by Alex; Ogg
In straitened circumstances for the music industry, every such revenue stream is important. “It’s crucial, yes. And we are actively engaged through those bodies and through Merlin in trying to make sure that independents have access to those revenue streams in the same way as a major. That’s, I guess, a bit of a crusade – that there should be alternative ways of doing it. If you look at how most great music in the world has started and emerged, it’s not been with the majors.”
Chapter Seven
Behind The Wheel
Mute Records, Industrial, and the New Electronica
Of all the storied independents of the late 70s, one of the most arresting tales is that of Mute Records, and the birth of a distinguished, distinctive and hugely influential record label that had absolutely no intention of being anything of the sort at its outset. Daniel Miller was a film student with a particular interest in silent cinema when he embarked on his accidental career. It was that background that gave him the idea of choosing Mute from a list of some 50 potential names he’d juggled with – that fact alone giving notice of his thoroughgoing, meticulous nature. Initially, all he had in mind was the release of just one single. Credited to The Normal, ‘T.V.O.D.’ and ‘Warm Leatherette’ (the latter, inspired by JG Ballard’s Crash novel, was later covered by Grace Jones) was as starkly impressive, and genuinely left field, as anything released in the ‘mushroom’ year for independents of 1978. Its execution was as singular as its evolution. Unlike other totemic independent releases like The Undertones ‘Teenage Kicks’ and Buzzcocks’ ‘Spiral Scratch’, its raw, percussive electronica and macabre lyrics spoke to the future rather than the present – in which the guitar, the dominant strain of outsider pop, was conspicuously absent.
“I think it was quite a few different things coming together at once,” says Miller now, almost exactly 30 years since the single’s release. “I’d been in bands when I was a kid, and even into my early 20s at college and afterwards. There was a lot of stuff I wanted to play and wanted to get involved in, that I couldn’t really do, like electronic music. I went to art school [Guildford School of Art] to study film and we had a film studio with a few tape recorders, and we did tape loops and worked with oscillators and things like that. It was great to do and I wanted to take it further, but it was difficult at the time because synthesizers were too expensive. But a few things came together at once. Punk happened, and possibilities seemed to open up for anyone to try anything they wanted to do. The first wave of cheap, second-hand Japanese synthesizers came along in the mid-70s, with people like Korg and Roland.”
The one Miller settled on was the slightly more expensive 700S model. “The 700S has a bit more on it, that’s all. But I wouldn’t have been able to make the record with the 700. They looked the same – they’re both tiny synths designed to go on top of a keyboard so people can play a few weird effects and lead lines. It wasn’t meant to be a standalone music-making machine or instrument, which is what it was for me. Very simple, but very effective. I’d started to read about these people like the Desperate Bicycles who had put out their own record, and I was getting very excited about the whole thing. I was 24 or 25, and had worked and travelled after college.” In fact, he had been employed variously as a mini-cab driver in London and as a DJ in a European ski resort on his adventures. “I always had ways of earning money from my film-editing experience. So I said, fuck it, I’m going to get another film-editing job – which I didn’t really want to do – just to earn as much money as I could to buy a synth.”
Miller recalls his starting costs equating to roughly £200 for the second-hand Korg, and between £200 and £300 for a TEAC 2340 tape recorder. “That was quite a lot of money at the time. But I was working at ATV as a freelance assistant film editor, and there was always voluntary overtime to do. So I did as much overtime as I could, at double time – thanks to the ACTT film union at the time.”
Despite it remaining his primary source of income, he had realised that film could never be his chosen medium. “Music was my first love, always. I like them both. But I knew I had to be, ultimately, the auteur. I learned a lot, but I knew that I didn’t have the personality to make it in the film industry as a director or a producer. There were very few opportunities anyway. Nowadays there’s an entry through pop videos, but there wasn’t even that in my day. I was working in commercials, which was interesting and educational, but I knew I’d never be satisfied doing that. I knew a lot of people in the film industry at that point, and I could see the kind of people who were successful. I didn’t feel I was one of those people. I don’t think, really deep down, I have the passion, but I did have the passion for music. I fell in love with pop music when I was zero. So I got to this point, and I thought, fuck it, I’m going to put out a record, buy a synthesizer and a tape machine. I think in the back of my mind, I thought I’d get those, and whatever happens, I’ll have a lot of fun with it. And if I think it’s any good, I’ll put a record out. Nobody will buy it, nobody will be interested, but I just want the experience of doing it, then I can get along with my life! Basically that’s what I did.”
There was a hitch, though. “People seemed to like it! That hadn’t figured in my plans at all. I’d pressed the minimum, which I think was 500 at the time. But once I’d decided to do it, I phoned up a few people like Rough Trade and Pete Stennet at Small Wonder. I didn’t know them at the time, but they’d just started putting their own records out. I phoned up Pete and said, ‘I want to put a record out – how many do you think I should press?’ No-one knew fuck all. I didn’t know, and he didn’t know. But he gave me an address of a sleeve printer and label maker. Everyone was in it and enjoying it, and there was no territorial sense. Then I spoke to someone at Rough Trade. I said, ‘I want to press 500. ‘Ah, we’re only interested in records that sell more than 10,000,’ weirdly enough. I said, ‘OK, fine, whatever.’”
