The Residents

 

THE RESIDENTS RETRO-ACTIVE

Melody Maker, 1989? 1990?

by Simon Reynolds

     From the start, The Residents had a parasitical relation

to the pop culture that surrounded them. The sleevenotes to

"Meet The Residents", their 1973 debut, describes how they

spent the Sixties scavenging together a collection of sonic

detritus: "cassettes of soldiers in Vietnam singing songs

with impromptu instrumentation... reels from second hand

shops... sound effects and bird call collections from garage

sales ... even a few bootleg tapes of well-known pop artists

going avant-garde between takes". They were samplers long

before the invention of the Sampler.

     The early Seventies were a time when pop culture had

become so pervasive, so totalitarian, that its myths and

protocols began to replace 'real life' as pop's subject

matter.  Glam was one version of this meta-pop practice

(whether self-consciously articulated, as with Ziggy Stardust

and Roxy Music, or brutally vacant as with Glitter). The

avant-garde vandalism of The Residents was another. "Meet The

Residents", with its grotequely defaced Beatles cover, was

the birth of what has since become practically a genre of

plagiarism and misappropriation (Culturcide, Pussy Calore,

Laibach etc). Musically, "Meet The Residents" makes me think

of The Band, of all people: a polyglot commingling of

American traditional musics (R&B, proto-funk, New Orleans

jazz). But in The Residents' case, it's as though this

poly-rhythmic bouillabaise is being played on invented

instruments, or has been adapted to non-Western scales with

only partial success.

     "Third Reich 'N' Roll" (1976) develops The Residents

idea of the totalitarian nature of pop's rise to the level of

this planet's Esperanto of desire. It turns Sixties pop into

the soundtrack for Hitler's Blitzkrieg. "Swastikas On Parade"

is a segue of bubblegum classics like "Psychotic Reaction",

"The Letter", "Land Of 1000 Dances", competing with

divebombing Stukas, sirens, and machine gun fire, plus free

jazz gibberish and giddy constellations of Sun Ra synth.

"Hitler Was A Vegetarian" is a more downered trek through

songs like "96 Tears", "It's My Party", "Pushing Too Hard"

and "Gloria". Imagine The Clangers aspiring to the poignancyt

of Erik Satie.  "Third Reich 'N' Roll' is probably The

Residents' masterpiece.  As an added bonus, the CD includes

their hell-spawn (per)version of "Satisfaction", and "Beyond

The Valley Of A Day In The Life", in which "samples" of the

Beatles' wiggier moments are reconstructed into a wholly new

work.

     "Fingerprince" (also from 1976) is re-issued for the

first time in its full length. Along with the Hawaian guitar

pastiche "You yesyesyes" and the hilarious "Godsong" ("all

that God wanted to be/Just a normal deity"), there's two

pieces of particular interest. "Jealous Westinghouse" ,

described as a mini-opera, consists of electro pulsations

like Acid House at 16 rpm and doggerel dialogue in a Muppet

hillybilly twang. "Six Things To A Cycle" (a ballet) is an

atypically tropical suite of of crazy percussion and

Creatures campanology.

     "Duck Stab" (1977) is another fine collection of

25th Century nursery rhymes, conceived in the spirit of Dada

and Alfred Jarry. It's accompanied by "Goosembump", a

project undertaken with Snakefinger, whose aim was to bring

to the fore the macabre overtones latent in kindergarten

ditties. All the sounds were produced from childrens' toys,

but were drastically peculiarised by "adult studio toys". The

result is a suite of nauseatingly rubberised nursery rhymes,

that at times ("Three Blind Mice") are creepy almost

beyond endurance.

     Even more unsettling is "Eskimo", The Residents' 1979

elegy for the extinct Inoit culture of the now-thorougly

Americanised Eskimo. While their liberal tolerance for Inoit

rituals (e.g. bathing in urine, exterminating all superfluous

newborn girls) is a tad dubious, the album is a superb sonic

evocation of the irreconcilably alien Arctic lifestyle

(walrus hunts conducted in conditions of

disorientating white-out, 'arctic hysteria' induced by the

sensory deprivation of the long winter darkness).

     "Not Available" was actually recorded in '74, in

accordance with N. Senada's "theory of obscurity": the idea

that creating music in the understanding that it is never to

be heard, is the only way to avoid subconsiously pandering to

an audience. But Ralph Records slipped it out surreptitiously

in '78, when The Residents were falling behind their deadline

for "Eskimo". It's not that radical, actually: its cheapo,

pre-programmed beats making it a distant, Dadaist cousin to

shopping mall or funeral parlour muzak.

     "The Commercial Album" (1980) is probably the best

introduction to The Residents. It consists of 40 pieces each

exactly one minute long. The idea is that, since most pop

songs contain a verse and chorus repeated three times within

three minutes, if you condense that span down to one minute

(the length of most commericals) you get the kernel of the

song without the extraneous matter. Here, the result is a

collection of 'jingles' as intricate and succint as a haiku

poem (one of the prettiest is called "Japanese Watercolour")

and a sound somewhere between the Human League circa

"Reproduction" and the Suicide of "Dance".

     After "The Commercial Album", The Residents seemed to

lose their way. "The Mole Trilogy" and its sequels "Tunes of

Two Cities" and "The Big Bubble" amount to an impenetrable

allegory of something-or-other. Only the most dedicated fan

could be bothered to slog through through the dank, drab

textures of "The Mole Trilogy" to reach enlightenment. Then

there's the flaccid "God In Three Persons", a couple of live

albums, and a fine collection of material by Snakefinger

(their favourite collaborator, the now deceased guitarist

Philip Lithman).





The "American Composers Series" (The

Residents 20 year project of tributes) has brought back a

measure of rejuvenation to their sound. It seems we can

apprehend more clearly the nature of their alien-ating method

when they bring their warp factor to bear on something we

know already.  The mystery continues...

THE RESIDENTS at THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Art Review, 2006

by Simon Reynolds

From the start, The Residents saw themselves as a sound and vision entity. Way ahead of punk’s indie label revolution, the San Francisco group set up not just their own record company, Ralph, but a do-it-all-yourself production facility, which included, alongside studios for recording music and graphic design, a huge sound-stage for making films.

Before they’d even released their debut album, 1973’s Meet the Residents, the band had embarked on a movie, Vileness Fats, intended to be the world’s first fourteen-hour musical-comedy-romance set in a world of one-armed midgets. The project was pursued fitfully for four years only to be abandoned in 1976. But the warehouse HQ on Grove Street did spew out a stream of innovative and derangingly strange music videos and short films, and these, along with footage from the aborted Vileness, are now being honored with a MOMA retrospective.

Mixed-media performance and audio-visual malarkey were the norm in San Francisco’s postpunk scene. Tuxedomoon, an electronic cabaret outfit who recorded for Ralph,

came out of Sixties underground theater, with one member having belonged to the

legendary all-gay troupe Angels of Light,, while SF industrial band Factrix staged mind-bending spectacles in collaboration with local performance artists like Monte Cazazza and Mark Pauline (the robot-builder and pyrotechnician behind Survival Research Laboratories). Punk certainly opened things up and created a new climate in which bands like the Residents and Devo could find an audience. But in truth the Residents were post-psychedelic rather than post-punk: the group had been in existence since the late Sixties and had arrived in San Francisco from their native Louisiana

just as the high tide of acid rock was ebbing. According to Residents’ spokesman Hardy Fox (the group itself shuns interviews and has preserved its anonymity for over thirty years), the band “sprang from the fact that psychedelia dead-ended. The people who were doing experiments in that direction stopped when they had barely scratched the surface.”  Those “people” included the Beatles, Frank Zappa, and Captain Beefheart. Undeterred by the fact that they could barely play instruments, The Residents wanted to pick up where their freak heroes had left off. And, whether onstage or in their videos, they wanted imagery as weird and wigged-out as their sounds.

