A live Wire performance is always an exciting prospect. In this video, taken in London in 1985, the band is in one of its transitional phases; recreating itself on stage like a snake shedding its skin.
At this time, Wire were part of Mute Records, and their recordings were made with the help of the same producers who worked with acts like Depeche Mode. On stage, however, they were free to make their own sound, and they subverted pop conventions at every turn.
John Tilbury, the pianist and collaborator of Cornelius Cardew, once wrote an article with the title, “John Cage: Ghost or Monster?”
On the current news from Mute, the answer is both: the influence of Cage’s work, “4’33’,” is the motivating force behind a new box set in the label’s fortieth year; and there will be no less than fifty Mute artists featured in the collection.
STUMM433 follows the label’s catalogue numbering scheme while paying tribute to the notorious work. The key to the joke is that the artist’s role in “4’33′” is not to play for that specified length of time. Fans of Depeche Mode and Nitzer Ebb should not, therefore, be looking forward to new material.
“4’33′” is not about silence; rather, it turns the focus onto the ambience of the concert hall and the reaction of the audience by musicians not playing their instruments. Expect very different takes, therefore, from The Normal and Simon Fisher Turner, or Laibach and Polly Scattergood.
They can take some comfort in the news that the net profits from the project will go to help sufferers of tinnitus and musicians needing mental health support.
Artists featured include:
A Certain Ratio, A.C. Marias, ADULT., The Afghan Whigs, Alexander Balanescu, Barry Adamson, Ben Frost, Bruce Gilbert, Cabaret Voltaire, Carter Tutti Void, Chris Carter, Chris Liebing, Cold Specks, Daniel Blumberg, Depeche Mode, Duet Emmo, Echoboy, Einstürzende Neubauten, Erasure, Fad Gadget (tribute), Goldfrapp, He Said, Irmin Schmidt, Josh T. Pearson, K Á R Y Y N, Komputer, Laibach, Land Observations, Lee Ranaldo, Liars, Looper, Lost Under Heaven, Maps, Mark Stewart, Michael Gira, Mick Harvey, Miranda Sex Garden, Moby, Modey Lemon, Mountaineers, New Order, Nitzer Ebb, NON, Nonpareils, The Normal, onDeadWaves, Phew, Pink Grease, Pole, Polly Scattergood, Renegade Soundwave, Richard Hawley, ShadowParty, Silicon Teens, Simon Fisher Turner, The Warlocks, Wire, Yann Tiersen
Mute note:
The box set will be released in May 2019 with more details being shared over the coming months. To register interest in STUMM433 and be first in line to pre-order and receive exclusive updates on the contributions, sign up at http://mute.com/stumm-433
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Fredrik Strage’s new book begins with the line, “No one who has seen Fucking Åmal buys a pop-star perfume.”
If that was the only sentence in 242, it would easily sum up cultural observation in the twenty-first century. The reference to Lukas Moodysson’s uncomfortable tale of forbidden love in small town Sweden, set in opposition to the fetishisation of celebrities and the consumption of them through commodities, is not only about authenticity; it is about knowing.
Strage’s day job is to know what is going on. As a writer for the large Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter (DN), Strage is wired to the underground and a keen observer of trends. He is a frequent guest on daily news programmes, where his role is to highlight the emergence of an EBM artist like Rein to an audience otherwise distracted by reality TV. His podcast, Hemma hos Strage [EN: At Strage’s House], gets close to artists in a more modern format.
242 collects as many articles from Strage’s regular column in DN. They start with a note on Britney Spears’ perfume from 2005 and end with a piece about a children’s tale read to his daughter from 2017. Although the title is suggestive of Front 242, the Belgian godfathers of electronic body music, the band is only referenced in an appended auto-interview – one-fifth as many times as Kate Bush is listed in the index.
Strage’s background is as a fan of bands like Depeche Mode and Liaisons Dangereuses, but his perspective is as broad as his style is light. That’s why Damon Albarn rubs shoulders in the collection with Dead or Alive; Ke$ha with Kraftwerk; and Madonna with Malaria.
We follow him to an underground club in Berlin, where Douglas McCarthy of Nitzer Ebb sprays him with saliva as he sings, and to the Mall of Scandinavia in search of records. At Stockholm’s Bodyfest event, he enters the mosh pit with Karin Bolin Derne. We hear about neo-Nazis invading the synthwave music scene and are offered thoughts on dying alone.
In article 230, we meet Andreas Noreen, presented to the readers of DN as Depeche-Andreas. A life-long Depeche Mode fan from Gothenburg, he brims with excitement at the opportunity to meet the band and have a photo taken during a Stockholm visit. What is omitted in print is that Strage is not only an observer at the meeting; he is a facilitator, having used his influence to open the band’s dressing room doors for Noreen. It’s an act of kindness that is blurred through remote viewing.
Several of the reviews for 242 in his native country have lamented that Strage’s book is not about the magic of the number 242 for followers of electronic music or a novel set in their world. Those would have been interesting ideas to pursue, but this collection is a fun and insightful commentary on popular culture over more than a decade, as seen through a very particular Nordic lens.
