Around 1981, in a calculatedly offhand aside while writing about some other group altogether, the NME’s Paul Morley referred to ‘hard’ groups like Depeche Mode. It was a provocation, uttered as though it were a given that Depeche Mode were hard. They were generally regarded as nothing of the kind, of course. The ‘hard’ groups of the day were part of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, the likes of Tygers of Pan Tang or Saxon or Iron Maiden, denim-clad, poodle-haired bastions of defiantly unreconstructed roaring and Viking maleness, hard and heavy rockers who would nut you if you so much as suggested that Freddie Mercury was a puff. Come and have a go at playing like them, if you thought you were hard enough. In your air-guitar dreams, mate. Their hardness lay in their power chords, wrought and smelted with visible effort, unleashed at 750cc engine volume. Contrast them with a new, emergent, doily-thin wave of synthpop bands, dressed in Fauntleroy-esque garb like they were on their way to Bertie Blenkinsop’s birthday party, prancing nimbly on Top of the Pops and dabbing softly at keyboards as if licking their fingers to turn the page of a clothes catalogue. It would take a particularly perverse and ironic mindset to describe these pouting, mimsy, ostentatious little bantamweights as ‘hard’, and, as we knew, they didn’t come more perverse and ironic than Paul Morley.
Morley was having an acute dig at the spuriousness of ascribing densities to particular musics based on whether they were rock- or pop-based, guitar- or keyboard-orientated. He was arguing that what constitutes substance was something more subtly, deceptively durable and meaningful, whose durability might even consist in its supposed flimsiness. He was more right than he might even have anticipated, however. Today, Tygers of Pan Tang are part of the soft, dead mulch of rock history, while Depeche Mode’s own history is an epic one of American conquest, stadia and debauchery on an appalling scale.
Depeche Mode’s durability has been astonishing – as has that of New Order or, in their different way, the Human League – while their German forefathers, Kraftwerk, far from being blown away by gales of Zeppelin in the 1970s, continue to overarch all. Not that substance or hardness are contingent on long-lasting success. As Morley understood, it is a more elusive, metaphysical quality, one which even those in possession of it are loath to discuss.
Depeche Mode emerged in 1981. There is a possibly apocryphal story that a newspaper from their native Basildon, covering the band just as they were on the cusp of chart success, led with the headline ‘Posh Clobber Could Clinch It for Mode’. It did, along with substances even less material than clobber.
Before that, however, there was a shadow zone, as the 1970s were petering out prematurely, a world of Wimpys and Tescos, of supersonic vapour trails, of the last generation of working horses treading the cobbles, of transistor radios and ominous, paternalistic public-information films, of poison and violence and endless summers, of a nation in flight from itself and from its own post-war construction, of the decaying old and the already decaying new. A handful of boys, working in the fading new dawn of Krautrock, scratching out a tentative new music on the black sheet of the future that was the 1980s, unknowable in 1979.
2017. I’m in the back room of the Bar & Kitchen in Hoxton Street, adjacent to a noisy room of lagery carousers. Daniel Miller, founder of Mute Records, is giving a talk and slideshow of his street photography, a passion of his in which he exercises the principle established by the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson of the ‘decisive moment’. The scenes he captures aren’t particularly interesting for their subjects or for the inconsequential incidents they represent. He’s more interested in the fleeting, inadvertent symmetries you can capture with a single snapshot if you happen to be in the right place at the right time, ready to anticipate the possibility of the spontaneous. Accompanying him is an ongoing bubbling of modular synthesizer. Miller makes the point that there are such things as ‘decisive moments’ in music-making. ‘I just get very sick of the thousands of presets you get in modern synths. It’s got worse and worse. For me, if you’re making electronic music, the idea of using presets is a very boring, non-creative way of making music. When I worked as a producer, one of the rules I set was no presets.’
I suggest to Miller that one aspect of the synthpop emergence circa 1978 was its imagistic nature. Despite the scratchy, monochromatic feel of the cheap, basic synths that were emerging from Japan onto the market at that time, you could paint pictures, suggest atmospheres, rather than merely drive the narrative lines of three-chord punk. Had that aspect of the new instruments appealed to him?
‘In a way, yes. I think a lot of people making music back then had a visual arts background. I studied film – my first job was as an assistant film editor, making commercials. The content wasn’t very inspiring but the process was fascinating. I learned a lot about structure and about compressing ideas into a very short space of time. Peter Christopherson from Throbbing Gristle was part of the Hipgnosis design team who created album covers for Pink Floyd, among others.’
Miller was among a handful of rarified, isolated and dispersed souls who had taken inspiration from the experimental West German music scene of the 1970s, which in terms of its form and ambitions was antithetical to the dominant Anglo-American prog rock and its classical pretensions and ascension into the clouds of Tolkien-esque whimsy. Sensing the exhaustion and coming extinction of the 1970s behemoths – just what was the point of Led Zeppelin come 1978? – they took the opportunity to seize a new means of production, on a less epic and heroic but more accessible and meaningful scale.
The new technology also encouraged the phenomenon of bedroom recording. The extroversion necessary to form a band and knock heads with fellow members in a rehearsal space was no longer an absolute requirement. Glasgow-born Thomas Wishart, aka Leer, had moved to London and joined a punk band called Pressure with, among others, Robert Rental. He understood the importance of punk in recharging music in the UK, dispelling the whiff of staleness that was almost palpable when you surveyed the pages of Melody Maker in particular, and the ageing, hirsute music it reported on in a dully ruminative manner. But within months he found the limited room for musical manoeuvre within the three-chord format stifling. He retreated to the bedroom of his tiny Finsbury Park flat and recorded his debut single, ‘Private Plane’. The equipment at his disposal was a four-track recorder and a little mixing board, a tape-echo unit, a DrQ filter, a preset drum machine and a Stylophone. Wobbly and aerial, trailing wispy clouds of synth, its vocals sound whispered, as if not to disturb other sleepers in the house while recording. It’s antithetical to punk’s public and soon-to-be-predictable holler. It’s a product of introversion, discretion, yet it’s exploratory; a private plain, indeed. With its Germanic suggestiveness, Leer was the perfect moniker. It’s the German for ‘empty’, and the terrain Leer and his contemporaries were alighting on felt empty indeed, like a grey yet fertile pop planet awaiting discovery and development.
As for Miller, he enjoyed modest success as the Normal with ‘Warm Leatherette’/‘T.V.O.D.’, the former’s irresistible pneumatic inhalation/exhalation a very obvious tribute to J. G. Ballard, which suggested that the newly minted synthpop had peculiarly erotic possibilities that made it ideal for chart consumption; Grace Jones would recognise this in covering the song herself. The lessons in terseness and compression he’d learned from the advertising world came in useful and would become the founding stone of Mute Records.
