a story of malevolent miseducation
The Rudimentary History Of Uneasy Listening
by Dave Henderson1979: THE REZILLOS are playing pert pop at The Music Machine in Camden Town. They're supported by The Human League, who seem to be playing the soundtrack to Dr Who with their synths hiding behind scaffolding. Their singer has half a haircut. They are different. Beer glasses fly.
1980: At the YMCA in Tottenham Court Road, Final Solution "happens" over four nights, with performances by Throbbing Gristle, This Heat, Essential Logic, a drummer less Echo And The Bunnymen, Clock OVA and Joy Division. Grey overcoats are everywhere. Everything has gone mono chrome. Somehow TG have become the measure of modern pop culture, and a month later they take over the Scala Cinema in Tottenham Street for an all-nighter. They show William Burroughs' films and let Leather Nun administer brain-numbing metal at four in the morning. It is the beginning of a noise age.
1981: Somehow, I'm the art editor of a technical music magazine called Sound International. Every day I travel to East Croydon by train listening to DIY cassettes that I've bought after reading dismissive reviews in the weekly music press. I'm sick of normal music. Top Of ThePops is not for me. The groups on these tapes don't sound like anyone else. They have odd and threatening names, they write about things that only previously existed in bad dreams. Some of them are awful, some of them are spine-tingling.
John Carpenter's Escape From New York is released. It buzzes with his own synth soundtrack - it's the future in a film. We are at the dark end of post-punk. Fuelled by a DIY ethos, inspired by The Human League, John Foxx post-Ultravox, early OMD and The Normal's Warm Leatherette, we are immersed in emerging new technology. A decidedly awkward generation are looking for something different. They are too lacking in confidence to get on stage and play three chords, but they can sit in their bedrooms brooding. At the same time, running parallel to the angst, a series of singles on Absurd from the faceless Blah Blah Blah and Gerry And The Holograms underline that anyone can do it given a vivid or damaged imagination. There are no rules here, no record labels with a clothing allowance, no thirty-two track studios. There are only outsiders, locked inside. Non-musicians making music. It is the antithesis of Sound International magazine and, of course, they are going to let me write a feature on this miniscule phenomenon. What are they thinking of?
Across Britain, UK Electronic music undulates forward in strange jerky movements, its Bible being the three cassette set Rising From The Red Sand, a cornucopia of alien soundtracks carefully assembled by Gary Levermore of the Tone Death fanzine. The bedroom is no longer the domain of aspiring lotharios, it's turned into a squelchy mess of cheap analogue noise recorded on reel-to-reels and early Portastudios. The results are roughly copied onto second-generation tapes, housed in anarchic photocopied sleeves, and released on labels with either esoteric or ludicrous names.
The tape feature leads me to Cabaret Voltaire and, after months of nagging, Sound International agree that I can go to Sheffield to interview them at their Western Works studio. Amid the hum of sweatshop sewing machines, the Cabs tell me that they were trying to play 'Motown' but that it came out wrong. I was brought up on northern soul, and I love them. The feature runs and the magazine, in an unrelated incident, closes. By pure fluke, I end up on the weekly Sounds. I'm sitting between Sandy Robertson, who knows TG (he was at the recording of Heathen Earth and has a methadone prescription bottle that was William Burroughs') and Edwin Pouncey, who digs The Residents. What could possibly go wrong?
While New Romanticism
blossoms with an unpleasant aroma and Sounds fails to
understand 'pop', million selling Smash Hits prospers, and a
procession of intellectual extremists visit me at the paper's Covent Garden
office. They include Non's Boyd Rice, Laibach, Lustmord, Graeme Revell of SPK,
Die Todliche Doris, Steve Stapleton of Nurse With Wound, DDAA, some of the Trax
collective, Lydia Lunch, The Legendary Pink Dots, Bourbonese Qualk, O Yuki
Conjugate, 400 Blows, Deux Riles. The chatter is intense, the noise, in a lot
of cases, extreme. By now, Sounds is in freefall. Alan Lewis
and Geoff Barton ask me what's the most commercial thing I can write about and
the best I can come up with is 23 Skidoo.
One Sunday morning I go to a preview of Bladerunner. Vangelis has provided the electronic soundtrack. Because he is established, I don't like him, but his swirls and waves are infectious and the movie's dialogue is amazing. The whole thing galvanizes the Wasp-burbling electronic scene in the UK. Sample dialogue appears in songs, the wall of noise takes some kind of shape. Lyrics become dark and foreboding. Sampling is the new punk rock.
