Depeche Mode need no introduction, but in the early days it wasn’t uncommon for them to be called “De-peche-ay.” Dave Gahan used to mangle their French name, too, so the presenter of ITV’s Razzmatazz can be forgiven his synths.
Shot for Italian TV, this clip of Depeche Mode miming on a boat cruise doesn’t seem to have attracted much attention. That is a pity, because it shows the band in their classic line-up, working one of their best songs.
Skip past the intro with “Just Can’t Get Enough” to see how young Londoners partied back in the day.
Depeche Mode fans are a special breed. The band might only release albums on a four-year cycle, but this Olympian schedule is synced with gruelling tours that are estimated to earn in the area of $200,000,000. The bulk of that revenue comes from their most hardcore fans, who are devoted to the trio and their songs of pain and suffering in different tempos.
The strength of the commitment and the connection between fans was neatly summed up by Karen Castrischer Stegall on Depeche Mode’s Facebook page:
Fans. The Devotees, The Black Swarm. Those are my people! Before the internet, I found a pen pal through an issue of BONG and made my very first DM international friend for life.
BONG was Depeche Mode’s official fanzine. Published fifty-two times in its UK edition between 1988 and 2002, BONG provided information on the band’s latest exploits. It also featured a section which allowed fans to publish their interest to hear from others by post.
The growth of email and chat groups eventually made the pen pal section of BONG redundant, but for a time it provided a way for devotees to share their love of the band, connect with other fans for tour events and meet-ups, and even fall in love.
We asked three of the fans who took part in the pen pal section of BONG to tell us about their experiences.
MERJA OUTALA (Finland)
Photo: Merja Outala
I remember it was a such a dream world to me to find the DM fan club and get the magazines.
Living in Finland, there was hardly anyone around who was loving DM, too. I have my DJ brother to thank for get to know about DM. He had their music and a lot of similar stuff, like Kraftwerk, Human League and so on. The “Shake the Disease” 7″ I got from him, and I used to play it before going to school. I was totally hooked and started collecting DM.
When I started getting pen pals through BONG and then the DM pen pals site, it was a dream to me and so much fun. I had eventually about forty pen pals, and I think I got to know some Finns there, too.
Mainly, all we wrote about was DM. I had friends from all over the world, and seem to have many bootleg fan club magazines from Japan, etc. We exchanged pics, posters, cassettes and videos of DM – practically everything you can send. People sent me real pics when they met DM and went to concerts. I couldn’t because they never came here and I could not go approad at the time. All the letters and envelopes were full of DM pics and drawings.
We used to all have a nickname, depending on whom we loved the most. I was called Gorette 
I still have all the cassettes I got from pen pals. I got to know some other bands who played synth music and got their tapes. I remember I once sent a tape with good music like DM, etc., and mixes to someone who worked for Russian radio and they played it. I guess it was harder for them to get music the music then 
I got so much: so many friends, and so much more knowledge of DM and similar bands through these pen pals around the world.
It was so much fun, and it was very exciting waiting for letters. Some days, you got many letters. I went to Essex to be an au pair for two months to get to a DM convention in London at Camden Palace in 1990. I also ended up dating, for a while, one of the pen pals. He once won a Dave Gahan look-alike competition at a DM convention. I went once to a DM convention in Birminham with him and his band mates.
Some of the pen pals came very close to me. We have met in real life and found each other again on Facebook.
BERNARD VAN ISACKER (Belgium)
Back in the day, there was simply no internet; or, at least, it looked rudimentary. Look at what the first official Depeche Mode Web site looked like: it was a graphical monsterpiece! Anyhow, BONG magazine offered a good platform to connect with people, so I got in touch with a few via the ad I posted there (which looked quite freakish to be honest – I wouldn’t have reacted if I were a reader!). I remember I exchanged lots and lots of cassettes with bootleg material, and I got to know a few more obscure bands – but also Wumpscut, thanks to a German pen pal.