‘1978 saw debut releases by Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, as well as the Normal and Thomas Leer, among others,’ says Miller. ‘And there’s a historical reason for that. It came out of punk in a way, but wasn’t punk. A lot of punks hated electronic music because for them it represented Emerson, Lake and Palmer.’
Miller discovered this when he toured with Robert Rental. They toured with Stiff Little Fingers and, as with Suicide supporting the Clash, found themselves facing the wrath of punk fans who viewed synthesizers with Luddite disdain, seeing them as mysterious black boxes of alienation and a betrayal of everything they were pogoing for.
‘It went down very badly,’ recalls Miller. ‘We played with Stiff Little Fingers from Belfast, who’d just released their first album on RT, which was a success. The venues were much bigger and it was a punk audience. We often left the stage with burns from lighted cigarettes that had been thrown at us, covered in alcohol from bottles hurled onstage … However, we made a pact that we would never allow ourselves to be bottled off stage. We would complete the gig. And always there’d be one or two people who came backstage who said that they’d been inspired by what we’d done. And that made it worth it for us.’
The most potent document of their work together is the one-sided 1979 disc Live at West Runton Pavilion. The very name West Runton Pavilion sticks out with rustic soreness in the annals of early electronica. Closed in 1986, it was situated on the North Norfolk coast, Alan Partridge country, a venue whose excellent acoustics made it a preferred drop-in for pop and rock acts looking to try out new material before going out on tour proper. According to the blue plaque that now sits outside the former venue, in its heyday it saw Chuck Berry, T. Rex, Black Sabbath and the Sex Pistols, among others, pass through its doors. Unmentioned are Robert Rental and the Normal, who played there on 6 March 1979.
Live at West Runton Pavilion is a milestone recording, one which I purchased with school dinner money shortly after it came out, and whose surfaces – machine-generated crags and rough contours – I came to know intimately, like a climber his favourite rock. It begins with a random, haywire scatter of analogue, as if the newly activated machines are spraying ideas everywhere to see what might stick, before giving way to a kitschy extended section of mid-twentieth-century dance-band music, as if channelling the sort of brassy, MOR tea-dance fare in which the venue had specialised before the advent of rock’n’roll. Decades later, Leyland James Kirby, the ambient artist also known as the Caretaker (an allusion to Jack Nicholson’s role in The Shining), would poignantly frame this sort of music in his sympathetic explorations of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. In 1979, however, it still provided the dismally patterned aural carpeting of Radio 2’s daily output, a part of the frustrating soundtrack to young people’s lives.
From there, however, an analogue signal strikes up, like the first flashing lighthouse signal of an electrified music to come. What follows is a churning, looping deluge, reminiscent of Faust, like a ruthless agricultural process, as if machinery is tilling the dull earth to lay cable for the impending decade. Onwards and upwards pours the noise billowing from Miller’s and Rental’s wires and boxes, flooding out the venue, as if purging it of all its previous musical connotations, from the dance bands to Chuck, even the Pistols, until, around the fifteen-minute mark, in what feels like a Decisive Moment indeed, a silvery eruption, a three-note signal and a shuffle of drum machine burst up like a spinning top from the morass, and the immediate future – from OMD to Ultravox, Numan to Depeche Mode – is up and online. 1980 is months away.
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From Thomas Leer to Martin Zero. In 1978, a producer going by that name went down to Salford Tech to catch one of the many bands who had taken up guitars in the wake of the Sex Pistols’ appearance in Manchester. The producer had already carved his first historical mark by producing the Buzzcocks’ indelible Spiral Scratch EP, and even had a hit, producing Graham Fellows’s Jilted John single. It was a disastrous gig – the PA had broken down and the guitarist and bassist had to compensate as best they could – but the producer was impressed by the drummer, Stephen, and his industry and application. He also divined, amid the muddy push of fretboards and the distracted intensity of the vocals, a sense of space. A space in which he could work. ‘It was a very big room, they were badly equipped, and they were still working into this space, making sure they got into the corners,’ he later told Jon Savage.
The group had been known as Warsaw, a worthy post-punk moniker, suggestive of the cold war’s permanent grey clouds, the twentieth-century promise of the world becoming a socialist utopia long since faded into a dreary oppression from which the only likely release was thermonuclear annihilation. They’d dumped that, however, in favour of the rather more dubious Joy Division. It was as Joy Division that they made their first recordings with Martin Zero, aka Martin Hannett: ‘Digital’ and ‘Glass’, their contributions to 1978’s A Factory Sample, alongside the Durutti Column and Cabaret Voltaire.
Hannett had been a bassist himself but he wasn’t especially musicianly in the conventional sense. He enjoyed the distance and contrast between treble and bass, the effect you could get on a snare drum if you isolated it, the way you could use echo, delay and reverb in ways that made the spaces between the playing as electric and as meaningful as the playing itself.
Although Hannett never claimed to be a creative element within Joy Division or co-author of their spirit – he had no hand in writing the songs – he can be credited with crucially enhancing their sound, adding vital details, teasing out the very best of them sonically. This he did in various strange ways: injunctions to play faster but more slowly at the same time; mild methods of psychological abuse, such as turning up the air conditioning to freezing in the studio. ‘Martin did not like musicians,’ Peter Hook later remarked. ‘It was a constant battle with him. He was a genius but also a lunatic. He’d do things like go record the silence on the moors and listen back to it in the studio.’ His curly hair and shades, meanwhile, gave him the air of that other martinet of the mixing desk, Phil Spector.
Among the ways Hannett helped seal and glaze the permanence of Joy Division, however, was through electronics. Ironically, the band had been signed to RCA but demanded to be released from their contract when the label insisted they add synthesizers for the purpose of softening their edge. With Hannett, though, Joy Division would use synths not just to add an icicle sharpness to their sound but to make metaphysical piercings.
The first synthesizers Hannett and guitarist Bernard Sumner owned were Transcendent 2000s and ARP Omnis. Hannett also owned and used several Jen SX1000s and an ETI 4600 modular synth. Images show Hannett himself at the controls, looking more au fait with their workings than the onlooking Sumner. Hannett, you might say, was the machine in the ghost of Joy Division.
On their debut, Unknown Pleasures, keyboards are less in evidence; there are, however, ingenious ambient features, such as the lift-shaft effect on ‘Insight’ – a spatial sleight that only adds to the overall feel of the album as sucking you into its charismatic, echoladen black hole – and, on the same track, an ambush of Space Invader-style munchkins. Then there is the strobe-lit drone and broken glass that strew the closing track, ‘I Remember Nothing’.