Over Christmas 1982 I sit with boxes of weirdness from all over the world, writing what would become the three-part feature Wild Planet, an A To Z of 'difficult music'. There are cassettes, lavish hand screened album covers, beautifully illustrated singles, conceptual mail art things. All life is here. Post-Christmas the release schedules are slow, so it's the perfect time to introduce the world to Attrition, Portion Control and Nocturnal Emissions, who are at the heart of the global scene's UK core.
On May 7th, the Middle East crisis continues to grow, the US are funding covert operations in South America and the Hitler Diaries are outed as fake. It's post-cold war industrial austerity and it's become strangely chic. Wild Planet part one is published. The response is mixed, the Sounds stalwarts hate it, but bedroom lights flicker on across the country. I'm allowed to orbit Wild Planet every other week, and as a result a gaggle of like-minded extremists interact. One man and his synth suddenly become "a concept". Some get record deals, some change their spots, some remain hopelessly bedroom-bound but unflappable in their beliefs. Many grow old selfishly indifferent to convention, making great unfathomable music as the years tick by ... in many cases they're still doing it.
It's now 2016, some thirty-three (and a third) years later, and someone has just placed a blue plaque at what was Western Works in Sheffield (now part of the University there). The UK electronic noise generation eventually got into soundtracks, and in some cases, they became pop stars. This aspiring, disparate 'collective' inspired Nine Inch Nails, Front 242 and Skinny Puppy, the reach was global.
The original groups came about as a backlash against the feeble pop music that was a reaction against punk. They were people who were uncomfortable doing interviews, totally lacking in confidence in many cases, committed to what they were doing and, without reservation, convinced that it was the right thing to do, often flabbergasted that anyone out of their circle of allies actually was interested.
With the advent of computer games, like-minded modernists from this decade are adopting shoot to-kill fantasies rather than making noise to annoy their neighbours, parents and mates. As a result, the music on this collection is from a time that will never be repeated. It is raw and uncompromising, angry, and desolate, the antithesis of rock 'n' roll. Music by and for a blank generation.
Dave Henderson 2016.
Published in CLOSE TO THE NOISE FLOOR formative UK electronica 1975-1984 excursions in proto-synth pop, diy techno and ambient exploration.
One Sunday morning I go to a preview of Bladerunner. Vangelis has provided the electronic soundtrack. Because he is established, I don't like him, but his swirls and waves are infectious and the movie's dialogue is amazing. The whole thing galvanizes the Wasp-burbling electronic scene in the UK. Sample dialogue appears in songs, the wall of noise takes some kind of shape. Lyrics become dark and foreboding. Sampling is the new punk rock.
Over Christmas 1982 I sit with boxes of weirdness from all over the world, writing what would become the three-part feature Wild Planet, an A To Z of 'difficult music'. There are cassettes, lavish hand screened album covers, beautifully illustrated singles, conceptual mail art things. All life is here. Post-Christmas the release schedules are slow, so it's the perfect time to introduce the world to Attrition, Portion Control and Nocturnal Emissions, who are at the heart of the global scene's UK core.
On May 7th, the Middle East crisis continues to grow, the US are funding covert operations in South America and the Hitler Diaries are outed as fake. It's post-cold war industrial austerity and it's become strangely chic. Wild Planet part one is published. The response is mixed, the Sounds stalwarts hate it, but bedroom lights flicker on across the country. I'm allowed to orbit Wild Planet every other week, and as a result a gaggle of like-minded extremists interact. One man and his synth suddenly become "a concept". Some get record deals, some change their spots, some remain hopelessly bedroom-bound but unflappable in their beliefs. Many grow old selfishly indifferent to convention, making great unfathomable music as the years tick by ... in many cases they're still doing it.
It's now 2016, some thirty-three (and a third) years later, and someone has just placed a blue plaque at what was Western Works in Sheffield (now part of the University there). The UK electronic noise generation eventually got into soundtracks, and in some cases, they became pop stars. This aspiring, disparate 'collective' inspired Nine Inch Nails, Front 242 and Skinny Puppy, the reach was global.
The original groups came about as a backlash against the feeble pop music that was a reaction against punk. They were people who were uncomfortable doing interviews, totally lacking in confidence in many cases, committed to what they were doing and, without reservation, convinced that it was the right thing to do, often flabbergasted that anyone out of their circle of allies actually was interested.
With the advent of computer games, like-minded modernists from this decade are adopting shoot to-kill fantasies rather than making noise to annoy their neighbours, parents and mates. As a result, the music on this collection is from a time that will never be repeated. It is raw and uncompromising, angry, and desolate, the antithesis of rock 'n' roll. Music by and for a blank generation.
Dave Henderson 2016.
Published in CLOSE TO THE NOISE FLOOR formative UK electronica 1975-1984 excursions in proto-synth pop, diy techno and ambient exploration.