Twenty-seven years later and I’m helming Side-Line magazine and the Alfa Matrix label, and I’m still sporadically in touch with some of these people. Those were damn good times, and it was a pity when BONG stopped – you kinda lost a ‘community,’ so to speak. Having said that, many readers from back then now turn out to be current contacts and friends of mine these days! The world is full of surprises.
LISA SHRED (USA)
Photo: Merja Outala
The DM fan club has changed over the years. In 1990, I was volunteering at the New Music Seminar in NYC when I asked Daniel Miller, who I met there, if I could start a DM fan magazine myself in the USA, besides the UK BONG. Daniel told me that someone else in the USA had already just started one. I managed to find this person months later, became friends with him, and helped him out with the US issues of BONG magazine from time to time.
We worked on a DM convention in New York together, along with Jo Bailey from the UK, who ran BONG there at the time. We visited the Mute Records office together. Years later, I joined the DM fan forum online at www.depechemode.com, since there were no more paper magazines. I met many local friends on this forum, and we would chat every day online on the Web site about not just Depeche Mode but other things, too. We would meet each other at local Depeche Mode parties in town, where a DJ would play mostly DM all night and we’d dance. We then would meet each other in person when the band was having record signings, or at concerts. This happened for several years, and many of us have remained friends or acquaintances to this day, eighteen years later!
Photo and Cover Photo: Merja Outala
On some tours, we fans would all get together and get a hotel room for after the show, after car-pooling together to an out of town DM show. In fact, one day the band held a private party in NYC after their rehearsal show, and all of us fans who knew each other and who always attended the DM events were allowed in to their private party at a rooftop hotel in NYC. Here we were, drinking champagne with Martin and Fletch, and yet it all started because we met online at depechemode.com. That was also the year I became a Depeche Mode DJ in NYC, and started to have dance parties where I’d play lots of Depeche Mode songs all night myself.
Now, as a DJ, I can attract as many as 600 people per Depeche Mode party. The record company helps us at our events (Sony – and, before that, Warner), and we do the official after-parties for DM on each of their tours. I still see some of the same faces that I saw almost twenty years ago on the dance floor! Although I have become a professional DJ over the years (somehow by accident!), I am and will always be a big Depeche Mode fan.
Adrian Sherwood launched his On-U Sound label in 1979, but he was already a fixture on the London roots and dub scene. Selling imported dub plates from his van across the city, a teenaged Sherwood had absorbed the transplanted sounds of the Caribbean with the air he breathed. Living in a Battersea squat with Neneh Cherry and Ari Upp, he was also close to the city’s post-punk explosion.
It didn’t take long for Sherwood to start putting out music himself. He soon learned to play with the studio controls in the spirit of dub pioneers like Lee “Scratch” Perry. Tearing sounds apart and reconstructing them through radical combinations of delays and distortion became the On-U Sound signature.
Sherwood’s ability to drive beats for projects like Dub Syndicate and New Age Steppers, while maintaining hypnotic grooves, brought him to the attention of electronic and industrial artists like Cabaret Voltaire, Skinny Puppy and Depeche Mode. Ministry’s Al Jourgensen used him to make the Twitch album, “borrowing” Sherwood’s studio techniques for later use in Ministry and Revolting Cocks.
Surrounded by talent from the roots and dub scenes, Sherwood took on industrial remix projects but also put out music with incredible sensitivity. The ultimate combination of these strands came on Mark Stewart’s “Stranger than Love,” which combined Erik Satie’s piano exercises with Bristol’s most powerful voice. It was proof positive that, in a master’s hands, the most delicate emotions can still be found in the red zone of the VU meter.
10. Bim Sherman – Slummy Ghetto
A key part of the On-U Sound ensemble, Bim Sherman was an uncompromising talent. He recorded solo, as well as with Dub Syndicate, New Age Steppers and Singers & Players – On-U projects that drew from the collective of artists surrounding Sherwood.
This take shows the mainstream version of Sherwood’s production work. In his hands, the material is classy but subversive.