By the time of 1980’s Closer, electronics are like an artificial limb added to the Joy Division body, or maybe the means of dispersing their spiritual ectoplasm. All of this had as much to do with the sonics of the recording space as the instruments – drawing energy from architecture. ‘We used a half-completed construction project as an echo room,’ explained Hannett. ‘A huge shell with plaster walls. I invented all these little tricks to do with generating sound images, like a holographic principle. Light and shade … I like deserted public spaces, empty office blocks. They give me a rush.’
On ‘Atrocity Exhibition’, Ian Curtis’s homage to the J. G. Ballard collection of ‘condensed novels’, a machine-like clatter snakes remorselessly and impersonally through the track, subjects its lumps of guitar to a sort of evisceration. The effect reminds one of a Francis Bacon painting, in which flesh is ripped and tugged by invisible psychotic forces.
Track two, ‘Isolation’, is synthpop as pure ice, dispensed in sub-zero waves as if actively to repel human warmth. Borne by the wisp and slap of Stephen Morris’s electronic drum pattern and underpinned by Peter Hook’s typically low-slung, high-register bass, it seems to sleigh and skitter impossibly, as if at the mercy of an imminent thaw, yet so precisely is it customised by Hannett that it has been preserved through the ages, and will be through ages to come.
And then the album’s final two tracks, advancing like a solemn procession, as if in advance knowledge of Curtis’s fate. The gothic cricket drones of ‘Eternal’ threaten to tropically overwhelm a track otherwise dominated by a sense of sad, sepulchral froideur; it’s a paradox that elevates the track from ponderous despondency. Finally, ‘Decades’ continues in the same sombre, black-hooded vein: ‘Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders … we knocked on the doors of hell’s darker chambers.’ Precocious, but it’s a precocity that is deserved. Its concluding grainy synth layers are drawn over the song like a shroud. Curtis’s death was a pitiful one: a washing machine, a Macclesfield kitchen, the guilt of an everyday act of infidelity. It was a private tragedy. The production, however, of Closer is one of the key factors in lending Curtis’s demise an inadvertent symbolism, the marble entombment of a myth and another paradox: the utterly perished and the imperishable.
Joy Division occur in that dark moment between the death of the modern and the birth of the postmodern (or the beginning of the post-space age). Slum clearances had taken place, to be replaced by nothing; the crater-like evocations of Joy Division’s sound evoke this emptiness. Manchester and the environs from which the band’s members were drawn seemed to be in a state of terminal decay. During the group’s tenure, there was a breakdown of the city’s sewerage system, which emitted a stench symbolic of the collapse of civic infrastructure. Joy Division represented a sense of collapse at personal, existential, local and global levels: from Curtis’s private traumas as worked out through the lyrics of ‘24 Hours’ or ‘Shadowplay’, to the imminent disaster about to be wrought by the incoming Conservative government, to the paralysing terror of nuclear war that saw CND’s membership jump tenfold around 1980. All of this, however, is my reading. Joy Division themselves put up a northern bitterman’s carapace in interviews, their comments essentially reducible to ‘fuck off’, saying as little as possible, as if journalistic inquiry might disturb the mystery of what they were drawn to do live and in the studio, or maybe force them to reflect on a music they preferred to channel instinctively.
As anyone who lived through the 1970s in the north knows, it was not as monochrome as represented in the photos of Anton Corbijn and Kevin Cummins – not that these brilliant images were deceitful, but they were super-real, not unlike the synths that shimmer round the edge of Joy Division. It was a place of hideous oranges and browns, garish flare-and-tanktop combinations, plastic signs in bad orange fonts outside cheap cafes, and patterned carpets. Monochrome felt like an escape from all of this; the silvery releases of synth in Joy Division’s music feel like temporary escapes from the oppressive, cyclical grind of their traditional instrumentation, in the midst of which Curtis writhed like a trapped butterfly. The emissions of the aptly named Transcendent 2000 hint at other dimensions, perhaps only imaginable rather than within grasp – vaguely European dreams of Belgium, Kraftwerk, Herzog, Bowie’s Euro-melancholia. Curtis was to be denied all of these things. Joy Division remained, alluringly frozen on the very edge of the 1980s.
I never saw Joy Division live, knew very little about them until the first edition of the NME appeared after several weeks off the shelves due to industrial action, the issue dated 14 June 1980 announcing Curtis’s death a month earlier. My first exposure to them was ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’: my ear’s eye was drawn to the synth lines that drew diagonally across the track, like a solemn semaphore. Then there was ‘Atmosphere’/‘She’s Lost Control’, a pairing of absolute perfection.
The decades to follow did not pan out in the way Ian Curtis’s frightened gaze appeared to foretell. There was no ice age, no apocalypse. Warsaw was liberated. The times became increasingly hedonistic and frivolous. Happy Mondays, happy pills. The European dreams were of Ibiza. And yet nothing has dimmed the immaculacy of ‘Atmosphere’/‘She’s Lost Control’. The latter was an upgraded version of a track that had originally appeared on Unknown Pleasures. This new take was rid of the earlier version’s dank reverb. Built around a taut, amplified snare drum, it impacts violently, like a flashlight. It’s whiplash, urgent, on stalks, so brutally minimal that when the synths cascade sparsely in the fadeout, it feels like the stars are dancing in sympathy. Others used the same synthpop machinery, the same tunings, but, crucially, never in the same context.
Finally, ‘Atmosphere’. For all the desperate sadness of Curtis’s demise, it’s like a pre-recorded message from beyond the grave. For all that the world changed in ways Curtis would never get to recognise, there is a strange, moving, even triumphant sense of consolation, a cheating of death, that occurs in these verses. All of this is signified by the fountain of synths that is the song’s centrepiece, as magnificently inappropriate as confetti at a funeral. Despite his personal extinction, despite the way the world eventually walked away, this track sealed Joy Division’s permanence.
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Today, Sheffield is a postmodern, heritage version of itself, the area surrounding the station brightly scrubbed and boasting a water feature as a symbol of perpetual self-cleansing, as well as a ghastly piece of doggerel carved in stone paying tribute to the city’s charms. Rather than a centre of the steel industry, it nowadays seems to have put itself at the service of the much-expanded university. The city is still flanked by hills, a reminder of the raw beauty of the Peak District that lies just twenty minutes away, but it is a far cry from its grim heyday. Destitute fossils of pubs and vestigial blocks of grand nineteenth-century architecture nestle with depressing neatness alongside various civic heritage and commercial initiatives dating from the Blair years. It’s like Threads never happened.
