships between themselves and to ‘the world outside the performance space’ (2011: 48). It is an important technique for apprehending collective existence not only as it is, but how it might be (2011: 50). Musicking can affirm an existing community but also experimentally probe and figure the possibility of a better life. In capitalism, we might seem to be gripped, hopelessly, in ways of life to which there are no viable alternatives – a situation Mark Fisher (2009) has described as ‘capitalist realism’ – but musicking holds open the promise of something beyond the profit imperative. Music, under capitalism, is reificatory, framing value in terms of the product, the static work as commodity. However, musicking names a logic of agency that runs against the complacency of capitalist realism. We are all born with musical powers, Small believes, but under capitalism we are ‘robbed’ of them; musicking has been ‘hijacked’ (1998: 8). Swans express a need to escape the capitalist reification of music. They spurn the virtuosic and hark back to a DIY punk ethos which celebrates the capacity of all-comers to participate, but are interested in surpassing punk in so far as they reject nostalgia and explore the potential of a collaborative experimentality – simply, to see what happens. Swans’s alliance with Mute indicates that the label is capable of creating spaces within its business for such endeavours. Mute has always placed great importance in assisting the evolution of its artists’ ideas in the way artists choose, and ‘at their own pace’ (Burrows 2017: 206). Of course, there is a tension here, in that it is difficult for record companies, focused as they are upon products, to fully endorse the ethos of musicking. However, in parallel with the commercial thrust of their activities, it seems that it has been important for Mute to hospitably hold open the possibility of joint ventures with artists such as Swans whose embrace of the experimental turns on an attitude to musical labour which can be characterized as utopian.

Construction work When, in 2015, Swans won the UK Association of Independent Music (AIM) award for ‘Hardest Working Band’, in recognition of their fortitude in weathering demanding live tours, Mute boss Daniel Miller, collecting the award on Swans’s behalf, stated his preference for artists ‘who don’t chase charts, who

158

Mute Records

don’t chase likes, who just chase their passion. That, for me, is what independent music’s about’ (‘Interview’ 2015). Mute has sought to create spaces in which the imperative to make profit can be set to one side in order to nurture and promote artists with whom they wish to form a special relationship. As Miller has said, ‘We release records because we like the music. … We’re certainly not shutting ourselves off from commercial possibilities. It’s just that we’re not driven by them’ (Burrows 2017: 97). Swans’s independence, throughout their various incarnations, has been closely associated with a work ethic that exists in an uneasy relationship to the commercial sphere. Both Swans and Mute are pushed into a necessary compromise, compelled to accommodate themselves to the inescapable realities of business in order, at least under present conditions, that the passion that animates independent musicians and their audiences can flourish. Gira has spoken of physical hardship in his life, getting by at an early age through taking on construction work. This cultivated his distinction between work as discipline bound up with finding ‘the authentic core of something you’re doing’ and work associated with stultification: ‘the worst thing that could happen to you as a human being, because nothing on Earth is more important than time and what you do with your time’ (Doran 2014). Work as stultification goes hand in hand, for Gira, with consumerism and promotional media culture, which effectively conditions and transforms individuals into parts of a capitalist machine: ‘from the time you’re reared up through adulthood, it’s invading your psyche until it eventually alters your DNA and you become a consuming machine’ (Doran 2014). It is the authentic work of musicking that drives Swans. In Jason Toynbee’s formulation, musicians can be understood as ‘exemplary agents who make a difference’ (2000: x). The musician, far from being the ‘special kind of being’ that is the romantic visionary, possessor of abnormal and inexplicable genius, is rooted in the social, ‘from the people’ and the ‘ordinary’ (2000: x). The musician is ‘exemplary’ precisely in finding his or her ground in the popular, ‘extraordinary’ only to the extent that they probe ‘what life could be like’ for the people from whence they emerge (2000: x). All popular musicians, of course, are situated within the capitalist system, and thus utopian aspirations, as Michael L. Jones insists, sit alongside notions of success that are inevitably framed in terms of a pragmatic need to enter into partnerships with music companies in order to reach audiences, as well as the necessity of becoming themselves ‘objects of consumption’ (2012: 15). For Jones, musicians are inseparably bound

The Blessed Glow of Labour

159

up with music industry understood not as a singular entity but as a set of ‘disparate alliances’ (2012: 16). Musicians do not exist in an inviolate separate realm of spontaneous creativity, popular objections to the contamination of art by commerce notwithstanding. Right from the first, they are in competition. As exemplary agents, they are interested and invested in success in so far as they wish to send out their probes to as many people as possible, and are willing partners with music companies to the extent that this serves such an aim. Toynbee considers that the musician is gripped by business ontology, at the extreme seduced into ‘vainglorious’ participation in commodity spectacle (2000:  xi). However, he argues that musical competitiveness and market aspirations do not exhaust the space of possibilities that is music-making (or musicking); he claims that there is a potentiality ‘prior to the market transaction’ (2000: xvi), a zone of ‘anarchic voluntarism’ which the market concedes in order to encourage the creative effort from which it will extract value to come about (2000: xxi). Even if it is intensely scrutinized by the market, waiting to pounce, there is still, minimally, a gap from which can be galvanized the promise of autonomy, a ‘call to others to get involved … even in the most reactionary of times when the possibility of agency seems to be lost’ (2000: xi). How have Swans manifested ‘exemplary agency’? The period in which they emerged was certainly one that, on the surface, presented little opportunity for decisive action. Gira’s sense of work as stultification was nurtured in the atmosphere of malaise characterizing New York in the early eighties, specifically Alphabet City in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He was drawn to this locale because of the music it had spawned in bands such as the Velvet Underground, Suicide and Television. Swans found their calling in the ashes of the no wave scene – James Chance and the Contortions, Lydia Lunch’s 8-Eyed Spy, DNA, Ut and others – clearly fuelled by its confrontational energies and rejection of rock tradition. They sought, like their contemporaries Sonic Youth (who would also be associated with Mute through its sub-label, Blast First), to forge a separate, singular identity and style. As Nicholas Rombes comments, somewhat dismissively, ‘No Wave represented a disavowal – even a betrayal – of punk insofar as it rejected the populist, melodic streak that animated punk’s first wave’ (2009: 166). At its heart, this was a ‘music for people who hate music. Listening to it, you feel it hollows out a part of you’ (2009: 167). To be sure, musical aptitude was not de rigueur in the scene, and Swans were certainly perceived as carrying on its legacy of negativity. The difficulty Gira faced in this context was one of navigating his

160

Mute Records

situation within the capitalist machine in a way that did not entirely destroy utopian aspirations. It was the difficulty of being a critical presence within the machine that was articulated in the no wave attitude of those bands around him at this time. In fact, he was driven at least as much by a sense of constructive potential. Gira liked the ‘idea that was in the air, of building things through aggressive sounds, without much chord structure or anything’ (Pattison 2014). This chimed with his professed indifference to the world of commerce: ‘we’re not what is commonly defined as commercial music … I don’t really care about commercial radio or changing it at all’ (Neal [1987] 2001: 149). Swans adopted standard rock instrumentation of electric guitar, bass guitar and drums but forfeited melody and conventional chord progressions, preferring pulverizing and repetitive riffs and ‘slave-ship rhythm’ (Soulsby 2016). The music was carnal and claustrophobic, reducible neither to rock’s jubilant macho assertiveness nor art music’s avant-garde sensibility but occupying a middle ground redolent of machinic labour. Swans rejected the ‘noise’ label because of its suggestion of indiscipline and laziness (Neal [1987] 2001: 145). Instead of noise, Swans conceived their music as laminar: ‘Everything was chunks of sound with some generous sheets of extra sound over the top of that’ (Doran 2014). Gira’s lyrics in this period revolved around destructive human tendencies, predators and prey playing out ‘relationships as vectors of domination, dependency, parasitism’ (Reynolds 2005: 487). Cop (Some Bizzare/K.422 1984), for example, dealt with the open secret of work as ‘half life’, stripped of volition and ambition, the worker rendered compliant by authorities. For Gira, the words were performative as much as they were representational, involving ‘cryptic phrases’ akin to advertising messages, phrases with multiple meanings, like mantras or ‘like a worm going into your subconscious’ (Pattison 2014). Alternatively, words, like music, were treated as construction materials: ‘They’re not a portrait of something, they’re more like blocks of concrete’ (Neal [1987] 2001: 149). From their earliest performances and recordings, Swans embraced the potential of music to ‘nullify consciousness’ and evacuate thought (Reynolds 2005: 401). Gira’s prose vignettes from the mid-eighties (collected in The Consumer and Other Stories (1995)) echo this emphasis on mindlessness. ‘At work, I’m dead flesh, waiting to be eaten’, he wrote in ‘The Ideal Worker’ (1994: 156), and, in ‘Raping a Slave’ (a deliberately provocative title also used for a song released at this time), ‘While I’m at work, where I’m treated like a dog, only my body is present’ (1994: 166). Biba Kopf, writing of this period, identified the

The Blessed Glow of Labour

161

band with a ‘descent into the hole of the self, during which time every barb, every hurt is absorbed’ (Neal [1987] 2001: 12). Gira has embraced abjection, ‘a horror not of death – after all, a final escape – but a horror of being, that life sentence in the hole with no chance of parole’ (Neal [1987] 2001: 12). If the body is figured as a site of abjection, however, it is also associated with a spiritual cleansing. The best performance, Gira has announced, is ‘when the performer loses himself and the audience members lose themselves’ (Neal [1987] 2001: 145). Through self-abasement shines the promise of healing. A way of thinking about the tensions in early Swans material might be through Theodor Adorno’s notorious discussions of the jazz scene, and specifically his remarks on the American dance craze, the jitterbug, popular in the thirties and forties. For Adorno, this music was nothing less than an expression of fascistic cultural domination, meriting careful analysis because it was not followed by its fans in a passive manner but was self-inflicted, internalized with ‘tremendous effort’ (1941: 48). The jitterbug involved work, dancers compelling themselves with gritted teeth to attune their bodies to the music as if to the mindless behavioural repertoires of insects. The ‘as if ’ here is important. Adorno comments, ‘Terms like the latest craze, swing frenzy, alligator, rug-cutter, indicate a trend that goes beyond socially conditioned reflexes’ (1941: 45). Jitterbugging entailed deliberation, a furious wilful suppression of apprehension of its demeaning and shameful ‘commodity-character’ (1941: 45). In fact, in their frenzied ‘overdoing’ of this act, jitterbuggers attempted to ‘exonerate’ themselves by virtue of the obvious ridiculousness of their caricature (1941: 46). Crucially, for Adorno, the labour expended in this effort must in principle be available for other applications: ‘To become transformed into an insect, man needs that energy which might possibly achieve his transformation into a man’ (1941: 48). Evidencing the promise of a more fruitfully directed innervation, jitterbugging traced a minimal hope; if not for these dancers, then for those who might one day be called to direct their fury into revolutionary fervour. Swans’s relationship to the capitalist system can, I suggest, be seen in terms of the development of a certain mode of reflexivity, mockingly ironic along Adornian lines. In its bid to ‘nullify consciousness’ in zombie-like identity with dead flesh, there is, as with the jitterbuggers, something hopeful here also, a promise of transfiguration, of love of life and the potential it harbours for becoming otherwise. The musicking of early Swans can be seen as a reflexive semblance, an aesthetic and affective figuration of life and relationships under capitalist realism. Allying with Mute in 1987, Swans continued in this mode, as is indicated in the ironic

162

Mute Records

name of the Mute imprint, Product Inc., with which they were associated (this label was also home to the Young Gods, World Domination Enterprises, Pussy Galore and Corrosion of Conformity among others). Note, however, that here the ‘frenzy’ took on a more religious aspect. In the excessive, mocking evangelical zeal of the single, ‘New Mind’ (Product Inc. 1987), from the Children of God album, for example, Gira processes the trope of abjection in terms of subsumption by the will of God, resulting in an unresolvable suspension between damnation and redemption. In their most recent incarnation, Swans have exhibited a shift from the expenditure of energies in Adornian frenzy, whether capitalistic or evangelical, to a more explicitly utopian conception. Gira has a desire to ‘ride the river of intention that flows from the heart of the sound wherever it would lead us – and what’s the intention? LOVE!’ (2016). ‘Love’ appears here as a renegotiation of self-surrender. It casts what was once circumscribed by defeat as a positive aspiration. In the new dynamic, Swans, still abjuring direct messages, would seek an experience of communion. In fact, what really distinguishes Swans in the period from My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky (Young God 2010) to The Glowing Man (Young God and Mute 2016), as Patrick Smith identified in a 2014 live report, is an overt concern to foreground, celebrate and open up to scrutiny the processuality of their music and performance as labour. In interview and in liner notes, for example, songs are discussed as they evolve. Work in progress is appended to live albums as demos. The vital business of shaping and reshaping pieces of music that have become, in principle, unfinishable except by virtue of their having ceased to be performed anymore, has come to dominate Swans’s practice. As a consequence, songs have become longer, unfolding experiences. Independence, for Swans, entails exerting autonomy but here it also entails, more than ever before, an ecstatic surrender to a vector which demands that the music, specifically in performance, is always left open to be developed in unforeseen and uncontrollable directions. Gira’s proclivity for hatching cryptic slogans – ‘advertising slogans influenced me the most.  … It’s reaching for the back of your mind to influence you’ (Pattison 2010) – which act as earworms is transfigured into a kind of gospel, a rope to the sky, ‘repeating phrases that lead you up to heaven’ (Pattison 2014). Swans, in the 2010s, interpret self-nullification as spiritual ordeal, a search for ‘the infinite in the sound … a force that is definitely greater than all of us combined’ (Gira 2016). The work is now surrounded with, in the words of Thomas Carlyle, a ‘blessed glow’ (1843).

The Blessed Glow of Labour

163

Swans explore a space of possibility, a vital form of work immanent to, but in excess of, the capitalist system. Mute’s operations are also enlightened enough to permit certain of its artists – sui generis, ‘self-contained and adventurous’ (Burrows 2017: 188) – to take the lead with their creative vision, trusted to evolve in their own way without there necessarily being a clear vision in advance of where the journey might lead. This is an affirmation of what Simon O’Sullivan, after Deleuze, has described as ‘bastard community’: ‘a mutant community always in progress’, in which what members hold in common is ‘their failure (intentional or otherwise) to “live up” to the models offered (in fact forced upon them)’ by the capitalist system (2006: 78). Doubtless, Swans signed to Mute with different expectations than those associated with acts such as Depeche Mode and Goldfrapp, with whom there has been a greater drive to ensure commercial success. Mute, in this respect, is aligned with the music industry as a whole. ‘Failures’ are funded by blockbuster successes. However, it is distinct from the major labels to the extent that it actively signs and supports ‘bastard’ musicking such as Swans, rather than tolerating it merely as a by-product of the search for profits.

More work to do Gira, somewhat self-consciously too busy to attend the AIM ceremony to collect the band’s award, sent a video message from the band’s ‘worksite’, thanking Mute for giving the band ‘more work to do’ and referring to recording and touring as ‘decidedly lightweight’ when compared to the ‘true labour’ of construction workers or Amazon delivery operatives. Despite such deprecation, it is undoubtedly the case that Gira views his work as worthwhile. What precisely, though, is the relationship between artistic work and ‘true labour’? Swans’s resurgence is defined by a heightened focus on labour as mutation. Smith (2014) draws a connection between this and John David Rhodes’s notion of style in relation to labour. In this section, I will develop this connection to argue that artistic independence can be understood as emerging from a particular sensibility towards work as style. Rhodes invokes Hannah Arendt’s distinction between labour and work. Where labour in itself leaves nothing behind, work entails the production of ‘an entirely new thing with enough durability to remain in the world as an independent entity’ (2012: 49). He suggests, though, that work always calls for more work.

164

Mute Records

The artwork ‘demands that other works be produced in response to it’ (2012: 50). That is, work cannot be extricated from the process of labour because, despite the production of an artwork as an apparently stand-alone thing, work remains labour in the sense of this imperative to go on. The independent artwork is never finished; it is always caught up and defined in a potentially endless ‘call and response’ relation (2012: 50). Style is typically thought to be property, ‘something a person or a group has’ (2012: 48). However, Rhodes’s thesis is that style is better understood as inseparable from the call and response process. Style is work and, further, style can be understood as work’s rendering visible of itself; work is disclosed in and as style (2012: 49). To encounter style is to be struck by a certain materiality, an ‘opacity’ in the work (2012: 49). Musical performance is often self-effacing with respect to its difficulty. Thus, it appears effortlessly natural rather than artefactual. In the mode of performance known as sprezzatura (‘disdain’ in Italian – a kind of calculated ease, the nonchalance of performers such as Eric Clapton, who in many ways represent the opposite of the self-absolution Adorno suggests was sought by the jitterbug’s wild display), the appearance of effortlessness should not entirely occlude the genius at hand. It is uncouth to appear to work hard but unforgivable not so to have the work involved acknowledged (2012: 51). In this way, a strange tension between disavowal and demand for recognition characterizes virtuosic performance. However, in ‘serious modern art’, we find an ‘ambition to undo and overturn the hegemony of sprezzatura’ (2012: 55). Citing Adorno’s approval of art that is unafraid of appearing difficult, Rhodes suggests that serious art brandishes traces of the violent imperfection of labour – ‘scars’ from which new work springs in a restless bid for impossible perfection (2012: 56). Adorno posits the unfinished character of art as a ‘negativity’ refusing the fake ease promoted by the culture industry. The culture industry, valourizing consummate performance of rules, ‘delivers us right back into the logic of sprezzatura’ (2012: 56). Rhodes commends, instead, Alexander García Düttmann’s notion that art seeking not merely to repeat the given must entail ‘a not-knowing with regard to the making and a not-knowing with regard to what is being made’ (2012: 58). It is a speculative blindness, an interruption of knowledge. Düttmann comments that ‘it is essential that a reality be recognized which is nothing other than the change which has occurred. We see the world (differently)’ (2012: 59). Style that entails an embrace of work’s unpredictable transformative power is ‘utopian’ (2012: 59). It is, perhaps, what Gira means by

The Blessed Glow of Labour

165

‘love’. It is the conspicuity of the unpredictable and speculative nature of labour. Style is labour which differs with the capitalist mode of work, in which what will result is always anticipated and captured. Capitalist labour, of course, is driven by the guarantee of value. Utopian labour, however, is suffused with a speculative spirit – an insurgence that proceeds just as it ungrounds itself. This labour of love is ‘inefficient for the production of value’, or, at least, value that is fitted out for capitalist imperatives (2012: 60). Style is that which impassions. It belongs with a spirit of independence that keeps alive the promise of some elsewhere. Here is an answer to the question with which this section began. Utopian labour – style as labour – both depends upon ‘the hard work of “actual” labour’ (or ‘true labour’ as Gira puts it) and gives expression to ‘the desire that the conditions of labour and the nature of the value produced by it be other than what they are’ (2012: 61). Swans’s latest incarnation nurtures this desire and the speculative sensibility which accompanies it. Where they were once mimetically caught up in abject, machinic drudgery, their contemporary performances strive for the movement of the infinite, a condition which encompasses everything and everyone.

Glowing The song ‘The Glowing Man’ originated with live reworkings of ‘Bring The Sun’, a piece from the To Be Kind album, which first took shape as ‘Black Hole Man’. The lyrics initially made references to the narrator’s self-representation as an ‘asshole man’. However, as recorded in the studio and performed subsequently, this black hole man was transfigured into a glowing man. The song took on a different cast, swerving away from its initial nihilism and towards an ecstatic potential in the music. As I have previously intimated, the Victorian polymath, Thomas Carlyle, may be an apposite reference here. Carlyle contrasted the high esteem in which labour was held in medieval monasteries as compared with the modern world. For Carlyle, the authentic gospel is not to ‘know thyself ’, as per the Delphic maxim, but to ‘know thy work and do it’. ‘The blessed glow of Labour’ is as a ‘purifying fire’. The aim must be to follow one’s purpose in work, ‘a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mud-swamp of one’s existence’ (1843). Carlyle supposed that man ‘sees and fashions for himself a universe, with azure, starry spaces, and long thousands of years. … Stands he

166

Mute Records

not thereby in the centre of immensities, in the conflux of eternities? … Does not the spirit of love, free in its celestial, primeval brightness, even there, though but for moments, look through?’ (1837: 70–1). Swans, I believe, aim similarly for a glimpse, through ‘sacred’ musicking, of such a brightening where all flows together in a medium both of our own making and one in which we are taken up to momentarily become everything. Swans no longer feel the need to antagonize audiences. Instead, they work to invigorate, ‘breathing the air that the spirits breathe’, and pointing towards transfiguration of the world as we know it into something better (Doran 2014).

References Adorno, T. W. (1941), ‘On Popular Music’, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, IX: 17–48. Burrows, T. (2017), Mute: A Visual Document, London: Thames & Hudson. Carlyle, T. (1837), Sartor Resartus, 2nd edn, Boston: James Munroe and Company. Carlyle, T. (1843), Past and Present. Available online: http://www.historyhome.co.uk/ readings/carlyle/3-11.htm (accessed 15 December 2016). Cooke, D. (1959), The Language of Music, Oxford: Clarendon Paperbacks. Doran, J. (2014), ‘This Is My Sermon’, The Quietus, 6 May. Available online: http:// thequietus.com/articles/15163-michael-gira-swans-to-be-kind-interview (accessed 15 December 2016). Fisher, M. (2009), Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero. Gira, M. (1995), The Consumer and Other Stories, Los Angeles: 2.13.61. Gira, M. (2016), ‘A Note from Michael Gira of Swans’, Young God Records, 10 August. Available online: http://younggodrecords.com/blogs/news/a-note-from-michaelgira-of-swans (accessed 15 December 2016). ‘Interview: Daniel Miller’ (2015), M, 17 September. Available online: https://www.mmagazine.co.uk/features/interviews/interview-daniel-miller/ (accessed 4 February 2018). Jones, M. L. (2012), The Music Industries: From Conception to Consumption, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Langer, S. K. (1953), Feeling and Form, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Machin, D. (2010), Analysing Popular Music, London: Sage. Massumi, B. (2011), Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Neal, C. ([1987] 2001), Tape Delay: Confessions from the Eighties Underground, London: SAF.

The Blessed Glow of Labour

167

O’Sullivan, S. (2006), Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pattison, L. (2010), ‘Waxing Lyrical: Swans’ Michael Gira on his Love of Words’, Guardian, 19 October. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/ oct/19/swans-michael-gira-lyrics (accessed 25 March 2018). Pattison, L. (2014), ‘Swans’ Michael Gira is Searching for God’, Wondering Sound, 7 May. Available online: http://www.wonderingsound.com/feature/swans-michaelgira-interview/ (accessed 15 December 2016). Reynolds, S. (2005), Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-punk 1978–1984, London: Faber and Faber. Rhodes, J. D. (2012), ‘Belabored: Style as Work’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 53 (1): 47–64. Robb, J. (2013), ‘Swans: In-depth Interview with Michael Gira’, Louder Than War, 10 February. Available online: http://louderthanwar.com/swans-in-depth-interviewwith-michael-gira/ (accessed 1 December 2016). Rombes, N. (2009), A Cultural Dictionary of Punk: 1974–1982, New York: Continuum. Small, C. (1998), Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Smith, P. (2014), ‘Live Report: Michael Gira’, The Quietus, 31 March. Available online: http://younggodrecords.com/blogs/press/13266713-live-report-michael-gira (accessed 15 December 2016). Soulsby, N. (2016), ‘The Eternal Process Of Becoming: Swans’ Michael Gira’, Clash, 6 October. Available online: http://www.clashmusic.com/features/the-eternal-processof-becoming-swans-michael-gira (accessed 15 December 2016). Toynbee, J. (2000), Making Popular Music: Musicians, Creativity and Institutions, London: Arnold.