The visual work does indeed closely mirror the arc of the Residents music, (de)evolving from a lo-fi yet genuinely uncanny neo-Dada to a high-tech but increasingly sterile kookiness. The early “promos”--scare quotes because when they were made in the late Seventies there were hardly any places on American TV that showed videos and nobody, except maybe the cable TV fringe, would dare to show the Residents films--have a macabre whimsy and gorgeous grotesqueness that at various points brings to mind the Quay Bros, Eraserhead (a late-night movie-house fave with the San Francisco postpunk set) and the Anglo-surrealist children’s animations made by Postgate Films (The Clangers, Bagpuss, Pogle’s Wood).  In  Third Reich’n’Roll (1976) the Residents cavort in Ku Klux Klan-like head-dresses made from newspaper, pounding percussion as their mutant cover of Wilson Pickett’s “Land of a Thousand Dances” plays. 


The four One-Minute Movies for the sixty-second tracks off 1980’s Commercial Album are visual haikus as exquisitely eerie as the tunes, full of images that linger in the memory: a female corpse cocooned in cob-webs, a rheumy-eyed geezer watching TV on a bare mattress who suddenly levitates to the ceiling, a dead pig with roman candles stuck between its trotters. In several of these micro-movies, The Residents appear in their famous Fred Astaire meets Un Chien Andalou image: the elegance of top-hats, tails, and canes disrupted by the gigantic, veiny eyeballs that completely replace their heads. A fractured tale about a mis-shapen misfit with  Zelig-like traits of recurrence and ubiquity, Hello Skinny (1980) pays homage to Chris Marker’s La Jetée with its black-and-white stills, the  collaging of photographic and drawn material further recalling Terry Gilliam’s animations for Monty Python.

The Residents had a parasitical-cum-parodic relationship with mainstream pop culture, which they regarded as a new form of totalitarianism, evil because of its banality. Hence the love/hate for the Fab Four expressed in the cover of their debut album, a defacement of Meet the Beatles’s famous cover; hence Third Reich ‘n’Roll’s  transformation of the entirety of Sixties pop into the soundtrack for Hitler’s Blitzkrieg. By the mid-Eighties, the group launched a massive project, the American Composers Series, 20 albums across 20 years that would honor-through-vandalisation the work of figures like George Gershwin and Hank Williams.  (In the event, the series sputtered to a halt after just two records). It’s as this point that things start to go awry with the Residents output, sonically and visually: the irritatingly goofy cover of James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s World” is out-dulled only by the uninspired animations that accompany it, while The Residents’ video for their take on John Philip Sousa "Stars and Stripes” is a smug and clunky exercise in anti-militarism (World War III rendered as an amusement arcade shooting gallery designed by Lari Pitman and Disney: clown-face bombs, rabbits riding on top of intercontinental missles, and so forth).



What the later Residents work, like the flat and strangely static 2000 video for “Constantinople”, shows is that 98 times out of 100, analog trumps digital. Computers can create the most superficially “fanstastical” images, but because you literally can’t believe your eyes, there’s no sense of the unheimlich, none of that “dreamed” quality possessed by the Residents’ early work, made when the group had to get by with hand-made props, stage sets, and costumes, with lighting and camera-work, and above all with their own bodies. 

from a guide to parody and pastiche in pop and rock, Pitchfork 2016

The Residents: The Third Reich ‘N Roll (1976)

The Residents started out spoofing Meet the Beatles! with their own debut album Meet the Residents. As the grotesquely defaced cover art indicated, theirs was a love-hate relationship with the Fab Four and their entire era. The Third Reich ‘N Roll was a through-the-looking-glass replay of the previous decade, like some parallel reality where World War II and the ’60s temporally coincided; Wilson Pickett’s “Land of 1000 Dances” and Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction” compete with the din of diving Stuka bombers and MG15 machine guns.

That same year, the Residents released a cover of the Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” even more mangled than Devo’s. Then, in 1977, they put out The Beatles Play the Residents and the Residents Play the Beatles. The A-side “Beyond the Valley of a Day in the Life” wove together samples of the Beatles and interview soundbites in which Lennon appears to apologize to the fans: “Please everybody if we haven’t done what we could have done, we’ve tried.” After several albums of all-original, gloriously peculiar music, the Residents returned to the perverted cover version concept with The American Composers Series, attempting ambiguous tributes to 20 musical greats. This petered out after just four twisted homages across two albums, to George Gershwin, James Brown, Hank Williams, and John Philip Sousa. By this point in the mid-’80s, the Residents had spawned a mini-genre of vandalistic plagiarism which we’ll encounter later, whose exponents include John Oswald, Negativland, and Culturcide.

RIP Kenny Morris

One intriguing counterfactual in rock history is what would have happened if drummer Kenny Morris and guitarist John McKay had not quit Siouxsie and the Banshees at the start of a major tour - after an altercation at an LP  signing session in an Aberdeen record shop...

McKay & Morris broke their silence about their seemingly impulsive decision to leave a few months later, in December '79

In the counterfactual scenario, Morris & McKay stick around - and Budgie and John McGeoch do not join as their replacements...

And while you wouldn't want to have missed all the amazing music that the new line-up created - "Happy House", "Christine", all of Juju, all of A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, "Fireworks" etc - I wouldn't have minded an album or two more in the Scream / Join Hands mode.

The difference is like the switch between monochrome and Technicolor. 

In  "Concrete Pop", a 1986 piece written for Monitor, Chris Scott - who vastly preferred the first-phase Banshees - argued for the higher powers of the non-virtuoso and the untrained: 

"Now: the archetypal goth band, drone drone drone, texture texture texture, the sound of the sea. Then: the sound of people doing things to objects. Being a punk Siouxsie treated even her voice as an object, and more spectacularly than Rotten or Poly Styrene. The music was not just an atmosphere: it kept us aware of the presence of the instrument, the object and of the presence of the people manipulating the objects, communicating with us because we were kept aware that someone had made these noises for us. Each sound itself was like an object put there for our consideration. Buying that first LP was like finding a huge rusting metal thing in the street, bringing it home and putting it in the middle of your bedroom just because it looked so good. Buying a Banshees album today is like buying a settee. Or a carpet."

He also made an invidious contrast between the two drummers: Kenny Morris's "epochal battering" versus Budgie getting "his drumsticks specially made 200 at a time - rockstars are dead, eh""

When I interviewed Steve Severin he made some points compatible with the Chris Scott viewpoint: 

“When you listen to The Scream, you can hear the fingers on the strings, the effort that’s actually going into it. You get to the end of a track and you can hear Kenny breathing.” 

The sound-style emerged out of the combo of the performer's limitations and their active aversions. Severin again:

“It was a case of us knowing what we didn’t want, throwing out every cliché. Never having a guitar solo, never ending a song with a loud drum smash. At one point, Siouxsie just took away the hi-hat from Kenny Morris’s drum kit.” 

Here's a bit on Morris's approach to drumming from an interview done only a few years ago by Ellie O'Byrne:

His unorthodox, self-taught drumming style used almost no cymbals: he would turn his sticks round the better to belt his drum kit as hard as he possibly could. Siouxsie said he was like a marionette seated at his kit.

“I was really physical on the drums,” he says. “When I eventually got my own kit, it had to be practically specially built. I think it was ’78 before I even got that.”

“I had a Pearl Drum Kit with a special indestructible pedal. When most drummers use a ride cymbal, I didn’t want a ride. I’d have my high hat and a crash and an upside down Chinese cymbal. I would play time on the side drum, not the ride. When I got a riser, I made chalk marks where they had to drill holes and attach metal clasps to secure the cymbal stands.”