Back in the 1970s, the air was still grimy and toxic, the cultural landscape featureless apart from Tony Christie. The Sheffield scene that emerged revolved around Cabaret Voltaire, at a pub, the Beehive, near their Western Works studio in West Street. Among the assorted would-be Futurists and overcoated post-punksters, such as Clock DVA, were a group of floppy-haired young men who had started life as the Future but would switch their moniker to the Human League.
The substance of the Human League originally lay in its two founders, Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware, a pair of computer operators who decided to acquire a Korg 700S. Deciding that they needed a visual focus for their instrumental musings, they brought in a vocalist, a hospital porter called Philip Oakey. Having released the portentous ‘Being Boiled’, in which Oakey intoned nonsense lyrics with utter conviction, they decided that they needed to enhance their visuals still more and brought in Adrian Wright, whose collection of sci-fi and vintage memorabilia – including 3,500 bubblegum cards, 1960s Observer magazines and horror and sci-fi paraphernalia – would provide a sort of mulch for the Human League as they approached the threshold of the 1980s.
Weaponised with the past to face the future, their early sets were highlighted by a version of the Delia Derbyshire-created theme to Doctor Who. In 1979, they released the Eisensteinian EP The Dignity of Labour, a salute to Yuri Gagarin, told in vaulting electronic strokes using the Roland System 100 as their toolkit. They further covered Gary Glitter’s ‘Rock’n’Roll Part II’, in a manner which sounded a death knell for rock’n’roll. Their debut album, Reproduction, featured ‘Empire State Human’, in which Oakey imagined growing ‘tall, tall, tall, as big as a wall, wall, wall’, through sheer ‘concentration’. While Marsh and Ware were immersed in the adventures of board and wire afforded by the new generation of affordable electronics, Oakey saw no reason why he, his hair and the Human League could not become pop, as big as a wall. Why not? Everyone else was doing it. Oakey quarrelled with Ware, and Ware and Marsh left the group, agreeing that Oakey and Wright could keep the name Human League but also deal with the debts they had accrued.
The Human League now consisted of a haircut and a collection of slides. Realising the need to add substance to the group, Oakey went to a nightclub in Sheffield city centre and spotted two teenage girls, Joanne Catherall and Susanne Sulley, ‘dancing differently to anyone else in the building’. Their defiantly ill-co-ordinated efforts would remain core to the Human League throughout their years of success. Oh, and then they hired some musicians.
The new Human League released a single, ‘Boys and Girls’, on 21 February 1981, minus the girls. It was inauspicious in every way, looking in briefly at number forty-eight in the charts. Just a month later, Marsh and Ware made their own altogether more substantive chart smackdown with ‘(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang’, immediately hailed by Paul Morley as one of the greatest singles of all time. Impetuous, but maybe not wrong. Heaven 17 were now a trio featuring Glenn Gregory – their original first choice of frontman for the Human League, but who had been unavailable at the time – his deadpan, chin-in-chest vocals perfect for skating across the slick chromium surfaces of Marsh and Ware’s synth generations.
Tongue-in-cheek but deadly earnest and lethally brilliant, ‘(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang’ was a protest song against the march of the right on both sides of the Atlantic, expressed in a parody of the funk vernacular. At a time when politically minded pop commentators, like the NME cartoonist Ray Lowry, were lamenting the post-punk drive towards the hedonism of the dancefloor it was an inspired soldering. The multi-layering of the drum programming gave it a near-impossibly accelerated feel, like a rapid, urgent mobilisation brought on by the prospect of a Ronald Reagan presidency. At the same time, it was a demonstration of synthpop’s potency and ability to marshal new powers for new, more complex times. The likes of the Clash suddenly felt like stragglers, still toting their guitars like spaghetti-western rifles in a machine-gun age. With this single Heaven 17 were moving faster than Pacman, harder and smarter, too. Keep up if you dare.
Heaven 17 would follow up ‘Fascist Groove Thang’ with Penthouse and Pavement, a melange of white funk and polemical lyrics delivered from within the framework of electronics buffed to a high shine. The cover featured animations of the group members looking uncannily like the yuppies who would be ubiquitous in 1987, several years hence. Sporting ponytails and pinstripe suits, against a backdrop of glass-fronted office blocks, and working on keyboards, telephones and tape machines, they were not ragged outlaws looking on helplessly in torn jeans but a group who would engage with the system by using its own technologies, subverting from within. Was this the group of the 1980s?
Phil Oakey, meanwhile, planned a new album with the Human League. He had initially considered calling it ‘Jihad’, perhaps still a little in thrall to the spirit of Cabaret Voltaire, whose latest album, designed to conjure geopolitical nightmares, was called Red Mecca. Oakey decided against the idea, since he anticipated having repeatedly to explain its meaning to journalists.
In 1982, Oakey made a vow to the NME’s Charles Shaar Murray: ‘I always said that there would only be two albums with Martyn, and I’ve said to a few people that there’ll only be one more Human League album after Dare because I don’t want it to run forever. There is something trashy about the Human League that ought to be stopped at some stage.’
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With ex-Material drummer Fred Maher now making up the Scritti Politti trio, Green Gartside, the founder member of the erstwhile DIY post-punksters, approached Arif Mardin, best known for his production work with Chaka Khan, particularly on her 1981 album What Cha’ Gonna Do for Me, which featured the splash-funk of ‘I Know You, I Live You’ and the dappled ‘Any Old Sunday’. At a time when white hipsters were turning to black music for the earthy, worthy antiquity of old 1960s grooves, Green was steeped in its most recent modernistic manifestations. (I first learned of the existence of Run-DMC from reading a Green interview.) He wasn’t interested in grit – all that ‘soulfulness, honesty, earnestness’ – he was interested in the gloss, contemporary black gloss, and the exquisite twist a Mardin could bring to his material.
Cupid & Psyche 85 sat alongside the black boombox brilliance of Trevor Horn’s production work with Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Propaganda and the Art of Noise. Both shared a predilection for the Orch5, for example, whose single symphonic stabbing effect was said to have been used on Rockers Revenge’s ‘Walking on Sunshine’, Afrika Bambaataa’s ‘Planet Rock’ and, most recently, the Art of Noise’s ‘Close (to the Edit)’. Perhaps its origin as an idea, however, is in Chic’s ‘Good Times’, that sound of the strings snapping back as if to simulate a snort of cocaine.