9. Robert Wyatt – Biko
The British communist activist and composer, Robert Wyatt, engaged Sherwood to shape his cover of Peter Gabriel’s tribute to the South African anti-apartheid leader, Steve Biko. Recorded in London’s legendary Blackwing Studios, with John Fryer engineering, the track still raises goose-bumps with its haunting and spacious mix.
8. Cabaret Voltaire – Here To Go (Live Drum Jacknife Mix)
Cabaret Voltaire had already found their way to the alternative dancefloor when they recorded Code. Years of listening to James Brown in Sheffield had influenced the industrial pioneers; but, as this single showed, they were just as moved by Brion Gysin’s art and writing.
Sherwood was brought in for the production of part of the album, but he took the tapes apart for this remix.
7. Skinny Puppy – Deep Down Trauma Hounds (Remix)
Canada’s dark electro pioneers called on Sherwood for the 1987 release of “Addiction,” which featured this version of “Deep Down Trauma Hounds” on the flip side.
6. Depeche Mode – Master and Servant (An On-U Sound Science Fiction Dancehall Classic)
Many Depeche Mode fans were mystified by the limited edition remixes that Mute released with Sherwood at the controls. Stripped back melodically (and given what sounds like a thorough going-over with Keith LeBlanc’s drums), the retooling of “Master and Servant” and “People Are People” was unexpected and – for the less forgiving – unwelcome.
Today, the remix of “Master and Servant” isn’t as jarring. Sherwood’s signature is still engraved in the rhythm – carved by hammer and chisel across the master tapes – but the world has caught up to the idea.
5. Dub Syndicate – Wadada (Means Love)
Of Sherwood’s many projects, his collaboration with “Style” Scott as Dub Syndicate was the most successful. Infused with the possibility of space travel in the mind, and hidden in a cloud of sweet-scented smoke, it represented the avant-garde end of the roots spectrum.
Scott was murdered in Jamaica, which brought this project to an end. Its legacy is an incomparable body of reggae with experimental flair.
4. Mark Stewart – Hypnotized
The dissolution of The Pop Group freed singer Mark Stewart to mix his love of noise, funk and reggae together in a flammable cocktail.
“Hypnotized” is a savage cut-up of beats, breaks and scratches that completely dismantles conventional song structures.
Sherwood worked with Stewart to mangle tapes, splice beats and throw faders, created the most subversive 12″ single of all time. People still quote the statistics cited in the song.
3. Ministry – The Angel
Al Jourgensen claims to dislike Twitch, but Ministry’s last album before they let metal in was an alternative dancefloor classic. With tracks like “Over the Shoulder” pummelling clubbers like a backhoe shattering asphalt, it set a new bar for hard beats.
Jourgensen managed to sound menacing throughout, and nowhere more than on this track. When he returned to Chicago, he took samples of Keith LeBlanc’s drum sounds with him, fuelling the Wax Trax sound for years to come.
2. Einstürzende Neubauten – Yü Gung
German metal-bashers, Einstürzende Neubauten, recorded “Yü Gung” with Gareth Jones at Hansa in Berlin before Adrian Sherwood was let loose on the tapes. Blixa Bargeld screams “Feed my ego!” with the intensity of a drug-addicted chemistry grad starved of narcissistic supply – which is fitting, as the song was inspired by the chopping and snorting of methamphetamine.
1. Tackhead – Mind at the End of the Tether
In 1984, Sherwood was in New York on a studio assignment when he met up with Keith LeBlanc, the drummer in the Sugar Hill Records house band. Within short order, LeBlanc was in London with two other members of the band, Doug Wimbish and Skip McDonald, making magic with Sherwood as Fats Comet.
Wimbish – who went on to play with Living Colour and the Rolling Stones – suggested using the name, Tackhead – New York slang for a homeboy – for the group’s less commercial work.