Still, as severe as the first-phase Banshees could be, the single were pop punchy. 

Things like this flange-ferocious beauty - a medium-size hit single

The earlier Banshees also had a better, more coherent look as a band - McKay's beauty, Kenny Morris's pallor, contributed as much as Siouxsie and Severin. 

High-contrast black-and-white - the look mirrors the sound of The Scream and Join Hands. 

One wonders if the first-phase was selected as much for appearance as ability (since none of them had it or sought it, then). 

Whereas the second-phase new recruits were picked for their musical accomplishment and the way that would enable the Banshees to expand and evolve. 

I pose that counterfactual query about John and Kenny not leaving at the end of this review of a Deluxe Reissue of The Scream

Siouxsie and the Banshees

The Scream

Uncut, 2005

Knowing Siouxsie as Godmother of Goth, it’s easy to forget that the Banshees were originally regarded as exemplary postpunk vanguardists. Laceratingly angular, The Scream reminds you what an inclement listen the group was at the start.  Sure, there’s a couple of Scream tunes as catchy as “Hong Kong Garden” (which appears twice here on the alternate-versions-crammed second disc of BBC session and demos). “Mirage” is a cousin to “Public Image,” while the buzzsaw chord-drive of “Nicotine Stain” faintly resembles The Undertones, of all people. 

But one’s first and lasting impression of Scream is shaped by the album’s being book-ended by its least conventional tunes. Glinting and fractured, the opener “Pure” is an “instrumental” in the sense that Siouxsie’s voice is just an abstract, sculpted texture swooping across the stereo-field. Switching between serrated starkness and sax-laced grandeur, the final track “Switch” is closer to a song  but as structurally unorthodox as Roxy Music’s “If There Is Something”.

Glam’s an obvious reference point for the Banshees, but The Scream also draws from the moment when psychedelia turned dark: “Helter Skelter” is covered (surely as much for the Manson connection as for Beatles-love), guitarist John McKay’s flange resembles a Cold Wave update of  1967-style phasing, and the stringent stridency of Siouxsie’s singing channels Grace Slick. In songs like the autism-inspired “Jigsaw Feeling,” there’s even a vibe of mental disintegration that recalls bad trippy Jefferson Airplane tunes like “Two Heads.” 

Another crack-up song, “Suburban Relapse” always makes me think of that middle-aged housewife in every neighbourhood with badly applied make-up and a scary lost look in her eyes. Siouxsie’s suspicion not just of domesticity but of that other female cage, the body, comes through in the fear-of-flesh anthem “Metal Postcard,” whose exaltation of the inorganic and indestructible (“metal is tough, metal will sheen… metal will rule in my master-scheme”) seems at odds with the song’s inspiration, the anti-fascist collage artist John Heartfield.

Scream is another Banshees altogether from the lush seductions of Kaleidoscope and Dreamhouse.  McKay and drummer Kenny Morris infamously quit the group on the eve of the band’s first headlining tour, and their replacements--John McGeoch and Budgie--were far more musically proficient. Yet The Scream, along with early singles such as  ‘Staircase Mystery” and the best bits of Join Hands, does momentarily make you wonder about the alternate-universe path the original Banshees might have pursued if they’d stayed together and stayed monochrome ‘n’ minimal.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

From the O'Byrne interview, Morris's account of the breakup at the Aberdeen record shop LP signing session: 

“When we left the record shop, we went outside and went, ‘what are we going to do?’ So we went back to the hotel. Margaret Thatcher was staying there too, so security was everywhere: guys talking into their sleeves.”

They booked a taxi but, fearful of the rest of the band catching up with them, lied to the receptionist and said they were going to the train station when in fact they were headed to the airport.

The band did arrive, just as they were leaving.

“[Banshees manager] Nils came up to the taxi and reached in through the window, and started trying to strangle me,” Kenny says. “So I wound the window up on his arm. He fell to the floor and he was going, ‘I’ll see you never work again. I’ve invested 45,000 in this tour!’ and John was going, ‘have you? Whose money? Is that our money, Polydor’s money?’  Things had gotten that bad that we didn’t know.”

A film made by Kenny Morris, said to be an allegorical account of the break-up 

Kenny Morris interviewed by John Robb, who - nothing if not direct and to the point - immediately, bluntly, asks him, "so, what have you been doing for the last 30 years?"  

Ooh, a weird loop - in Chris Scott's "Concrete Pop" article, Robb's group the Membranes are considered exemplars (as was The Rox, Robb's zine, in Chris's earlier Monitor article celebrating fanzines for their aesthetic of anti-professionalism). 

Of course, I'm a big fan of atmosphere, "the sound of the sea". A nice-looking settee, an attractive carpet - what's the problem? 

I also like a nicely laid out page.

Umbrellas in the Sun (Disques du Crepuscule / Factory Benelux DVD)

VARIOUS ARTISTS

UMBRELLAS IN THE SUN: A CREPUSCULE/FACTORY BENELUX DVD 1979-1987

(LTM )

The Wire, long ago

by Simon Reynolds

 Founded in Brussels at the dawn of the Eighties, Les Disques Du Crepuscule was operated by a clutch of Belgian aesthetes suffering from an unhealthy infatuation with Factory Records. They swiftly formed an alliance with their Manchester idols and jointly released records by the likes of A Certain Ratio in the Low Countries (hence Factory Benelux).  Now the equally Fac-obsessed reissue label LTM-- not content with echoing the Belgian imprint in its very name, an acronym for Les Temps Modernes--is paying tribute with this splendid DVD of promos and live footage of Crepuscule/Benelux acts. 

Vintage videos can be embarrassingly dated, but the bulk of the material on Umbrellas gives off a sense of “limited means, effectively used.” ACR’s “Back To The Start” is a case in point, juxtaposing murky hand-held film of the band shaking their stuff in a field after nightfall with scenes of children dancing on the edge of an indoor swimming pool. The sallow lighting, oddly angled shots, and strange bodily geometries perfectly suit the group’s dislocated disco, its parched percussion draped with the bled-like-veal vocal pallor of Martha Tilson. 

Josef K--like ACR, Northern punk-funkers with cropped hair and very clean ears--appear here performing “Sorry For Laughing” on a television pop show. The simple but clever twist is that the TV footage intermittently appears projected, bluescreen-style, onto a lump of Gak nestling on a girl’s bare stomach. Manipulating the goo, she distends the images of the band as they bob on her belly.  

On a purely sonic level, Umbrellas’ highlight is  Cabaret Voltaire’s “Sluggin’ For Jesus,” the lead track off 1981’s Three Crepuscule Tracks EP (arguably the group’s peak). Laced with American televangelist prattle, the entrancing Karoli-funk groove is accompanied by light-flickered images of the guys fondling their synths and, in Richard Kirk’s case, scritching away at a violin.  

Close behind “Sluggin’” is the exquisitely plangent threnody for Ian Curtis that is The Durutti Column’s “Never Known” (although, for mystifying reasons, the track is here titled “Marie Louise Gardens”). With Vini Reilly generating such agonizing beauty of sound, all that’s required is the sparest of visuals, and that's what we get:  the “missing boy” alone in a deserted public park at twilight, caressing the guitar strings with his finger-tips.  

In scarcity terms, though, the gems here comprise the fabulous monochrome footage of Malaria! onstage performing “White Sky, White Sea”   Tuxedomoon’s “Litebulb Overkill,” also live, but juxtaposed with Eurail travelogue footage (what looks like France seen from a moving train); and the 23 minute long film of a performance by Belgian funkateers Marine live juxtaposed with arty, kaleidoscopic visuals. Most known for the existensialist Chic of “Life In Reverse”, Marine’s entire aesthetic was based on the debut Benelux release, ACR’s emaciated cover of “Shack Up”. 