If Trevor Horn’s productions sometimes overwhelm their subjects with a black box of tricks, on Cupid & Psyche 85 there’s a perfect balance between material and medium. Yes, Maher’s LinnDrum made for a huge scaffolding, the biggest and best of the 1980s. Granted, American keyboardist David Gamson can take great credit for this album (as co-writer of some songs also), adding layer upon layer of PPG Wave 2.3, Minimoog, Yamaha DX7, Oberheim OB-X, Fairlight CMI and Roland’s MSQ-700, Jupiter 8 and JX-8P, all of this jewellery perfectly arranged and presented on a black velvet backdrop – mass music of quality and distinction. However, it’s Green’s dialectical mastery that raises Cupid & Psyche 85 to its pinnacle status.
The very title of the album is indicative of Green’s philosophical take: that all is ‘provisional’. Pop is full of ideals – the sweetest this, the perfect that – and Green’s songs reflect this ironically because he believes such ideals are open to interrogation, are shifting and illusory. Hence titles like ‘Perfect Way’ and ‘Absolute’, while ‘Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)’ alludes to a singer regarded wistfully by white soul crooners like George Michael as representing some unmatchable state of holy pop grace. Green’s lyrics see him peel away these layers of certainty, at which point the pop song and its traditionally romantic subject matter are revealed as a metaphor for broader ideals and conditions, political, social, philosophical.
These agonies, however, are hard-candy-coated, in a music that seems to ascend to states of glittering immaculacy, whose validity is questioned in the lyrics, the searchlights somehow all the brighter because the search is futile. The cod-reggae gait of ‘The Word Girl’ is showered in sporadic bursts of diamond manna, its perfect curves stressed by a heavenly upward arc in the bridge. No pop star was more studious than Green, yet there’s absolutely nothing studied about his ability to turn a melody. ‘Wood Beez’, simulated by the pirouettes of contemporary dancer Michael Clark in the video, features a swooning, starlit chorus and synths that descend in chunks like white plaster from the ceiling as if Franklin herself were shrieking gospel. ‘Absolute’ is cavernous, the keyboards shimmering galactic, soaring and plunging in tandem with Green’s vocals.
Cupid & Psyche 85 is an album absolutely of its time, a showcase for the latest in high-budget mid-1980s state-of-the-art studio technology, as bold as it is commercial. It is at once date-stamped and timeless. Its machinery of sampling and sequencing would soon become more developed and widespread, and yet this is not a record that ‘anticipates’ anything further down the line as such; rather it is a supreme pop expression, to be ranked alongside ABC’s The Lexicon of Love. It uses samples, but not in the referential manner of early sampling, full of nods and winks, quotes and references. Cupid & Psyche 85 refers to itself only, its exquisitely twisted sheet layers of synth acting as corridors of mirrors; it’s an album in the distinctive depths of whose surfaces the listener can, perversely, admire themselves. It’s exquisite, but with a built-in critique of its own exquisteness. It’s an album that has its cake and deconstructs it.
Perhaps Green himself reflected that paradox. In interviews, while expanding with post-structuralist meticulousness on the uncertainty that underlies all things, he could come across as absolutely assured of his own rightness and superior analysis. In this case, it was utterly correct to go pop, to eschew the sort of ‘importance’ vaguely hankered after by the likes of Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis which lay somewhere beyond the margins. For Green, the progressions of the white avant-garde were deluded, invalid, irrelevant. The great Now, the splashback of the moment, was contemporary African American music, soul × machinery, the subject of Green’s contemplation from afar. 1985 – the perfect moment. However, come 1988, the wheel had rotated 180 degrees. White rock was enjoying a ghostly resurgence and white pop stars mediating black American music had become a cliché. That didn’t stop Green making what was effectively Cupid & Psyche part 2, as if he had settled on a Great Permanence in 1985 rather than something provisional. All the more ironic, then, that the 1988 album should have been titled Provisional.
1985 saw peak Scritti – pretty much matchless, with the exception of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love and Prefab Sprout’s Steve McQueen. On both of those albums, synths waft and shadow subtly, in a manner that would soon be considered obsolete as the technology moved on. Consequently, all three albums feel magnificently preserved, even as 1985 has melted into air.
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In 1993, Depeche Mode were on top of the world. By this point, they had outlasted just about everything there was to outlast. Industrial, rave, techno, metal, grunge, all were coalescing into a swirl of sludge as trends and narratives began to slow down and slop over into one another. That collective tide was the one that the Mode sailed. Initially regarded as the sort of paper-thin flunkies who would be blown back to Basildon the moment the flimsy trend that had blown them onto Top of the Pops in the first place abated, Depeche Mode had proven both resilient and absorbent. Moreover, unlike even the mistrusted Duran Duran, they had made the transition to American success. Theirs was an unexpected hardness. In the US, however, their lead singer, Dave Gahan, suffered the ravages of that success. Isolated, gaunt, scarred and tattooed to within an inch of his pampered, pitiful life, as blackened as Johnny Cash, living in apartments with blacked-out windows, he was about to suffer backstage in New Orleans the sort of near-death experience, the Act Two hitherto unassociated with synth bands: total collapse brought on by a surfeit of booze and hard drugs, because when you reach the top and there’s nothing there, that’s what you do.
Basildon. As with Neasden, there’s an inherent comedy in the name, its shallow history as a ‘new town’ created after World War II to take on London’s overspill adding to its sense of provincial banality. How very Basildon that in 2010 they erected a miniature version of the white Hollywood sign boasting the town’s name in a bid to attract tourists. Having played host to a number of heavy industrial firms, such as Ford, from the 1960s onwards, it is mainly memorable for its construction of an enormous shopping mall and for voting in larger numbers than expected for John Major, an early indication on election night 1992 of yet another Conservative victory. And for spawning Depeche Mode.
There is, though, a strangeness about the essential depths of England, obscure forces lurking in its backwaters, which give a place like Basildon its unique abnormality. As with Joy Division and Greater Manchester, Depeche Mode were in some ways typical specimens of the place, broad of accent and blokeish rather than foppish. ‘We’re Sun readers, basically,’ Martin Gore once said. However, Depeche Mode’s various band members were of somewhat intense provenance. Vince Clarke and Martin Fletcher were born-again Christians right through their teen years. Gore, whose own sense of moral introspection saw him oscillate between the virtues of devout vegetarianism and assorted rock’n’roll vices, had been somewhat fazed to learn that his real father was an African American GI, while Dave Gahan was busy accumulating a modest rap sheet for petty criminality.
It was not Kraftwerk but punk that fired up Depeche Mode. In later years, when punk appeared to have been banished to a handful of scowling, Mohican-haired beer-swillers on a bench on the King’s Road and new pop was king, Gahan surprised an interviewer by chanting the words to Sham 69’s ‘Borstal Breakout’, before adding, ‘Those were the days of proper music.’