For this powerful 12″, LeBlanc’s beats create a furious racket, while a voice laments the decline and fall of civilisation. Citing H.G. Wells, the narrator asks, “Is there a way out?” The only way is across the dancefloor.
Daniel Miller (Photo: Diane Zillmer)
It is common knowledge that Daniel Miller was inspired by the writings of J.G. Ballard when he came up with the lyrics for “Warm Leatherette.” It is less well known that his imagination was fuelled by the sounds of actual car crashes taking place at Henlys Corner, just a short distance from the house where he lived with his mother in North London. As Miller lay in his room at night, he could hear the vibrations of violent collisions drifting through his open window.
One of Miller’s contributions to STUMM433, the forthcoming release from his Mute label, is an ambient recording of the sound outside his former residence at 16 Decoy Avenue. His performance of John Cage’s 4′ 33″ is only the third time that he has recorded as The Normal, and it forms part of a compilation issued to raise funds for mental health and tinnitus charities.
Cage’s infamous work requires performers to avoid playing instruments for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Instead, they play with the audience by upsetting their expectations and drawing attention to the sounds they are making themselves. Coughs, rustling of programmes and the sounds of breathing are common elements in concert settings.
STUMM433, a play on the catalogue number for the album and the title of Cage’s composition, sees more than fifty Mute artists turning in recordings of their own performances. So, one shouldn’t expect to hear Dave Gahan’s sleazy crooning on Depeche Mode’s contribution; nor should Erasure fans hope for melodic work from Vince Clarke’s New York studios. Rather, each interpretation will reflect the sounds around the artists as they staged the work.
Miller, himself, appears several times on the album, as The Normal, Silicon Teens and part of Duet Emmo (his collaboration with Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis). We will have to wait to see if the Fad Gadget contribution is from Miller’s studio time with Frank Tovey. Other featured artists 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, Danny Briottet, Depeche Mode, Duet Emmo, Echoboy, Einstürzende Neubauten, Erasure, Fad Gadget, 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 / Sonskrif / The New Banalist Orchestra, Michael Gira, Mick Harvey, Miranda Sex Garden, Moby, Modey Lemon, Mountaineers, New Order, Nitzer Ebb, NON / Boyd Rice, Nonpareils, The Normal, onDeadWaves, Phew, Pink Grease, Pole, Polly Scattergood, Richard Hawley, ShadowParty, Silicon Teens, Simon Fisher Turner and Edmund de Waal, The Warlocks, Wire, Yann Tiersen and Gareth Jones.
If that wasn’t enough, the vinyl version of the release will be spread across five LPs in a box set with designs from Anton Corbijn and Malcolm Garrett, among others. As Mute note:
Each artist has created a visual to accompany their performance and a selection of 28 designers associated with Mute have contributed artwork inspired by 4’33”, including Simone Grant, who worked with Miller on a lot of the early Mute artwork (The Normal, Fad Gadget and Depeche Mode); Steve Claydon, a member of Add N To (X) who designed for Goldfrapp; Slim Smith, who worked with Mute through the 1980s and 1990s; Malcolm Garrett, who designed the House of Illustrious box set for Vince Clarke and Martyn Ware; Tom Hingston, who has worked with Erasure and created the majority of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and Grinderman artwork since the early 2000s and Anton Corbjin, who has worked closely with Mute on many campaigns since the early 1980s, including Depeche Mode, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and Fad Gadget.
Box set purchasers will also receive a set of candles infused with the scent of silence, as imagined by Joseph Quartana of Six Scents Parfums.
A CD version will be available, but it doesn’t come with candles or a certificate of authenticity signed by Daniel Miller.Part of the proceeds from the sale of the album will go to the British Tinnitus Society and Music Minds Matter. These charities were chosen in memory of Craig Gill of Inspiral Carpets, who took his own life as a consequence of anxiety and depression brought on by his tinnitus.
STUMM433 ships on 4 October 2019, but the strictly limited edition box set is available for pre-ordering now.
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 https://old.mute.com/mute/stumm433-pre-order-now
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.
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.