Strage’s significance for Swedish criticism is that he approaches culture from outside of the mainstream. In his writing, artists on independent music labels or from alternative subcultures are given their place without the fear of not fitting in. A trendspotter he might be, but the articles collected here succeed in conveying the joy of people making that culture their own.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
To get the measure of Mute’s influence, it is enough to note that Yazoo’s second and final album was given the catalogue number, STUMM 12. The eleven that had come before it included three LPs from Fad Gadget, two from Depeche Mode, one by DAF and the only Silicon Teens album.
By the summer of 1983, when You and Me Both came out, Mute was on the cutting edge of electronic and experimental music. Founded at the end of 1978, Mute was originally just a name for Daniel Miller to release his single, “TVOD/Warm Leatherette.” The DIY punk ethic had seen many bands put out their own 7″ singles, and as The Normal he wanted to make punk with a Korg 700s synthesizer.
Dividing his time between his mother’s house in Temple Fortune and Rough Trade’s back rooms in Notting Hill, Miller took on additional and more ambitious projects, gaining a reputation as the go-to guy for synth programming (Soft Cell, Thomas Dolby, Alex Ferguson) and alternative records.
Early projects, like his own Silicon Teens enterprise, were the stuff of record store fantasies: covers of rock standards using synths; industrial records with multiple grooves and spindle holes; singles about love during nuclear war. Then, attending a show by Fad Gadget, Miller stumbled upon a diamond the size of a TR808: four Essex futurists named after a French fashion magazine that they couldn’t pronounce accurately but with an instinct for infectious pop.
Depeche Mode changed everything for Miller and Mute. When they agreed to work with him, he gained the band that he had imagined Silicon Teens to be. Guitarless and guileless, Depeche Mode were on an upward pop curve but willing to experiment. He took them into Blackwing Studios in South London, where he had been working on other Mute projects, and emerged with a string of singles and an album, Speak and Spell, that lifted both the band and the label into the musical stratosphere.
When Depeche Mode lost their main songwriter, Mute gained another artist and repeated its success with Yazoo. When they broke up, the label kept its relationship alive with Vince Clarke, who provided them with a longer-lived project as Erasure.
These pop successes drew in funds that allowed Mute to support work by industrial and alternative artists like NON, Diamanda Galas, Pan Sonic and Simon Fisher Turner. Sublabels began to sprout, focussed on everything from soundtracks to techno. Sometimes, these had massive hits of their own (S’Express, Bomb the Bass), but often they just accumulated catalogues of exceptional artists (SPK, Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle).
Dedication to artists proved a profitable as well as principled practice for the label. Mute kept the faith with Moby during his Animal Rights years before turning Play into sync-rights gold. Nick Cave was able to explore a range of styles, becoming one of the greatest songwriters of his generation.
This is only the background to the stories of Mute and Miller. We have learned that his parents moved to the UK as refugees from Nazism. It has become well known that Mute bailed out Rough Trade during its lean years; but, in its own time, was sold to EMI. What did Guy Hands think about Neubauten? There is a lot of interesting material to be shared, for sure, but it’s being saved for another day.
What we do have is Mute: A Visual Document (Thames & Hudson) by Terry Burrows with Daniel Miller. It’s a trawl through the Mute archives, collecting artwork for sleeves and advertisements with short, accessible essays. Some of the biggest names in photography and design have worked with the label’s artists – including Anton Corbijn, Neville Brody, Brian Griffin and Peter Saville – so there is a lot of eye candy between the dayglo orange covers. The early graphics of Simone Grant are a key to Mute’s visual identity, and it’s great that Grant has been interviewed for the book. Miller provides colour commentary, and the approach is effective – rather like a director’s comment track on a DVD.
Even if our understanding of the economic history of Mute is not deepened by the book, Mute: A Visual Document does enrich our appreciation of a genuine success story. Mute have been innovators at using technology, exploring new formats and extending their brands. They didn’t have written contracts with their largest artists for a long time, but managed to keep them from being poached by the majors by living up to their handshake deals. As a consequence, the vaults are full of graphics that tell stories that might not otherwise have been told.
Mute: A Visual Document will delight fans of the label and its artists, but it will tease anyone who is interested to know more about the way Mute was grown from a start-up into a giant among independents. There needs to be a book written about Miller’s experience in business, and it may still come – it just won’t have so many shots of Add N to X covers.
Little Britain might have decided they have had enough of the European project, but Tracy Howe’s heart still belongs to the continent. The Canadian synth legend’s musical heritage traces a direct line back to Kraftwerk, and his Kling Klang vibe hasn’t weakened since the days when he formed Rational Youth together with Bill Vorn in the early 1980s.
Back then, Montréal was a guitar and black leather jacket kind of place, but Rational Youth were a synthesiser and double-breasted shirt kind of band. They reflected the experience of the Cold War with electronics – at that time, a cultural heresy to match their status as political provocateurs. The gritty, grainy images of missiles, Solidarity’s flag and love inside the Warsaw Pact filled their artwork or lyrics, while Kraftwerkian sequences echoed the anxiety that spread from the fault line between two Germanies.
Their first album, Cold War Night Life, was a synthetic masterpiece. It sat neatly alongside contemporary classics like John Foxx’s Metamatic and Depeche Mode’s Speak & Spell, pioneering a new kind of pop music from electronic circuits. While Kraftwerk had opened the path, Rational Youth developed their own sound, which included Howe’s sing-speak vocal style and fizzing electronics that owed little to the disco template.