That was, in the circumstances, an odd answer. “Yeah! I know who I got, and I got an odd person at the wrong time, and I spoke to them about it afterwards. And I got to know everybody at Rough Trade very well and we became friends, so it was fine. They’d just put out their first Metal Urbain single, which was RT001. I decided to go ahead and do it. I went to the pressing plan in Dagenham that everybody used at the time, Orlake. Delga was the company that did the sleeves. If you look at a lot of old punk 7-inches, it’s always got Delga on the sleeve. And Peter Gray printers did the labels. They are important, those names. I walked in off the street. These were old fashioned companies, been around forever. I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about, and they were really friendly and really helpful. All of them: the pressing plant, the sleeve maker, the label maker. I was just some bloke making 500 copies – it was nothing for them. A small hit in those days sold 150,000 singles. And they were all really helpful to me, and not just to me but to other people, and I don’t think they ever get any credit.”
That was the manufacturing taken care of. The next stage was distribution. “I went to Orlake in East London to pick up the test pressing, and I thought I’d pop into Small Wonder as it was on the way home. I saw Pete and introduced myself. He said he vaguely remembered talking to me. ‘Here’s the single, what do you think?’ Because I thought I’d take it round to shops, to see if they’d take it. I didn’t understand the concept of distribution. I knew nothing about the record industry. He said, ‘Yeah, it sounds pretty good. It’s all right. I wouldn’t have done it that way, but it’s not bad. I’ll take a box.’ Twenty-five! Fucking hell. That’s brilliant! Somebody in a record shop listening to my record? I can’t believe it. It was unbelievably exciting. I can remember every moment of it. Then I went to Lightning Records, and they didn’t seem that interested in seeing me. So I thought, I was near Rough Trade, and I’d never been to the shop before. During the period I was buying all those 7-inches, I was working in Boreham Wood at ATV, and there was a little shop there. He used to go to Rough Trade once a week. I would put my order in, and he’d get me the rec
ords. I was working so I never had the time to go. So I went to Rough Trade, which was like the centre of the whole world of coolness. And I was very intimidated – not by them, but my perception of it. And I walked in the door with my single, and Judith [Crighton], who is still there, said go through the back and see Geoff [Travis]. And Geoff and Richard Scott were there. They were dealing with some export customer or something. They asked me to hang on a second. I was just standing there with all these records in this tiny little room. Then we went to the shop and played the record in front of all these cool people.”
It sounds like the definition of terror. “It was and it wasn’t. It was because I was nervous. But my expectations were so low. I wasn’t thinking this is the make or break of my career, but in terms of putting it out there in public? I made the record in 24 hours because I had to hire one piece of equipment, which I could only just afford. So by the time I’d finished I didn’t really know what I was doing, it was a solid 24-hour recording session at home. And they liked it. They said, ‘How many do you want to press?’ I said, ‘I was thinking of 500’. ‘I think you should do 2,000, we could easily do 2,000 of this.’ I think they gave me a bit of money [they advanced him £300] to help me get those pressed, and off it went. And it got amazing reviews.”
Indeed one review, by Jane Suck for Sounds, which ran in their 8th April edition, described it as ‘single of the century’. Record Mirror made it joint single of the week a month later, by which time it had actually been officially released. “Jane Suck had got hold of a test pressing from Rough Trade,” Miller recalls. “And I got this message, a telegram or something – I’d gone away to visit friends. It said ‘single of the century’. I couldn’t believe it. And that’s how it was in those days. I was just some bloke in off the street who’d made an electronic record. And there weren’t really electronic records around at the time. Obviously there was Kraftwerk and those kind of things, but the post-punk electronic scene, Throbbing Gristle, and those things? I was aware of them. I was aware of The Residents, and early Devo. But I hadn’t really heard any of it. In a way I didn’t want to listen to it. I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do, and I didn’t want to be influenced either way by hearing someone else. I wanted to be pure. Obviously I was a massive Kraftwerk fan, but also The Ramones. I was actually listening more to The Ramones when I made my record, rather than to other electronic records. I wanted to make a punk rock electronic record, or an electronic record in the spirit of the time, something that wasn’t rooted in the hippy era. And I wanted to make a bit of a statement – I was a big believer in electronic music as being the next thing. And the fact that it [electronic music] was more of a punk rock music than…” Anything with guitars could ever be? “Exactly. It wasn’t really that revolutionary, and you had to learn three chords. Which you certainly didn’t have to do with a synthesizer, you just had to play one note and make a noise. That seemed a much better option to me.”
Miller put an address on the rear of the sleeve, his mother’s house in Decoy Avenue, Golders Green, where he’d recorded the songs and was staying after returning from travelling. He still doesn’t know why. “I thought that’s what you do. I don’t know why I did it, but I did it.” It’s worth considering how Miller’s ‘it’s what you did’ insouciance contrasted with the explicit political convictions behind Scritti Politti’s debut, a band with whom Miller would later share a stage. But the effect was similar. “I immediately got demos. I got a Clock DVA tape very early on. But I didn’t want to be a record company at that point. I just wanted to put a record out, see what it felt like. I wanted to experience the feeling of putting a record out.”