Further fired up by the dark pop clouds being generated by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, the Human League, Gary Numan and the Cure, the various Mode members in their pre-incarnations began to eschew conventional instruments in favour of electronic keyboards like the Minimoog and the Yamaha CS-5. Gore described synths as ‘punk instruments, a do-it-yourself kind of tool’, a still easier means of access to music for those who couldn’t even afford vans or amps, who had to walk to gigs.
All in all, the Mode felt unremarkable. When they arrived on the scene, they were hardly trailblazers; indeed, they seemed somewhat guileless – when they were interviewed about the subject matter of their debut single, ‘Dreaming of Me’, Gahan piped up with the question, ‘What’s a narcissist?’ Daniel Miller, head of Mute Records, where they were eventually to find their home, found them so nondescript the first time he was exposed to them that he overlooked them completely (but not the second time). They felt like the sort of group that if they did not exist, it would not be necessary to invent them. Miller had, however, invented a group, the Silicon Teens, a fictional teen synthpop outfit, a marvel of inauthenticity which had pulled the wool over many pairs of eyes. ‘They could only play one note at a time,’ noted Miller of their minimal compactness. Clean, no chords, no messing.
Still, with songwriter Vince Clarke taking up all songwriting duties, Depeche Mode had a knack of hitting the sweet spot every time on their keyboards. ‘New Life’ shuffled and sashayed across the dancefloor tiles with nifty, machinic gloss. ‘I Just Can’t Get Enough’ was a sparkling affair, deceptively slight, the sort of pop item that would be discarded like a glittered glove come the next fashion season. Even by 2006, however, the Mode were playing it live, accompanied by a veritable Luftwaffe of electronics, its riff delivered with imposing, Front 242-style density.
Clarke was a strange one. He sat out high-profile interviews. It was as if he felt the machinery of pop he had set in train was overtaking him, and the group. A schedule, a programme of media obligations and appearances had kicked in, which to him was far more insidious than the machinery of machines, the toys he wanted to play with. He could bear it no more, and Clarke, the creative mainstay of the group, abruptly quit following the first album. He’d grown apart from the rest of the group, grown contemptuous of their mannequin willingness to do whatever their commercial handlers asked of them. He would pack up and go on to play the deadpan keyboard foil first to Alison Moyet in Yazoo, and then to Andy Bell in Erasure, pegging down their ballooning flamboyance and soulfulness with his tautly memorable keyboard lines, a lone figure in the back row.
Surely that was the Mode clobbered. ‘I think we should have been slightly more worried than we were,’ Gore would later comment.
*
‘Our biggest singles have been the ones on which Joanne and I have made the biggest vocal contribution. It’s not to slag off Philip, it’s just the truth. Look at the sales figures for “Fascination”, “Don’t You Want Me” and “Human”,’ Susanne Sulley told me when I interviewed the Human League in 2001, at which point I was interviewing them, this long-standing institution, at the regular rate of once a decade, each time just a stone’s throw from Sheffield railway station, each time treated to a tour around a mini-museum of their vintage keyboard units, enclosed in glass cases.
Phil Oakey doesn’t take offence. He agrees.
‘The musos who more or less control the music business underestimate the communications aspect of what we do,’ he says. ‘Pop music is about communication between like-minded people. It’s not about great singers. The people who succeed are the ones that are so good that they don’t sound too much like Michael Jackson, or the ones that you know what they’re talking about, just from their voices. Like John Lydon or Neil Tennant. Ordinary people. We’re ordinary people.’
The latest musicians hired by the group to perform the necessary and not-to-be-sniffed-at keyboard chores, Russell Dennett and Neil Sutton, do not give their opinions. They are absent from the interview.
Ordinariness was the factor plastered over the alien strangeness in which the Human League had initially traded. Around 1981, I remember going to the Leeds Warehouse, the only club in that city that played the truly emergent electronic and new pop sounds of the early part of the decade, rather than the more mainstream fare of Duran Duran and the Jam, which was more the staple of the junior common room and mobile discos. Around that time The Face had put out their ‘hard times’ cover, an exercise in sartorial rebranding which saw torn denim supplant the more flamboyant garb of the New Romantic era. Still, the Human League were a part of the overall defiantly glam response to the first great recession to hit the north. The big, shiny, sequenced sounds of a synthpop hit were part of the same sonic continuum as the rattle of a bucket of coins on a street corner. ‘Hard Times’ was also the title of a Human League release, its big synth theme resounding like a siren’s wail as Sulley, Catherall and Oakey chanted the title over and over like a terse bullet point. I remember Sulley- and Catherall-alikes moving uncoordinatedly up and down the dancefloor, together but incapable and unwilling to sway precisely in sync. They were similarly frocked in outfits doubtless picked up from second-hand shops, reclaimed and modified rather than bought off the peg from Top Shop or H&M.
Before that came ‘The Sound of the Crowd’, and the Human League’s first appearance on Top of the Pops. Large tape reels signified the wheels of electronic industry, while Phil Oakey still hadn’t cropped the fringe that curtained half his face (a look I shamelessly copied during my sixth-form years, along with a little Midge Ure moustache – all facial bases covered). Most striking, however, were Sulley and Catherall, attacking the song with their determined non-choreography, Sulley brandishing an imaginary lasso, Catherall in high heels stamping on the beats as if trying to squash snails on the dancefloor. This was ordinariness in excelsis, dancing as you saw out in clubs, dancing not just to the actual song but to the song as it played in your imagination, acting out its attitude rather than conforming exactly to its rhythm. ‘Everyone would absolutely agree with me: I can’t keep time,’ Catherall would tell the Guardian’s Paul Lester. ‘I can’t do step class or anything like that at the gym, because I’ve got no rhythm.’
Moreover, this was dancing in the true analogue spirit – spontaneous, independent, imprecise, non-preset. Phil Oakey once said that the Human League were making music as all music would be made in the future (i.e. in a mechanical, post-guitar age). In fact, it did not pan out like that. Guitars made their comeback, in a corollary to perma-conservative cultural and political times, while a digital era of electronic pop brought with it a more digitalised, disciplined choreography that in its faintly joyless bump’n’grind felt regressive, post-feminist (which, in effect, is to say, pre-feminist). The League themselves had to militate against this when they were invited onto the American show Solid Gold, whose producers tried to impose their own professional choreographed go-go dancers on them. An act of sheer, more uncomprehending pop sacrilege it is hard to imagine. ‘We don’t have dancers – that’s a rule,’ insisted Oakey.