Three decades later, as things heat up for Cold War II, Rational Youth are back with a new set of original material. Future Past Tense (Artoffact) represents their first release of new songs since 1999’s To the Goddess Electricity. On the evidence of this EP, the intervening years as a languages specialist and donkey farmer have not cost Howe his deft touch at composing melodies and synthetic hooks. He has also kept a political slant in his lyrics, which have always been prescient rather than didactic – this is, after all, the writer who gave us “Dancing on the Berlin Wall” a decade before German reunification became possible.
The band has evolved over the years. It’s been pared down now to Howe and his partner, Gaenor, who delights with excellent vocals on ”This Side of the Border,” a clever track destined to be part of the classic RY repertoire. Howe is a keen observer of the differences between his own country and the superpower to his south, and it is not only the better standard of chocolate that has caught his attention.
Howe’s deft sense of humour comes through in ”Western Man.” Pointing his (special edition merch laser) finger at the arrogance of empire builders, Howe spies them trying to impose their failed systems on other countries and retorts with driving beats and synth lines in his classic style.
Howe’s style has always been closer to spoken word than power ballad belter, and that is the space he continues to occupy on “In the Future.” A smooth number that easily fits into the later RY canon, it’s another highlight of the EP. This is mature pop that couldn’t be written by Hoxton hipsters for love or money.
“Here It Comes Again” brings Gaenor back into the frame, as the Howes duet in a track that bounces with an 80s pop feel, while “Prison of Flesh” finds Howe developing territory first explored in “Merry Christmas Mary Ann,” a track he dedicated to Gaenor when they were just a couple outside of the studio.
The EP closes with a revamped version of Psyche’s alternative Eurodance hit, “Unveiling the Secret.” Written by the original lineup of Darrin and Stephen Huss, it is signature Psyche, but the song gains a distinctive RY makeover here. It’s a tribute, not only to Canada’s other innovative synth band, but also to the black-clad fans who have kept the flame flickering for electronic music in the years since Cold War Night Life.
Depeche Mode fans will know Rico Conning’s name best from the Blind Mix of “Strangelove” or the Black Tulip Mix of “A Question of Time.” Nick Cash will come to mind first as Fad Gadget’s drummer. Jo Forty’s name is less bound up with the heroes of early electronic music; but, together with Conning, Cash and ex-Alternative TV guitarist Mick Linehan, he formed the core of The Lines, a celebrated post-post incubator.
Founded in London in the immediate wake of punk and its DIY culture, The Lines came together when Conning and Forty met on an English literature course. As Conning tells the story:
We both had a strong interest in music. For me, music was probably a stronger interest than English literature. I found the study of music very boring. I didn’t like to study it; just to play it. We decided to start a band. This was around ’76, and a lot of other people in London were focused on the same thing about the same time. It took us a couple of years to get to where we thought we were good enough to put a record out, and we put out “White Night” in 1978.
“White Night” had a long shelf life: besides The Lines’ original, it was covered by both Torch Song and Adult Net. Although Laurie Mayer, the third member of Torch Song, together with Conning and William Orbit, sang the version that appeared on their album, a version also exists with Sarah Blackwood of Dubstar and Client. Adult Net, the band launched by Brix Smith after she left The Fall, took a more indie route with its version.
Although major success proved elusive, The Lines or its members crossed paths with many of the key players in the city’s independent music scene. Recording at Blackwing Studios, they returned one time to find Vince Clarke and Alison Moyet concluding the first Yazoo single, “Only You.” The band had been drawn to Blackwing by the sound of Dome, the Lewis-Gilbert side project, and Conning went on to work with all of Wire as a mixing engineer for “Eardrum Buzz.” That was only one of many assignments given by Daniel Miller to Conning, who became one of Mute Records’ house studio gurus, recording or mixing Depeche Mode, Erasure, Laibach, Renegade Soundwave and Frank Tovey.
Conning recalls:
I had known Daniel, anyway, from the late 1970s, and The Lines were gigging at about the same time, and our drummer was in Fad Gadget’s band. I did know Daniel vaguely, and one day he turned up at Guerilla, where I worked, to mix some Depeche Mode live tapes. He asked me to do a few of the mixes by myself. He asked me to do “Black Celebration.” After that, he asked me to do “A Question of Time.” They were both good mixes, and then the one I did with Daniel after that was a really good mix which I think actually affected the career of the band – the Blind Mix of “Strangelove” – was a pretty important mix for them. It was the main single out here in the States.
It was another Mute favourite, John Fryer, who did a lot of the studio work on The Lines’ first two full-length albums, Therapy and Ultramarine, together with studio boss Eric Radcliffe. Fryer, one of two permanent members of This Mortal Coil, had developed a reputation as an experimental engineer, and his ability to cope with reel-to-reel tape loops, wrapped around the studio premises, was one of the attractions for the band. Like Dome, The Lines played the studio as an instrument, and their sound owes a lot to the creative setting in Southwark.
After those albums, the band went on hiatus. It was never officially dissolved, but the band members all went in different directions: Conning assumed a job as engineer at William Orbit‘s Guerilla Studios and as a member of Torch Song (just listen to his work on S-Express’ glorious “Mantra for a State of Mind” with Orbit to see where he was going); Cash had his Fad Gadget responsibilities; and Forty and Linehan each went on Eastern travels. Although tracks were in demand for compilations and a retrospective was issued in 2008, it seemed a remote prospect that new material would be forthcoming from The Lines.