12

Moby, Minstrelsy and Melville Richard Osborne

In 1999 Mute Records released Play by Moby. Daniel Miller has admitted that the label was not in ‘great shape’ at this point and nor was Moby’s career (2017: 29). The performer had had chart success in the UK with his 1991 single ‘Go’, which was released by the Mute sub-label Rhythm King. His left-turn turn from electronica to hardcore punk with Animal Rights (Mute 1996) was poorly received, however, confusing fans and record company alike. Play was therefore an unexpected triumph. By 2016, it had sold more than twelve million copies, making it the world’s highest-selling electronica album (Zlatopolsky 2016). For Miller, this turnaround was ‘like the cavalry coming over the hill’, safeguarding Mute for the twenty-first century (2017: 29). This chapter explores the phenomenon of Play in a tangential manner. It traces three overlapping stories. It explores ‘blackface’ minstrelsy, the most popular form of entertainment in the United States from the mid-1840s until the end of the nineteenth century. It addresses the work of the author Herman Melville, whose quest was ‘the absolute amidst its relative manifestations … the delicate and shifting relationship between its truth and its illusion’ (Wright 1949: 15). And it examines Moby and the music he recorded and sampled for Play. This album, through its use of sampling, bears hallmarks of minstrelsy. It also raises questions about truth and illusion.

Melville and minstrelsy Oh yes, oh yes, dar is aboard here a werry nice, good ge’mman wid a weed, and a ge’mman in a gray coat and white tie, what knows all about me; and a ge’mman wid a big book, too; and a yarb-doctor; and a ge’mman in a yallar west; and a ge’mman wid a brass plate; and a ge’mman in a wiolet robe; and a ge’mman as is a

170

Mute Records

sodjer; and ever so many good, kind, honest ge’mmen more aboard what knows me and will speak for me, God bress ‘em; yes, and what knows me as well as dis poor old darkie knows hisself, God bress him! (Melville [1857] 1999: 14–15)

This is the most important piece of narrative exposition in Melville’s The Confidence-Man. It is also, as John Dugdale explains, ‘the trickiest passage in the novel’ (1999: 337). This is appropriate. In this novel of flux and metamorphosis we are not supposed to be entirely sure of the main character(s). The person speaking is Black Guinea; he is one of the confidence men in the novel. The characters ‘what knows’ him approximate to other confidence men on board the steamboat Fidèle. It is almost certain that it is Black Guinea himself who transforms into these other characters, but some doubt always remains. Melville was quietly breaking new ground here. In the novel he excuses his loose characterization, stating: ‘If reason be to judge, no writer yet has produced such inconsistent characters as nature herself has’ (1999: 90). However, there is a larger claim to be made for Melville’s creation. In Tony Tanner’s words: ‘Melville’s confidence-man (or men) – deft, fraudulent, constantly shifting – can be seen as a major symbol of American cultural history’ (1999: xxx). Melville wrote The Confidence-Man in 1856. In the forty years preceding this date approximately five million people emigrated to the United States, doubling the size of the population (Barraclough 1993: 220). In terms of cultural history, it can be argued that all of these people were confidence men (and women), attempting to install faith in their newly made selves. This was a period of transformation and change. The recognized landmass of the United States expanded more rapidly than the population. In 1803, an area of about 800,000 square miles was occupied; by 1853, when the Gadsden Purchase completed the contiguous landmass of the United States, this had risen to approximately 2,392,000 square miles (Barraclough 1993: 216). Independence was in the process of transforming the country from a deferential to an egalitarian society. According to Robert C. Toll, this happened ‘at a rapidly accelerating rate in the decades after 1820’ (1974: 5). Alexis de Tocqueville mourned the effects of this process: Not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart. (Melville [1857] 1999: xv)

Moby, Minstrelsy and Melville

171

This sense of dislocation was compounded by other factors. Changing work practices brought on by industrialization, a transport revolution and the previously mentioned population and landmass expansion all helped to swell the ‘endless inpouring of strangers, who in the general movement became endlessly estranged’ (1999: xvi). This was the period of the confidence men. It was also the period in which blackface minstrelsy was codified as an entertainment form (Lhamon 1998: 57–8). It is apt that Black Guinea is the principal confidence-man in Melville’s novel. He is almost certainly a white man in blackface. In a novel which ‘lifted many of [its] most radical elements from minstrelsy’, his character confirms the links between minstrelsy and the confidence men (Lhamon 1996: 275). Minstrelsy itself was a confidence trick, one that unravels different meanings of the term. On the one hand, it was ‘an enterprise and even a scam’ (Roediger 1993: 119). On the other, it was a means by which both performer and audience could find ‘confidence’ within themselves. In its classic form the minstrel show fell into three parts. The show would commence with the ‘first part’, which consisted of repartee in which simple ‘plantation niggers’ (Sambo or Bones) mocked the pretensions of the free black, urban dandy (Tambo). This was followed by the ‘olio’, which featured variety entertainment such as dancing, ‘wench’ numbers (blackface drag), stump speeches and sentimental ballads. In conclusion there was the ‘after-piece’, which commonly included slapstick versions of high cultural entertainment, such as Italian opera or Shakespeare. Throughout there was gross caricature of black people: the creation of an ‘other’ that brought confidence to the white audience. One of the few points that the majority of minstrelsy scholars agree on is perhaps the largest claim that has been made for the form: not only did minstrelsy enact racial division, it was one of the means by which modern senses of the racial categories ‘black’ and ‘white’ came into being. The distorted racial caricatures of minstrelsy were an enabling device around which the disparate white working class coalesced. As David Roediger has written, ‘Minstrelsy made a contribution to a sense of popular whiteness among workers across lines of ethnicity, religion and skill’ (Roediger 1993: 127). Eric Lott concurs, stating that ‘it made possible the formation of a self-consciously white working class’ (1993: 8). This racial distinction came about as a reaction to the abolition of slavery. As the black-andwhite working classes were now both ‘free’, the latter sought and were provided with a new means to differentiate themselves. Jan Nederveen Pieterse has noted

172

Mute Records

that ‘the period of abolitionism coincided with the rise of racism … race was the answer to the “problem of freedom”’ (1992: 57, 63). One of the ways in which this problem was worked out was through the crude racial distinctions of the minstrel show. Minstrelsy was, nevertheless, a layered cultural form. The act of putting a blackface over white skin was not only a means of expressing difference; it was also an act of identification. It is this factor that has caused most argument among minstrelsy’s scholars. All agree that minstrelsy characterized black people as being ‘different’ to white people. Black people were depicted as more natural, more bodily, more musical and more childlike – in essence ‘lower’ in the social order. And virtually all agree that there was desire for, as well as ridicule of, these qualities among the white audience. There is no agreement, however, about how this process operated. At one extreme is Nathan Irvin Huggins, who believes that the minstrelsy caricature was ‘patently the antithesis of the Protestant ethic’; the focus on hard work, discipline and frugality that was at the core of the white audience’s daily lives (1971: 251). Consequently, the minstrel mask was the representation of a suppressed self, one that the audience ‘harboured with both fascination and dread’ (1971: 254). At the other extreme is W. L. Lhamon, who locates a different moral standpoint among the white audience, and who views the early white audience for minstrelsy as having almost total identification with the black character: Blackface action is usually slashing back at the pretensions and politesse of authority more than at blackness. Certainly in these earliest instances of white fascination with black performance there was little laughing at blacks. (1998: 22)

If we turn to the minstrel performers, we see that their reaction to black culture was more one of fascination than of dread. Alexander Saxton has researched the backgrounds of famous minstrel artists such as T. D. Rice, Dan Emmett and E. P. Christy, as well as the songwriter Stephen Foster. In doing so he discovered: All were Northerners (but none was born in New England) and all except Emmett were of urban origin. At least three came of old-stock American families and were clearly of middle-class background. They all rejected the straight ways of the Protestant ethic and sought escape into the bohemianism of the entertainment world. Three had direct contact through their wanderings in the lower Mississippi Valley with the music and dance of black slaves, and we know from their own accounts that they consciously exploited this resource. (1975: 6)

Moby, Minstrelsy and Melville

173

These characteristics can also be applied to the minstrel performer Ben Cotton, who spoke of his camaraderie with black musicians in the Mississippi Delta: I used to sit with them in front of their cabins, and we would start the banjo twanging, and their voices would ring out in the quiet night air in their weird melodies. They did not quite understand me. I was the first white man they had seen who sang as they did; but we were brothers for the time being and were perfectly happy. (Lott 1993: 50)

Here we witness the first ‘white negroes’. As Lott has stated, ‘With antebellum blackface performers a set of racial attitudes and cultural styles that in America go by the name of bohemianism first emerged’ (Lott 1993: 50). He adds: This fact should also interrogate the racial logic usually hidden in our romantic notions of the bohemian, the Beat, the hipster. We ought to recognize, in other words, the degree to which blackface stars inaugurated the American tradition of class abdication through gendered cross-racial immersion which persists, in historically differentiated ways, to our own day. (Lott 1993: 51)

Indeed, is ‘hipster’ Norman Mailer’s famous passage in ‘The White Negro’ any less caricatured than the stereotypes perpetuated by minstrelsy? Knowing in the cells of his existence that life was war, nothing but war, the Negro (all exceptions admitted) could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body, and in his music he gave voice to the variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm. ([1957] 1968: 273)

Moreover, it would be a mistake to think we have left Mailer’s ideas behind. While few would now openly use terms such as ‘primitive’, blackness is still all too readily associated with violence, sex and the body, rather than with the mind.

Minstrelsy and Moby If the caricatures of minstrelsy have persisted, then so has cross-racial immersion. This is notable in popular music, where white artists continue to put on black masks. One way that they have done so is through sampling. The digital sampler enables artists to take elements of other people’s recordings and reassemble them

174

Mute Records

as part of their own. In Britain, the first successful record to feature widespread use of this technology was ‘Pump Up The Volume’ by M/A/R/R/S, a number one single released by 4AD in 1987. It was followed by two 1988 singles that employed similar techniques: Bomb the Bass’s ‘Beat Dis’ (Rhythm King), which reached number two in the UK charts, and S-Express’s ‘Theme from S-Express’ (Rhythm King), which reached number one.1 On their appearance, these records were celebrated as being examples of postmodernism. It was argued that with their heterogeneity, plunder and pastiche they questioned notions of authorship and aura; they were radical products of a new cultural era. Correspondingly, ‘sampling’ has been claimed as the perfect metaphor for postmodern art (Adamson and Pavitt 2011: 62). Andrew Goodwin pointed out, nonetheless, that within sampling practice ‘discourses of authorship remain dominant’ (1990: 272). He witnessed the fact that new auteur theories were emerging, ‘focusing on the producer as author’ (1990: 271). This latter manoeuvre introduced the possibility of a ventriloquistic form of minstrelsy. The auteurs of these records took credit as being the creators and performers of music that was largely made up of samples of black voices and musicians. This act of displacement was compounded by the fact that the performers and writers of the original sampled recordings were rarely credited.2 This is where Moby comes in. Play also features a variety of black voices. ‘Honey’ samples Bessie Jones’s song ‘Sometimes’ (Atlantic 1961); ‘Find My Baby’ features elements of Boy Blues, Willie Jones and Joe Lee performing ‘Joe Lee’s Rock’ (Atlantic 1961); ‘Natural Blues’ incorporates Vera Hall singing ‘Trouble So Hard’ (Atlantic 1961).3 The originals are blues recordings and spirituals made in the southern states of America. Despite the prominent use of these samples, Moby’s is the only name featured on the sleeve of Play. The first line of the sleevenotes states that the songs are ‘written, produced, engineered, and mixed

1

2

3

This success meant that Mute sub-label Rhythm King headed the charts four years before the parent label, which achieved its first number one in 1992 with Erasure’s Abba-esque EP. Despite using over thirty samples, including prominent use of James Brown’s voice, the authorship of ‘Pump Up The Volume’ is credited to M/A/R/R/S members Steven Young and Martin Young; ‘Best Dis’ is centred around the riff of ‘Shaft’, written by Isaac Hayes, but is credited to Tim Simenon and Amilo Pasquez; ‘Theme From S-Express’ is lifted almost wholesale from ‘Is It Love You’re After’, written by Miles Gregory, but is credited to Moore, Gabriel, Gregory, Noble and Smith. The sample in ‘Honey’ is used in all but three of the eighty-eight bars of the song, and the source recording is hardly altered. The sample in ‘Natural Blues’ is used in all but eight of the song’s fifty-six bars; slight reverb is added, but it is instantly recognizable. The sample in ‘Find My Baby’ is in all but nine of the eighty bars of the song; again a slight reverb is added.

Moby, Minstrelsy and Melville

175

by Moby’. Moreover, when he performs these songs live, he half-mimes and halfsings along with the sampled vocals.4 The inference is that this is work. Moby puts on these black voices in a manner that has correspondences with the minstrel performers’ adoption of blackface. They are used as a marker of both difference and identification. Moby has been associated with the cerebral genre of ‘intelligent’ dance music and was known for his righteous beliefs. A profile written at the time of Play’s release describes him as an ‘existentialist vegan environmentalist’ and portrays his upbringing as one of ‘intellectual bohemianism’ (Lester 2000: 38, 40). Yet Moby’s background was more complex than this. His 2016 autobiography details impoverished beginnings as well as the wealth that was gained through recording and DJing. It illustrates how periods of abstinence were alternated with alcoholic and sexual binges (Moby 2016). The book does underline his bohemian credentials, however. Moby lives a garret lifestyle in New York City. Like Mailer, he is something of a hipster. He recalls a Rimbaud quote that he taped to his mirror when he first moved to Manhattan, ‘I is another’ (Moby 2016: 292). The book is titled Porcelain, after a track on Play that Moby regards as being ‘white and fragile’; he notes that he is ‘white and fragile’ as well (Zlatopolsky 2016). Moby celebrates the otherness and danger of black people: Whenever I was allowed into hip-hop clubs or house clubs I felt grateful. I didn’t want to go to straight white clubs where the people I grew up with drank Rolling Rocks and made cautious and ironic comments about New Yorker articles and Pavement records. I wanted to be on a dance floor, surrounded by black and Latino and gay people, getting lost in the euphoria that only seemed to happen there, when the perfect record came on and five hundred people cheered in a way that I’d never heard white people cheer. If the price of admission was being spit on or called a Klan member, then so be it. (Moby 2016: 70)

As indicated above, Moby is far from being the only ‘hipster’ to have sampled black music and to have embraced the ‘otherness’ of black culture. Aspects of Play do warrant further investigation, nonetheless. They can be explored by using Mailer’s terms. First, ‘relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body’. This phrase parallels Huggins’s description of the minstrel caricature: ‘he was unrestrained in his enthusiasm for music – for athletic and rhythmical dance. Likewise, he was 4

For an example of this see his performance ‘Live on TV Jools Holland’ included in Play: The DVD (2001).

176

Mute Records

insatiable in his bodily appetites’ (1971: 251). This caricature was perpetuated by black performers when, later in the nineteenth century, they too entered the minstrel tradition. Toll has written: Because the notion that blacks were inherently musical was already deeply embedded in the public’s images of Negroes and because these [black] performers stressed their authenticity, they were thought of as natural, spontaneous people on exhibit rather than as professional entertainers. (1974: 201)

According to this argument there is no artifice in black music. It is authentic and natural; it is spontaneously formed. Moby has been prone to this way of thinking. In sampling ‘Trouble So Hard’ he re-titled it ‘Natural Blues’; what drew him to the sample included in ‘Honey’ was the fact that the song had ‘a quality of sexual menace’; Moby interpreted the lyrics as meaning ‘While my boyfriend’s away, I’m going to have sex with someone else until my back gives out’ (Harris 2000: 101). His reasoning for the popularity of his versions of these songs is the fact that the sources are ‘emotional’ (Harris 2000: 104). For critic John Harris, their success results from juxtaposition: ‘this is Play’s trump card: the collision of a very modern kind of music with the very embodiment of folksy authenticity’ (Harris 2000: 101).5 There is a deliberate sense of ‘others’ meeting: the intellectual, computer-programming, city-dwelling dance musician and the ‘natural’, acoustic, rural black singer. This was the plan: Each track [the original sampled music] was road-tested via the simple expedient of being played on a Walkman while Moby strolled around his neighbourhood. If it seemed to alter the way he looked at the world, then it made its way on to the final track listing; if not, it was jettisoned. (Harris 2000: 101)

What we are witnessing here is a form of romantic primitivism, one in which the ‘authentic’ black music of the American south is (once again) being presented to the audience as its opposite. This ‘other’ is one that counters advancement, technology, the mind and, ultimately, capitalism. It is nevertheless a product of capitalism, as Richard Middleton explains: Romantic primitivism is embedded in the development of capitalism itself: ideologically, in capitalism’s need for an Other, to refresh its ‘spirit’ in non5

Harris’s comments are indicative of the fact that Moby is dealing with two forms of caricature: the tropes that surround electronic music and its ‘alienated synthesists’ (Synth Britannia 2009) and those relating to the naturalness of black music. There is a fundamental difference, however, in that Moby is in a position to play with the signifiers electronic music, whereas the black musicians he has sampled do not have agency.

Moby, Minstrelsy and Melville

177

productive time, to energise and justify its own contrasting drive to ‘civilization’, and at the same time to prove its liberalism; economically, in capitalism’s need for ‘raw materials’, natural, human and cultural, to feed the expanding machinery of commodification. (1990: 168–9)

This logic can be witnessed in the licensing of the tracks from Play. Moby’s album was famously (or ‘mythically’, according to Miller (2017: 3)) the first album to have all of its tracks licensed to adverts, TV stations and movies. ‘Find My Baby’ advertised the Nissan Almera, while ‘Honey’ was used for the Financial Times. The ‘folksy authenticity’ of the samples undercut the commodification of the goods, while the ‘very modern kind of music’ ensured their contemporaneity. This manoeuvre was hugely successful. It has been estimated that Moby earned £10m from these licensing endeavours (Sharon Osbourne 2017). Folksy authenticity is nevertheless to a large extent a myth. The work of Dave Harker (1985), Vic Gammon (1980) and Middleton (1990) has revealed that canons of ‘folk’ music are artfully constructed. Folk music collectors, who always come from outside of the cultures that they are seeking to define, are in search of music that stands in opposition to the popular music of capitalist society. Gammon has written of one of the consequences: So that the rural folk song of the past should stand out against the urban popular song of the day, viewed as totally corrupt, it was necessary that the source singer be perceived as a sort of noble savage, in a way apart from the modern world. (1980: 83)

It could be argued that Moby was in search of similar characters. Here we find a correspondence with another of Mailer’s terms: ‘the art of the primitive’. Within minstrelsy, black people were not only viewed as being primitive because of their ‘bodily appetites’, they attained this distinction because they symbolized the past. As Lott has written, ‘The blackface body figured the traditional, “preindustrial” joys that social and economic pressures had begun to marginalize’ (1993: 148). This was principally achieved through minstrel show’s depiction of the ‘happy’ times of the plantation. Saxton has commented that these performances produced ‘a mythology of the South as a region fascinatingly different, closely wedded to nature, and above all, timeless’ (1975: 14). It was the mythology of this region that Moby bought into when he sampled the southern singers for the tracks on Play. He was seeking music from a folk society. Moby claimed that ‘there’s a beautiful quality to it that a lot of contemporary music doesn’t have’ (Harris 2000: 104).

178

Mute Records

One of the consequences of this way of thinking is that Moby misjudged (or misrepresented) the age of the recordings he sampled. He associated them with the folk blues recordings made by John and Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress and Fisk University in the 1930s. In a press biography issued by Mute in 1999 he states: The field recordings were made by a folk historian called Alan Lomax who, along with his father, amassed a huge catalogue of indigenous filed recordings in the early part of the twentieth century. When I first heard these recordings I was so moved by them. These wonderful vocals became the starting points for my music. (‘Moby Biography’ 1999)

Although Alan Lomax did produce the sampled recordings, they were not ‘obscure recordings from the beginning of the century’ (Harris 2000: 101). They were made in 1959 and were financed for commercial release by Atlantic records.6 David Hesmondhalgh has suggested that the effect of this ‘mistake’ is to ‘make the recordings seem more ancient and distant than they really are, and to justify the anonymity of the performers’ (2006: 66). He points out that these performers were neither archaic nor obscure: Bessie Jones was still an active singer in the 1970s; Vera Hall performed at New York’s famous Carnegie Hall. One possible consequence of Moby’s error is that he believed the songs were of ancient origin and therefore in the public domain. This would account for the fact that he claimed full authorship of the sampled works when they appeared on Play.7 Moreover, it is notable that in the sleevenotes for the album he gives special thanks ‘to the Lomaxes and all of the archivists and music historians whose field recordings made this record possible’. The original artists are not thanked; they are not regarded as authors, but are instead the nameless conduits of a folk tradition. Here, Moby is both victim and perpetuator of the myth that black music is ‘primitive’. More damaging is the implication that the same quality can be applied to black people.

6

7

The original recordings are available on Sounds of the South (Atlantic 1993), a CD reissue of the original seven albums of 1959 field recordings that were first issued by Atlantic in 1961. Moby originally claimed 100 per cent authorship for the three songs under consideration and the sleevenotes of Play state they are ‘Written … by Moby’. His authorship share has been reduced, however. ‘Find My Baby’ is now credited to Richard Hall [Moby] and Joe Lee; ‘Honey’ is credited to Richard Hall, Bessie Jones and Alan Lomax; and ‘Natural Blues’ is credited to Richard Hall, Vera Hall and Alan Lomax. The credits to the latter two songs evidence an earlier injustice suffered by the original writers. Alan and John Lomax regularly claimed compositional shares for the field recordings they made even though they were not the songwriters (Heylin 2015: 167, 193).