This DVD sags somewhat near its end as we enter the undistinguished and rudderless mid-80s phase of Factory output (the sub-Sade café bleu-isms of Kalima, anybody? I didn’t think so). But overall Umbrellas In the Sun is a wonderful document that conveys Crepuscule’s ultra-refined Euro-vision while also capturing captures a lost moment of art-into-pop infusion.

ohmylord, this period of Anthony H. Wislon A&Ring is quite something innit 

The Associates (RIP Alan Rankine)

The Associates

Popera

Melody Maker, January 12, 1991

Once upon a time (the early '80s), there was something called "new pop". For about a year Morley's pipedream of a chartbusting music that combined pop's flash and dazzle with post-punk's perplexity and unease, come true. Glamour; danceability, luxury, the lore of romance, were reveled in and unraveled, simultaneously, thanks to a creed of "passionate irony".

In retrospect, not a lot of the music of that dizzy era got beyond being meta-pop, ie: rock criticism in pop flesh. The Associates did. Billy Mackenzie had the bodymoves, the shimmying, supernatural panache, above all The Voice, whereas Martin Fry was always a dead-below-the-waist dork in a low-rent lame suit. Perhaps the crucial factor was that Mackenzie had never been into rock'n'roll. His love for Diana Ross, disco, Sparks, wasn't gestural, a reaction against punk, but seethed in his blood. And in Alan Rankine, he had his own Eno to peculiarise the Associates' resurrection of Roxy/Bowie glam-odromatics.

The Associates stint as a pop phenomenon was tragically brief. Their only Top 10 Hit, 'Party Fears Two', was a fractured vignette of the agonised tentativeness of EITHER a  faltering courtship OR a slow break-up (I've never been able to work it out). With its oblique lyrics ("Even a slight remark makes no sense and turns to shark") and highly strung falsetto harmonies, 'Party Fears' fused the grandeur of cabaret with the schizoid delirium of psychedelia. 'Club Country' was nerve-edged aristo-funk, whose lyrics saw right through to the emptiness at the heart of the New Romantic/cocktail culture of the time. "The fault is/ I can find no fault in you/ If we stick around/ We're sure to be looked down upon." Like the rest of the Sulk album, 'Club Country' is at once torrid and glacial, fusing European hauteur with American disco feverishness.

'18 Carat Love Affair', the last Associates hit, was a vehicle for some of Mackenzie's swooniest singing: falsetto to get drunk on, sorrow to drown in. Its flipside was a hyperventilated version of Diana Ross' 'Love Hangover', whose title neatly pinpointed the Associates' aesthetic: love as inTOXICant, malady, madness... pop as hysteria.

After this delirious zenith, and the departure of Alan Rankine, the Associates returned with the relative composure and controlled classicism of '84's, Perhaps LP. 'Those First Impressions' had beautiful bass palpitations, a fine vocal performance, but something was missing. The twee scenario of 'Waiting For The Loveboat' and the gloopily lugubrious 'Breakfast' were small-scale, merely tasteful.

Then there was a long silence until '88's 'Heart Of Glass'. But even at the nadir of his career, Mackenzie was too smouldering a singer for Blondie's glassy-eyed disco music anthem. Read Lester Bangs on Blondie as ultimate blank generation meets Pop Art void-oids, and you'll realise that, even on autopilot, Mackenzie injects too much lip-quavering "emotional truth" into Harry's ciphered lyrics.

Since then Billy recovered his dignity, if not his madness, with last year's Wild And Lonely. But to be honest his latest material sounds chastened and cowed compared to the extra tracks on this CD: on Yello's 'The Rhythm Divine', Mackenzie finds, in Boris Blank a new Alan Rankine, and in Dieter Meir a kindred spirit in nostalgia for a bygone, pre-war European "ancient regime". And the five tracks from Fourth Drawer Down (pre-chart top Associates) still sound like nothing on Earth. With 'Q-Quarters', 'Kitchen Person', 'Message Oblique Speech', 'White Car In Germany', it's like Scott Walker had never retired, but got turned onto Can, Kraftwerk, Cabaret Voltaire, and returned with an even an even more baroque, festering, visionary paranoia than before.

We cry wolf too often with the old mystic effusions, but you simply have to hear this stuff, it'll make your insides spin.

ASSOCIATES

Fourth Drawer Down

Sulk

Double Hipness

Uncut, August 2000

by Simon Reynolds

The first time I heard Associates was the first time I saw Associates was one of the four or five true pop epiphanies of my life: Top of the Pops, February 1982, "Party Fears Two". That blithe bittersweet piano refrain, the cold smolder of Billy MacKenzie's voice, the still-never-totally-fathomed-to-this-day song-scenario (oblique snapshots of a breakup in progress?).... But what really brought me to the brink of a swoon was the way MacKenzie moved (at one point, he sashayed backwards), the impossible panache of the man. Even if he'd never emitted breath into a microphone and engraved it in wax, if you just saw him strolling down the street on the way back from Sainsburys, you'd still have recognised a star from the supernatural glow.

That TOTP appearance pierced and transfixed lots of other people: "Party Fears" shot straight to Number 9 the following week, launching Associates's brief (just eight months!) reign as a pop sensation. The career/careen of Billy MacKenzie invites all kinds of questions about why born stars can't maintain, the reason they mutilate their own genius and fail their own gift. I won't get into the biographical speculations about MacKenzie's apparent self-destructive streak, but there's another related mystery worth addressing: how does "chemistry" happen in pop music, why is it so hard to sustain or recreate? The fact is that without his other half, Alan Rankine, MacKenzie produced fine but ultimately modest and minor work that we (meaning critics) bigged up extravagantly only 'cos we loved the guy so much...  Even when they briefly reunited in 1993, the duo couldn't re-ignite the spark--judging by the scrappy, incandescence-free Autchterhouse Sessions, now available on Double Hipness, a double CD of demos, out-takes, alternate versions, and other undercooked material that mostly serves to tarnish the myth.

To the ears and eyes of the fan, it's the precedent-free singularity of the love object, its un-likeness to anything past or present, that is dazzling in its obviousness. The task of the critic, though, is (supposedly) to bypass the present-tense, ahistorical FAB WOW! and get into analysis--breaking something down into its constituents, showing where it came from. At the time it never even remotely occurred to me, but now (cursed with knowledge) I can hear the substantial debt to Bowie in MacKenzie's voice and in elements of the Associates sound. Billy might actually be the sole example of a positive Bowie influence in the annals of UK pop. Indeed, the first Associates single was a cover of "Boys Keep Swinging" (included on Double Hipness, it's oddly restrained, un-camp, almost U2-like in its earnestness), and Billy later sang a highly-strung version of "Secret Life of Arabia" (from Heroes) for BEF's Songs of Quality and Distinction.

The spate of astonishing EPs subsequently compiled as Fourth Drawer Down (now reissued with several extra tracks) are steeped in the un-American Europe Endless-ness of Bowie's Berlin trilogy Low/Heroes/Lodger --especially "White Car In Germany", with its metronomic march rhythm and "Dusseldorf's a cold place/Walk on eggs in Munich" lyric. With its furtive rhythm, broken balalaika riff, echoing footsteps, and clammy electronics, "Q Quarters" is Hapsburg dub, Cabaret Voltaire remaking The Third Man soundtrack. Lyric shards about "concrete civilians" and the black-humorous punch line "'washing down bodies/seems to me a dead end job" conjure a Cold War ambience-- partitioned cities, deportations, informers, double agents. Think The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, the Ipcress File (Rankine and MacKenzie had bonded through their love of soundtracks, plus Kraftwerk and disco). Other Fourth Drawer gems include "A Girl Named Property" (Scott Walker, from the title downwards), the torrid xylophone-scampering romp of "Kitchen Person", the sculpted histrionics of "Tell Me Easter's On Friday," and the "I Am The Walrus"-like Dada-dementia of "Message Oblique Speech" ("he drinks double hernias/spits out wooden spoons').