Fast forward to 2016, then, and one of the surprises of the year is the release of hull down, the third album from The Lines. Although the original demos had been recorded in 1982-3, and some attempt had been made to improve the recordings in 1987 for a potential release through IRS, the material had to be parked until 2004. That’s when Conning digitised the tracks and started to play with them in Pro Tools; blending the versions to create something new and potent.
We tracked down Conning at his Los Angeles base to learn something about the story of the album. He told us:
This is an attempt to realise what we were trying to realise back then, with the benefit of hindsight. All I did, on some of the tracks, was blend very early demos with much later, much more polished, 8-track versions. When I did that, it was a bit of a revelation. In a couple of cases, particularly – I would say “Flat Feet” and “Archway” – I had no idea what to do with those two until I blended the earliest demo with the later thing. With a couple of others – “Raffle” and “Haberdasher” – it was a similar thing, but in those cases the demo starts and finishes the track and the later development is in the middle.
Although the product of work that began in the 1980s, the sound of hull down remains fresh. “Flat Feet,” the lead track, is rhythmically vigorous and filled with enough authentically snappy analogue sounds to stump even the most jaded hipster. “Single Engine Duster” could be a later-era Wire track, albeit with trombone, Linn drum and Chakk-like funk in the mix. “Nicky Boy’s Groove” features Cash’s TB-303 actually playing a bass line – its sound sitting on the cusp of acid house while guitars and synths drift around in dark, apocalyptic swirls.
Proceedings enter ACR territory with “Zoko Am3,” a track based on a live jam. Conning describes his contribution as a duet with a Watkins Copicat echo unit, and the lines-out soar with a prog-like effect, comparable to the early material from Nash the Slash or Steve Hillage. The use of effects continues with “Where Is the World,” a track that was originally laid down to test out various new gear, including the then-current TR-808. Come “Raffle” and the sound is not a million miles from the Guerilla template: arpeggiators glistening over brilliant, dancefloor-friendly bass lines, while Conning’s vocals come and go as needed.
The pace slows down again for “Archway,” which incorporates Cash’s vibraphone and a Hammond organ in a tribute to the road running under Suicide Bridge. It doesn’t lift for the run-out track, “Haberdashers,” but the sound is much more easily located in its time, using Laurie Mayer’s Juno 60 for arpeggiation. The experimentation at the heart of the The Lines is in the clearest relief here, and it is remarkable that IRS didn’t go for it as part of their No Speak series of instrumental albums.
Three decades after the original tracks were laid down to tape, hull down is partly a sign of what could have been for The Lines, but it also contains traces of what has been for its members. More than an artifact, the album is a document for the present, and it’s dense with rich, experimental music that is even better suited to our time.
LINKS:
Rico’s Reel blog
Buy hull down at Carpark Records
Before Mute started using the format as part of its “brand extension” strategy, 12″ singles were primarily used to provide longer versions of singles for DJs. The usual way of stretching a song was to add some drum loops or an extended intro or extro, but the basics of the song sounded the same. One of Mute’s innovations was to offer new versions of songs, played around with in the studio by the same producers or specialist remixers, perhaps paired with additional tracks that were not available elsewhere. And then to do it again – and again – so that fans of a Depeche Mode song might end up with a number of different versions of the same single, pushing up sales figures and the single’s chart position.
This approach has been a boon for both remix artists and collectors, as the label drew in emerging names from the dance music scene to provide mixes and pushed out multiple official releases, promotional versions and overseas exotica in marbled vinyl. We’ve gathered some of our favourite remixes below, on the basis of rarity or the funkiness of the bassline. Which tracks would be on your list?
Depeche Mode’s first 12″ single came out in 1981. “New Life” came backed with an extended version of its B-side, “Shout,” which was louder, funkier and more experimental than the lead track. It’s not really pop, and it’s a pity that those who tried to write the band off as twee bubblegum lightweights didn’t flip the record to find it.
By 1984, Depeche Mode had become a band living on 12 inches. “Master and Servant” provided them with an enormous club hit, so it was natural that Joseph Watt of Razormaid should be approached for a DJ-friendly remix.
Basildon, the Essex community that gave rise to the Mode, is called a “new town,” because it was developed after the Second World War. Rico Conning, who was a member of Torch Song with William Orbit and worked with him in Guerilla Studios, provided the “New Town” mix for the alternative, limited-edition version of “A Question of Time,” the main mixes having been made by the PWL stalwart, Phil Harding.
Made as a transitional single between the doom-pop of A Broken Frame and the digital-infused Construction Time Again, “Get the Balance Right” was Alan Wilder’s first recording with Depeche Mode. The band eventually dropped the song, but it’s one of their most modern, harder tracks.
Phil Harding made his name working for Stock Aitken Waterman’s hit factory, before being recruited by Mute to produce Nitzer Ebb’s first album and provide some mixes for Depeche Mode. His work on 1987’s “Strangelove” yielded this mix for a promotional single.
The Beatmasters were signed to the Mute sister label, Rhythm King – which was founded with profits from Depeche Mode’s 80s successes – when they made this remix for the limited edition version of “Behind the Wheel.”
Lifted from Songs of Faith and Devotion, “Rush” was remixed for the B-side of “Condemnation” and then released as a promotional single with this contribution by Guido Osorio.