With Dare, the Human League captured the spirit of the pop age like an electric eel by the tail. This was the future, for the time being, and this was now. Electric typewriters, shiny lipgloss, reflections in shop windows, hard stares. ‘Love Action (I Believe in Love)’ struck up with a mewling, underlying pulse, then an elaborate dial-up synthtone and then ‘Phil talking’, expounding his typically home-baked philosophy over an electropop that was at once a silver lining of escapism and a representation of the times, their pulse and the pathways we walked to and from work. Glad time it was to dance away the day’s frustrations, economic, social, political and sexual, in northern clubs, with Soft Cell cued to come up next. Much of the credit for the Human League’s sound has to go to Martin Rushent, who, like Martin Hannett with Joy Division, helped conceive, frame and realise their electric dreams. Basically, they would bash something out, waywardly, on a keyboard, with added syndrums, and take it to Rushent, who would run it through the computer to make it presentable for mass consumption. But for all that, he was never close to being the essence of the group, neither superficially nor spiritually.
The Human League sealed their dominance with ‘Don’t You Want Me’, which, even more than ‘Love Action’, would, over the decade as well as the decades to come, become embedded in the sonic warp of British life, its drama reflecting to a degree the drama that existed romantically in the Oakey–Catherall–Sulley axis. Oakey dated Catherall; they split up, but the trio would remain together as everything and everyone else around them fell away and fell apart.
*
Following the departure of Vince Clarke, Depeche Mode might easily have disbanded and melted back into their old jobs as bank clerks or non-occupations such as petty crime. That this didn’t happen was down to a variety of factors: the care they were afforded by being on Mute, a small indie label with a small roster, which they might not have enjoyed had they been signed to a major, along with the personal attention of Daniel Miller; the fact that in Martin Gore they had an able stand-in who’d already proved his songwriting skills; their desire to retain their foothold in the pop world, of which Clarke had been disdainful; but, crucially, they were about something, tapped into deeper undercurrents – depravity and political indignation, the virtues and vices of the early-1980s experimental underground – all of which were coming up electric.
Granted, there was a moroseness, almost valedictory, about their immediate follow-up album, A Broken Frame, penned entirely by Gore and leading off with the single ‘Leave in Silence’, which was about the quiet termination of a tempestuous relationship (‘This will be the last time / I think I said that last time’). Yet while such gloom might have seemed out of kilter with the garishly overlit early-1980s new-pop ethic of mandatory brassy upfulness, with songs like this Depeche Mode were sowing black seeds. An unlikely, disaffected swell of people were listening.
However, the third album, 1983’s Construction Time Again, signalled an explicit determination to clamber out of their slough of despond. Depeche Mode were tracking the methods of outfits like Einstürzende Neubauten and Test Dept, ‘metal bashers’ who supplemented their electronic music with the physical field-recorded sounds of metal detritus and discarded parts of a disintegrating post-industrial society, taking up broken metal pipes like cudgels and, in the process, deconstructing/reconstructing popular music. It was a fairly short-lived trope, which too easily become codified as a sort of modern skiffle, with cheerfully improvisational theatre groups leaping around in dungarees to the rhythmic accompaniment of dustbin lids. However, in the moment the idea was at its white-hottest, Depeche Mode converted it into pop ore, with hits like ‘Everything Counts’, a direct attack on corporate greed whose backdrop of sampled noise simulated the havoc such bodies wrought on the social structure.
(Co-running a club night in the early 1980s, we once had ranting poet Attila the Stockbroker in as a guest, who had often railed in somewhat unreconstructed terms against the likes of Depeche Mode, whom he saw as deserters of the true agitpop spirit of punk, foppish and apolitical. On being played ‘Everything Counts’ he offered a qualified onstage mea culpa, though he did insist on doing a mincing, tinkly parody of the Mode sound.)
Despite the often clumsy descents into handwringing angst of some of Gore’s lyrics, as on ‘People Are People’ (‘So why should it be / that you and I should get along so awfully’), they seemed impervious to failure, drawing ever-bigger crowds from the shadows. ‘People Are People’ would be their biggest international hit to date.
The more Depeche Mode descended as people, the higher they ascended commercially and the wider their influence spread. 1986’s Black Celebration was the creative upshot of Martin Gore following Bowie’s footsteps and relocating to Berlin, with a view to acting out his own dark cabaret, reading Camus and Brecht and dressing in women’s clothing and rubber S&M garb. Dave Gahan looked on disdainfully – he was going through a sober patch in the mid-1980s – before later his own absorption in his role as frontman and spinning dervish saw him gradually cut himself off and anaesthetise himself with booze and drugs. But his deterioration contrasted with the ever-ruder health the band were enjoying. Americans in particular found something authentic in their dark matter and atmospherics, their objections to invading 1980s English haircut bands waived in the case of the Mode. By 1990, with Violator, they were, in the eyes of millions, leather-clad, stadium-filling symbols of the triumphant ubiquity of synths as valid rock instruments, channels of male authenticity rather than disposable pop toys for girls. It was, however, an evolutionary process that would be achieved at great personal cost to their lead singer. Substance at the expense of substance abuse.
*
Despite mostly exceeding its own expectations with regard to the extent to which it would occupy the future – in 1980, it felt optimistic to dream that there would be a 1985, let alone a 2018 – electropop had its share of Missing Boys, to co-opt the title of the Durutti Column’s paean to Ian Curtis. Robert Rental dropped away from the front line of synthpop almost the moment it was established – he died of lung cancer in 2000. Thomas Leer, his old compadre, made the brilliant 4 Movements EP, an exquisite colourisation of the ideas he had sketched in synth charcoal on his earliest releases, followed by the album Contradictions, and yet he found few takers in the aggressive pop marketplace.
John Foxx left Ultravox to be replaced by journeyman of journeymen Midge Ure, only to return when electronic dance music dissolved into the abstracts of ambient and rave. Figures like Thomas (‘He Blinded Me with Science’) Dolby and Landscape (‘Einstein a Go-Go’), who perhaps overplayed the boffin-ish aspects of synthpop, gave way too as the music became quotidian in pop, though Dolby was a discreet influence as a producer on Prefab Sprout’s 1985 masterpiece Steve McQueen – the banjos on opening track ‘Faron Young’ were actually programmed by Dolby. There were enigmatic, electronic pop pearls that were washed utterly away by public indifference – Video Aventures’ 1981 EP Musique pour garçons et filles, a series of Satie-esque miniature electronic sketches of irresistible cartoon panache, remains pristine through sheer underexposure.