Moby, Minstrelsy and Melville

179

Moby and Melville Play has been a hugely successful album. Why, then, has Moby’s use of black voices passed without much attention? One reason is that Moby is not alone in borrowing black voices in this manner. Another is that his borrowings are multiple and in flux. On the album we listen to many voices. In addition to the singers mentioned above, we hear the Shining Light Gospel Choir, the rappers Spoony G and the Treacherous 3, and also Moby’s own voice. All appear under the sole moniker of ‘Moby’. As Hesmondhalgh notes, ‘These other voices become incorporated into Moby’s own star persona; they become an element within the Moby “brand”’ (2006: 62). Moby is all things to all people. In fact, he is all things and all people. Lhamon has written that the purpose of minstrel performance was to be both white and black, to ‘flash white skin beneath a layer of burnt cork’ (1998: 42). He argues that ‘the presence of the dark within the white man ... enables him to assume the position as the universal signifier for humanity. He encompasses all the possibilities for human existence, the darkness and the light’ (1998: 28). If, in his hybrid music, Moby can be said to have achieved such a position, he will have pulled off one of the oldest and greatest confidence tricks of all. Another possible reason why the samples have garnered little comment is because they are regarded as positive borrowings from black culture. However, the fact that this culture is taken up in the spirit of admiration rather than caricature – that there is love as well as theft – should not blind us to the fact that these borrowings can be traced back to their troubled roots in minstrelsy. We may only have exchanged the ‘gross racial stereotypes’ of that entertainment form for the ‘smaller or finer, perhaps therefore more pernicious, stereotypes’ of today (Lhamon 1998: 81). Melville’s Benito Cereno sounds an early warning about these stereotypes. This short story depicts the ‘singularly undistrustful’ captain Amasa Delano, a man with an ‘old weakness for negroes’ ([1855] 1988: 209). Delano outlines their qualities: Above all is the great gift of good humour. Not the mere grin or laugh is here meant. Those were unsuitable. But a certain easy cheerfulness, harmonious in every glance and gesture; as though God had set the whole negro to some pleasant tune. When to all this is added the docility arising from the unaspiring contentment of a limited mind, and that susceptibility of blind attachment sometimes inhering in indisputable inferiors, one readily perceives why those

180

Mute Records

hypochondriacs Johnson and Byron … took to their hearts, almost to the exclusion of the entire white race, their serving men, the negroes, Barber and Fletcher. (1988: 208–9)

Delano is utterly undone. The ‘good humoured’ negroes are performing their own minstrel show. They have overpowered the ship San Dominick and are merely acting as slaves to lure him into their trap. Delano is unable to see this and only narrowly escapes. Even when the case of the uprising comes to trial there is widespread disbelief that ‘indisputable inferiors’ with ‘unaspiring contentment’ could have acted in such a manner. The facts are ‘held dubious for both learned and natural reasons’ (1988: 232). ‘The implication’, Lott has written, ‘is that Captain Delano’s inadequate responses to the slaves in secret revolt have been so conditioned by forms such as minstrelsy that the blacks are reduced to instances of white fantasy about them, a fact the insurrectionaries use to their advantage’ (1993: 234). It is a grim picture and one that sees little chance of escape for either white or black people: both parties are operating in accordance with stereotypes perpetuated by the minstrel mask. These same stereotypes are present in Moby’s sampling of southern black singers. The fact that his real name is Richard Melville Hall and he gained his nickname because he is a direct descendant of the author of Moby Dick only makes Melville’s early warnings more tragic.

References Adamson, G., and J. Pavitt (2011), Postmodernism Style And Subversion, 1970–1990, London: V&A. Barraclough, G., ed. (1993), The Times Atlas of World History, London: Harper Collins. Gammon, V. (1980), ‘Folk Song collecting in Sussex and Surrey, 1843–1914’, History Workshop Journal, 10: 61–89. Goodwin, A. (1990), ‘Sample and Hold: Pop Music in the Digital Age of Reproduction’, in S. Frith and A. Goodwin (eds), On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word, 258–73, London: Routledge. Harker, D. (1985), Fakesong: the Manufacture of British ‘Folksong’, 1700 to the Present Day, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Harris, J. (2000), ‘Moby’s Dick’, Q, July: 101–5. Hesmondhalgh, D. (2006), ‘Digital Sampling and Cultural Inequality’, Social and Legal Studies, 15 (1): 53–75.

Moby, Minstrelsy and Melville

181

Heylin, C. (2015), It’s One for the Money: The Song Snatchers Who Carved up a Century of Pop & Sparked a Musical Revolution, London: Constable. Huggins, N. I. (1971), Harlem Renaissance, New York: Oxford University Press. Lester, P. (2000), ‘Whale of the Century’, Uncut, July: 36–44. Lhamon, W. L. Jr. (1996), ‘Ebery Time I Wheel About I Jump Jim Crow: Cycles of Minstrel Transgression from Cool White to Vanilla Ice’, in A.-M. Bean (ed.), Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, 275–84, Hanover and London: University Press of New England. Lhamon W. L. Jr. (1998), Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop, London: Harvard University Press. Lott, E. (1993), Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mailer, N. ([1957] 1968), ‘The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster’, in Advertisements for Myself, 269–89, London: Panther. Melville, H. ([1855] 1988), ‘Benito Cereno’, in R. Miller (ed.), Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales, 164–248, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Melville, H. ([1857] 1999), The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, introduction by T. Tanner; explanatory notes by J. Dugdale, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Middleton, R. (1990), Studying Popular Music, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Miller, D. (2017), ‘Eyewitness: Moby Sells 10 Million Copies of Play, 2000’, Mojo, January: 29–30. Moby (2016), Porcelain, London: Faber and Faber. ‘Moby Biography’ (1999), Mute Press Office, London. Pieterse, J. N. (1992), White On Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Play: The DVD (2001), [DVD] UK, Mute. Roediger, D. (1993), The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, London: Verso. Saxton, A. (1975), ‘Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology’, American Quarterly, 27 (1): 3–28. Sharon Osbourne Presents Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Dodgiest Deals (2017), [TV programme] BBC4, 26 May. Synth Britannia (2009), [TV programme] BBC4, 16 October. Toll, R. (1974), Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America, London: Oxford University Press. Wright, N. (1949), Melville’s Use of the Bible, Durham: Duke University Press. Zlatopolsky, A. (2016), ‘Moby on New Memoir, the Decade in NYC that Changed his Life’, Rolling Stone, 7 June. Available online: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/ news/moby-on-new-memoir-the-decade-in-nyc-that-changed-his-life-20160607 (accessed 19 March 2018).

13

Country Girl: Rural Feminism in the Performance of Alison Goldfrapp Lucy O’Brien

Photographs: Anna Fox and Alison Goldfrapp Goldfrapp occupy a unique place in the Mute roster of artists. Where bands like Depeche Mode, New Order and Cabaret Voltaire suggest urban dystopian vistas with their electronic, industrial grooves, Goldfrapp explore rural and pagan themes in their work. ‘The power of nature and the elemental has always been in our music’, says Alison Goldfrapp (Rogers 2017). For this chapter I will focus on these themes in Goldfrapp’s imagery, with particular reference to Country Girls (1996–2002), a project she undertook with documentary photographer Anna Fox exploring the countryside of their childhood. I will be looking at the Country Girls project and the band’s artwork as different examples of Goldfrapp’s use of photography and performance art. Because I want to trace her approach as a frontwoman and visual communicator, I will not be discussing in detail the work of her musical partner Will Gregory (Fox 2002). From the start of her career Goldfrapp used the untamed countryside as inspiration. In the video for her group’s debut single ‘Lovely Head’ (Mute 2000), Goldfrapp, in khaki shirt, underpants and wellington boots, plays a woman unhinged; kicking trees, throwing sticks and hurling a white picnic chair across a field. Shot in a home-movie style and released in 2000 at a peak period for corporate, chart-friendly pop, it is very much an anti-video, anti the slick conventions of music video performance. Like other female artists signed to Mute – including Diamanda Galás, Alison Moyet (Yazoo), and Karin Dreijer/ Fever Ray – Goldfrapp has an image and stage presence that is strongly selfdefined.

184

Mute Records

Goldfrapp was attracted to Mute precisely because it allowed her creative freedom, and, despite a preponderance of male artists, it felt a less precarious place for her as a woman. ‘Mute is a small operation with a great legacy and you’re trusted, left alone to do your own thing. When you’re on a major, you’re constantly on the edge of being dropped and you feel it’, she has said (Mute 2000). Mute has always fostered theatricality and audio/visual experimentation. Building on her fine art background and her stint as a young, operatic singer with a contemporary dance company in Antwerp in the 1980s, Goldfrapp was able to experiment with photography and her visual image. On a label that articulates different versions of masculinity in Moby, Erasure and Depeche Mode, Goldfrapp also feels free to explore androgyny and intersectional feminism in her work, whether it is the Weimar-style dominatrix pose of 2003’s Black Cherry tour, or the strange alien beings of the ‘Anymore’ video (Mute 2017). From the band’s early videos to current photos on her popular Instagram stories, Goldfrapp has always been interested in the nexus between photography and performance. That is why Joel Anderson’s work on theatre and photography provides a useful theoretical model for this chapter. Theatre creates an image in motion, while photographs are stills that capture that motion. Anderson argues that rather than being a mere record of a live event or a play, the photograph is also art object and performance. The photographer and subject can approach visual communication from a conceptual point of view, and both can claim authorship of the image (Anderson 2015: 3). Goldfrapp show this command of visual communication throughout their work, in both pop and performance art spheres. From 1999, when Will Gregory and Alison formed Goldfrapp, there has always been a filmic aspect to the band. Her idol was the husky singer/songwriter Francoise Hardy and his was soundtrack pioneer Ennio Morricone (Simpson 2001), and the combination of these influences gives an accurate sense of their sound. They want their audience to ‘conjure up mental pictures’ as they listen to the music (Sturges 2003). The cinematic soundscapes of their Mercury Prize nominated Felt Mountain debut (Mute 2000), for instance, were reflected in the visuals: the snowy mountains and fractal spaces of the ‘Utopia’ video, or the voyeuristic film noir theme of ‘Human’. This desire to synthesize sound and vision reached a peak with the thirty-minute Goldfrapp: Tales of Us film (2014) that accompanies the shadowy folktronica of the Tales of Us album (Mute 2014). Based on stories from the album, the film made by Goldfrapp, Gregory and director Lisa Gunning was streamed into 400 cinemas across the world in January 2014. It includes an elegiac, mournful

Rural Feminism in the Performance of Alison Goldfrapp

185

dreamscape featuring two women walking but never meeting up, and the moody, monochrome video for ‘Annabel’, a song inspired by Kathleen Winter’s novel of the same name (2010), about an intersex child brought up as a boy. Goldfrapp’s work combines the tension of opposites: nature and the countryside versus glitter balls and glam; chill-out downtempo electronic music versus thumping disco rock. In lots of ways this reflects Alison’s teenage years in Alton, growing up in a rural setting and also coming of age in clubland. These colliding themes emerge again and again. In 2004 she appeared onstage at Glastonbury wearing diamante, fetish boots with stiletto heels and a large horse tail. For that tour her female dancers wore deer heads and the men had wolves heads. As they cavorted behind her Goldfrapp sang, with minimal movements, holding the stage with a detached, controlled quality. Glastonbury is a key site for Goldfrapp. It is a festival that combines themes of clubland, nature and paganism. It is also highly mediated, allowing Goldfrapp to project imagery from the ‘natural’ setting of the festival to the viewers watching on TV and online. She returned to Glastonbury four years later, performing songs from the album Seventh Tree (Mute 2008). This time the stage set looked like a scene from 1973 horror film The Wicker Man, with pagan flower queens dancing round a maypole as Goldfrapp sang the ambient psychedelic song ‘Little Bird’ in a white dress fringed with ribbons. The pagan imagery surfaces again in the video for ‘A+E’ (Mute 2008), where Goldfrapp lies in the woods on a bed of autumn leaves, while strange anthropomorphic leaf men dance around her. Goldfrapp explores the countryside as a place of liberation and ritual magic, an arena that she can control. In an early interview she referred obliquely to chaotic teenage years hanging out with Borstal boys,1 glue-sniffing and cartheft, and a few ‘horrible moments’; much of her work seems to be about finding control in situations where one feels ‘total loneliness where something horrible is happening’ (Simpson 2001). While Goldfrapp’s work is infused with natural elements of wind, grass, sun, and sky, and a utopian sense of liberation, there is also its opposite. There is a mockery of pop tropes and the constriction of urbane cultural codes in songs like ‘Strict Machine’ (Mute 2003) or the glammy disco ‘Ooh La La’ (Mute 2005). In the video for the latter, Goldfrapp stands on stage in flares, shoulder pads and platform shoes, like a female Alvin Stardust. Male musicians are arranged

1

A Borstal was a type of youth detention centre in the UK and Commonwealth. The Borstal system was abolished in 1982 and replaced with youth custody centres.

186

Mute Records

carefully around her, posing with tight, restricted movements. She is mistress of the scene, a point humorously amplified when she appears, like Bianca Jagger riding into New York disco Studio 54, on a huge silver horse. This command of the visual tableau is enacted again in the video for the song ‘Head First’ (Mute 2010), where Goldfrapp sends up 1980s power pop, driving a juggernaut with a rocket. A man sits next to her on the passenger seat, bound in silver gaffer tape. Underlying much of Goldfrapp’s work are themes of psychological fear and female sexuality. In talking about the song ‘Laurel’ (Mute 2014), for example, she once said, ‘I really wanted it to have the feeling of being sleepy and losing consciousness. David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) is like that too, where he just has a camera hovering, looking at a room that’s empty, and you don’t quite know why you’re looking at it? I like the idea that the dread doesn’t really arrive. … Sometimes you don’t want things to be resolved, or explained’ (Hasted 2013). Goldfrapp show a confident use of visual imagery, incorporating elements of theatre and performance art in the pop sphere. Clearly their record deal with Mute has given the band room for creative, leftfield work. In nourishing her own projects with different filmmakers and photographers, Goldfrapp has developed a strong aesthetic, and with that a valuable sense of agency in an industry that can squash women’s artistic vision.

Sweet Fanny Adams To demonstrate this sense of independence and agency I will now focus on her Country Girls collaboration with photographer Anna Fox. This investigation is based on personal interviews that I conducted with the pair of them in a central London hotel in December 2016. I chose interviewing as my main research method for this chapter, because I wanted to find out how Goldfrapp and Fox executed this project, and tease out the main themes in the work. Goldfrapp, Fox and I approached this chapter as a collaborative project in itself, and as a way of exploring issues of feminism and agency together. This powerful work features Goldfrapp in a series of ambiguous, darkly humorous and violent images that are situated outside the usual channels of music industry promotion. They show a different side of her as a visual performer and female artist. In contrast to Goldfrapp’s glamorous, well-delineated pop persona, in her Country Girl characters there is both dark humour and brutal

Rural Feminism in the Performance of Alison Goldfrapp

187

anonymity. Shot between 1996 and 2002 this series of staged photographs explores storytelling and constructed imagery. It is based on both personal stories – Goldfrapp’s and Fox’s experiences of growing up as young women in rural southern England – and the story of Sweet Fanny Adams, a young English girl violently murdered near their hometown of Alton in the late 1800s. The project evolved in an organic and experimental way. The seeds were sown in 1983 when they first met, and Fox took pictures of Goldfrapp for ZigZag magazine when she was in a local Alton band. At the time Fox was living in Chawton House, an Elizabethan manor house in the Hampshire village of Chawton. Formerly the home of Jane Austen’s brother Edward Austen Knight, in 1992 it was purchased for £1.25 million by the co-founders of multinational technology conglomerate Cisco Systems, extensively restored and turned into the renowned Centre for the Study of Early Women’s Writing 1600–1830. Back in the 1980s, however, the house was in a dilapidated condition, with Austen Knight’s descendants living in one wing, and renting out cheap rooms to punks and anarchists in another. ‘It became this crazy place for everyone to hang out’, recalls Goldfrapp, ‘All the hippies from nearby towns and villages gathered there. It was like a squat, quirky and eccentric, with bare stone floors’. Fox was studying at the West Surrey College of Art & Design, and was interested in collaborating with people who wanted to be photographed. ‘When someone is styling themself, modeling for the camera as an artistic participator, that takes photography to a completely different level’, says Fox. Photography then becomes cinematic, or a kind of theatre. As photography scholar Joel Anderson notes, quoting Brecht, when there is ‘an interpenetration of photography and theatre … the two adopt each other’s procedures, resulting in those procedures being transformed’ (2015: 87). Goldfrapp was going to art school in London, but frequently came back to her hometown to visit. ‘I knew Anna was a photographer. I was interested in performance, and we both had a similar interest in the history of Alton’. They were fascinated by the gruesome tale of local girl Fanny Adams, who is buried near Flood Meadow, an area behind the house where Goldfrapp grew up. One hot August afternoon in 1867, eight-year-old Fanny Adams was abducted, then brutally murdered and dismembered in a hopfield on the outskirts of Alton. Within days solicitor’s clerk Frederick Baker was arrested. In the ensuing court case he was found guilty and hanged four months later outside Winchester County Prison, in the UK’s last public execution. The community was devastated by the murder and over 5,000 people gathered to watch his hanging, most of

188

Mute Records

them women (Hoskins 2008). Over time, however, the murder of the young girl drifted into national folklore, so that by the twentieth century her memory was treated with casual misogyny. Years after the murder British sailors used the term ‘sweet Fanny Adams’ pejoratively to describe their tins of mutton. The large tins in which the meat was packed for the Royal Navy were often used as mess tins and even today they are colloquially known as ‘fannys’. When Fox and Goldfrapp began researching Alton’s history and revisited this story, they saw this as a metaphor for how rural women were considered disposable or invisible. ‘We saw the connection between our own experience and this story that everyone knew about’, says Goldfrapp. Fox was perturbed at the way the phrase ‘sweet FA’ was used, not just for chopped up meat, but also for something worthless: ‘nothing at all’ or ‘fuck all’. This euphemism migrated from naval slang to common usage in the twentieth century. ‘People used that phrase without knowing where it came from. It wasn’t a serious issue for people that a young girl had been chopped up. I know that’s an extreme metaphor for the experiences we had, but it summed up that feeling of being a young woman in the countryside – that people didn’t really care if you got treated badly or beaten up.’ Both Fox and Goldfrapp found the environment for young women growing up in a small Hampshire town to be harsh and ‘small minded’. Goldfrapp recalls hostility from men in the village, saying: ‘I liked to dress in a loud way. Anything that wasn’t conventional caused a lot of aggression in people. They didn’t like it or understand it. People in our peer group got beaten up regularly. I was desperate to get out and I moved away as quickly as I could’. But in the mid-1990s she returned with Fox to locations of their youth, exploring connections between performance and photography. The first photograph they created was of Goldfrapp wearing her mother’s clothes, carrying all her handbags (Plate 1). The next photo was of Goldfrapp in her mother’s Barbour coat, headscarf and boots, sitting on a rug in a field and holding dead pheasants (Plate 2). ‘I like playing with the idea of glamour and violence’, she says, ‘Things that contradict each other’. That contradiction is present in surreal Goldfrapp songs like ‘Train’ (Mute 2003), where flashy LA ladies are annihilated by beauty treatments, and the electroclash pop of ‘Ride A White Horse’ (Mute 2006), with its hints of S&M imagery. In the Country Girls project Goldfrapp enjoys this combination of repression and glamour. The images hark back to a conservative 1950s era in which dutiful country women baked cakes, went to the Women’s Institute and rode horses. ‘My mum was from another era, hence all

Rural Feminism in the Performance of Alison Goldfrapp

189

those clothes’, recalls Goldfrapp. What comes out strongly in these photographs is the performative aspect. The exaggerated, staged element of Goldfrapp’s styling is reminiscent of nineteenth-century ‘fiction photography’. This genre is described by Anderson as portraits that focus on the construction of an image of an individual playing a social role: Actor portraits of this period are examples of a photographic trend whereby photographer and sitter devised a pose befitting the sitter’s social or civic status and identity. Clothing was chosen as costume, and objects, held by the sitter or otherwise strategically placed in the image, usually pointed to a subject learning and worldliness. (2015: 41–2)

Fox and Goldfrapp spent a lot of time preparing for the Country Girls photographs, sourcing props (cars, dogs, pheasants from the local butcher) and costumes (hats, jewellery and vintage dresses). In the photo of Goldfrapp wearing her mother’s pearls and holding twelve of her leather handbags (‘objects strategically placed’), she is standing in front of the corrugated prefab hall where she went to Brownies as a child. She comes across as the little girl playing ‘dress up’. As she and Fox took more photographs, Goldfrapp explored locations from her teenage years, such as the woods where she had her first sexual experience. They staged scenes where she is running through the woods with dogs, half naked and wearing a gold skirt (Plate 3). ‘As a teenager growing up in the countryside you often found yourself at some point lost on a country lane drunk. There was a lot of rummaging around in hedges and bushes’, she says. There is a development from the staid lady of the manor caricatures (how country women were expected to deport themselves) to the reckless images of mud and glamour – like Goldfrapp’s gold skirt, her shiny black high heels in a puddle of mud or running wild in a red satin dress. There is a dark undertow to these shots, particularly one of Goldfrapp shot from behind, sprinting away from car headlights (Plate 4). This image suggests female panic and vulnerability, and someone else in control. ‘Photographers are usually invisible, you’re not usually aware of who is behind the camera. But the car headlights give you a sense of the driver, that there is someone else there’, says Fox. The shot was partly inspired by the 1972 film Prime Cut where a man tries to drive his combine harvester into Lee Marvin and Sissy Spacek, turning a piece of farm machinery into a monster. Marvin plays Nick Devlin, a mob enforcer from Chicago sent to Kansas to collect a debt from a meatpacker boss. Spacek’s Poppy is a runaway sex slave who nearly ends up under the blades of the combine

190

Mute Records

harvester. Scenes of sunlit fields are imbued with a dark, brooding violence. The Country Girls photographs have the same sense of threat. ‘I would regularly hitch lifts with soldiers on those country roads. We’d get lifts in their van. We were definitely testing ourselves. It felt quite wild, quite feral’, recalls Goldfrapp. There is a sense, too, that she is destroying the fashion plate. Shots of her lying face down in the mud with immaculate red shoes (Plate 5), or posing as a dead body in the back of a pickup truck wearing a perfect Louise Brookes-style black wig, reframe the Vogue fashion magazines her mother would buy. They articulate a rural, risk-taking femininity – what happens when a girl misbehaves and trespasses into forbidden territory, both geographical and psychological. ‘Taking these photos felt mischievous. Sneaking into the woods, going near someone’s hay barn. It was like rediscovering your childhood, but in a different context. It felt liberating’, recalls Goldfrapp. In these photographs there is the same collision of glamour and nature that Goldfrapp has pursued in her music; urbane glitz meets the brutality of the countryside. Goldfrapp and Fox like to twist the visual vocabulary of fashion, like painter and photographer Guy Bourdin’s suggestive high gloss style taken to extremes. ‘If you think of Bourdin, he did lots of pictures of legs. They were very glamorous, but there was also the undertone of something much darker’, says Goldfrapp. There is obvious commercial sexual exploitation in Bourdin’s most provocative work, where models are reduced to sleek body parts. Photography, particularly in high fashion or music press editorial, stimulates longing and desire and possibilities for repetition and repeated looking (Anderson 2015: 47). What’s interesting about the Country Girls project is how Goldfrapp and Fox take some of the fetishistic motifs of Bourdin’s high fashion photography and redefine them. ‘I’ve always played with the idea of fashion, glamour and violence – things that contradict’, says Goldfrapp, who first explored these ideas studying fine art at Middlesex University in the 1980s. Fox felt that she could push the performative aspect of photography with Goldfrapp. ‘When I met Alison and we talked about doing a project together, I realized the performance could be an exaggerated part of it’, recalls Fox. Goldfrapp appreciated the artistic freedom of the project: ‘We were working in our own little bubble with no agenda. It was fun, experimental and in a way cathartic to re-enact things we had experienced as young women.’ Goldfrapp explores nakedness as a bold statement about form. In one shot we see her body in a nude leotard, lying motionless in a field of bluebells. In another her naked form lies half in a field, half on a country track.