The strategy of “brand extension” reached its peak with “Enjoy the Silence,” which ended its run with an extra-limited edition mix clocking in at more than 15 minutes. Stretched out with samples of clocks by the band and Flood, engineered by Paul Kendall and Peter Iversen, with mixing credits given to Gareth Jones, Adrian Sherwood, Holger Hiller and others, it’s a kitchen sink mix to end them all, on one side of vinyl.
Depeche turned their backs on “But Not Tonight” almost as soon as it came out, having felt rushed into it by their US label, but the song is one of the band’s best-loved and Dave Gahan’s vocal is a raw sensation.
William Orbit‘s sonic signatures are all over this 1993 remix, and the clues are there for what was coming for Madonna’s “Ray of Light.”
Their name is inspired by a line from a Human League song, they make girl-meets-boy pop songs, and they have a knack of producing infectious grooves-it’s no accident that Sweden’s Train to Spain were invited to play at Cold War Night Life‘s event, An Evening with the Swedish Synth, in 2014. As one of a new generation of poptronica acts coming from the Nordics, the duo of Helena Wigeborn and Jonas Rasmusson are great entertainers in a live setting and just as much fun in their studio guise.
Just in time for summer, they’ve revealed their debut album, What It’s All About (SubCulture Records). Eleven tracks of fine poptronica are assembled in this virtual package, drawing on favourites from their live show and previous teasers. The Train is inspired by the synthetic sounds of the 80s, and these can be heard in tracks like “Keep on Running” and “Blipblop” to great effect. Wigeborn’s vocals cover a lot of stylistic ground, even getting a little Opus III on the acid-infused “Remind Myself.”
This is a playful album, which comes with a sense of humour. Depeche Mode fans will love their favourite banana-waving, hand-clapping member being name-checked in the deadpan tribute track, “Martin, David and Fletch”:
We’ve been waiting for some time to hear What It’s All About, and the results are worth it. Train to Spain have produced the soundtrack to summer.
Available on [ot-link url=”http://subculturerecords.bandcamp.com/album/what-its-all-about”]Bandcamp [/ot-link] and [ot-link url=”https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/what-its-all-about/id989266718″]iTunes[/ot-link].
Mark Reeder left Manchester in 1978 to live in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. At the time, it was a world away from being a Mecca for hipster baristas or techie start-ups: reconstruction had been held back by the practical exigencies of the Cold War, and parts of the city had been left a patchwork of squats inhabited by punks, junkies and other outsiders. It was an island of Western decay surrounded by a sea of make-believe socialism, connected to the Federal Republic by a road that was the on-ramp to World War Three. Residents were exempted from compulsory military service and had liberal access to social assistance, so had a unique space within which to create music and art.
Reeder immersed himself in this world, enjoying the alternative arts scene that flourished on Europe’s political fault line. He soon found himself playing Our Man in Berlin to English record companies needing a local representative, promoting Factory Records artists like Joy Division and A Certain Ratio to shops and clubs. He played in his own band, Die Unbekannten (which became Shark Vegas), promoted shows for Die Toten Hosen, and co-managed the legendary Malaria! founded by Gudrun Gut and Bettina Köster.
When the Wall came down, the scene started to dissipate, but a different energy filled the void: the beat. House and techno took over dance music at the end of the 1980s, and the first Love Parade was held just over a year before German reunification. Berlin after the Wall absorbed these sounds, giving up heroin for MDMA and trading big hair for acid bass lines. At Ground Zero, Reeder founded a new label, MFS (Masterminded for Success), channelled the emerging trance sound into vinyl grooves and gave a push to the fledgling Paul van Dyk, amongst others.
As a musician himself, Reeder’s ear has been tuned consistently into sounds that belong five minutes into the future. Among his many projects, he has put out a compilation of remixes undertaken for some of the most respected electronic music artists, including Depeche Mode, John Foxx and Anne Clark. Five Point One assembles specimens of Reeder’s work for the Pet Shop Boys and Sam Taylor-Wood, Blank & Jones, Bad Lieutenant, amongst others, in both stereo and 5.1 surround sound formats. The tracks are all tailored for the dancefloor, lifted by old school drum beats and slick arrangements.
Reeder’s story is now going a step further with the highly-anticipated release of B-Movie. Currently touring on the festival circuit, the film tells the story of Berlin as an artistic cauldron by following Reeder’s own path. Through archive footage, interviews and stylised re-enactments, the Walled City’s underground is revealed in its gritty, darkly humorous glory. We caught up with Reeder while waiting for the film to come to a cinema closer to us.
What inspired you to move to Berlin in 1978?
I had previously travelled around West Germany before going to Berlin, and when I asked people what Berlin was like, I always seemed to get a really negative response; something like, “What do you want to go there for?” Their attitude made me even more curious to find out for myself why they didn’t seem to want me to go there. In hindsight, perhaps was it because Berlin didn’t represent the prosperous image of the concrete, chrome and squeaky clean version of the flourishing Federal Republic. Berlin was just so far away, stuck in the middle of East Germany, and getting there was not easy, especially on a shoestring budget.