Mute might have ended there, had it not been for Miller meeting some of the other early electronic adventurers – fellow bedroom mavericks emboldened by the affordability of synthesizers. One-time collaborators Robert Rental (‘Paralysis’) and Thomas Leer (‘Private Plane’) also released pioneering electronic-based solo singles for similarly home-grown labels in 1978. “I met up with Robert Rental at a Throbbing Gristle gig,” recalls Miller, “the famous one at the London Film Makers’ Co-Op [July 1978] that ended in violence. We were talking to the band – I’d vaguely met Throbbing Gristle at that point through Rough Trade. Then Robert came along. And separately, there was a gig promotion company called Final Solution [partly founded by Colin Favor of Small Wonder]. They were very much the post-punk people. They put on Joy Division etc. And they wanted to put on a gig of the new electronic bands. They asked me if I’d play, and asked Robert if he’d play. Neither one of us really wanted to do it on our own, so we decided to do it together. I’d done a few gigs, we didn’t do that many – it wasn’t that I didn’t want to appear in public, because I kind of wanted to experience that as well. It was more that I didn’t know how I would do it on my own. That ended up with us doing the Rough Trade tour, with Stiff Little Fingers and Essential Logic.”
Said tour was chastening, as the duo played to non-plussed die-hard SLF fans every evening as they criss-crossed the UK together on a 30-date winter tour. There were further adventures on the continent, too. “There was a venue in Paris called the Gibus Club, and they used to bring punk bands over, The Slits and The Damned etc. You basically played three nights, they put you up in an awful hotel, and they fed you – a bit. We had a laugh. We did that, and got so drunk that on the last night we had a massive fight on stage. Had to be broken up by a guy called Simon Leonard who was in various bands later on Mute, like I Start Counting and Fortran 5. He came to the gig and ended up having to run up on stage and separate us. So I wasn’t really running a record company, I was leading the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle! There were things I wanted to experience, so I did. I was also helping Rough Trade out a little bit, doing a bit of promotion and stuff like that.”
The idea of the label still hadn’t formulated, but the success of ‘T.V.O.D.’ ensured he was at least able to stop work as a film editor. “At that point the record was selling enough, and I was having to keep track of getting it pressed, and there were a few interviews coming in and it started to get played in America, which was very weird.” Sire president Seymour Stein, who would become a long-term ally, was the connection here. He quickly licensed the single for America. “I saw him [Miller] at Rough Trade, I used to hang out there a lot,” Stein recalls. “I said, ‘I’m Seymour Stein.’ He said, ‘I’m Daniel Miller, this is the first record I’ve put out. And it’s The Normal.’ I loved both sides of it, and I said I think this could really do something, and he licensed it with me. Then later on he got involved with Rob Buckle, an old friend of mine from Sonnet Records, and I picked up [Miller’s second record] Silicon Teens.”
“I started to get these college radio playlist reports through with my record on it,” recalls Miller, visibly still bemused at the memory.” I did an interview with Rodney Bingenheimer [famous American KROQ DJ]. He called me on the phone and I couldn’t quite believe that. I came to a point where I thought, I’ve got to decide what to do next. I didn’t feel like doing another record. But I had a Silicon Teens record, half of which I’d done before anyway. It was never meant to be a record, it was just experimenting with Chuck Berry songs.” The Silicon Teens project is recalled as “The Archies meet Kraftwerk” by Dave Henderson in the Mute Audio Documents box set, a description this author can’t improve on. “Then I met Fad Gadget through Edwin Pouncey [NME cartoonist Savage Pencil], because they shared a flat. I think that Edwin’s goal was to get Frank a record deal so he could afford to live somewhere else! But they were very close friends. That was the first thing that I heard where I thought it was something I could really get into. And I met Frank [Tovey; aka Fad Gadget] and we got on like a house on fire, and we had really similar ideas. So I just said, ‘Why don’t we record a single?’”
That effectively marked the start of Mute Records as a going concern. Miller retained the name because “it had been difficult enough making a decision in the first place! Even though we’d put just one single ou
t, by that time it had a little bit of a reputation. So we did the single together, a hand-shake deal, 50-50 profit-share, no commitment to further product, etc. It was a really casual thing. And that was a song called ‘Back To Nature’, which was a great single. I had the Silicon Teens thing, but I didn’t want to put that out as the second thing on Mute. So we did Frank’s single and then I did the Silicon Teens’ ‘Memphis Tennessee’ single. And again that took it to another level. That got picked up on Radio One, mainly through John Peel, who played it an awful lot. I remember him playing it twice in one show. That was it. You should just retire when that happens – when John Peel plays your single twice in one show. And then it all got weird. Major record labels like this [he is speaking from EMI’s offices in West London] started to ring up and say, ‘Are you interested in signing?’ I went to see all these people, though I had no intention of doing anything. Coincidentally they’re people you end up working with 30 years later. Like Chris Briggs, famous A&R man, he works here now – he signed Wire and Gang Of Four to EMI, and Roger Ames. All these people were trying to nick my bands!”