Rural Feminism in the Performance of Alison Goldfrapp

191

‘I like no clothes – choosing certain elements like wearing a wig and shoes and nothing else – it shows the space between objects.’ Goldfrapp also features themes of sex and fetishization of the body in the group’s music. ‘Strict Machine’, for example, is driven by a clean, clinical electro beat, and a video filled with fractal images of legs, arms and nipples – body parts assembling and reassembling in time with the electronic wall of sound. The distorted white noise of the song ‘Train’ is accompanied by a video where burlesque showgirls with animal heads dance themselves into a frenzy, and the animated fantasy of ‘Twist’ (Mute 2003) combines orgasmic moans with a fractured Moroder-style disco beat. Goldfrapp reworks themes of sex and threat throughout her music and imagery, from her more commercial output to the art project Country Girls. Fox, meanwhile, has sought to reclaim representation of the naked female body. ‘Being naked as a woman has largely been stolen by fashion and porn’, she says. ‘It’s been hijacked.’ The critical context is key to her work. Country Girls, for instance, has been shown in various galleries and within academic lectures. In 2017 it was part of the ‘Creating the Countryside’ exhibition at Compton Verney, featured alongside paintings by John Constable and Gainsborough. ‘I think very carefully about where my work is going. The context affects the meaning and how work is read. It would be very different if you put one of these images on a billboard; that might not be responsible. It could be interpreted in a different way’, says Fox. Fox grew up reading Gothic fairy tales, and there is an element of the monstrous and supernatural in these images. She and Goldfrapp are also influenced by photographer and film director Cindy Sherman’s ability to tell a story with images. For Sherman’s collection of Untitled Film Stills, for instance, she staged herself as generic film characters like the working girl, the lonely housewife or the seductive vamp, mimicking over-arch photo stills from 1950s and 1960s Hollywood film noir or B-movies (Sherman 2003). The Country Girls project has the same effect, as if staging scenes in between the action. The narrative behind the project is about the sense of threat and menace in the countryside, and the possibilities of that violence not being discovered. ‘I don’t like walking in the countryside without a dog or another person; I still find it a bit scary’, says Fox. According to Goldfrapp, ‘The silence and the space is really disconcerting’. The two of them were nevertheless inspired by that sense of space and the elemental possibilities of the landscape: contrasts of fields and sky, for instance,

192

Mute Records

empty stone quarries, muddy tracks that lead to the horizon. Isolated locations far from people and houses, where anything can happen. Some of Fox’s images look like beautifully produced police crime photographs. They are an example of what Barthes describes as photography’s possession of ‘that has-been’, an imprint of something that was eerily ‘there’ (Barthes 1977: 76). Situated in the same landscape where Fanny Adams was killed, there is a sense of history haunting the Country Girls series. Linking the past murder with their personal memories, Fox and Goldfrapp created a cinematic narrative ‘who-dunnit’ that, though laced with a dark fairy tale humour, is rooted in real events. ‘I think of myself as a documentary photographer’, explains Fox. ‘Then I make work that challenges what is a documentary photograph. Working collaboratively is a challenge to that order.’ Goldfrapp agrees: ‘A lot of how I work is experiencing something and then making something out of that experience – writing, making music, performance and performing.’ What Fox and Goldfrapp construct with some of the project images is the aftermath of a murder, what looks like photographic evidence of violence in a rural setting. One of the bleakest shots is of Goldfrapp’s bare white legs poking out of a field of rapeseed (Plate 6). They were aiming to create a scene reminiscent of 1970s cinema they had seen, films like Straw Dogs (1971) and Badlands (1973) conveying the ambiguous drama of something that happened in a field. Goldfrapp says this image is the one that makes her feel most uncomfortable. ‘There is an element of humour to all the other pictures. They felt ridiculous – we were sending up people and situations we knew, and laughing while we did it. But this didn’t feel ridiculous. When we were doing it I felt a bit strange, slightly spooked. I didn’t feel in control. It was claustrophobic.’ Fox sees that photograph, and others like Goldfrapp as the anonymous woman face down in the mud, as symbolizing a contortion of femininity. ‘Women are pressed into ways of being, and there’s a nasty layer underneath that. … The way society was in the 1970s and 1980s affected the way you could grow as a person. In photography one has to exaggerate the feeling. In a way that was the fun of it, making it as severe as we could.’ Much of the power of this project derives from Fox and Goldfrapp’s experimental approach and creative freedom. As Goldfrapp underlines: ‘There wasn’t an agenda at any point.’ This is in contrast to the limitations of creating artwork for a musical product. Goldfrapp is aware of the way the record industry can restrict representation of women artists when the emphasis is on visual allure rather than innovative content. The project was done independently of

Rural Feminism in the Performance of Alison Goldfrapp

193

Mute and was not financed by the label, but a few shots from the Country Girls series were used in the marketing for Felt Mountain; one of Goldfrapp sitting on a pile of logs in a forest wearing green wellies, and another showing stark legs and shiny red heels in a bluebell field. The latter image was used for the cover of the band’s single ‘Human’ (Mute 2001), enhancing the obsessional, murderous undertow of the song. Mute boss Daniel Miller liked the Country Girls project, but some people were uncomfortable with the more graphic pictures. ‘They’d say, “You look like you’ve been raped”’, recalls Goldfrapp. ‘People don’t know how to react to them.’ According to Fox, extra layers of meaning emerge from the photographs as people read and interpret them, and they arouse strong feelings. Some for instance, think Goldfrapp is a dummy or a mannequin, and are surprised to learn these are shots of a real woman. ‘There is another layer with photography, in the process of editing and selecting images’, Fox says.

Art and desire Although Country Girls was a separate art project, the fact that Goldfrapp feels free to express her creative side independently of the music business has given her confidence as a female musician and extra conceptual depth to her visual identity. Women performers are often restricted by the parameters of music marketing, particularly when it comes to representing sexual desire or seduction. Goldfrapp has a positive working relationship with Mute, and the only time she felt compromised was in 2010 during the promotion of their fifth album Head First, when Mute was owned by EMI. ‘It was very nasty’, Goldfrapp told the Independent. ‘Because if you produce something that they think may very well be a hit, then you … do all these things that they think will make it into this hit, and I’m not interested in that world, or to fulfill their idea of a commercial hit’ (Hasted 2013). EMI kept the band to a tight schedule with heavy promotion of songs that they weren’t completely happy with. Goldfrapp’s image for the album was that of a disco pop siren, and the music was more ‘normal’ with less of the group’s imaginative soundscaping. In reaction to this Goldfrapp consciously toned her wardrobe down to plain black for the next album Tales of Us and was ‘anti-costumes’ (Hasted 2013). Cultural activist Susan Sontag wrote about photography as a tool of surveillance and control (1977: 3), and in the music industry, photography can be used as a way of disciplining women. Miki Berenyi, for instance, from

194

Mute Records

the 1990s band Lush, has talked about a magazine photo shoot that ended when she refused to lean forward and show her cleavage (O’Brien 2016: 22). Goldfrapp has always been careful with the visual management of her work, her fine art training making her aware of the tension between pop glamour and artistic freedom. Though she embodies a dark femme fatale sexuality she has worked hard to control her image, so that the sexuality she projects is on her own terms. Goldfrapp has found a way to bring her avant-garde approach into the pop mainstream, being represented by Fascination management, an agency founded by the former marketing director of Polydor, Peter Loraine. Fascination specialize in pop acts like the Saturdays, All Saints, Bananarama and Steps – the very ‘uptempo classic dance pop music with singalong choruses and key changes’ that Goldfrapp send up and celebrate (Garner 2017). Although most of their artists project commercial glamour, Goldfrapp is proudly displayed on the website homepage. The band’s art house styling gives Fascination a cooler, more leftfield currency. Goldfrapp demonstrates the freedom to be elusive, exploring feminist ideas that resonate from personal experience. With Country Girls she and Fox used photography as a way to negotiate memory and history, an artistic re-imagining of the English rural landscape and its place for modern women. Some of Goldfrapp’s most enduring images are set in the country landscape  – like the Pierrot clown of Seventh Tree era and her commedia dell’arte-style Harlequin with antique lace ruffle and pirate hat, wandering through heather-thick moorland. There is a link in the band’s music, with the acoustic guitar, birdsong and harps of Seventh Tree inspired by rural settings and traditional English children’s literature. Goldfrapp’s record deal with Mute has enabled her to explore these themes in a profound way, with an unusual degree of licence for a pop artist. Through characters like the trickster, the shaman and romantic hero, Goldfrapp has found a way to reclaim the violent countryside of her teenage years and express her artistic imagination and her power.

References Anderson, J. (2015), Theatre And Photography, London: Palgrave. Badlands (1973), [Film] Dir. Terrence Malick, USA: Warner Bros.

Rural Feminism in the Performance of Alison Goldfrapp

195

Barthes, R. (1977), Image, Music, Text, London: Fontana. Fox, A. (2002), Country Girls. Available online: http://www.annafox.co.uk/work/ country-girls/ (accessed 3 July 2016). Garner, G. (2017), ‘5, 6, 7, 8 … 20 Years Of Steps: Fascination Management’s Peter Loraine Takes us Inside Steps’ Big Comeback’, Music Week, 21 April. Available online: http://www.musicweek.com/talent/read/5-6-7-8-20-yearsof-steps-fascination-management-s-peter-loraine-takes-us-inside-steps-bigcomeback/068206 (accessed 12 November 2017). Goldfrapp, Alison, and Anna Fox (2016), personal communication via face-to-face interview, London, 7 December. Goldfrapp: Tales of Us (2014), [Film] Dir. Lisa Gunning, UK: Cap Gun Collective. Hasted, N. (2013), ‘Interview: Goldfrapp Explore the Shadows’, Independent, 6 September. Available online: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/ music/features/interview-goldfrapp-explore-the-shadows-8800750.html (accessed 3 July 2016). Hoskins, J. (2008), ‘Brutal Slaying of Sweet Fanny Adams’, Southern Daily Echo, 7 February. Available online: http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/features/true_ crime/2026904.Brutal_slaying_of_sweet_Fanny_Adams/ (accessed 3 July 2016). Lost Highway (1997), [Film] Dir. David Lynch, France, USA: October Films. O’Brien, L. (2016), ‘I’m With the Band: Redefining Young Feminism’, in A. Adrian and J. Warwick (eds), Voicing Girlhood in Popular Music: Performance, Authority, Authenticity, 15–36, New York: Routledge. Prime Cut (1972), [Film] Dir. Michael Ritchie, USA: Cinema Center Films. Rogers, J. (2017), ‘Alison Goldfrapp: “Artists are Private People, Observers”’, Guardian, 26 February. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/feb/26/ alison-goldfrapp-interview-silver-eye-album (accessed 5 November 2017). Sherman, C. (2003), The Complete Untitled Film Stills, New York: Museum of Modern Art. Simpson, D. (2001), ‘The Mercury Prize? Oh God, That Would be Great. I Deserve Something’, Guardian, 4 May. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/ music/2001/may/04/artsfeatures (accessed 30 October 2017). Sontag, S. (1977), On Photography, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Straw Dogs (1971), [Film] Dir. Sam Peckinpah, UK, USA: ABC Pictures. Sturges, F. (2003), ‘Alison Goldfrapp: After The Gold Rush’, Independent, 24 April. Available online: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/ alison-goldfrapp-after-the-gold-rush-116514.html (accessed 30 October 2017). The Wicker Man (1973), [Film] Dir. Robin Hardy, UK: British Lion Film Corporation. Winter, K. (2010), Annabel, Toronto: House of Anansi Press.

14

Twist: Goldfrapp’s Genre Perversion Glyn Davis

Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory formed Goldfrapp in 1999. Both had previous experience as musicians: Alison Goldfrapp had provided vocals for artists including Add N To (X), Orbital and Tricky, and Gregory had worked with, among others, Tears for Fears, Tori Amos and Portishead. The duo signed to Mute in August 1999 and has remained with the label since then. They released their debut album, Felt Mountain, in September 2000; their seventh and most recent studio album, Silver Eye, appeared in March 2017. Throughout their career, Goldfrapp have drawn on various musical styles: Weimar cabaret, film soundtracks, orchestral pop, disco, glam, electronic dance music, folk. Some individual albums are dominated by a particular musical form’s aesthetic; others move between genres from song to song. This chapter focuses on the idioms Goldfrapp have deployed most frequently (disco, glam and folk), and argues that the duo’s music offers innovative queer takes on these genres. With disco and glam, genres that already have some queer resonance and import, Goldfrapp articulate recalibrations: disco’s connections to queers and queerness, marginalized during the mainstreaming of disco, are restated in an overtly erotic register; glam’s problematic gender politics are highlighted and challenged via queer twists. Folk music has only a minor historical relationship with queerness, and one that is somewhat fraught: Goldfrapp attempt to model new ties, introducing the genre to fresh forms of desire and politics. Mute serves as an appropriate home for Goldfrapp’s queer contributions to popular music. Over its history, the label has released a variety of records with queer resonances by artists ranging from the mainstream to the experimental. This lineage begins with Mute’s first single, The Normal’s ‘T.V.O.D.’ (1978)  – specifically, its AA-side, ‘Warm Leatherette’, inspired by J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash (1973), whose narrative combines the erotics of automobiles with non-

198

Mute Records

normative forms of sexual gratification. It would also include Depeche Mode’s debut album Speak & Spell (1981), a record that, as Lucas Hildebrand notes, ‘conspicuously flirted with gay innuendo’ and ‘got heavy rotation in gay clubs’ (2013: 427). At the more radical or avant-garde edge of Mute’s roster, the first albums that the label released by Diamanda Galás were her Masque of the Red Death trilogy (1986–8), records which address the suffering of people with AIDS. Erasure, much more commercial in their appeal, also occupy a key position in this genealogy. Their trashy, campy Abba-esque covers EP (1992) is arguably the queer highlight of their output, offering gender-flipped electro-pop takes on the original ABBA tracks.

Disco At the time of Abba-esque’s release, disco had become such a mainstream form of music that it could be productively queered. Erasure did this through camp, playfully dragging up as Agnetha and Frida and mimicking ABBA’s original video for their version of ‘Take A Chance On Me’. This was a relatively safe form of queering that did not seem to threaten many straight people. Tacitly, however, it served as a reminder of disco’s queer roots. Alice Echols identifies these foundations, noting that ‘gay men were among the genre’s first and most legendary deejays, its earliest audience, and at the height of the glitterball mania practically ran the industry’ (2010: 40). Across the 1970s, disco became increasingly popular with a broader audience, the box office success of Saturday Night Fever (1977) serving as a marker of this appeal. By the end of the decade, however, a backlash was underway, sales slumped, and the record industry moved on to nurturing other musical forms. Disco has emerged back into popular music in minor ways in subsequent decades – through reissues and compilations, via covers, homages and samples. For many listeners, disco has become a shorthand signifier for the 1970s – a tacky, cheesy form of music associated with heterosexual rituals such as hen parties. The genre’s queer associations have been recognized and acknowledged by artists such as Erasure, Kylie Minogue and Madonna, but for others it is deployed merely as a historical reference point ripe for stylistic appropriation. Disco serves as a recurrent touchstone for Goldfrapp. As Alison Goldfrapp revealed in a 2003 interview, ‘I’ve always kind of been into disco … One of the things that I like about disco, old disco music, was all those lush string

Twist: Goldfrapp’s Genre Perversion

199

arrangements’ (‘Beats and Lust’ 2003). She claims that disco’s influence is subtle on their debut album, but more overt on its follow-up, Black Cherry (Mute 2003). I would argue that it peaks on the duo’s third album, Supernature (Mute 2005), where disco is repeatedly referenced as a set of signifiers and an aural landscape. Referring to that LP, Alison Goldfrapp said, ‘It’s a place to take part in fortnightly disco séances, where people dance with spirits and howl like beasts of the forest wearing lycra and stilettoes’ (‘Supernature: Review’ 2005). The album’s title references Cerrone, whose disco hit ‘Supernature’ appears on his album of the same name (Malligator 1977). (Cerrone reappears as a reference point on Goldfrapp’s album Seventh Tree (Mute 2008) in the name of the song ‘Cologne Cerrone Houdini’.) The title of ‘Ride A White Horse’, one of the singles from Supernature, evokes the decadent history of legendary disco club Studio 54, specifically, the moment in May 1977 when Bianca Jagger appeared on the dance-floor astride a horse’s back. In the song’s lyrics, Alison Goldfrapp reveals desires to ape Jagger’s behaviour. This desire resurfaces in a mutated form in the video for ‘Ooh La La’, the first single to be released from Supernature: a brief digitally enhanced fantasy sequence depicts Alison Goldfrapp riding a disco horse – more precisely, a living mirrorball in the shape of a horse. Goldfrapp’s use of disco is not solely concerned with surface-level nods and echoes; however, it is a queerly inflected deployment. Richard Dyer’s essay ‘In Defence of Disco’, first published in 1979, provides us with a valuable framework for understanding the mechanics and textures of Goldfrapp’s sustained engagement with the form. Dyer discusses three key facets of disco: its eroticism, romanticism and materialism. Disco’s eroticism, he argues, is ‘whole body’ eroticism (Dyer [1979] 2006: 104). In contrast with popular song’s focus on the heart and the soul, the lyrics in disco songs are ‘often more directly physical and the delivery more raunchy’ (2006: 104); against rock music’s ‘grinding, phallic’ carnality, disco ‘restores eroticism to the whole of the body and for both sexes, not just confining it to the penis’ (2006: 105). Dyer goes on to identify the romanticism in disco’s lyrics, instrumentation and arrangements. ‘At a minimum’, he posits, ‘disco’s romanticism provides an embodiment and validation of an aspect of gay culture’ (2006: 107). Finally, he pinpoints disco’s materialism in its ‘riot of consumerism’ and ‘tacky sumptuousness’ (2006: 108). It is in the combination of disco’s eroticism, romanticism and materialism that queers may experience a sense of accommodation, Dyer argues; the particular contours of queer identities seem somehow to fit with, be afforded room by, this specific musical form.

200

Mute Records

In line with Dyer’s first component, a physical, smutty form of nonproductive eroticism is repeatedly explicitly expressed in the lyrics and imagery of Goldfrapp’s disco tracks. ‘Twist’, for instance, from Black Cherry, contains the lines ‘Put your dirty angel face / between my legs and knicker lace’; the chorus has Alison Goldfrapp singing ‘Ride me, try me / kiss me like you like me / twist it round again and again’, each line lifting the melody line several notes higher towards the oscillating pinnacle of the sustained word ‘round’.1 Whatever it is that is being twisted, Alison Goldfrapp’s shrieks reveal their carnal impact. Towards the end of Supernature’s ‘Ride A White Horse’, Alison Goldfrapp revels in a peak experience: ‘Oh I love this feeling / feels like forever’. It is a peak with a perverse edge, however: the song closes with the line ‘Oh, I love this feeling / feels like real leather’.2 In other songs, lyrics with a sexual charge combine the fleshy and the mechanical. Thus, in ‘Strict Machine’, from Black Cherry: ‘I get high on a buzz then a rush when I’m plugged in you / I connect when I’m flush, you get love when told what to do’.3 And in ‘Ooh La La’, from Supernature: ‘Switch me on, turn me up’.4 (Arguably, there are echoes here of both ‘Warm Leatherette’ and of singles by Mute act Add N To (X) such as ‘Metal Fingers In My Body’ (1999) and ‘Plug Me In’ (2000)). For Goldfrapp, the activities ‘plugging in’, ‘switching on’ and ‘turning up’ are not solely reserved for one sex or gender; they may combine with playful top/bottom dynamics. These expressions of queer pleasure are also traced back through disco’s history – identified and amplified – in Goldfrapp’s overt engagements with particular moments from that lineage. The single release of ‘Twist’ included ‘Yes Sir’ – a filthy, perversely charged cover of Baccara’s disco song ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’ (RCA 1977) – as an extra track. The shortened title omits the original’s emphasis on dancing, instead focusing on sexual role-playing. In line with this, Goldfrapp’s take exchanges Baccara’s jaunty melody for a breathy delivery over harder electronic synth stabs and squelches. ‘Yes Sir’ was not the duo’s first disco cover version. Their single ‘Utopia (Genetically Enriched)’ (Mute 2001), a remix of the song ‘Utopia’ from Felt Mountain, featured ‘UK Girls (Physical)’, a cover of Olivia Newton-John’s soft disco hit ‘Physical’ (MCA 1

2

3

4

‘Twist’ written by A. Goldfrapp and W. Gregory, courtesy Warner/Chappell Music Publishing Limited. ‘Ride a White Horse’ written by A. Goldfrapp, W. Gregory and N. Batt, courtesy Warner/Chappell Music Publishing Limited/Wixen Music UK Ltd. ‘Strict Machine’ written by A. Goldfrapp, W. Gregory and N. Batt, courtesy Warner/Chappell Music Publishing Limited/Wixen Music UK Ltd. ‘Ooh La La’ written by A. Goldfrapp and W. Gregory, courtesy Warner/Chappell Music Publishing Limited.

Twist: Goldfrapp’s Genre Perversion

201

1981), as the B-side. Like their cover of ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’, Goldfrapp’s version of ‘Physical’ extracts and emphasizes the original’s salaciousness. A bouncing electronic pulse keeps rhythm; the guitar solo on Newton-John’s track is replaced by a complex arrangement of synth tones and sounds, fizzles and whines; Alison Goldfrapp provides high ecstatic moans of pleasure as a backing vocal line. Romanticism and materialism, Dyer’s other key components of disco, can also be located in particular aspects of Goldfrapp’s deployment of the genre. However, it is the duo’s foregrounding of disco’s eroticism that is of especial import. This tactic shines a spotlight on disco’s queer roots, reminding listeners of the link between this musical form and a specific demographic, a link that has become occluded through disco’s dissipation into banal cultural ubiquity. It also serves to restore a queer libidinal charge to the genre through contemporary articulations – articulations that are witty and catchy, propulsively rhythmic, and (most significantly) sexy.