There were no budget airlines to Berlin back then, only expensive flights, so people didn’t fly so much. The alternatives were by train or car. I had a Eurail pass, which was a cheap train travel ticket for under-26 year olds. On my way from Hamburg to Berlin, I missed my train and ended up stuck in the middle of West Germany on a warm, drizzly night. The station master told me I could take a regional train to the border and then hitch a ride to West Berlin from there, as it was the only destination along the transit road. So, that’s exactly what I did. I had only been waiting at the border for a few moments when a hippy-looking student in a rusty, bile-green Volkswagen gave me a ride. We trundled along the bumpy autobahn in almost total darkness; it was like travelling in space.
Whatever inspired me, music certainly played a major role in my decision to go to Berlin from the onset, especially my thirst for electronic music. Probably, from the first time I had heard the Dr Who theme, then Walter Carlos’ album Switched on Bach in the late 60s, I had become synth-obsessed. I listened to anything that had a synth. It sounded so sci-fi.
Back in the 70s, synths were a rarity in Britain, and only established bands like Yes, Pink Floyd or King Crimson could afford such luxurious instruments. It was also quite hard to get hold of any kind of weird, underground synth records, too, as traditional record shops like HMV didn’t really stock such exotic sounds. Luckily for me, I was working in the small Virgin record shop in Manchester, so I could order all the weird synth music from Germany and elsewhere.
In the early 70s, I listened to a lot of krautrock and early electronic music by bands like Faust, Neu!, Cluster, Popol Vuh, Michael Rother, Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, or Klaus Schulze; and, of course, when the two Bowie Berlin albums, Low and Heroes, came out, they had really impressed me. They were dark and became the soundtrack to my imaginary Berlin. Bowie had obviously been impressed by this city scarred by the war.
So, the expectation that I would discover more records in a similar style – stuff that hadn’t been imported into Britain – was a huge incentive to me. I couldn’t wait to scour the record shops within the ruins. Naturally, at this time while in Manchester, working in the only shop in the city that sold punk, I had also become part of the emerging punk scene, too, and that was also very exciting. Punk was something else. It wasn’t only a musical movement but a vehicle to portray how young people thought. Punk liberated us lost teenagers from the shackles of boring middle-of-the-road rock and mind-numbing bubble-gum pop. I pushed aside my progressive rock roots and delved into the excitement of punk. It was what I listened to live and in clubs, and electronic music became my chill out. I even played bass in a band called The Frantic Elevators with Mick Hucknall.
Yet, by 1978, I had already decided to leave Britain. I had become disillusioned. Punk was no longer thrilling, and I wanted to venture over to Germany to see what was happening there and hopefully find new, more electronic music. Once I arrived in Berlin, I was totally captivated. Indeed, it was nothing like I had imagined. Driving from the dark, bleakness of the transit autobahn into the inviting lights of the city, Berlin was not a pile of rubble, but it appeared to be a shiny, gleaming, colourful, modern-looking place. In fact, I would find out it was actually both. The shiny bit was the Ku’damm and the crumbly bits were scattered everywhere around it.
My first Berlin encounter was the next day, when I went out to get change for the payphone. I entered into the nearest corner bar and asked the person who was bent down, stocking up the shelves, if she could give me change. She arose, and it was a 6 foot transvestite with bright orange hair and a yellow-and-black polka-dot top and horror-show make up. It was at that moment that I realised I really was in Berlin. Yes, Cabaret and all that. I went out to as many bars and clubs as I could find and saw all kinds of weird and wonderful people. Their attitude was very different to the one I was used to in Manchester. I discovered that most of the guys living in Berlin were there because it exempted them from their obligatory military service.
The excitement of going over into unknown East Berlin was also definitely one of the aspects that kept me here. No one went there, and I encountered the same attitude as I had in West Germany with regard to Berlin. It was fascinating. East Berlin was like a parallel world, resembling something from an episode of Star Trek; it seemed to be stuck in a 50s time-warp. There were uniforms of all kinds everywhere, and being a Westerner East Berlin always had that Great Escape feeling – like being in a war film, on the run. It was actually thrilling, but equally scary to know that you were probably being constantly watched by agents of the secret police.
I loved the crappiness of it, too, and the way people were creative in their attempts to make ends meet. After a while, it became my own strange kind of Disneyland. The rest of the Eastern Bloc was also untouched and there to be discovered, too. No one went there, either, so I did. I travelled regularly to Prague, Budapest and Bucharest, and became totally addicted. Berlin was the perfect platform to venture east.
The battlefield life expectancy of a West German punk was probably not great, should the Cold War have heated up. How did that affect the atmosphere in Berlin?
I think if there had been a war with the Soviets, the punks would probably have survived it pretty well in a Mad Max kind of way. After all, they already lived on the edge of society and were used to dealing with everyday hardships of little food, no accommodation, water or electricity. The city was full of washed-up kids, punks, draft dodgers, gay men and weirdos, all mixed in with little old ladies (these were the former trummerfrauen – the ones who rebuilt Berlin after the war).
The atmosphere of constant military invasion always hung in the air, threatening, but in reality everyone knew Berlin was already lost. After all, it was surrounded by the massed might of the Soviet army, all waiting to pounce, and the West part was proudly defended by the allied forces of freedom, and they knew they didn’t stand a cat-in-hell’s chance. We were walled in, isolated and forgotten. So, no one gave a fuck. People did what they wanted. The music definitely reflected that attitude.