The non-American aspect was crucial: the Associates aesthetic revolved around Anglo art-rock's artifice/androgyny/aristocracy (apologies for alliteration overload), around disco diva operatics and fabulousity, i.e. things considered treasonably unmanly and effete by American heartland rock'n'rollers. Many of their favorite bands also passed through the glam/disco interzone: Sparks shifted from guitar swashbuckling hysteria into Moroderized electro-throb, Roxy streamlined their angular art-rock into sleek jet-set disco. And there was that man Bowie again--the plastic funk of "Golden Years," the Neu Romanticism of "Ashes To Ashes". "Funk art, let's dance" anti-rockism was par for the course, of course, for UK bands poised on the cusp between post-punk and New Pop, angst and irony. But unlike most of the music of that 1980-82 era, which now sounds dated, flimsy, and "funky" only in the most notional sense (e.g. Lexicon of Love --then hailed as possibly the best pop album of all time, but unlikely to make any mag's Top 200 today), Associates records still tantalise like an unrequited future: the direction pop should have gone.

Sulk is so lovely it's harrowing. Overdubbed to the hilt, obsessively mixed, addled with bizarre found-sounds, it's bruised, over-ripe, fruity as fuck--headspinning and delirious, all the sugar fermented to alcohol. Like the Banshees (whom Billy admired) and later Prince, Associates crammed all the derangement and texture-saturated voluptuousness of psychedelia into pop, nearly bursting it at its seams. (MacKenzie actually described the Sulk sound as "Abba on acid", Rankine called it "thick... dripping"). After the perverse opener of instrumental "Arrogance Gave Him Up," Sulk really starts with the impossibly towering grandeur of "No"--a tormented ballad with helium-high backing vocals that ooze around the song's crenellations like ghostly mist. "Bap De La Bap" is overwrought in both the emotional and baroque metalwork senses, flailed along by the snap crackle pop of John Murphy's fireworks drums and Rankine's iceburn spires of glassy guitar. One of the forgotten things about Associates music, given New Pop's anti-rockist tenor, is how fabulously inventive it was as electric guitar music. Working from the post-blues, un-American sounds of Neu!'s Michael Rother and the blazing celestial pageantry of Fripp on "Heroes," Rankine was part of a postpunk moment in which guitarists (Wire, Johns McKay/McGeoch of the Banshees, Joy Div, the Edge) operated with absolute confidence that the instrument could probe new horizons. Nobody would have dreamed of stooping to a refried Stones lick.

Sulk has too much preciousness to inventory; the frisk and stealth and anxious exhilaration of "Skipping," the fraught bombast of "It's Better This Way, " the sunshafts-peeking-through-clouds intro of "Party Fears Two" and its celestial cloisters of double-tracked MacKenzie harmonies; the Nordic Chic of "Club Country," all zinging rhythm guitar and beetling slap-bass; Billy's words throughout, absurd and portentous yet utterly right, from "tear a strip from your dress/wrap my arms in it" ("No") to "it lies there canistered for future reference" ("Nude Spoons") and "even a slight remark makes no sense and turns to shark" ("Party Fears Two"). It's staggering to think that this record--the best of its era--sold a quarter million copies. The re-ish adds fine B-sides of the time like "Ulcragceptimol" and the gloriously over-the-top cover of Diana Ross's "Love Hangover", double-A side of their last proper hit "18 Carat Love Affair."

You've heard the best, what about the rest? The first CD of Double Hipness pulls together demos from MacKenzie/Rankine's early phase as punk-cabaret troupe Mental Torture and sundry Associates out-takes. The early stuff, done with a pick-up band, is motley at best, ranging from the one-line gag of "The Shadow of My Lung" (a Lurkers-meets-Bacharach spoof-cover of "Shadow of Your Smile"), through the almost Rocky Horror Show -like "Not Tonight Josephine," to a smarmy-vocaled and saxophone-wheezed prototype for "18 Carat Love Affair" that's horrifically redolent of Darts (the intended reference was probably the rockabilly version of "John, I'm Only Dancing"). The early Associates demos are better: "Janice (AKA Deeply Concerned)" is a beautiful sketch of a song, "Saline Drips" shows Rankine emerging as an interesting guitarist, "Galaxy of Memories" has the spindly spidery quality of Young Marble Giants, "Mortice Lock" hints at flushed fevers to come, and the silverpoint stitchwork on "Big Waltz (AKA Paper House)" has a crisp Celtic frost that is pure Edge. Disc Two is much more ropey, with cute, utterly unnecessary early versions of Sulk and Perhaps tunes, and the lacklustre secretions of the aforementioned Rankine/MacKenzie reunion tryst of '93. Most of this stuff sounds like deathbed Roxy or Eighties/Nineties solo Ferry, with Rankine impersonating an expensive session guitarist and MacKenzie succumbing to cliche-encrusted melodrama. Still the mysterious "Edge of the World" is a sketch for a twilight-gem a la "Slave To Love". And the muddy glam rock pummel of "Stephen, You're Really Something"--Billy's belated riposte to Morrissey's kiss-off "William, It Was Really Nothing"--at least inspires an alternative-history fantasy: the parallel universe where the twosome stayed "close" long enough to record a duet single. The fey flamboyance of the resulting Top of the Pops appearance would probably have put me in a coma.

But being (still) a star-struck fan in relation to all things Associates, I don't really want to hear the stumbling baby-steps towards the Divine Pinnacles ("of historical interest" is by definition anti-pop), let alone the dwindling diminuendos of a tragically spent force. Having never bought a bootleg in my life, I can't understand the mindset of those who savor such droppings. Fourth Drawer Down and Sulk are all you need. 

The Associates

Wild and Lonely

Melody Maker, March 24 1990

by Simon Reynolds

The first time I heard the Associates was when I saw 'Party Fears Two' on Top Of The Pops. It was one of those moments - the first snarl of 'Anarchy in the UK', the first spin and reel of 'This Charming Man', the first giddy sip of Prince – when the mind gapes, you exhale sheer awe. Billy Mackenzie oozed such illegal self-assurance, lethal panache, supernatural elegance. It was a revelation, a ravishing.

Since then, the Associates have lingered, reproachfully in the back of the mind as one of the great "should-have-beens" of pop. By rights, Mackenzie and Rankine should have dominated the decade like Prince. Fourth Drawer Down and Sulk continue to shame this day and age with their febrile exploration of the outer limits of the pop form. Like Siouxsie at her pinnacle, the Associates injected all the derangement of psychedelic angst into pop, almost bursting it at the seams.

Wild And Lonely is no Sulk, but it is a splendid reprise of the torrid, wind-swept, never-never pop that the Associates made their own. The reference points are all mid-to-late seventies: Donna Summer's Once Upon A Time, Bowie's plastic soul, Sparks, Diana Ross' 'Love Hangover', an entire long-lost wonderland of orchestral disco. The arrangements alone – a swirl of strings, percussion and rather to many grand piano flourishes – are marvelous: sculpture in four dimensions. On 'Fire To Ice' (three words that just about encapsulate the Associates' aesthetic) and 'Fever', Mackenzie is in top vocal form: more composed than the devotee might wish, but still capable of some electrifying shudders and tics, spasms and swoons. As for the rest of side one, the relentlessly uptempo pace irks somewhat, after a while: the Moroder throb of 'People We Meet' never really ignites, 'Just Can't Say Goodbye' is a little bit Tina Charles, and 'Calling All Around The World' is marred by a jocose horn section.

