Two notes, a hissing pulse, and a man describing a car crash. That was the whole plan. In 1978, Daniel Miller was an assistant film editor with a second-hand miniKORG 700S bought on Charing Cross Road, a TEAC reel-to-reel, and a Space Echo hired for a single day. He recorded at home, under the name The Normal, on the reasonable assumption that nobody was waiting for it.
The lyrics were inspired by J.G. Ballard’s take on auto-eroticism, Crash. Miller and a friend had drafted a film script from the novel. When that idea didn’t pan out, he cut the idea down to a few minutes of sawtooth wave and deadpan reportage – sex, chrome, and a shattered windscreen, delivered without a flicker of emotion. The sounds of vehicles colliding where Finchley Road meets the A406 North Circular Road – known as Henly’s Corner after a garage that used to be located there – came through Miller’s Decoy Avenue bedroom window at night as background noise, and his vocal delivery was as matter-of-fact.
“T.V.O.D.” was the A-side of The Normal’s first (and only) single. Rough Trade took a test pressing, helped press 2,000 copies, and the B-side promptly ate the record. Miller needed a label name and remembered the silent film cans stamped “mute” at his day job. MUTE 001 eventually sold around 30,000 copies and was declared “Single of the Century” by an enthusiastic music journalist.
“Warm Leatherette” has been covered by dozens of acts across disco, EBM, techno, glam and industrial genres, despite its dramatic juxtaposition of lust and serious injuries. There is nothing to beat the sinister hiss of the original, but here are ten of the cover versions that we rate.
10. Sleep Chamber – Warm Leatherette
John Zewizz put the song out as a 7” on his own Inner-X-Musick, backed with “Fetish” – which tells you exactly which part of the lyric interested him.
Where Miller kept the fetish implied, Sleep Chamber drag it into the room: ritual percussion, tape grime, a vocal that leers rather than reports. It is the first cover to treat the crash as foreplay instead of a news bulletin, and the loss of restraint costs it something. Still, it establishes the pattern for every industrial act that followed.
9. Chicks on Speed / Hell – Warm Leatherette
The first Chicks on Speed single was a split 7” with DJ Hell, each side a different reading of the same song. For a group built on collage and cheerful amateurism, Miller’s one-finger manifesto was an obvious inheritance.
Their side is thin, tinny and slightly bored, the vocal passed around like a shared cigarette. The primitivism is deliberate and the joke lands: two decades after MUTE 001, the song is still a proof that equipment is not the point. Hell’s version, on the flip, pushes it towards the dancefloor and loses the sneer.
8. Vitalic – Warm Leatherette
Recorded live for BBC Radio 1 and tucked onto the maxi-CD of “My Friend Dario”, later reappearing on a collector’s edition of OK Cowboy.
Pascal Arbez treats the song as chassis rather than lyric. The kick is enormous, the synth line has been sharpened into a katana, and the vocal is held at arm’s length so the rhythm can do the driving. It is the most physical version here and the least frightening – a crash you can dance away from.
7. Terence Fixmer – Warm Leatherette
Fixmer’s reading arrived on the Oppression EP for Planète Rouge, four decades into the song’s career and squarely inside his own lineage.
The tempo is patient; the low end enormous. Fixmer understands that the original is a machine study, so he builds his version out of pressure and repetition and lets the vocal sit low in the mix, almost muttered. Modern club engineering meets old Ballardian chill.
6. Pankow – Warm Leatherette
The Italian group put their version on Gisela, an album otherwise notable for its scatological humour and general contempt for good taste.
Pankow supply what Miller withheld: muscle. The lyric is delivered with theatrical relish that makes the track more of a sermon than a report. It is EBM logic applied to a futurist artefact, carried off by a band who never once sound as though they are paying tribute.
5. Suzi Quatro – Warm Leatherette
The strangest entry, and the best argument for digging through box sets. Quatro’s version surfaced in 2014 on the four-disc anthology The Girl From Detroit City. It was described there as an outtake from the sessions around Rock Hard.
Quatro sings it as rock and roll, with a band, and the effect is peculiar: the lyric’s flat inventory of injuries acquires a swagger it was never meant to have. She was, after all, the one and only Leather Tuscadero. Nobody needed to explain the title to her.
4. Foetus – Warm Leatherette
J.G. Thirlwell first cut the song for Fractured Recordings’ limited Recovery 7” box in 2008, credited to his own name. He then placed it on Foetus’s Soak in 2013, recorded at Self Immolation in Brooklyn, among a John Carpenter theme, a Nino Ferrer song, and his own material.
Miller wrote a two-note diagram. Thirlwell is constitutionally incapable of leaving a diagram alone. The lyric stays, the temperature rises, and the crash is no longer reported from a safe distance.
3. Trent Reznor, Peter Murphy, Jeordie White and Atticus Ross – Warm Leatherette
Recorded backstage at the Tweeter Center in Boston on 23 June 2006, for a radio session during the Nine Inch Nails With Teeth summer tour. Four people, minimal gear, no album to promote – just some musicians doing what they love.
Murphy takes the lyric and Reznor holds the pulse. The division of labour is the whole performance: Bauhaus melodrama pressed against the flat electronic grid it was designed to resist. Murphy croons where Miller reported, and the tension between the two approaches keeps the thing upright. It is loose, unpolished, and spellbinding.
2. Laibach – Warme Lederhaut
Laibach played the song at Mute’s Short Circuit festival at the Roundhouse in May 2011 and then recorded it in German as “Warme Lederhaut”, opening An Introduction To… Laibach / Reproduction Prohibited on Mute the following year. The German adaptation is credited to the group, with Matevž Kolenc arranging and co-producing.
Translation does most of the work. Sung in German at parade tempo, over brass-weight synths and a martial drum pattern, the lyric stops being a fetish and becomes an instruction. The car crash is now policy. Laibach have spent forty years demonstrating that any pop song can be made to sound like an announcement, and few source texts have submitted so readily.
1. Grace Jones – Warm Leatherette
Two years after MUTE 001, Chris Blackwell and Alex Sadkin took Jones to Compass Point and rebuilt her around the Sly and Robbie rhythm section. The title track of Warm Leatherette was the announcement: Miller’s bedroom experiment reissued as international style, and later the opening number of the A One Man Show tour.
The arrangement is the opposite of the original in every measurable way – live bass, reggae-inflected drums, guitar, space where there was once only hiss – and identical in temperature. Jones does not act the lyric. She reads it, unhurried, as though the wreckage were a wardrobe choice, and the band leave gaps wide enough to hear her decide. Miller wrote a song about a man aroused by damage; Jones turned it into a song about a woman entirely unmoved by it. That reversal is why hers remains the definitive cover.