Once the radical idea of new wave/punk reached Berlin, it changed the way people made music here too. However, whereas UK bands tried to make hit punk records in the hope of escaping the dole queue to a better way of life, the people making the music in Berlin had already escaped and were just making music which reflected their lives. They didn’t think about making hits, they just wanted to express themselves and their situation.
B-Movie follows your adventures in Berlin, in order to tell the Walled City’s eclectic and chaotic story as a music centre. How did the film come about and how has it been received?
The idea was initially Heiko Lange’s, while he was working with Joerg Hoppe on another project. During the 80s, Joerg used to manage a band called Extrabreit and knew a lot of the people involved in the music scene back then. Being an infant during the 80s, Heiko was interested in the idea of telling the story of Island West-Berlin through pictures and music. Joerg had also been given a copy of my Five Point One album, which was a compilation of remixes I had made in surround sound for bands like Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, Anne Clark or John Foxx. He thought it was a great album, and he wanted me to restore the 80s tracks he wanted to use in the film and compose some score music for the film in a similar style, which I did.
B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West-Berlin (1979-1989) – Official Trailer from scenes from on Vimeo.
That’s how I got involved. However, during our first meeting, I told Joerg that I had also quite a bit of footage of 80s Berlin from programmes I had been involved in for ITV and BBC – mostly long forgotten footage, never seen outside of the UK and certainly never since. When he saw it, he couldn’t believe what I had given him. It was exactly what he had been looking for. Now he had a story to hold all the pictures together. The story of West Berlin would be told through my eyes – the eyes of a Brit in Berlin.
Obviously, we couldn’t cram everything we wanted into a 90 minute movie. We sadly had to leave many parts out; in most cases, because footage didn’t exist or because it simply didn’t fit in. We did our best with the resources and budget we had. The film has been very well received, I am happy to say; mainly, because it probably isn’t a traditional documentary film of talking heads, telling you how brilliant it was back in the 80s, but an adventure told through real images and my narrative.
Germany is one of the countries where electronic music was first embraced by a mass audience. You have played a role there in managing bands and releasing music, both as a label boss with MFS and as an artist. What have been some of the highlights for you so far?
My musical story begins with my arrival in Berlin and almost immediately being designated the then-newly-formed Factory records’ Man in Berlin. I was their so-called representative. This really meant I tried to get Joy Division played on the radio or get the magazines to write about them. In marketing terms, it was a total disaster. People only became interested in Joy Division after Ian Curtis died. I slogged through the 80s managing Malaria!, mixing bands live, working in the Loft club and playing in my own bands, Die Unbekannten and Shark Vegas.
Obvious highlights were making my first records, Die Unbekannten, and, later, “You Hurt Me” with Bernard Sumner. Also, producing Torture by East German indie band, Die Vision, which we recorded in East Berlin – that was a very interesting experience, especially as the communist state was falling apart during the process. It was destined to become the last album ever to be recorded in the GDR, as the Berlin wall fell literally a week after we finished, and I feel very privileged to be the only Westerner ever to have produced an album in East Berlin. I am currently putting together a special 2CD edition remaster of Torture, as I found some old tapes with outtakes and demos.
My experience and contacts with the AMIGA (the former state-owned East German record label) opened the door to create my own label, MFS (Masterminded for Success). The initials I took from the official name of the dreaded East German secret police, the Ministry for State Security or STASI. My label was housed in room 101 of the former office building of the Reichstag’s President, Herman Goering, which since 1948 had become the home of AMIGA. It was from a secret tunnel under this palais that the Nazis set fire to the Reichstag in 1933, as the German parliament building was only a few meters away. The two buildings had been separated by the Berlin Wall since 1963, and in 1990, when I moved in, the Wall was still there.
MFS was the first indie label in East Berlin (or even East Germany) and the first joint East-West label venture. Finally, for the first time since the 1920s, the Eastie kids could listen to whatever music they wanted – not the tepid rubbish the state force-fed them – and their music of choice was techno. No complex lyrics, just driving beats.
With MFS, my initial aim was to provide a platform mainly for poor Eastie kids all eager to make techno, but I decided to make my style a more melodic version of techno, tapping into the optimistic emotions and expectations of German reunification fuelled by Ecstasy. I wanted my music to be hypnotic and trance inducing, so I called it trance-dance, until my label sound eventually became known as trance.
Through MFS I launched the careers of quite a few (now well-known) names. It was a thrilling and exciting time. I would spend a lot of time in the studio with many of the artists and oversee their projects. I decidedly took a back seat as a producer, though, and undoubtedly, due to the time involved in running the label, I ended up sacrificing my own musical career in order to help others: I invested everything; I sat in the studio and mastered everything they did; I designed most of their covers, wrote all the copy and PR; I created their images, managed them and even went on tour with them around the world. I had a great time.
I thought nomen est omen, so I put all my love, time and creativity into the label and my artists in the pursuit of success. I expected only loyalty, but they rewarded me by defecting to major labels. Unfortunately, it appears they were only driven by money, while I was driven by an ideal. It was very disappointing. Yet, I am not one to give up so easily. I had to regroup. After much prompting to make music again, I eventually capitulated and stopped running the label. I guess, after almost 20 years, I had got a bit bored by it all. So, by going back to roughly where I left off musically, I could utilise all my experience, as well as the luxury of modern technology, and finally make my own kind of retro-modern sounding electronic music.