Mercifully, side two is altogether more blue. 'Something's Got to Give' is lugubrious Eurodisco, somewhere between Cabaret Voltaire and Scott Walker, with wraith-like keyboards hinting at insanity seething between the immaculate surface. 'Strasbourg Square' is a doomy ballad, fidgeting with needling, nervous detail. 'Ever Since The Day' is like a cross between Mantronix and Bassey's 'Goldfinger', while 'Wild And Lonely' is a majestic, highly strung finale, a hooded Mackenzie glowering into the void from the vantage point of some desolate, mind's eye heath or cliff, (Heathcliffe!).

Like Yello, the Associates' sound harks back to some indeterminate bygone era when the malady and madness of love was properly expressed in epic proportions, when pop music luxuriated in grief. It's no coincidence that Mackenzie was involved in Yello's finest moments ('The Rhythm Divine' and 'Moon On Ice'). Unlike Yello, with The Associates there's something consumptive beneath the surface camp, a fire that burns like ice. Wild And Lonely is no Sulk: the volcano of Mackenzie's purple hysteria remains dormant. But this album is a thoroughly aristocratic return for one of our last pop heroes.

Throbbing Gristle - first exposure

 the first time I heard TG, when the stuff was reissued on CD as part of Mute's The Grey Area programme of reissues (so circa 1990?)

written for Melody Maker, but for some reason unpublished - mislaid? 

THROBBING GRISTLE 

THE SECOND ANNUAL REPORT

20 JAZZ FUNK GREATS

D.O.A - THE THIRD AND FINAL REPORT

HEATHEN EARTH

MISSION OF DEAD SOULS

Industrial/Mute

     For those of you for whom "Psychocandy" is the dawn of pop time, it'll be hard to comprehend how unimaginably different the scene was when I was a nipper. Post-punk, we lived in a culture of confrontation, not consolation.  Today, rock groups aim to immerse us in 'dreamtime', simulate the effects of drugs; back then, the goal was to wake us up from our mass culture sleep, rouse us from our zombie addiction to TV and pop.

     Throbbing Gristle were all about confrontation: "confronting all assumptions", testing the outer limits of their audiences' tolerance. They began as an "art-rage" collective called COUM, whose "Prostitution" show at the ICA made front page headlines only a few months before punk. Stepping sideways into music, they modelled themselves as a corporation in order to expose the industrial nature of the pop biz.  Demystification was their modus operandi and raison d'etre (c.f. the mysticism and mystique of 1991 rock).  Live, TG played "disconcerts". The 'music' was a mirror of a world of unremitting ugliness, dehumanisation, and brutalism.  They took the degradation and deterioration, maiming and mutilation, of sound to nether limits that even now have yet to be under-passed. ("Second Annual Report" was recorded on a Sony Cassette Recorder with condenser mike to get a deliberately thin, compressed sound.)

     Along with Cabaret Voltaire, TG invented the "industrial" sound: synth-drones and squelches; hissing, programmed percussion; tape-loops and found sounds; hideously mangled, effects-ridden guitar; creepy vocals. Sometimes TG sound like Loop or Hawkwind liquidised into an ambient puree then played at 16rpm. Later ("20 Jazz Funk Greats", parts of "Heathen Earth"), they explored a different but equally disorientating kind of sound, leaving the noisome aural effluent for clinical, arid, ultra-pristine electronic music. "Tanith" is morose mood muzak, with vibes and a clammy 'jazz' trumpet like an android version of Miles Davis; "What A Day" is a lurching electro-dirge with vocals that whinge in a preposterous Cockernee accent; "Adrenalin" anticipates the serene sterility of ambient house.

     TG also coined the gamut of "industrial" obsessions:serial killers, conspiracy theories, subliminals and brainwashing, etc. Above all, they coined the industrial attitude, a sort of gynecological drive to probe reality and expose the visceral mess behind the facades of everyday life. I use the word "gynecological" because Woman was the privileged victim of all this vivisection: "Slugbait" is a corny tale of a "wicked boy" who pulls a foetus out of a seven months pregnant mother and chew its head off; a later version of the same song features a taped confession by a girlchild-murderer; "Hamburger Lady" goes into gruesome forensic detail about a real-life burns victim.  There's even a song called "We Hate You (Little Girls").  Whatever the ethics of TG's intentions, their work was always going to be easily adopted by twisted retards, pervs and teenage ghouls.

     TG's work did occasionally, perhaps inadvertently, create "beauty" (e.g. the derelict, industrial blues of "Weeping"). But because the aim was to reflect/amplify the monochrome horror of it all, too often these records are simply unendurable, a deadening dead end.  Eventually, Genesis P. Orridge seems to have come to the same conclusion. First, there was "hyperdelia": Psychic TV's rediscovery of colour and flamboyance as expressed in the kaleidoscopic sounds of acid rock and incarnated in the dandyism of Brian "Godstar" Jones (adorning rather than reflecting reality). Then there was "techno acid beat", Jack The Tab's response to the fact that TG's "death factory" of electro-drones and trance-pulses had resurfaced (in acid house) as a pleasure factory.  An orgasmotron, in fact. 

In view of these subsequent developments,  perhaps TG should be remembered as a necessary, but necessarily transitional phase (minimalism, reductionism, negation) before the return to affirmation and expansion. TG will endure, as Jon Savage puts it in his liner notes, as "a reference point and a shudder", but probably not as something people actually listen to much.

                                            

RIP RHK - Cabaret Voltaire + Sweet Exorcist + Xon writings

Cabaret Voltaire (and Factrix)

Village Voice, July 29, 2003

by Simon Reynolds

Thesis: Industrial music, in its original late-’70s incarnation, was the second flowering of an authentic psychedelia. (“Authentic” meaning non-revivalist, untainted by nostalgia). There was the same impulse to blow minds through multimedia sensory overload (the inevitable back-projected, cut-up movies behind every industrial performance—attempts at “total art” only too redolent of 1960s happenings and acid-tests). And industrial, like psychedelia, believed “no sound shalt go untreated”; both adulterated rock’s “naturalistic” recording conventions with FX, tape splices, and dirty electronic noise.

There were even direct links between the blissed freaks of the late ’60s and the autopsy aesthetes of the late ’70s: The precursors of pioneering London industrialists Throbbing Gristle were COUM Transmissions, who began in 1969 as an absurdist-primitivist cosmic rock group, evolved into a taboo-busting, tabloid-scandalizing performance art ensemble, then mutated into TG. There’s also something quite Grateful Dead-like about TG, from the cultishness they cultivated to their habit of excessive self-documentation. Earlier this year, the gargantuan box set 24 Hours made available again Throbbing Gristle’s 1979 cassette-only chest, which contained lo-fi live recordings of every single performance—all two dozen of ’em—TG had played up to that point.

Cabaret Voltaire, Sheffield Roxy Music fans who liked to dress sharp, probably despised straggly-haired, afghan-clad hippies. Still, the early Cabs lineup featured clarinet (shades of Jethro Tull!), while local fanzine Gunrubber compared their live sound to Hawkwind. The Cabs were huge fans of German kosmische rock (particularly Can) and loved Nuggets to the point of covering the Seeds’ punkadelic garage classic “No Escape.” The band’s Richard H. Kirk used to describe their shows as “like a bad trip,” and indeed “Possibility of a Bum Trip” is one of the unreleased goodies on Methodology ’74/’78.