Glam Disco is not the only musical genre that Goldfrapp have engaged with that has a complex queer history and affiliation: the duo has also repeatedly drawn on glam. Alison Goldfrapp, in interview, has stated that she is ‘drawn to [glam] in the same way as I’m drawn to disco I suppose, in that it’s sort of opulence and dressing up and a kind of fantasy, decadence’ (‘Beats and Lust’ 2003). Glam rock was a relatively short-lived musical movement, lasting for only a few years in the early 1970s, though it had precedents, and echoes trailed after it in its wake. In opposition to rock music’s association with authenticity, glam revelled in the artificial, the theatrical, the over-the-top. The sartorial styling of glam artists was opposed to the everyday presentation of many 1960s musicians: value was placed instead on the fake and shiny, on lush textures, on synthetic patterns, on bold and striking colours, and (especially) on men donning clothing traditionally associated with women (feather boas, high-heeled boots, dresses and skirts, make-up). The sound of glam was retro at root, echoing basic 1950s rock‘n’roll music, yet this was often dressed up with futuristic allusions and sounds. Barney Hoskyns has identified the queer import of glam, writing that the movement ‘called into question received notions of truth and authenticity, especially in the arena of sexuality. It blurred the divide between straights and queers, inviting

202

Mute Records

boys and girls to experiment with images and roles in a genderless utopia of eyeliner and seven-inch platform boots’ (1998: 6). Bands and musical artists – from Slade to the Sweet, from Alice Cooper to Gary Glitter, from David Bowie to Roxy Music – provided models of glam style that audiences could choose to imitate. Repeatedly, this modelling also included provocative visual and verbal statements about sexuality. To take just one example, the back cover of the first Alice Cooper album, Pretties for You (Straight 1969), depicts Cooper in a gold and green mini-dress, his hands crossed over his crotch. His hair – and that of the rest of the band – suggests hippie stylings, but here works with the clothing to code femininity. Cooper also gave interviews in which he confused sexual categories. As Simon Reynolds notes, Cooper ‘spoke of being into the idea of playing benefits for both Women’s Lib and Gay Lib, [and] imagined a near-future world of “sex without any categorisations … no longer … homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual – just sex”’; in one interview, Cooper stated, ‘I’ve never made it with a guy, but that doesn’t mean I won’t’ (2016: 132). Despite declarations like these being made by many glam artists, the genre was primarily populated by heterosexual men. Jobriath (Bruce Wayne Campbell), who released two glam-inflected albums on Elektra in 1973 and 1974, serves as a notable exception. Glam features as a prominent stylistic reference for Goldfrapp on the band’s second and third albums, Black Cherry and Supernature. It is notable that the release of these records coincided with the emergence of the schaffel (shuffle) trend in German electronic music, in which particular producers including Superpitcher and T. Raumschmiere drew inspiration from glam bands such as T. Rex, Slade and Gary Glitter, mixing 1970s rock stylings with components of dance and techno (Turenne 2006). Particular songs by Goldfrapp have marked glam trappings. Alexis Petridis, in his review of Black Cherry for the Guardian, compared ‘Train’ to David Bowie’s ‘Jean Genie’ (RCA 1972) and noted that ‘Strict Machine’ ‘has the sort of tubthumping drums once closely associated with Gary Glitter’ (2003). He could also have compared the latter to Suzi Quatro’s ‘Can The Can’ (RAK 1973); indeed, in 2011, Quatro covered ‘Strict Machine’, folding two lines from her own track into the Goldfrapp song. The first track on Supernature, ‘Ooh La La’, is particularly indebted to glam. The song’s bassline is close to that of Norman Greenbaum’s proto-glam ‘Spirit in the Sky’, and the lyrics nod to Marc Bolan with the line ‘Oh child of Venus, you’re just made for love’. The song’s video, directed by Dawn Shadforth, features Alison Goldfrapp in a studio surrounded by male band members styled in exaggeratedly glam

Twist: Goldfrapp’s Genre Perversion

203

clothing, seeming to reference early Roxy Music. The title of the Supernature song ‘Ride A White Horse’ echoes T. Rex’s ‘Ride A White Swan’ (Fly 1970). Goldfrapp released We Are Glitter (Mute 2006), an album of remixes of tracks from Supernature, including a contribution from T. Raumschmiere. The title of this compilation serves as a further link to glam: in some journalistic coverage in the 1970s (and, indeed, subsequently) glam was referred to as ‘glitter rock’. As with disco, Goldfrapp’s engagement with glam moves beyond stylistic quotes and echoes, and into a political register. Most obviously, this manifests as a challenge to the genre’s dominance by men. For all of its flirtations with identity fluidity, glam’s gender politics were circumscribed: aside from Suzi Quatro, glam was a movement fronted by male artists. As Philip Auslander notes, ‘Women were important in the creation of glam rock, but always behind the scenes’ (2006: 195). On ‘Ooh La La’, Goldfrapp take on a key progenitor of glam, the dandy, specifically Charles Baudelaire, the writer whose accounts of flânerie, non-purposeful wandering encounters with urban space and its denizens, have been a source of inspiration to many subsequent authors, artists and philosophers. ‘Don’t want it Baudelaire / just glitter lust’ sings Alison Goldfrapp, rejecting the canonical poet and critic’s form of decadent activity, underpinned as it is by privilege and a specifically male relation to social space, in favour of a combination of sex and sparkles. Later in the song, however, Alison claims a right to Baudelaire’s activity too. She sings of her own wanderings: ‘You know I walk for days / I want to waste some time’. Over a driving glam tempo, ‘Ooh La La’ makes clear that dandyish behaviour – indulgently wasteful activity, a preoccupation with aesthetics and comportment – can be adopted, in part or wholesale, by women as well as men. The value of glam for Goldfrapp also lies in its foregrounding of the power of performance and the performative. For Auslander, this is the most significant element of glam rock: its rejection of the authentic in favour of the theatrical, its revelation of the degree to which identity is constructed through clothing, gesture, behaviour. In one of the images shot for the sleeve and inlay of Supernature, a semi-naked Alison Goldfrapp stands before a black-and-glitter theatrical set wearing a train of peacock feathers and gold wedge high heels. The male peacock’s spectacular, excessive plumage, used as a means to lure a mate, provides the image with a sexual current, one that also operates through the disrobed but occluded female body on display. Simultaneously, the feathers are worn as an extravagant, stagey costume that echoes glam precursors, such as the fronds that Brian Eno sprouts in his

204

Mute Records

portrait inside the sleeve of Roxy Music’s second album, For Your Pleasure (Island 1973). Through simple but bold means, the rhetoric of glam is utilized in this image to destabilize categorical distinctions between the organic and the artificial, the ‘real’ and the ‘performed’. Overtly staged, the photograph argues that even the disrobed human form is never entirely free from front and masquerade.

Folk Goldfrapp’s fourth album, Seventh Tree, was the first on which a folk-inflected pastoral idiom dominated their sound and imagery. (Elements could be discerned occasionally surfacing on their debut.) The generic shift from Supernature’s electro-disco was queer in its own right, a substantial and striking reconfiguration that was embraced in full by the duo. Acoustic guitars and gentle strings were foregrounded, with percussion and synths used only sparingly. Alison Goldfrapp appears on the album’s sleeve in a smock and a bicorne, backlit by low sunlight; in a photograph inside the packaging, shot against the soft golden-brown background of a field, she wears a Pierrot outfit and an origami newspaper sailboat hat. Her eccentric choices of clothing square with the whimsy and quirkiness often associated with folk cultures. In the video for the first single from the record, ‘A&E’, she rolls around in autumn leaves in a forest before being joined by dancers clothed head-to-toe in leaves, outfits redolent of figures that feature in pagan celebrations of the seasons such as the Jack-in-theGreen or the Burry Man. Despite seeming like a thorough reinvention of Goldfrapp’s sound and identity, Seventh Tree’s aesthetic choices fitted with prominent strains of contemporary popular and indie music. Goldfrapp’s adoption of a folk aesthetic appeared in the wake of folktronica, a generic hybrid combining acoustic and electronic instrumentation associated with artists such as Four Tet, Tunng, Múm and Bat for Lashes. It also coincided with the emergence of ‘freak folk’, a musical movement with which Devendra Banhart, Espers, Joanna Newsom, Vetiver, Brightblack Morning Light, Josephine Foster, and others were affiliated. Melodic and gentle, Seventh Tree lacks the glitchy electronics of folktronica and does not fit easily with the more esoteric and experimental strains of freak folk, such as Newsom’s high-pitched vocals and triple-album epics, or Brightblack Morning Light’s lengthy, drifting stoned-sounding jams.

Twist: Goldfrapp’s Genre Perversion

205

Folktronica and freak folk both drew somewhat nostalgically on the aural textures of folk music, only occasionally attempting revisions of its gendered dynamics; on this front, the work of Josephine Foster and CocoRosie is particularly worthy of note. Goldfrapp’s engagement with folk, however, seemed to markedly clash with the duo’s established sexual and gender politics. Unlike disco and glam, folk music’s history stretches back centuries. In its oldest forms, folk music is associated with oral tradition, its composers usually unknown; its songs are of localized significance, sustained and transmitted between generations. Homosexuality and queerness are marked by their absence. The occasional song such as ‘The Handsome Cabin Boy’, in which a captain falls for a shipmate who is ultimately revealed to be a cross-dressing woman, uses gender confusion only to build towards a revelation of ‘real’ identity and a successful heterosexual union, but such examples are rare. Across the twentieth century, folk music hybridized with other musical forms – its history intertwines, for instance, with the tradition of the singer-songwriter who uses acoustic stylings to address matters of personal, social and political valence. Thomas R. Gruning, in his examination of this hybridization and its recent incarnations, has identified the dominant heterosexuality of folk music: ‘For most of the twentieth century folk music has been, at least in its public face, a primarily male, heterosexual pursuit. The idea of the common man, with which folk music is usually aligned, left little room for obvious allusion to anything other than confident heterosexuality. Women have played important, if subordinate, roles in folk’s past, but homosexuality was rarely a topic for public consumption’ (2006: xxiii). Gruning discusses the work of specific queer folk musicians – Ani DiFranco, Martin Swinger, Mark Weigle – but concludes that the responses of folk music audiences to work by these individuals ‘have been decidedly mixed’: ‘The more subtle manifestations of long-held homosexual prejudices have yet to be reconciled for today’s folk [music community] and the American public at large’ (2006: 159). The songs on Seventh Tree are not indebted to traditional folk songs in lyrics or melody. The ‘folkiness’ of the album manifests in other ways, and it is noticeable that it is these facets that are subjected to queer twists. Inside the packaging for the album there appear two images of human/owl hybrids: a coloured pencil drawing by Alison Goldfrapp of a naked female form with a bird’s head, drawn in a rather naïve style, and a photograph, shot outdoors, of her in a pinkish Pierrot top and white ruff being embraced from behind by a human wearing a large carnivalesque owl head and ‘wings’. (These pictures would not look out of place on many a freak folk release.) Read together, these two images suggest that

206

Mute Records

Goldfrapp is wrapping herself in a female bird; the owl’s traditional associations with wisdom, knowledge and vision are here shot through with a sexualized tone. Most striking, perhaps, is the sense of inter-species hybridization they visualize. Other queerly tinged animal/human combinations appear across Goldfrapp’s oeuvre. In ‘Train’, Alison Goldfrapp sings of a ‘wolf lady’ who ‘sucks my brain’,5 her tone leaving it unclear whether this is welcomed or not; the cover of the single features an image of a wolf ’s head collaged onto a human body dressed in T-shirt and scanty underwear. Wolves also featured in the sleeve art for Black Cherry, adorning Alison Goldfrapp’s shoulders as living clothing. The music video for ‘Number 1’, directed by Dawn Shadforth, is set in a plastic surgery clinic populated by humanoid figures with the heads of dogs. On stage, Goldfrapp have repeatedly been accompanied by dancers sporting animal features, such as horse heads and tails or wolf masks. While the sexualization of inter-species relations is obviously ethically troubling, Goldfrapp’s animalhuman hybrids do not shy away from asking complex queer questions: where are the acceptable boundaries in human-animal interactions, and why? When do the formal, categorical distinctions between humans and other species collapse? Goldfrapp’s use of folk motifs and elements also enables the duo to suggest that non-urban locations are sites in which we can locate queer bodies and affects. Disco and glam are the sounds of the metropolis, the city, or (at least) the hard urban landscape. Folk, in contrast, is associated with the countryside, the village, the remote community. On Seventh Tree, Alison falls for women she can’t keep – the ‘Caravan Girl’, ‘like the sun’, whose name is unknown;6 the woman in ‘Little Bird’ who is compared to the titular creature, but who has been lost, leading to melancholic memories of ‘the land of blue gold’, ‘where we were free’.7 Here, the folk-inflected non-metropolitan landscape is one of queer possibility, through its making affordance for eccentricity and difference. ‘Cologne Cerrone Houdini’ attempts to locate a utopian elsewhere, somewhere beyond the city, for a couple: they have ‘left the smoke behind’ them, and dwell, ‘idle in the sunshine / over there in yonder / in another world’.8 Though the non-urban can be a space of ostracization, threat and prejudice for many queer people, Seventh Tree attempts 5

6

7

8

‘Train’ written by A. Goldfrapp and W. Gregory, courtesy Warner/Chappell Music Publishing Limited. ‘Caravan Girl’ written by A. Goldfrapp and W. Gregory, courtesy Warner/Chappell Music Publishing Limited. ‘Little Bird’ written by A. Goldfrapp and W. Gregory, courtesy Warner/Chappell Music Publishing Limited. ‘Cologne Cerrone Houdini’ written by A. Goldfrapp and W. Gregory, courtesy Warner/Chappell Music Publishing Limited.

Twist: Goldfrapp’s Genre Perversion

207

to model a queer alternative: that the countryside may provide a haven for the non-normative. Though not a folk album in sound or visual design, Goldfrapp’s sixth album, Tales of Us (Mute 2013), is also dominated by a gentle, acoustic aesthetic. The still images produced to accompany the record are all in black-and-white, and largely depict blank and quiet spaces: trees in fog, a patch of gravel illuminated by car headlights. Each of the ten songs on the album engages with a different character; all but one have Christian names as their titles. ‘Annabel’ was inspired by Kathleen Winter’s novel of the same title (2010), whose narrative traces key moments in the life story of an intersex individual growing up in Labrador, Canada. The lyrics of ‘Clay’ are based on a love letter written by one male soldier to another. The figure addressed in ‘Stranger’, meanwhile, was ‘born a mystery, you’re the in between / boy or girl’;9 like ‘Annabel’, this unknown individual is also ambiguously gendered. In fact, it could be argued that the entirety of Tales of Us has a queer colouring: as Darren Lee notes, Alison Goldfrapp has identified the lesbian novelist Patricia Highsmith ‘as a key influence behind these dark, twisted vignettes’ (2013). Viewed from this perspective, the ‘Us’ of the title suggests that the record is specifically addressed to, and telling stories about, a queer community. The video for ‘Annabel’ depicts an ambiguously gendered child on the cusp of adolescence wandering around a large country house and its surrounding grounds. In slow-motion black-and-white footage, the child throws a pebble into a stagnant swimming pool, traces fingers along a dilapidated tennis net, rides a bicycle through the rooms of the house, takes a bath, shelters in a woodland den which is decorated with strings of pearls, ribbons, sketchbooks, dolls and a picture of David Bowie, and finally dons a silver dress and skips through a field. As the child puts on the dress, colour starts to fade into the imagery, and the song gains extra contours of synths and orchestration; this queer individual seems to have found a place in which to fleetingly belong. The song and video for ‘Annabel’ feature echoes of the various musical genres that Goldfrapp have attempted to queer in sustained ways – disco (lush string orchestrations), glam (Bowie), and folk (the rural as a potentially utopian space for non-normative individuals) – and serves up a vision of queer possibility. Indeed, it serves as a valuable summation of Goldfrapp’s achievements across their career: the duo

9

‘Stranger’ written by A. Goldfrapp and W. Gregory, courtesy Warner/Chappell Music Publishing Limited.

208

Mute Records

have repeatedly offered up fresh, queer twists on established musical genres in ways that invite reconsideration of their political implications and resonances.

References Auslander, P. (2006), Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Ballard, J. G. (1973), Crash, London: Jonathan Cape. ‘Beats and Lust’ (2003), New Beats, April. Available online: http://goldfrapp.free.fr/php/ home.php?N=2&id=814&year=03 (accessed 29 January 2018). Dyer, R. ([1979] 2006), ‘In Defence of Disco’, New Formations, 58 (Summer): 101–8. Echols, A. (2010), Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company. Gruning, T. R. (2006), Millennium Folk: American Folk Music Since the Sixties, Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press. Hildebrand, L. (2013), ‘“Luring Disco Dollies to a Life of Vice”: Queer Pop Music’s Moment’, Journal of Popular Music Studies, 25 (4): 415–38. Hoskyns, B. (1998), Glam! Bowie, Bolan, and the Glitter Rock Revolution, London: Faber and Faber. Lee, D. (2013), ‘Goldfrapp, Tales of Us Review’, The Quietus, 9 September. Available online: http://thequietus.com/articles/13298-goldfrapp-tales-of-us-album-review (accessed 29 January 2018). Petridis, A. (2003), ‘Goldfrapp: Black Cherry’, Guardian, 18 April. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2003/apr/18/popandrock.artsfeatures1 (accessed 29 January 2018). Reynolds, S. (2016), Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, London: Faber and Faber. Saturday Night Fever (1977), [Film] Dir. John Badham, USA: Paramount Pictures. ‘Supernature: Review’ (2005), Observer, 17 July. Available online: http://goldfrapp.free. fr/php/home.php?N=2&id=1136&year=05 (accessed 29 January 2018). Turenne, M. (2006), ‘Schaffel Beat Resuscitates Techno’, Exclaim! 1 January. Available online: https://exclaim.ca/music/article/schaffel_beat_resuscitates_techno (accessed 29 January 2018). Winter, K. (2010), Annabel, Toronto: House of Anansi Press.

15

Arca: Mute’s Mutant Michael Waugh

Everything is a performance, but that just leaves us with the awareness to shape what we desire. Arca (2015b) Historically, the roster of Mute Records has been replete with transgressive musicians with diverse identities, from the industrial avant-garde of Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire to the electronica and dance-pop of Plastikman and Depeche Mode. Much of the transgression has been overtly sexualized, provocatively foregrounding non-heteronormative genders and sexualities. This chapter studies the latest Mute artist to explore these themes: electronic musician Arca. Taking the mutable performativity of the self as a conceptual starting point, Arca’s abstract sound, ‘pandrogyne’ costuming and fluid self-representation embody the liminal ungraspability of queer identity. By examining his (Arca has, as yet, offered no vocal resistance to associations with the male pronoun) two Mute albums, 2014’s Xen and 2015’s Mutant (whose title evokes that of its parent label), I suggest that Arca’s studies of gender and sexuality display a holistic disintegration of binary categorization that is conducive to queer theory. For brevity, and to remain true to the focus of this anthology, I only make passing reference to his 2017 album Arca (XL Recordings), released after Arca departed Mute (his reasons for moving to XL have not been confirmed by the parties involved). I begin by outlining the key themes of queer theory, emphasizing the notion that identity (and, by extension, gender) is a constructed fluid performance: as Arca stresses, ‘identities are picked up and shed multiple times in life’ (2015a). I then provide a brief history of queering and transgression in Mute’s canon. These conceptual and contextual elements are employed to analyse Arca’s work, outlining the fragmented sonic juxtapositions of Xen, the intimate celebration of the conventionally ugly in Mutant, hyper-sexualized live

210

Mute Records

performances, and collaborator Jesse Kanda’s artwork and videos. I have been fortunate enough to collaborate with Arca and Kanda, interviewing them several times for my doctoral thesis (during the process of which they were generous and accommodating) and co-authoring (with Arca) the 2015 press release for Mutant, and I consider both to be friends. From this position, I have gained considerable insight into Arca’s creative approach and thematic inspirations, and I argue here that his abstract studies of identity and ‘pride [in] deformity, innocence, distortion and vulnerability’ further the subversive representations and sounds historically promoted by Mute (Waugh 2015). I open with a brief overview of the key issues of queer theory, as these themes have strongly inspired Arca’s output (Arca 2015a). ‘Queer’ was accepted into academic discourse following the publication of several influential texts by Judith Butler (1988; 1990), informed by the idea that gender is constructed, performed and fluctuating. As Butler explains, ‘Gender is in no way a stable identity … rather, it is [an identity] instituted through a stylized repetition of acts’ (Butler 1988: 519, emphasis in original). Gender is not a prescriptive ‘model of identity’ that defines a person’s actions or feelings from birth, but is instead a personally selected or socially ascribed performance of identity that is malleable and related to ‘social temporality’ (Butler 1988: 520): where the person is, whom they are with, what they are doing, and so forth. A person ‘selects’ their gender by electing to wear a particular costume, both literal (choice of clothes/hairstyle) and metaphorical (their ‘performance’: tastes, actions, vocal cadence, sexuality, etc.). These costumes are inhabited and shed on a regular basis throughout one’s life. As such, structuralist heteronormative definitions of gender – male versus female, homosexual versus heterosexual, and so forth – are flawed in their limited binary outlook. The concepts debated in queer theory can be traced back to these ideas. In 1991, as guest editor of influential feminist journal Differences, Teresa De Lauretis produced one of academia’s most noteworthy reappropriations of ‘queer’ from its historically homophobic, biphobic and transphobic context. Subtitled Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities, its articles embraced Butler’s notion of gender as a performative construction, rejecting patriarchal gender binaries in favour of a foregrounding of fluidity (De Lauretis 1991). Although certainly not the first example of queer commentary, the journal offered a visible and influential platform for the discourse. In principle, queer theory highlights multiple minority groups while simultaneously celebrating the differences between them and undermining hegemonic heteronormativity, although Lauren

Arca: Mute’s Mutant

211

Berlant and Michael Warner assert that the term ‘queer’ must not depreciate into a mere ‘umbrella for gays, lesbians, bisexuals’ and trans (1995: 344). Instead, it must retain the very indefinability, ‘ambivalence’ and ‘unpredictability’ that initially inspired it (1995: 344). It is here that a certain disharmony within queer studies must be noted. Queer theory, according to Turner, was formulated in response to the dominance of ‘white, middle-class’ men in gender studies, with articles by/about gay white men continuing to overshadow writing by/about cis women, lesbians, trans, bisexuals or minority racial groups (2000: 107). This issue continues to proliferate, producing a schism between those who favour a unified queer ‘umbrella’ and those whose discourse of ‘ambivalence’ and ‘unpredictability’, employed to counter patriarchal structures, grows ever more abstract. It is the latter form of queer commentary that most acutely applies to Arca’s work outlined below. This conceptualization of queerness, adopted in the following analyses, is not ‘the theory of anything in particular’, but is instead empowered through its subversive ability to ‘take on varied shapes, risks, ambitions, and ambivalences in various contexts’ (Berlant and Warner 1995: 344, emphasis in original). To truly exemplify the shapeshifting nature of gender, queer must itself be a flexible, malleable concept, allowing minority groups to elude the constrictions of patriarchal binaries of identity. Queer theory, then, is ‘radically opposed to a fixed subject or practice, a political metaphor without a fixed referent’ (Enteen 2010: 12). A significant portion of Mute’s roster is comprised of industrial and club music, both of which have extensive connections to queerness and nonheteronormativity (Reed 2013: 205; Glazer 2014). Jordie Taylor notes that many musical movements such as ‘genderfuck’, queer punk/‘queercore’ and ‘riot grrrlstyle third-wave feminism’ have transcended conservative gender definitions and promoted a queer fluctuation, inclusivity and celebration of difference (2012: 99, 117, 150). This music ‘offers a commentary on gender construction, performance and enactment, thus situating [it] within a [transgressive] queer … discourse’ (2012: 67). It is possible to apply these ideas to industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle, a Mute act that embraced the ‘spectrum of genders [and] sexual orientations in industrial music communities’ (Reed 2013: 205). Throbbing Gristle openly explored transgressive and non-traditional sexual experiences musically and performatively. Their controversial live shows and lyrics referenced multiple taboo subjects, focusing on discomfiting exaggerations of pornography, serial

212

Mute Records

killers and ‘bodily [and] erotic functions’ (Reed 2013: 77) while maintaining a ‘subcultural interest in tattooing, body-piercing and body modification’ (Daniel 2008: 138). Notably, Throbbing Gristle were fronted by Genesis P-Orridge, who has latterly identified as third gender and initiated the 1990s ‘Pandrogeny Project’ alongside partner Lady Jaye. The two participants underwent body modification and rejected/alternated gendered pronouns in order to resemble one another, adopting the term ‘pandrogyne’, a concept whose definition is largely synonymous with the fluctuating liminality of queerness. These issues mirror the tendencies of many Mute signees and associated artists. Swans, Einstürzende Neubauten, Laibach and Cabaret Voltaire all employ similar tactics built on extremity and profanity, drawing attention to sexualities and genders largely concealed in mainstream heteronormative discourse by ‘using sexuality or eroticism in almost an intimidating way’ (Arca 2015b), while the Residents and Kraftwerk (acts with Mute distribution deals) explore issues of anonymity and identity in their representational approach (Glaros and Laffey 2012: 73; Bussy 2001: 107). Alison Goldfrapp, of electronic duo Goldfrapp, foregrounds her pansexuality while rejecting the limitations of categorization (Flynn 2010). Mute has been central to the growth in popularity of electronic/club genres, with its signing of artists such Depeche Mode and Yazoo (and its adoption of artists such as New Order) progressing to the promotion of techno pioneers Plastikman and Apparat, dance-pop group Liars, goth vocalist Zola Jesus and DJ Moby. Club music history – despite patriarchal attempts to rewrite it – is inseparable from LGBTQ communities (Glazer 2014; Garcia 2014), from its Chicago house beginnings through to contemporary ballroom and ‘voguing’, and many important figures from industrial music (notably P-Orridge) began producing dance music as clubs replaced post-punk/industrial culture as liberating queer spaces. Much club music dissolves traditional musical representation politics given the frequent absence (or, at least, the distortion) of a definably male/female vocalist (although, admittedly, there continues to be a problematically male dominance in production and DJing). As emphasized by Simon Reynolds ([1998] 2013) and Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson (1999), there is a powerful disintegration of identity connected to club cultures due to the absence of recognizable frontmen/women (as found in most popular musical forms). This avoidance of hierarchical (usually gendered) norms, coupled with the intoxicated nature of much dance-floor experience, provides potential for openness and a liberal attitude towards unconventional gender/ sexual practices (though, it must be noted, not all clubs are so utopian or open-