Most tragic was the case of Düsseldorf’s Wolfgang Riechmann. He had started musical life in the 1960s in the proto-Krautrock group Spirits of Sound, alongside Kraftwerk’s Wolfgang Flür. His career faltered in the 1970s, but he resurfaced in 1978 with the electropop album Wunderbar – a corollary to Kraftwerk’s Man-Machine, released the same year – his hair dyed blue and with matching lipstick, as if to invite further contrast/comparison with Hütter and co. An album of compact, futuristic, icicle warmth, the title track in particular is a spectral, melodic instrumental, spangled with the effects of the day, reminiscent of Cluster but projecting forward into the imagined 1980s. Riechmann never reached the ’80s. In January 1979, he was unlucky enough to be in a bar in Düsseldorf’s Altstadt, where he was confronted by a pair of drunks who took exception to his appearance. They set upon him and stabbed him; he later died of his wounds. Synthpop’s first martyr, perhaps.
Ian Curtis had hanged himself on the eve of Joy Division’s planned first tour of America. There was an inadvertent symbolism here, as Joy Division did not share what Simon Frith once called rock’n’roll’s essential ‘fascination with America’. Curtis’s gaze was set towards Europe. The remaining members of the group, however, now travelling under the moniker of New Order, did travel to the States and were fatefully taken by the emerging ‘electro-funk’ club scene there, in which Arthur Baker was a lead player. They would shed their more gothic electronic trappings and become increasingly dance-orientated and sequencer-driven, albeit as a counterpoint to the deadpan solemnity of Bernard Sumner’s vocals and Peter Hook’s lugubrious driving basslines. This dance noir would reach its apotheosis with ‘Blue Monday’, prefaced by a legendary live Top of the Pops appearance in 1983 that revealed all of their musical fragility when exposed in real time. No matter. As a synthesis of Joy Division’s magisterial shadowplay and the radical electronic dance ethos of the early 1980s, the song would become so successful as to be a cliché. I recall being there the night it was rolled out at the Leeds Warehouse, played four times within an hour, and dancing to it time and again in a state of total absorption, drink- and drug-free, oblivious to the young things in physical proximity to me.
Thereafter, New Order developed a synth groove that saw them ride the 1980s like a quad bike: ‘Confusion’, ‘True Faith’, barely breaking stride, the surviving, thriving link between the gothic despair of the late 1970s and the Madchester delirium of the late ’80s, whose acid squelch they mimicked on 1988’s ‘Fine Time’, recorded in Ibiza. Sumner began to sing the praises of the Prozac with which he had cured himself of a fifteen-month creative block and, by the late 1990s, true to themselves and yet somehow the opposite of their old selves, they were playing to Britpop-crazed audiences bobbing en masse. With ‘World in Motion’ they even managed to cheerlead England’s 1990 World Cup team without upsetting too many people – the logically evolved, increasingly electronic New Order sound was that mainstream.
New Order and Depeche Mode occasionally sounded in tandem. Take 1990’s ‘Enjoy the Silence’ by the Mode (what was it with Depeche Mode and silence? Is to speak and to spell to suffer? Was the taciturn ring-fencing it implied part of the secret to their durability?). It loped with the same stoically elegant gait of any New Order hit from around the same time.
Still, despite the fact that they were never outright originators, and often faced accusations of triteness from British music critics, subsequent beatmakers found an inspiration in Depeche Mode that they did not find elsewhere. DJ Shadow, who in 1996 created the sample-based trip-hop masterpiece that was Endtroducing, said that it was Depeche Mode who had introduced him to synth music proper, that they were the only group he listened to outside of hip hop. Something about the way they plotted their music appealed to him. House innovators claimed Depeche Mode as precursors, even to the bemusement of the band themselves. ‘It was clean and progressive and you could dance to it,’ said Inner City’s Kevin Saunderson.
Ricardo Villalobos, perhaps the foremost auteur of minimal techno, started musical life as an ardent Depeche Mode fan and imitator; all of the ultra-offbeat excursions and strangely filtered, looping mixes that have snaked from his rhythm boxes over the years find their origin in his Mode appreciation. Jacques Lu Cont’s remix of ‘A Pain that I’m Used To’, building and grinding and reviving, not only captures the sheer gnarl and persistence of Depeche Mode’s career, built on a pleasure/pain principle, but also demonstrates how today’s innovators may have extracted more from Depeche Mode’s music than the Basildon boys themselves consciously intended to put in in the first place.
As for the Human League, they honestly attempted a variety of metamorphoses throughout their intermittent career, while bloody-mindedly remaining true to their fiercely, extraordinarily ordinary selves. They tried political handwringing with ‘Lebanon’, 1980s Motown pastiche with ‘Mirror Man’, went to Minneapolis and attempted to partake of the silken lusciousness of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, yielding the wonderful ‘Human’, though they were best when they hewed closest to the Dare principle, with the wonderfully wobbly ‘Keep Feeling Fascination’, in particular, a masterpiece of knowing pop naivety, perfectly turned; watch the video and see the fleeting, sardonically polite smile Joanne Catherall delivers as the camera closes in on her dancing midway through the song. It quietly, subtly epitomises why she is one of the great siren keepers of the spirit of electropop. Maybe it’s a northern thing. In 1990, when I met them, they were nervously optimistic about the studio they had just invested in, promising an album every year to maintain its upkeep. When I interviewed them again just over ten years later, they were reminiscing on the financial destitution and nervous breakdowns this business decision had visited on them.
They survive. Come the twenty-first century, and every few years they play the Royal Albert Hall, maybe, or the Royal Festival Hall, essentially a vocal threesome, belting out ‘Don’t You Want Me’ and ‘Love Action’ to ever better, ever more upgraded light shows that put the basic filters of their Top of the Pops days to shame, while looking like immaculately preserved versions of themselves; it’s not unlike Kraftwerk’s permanently touring re-presentation of their 1970s and ’80s canon. They’re extending their fifteen minutes of fame into eternity, flying through the decades in a 1980 Tardis, and everyone with an opinion on them surely wishes them well.
There is, after all, a sense that despite electronics being permanently wired into pop today and forever, ‘electropop’ is an extinct species now that the otherness of electro has been lost. Later incarnations like Ladytron, who tried to re-establish that distance between (wo)man and machine with ‘Playgirl’, could not dispute that despite the wonderful 1980s manqué contours of their single, they were dealing in retro pastiche. Has all that was once substantial vanished into mp3 air?
To describe the likes of Depeche Mode as hard or substantial might well raise eyebrows, for during the late 1970s began to pump a new electronic music whose density was arguably even greater – ambient.