The Cabs’ box is part of a mini-boom in archival industrial: Alongside the strictly-for-nutters 24 Hours and a double CD by San Francisco’s Factrix, long out-of-print records by 23 Skidoo and Biting Tongues have recently been reissued. Last year also saw a bonanza of vintage Cabs material: the classic albums Mix-Up, Voice of America, and Red Mecca; a terrific brand-new compilation, The Original Sound of Sheffield ’78/’82. Best Of; plus the reissue of an older, even better comp of the early Cabs singles, The Living Legends. And in May of next year, Throbbing Gristle will reunite to headline and host “Re-TG,” a two-day industrial-music festival taking place at an English vacation resort.

The earliest material on Methodology is almost 30 years old. And what’s initially surprising about all this bygone futurism is how great it sounds as guitar music, given industrial’s general rock-is-dead stance. Kirk started out contributing clarinet (harshly processed and highly effective, actually—the multitracked woodwinds on “Fuse Mountain” create a psychotic-bucolic vibe, like Popol Vuh jamming on a steel mill’s slag heap). As punk kicked in, the Cabs went rockier and Kirk swiftly joined post-punk’s pantheon of guitar innovators. You can hear Can’s Michael Karoli and reggae’s scratchy afterbeat in Kirk’s choppy rhythm playing, but what’s really distinctive is his trademark timbre: a sensuously brittle distortion like blistered metal, needling its way deep into your ear canal. Often fed through delay units, Kirk’s sustain-heavy lead lines arc and recede through soundscapes that are soused in reverb yet feel curiously dry, evoking the dead echoing chambers of nuclear bunkers and underground silos.

The box’s subtitle, Attic Tapes, refers to an actual claustrophobic space, the equipment-crammed upstairs loft where the trio—Kirk, Stephen Mallinder, and Chris Watson—would meet several times a week and “jam” with the tape recorder running. Methodology‘s three discs draw from hundreds of hours of raw music generated in the years before the Cabs’ first EP for Rough Trade. A few tracks are throwaway juvenilia, but it’s amazing how listenable even the sketchy stuff is. Creaky and homespun, early musique concrète stabs like “Dream Sequence Number Two Ethel’s Voice” have an alien-yet-quaint quality reminiscent of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (most famous for their work on the cult sci-fi series Dr. Who), while the rattling synthetic percussion and soiled sheets of abstract sound on “Henderson Reversed Piece Two” could give electronic composer Morton Subotnick a run for his money. By disc three, we’ve reached 1977/78 and the archetypal Cabs sound is taking shape: hissy rhythm-generator percussion, dank synth-slime, viscous coils of reverbed bass, a stalking hypno-groove midway between death disco and Eastern Bloc skank.

If there’s an element that dates poorly, it’s the occasional recitative, typically Burroughs-blighted or imaginatively overpowered by Atrocity Exhibition-era J.G. Ballard. Just check the fetid imagery of “Bed Time Stories”: “with dogs that are trained to sniff out corpses/eat my remains but leave my feet/I’ll hold a séance with Moroccan rapists/masturbating end over end.” (Mind you, it actually sounds quite effective in a flat, dry Yorkshire accent). There’s a similar liability effect with the prose-poetry daubed over Factrix tracks like “Empire of Passion”: “I want your sex for my display case . . . my swarms of sticky flies/gnaw away her ivory limbs.”

The Art(aud)-damaged Factrix hailed from San Francisco—the major outpost, outside Britain, for industrial music. (Which sort of nails the industrial-as-psychedelia-redux theory.) TG and the Cabs played to big crowds there. Collaborating with local kindred spirits Mark Pauline (of Survival Research Laboratories) and Monte Cazazza (the guy who inadvertently christened the genre with his “industrial music for industrial people” wisecrack), Factrix provided the soundtrack for several multimedia shockfests. The most infamous involved dead animals grotesquely roboticized by Pauline—like his patented “rabot” made out of metal, electrical wire, and rotting bunny. This sort of audience-confronting art/anti-art malarky can be traced through ’60s outfits like the Vienna Aktionists (pig’s blood, self-mutilation, pagan ritual), all the way back to Dada. Factrix’s Cole Palme echoed the famous flinch-inducing image in Un Chien Andalou when he talked of the group’s desire “to take a razor to the mind’s eye,” while Cabaret Voltaire nicked their name from the original Dadaist nightclub in WW I Zurich.

Like the Cabs, Factrix were big on the mistreatment of sound, deploying an arsenal of Eno-like reinventions such as amputated bass, “radioguitar,” and “glaxobass,” along with tape-loops, exotic percussion, and Multimoog. But as with Methodology, the surprise stand-out aspect of Factrix’s Artifact reissue is the most traditional element—Bond Bergland’s trippy guitar work, whose keening lead lines are definitely in the West Coast acid-rock tradition, tinged with the angularity of Roxy’s Phil Manzanera. On tracks like “Snuff Box (Alternate)” and “Obsession,” the guitar billows up in gaseous columns and harrowed arabesques that recall Ashra’s Manuel Göttsching—stripped of their New Age serenity. There are non-psych guitar thrills, too: the stumbling lunge-riff on “Theme From NOW!,” a distortion-pocked cover of the VU’s “Beginning to See the Light.” Elsewhere, Factrix’s more anti-/un-rock side produces creepy delights like “Phantom Pain,” with its pitter-pulse rhythms and poltergeist-like leakage from the etherworld, while the group’s merger of metal-bashing and ethnic instrumentation (migh-wiz, doumbek, saz . . . ) sometimes suggests an unlikely merger of SPK and the Third Ear Band.

Factrix started out influenced by TG and CV, but as they evolved they anticipated industrial’s next stage, when Psychic TV, Coil, and their ilk embarked on a full-blown magickal-mystery trip. Partial to the occasional mushroom, Factrix talked of wanting to jettison language and escape time—a nakedly psychedelic agenda that Artifact was originally going to honor by containing a sheet of acid-blotter, undipped but perforated using a vintage machine once owned by one of Haight-Ashbury’s “acid barons.” After Factrix disintegrated, Bergland formed Saqqara Dogs, an overtly transcendental trio centered around his skykissing solos. Cabaret Voltaire, meanwhile, got deeper into dance music (a journey you can follow on 2001’s box Conform to Deform ’82/’90. Archive;), embracing sequencers and ultimately making a sort of bleak house music—just in time for rave, that other authentic, non-retro reflowering of psychedelia.

Cabaret Voltaire

The Original Sound of Sheffield--The Best of the Virgin/EMI Years

Conform to Deform--The Virgin/EMI Years

Uncut, 2001

by Simon Reynolds

 It's hard to believe today, but back in the early Eighties the "New Pop" ideal of  mainstream entryism was so dominant, and the alternative (staying indie) so discredited, that even the leading lights of industrial music had a bash.  Clock DVA, SPK, and Throbbing Gristle (renamed Psychic TV) all formed alliances with major labels, glossing up their music  seemingly in hopes of getting on Top of the Pops.  What's most surprising in retrospect is not the group's eagerness to "sell out"  (hell, everybody needs to make some bread), but the major labels'  belief they could sell the stuff to Joe Punter.

 Invariably, the post-industrial popsters stiffed in the marketplace and, tails (or pierced dicks) between legs, they rejoined erstwhile comrades like Nurse With Wound and Coil in the margins.  Still, flouting received wisdom, it's not always true that compromise ruins a band's sound. Sometimes it an improvement: the radio-friendly Nirvana of Nevermind is just plain better than the Subpop stuff.  Even a failed attempt at mainstreaming can serve as a  timely escape for a band that's hit an aesthetic dead end. So while I'd still rate Cabaret Voltaire's first phase from "Nag Nag Nag" through Red Mecca to "Your Agent Man" as their definitive legacy, it's undeniable that by 1982 they'd taken that approach as far as they could. It was time for a change: a new arena, bigger horizons, a shifted sound.