Arca: Mute’s Mutant

213

minded). Indeed, the rhythmic nature of club music has a sensual bodily effect comparable to that exacted by the extremity of industrial noise (Hegarty 2007), resulting in associations between physical/sexual experience and electronic instrumentation. Electronic music, then, in both its dance and industrial formats, has a longstanding relationship with queerness, sensuality and dissolution of the self. Mute, at the centre of these developments, has contributed to the cultivation of a subculture that promotes fluidity, sexual experimentation and a rejection of binary norms. This has inspired the mutable electronic sounds of Arca, whose work draws on and furthers the queer discourse that is fundamental to Mute’s legacy. I now study the absolute deconstruction of gender binaries in Arca’s productions. Identity politics and queer theory are definitive themes for Arca, and he has acknowledged the impact that Butler’s writing has on his music and live performances (Arca 2015a). I begin by examining the disintegrative textures of Arca’s 2014 album Xen alongside its accompanying visuals and live shows, before analysing the ways in which his 2015 release Mutant develops these themes. Xen is a highly abstract project with structures and textures that, at face value, seem wilfully non-representational. Indeed, this aspect of the release provoked confused reviews in several electronic music publications, whose writers seemed uncertain about what to make of the record (Brown 2014: 63; Kalev 2014). Yet the titular figure of Xen, according to Arca, is fundamentally representational; a part of his personality that he refers to ‘as “her”, but says [is] neither male nor female’ (Friedlander 2014). She is an aspect of his ‘fragmented’ identity that comes out in much of his work (Arca 2015a). It is significant that Arca admires the writing of Butler, believing that gender is a performance and that queer artists must break down the notion that sexuality is ‘black and white’ (Arca 2015a). He rejects the term ‘alter-ego’ to describe Xen, as she is actually a ‘part of me’ that is not restricted by the limitations that ‘clumsy’ language place on defining such an ethereal and abstract entity (Arca 2015a). She is ‘more joyous and messy’ than a mere ‘other me that I’m performing’ (Arca 2015a). Xen is a source of inspiration for Arca’s musical approach, and his sound encompasses the complex emotions and ambiguities that comprise his relationship to her. Xen may be ‘non-representational’ in a traditional sense, but it offers abstract images of the conflicting emotions that Arca experiences while simultaneously admiring, rejecting and ultimately embodying his ungendered ‘other’ self. Sonically, there are echoes of Mute’s musical history in the repeated employment of rhythmic club beats, aggressive industrial clatters and screeches,

214

Mute Records

and glowing synth-scapes. Yet the album (and, indeed, Arca’s subsequent releases Mutant and Arca) utilizes a distinctive palette that deviates from conventional styles of electronic composition. While the so-called ‘Intelligent Dance Music’ (IDM) of Aphex Twin, Autechre, and so on was credited with disrupting the uniform structures of electronic dance music long before Arca’s emergence, the movement’s sound is largely built on complex mathematical re-constructions of the format. In contrast with the linear, geometric progression of house, techno, and so forth, IDM’s intricacy is sonically rhizomatic (although still precise in its formation). Arca’s de-constructive music, however, renders the technical template of IDM fluid, slippery, intangible. It hyperbolizes the plasticity of synthesized instrumentation through the deployment of two distinctive textures: an emphasis on mechanical industrial noise, and an overarching aesthetic of vivid colour that drips and oozes like paint, instead of shimmering like metal. As Philip Sherburne acutely notes, ‘kick drums stutter and stumble; rhythmic patterns fall apart in mid-song [and] have come completely untethered from the rigid grid that usually governs electronic music’s timekeeping’ (2014). IDM’s exacting precision becomes liquefied, as though Arca was inspired by the musical style’s blueprint but chose to playfully reimagine it using DayGlo paints. This formula generates a sense of both time-in-flux (musically) and malleable identity (representationally), evoking the refusal of categorization that informs queer theory. This reflects the blurry love-hate relationship that comes from the fact that Xen’s ‘mere existence is kind of repulsive and attractive at once’ (Friedlander 2014). Issues criticized in the aforementioned reviews – particularly the overtly digital textures and ‘haphazard’ track sequencing – are in actuality critical aspects of the ambiguous queer exploration of self-identity that is exhibited on Xen. As mentioned earlier, electronic sounds have an affiliation with physicality, rhythm and extreme sensual expression. Arca acknowledges this, and both Xen and its follow-up Mutant explore the potential organic emotionalities of wordless electronic textures. Arca claims to be frustrated with the limitations of language: It’s so clumsy. There’s often two words that are close in meaning, yet what I’m trying to say is in between them, or it might be a little more layered and nuanced. … I had to renounce words in order to go deep into the practice of making materials and textures that would express what I’m trying to say more accurately. (Sherburne 2015)

While Arca has latterly started to utilize vocal textures in his music, with 2017 album Arca deploying voice to ethereal, haunting effect (crucially, however,

Arca: Mute’s Mutant

215

utilizing his native Spanish and wordless intonations to explore his transnational identity and to disrupt the interpretations of a predominantly Anglophone audience), his first two albums symbolize the indefinable nature of queerness through abstract instrumental representation, rather than the dominant form of storied emotionality found in lyrics/vocals. The ‘haphazard’ structure (Kalev 2014) of both Xen and Mutant is absolutely intentional. On the former, the delicate synthesized keyboards of ‘Failed’ clash with the aggressive Pendereckiesque strings of ‘Family Violence’ before moving into the club-oriented beats of ‘Thievery’, and so on throughout. These confrontational juxtapositions and ‘skeletal contrasts’ (Arca 2015b) are deliberate animations of the fluctuations of queer identity. As Arca asserts: I think about how binary works, from the 0s to the 1s, and my favourite moment is [the] millisecond that it takes to jump from one to the next. It’s the most fleeting ephemeral moment, the moment of the most fertility. [The clashes on Xen reflect the] split second when you’re readjusting, gathering your bearings, trying to figure out where you are. … You’re listening to something really quiet and something really loud and jarring comes in. There’s like a millisecond where you’re not yourself. (2015a)

Arca has suggested that the multiplicity of his ‘self ’ is not straightforward or constantly enjoyable (Friedlander 2014). It can be painful, it can cause self-doubt, and it can generate many concurrent divergent emotions. The instability of Arca’s first two albums – which shift rapidly from ethereal beauty, to devastating sorrow, to dark sexual aggression, to upbeat joviality – symbolizes the malleable nature of identity and gender. This simultaneously evokes and expands the foregrounding of queer ideas that has been present in Mute’s wider output. The visuals that Jesse Kanda produced for Xen and Mutant continue Mute’s tradition of producing groundbreaking cover art and videos that complement the sonic experimentation of its artists (documented beautifully in Burrows 2017). As well as being long-term collaborators, Arca and Kanda are close friends and share an ‘intertwined’ relationship (Kanda 2014). In Kanda’s words, it is ‘like we’re a part of each other’s DNA’ (Kanda 2014). This intimate bond sees them working organically in tandem and producing art that, intentionally or otherwise, ultimately generates similar themes. As such, it is telling that Kanda is intrigued by the potential for his videos to exhibit extreme fluctuation of sensualities, identities and emotions. Videos include themes such as ‘falling in love and the desire to melt into that person … violent self-expression and exposure, [and]

216

Mute Records

reminder[s] to not let yourself be bummed out’ (Kanda 2014). The expressive resonances of these motifs are clear in his videos, despite the fact that they forgo any attempt at narrative or ‘manipulative’ storied emotion (Arca 2015a). Kanda’s videos are ‘minimal’ in terms of content, amplifying the sensualities of colour, texture and motion. The 2015 clips for ‘Thievery’ and ‘Xen’ feature nothing but Arca’s ‘other’ dancing provocatively, yet a variety of clashing emotions generated by the textures, distortions and colouration of the images themselves (evocative of the album’s sonics) turn each film into a journey of sensations and sentiments. In the video named for her, Xen disintegrates and is pulled in multiple directions over and over again, her image splintering, morphing and attempting to escape the physical form that constrains the many facets of her identity. This equates the visuals with the fragmentation and oozing sounds of Arca’s music. Arca believes that ‘identities are picked up and shed multiple times in life. … One day you can wake up and feel like a boy, and one day you can wake up and feel like a girl’, and his sonic output and visual representation ‘flick between the two’ while inhabiting the liminal spaces between (2015b). In live shows accompanying all of Arca’s albums, Arca and Kanda amplify these motifs and render them even more abstract and subversive. The refusal of binary categorization is visualized in Arca’s election to wear explicitly ‘pandrogyne’ clothing onstage, in a style reminiscent of P-Orridge and Depeche Mode. His short, boyish haircut is contrasted with pencil skirts, knee-length leather platform boots, thongs, make-up and, at varying shows, leather croptops or ‘straightjacket’-like shirts. This costuming underscores the ambiguities and distortions of his own music. When asked about his selection of dress, he explained: A transgender person is physically embodying [queer theory]. I was thinking about [that when] deciding how to present the record. … I didn’t just wanna be in drag either. I wanted to complicate that. … How do you … communicate queering yourself? … For me it was important not to wear a wig. … You have to zoom in a little bit more to see it. (Arca 2015a)

These assertions, alongside his admiration for Butler’s discourses of performative identity, suggest that Arca’s live costuming consciously embodies queer ideas. It incorporates ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ elements alongside recognizably LGBTQ fashion styles, foregrounding ‘sexuality or eroticism in almost an intimidating way [that jumps between] binary states [by] rang[ing] from boyish and innocent to hyper-sexual’ (Arca 2015b). Matching the fluid costuming, the live

Arca: Mute’s Mutant

217

performances display Arca and Kanda cycling through a number of contrasting and extreme sensations. Kanda’s visuals pull apart the notion of a solid ‘human’ identity in increasingly evocative ways, illustrating Xen and other grotesque figures in various emotional and disintegrative states, while Arca explores varying themes of sensuality by shifting rapidly between gentle piano pieces, club beats, surreal collages and aggressive bursts of industrial static. As the performances progress, Arca sings wordlessly and in Spanish, dancing provocatively, grinding his body into the stage and voguing like a ballroom dancer, underlining his (and dance music’s) connections to queer club subcultures while sensually driving electronic music back towards its transgressive and bodily roots. On Mutant, Arca’s second album for Mute, the producer expanded his evocation of mutable identity into more inclusive territory. He noted that where ‘Xen was very introverted, Mutant is much more outwardly volatile and much more optimistic’, with this contrast allowing him to develop a more nuanced study of the notion that ‘everything is a performance [that] leaves us with the awareness to shape what we desire’ (2015b). While Xen’s fragmented clashes are often introspective and even violent, Mutant melds subtler tensions into a more personal and accessible aesthetic (an approach later expanded on the deeply intimate Arca). Xen’s jarring shapeshifting is replaced by smoother transitions between textures as Arca moves beyond the incendiary aggression of his earlier album’s queer juxtapositions. He believes that ‘strik[ing] against something’ or ‘using sexuality or eroticism in almost an intimidating way’, as with artists such as Throbbing Gristle, only offers effective disruptions in the short term, and that violent transgression must ultimately become a platform for more substantial integration ‘within the thing you’re up against’ (2015b). The press release for the album, conceived by Arca and myself, states that ‘Mutant is about sensuality and impulsiveness as escape routes out of rigidity’ (Waugh 2015), with its personal themes and erotic palette allowing for fluidity beyond the possibilities afforded by the more hostile Xen. Intimacy and nature animate the record’s composition, with song titles named after Arca’s closest friends (‘Soichiro’ is Kanda’s name in Japanese; ‘Snakes’ references Arca and collaborator Björk’s shared Zodiac sign; a bonus track on the Japanese edition, ‘Ashland’, is DJ Total Freedom’s real name) and bountiful floral imagery adorning promotion material for the release. This, alongside the hyper-revelatory selfportrait photographs and self-shot videos that complement the album, contrasts sharply with Xen’s more abstract imagery and impersonal track titles (only ‘Failed’ references an associate, his boyfriend Daniel Sannwald) (Gorton 2014).

218

Mute Records

This was a self-conscious choice, as ‘the only way to do [Mutant] justice is to look right into the camera and show my face and not be afraid. To make myself vulnerable and make it possible for people to disagree and lash out or to agree and feel that they’re present with me’ (Sherburne 2015). One reason for Arca’s movement towards a more open aesthetic may relate to the unflinchingly sexualized shows that followed Xen’s release. Arca had been relatively ‘anonymous’ in the media prior to this, offering few interviews or publicity photographs, so it is significant that he became a prominent visual and communicative presence in his own work after exposing his identity on stage. Again, this progression has been furthered with the centrality of vocals on Arca and the hyper-sexualized images (both of Arca and in Kanda’s artwork) used to promote/accompany it. Nevertheless, the major thematic impulse of Arca’s integration of personal traits into Mutant comes from an attempt to generate a more welcoming and optimistic record. He suggests that he has even come to regard ‘queer’ as a somewhat exclusive term, believing that, despite aspirations of absolute indefinability and fluidity, it has too frequently been associated wholly with the LGBTQ umbrella (2015b). His deployment of the word ‘mutant’ instead ‘allows for ambiguity and multiplicity of the self ’ for every listener, not just for sexual/ gendered minorities (2015b). Where the violence of Xen often shrouded Arca’s identity in favour of aggressive auditory assaults and hyperreal colouration, Mutant – mirroring its accompanying floral imagery and promotional selfportraits – is more overtly performative and exhibitionistic. As Arca explains, ‘rebellion is problematic to me if it stays in rebellion, because you don’t [have] optimism. So “mutant” [and] flowers and the idea of things blooming was important because out of all of this darkness I’m the kind of person that chooses hope. So Mutant is [a flower] that overgrew over all the gore’ (2015b). Arca’s second Mute album offered the first indication that his study of fluid identity is growing into a more welcoming and intimate aesthetic than the antagonistic industrial sounds of Xen, and his work since – especially the Spanish vocals and song-driven performances of Arca – has continued this trend. The almost unanimous critical praise that has accompanied both Mutant and Arca is testament to their more palatable sound, suggesting that Arca’s later projects have expressed his conceptual interests more universally than his abrasive first album. Notably, the selection of ‘mutant’ as a title amplifies the inclusivity of Arca’s post-Xen output. Arca prefers the idea of ‘mutation as opposed to evolution’, despite both concepts relating explicitly to the natural

Arca: Mute’s Mutant

219

visuals that adorn Mutant, as evolution suggests a problematically Darwinian form of ‘improvement’ or ‘survival of the fittest’ (2015b). A mutation offers a more acute representation of fluid identity as A mutation on its own doesn’t have a value of ‘better’ or ‘worse’. I like the idea of a mutation as not like an upward growth, but as a sideways growth, because that to me has implicit in it that we don’t have to be afraid of something that is different to you. You don’t have to be afraid of the other iteration of you as a being. … A mutation might make a being more fragile, but that being can have a value. (2015b)

Arca celebrates explicit difference and conventionally ‘ugly’ or ‘weak’ attributes, utilizing a term that incorporates every conceivable ‘growth’ or change of self, not just those deemed socially desirable. As our press release asserts, ‘Pride is taken in deformity, innocence, distortion and vulnerability’ (Waugh 2015). Butler (1988, 1990) stresses that every individual performs multiple selves at all times. A person does not just change ‘progressively’ as they age; they are constantly morphing and inhabiting numerous personas at once. The positivity of this perpetual mutability and transformability is mirrored in Mutant’s continuation (albeit in a less punishing way) of Xen’s fluctuating palette, and in Arca’s personal growth into a more central representational presence (including the adoption of a vocal persona on Arca) within his art. Arca simultaneously queers the notion of a secure sense of self while celebrating all forms of identity, no matter how ‘deformed’ or ‘undesirable’ they may be. As mutants do not ‘fit comfortably into binary oppositions of any normativity: race, nationality or gender’, they visibly destabilize the apparent solidity of dominant representational normativity (Arca 2015b). Alongside Kanda’s visuals for the project, which incorporate similar contrasts between the desirable and the repulsive, Arca’s Mutant draws attention to ‘things that are taboo or repressed within us [while] educating people to process why they feel disgust’ by illuminating beauty in the traditionally ugly and sonically amplifying the most repressed and intimate facets of his own identity (Sherburne 2015). To conclude, although Arca is far from the first electronic producer or queer musician to operate on Mute, his output for the label has stretched the possibilities for musical examinations of queering, performative identity and intimate non-vocal (or non-lyrical) representation beyond those previously exhibited. Xen and Mutant maintain the imprint’s tradition of a transgressive rejection of heteronormativity while simultaneously highlighting the limitations

220

Mute Records

of a purely hostile or provocative sonic/visual assault. Instead, Arca dissolves binary definition beyond even the groundbreaking art of P-Orridge and others. His focus on absolute fluidity may be refracted through harsh sonic juxtapositions (particularly on Xen); confrontationally ‘pandrogyne’ costuming; hyper-sexualized live performances; and visuals that challenge conventional perceptions of beauty (trends that have defined other Mute artists), but his output concurrently celebrates the personal and the organic. While Xen is undoubtedly aesthetically self-contained and brutal, Mutant provides a more optimistic and welcoming boldness that is even closer to queer theory’s exploration of difference, performativity and malleability. Arca is another example of an electronic musician breaking from heteronormativity on Mute, displaying a complete absorption and exposition of ungraspable queerness that reflects the label’s enduring centrality within progressive cultures.

References Arca (2015a), Interview with the author, 25 January. Arca (2015b), Interview with the author, 13 August. Berlant, L., and M. Warner (1995), ‘What does Queer Theory teach us about X?’, PMLA, 110 (3): 343–9. Brown, B. (2014), ‘Arca – Xen/FKA twigs – LP1’, The Wire, 369: 63. Burrows, T. (2017), Mute: A Visual Document, London: Thames and Hudson. Bussy, P. (2001), Kraftwerk: Man, Machine and Music, London: SAF Publishing. Butler, J. (1988), ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal, 40 (4): 519–31. Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Daniel, D. (2008), 33 1/3: Throbbing Gristle’s Twenty Jazz Funk Greats, London: Bloomsbury. De Lauretis, T. (1991), Differences: Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Enteen, J. B. (2010), Virtual English: Queer Internets and Digital Creolization, New York: Routledge. Flynn, P. (2010), ‘Alison Goldfrapp Walks Alone’, Sunday Times, 28 February. Available online: http://web.archive.org/web/20110615063654/http://entertainment.timesonline. co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article7037529.ece (accessed 20 August 2016). Friedlander, E. (2014), ‘Cover story: Arca finds Xen’, The Fader, October. Available online: http://www.thefader.com/2014/09/30/arca-producer-xen-interview-coverstory (accessed 16 October 2015).

Arca: Mute’s Mutant

221

Garcia, L-M. (2014), ‘An Alternate History of Sexuality in Club Culture’, Resident Advisor. Available online: http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?1927 (accessed 16 January 2016). Gilbert, J., and E. Pearson (1999), Discographies: Dance music, Culture and the Politics of Sound, Abingdon: Routledge. Glaros, M., and M. Laffey (2012), ‘Situating The Residents’, Journal of Film and Video, 64 (1–2): 72–8. Glazer, J. (2014), ‘Dance Pride: The Gay Origins of Dance Music’, Thump. Available online: http://thump.vice.com/words/dance-pride-the-gay-origins-of-dance-music (accessed 19 January 2016). Gorton, T. (2014), ‘Arca: Xen Master’, Dazed, 19 December. Available online: http:// www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/22973/1/arca-xen-master (accessed 19 July 2016). Hegarty, P. (2007), Noise Music: A History, London: Continuum. Kalev, M. (2014), ‘Arca – Xen’, Fact, 10 November. Available online: http://www.factmag. com/2014/11/10/arca-xen-review/ (accessed 19 July 2016). Kanda, J (2014), Interview with the author, 22 November. Reed, S. A. (2013), Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reynolds, S. ([1998] 2013), Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture, 3rd edn, London: Faber and Faber. Sherburne, P. (2014), ‘Xen’, Pitchfork, 3 November. Available online: https://pitchfork. com/reviews/albums/19836-arca-xen/ (accessed 8 January 2018). Sherburne, P. (2015), ‘Arca’s Warped Beauty’, Pitchfork. Available online: http:// pitchfork.com/features/interview/9754-arcas-warped-beauty/ (accessed 10 June 2016). Taylor, J. (2012), Playing it Queer: Popular Music, Identity and Queer World-making, New York: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers. Turner, W. B. (2000), A Genealogy of Queer Theory, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Waugh, M. (2015), ‘Arca – Mutant (Press Release)’, Mute. Available online: http://mute. com/arca/announces-details-for-new-album-mutant-to-be-released-20-novemberwatch-new-video-for-en (accessed 6 January 2016).

16

Composing in Circuitry: Sonic Artist Dirty Electronics Lourdes Nicole Crosby García

Working the circuit 1 A concept is born John Stephen Richards (also known as Dirty Electronics) is an electroacoustic musician and sonic artist hailing from southwest England. His focus is on collaborative experiences in the sonic world (he calls this approach ‘DIT’, or ‘doing it together’) and designing hand-held touch instruments out of printed circuit boards for his Dirty Electronics Ensemble events. The concept of ‘dirty electronics’ was born when, being isolated while working with sound on a computer, Richards came to the realization that he wanted to experience the social interaction he once had when being a performing musician. He wanted to get his hands ‘dirty’ again by having that social reciprocity once more and working with people of different backgrounds and musical skills. He has described this experience as ‘a physical response to being tied into making sound in a more abstract or virtual way with computers’ (‘Dirty Electronics’ 2011). Dirty Electronics emerged as an idea ‘that focuses on shared experiences, ritual, gesture, touch and social interaction. In Dirty Electronics process and performance are inseparably bound’ (Dirty Electronics n.d.). Through his exploration of shared experiences and social interactions in his Dirty Electronics Ensemble, Richards became convinced that it was not enough to be DIY, but to explore the process of ‘doing it together’, or DIT, as he would coin it. Dirty Electronics’ and Mute Records’ official partnership began when Joana Seguro, who had undertaken some A&R work for the label and had an interest in Richards’s projects, approached him about becoming involved in the Short Circuit festival, which took place at the Roundhouse in London in May 2011.

224

Mute Records

Capturing Daniel Miller’s attention, Mute commissioned Richards to produce a hand-held touch instrument for the event. This chapter looks into Richards’s formation and exploration of the DIT approach through Dirty Electronics’ and Mute Records’ collaborative endeavours.