Recently, I remixed a track called “mmm mmm mmm ahhh” for a new Manchester band called Modern Family Unit, and I also produced a more acoustic-sounding album called Unintended Consequences by Australian artist Stuart Orchard, which was quite challenging, as well as making the soundtrack score for B-Movie.
You organised a punk show in East Berlin under the guise of a religious event, pre-dating Pussy Riot by decades. Putin was probably stationed there at the time. Do you think that he took note of the STASI’s failure to shut it down?
Luckily, Putin was in Leipzig running the KGB there, so he probably didn’t get to hear about that gig until much later. I am sure he eventually did, as the Soviet authorities were very aware of what kind of reaction and repercussions such a momentous and inspiring cultural event could have throughout the communist republic. Even though it was very small, it meant a great deal to the Eastie kids and inspired others to be more adventurous. We had basically out-run the commie system and they didn’t like people doing that. They were totally paranoid control freaks and wanted to control everything and everyone. So, doing something like that was tantamount to a terrorist act. In East Germany, punk was seen as reflecting the failings of capitalism, and therefore it was a throwback of unemployment. East Germany was a workers’ and farmers’ state, and that meant everyone had a job, at least officially. That also meant punk didn’t officially exist, and any signs of it were immediately stamped out. They were fighting a losing battle, though. The Church, too, was seen as subversive, although tolerated to a degree. It was a silent form of protest against the communist regime.
We used the loophole of what was known as a “blues-mass” – which was basically an official church service with singing – for our gig. You couldn’t just buy a guitar, form a band and play in East Germany; it all had to be controlled. Every aspect. So those few who had instruments – but no permit to play – would strum out their protest songs within the confines of the Church. Once I heard about this, I first thought about organising a gig with my own band, Die Unbekannten, but as electronic equipment was almost non-existent, we opted to put on the gig with my friends from a relatively new punk band from Dusseldorf, called Die Toten Hosen, instead.
We all clandestinely entered East Berlin in small groups of three and met up at the station near the church. Another unofficial East Berlin punk band, called Planlos, supplied most of the equipment, and the rest was provided by another band, Feeling B. We invited a handful of punky friends, and after the performance we all had to pray.
In 1988, we repeated the Toten Hosen event in another church in Pankow, this time disguised as a concert for starving Romanian orphans, with Die Vision as support. That gig we even managed to film and smuggle in our own instruments, thanks to my friends in the US Army.
You recently released Five Point One, a collection of remixes by artists such as John Foxx, Depeche Mode and Parralox in the 5.1 format often associated with cinematic releases. What pushed you in that direction?
I’ve always loved surround. It is such a different, yet authentic listening experience. It’s also a challenge to produce too. Unfortunately, most surround albums were only by bands like King Crimson or Pink Floyd, but after the release of Depeche Mode and Nick Cave in 5.1, I was thinking how nice it would be to have more albums in 5.1 by my other favourite artists too. The idea really came about after mixing “German Film Star” for the Pet Shop Boys and Sam Taylor-Wood, which I made with my studio partner Micha Adam in 5.1 surround. We had already made a collection of remixes on Reordered for Blank & Jones, which also featured my version of “A Forest” with Robert Smith, and the PSB loved my remix of the track with Bernard Sumner. So I thought about expanding on that idea and making an entire album of my remixes all in surround. One thing led to another and with each new remix job we made a 5.1 mix, until I had enough for a compilation.
Is it intimidating to work with the material of such celebrated artists?
It was actually really thrilling. The intimidation was the constant thought of what the die-hard fans would think; but, as I am a fan too, I just decided to make it like something that would I want to buy – how I would like a remix to sound.
Berlin is still going through changes, including gentrification. Is there anything that you miss from the time of the Wall?
I knew that once the Berlin Wall had fallen, the city would never be the same again. I don’t let that bother me. I think the city is still vibrant and exciting. It’s a constantly changing city. I certainly wouldn’t want the Wall back, if that’s what you mean. The feeling of having to say goodbye to your friends at the border, knowing that you had the freedom of movement but they were confined, was always very upsetting. The fact that in the West I could go into a shop and buy any record I wanted or any instrument, or say or do what I liked, was one of the things that compelled me to help my friends in any way I could. I didn’t have weapons, so I fought the commies with music.
East Germany wasn’t all bad, though. It was advert-free and quiet. People seemed to help each other much more. I always got the impression that Britain must have been like that during the war. As a Brit in Eastern Europe, we were always under scrutiny, but we weaved through the obstacles. Today, I really only miss a few things, like the adrenalin rush of successfully being let into East Berlin, or the quirkiness of East German everyday life and, of course, smuggling crap.
B-Movie opens in Germany on 21 May 2015. Keep an eye out for festival dates.
Official B-Movie Web site: b-movie-der-film.de
Official B-Movie Facebook page: facebook.com/lustandsoundinwestberlin
Mark Reeder’s Five Point One: 5point1.org
Martin Gore has taken time out from Depeche Mode to release solo recordings before, as well as an album of techno made with Vince Clarke, but the emphasis has been on covers of classics from other genres. From Mute comes the news that an album called MG is on the way, loaded with 16 electronic instrumentals. The first taste is “Europa Hymn,” which loops pads luxuriously and might be said to follow the template of the House of Illustrious recordings of Vince Clarke and Martyn Ware. The full album is out on 17 April 2015, just in time for A Secret Wish.