 On their first two post-Rough Trade albums, The Crackdown and  Microphonies, the Cabs are basically trying to do a New Order: marry postpunk's angst with the party sounds of electro and Latin Freestyle that ruled Manhattan clubs like the Funhouse and Danceteria. If they never pulled off a "Blue Monday" or "Confusion", they  got close with "Crackdown", "Just Fascination," and especially "Sensoria", which gave an ultramodern sheen--all chattering sequencers, pert chugging basslines, and robotic handclaps--to the classic Voltaire vibe of twitchy, under-surveillance tension. The result---Shannon for J.G. Ballard fans---was  only a few leftward steps from  Depeche Mode in their "political", Neubauten-infatuated mode. But  Stephen Mallinder's sultry vocals were always too subdued and moody for full pop impact. And melody was never the Cabs's strong suit.

By the time a dance culture based around largely instrumental music arrived,  in the form of acid house, Cabaret Voltaire was running out of steam (understandably, after thirteen years and umpteen releases).   Remixes of  post-1988 Cabs tunes by dancefloor luminaries like A Guy Called Gerald and Rob Gordon show both how much the Cabs had in common with acid and bleep, but also how they needed assistance to really infiltrate that arena. Hooking up with Sheffield deejay Parrot as Sweet Exorcist, though, Richard Kirk did enjoy  the ravefloor impact that eluded the Cabs,  with early Warp releases like "Testone".  Avant-funk  finally had its day, as 'ardkore.

 The three-CD  Conform to Deform is flawed:  there's hardly anything from 1985's under-rated  The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, and an entire disc dedicated to live versions seems an odd decision (although the Cabs could be a formidable and forbidding live experience). Some tracks haven't dated well:  "C.O.m.a" is all stop-start edits, Fairlight gimmicks, and other modish mid-Eighties techniques, but, unlike equally of-their-time efforts by Art of Noise and Mantronix, the effect is "period charmless."   The single-disc  The Original Sound of Sheffield, though, makes a strong case for the  Cabs's crossover era.  An essential companion/sequel to the first-phase Cabs singles compilation The Living Legends, this "greatest near-misses" tells the story of how one pioneering postpunk  outfit tried to adapt to the challenging climate of the 1980s.

Melody Maker, June 30 1990

Kirk-related blurbs from my guide to "The 20 Best Bleep Records Ever Made", FACT magazine, 2008

SWEET EXORCIST

"Testone"

(Warp, 1989)

 

Sweet Exorcist were Richard H. Kirk from Cabaret Voltaire and Sheffield's DJ Parrot, and "Testone" is a classic example of bleep's sensual austerity: the barest components (growling sub-bass, a rhythmic web of Roland  909 klang and tuss, and a nagging sequence of five bleep-tones) are woven into something almost voluptuous. The title comes from the test tones built into synths and samplers, while the opening soundbite--"if everything's ready here on the dark side of the moon, play the five tones"--is sampled from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

XON

The Mood Set EP

(Network, 1991)

 Sweet Exorcist's Richard H. Kirk and Forgemaster Rob Gordon team up for this coldly compelling one-off. All whiplash percussion and spectral synths, "Dissonance" is the prize here. Its "ooh, ooh, techno city" hook, sampled from Cybotron (Juan Atkins' first group)  might be homage to Detroit. But it could equally be serving notice to the Belleville Three: watch out, Sheffield is the world capital of electronic music. Again. Because, actually, that Cybotron vocal sounds suspiciously like early Human League…

 

SWEET EXORCIST

"Clonk's Coming" (off C.C.C.D)

(Warp, 1991)

Bleep at its most sophisticated, the final tune on this seven track maxi-EP (or is it mini-LP?) starts with a dizzy-making roundelay of dub-delayed bleeps, falls into a strange loping sashay of a groove, and blossoms into a fiesta of textured percussion, clanking bass, and densely clustered electronic tonalities.

 

(Read this interview with DJ Parrot aka Richard Barratt, which has stuff on the primitive set-up they struggled with to make "Testone")

And the very first thing I wrote about Cabaret Voltaire, from Melody Maker, July 26 1986

stray bloggage

Blissblog May 12, 2004

Richard h. kirk earlier/later (mute)

lives up to nick gutterbreaks praise, esp. the second disc of early days stuff. and worth the price just for the front cover --photo booth pic of kirk as a teenager looking like this sort of glam kid gone feral/reverted to hippie -- bowie meets peter the wild boy

Blissblog May 07, 2004

Very nice piece by Nick Gutterbreakz on the Richard H. Kirk Earlier/Later Unreleased Projects Anthology 74/89 (Grey Area Of Mute) CD which is out any day and which I'm panting to hear. I'm not quite as obsessive about Cabs-related output as Nick but not that far behind him. And weirdly it's quite a recent development. I really liked the Cabs at the time, had a fair few things by them, some vinyl, others taped off friends. And there were certain tracks like "Black Mask" and "Sluggin"/"Secret Agent Man" and swathes of Covenant that really stood out for me. But I wasn't like an obsessive fan by any means. But now, I dunno, through doing the book or something, in these last three years, I just really fell in love with the Cabs--as Sound and as Spirit-- to the point where I want all of it, the juvenilia and solo side project marginalia.... last year, if Methodology: Attic Tapes had been a new release it might have beaten out even Dizzee as my year's favorite listen (was amazed how little love that record got in the critpolls and blog roundups, praps most people didn't actually hear it?) ... yeah I really feel Nick's Kirkmania.... cos there's just something that imbues even the scraps and half-finished stuff... Something heroic about Cabaret Voltaire. Culture warrior bizniz innit.

For a cultural and material topography of postpunk Sheffield, check out this extensive interview I did with the late Andy Gill, the NME's Sheffield correspondent during this legendary time and friends with the Cabs and most of the other significant musicians in the town. 

Here's what Andy had to say about the Cabs and Richard H. Kirk:

“... Before the Cabs had a record out, they used to come into Virgin, where I worked.  I had hair down to my waist in those days. They came up to the counter and asked 'Have you got any records by Cabaret Voltaire?'. I’d heard of the name, and what I’d heard about them sounded really intriguing to me. So, I said ‘As far as I know they haven’t got anything out yet, but I’d really be interested in hearing them, cos it’s my kind of thing.’ I remember them being quite shocked that this guy who looked like a Ted Nugent fan was heavily into that kind of that stuff. Ever since then we’ve been mates....

"Mal and Rich and Chris  and their gang were heavily into the sonics of Roxy. Although Mal was heavily into clothes too.  He had two rooms in his flat, and one room was where he lived and the other was his wardrobe – and he had an ironing board in the middle of it. It was just completely full of clothes. Mal was the most stylish person I’d ever met; he always had a consummate sense of style.

“The early Cabs gigs were trying to get a reaction – it was a racket, just squealing noise. And there’d be films behind them of god knows what: biological warfare experiments, people in chemical warfare suits. They’d collect old Super-8 footage of things like that.

"Around 1975 or 1976, we became friends. They had been going since ‘73 or ’74. So, it was a bit after that I got to meet them. They had this studio in this old industrial building. The whole building was called Western Works – and they recorded in it and called the studio Western Works.”

What were they like as people, Cabaret Voltaire?

“Richard’s always been a bit stroppy –in that very Yorkshire way. He can be hellishly stubborn. That’s a typically Yorkshire thing:  ‘if you say don’t do this, I’ll do it’.  He’s got that thing in his voice.

"In Sheffield, it wasn’t like the London Musicians Collective, where everyone’s got wire-rim glasses and that sort of avantgarde middle class attitude. In Sheffield, it was working class Dada. They were heavily into Dada and liked to get a reaction. Wake people up. Richard, then, mainly played guitar and clarinet. Mal did rudimentary bass and vocals, treated beyond legibility.