2 DIY ≠ DIT The ‘doing it yourself ’, or ‘do it yourself ’, concept has been in consumers’ mental framework since the early twentieth century and became a household phrase by the 1950s (Gelber 1997: 66–112). Academics Marco Wolf and Shaun McQuitty, who specialize in marketing, have defined DIY thus: ‘individuals engage raw and semi-raw materials and component parts to produce, transform, or reconstruct material possessions, including those drawn from the natural environment’ (2011: 154). Home improvement and car repair projects are perhaps the most popular forms of DIY. In the music world, punk rock pushed DIY into a subculture of ‘doers’. The main idea was action and self-expression. Punk allowed younger generations to pick up a guitar, learn three chords and begin making music regardless of skill level. DIY participants have a desire to casually involve themselves in inexpert, leisurely ventures for personal gratification and, most importantly, projects show an individualistic aesthetic. With a DIY endeavour, the object or tool becomes the ‘document’ – the instructions, photographs, videos, written or spoken descriptions of that moment. A document can also be the object created as the tool to facilitate the art, or the art object itself. However, according to Richards, ‘The notion of DIY is an oxymoron since those who share a DIY aesthetic rely on each other to exchange ideas and work together as a form of a counter-culture’ (2013: 274). As an alternative notion, Richards promotes the idea of DIT. The DIT aesthetic, like DIY, is informal and inexpert. The communal is stressed, however. It can be undertaken as a leisurely endeavour, such as a community gathering enjoying play; it can work towards a social need; and it can provide an educational opportunity or wellness project. Moreover, it can either be defined as the end result of the participants’ collaboration, or as the participatory experience of the members. Collaboration to create art together is ‘created through the participation of people in addition to the artist or art collective. In participatory art, people referred to as citizens, regular folks, community members, or nonartists interact with professional artists to create the works’ (Finkelpearl 2014: no

Composing in Circuitry: Sonic Artist Dirty Electronics

225

pagination). Accordingly, the ‘doing it together’, or ‘do it together’, terminology describes works in the arts that are collaborative, activist, community-driven, or participatory (often this vocabulary is used interchangeably, but as the field of participatory arts continues to evolve, these words may develop into separate meanings). The DIT experience creates temporary moments in space that are based on communal involvement and cannot be reproduced again. Its only proof of existence is through its documents and the shared experience participants memorialize.

Being Dirty Electronics 1 John S. Richards: The man behind the circuits Hailing from southwest England, Richards studied music formally at Dartington College of Arts. It was an institution famous for unconventional and radical art, while also having an interest in contemporary art. In the 1990s, he went to the University of York to study art electronic music with Trevor Wishart, a composer who made advances in computer-based sound processing technology and in community arts and music education (Couture n.d.). Richards would also find himself in London as an itinerate musician working in analogue studios with Vocodex vocoders, Moog and other early synthesizers and gadgets. He also busked on the street, playing double bass and several other instruments trying to survive (Richards 2017). Richards was never a musical purist and electronic systems of the day provided a platform for experimentation, a precedent that would manifest itself going into the new millennium. Richards coined the term ‘punktronics’ which ‘takes the broad ideals of punk and applies them to electronic music. It’s sticking up two fingers to more recognized forms of electronic music. Anyone can do it. It’s cheap, intuitive and has political overtones’ (Zurlo 2011). Richards’s term is reminiscent of the DIY punk spirit that revolutionized popular music in the late 1970s and influenced Daniel Miller to become a participant. This same attitude would resurface in the next decade, with ‘bedroom’ producers repurposing rejected devices such as the TR-808 drum machine and the TB-303 bass synthesizer and turning them into staple sounds in electronic dance music. These tools and ways of working describe ‘punktronics’ (and later on ‘dirty electronics’), that some musicians in the 1970s and 1980s unknowingly engaged in. Richards describes punktronics materials as ‘designer trash (deliberately made to look beaten-up or broken),

226

Mute Records

ugly, cheap, heavy, hand-made, designed to be handled or to come in contact with the body, ready-mades, hacked, bent, feedback and kitsch’ (2006). These were inadvertently a catalyst for the development of new music. In the 1980s and 1990s, working alone became the norm for many electronic musicians due to available technology that allowed them to create in solace. Richards was no exception, as he became lost in his solo works and sonic discoveries. However, he became increasingly uninterested in the structured performances that compositions depended upon and grew tired of the isolation this technology construed. Even though the possibilities of this new technology were once a welcoming aspect for Richards, he soon missed collaborating and feeding off of the energy from other musicians. Richards craved for the social interaction that playing music had offered in the past. He also wanted to perform works that were less structured and could not be reproduced once they were performed live: ‘Making music in the studio and on computers, which had become one and the same, lost its appeal and I sought to engage with sound, materials, and people in a much more physical way. I wanted to get my hands dirty in some kind of alternative process of music making’ (‘Collateral Damage’ 2012). Although Richards embraced the DIY spirit of the punk era for inspiration, he would push beyond it in order to build a platform where strangers could come together for a moment to participate in creating sonic art.

2 Invoking the punk spirit In the 1990s Richards nurtured his curiosity in the sonic arts. His past experiences had already taken him through European experimental music nights, working in performance art, being an itinerant musician in London, and being part of the post-punk five-piece called Sand. He was inspired by several composers and artists experimenting in electronic art music, among them John Cage, Steve Reich, David Tudor (who coined the term ‘composing inside of electronics’) and Cornelius Cardew and his Scratch Orchestra. However, there were two powerful quotes that left a major impression on his mind: Laurie Anderson’s ‘There is not enough dirt in virtual reality’ (Stone 2017) and Henry Cowell’s, ‘Since the “disease” of noise permeates all music, the only hopeful course is to consider that the noise-germ, like the bacteria of cheese, is a good microbe, which may provide previously hidden delights to the listener, instead of producing musical oblivion’ (1929: 287). Based on these ideas, Richards came up with the phrase

Composing in Circuitry: Sonic Artist Dirty Electronics

227

‘dirty electronics’, applying it to his new collective experimental sound art endeavour in order to epitomize the philosophy of the ensemble. Richards’s commitment to the Dirty Electronics’ philosophy, his experiences, and the influences of electronic experimental composers led him to approach his sonic collective by using a hybrid approach to materials, engaging with them in a direct way while making music with many collaborators.

3 The DIT experience: Accessibility, opportunity, creativity For Richards, working in a performance studio – a black box – became his canvass. It created the framework for Dirty Electronics’ philosophy. Anyone that was interested in music or performance was welcomed, even if they were not musicians. The studio experience allowed him to move from his solitary, DIY mode of working with music, to a more collaborative DIT philosophy. He had increasingly found the recording studio to be a sterile environment. The joy of making an album dissipated. The social dimension was gone when recording alone for a fixed medium. He missed approaching his work in a tactile manner (it was one of the reasons he had taken to learning a musical instrument, because he was good with his hands). He also missed live performance and the socialization he enjoyed when being a musician. Richards wanted to get back to working with physical material. He considers Dirty Electronics gatherings as holistic and the making of each events’ instruments meditative: ‘I would like to consider Dirty Electronics as an example of how participation and the holistic building and performance event has shaped a particular approach and understanding beyond DIY’ (2013: 275). When describing the DIT concept influencing Dirty Electronics, Richards answered, ‘It was really about doing stuff together, creating electronic music that does not revolve around the individual’ (Cotton 2011). Richards stated that he wanted to use Dirty Electronics in the social dimension as a blueprint for people from a variety of backgrounds to meet others and create music. He began this practice by forging an environment where many could come together and create collaborative performance pieces. He engaged with crossdisciplines from sound to circuit board design to instrument building. Richards conceptualized touch instruments and collaborated with other creatives in order to design copper-etched, artwork-printed circuit boards. One crucial decision he made was to work with raw and less economically dependent materials in order to create instruments for his Dirty Electronics’ performances. In this manner,

228

Mute Records

creative endeavours were not held up or limited by a lack of funding and his ventures were more accessible to participants. Richards summed up his thought process and the evolution of Dirty Electronics for Smart Beijing: During the 1990s and the rise of personal computers, I missed doing stuff with my hands. Playing musical instruments for me was very much a tactile thing. I liked the idea of an extended process where making stuff and playing were combined. In English there is a saying, ‘get your hands dirty’, which means to get practically involved. I had also been reading Henry Cowell’s essay on noise [The Joys of Noise] where he discusses the idea of noise as analogous to disease. So this is where the idea and name Dirty Electronics began. I started doing events and working with lots of people and learned as I went along. There was no plan. I just enjoyed it and luckily got more invitations to create and work that enabled me to develop my own practice. (Feola 2014)

Dirty Electronics allowed Richards to reconnect with visual stimuli and the other senses. Its performances became visual as well as aural. Its participants made their own sonic instruments. Materials and objects were the ‘documents’ of a Dirty Electronics performance. The great leveller for the participants was that no one would know how to play these one-of-a-kind DIY instruments ‘properly’; virtuosic ability would be stripped, preventing the need for developing a technique. For Richards, this philosophy created an environment of true participatory, DIT art and made the practice of music more democratic.

Mute meets Dirty 1 Short Circuit presents Mute: The Mute Synth is born John Richards’s connection with Mute goes back to 1997. Miller had seen Sand perform. As a result, the five-piece post-punk/experimental group were offered a publishing deal through the record label. In 2010, Richards was approached to be involved in Mute Weekender, as part of Short Circuit, an electronic music festival, at London’s Roundhouse performing arts venue. It would take eight months to prepare for this venture. Finally, from 12 to 14 May 2011, Short Circuit presented an event that featured lectures, films, installations and performances from important names in electronica. The roster featured many Mute artists, including Andy Fletcher and Martin Gore of Depeche Mode, both DJing individual sets; Slovenian avant-garde

Composing in Circuitry: Sonic Artist Dirty Electronics

229

band Laibach; EBM pioneers Nitzer Ebb; the Residents, an American art collective; Carter Tutti Void (featuring Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti from Throbbing Gristle with Nik Colk Void of Factory Floor); Erasure with special guest Alison Moyet; and a special event by Richards’s Dirty Electronics Ensemble. On the merchandise tables one could purchase a new pressing of the Normal’s ‘T.V.O.D.’ on vinyl, a 2011 compilation from the collaborative duo of David Baker and Simon Leonard (otherwise known as I Start Counting, Fortran 5, and Komputer), and the Mute Synth, a limited edition hand-held synth module which would serve as Dirty Electronics’ ‘document’ from the workshop held on that weekend. The Mute Synth was made out of a printed circuit board with copper-etched artwork designed in collaboration with Mute and London-based graphic designer Adrian Shaughnessy, who would go on to design the logo for the Mute Synth II. The Mute Synth did not contain knobs as expected of a synthesizer. It was handheld and relied on the skin’s electric conductivity to create connections between copper-etched panels in its front and back sides. Noise was generated by placing one’s fingers on these panels, which would create a distinctive palette of sounds. However, one must lick their fingers to make their body more conductive. The more moist the fingers were, the higher the pitch sounded. By tilting the panel, the rhythm pattern of the sounds changed. Two tilt switches on different planes allowed for gestural control of the sequencer (Richards 2011). The documentation warned that ‘this type of touch instrument is by design dysfunctional in that a myriad of signal paths come together through the body. Each function is not discrete and cannot be considered in isolation’ (Richards 2011). However, this uniqueness and unpredictability added to the instrument’s appeal. As The Quietus wrote, ‘The brilliant Dirty Electronics Mute Synth puts the human in synth technology as you have to use your actual flesh and blood fingers to link circuits and make the thing creep, whirr and squawk’ (‘Watch’ 2011). A Dirty Electronic ‘performance’ consists of a workshop, interaction and engagement with others, and a performance executed by the instruments created in the workshop. The event presented at Short Circuit was typical of other Dirty Electronics’ collective performances with the DIT aesthetic. Strangers came together at the workshop. Each had a Dirty Electronics Mute Synth kit that they built together with the guidance of Richards. Not only did the participants learn to solder, they learned about the components of the circuit board, the way sound was manipulated by the nuances of touch, and how to ‘play’ their newly made

230

Mute Records

instruments while interacting with each other. Since the Mute Synth was oneof-a-kind, developing proper technique for the instrument was not a factor for the participants. Everyone assumed the role of the novice, regardless of their musical background. After the workshop, the participants rehearsed together, familiarizing themselves with the instruments, each other, and Richards’s method of conducting. In the final aspect of the event, the group performed their sonic collaboration to an enthusiastic audience.

2 Mute Synth II: Against ‘vanilla’ MPEG culture In cultural theory there are schools of thought that differ in how the consumer’s role is viewed when encountering a product. Is it passive or is it active? The Frankfurt School adhered to the concept that consumers were passive while the British School overcame ‘the limitations of the Frankfurt School notion of a passive audience in their conceptions of an active audience that creates meaning and the popular’ (Kellner 2002: 44). Richards explored these polar concepts in the Insomnia Festival 2017 as ‘active engager vs. passive consumer’ (‘26.10’ 2017). One of the reasons Richards chose to work outside of the recording studio environment was that he was convinced the end result, the product, lost its connection to the consumer. He wanted the consumer to take on a more engaging role with physical materials. The Mute Synth II was ‘a  statement against MPEG culture and places emphasis on an active participant rather than passive consumer’ (‘Mute and Dirty Electronics’ n.d.). This statement can be related to Larry Lessig’s objection to ‘Read/Only’ culture, as opposed to a ‘Read/Write’ culture, where ‘ordinary citizens “read” their culture by listening to it or by reading representations of it (e.g. musical scores) … they (or at least the “young people of the day”) add to the culture they read by creating and re-creating the culture around them. They do this re-creating using the same tools the professional uses’ (2008: 28). A ‘Read/ Only’ culture is only concerned with consumption and not as readily involved in creativity or performance. With the Mute Synth II, Richards wanted to build an instrument that would facilitate the qualities of an active participant, a consumer who is readily involved with amateur creation. It was to be the very essence of collaboration and active participation, committed to Dirty Electronics’ noise aesthetics and experimentation of electronic sound. It was an intuitive hand-held synth and

Composing in Circuitry: Sonic Artist Dirty Electronics

231

sequencer, since it sported a pick-up-and-play approach with various knobs, touch controls and switches. It was also designed to have add-ons and additional modules. ‘One of the main ideas behind the Mute Synth II was to consider the dissemination of a musical idea other than through recorded fixed media, and to explore the intersection  between sound object and artwork etching. The synth also presents the notion of writing music through electronics and code’ (Richards 2014). Different rhythmic sequences were created ‘through hybrid 4-bit binary coding, feedback loops and bit bashing’ (Richards 2014). Many discussions were had between Miller and Paul Taylor, Mute’s art director, on how to bring the synth to reality. Shaughnessy created the artwork for the printed circuit board while the CD cover art of the selection of works to be accompanied with the Mute Synth II was developed by illustrator, Natalie KayThatcher. Richards’s vision for this new synth was realized; it was affordable, generative and in-sync with Dirty Electronics’ democratic philosophy of ‘doing it together’.

Democracy equals music technology! The DIT experience revisited Punk music’s aesthetics opened the door for a ‘do it yourself ’ attitude that continued with post-punk generations. Adhering to that same DIY approach, synthesizer enthusiasts would learn and repurpose some electronic instruments and gadgets in order to create their own unique musical expression. Out of this frame of mind Mute Records would be born and carry the torch for artistic individualism and practice a business sense emboldened by a collaborative spirit between label and artist. As for Richards, he distanced himself from the DIY scene which once was a reactionary statement against consumer culture, but has now become mainstream. To him, it was not enough to be DIY anymore; there had to be a way to create a distinctive art (‘Dirty Electronics’). He claimed, ‘I wouldn’t like to put all my eggs in one basket, as we say, in the DIY scene because that is just a process towards creating some interesting artwork’ (Richards 2014). He became tired of the solo laptop artist concept and the solitary DJ and ‘i’ cultures; he eventually embraced the collaborative force after years of working in solitude. Richards even went as far as giving this force a name: ‘do it together’. He formed

232

Mute Records

Dirty Electronics, which would be the embodiment of the DIT aesthetic. This platform would use instrument building and sound as a participatory art. People from different musical backgrounds, from the skilled to the novice, have come together to participate in these performances. According to Richards, a Dirty Electronics performance ‘begins on the workbench devising instruments and is extended onto the stage through playing and exploring these instruments’ (‘Dirty Electronics’ n.d.). Music technology has democratized the way participants interact with the art form and with each other. It has offered everyone, regardless of musical ability, the opportunity to become involved in music creation. Mute Records was founded upon Daniel Miller’s active participation with accessible technology in the 1970s. From there, he built a successful label based on other artists’ DIY efforts. Together, Mute and its roster of artists have moved on to a DIT philosophy where their collaborative process is not only concerned with the musical concept; it involves the image of the artist, marketing campaign, album cover, photography and music videos. According to Taylor, the label is based on relationships and encouraging artists to make their vision come to pass (2017). Miller has signed artists and collaborated in projects he finds interesting and believes in. This is the synergy that allowed Mute and Dirty Electronics to come together in their Mute Synths partnership. When asked about the staying power of the democratic force within the DIT path, Richards stated, ‘The future is always in somebody else’s hands. In terms of ownership, you kind of make these but give it to someone else. Can these tools be more realized by others? Maybe that is the future: to inspire people to make music in different ways’ (Richards 2017).

References ‘26.10 Insomnia Scream With Dirty Electronics’ (2017), Insomnia. Available online: http://www.insomniafestival.no/seminars-workshops/dirty-electronics (accessed 18 March 2018). ‘Collateral Damage: John Richards’ (2012), The Wire, March. Available online: http:// www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/collateral-damage_john-richards (accessed 23 September 2016). Cotton, R. (2011), ‘John Richards – Dirty Electronics: Mute Synth Workshop’, Supersonic Festival 2011 Zine, 26 September. Available online: http://issuu.com/ rosscotton/docs/supersonic_zine (accessed 07 September 2016).

Composing in Circuitry: Sonic Artist Dirty Electronics

233

Couture, F. (n.d.), ‘Trevor Wishart’, All Music. Available online: https://www.allmusic. com/artist/trevor-wishart-mn0001459690/biography (accessed 18 November 2017). Cowell, H. (1929), ‘The Joys of Noise’, New Republic, 31 July: 287. ‘Dirty Electronics’ (n.d.), Dirty Electronics. Available online: http://www. dirtyelectronics.org/info.html (accessed 8 September 2016). ‘Dirty Electronics: Interview With John Richards’ (2011), Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar, 12 August. Available online: https://vimeo.com/27809560 (accessed 30 October 2017). Feola, J. (2014), ‘Interview: John Richards, Dirty Electronics’, Smart Beijing, 9 January. Available online: http://www.smartbeijing.com/articles/art_galleries/interview-johnrichards-dirty-electronics (accessed 22 November 2016). Finkelpearl, T. (2014), ‘Participatory Art’, in M. Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gelber, S. M. (1997), ‘Do-It-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity’, American Quarterly, 49 (1): 66–112. Kellner, D. (2002), ‘The Frankfurt School and British Cultural Studies: The Missed Articulation’, in J. T. Nealon and C. Irr (eds), Rethinking the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies Of Cultural Critique, 31–58, Albany: State University of New York Press. Lessig, L. (2008), Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, New York: The Penguin Press. ‘Mute and Dirty Electronics Announce the Release of the Mute Synth II’ (n.d.), Mute. Available online: http://mute.com/mute/mute-dirty-electronics-announce-therelease-of-the-mute-synth-ii (accessed 03 December 2016). Richards, J. (2006), ‘32kg: Performance Systems for a Post-Digital Age’, Nime ’06, 5–7 June. Available online: http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/~jrich/docs/post-dig.pdf (accessed 30 September 2016). Richards, J. (2011), Dirty Electronics: Mute Synth, 4th edn. Available online: http://www. dirtyelectronics.org/docs/mute_synth.zip (accessed 23 August 2016). Richards, J. (2013), ‘Beyond DIY in Electronic Music’, Organised Sound, 18 (3): 274–81, 12 November. Available online: http://hdl.handle.net/2086/9665 (accessed 05 December 2016). Richards, J. (2014), MSII. Available online: http://www.dirtyelectronics.org/docs/ mutesynth_booklet_A4.pdf (accessed 28 September 2016). Richards, J. (2017), Interview with the author via Skype, 3 November. Stone, S. (2017), ‘Dr. John Richards: Wonky Shapes and Wrong Code’, Canterbury Christ Church University: Centre for Practice-Based Research in the Arts. 16 August. Available online: https://blogs.canterbury.ac.uk/practiceresearch/dr-john-richardswonky-shapes-and-wrong-code (accessed 21 November 2017). Taylor, P. A. (2017), Interview with the author via Skype, 29 November.

234

Mute Records

‘Watch: Daniel Miller Mute Synth Demo!’ (2011), The Quietus, 23 December. Available online: http://thequietus.com/articles/07630-mute-synth-dirty-electronics (accessed 21 November 2016). Wolf, M., and S. McQuitty (2011), ‘Understanding the Do-It-Yourself Consumer: DIY Motivations and Outcomes’, Academy of Marketing Science Review, 1 (3–4): 154–70. Zurlo, N. (2011), ‘Interview: John Richards (Dirty Electronics)’, Attn: Magazine, 20 October. Available online: http://www.attnmagazine.co.uk/features/4840 (accessed 3 August 2016).

Index 4AD 42, 52, 89, 93 n.5, 124, 174 Adamson, Barry 93 n.6, 95 n.8, 98. See also Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds Add N to (X) 197, 200 ‘Metal Fingers In My Body’ 200 ‘Plug Me In’ 200 AIDS 117–19, 135, 198. See also homophobia Almond, Marc 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56. See also Soft Cell anarchism 110, 148, 187 anti-music 80, 135, 144, 152 Apparat 212 Arca Arca 209, 214, 218 ‘Ashland’ 217 ‘Failed’ 215, 217 ‘Family Violence’ 215 live performances 209–11, 213, 220 Mutant 209–10, 213–15, 217–20 and non-binary sexuality 209, 213, 216, 217 position in Mute history 7 and queer club subcultures 217 ‘Snakes’ 217 ‘Soichiro’ 217 ‘Thievery’ 215–16 visuals 213, 215–17, 219–20 ‘Xen’ 216 Xen 209, 213–20. See also Jesse Kanda art rock 34, 128, 136. See also rock art school 3, 13, 48–50, 53, 131, 187, 225 The Assembly 6, 10, 116 Ball, Dave 48–50, 52–4. See also Soft Cell Ballard, J.G. 8, 17–18, 20–2, 24–6, 197 Band of Susans 134, 136 Bargeld, Blixa 91, 93 n.6, 97. See also Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

The Beatles 77, 85, 148, 152 Bell, Andy 10, 114, 116, 117, 118–20, 122, 125. See also Erasure Big Black 128, 134, 135–6 The Birthday Party 42, 89, 93, 94, 133, 138 Prayers on Fire 89. See also Nick Cave bisexuality 202, 211 Blast First 6, 7, 11, 127–8, 132–6, 138 Blast First Petite 128 blues 9–10, 87–98, 143, 174, 176, 178. See also Nick Cave; Moby Bowie, David 17, 56, 202, 207 Burroughs, William 76, 78, 103 Butthole Surfers 6, 128, 134, 136 Buzzcocks 2, 23 Cabaret Voltaire 19, 52, 56, 75, 84, 144, 183, 209, 212 Cage, John 8, 21, 22, 78, 226 Can 75 Canal, Nina 127, 129–31, 133, 137. See also Ut capitalism 8, 10, 25, 34, 96, 101–2, 106–8, 111, 142, 157–8, 160–3, 165, 176–7 Carr, Chris 54 Carter, Chris 77, 78, 84 n.6, 229. See also Throbbing Gristle Casey, Martyn P. 97. See also Grinderman; Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds Cave, Nick 6–7, 9–10, 12, 56, 89–98, 103, 118, 120, 123, 133 And the Ass Saw the Angel 91–2 King Ink 91 The Sick Bag Song 91. See also The Birthday Party; Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds Cherry Red 36 n.2, 124, 127–8

236

Index

Christopherson, Peter ‘Sleazy’ 76–7, 81. See also Throbbing Gristle Clarke, Vince 10, 48–9, 114–20, 122, 124–5. See also The Assembly; Depeche Mode; Erasure; Yazoo The Clash 17, 77 n.3 clubbing 26, 51, 131, 175, 185, 198–9, 211–13, 215, 217. See also dance music communism 64, 142 Corbijn, Anton 38, 39, 40, 65. See also Depeche Mode; Fad Gadget Cosey Fanni Tutti 73 n.2, 76–7, 81, 83–4, 229. See also Throbbing Gristle Coum Transmissions 73, 76, 81. See also Throbbing Gristle dance music 32–5, 40, 75, 103, 118, 146, 176, 197, 202, 212, 217, 225 intelligent dance music 175, 214. See also clubbing dance-pop 194, 209, 212 Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft 5, 51, 118, 133 Depeche Mode Depeche Mode: 101 9, 59–63, 66 ‘Dreaming of Me’ 6 ‘Enjoy the Silence’ 65 and fandom 59–68 importance in Mute’s history 5–10, 16, 40–1, 44, 74, 93 n.5, 102, 118–21, 123, 133, 144, 163, 183–4, 198, 209, 212 ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ 5, 54 ‘Leave in Silence’ 53 Our Hobby is Depeche Mode 9, 59–67 and pandrogyne clothing 216 ‘Photographic’ 47 and Short Circuit festival 228 Singles 81–85, 54 and Soft Cell 47–55 Speak & Spell 40, 115, 198 and Vince Clarke 114–16 Desperate Bicycles 1–2, 23 Devo 71, 77 De Witte, Charlotte 7

Dirty Electronics 13, 223–32 ‘do it together’ 4, 13, 223–5, 227–9, 231–2 Mute Synth 229–30, 230–1. See also John Stephen Richards disco 33, 37, 79, 185–6, 191, 193, 197–201, 203–7. See also Fad Gadget; Goldfrapp Do It Yourself (DIY) 1–2, 4, 13, 31, 50–1, 74, 114–15, 137, 157, 223–8, 231–2. See also post-punk DNA 133 n.2, 159 drum machines 34, 225 dub 10, 101–3, 107, 109–11 Einstürzende Neubauten 6, 42, 43 n.12, 56, 75, 91, 133, 138, 144, 212 Ellis, Warren 97. See also Grinderman; Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds Eno, Brian 129, 132, 203 Erasure 6–7, 10, 56, 102, 113–25, 133, 152, 174 n.1, 184, 198, 229 Abba-esque 119, 174 n.1, 198 ‘Always’ 120 ‘Am I Right’ 119 ‘Blue Savannah’ 119 ‘Breath of Life’ 119 ‘Chains of Love’ 119 ‘Chorus’ 119 Chorus 119–20 The Circus 117 ‘The Circus’ 117 ‘Drama’ 119 Erasure 121–2 ‘Fingers and Thumbs’ 121 ‘Heavenly Action’ 116 ‘Hideaway’ 118 The Innocents 119 I Say I Say I Say 114, 120 ‘A Little Respect’ 119 ‘A Lousy Sum of Nothing’ 114 ‘Love to Hate You’ 119 ‘Oh L’Amour’ 116 ‘Ship of Fools’ 119 ‘Sometimes’ 118 ‘Star’ 119 ‘Stay With Me’ 121

Index ‘Take a Chance on Me’ 120, 198 The Tank, The Swan and the Balloon 119 ‘Who Needs Love Like That’ 116 Wild! 119 Wonderland 116 World Be Gone 114, 125 ‘You Surround Me’ 119 eroticism 18, 24, 107, 197, 199–201, 212, 216–17 Factory Records 5, 124 Factory Floor 229. See also Nik Kolk Void Fad Gadget 5, 8, 31–45, 48, 115 ‘Back to Nature’ 5, 8, 31–2, 34 ‘Blind Eyes’ 39–40 ‘The Box’ 34 ‘Collapsing New People’ 33 n.1, 42 ‘Collapsing New People (Berlin Mix) 43 ‘Coitus Interruptus’ 37 ‘Faithless’ 41 Fireside Favourites 36–7, 40 ‘For Whom the Bells Toll’ 41 Gag 33, 38, 39, 42–3 ‘Handshake’ 35 ‘Ideal World’ 42 ‘I Discover Love’ 41 Incontinent 39–40 ‘Lady Shave’ 38 ‘Life on the Line’ 41 ‘Love Parasite’ 40 ‘Make Room’ 38 ‘One Man’s Meat’ 33, 43 ‘Pedestrian’ 37 ‘Plainsong’ 40 ‘Ricky’s Hand’ 35–6 ‘The Sheep Look Up’ 41 ‘Sleep’ 42 ‘Stand Up’ 42 ‘State of the Nation’ 37 ‘Swallow It’ 39 Under the Flag 40–2 ‘Under the Flag 1’ 40 ‘Under the Flag 2’ 40 ‘Wheels of Fortune’ 40 fascism 142–3, 147, 150–1, 161

237

feminism 90, 129–30, 137, 142, 183–94, 210–11 Fever Ray (Karin Dreijer) 183 Fletcher, Andy 48, 228. See also Depeche Mode folk 12, 31, 43, 90–1, 129, 143, 148, 176–8, 197, 204–8 folktronica 184, 204–5 Fortran 5 229 Fox, Anna 12, 183, 186–94 Country Girls 12, 183, 186–94. See also Goldfrapp Fras, Milan 149. See also Laibach freak folk 204–5 Gahan, Dave 48–9, 62. See also Depeche Mode Galás, Diamanda 6, 118, 120, 183, 198 Masque of the Red Death anthology 198 gender 12–13, 38, 118, 129, 136–7, 173, 197–8, 200, 202–3, 205, 207, 209–13, 215–16, 218–19 Gira, Michael 11–12, 155–6, 158–65 The Consumer and Other Stories 160. See also Swans glam 12, 185, 197, 201–7. See also Goldfrapp; rock Goldfrapp, Alison 12, 183–7, 190–1, 193–4, 197–207, 212. See also Goldfrapp Goldfrapp 7, 12, 56, 120, 123, 163, 183–94, 197–208 ‘A&E’ 204 ‘Annabel’ 185, 207 ‘Anymore’ 184 Black Cherry 184, 199–200, 202, 206 ‘Caravan Girl’ 206 ‘Clay’ 207 ‘Cologne Cerrone Houdini’ 199, 206 Felt Mountain 184, 193, 197, 200 ‘Head First’ 186 Head First 193 ‘Human’ 184, 193 ‘Laurel’ 186 ‘Little Bird’ 185, 206 ‘Lovely Head’ 183

238 ‘Number 1’ 206 ‘Ooh La La’ 185, 199–200, 202–3 ‘Ride A White Horse’ 188, 199– 200, 203 Seventh Tree 185, 194, 199, 204–6 Silver Eye 197 ‘Stranger’ 207 ‘Strict Machine’ 185, 191, 200, 202 Supernature 199–200, 202–4 Tales of Us 184, 193, 207 ‘Train’ 188, 191, 202, 206 ‘Twist’ 191, 200 ‘UK Girls (Physical)’ 200–201 ‘Utopia’ 184, 200 ‘Utopia (Genetically Enriched)’ 200 We Are Glitter 203 ‘Yes Sir’ 200–201 Gordon, Kim 138. See also Sonic Youth Gore, Martin 48–9, 54–5, 228. See also Depeche Mode gothic 26, 64, 89, 92, 98, 118, 133, 191 gothic rock 144, 212. See also rock Grant, Simone 34–6 Gregory, Will 200 nn.1–4, 206 nn.5–8, 207 n.9. See also Goldfrapp The Grey Area 7, 74–5 Grinderman 89, 93 n.5. See also Nick Cave 89 Ham, Jacqui 127–33, 136–7. See also Ut Hansa Tonstudios 42, 52 hardcore punk 128, 136, 169 Harvey, Mick 93 n.6, 95 n.8, 96. See also The Birthday Party; Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds Hawley, Richard 120 Hawtin, Richie 6. See also Plastikman Head of David 135 n.3, 136 heavy metal 136 heterosexuality 97, 198, 202, 205, 210 hip-hop 103, 175 homophobia 9, 54, 117–18, 210 homosexuality 54, 119, 202, 205, 207, 210–11 Hooker, John Lee 89, 94 house 103, 175, 212, 214 House, Eddie James ‘Son’ 87–9 The Human League 2, 3, 32, 115

Index improvisation 16, 76, 81, 83, 143 indie 115, 120, 134, 204 industrial 52, 75, 111, 136, 183, 209 Arca 211–14, 217–18 Laibach 144, 146, 148, 150–2 Throbbing Gristle 71–3, 75–6, 78, 84–5 Industrial Records 5, 73, 82, 144 Inspiral Carpets 123 I Start Counting 229 jazz 101, 105, 137, 143, 161 Jesus, Zola 212 Johnson, Matt 52. See The The Johnson, Robert 87, 90, 95–6, 98 Kanda, Jesse 210, 215–19. See also Arca Kefalas, Nicki 113, 124 Kirk, Roland H. 134. See also Cabaret Voltaire Kraftwerk 6, 17, 24, 27, 71, 150, 212 Laibach 6–7, 11, 19, 75, 103, 118, 141–52, 212, 229 ‘Anglia’ 142, 145–8, 150 ‘Francia’ 146 Let It Be 148 ‘Maggie Mae’ 148 Opus Dei 144, 151 Spectre 148 Volk 145 ‘Whistleblowers’ 142, 148–51 Leer, Thomas 2 LGBTQ communities and club music history 213 fashion styles 216 and fluidity 218 rights 54. See also bisexuality; homophobia; homosexuality; queer; transgender; transphobia Liars 6–7, 212 WIXIW 7 Mallinder, Stephen 50–1, 75, 78, 134. See also Cabaret Voltaire Mars 128, 133 n.2 Melville, Herman 12, 169–71, 179–80. See also Moby Miller, Daniel

Index art school background 3, 13 bridging pop and the avant-garde 55 as businessman 52, 102–3 and Depeche Mode 47–52, 55–6 and Dirty Electronics 13, 224–5, 228, 231–2 as DJ 7 and Erasure 113–16, 118, 121–5 and Fad Gadget 33–6, 38 film background 18 and Goldfrapp 193 and Laibach 144, 150, 152 and Mark Stewart 102–3, 111 and Middlesex University 13–14 and Moby 169, 177 and Nick Cave 93 personality 133 as producer 7, 34, 47 relationship with artists 6, 115–16 and Swans 157 and Ut 133, 135 n.3. See also The Normal; Silicon Teens Ministry 27, 75 Moby 6–7, 12, 56, 102, 122, 123, 169, 173–80, 184, 212 Animal Rights 169 ‘Find My Baby’ 174, 177, 178 n.7 ‘Go’ 169 ‘Honey’ 174, 176–7, 178 n.7 ‘Natural Blues’ 174, 176, 178 n.7 Play 6, 12, 122, 169, 174–9 Moore, Thurston 138. See also Sonic Youth; Ut Moyet, Alison 31, 40, 49, 116, 183, 229. See also Yazoo Mute and BMG 123 both mainstream and avant-garde 4–5, 7–11, 13, 32, 55, 74, 111, 113, 118, 144, 194, 197–8, 201 characteristics 3, 9, 209, 219 and EMI 4, 6–7, 10–11, 56, 122–3, 193 Harrow Road HQ 6, 135 independent status 6, 9, 33, 36, 48, 51–6, 102, 113–14, 120–4, 127, 129, 134, 158 international success 5–6, 40, 50, 52, 59, 122–4 and PIAS 114 and record deals 6, 34

239 and Sire 52, 115 visual aesthetic 3, 6, 8, 147, 149, 183–94, 210. See also Blast First; Daniel Miller; the Grey Area; Novamute; Rhythm King

nationalism 146, 150 new wave 129, 130, 136, 144 Nine Inch Nails 19, 75 noise 40, 74, 85, 128, 133, 135 n.3, 160, 230 New Order 121, 183, 212 new pop 32–3, 38, 41. See also synth pop New Romantic 26. See also synth-pop Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. See also Barry Adamson; Blixa Bargeld; Martyn P. Casey; Mick Harvey; Nick Cave; Warren Ellis ‘Blind Lemon Jefferson’ 93, 98 ‘City of Refuge’ 93 ‘Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!’ 97 The Firstborn Is Dead 93–4, 97 ‘Higgs Boson Blues’ 95, 96 n.9 ‘I’m Gonna Kill That Woman’ 93 ‘Jack the Ripper’ 97 ‘Loverman’ 97 Push the Sky Away 95 ‘Stagger Lee’ 97 Tender Prey 97 ‘Tupelo’ 94–5 ‘Wanted Man’ 93 ‘Wings Off Flies’ 97 Nitzer Ebb 75, 229 Non 5, 74. See also Boyd Rice The Normal 1–3, 5, 7–8, 13, 15–27, 31, 34, 50, 74, 115, 133, 197, 229 ‘T.V.O.D.’ 16, 31, 50, 74, 197, 229 ‘Warm Leatherette’ 1, 4, 8, 13, 15–20, 22, 24–7, 50, 74, 133, 197, 200. See also Daniel Miller Novamute 6–7 no wave 11, 127–38, 159–60. See also Blast First; Ut Out Records 127–8, 132. See also Ut pandrogeny 80 n.4, 209, 212, 216, 220 Pearce, Stephen ‘Stevø’ 47–8, 50–3, 55

240

Index

Pere Ubu 71, 77, 84 P-Orridge, Genesis 9, 72–3, 76–81, 83–5, 212, 216, 220. See also pandrogeny; Throbbing Gristle Plastikman 209, 212. See also Richie Hawtin pop and the avant-garde 4–5, 7, 10–11, 48–9, 52, 72, 102, 117–18, 194 and Erasure 113–14, 120 and Fad Gadget 31–3, 38, 44 and Goldfrapp 183–6, 197–8. See also dance-pop; new pop; power pop; synth pop Pop, Iggy 23, 133 The Pop Group 101, 108–11 ‘Amnesty International Report on British Army Torture of Irish Prisoners’ 101 ‘She Is Beyond Good and Evil’ 101 ‘We Are All Prostitutes’ 101 ‘We Are Time’ 108–9 ‘Words Disobey Me’ 109. See also Mark Stewart popular music and capitalism 158, 177 as deconstructed by Laibach 142–5, 148, 151–2 and disco 198–9, 204 Goldfrapp’s queer contribution to 197 and punk ethos 225 and race 173 semiotics of 156 post-punk and ‘black music’ 104 as contemporaneous with punk 144 as continuation of 1960s counterculture 71–2 correction to masculinist narratives of 11, 128–9, 137 culturalist and anti-culturalist tendencies 32–3, 43–5 and do it yourself aesthetic 231 and extreme politics 143, 150. See also do it yourself; industrial; noise; no wave Pouncey, Edwin (aka Savage Pencil) 33, 135 power pop 136, 137, 186

Priest, Eldritch 20, 22 Product Inc. 155, 162 progressive rock 76 psychedelia 71, 136 Psychic TV 52. See also Genesis P-Orridge; Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson; Throbbing Gristle punk 1977 breakthrough 1 and boredom 8, 23 bricolage 97 business innovation 2 controversial symbolism 26, 144 debt to rock tradition 17, 75 and gender 129–31, 136–7 lack of vocal affect 3 links to 1960s counter culture 71–2, 84 new wave as attempt at sanitisation 130 no wave as disavowal of 159. See also hardcore punk; queercore Pussy Galore 162 queer aesthetics 48 discourse as fundamental to Mute’s legacy 213 imagery 54–5 lyrical subjects 9 press 119 queering disco, glam and folk 12, 197–201, 204–8 spaces (nightclubs as) 212 theory 209–20 visual presentation 51 queercore 211 race appropriation of black cultural forms 10, 12 black masks as signifier of identification and difference 12 crossing racial lines 5, 10 and minstrelsy 12, 171–3 queer theory and minority racial groups 211 ‘race’ records 87, 90 racial difference 9–10, 89, 94, 96–8

Index racial stereotypes 12, 175, 179–80 reception of blues across racial boundaries 90 resisting racial binaries 219. See also Moby; Nick Cave The Raincoats 128–9, 131, 137–8 The Ramones 24, 27, 72, 144 reggae 101, 103–5 Rental, Robert 2, 5, 6 n.3, 16, 133 The Residents 6, 71, 73, 75, 212, 229 Reynolds, Simon 71–2, 202, 212 Rice, Boyd 6, 51, 103, 144, 150 Boyd Rice 6. See also Non Richards, John Stephen 13, 223–32 Sand 226, 228. See also Dirty Electronics riot grrrl 129, 137–8, 211 rock and authenticity 31–2, 34–5, 44–5, 201–2 conventions 79–82 and feminism 128–30, 137 influence 103 instrumentation 6, 9, 42, 49, 55 myths 91 and performance art 77, 83 and phallic carnality 199 precursors to punk 72 rejection of 31–2, 34–5, 44, 51, 75, 159–60 Robert Johnson as prototypical rock musician 96 rockism 118, 120. See also art rock; glam; gothic rock; indie; punk rock’n’roll 5, 91, 134, 201 Rough Trade distribution 1, 2, 23, 52, 121, 132–4 label 5, 11, 52, 124, 127, 132–5 shop 2, 5, 18, 51, 102, 132–3 Roxy Music 202–4 Rhythm King 6–7, 12, 169, 174 n.1 Scritti Politti 32, 41, 129 Seguro, Joana 223 The Sex Pistols 17, 23, 60, 144 S-Express 174 ‘Theme From S-Express’ 174 Sherwood, Adrian 101–3, 105, 109–10. See also Mark Stewart

241

Silicon Teens 5, 10, 16, 34–5 ‘Memphis Tennessee’ 5. See also Daniel Miller; Frank Tovey Skinny Puppy 75, 148 The Slits 104, 128, 137 Smegma 5 Smith, Bessie 89–90 Smith, Patti 71, 129–30 Smith, Paul 128, 134, 136. See also Blast First; Blast First Petite socialism 33, 41, 141–2, 147 Soft Cell 9, 47–56 Some Bizzare 9, 47–48, 50–6 Sonic Youth 6, 128, 134–6, 159. See also Kim Gordon; Thurston Moore Spence, Simon 49, 61 SPK 75 Stewart, Mark 7, 10, 101–11, 118 As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade 101–3, 105, 107 ‘As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade’ 105 ‘Blood Money’ 107 ‘Consumed’ 107 Control Data 101, 103–4, 107 ‘Dream Kitchen’ 107 ‘Faith Healer’ 110 ‘Forbidden Colours/Forbidden Dub’ 107 ‘Forbidden Love’ 107 ‘Hell Is Empty’ 107 ‘Hypnotized’ 107 ‘Hysteria’ 107 ‘Jerusalem’ 101–2 Learning To Cope With Cowardice 101–2 ‘Mammon’ 106 Mark Stewart 101, 103, 107, 109, 110 Metatron 101, 103–4, 106–7, 109–10 ‘My Possession’ 107 ‘Passivication Program’ 107 ‘Red Zone’ 107 ‘Stranger’ 101, 104, 107–8 ‘Survival’ 107 ‘These Things Happen’ 103 Studio 54 186, 199. See also clubbing Suicide 71, 159

242

Index

Swans 7, 11–13, 52, 56, 144, 155, 157–63, 165–6, 212 ‘Bring The Sun’ 165 Children of God 155, 162 Cop 160 The Glowing Man 155–6, 162 ‘The Glowing Man’ 156, 165 My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky 162 ‘New Mind’ 162 ‘Raping a Slave’ 160 To Be Kind 155, 165 synthesizers 1–2, 5, 7–9, 12–16, 18, 34, 41, 74, 77, 82, 84, 120, 225, 231 lowering barriers to entry 2, 31, 50, 114–15, 229–30. See also DIY; synth pop synth-pop 9, 16, 31, 33, 40, 42, 47, 55, 63, 74, 150 Taylor, Paul A. 120–1, 124, 231–2 techno 6–7, 103, 202, 212, 214 Thatcher, Margaret 37, 40, 117 The The 51–2, 56 Throbbing Gristle 2, 6–7, 9, 19, 71–85, 103, 118, 133, 144, 152, 209, 211–12, 217, 229 20 Jazz Funk Greats 78–81, 84–5 ‘20 Jazz Funk Greats’ 78 ‘AB/7A’ 78 ‘After Cease To Exist’ 82 ‘Beachy Head’ 78 ‘Blood on the Floor’ 78, 80 ‘Convincing People’ 78, 80–1 ‘Death Threats’ 80 D.O.A. The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle 72, 78, 81 ‘Don’t Do As You’re Told, Do As You Think’ 85 ‘E-Coli’ 78, 80 ‘Exotica’ 78 ‘Hamburger Lady’ 80, 84 Heathen Earth 72, 79, 81, 84–5 ‘Hit By A Rock’ 78, 80 ‘Hometime’ 78 ‘Hot on the Heels of Love’ 78–9, 81 ‘I.B.M.’ 78 ‘Maggot Death – Live at Rat Club’ 80 Mission of Dead Souls 74–5

‘The Old Man Smiled’ 84 Part Two: The Endless Not 81 ‘Persuasion’ 78, 81, 83 ‘Playtime’ 80 ‘Rabbit Snare’ 81 The Second Annual Report of Throbbing Gristle 72, 78–80, 82, 84 ‘Six Six Sixties’ 78 ‘Slug Bait’ 82, 84 ‘Something Came Over Me’ 85 ‘Still Walking’ 78 ‘Tanith’ 78 ‘United’ 76 ‘Valley of the Shadow of Death’ 78, 80 ‘Weeping’ 78, 80 ‘What a Day’ 78, 81 Tovey, Frank 5, 8, 31–45, 48 ‘Luddite Joe’ 43 ‘Luxury’ 43 Snakes and Ladders 43, 44 Tyranny and the Hired Hand 43. See also Fad Gadget transgender 216 transphobia 210 Travis, Geoff 18, 133 Tudor, David 22, 226 Ut 7, 11, 127–38, 159 Conviction 132 Early Live Life 132 ‘Evangelist’ 135 ‘Fire in Philly’ 135 Griller 136 Ut Live 132 The Velvet Underground 137, 159 Vicious, Sid 26, 144 Void, Nik Colk 229

85, 133,

Warhol, Andy 21–2, 24, 27 White, Paul 43, 44 Winter, Kathleen 185, 207 Wire 123, 131 Yazoo 6–7, 10, 31, 41, 44, 49, 116, 183, 212 Young, Sally 127, 129–31, 137. See also Ut

Plate 1 Untitled (1996A) from the series Country Girls. Courtesy of Anna Fox and Alison Goldfrapp.

Plate 2 Untitled (1996B) from the series Country Girls. Courtesy of Anna Fox and Alison Goldfrapp.

Plate 3 Untitled (1997A) from the series Country Girls. Courtesy of Anna Fox and Alison Goldfrapp.

Plate 4 Untitled (1997B) from the series Country Girls. Courtesy of Anna Fox and Alison Goldfrapp.

Plate 5 Untitled (2000) from the series Country Girls. Courtesy of Anna Fox and Alison Goldfrapp.

Plate 6 Untitled (1999) from the series Country Girls. Courtesy of Anna Fox and Alison Goldfrapp.