Following the release of “Being Boiled” and their first gigs outside Sheffield, the Human League started to get celebrity endorsements. David Bowie hailed them as a glimpse of pop’s future. They played in Europe on the same bill as Devo and Iggy Pop. They were invited to support Siouxsie and the Banshees on tour, for which they made their own fiberglass “riot shields” to protect the synths from lobbed beer. The partnership with Fast Product blossomed, with Bob Last functioning creatively almost as a fifth member of the band. Eventually he became their manager. “Bob had this fantastic sensibility where everything was an art event,” says Ware.
Along with a passion for concept and presentation, the League and Fast also shared the same antihippie, antislacker, no-time-for-flabby-thinking attitude. According to Ware, “We were into action, this super-Protestant, must-work-all-day outlook that is very much part of Sheffield.” The Human League’s second release for Fast Product was a tribute to the worker. The Dignity of Labour EP consisted of four electronic instrumentals inspired by the Soviet space program, all offering a different slant on a central concept: the extent to which modern technology ultimately depended upon the workers. In this case, Russian miners, toiling deep beneath the Earth’s crust, excavated the coal needed to make steel, which was then made into gantries for Yury Gagarin’s spaceship. Gagarin appears on the EP’s front cover as a splendidly isolated figure walking across a Moscow square to receive a medal for being the first human in outer space. The EP came with a free flexidisc, which documented—in true Brechtian fashion—the band and Last debating what the record sleeve should be. At the end, Oakey makes a brief statement about the concept EP’s theme of individualism versus collectivism.
Dignity of Labour was released in April 1979 on the eve of Britain’s general election. The ensuing massive defeat for the Labour government inaugurated an era in which individualism would be championed at the expense of collective values. “You couldn’t live in Sheffield and not be aware that the industrial era was crumbling,” says Last. “So on one level the EP was a totally serious hymn to the dignity of workers. But at the same time, it was imbued with many levels of irony, doubt, and alienation.” Despite its timely resonance and atmospheric, ahead-of-its-time electronica, the EP’s pensive instrumentals confused most “Being Boiled” fans.
Last believed there was no point in putting out a third League single on Fast Product and decided to secure a major-label deal for the group. Approaching the big companies again, the Human League pitched themselves as the trailblazers of music’s next big thing, a wave of positivity after punk’s nihilism and outrage. “Blind Youth,” the first song on their demo tape, ridiculed fashionable doom-and-gloom mongers, especially people who regarded modern urban life as some kind of dystopian nightmare. “High-rise living’s not so bad,” sings Oakey, a dig aimed equally at Ballard and the Clash, “Dehumanization is such a big word/It’s been around since Richard the Third.” Rejecting punk’s “no future” stance, the Human League exhorted the blind youth of Britain to “Take hope/Your time is due/Big fun come soon/Now is calling.”
CABARET VOLTAIRE’S RESPONSE to punk was different. To some extent, they went along with the ride. Kirk began to push guitar to the fore. Where once all three voices had been used, Mallinder settled into the role of lead singer, his vocals sinister and low in the mix. The Cabs started playing live regularly, renting rooms above pubs and promoting their own gigs. They wangled their way into the punk world, sending off tapes to New Hormones’ Richard Boon, who didn’t have the cash to release a record but gave them a supporting slot with Buzzcocks in March 1978. “It was at the Lyceum, the Slits were on the same bill, a complete fucking nightmare,” recalls Kirk. “Full of crazed punk rockers. We got covered in spit.”
Shortly after the Lyceum gig, Cabaret Voltaire moved their operational base from Chris Watson’s attic to a building called Western Works. The Cabs’ new headquarters had formerly been the offices of the Sheffield Federation of Young Socialists. “If you look at old photos of us rehearsing at Western Works, you’ll see this wall behind us covered with all these old socialist posters from the sixties and seventies. We left them there because we thought it made a nice backdrop.”
Having a space to hang out and work at any hour of the day was a breakthrough, says Kirk. The acquisition of their own multitrack tape machine and mixing board enabled Cabaret Voltaire to make recordings with good enough sound quality to release. This was the logical extension of the do-it-yourself impulse, no longer having to rent a studio and deal with the resident recalcitrant engineer or the ticking clock, but being able to spend as much time as one wanted on the recording process. Through the eighties and into the techno nineties, this kind of self-sufficient entrepreneurial collective would become widespread. In 1978, Cabaret Voltaire were developing the model for a kind of postsocialist microcapitalism, an autonomy that represented if not exactly resistance, then a form of grassroots resilience in the face of top-down corporate culture. “When you have your own studio, you don’t have to be beholden to some record company that’s paying the bills,” says Kirk. “Western Works gave us the freedom to do what we wanted.”
Initially, however, Cabaret Voltaire couldn’t afford to be totally autonomous, so Rough Trade “advanced us enough money to buy the four-track and mixing desk,” says Kirk. Actually recorded before they acquired the new studio setup, the group’s debut record, Extended Play, was released by Rough Trade in October 1978. The four-song EP kicked off a remarkable run of releases via the label that lasted until 1982 and included six classic singles, four landmark long-players, numerous live albums, and the odd mini-LP.
Somewhere between 1977 and 1979, the definitive Cabaret Voltaire sound took shape: the hissing hi-hats and squelchy snares of their rhythm generator, Watson’s smears of synth slime, Mallinder’s dankly pulsing bass, and Kirk’s spikes of shattered-glass guitar. Everything coalesces on singles such as “Silent Command” and “Seconds Too Late” to create a stalking hypno-groove somewhere between death disco and Eastern Bloc skank. Another Cabaret Voltaire hallmark was the dehumanizing of Mallinder’s voice via creepy treatments that made him sound reptilian, alien, or, at the extreme, like some kind of metallic or mineralized being. On “Silent Command,” for instance, Mal’s vocal bubbles like molten glass being blown into distended shapes. On other singles, such as “Nag Nag Nag” and “Jazz the Glass,” there’s an almost charming sixties garage punk feel, the fuzztone guitar and Farfisa organ vamps recalling? and the Mysterians or the Seeds.
Having started out playing clarinet, an instrument more redolent of Jethro Tull than PiL, Kirk swiftly joined postpunk’s pantheon of guitar innovators. You can hear the chill wind of his guitar sound emerging on “The Set Up” from the debut EP. Elsewhere he employs a choppy rhythm style, equal parts reggae’s scratchy afterbeat and the itchy funk of Can’s Michael Karoli. What really grabs your attention is Kirk’s trademark timbre, a sensuous, brittle distortion like blistered metal or burning chrome, needling its way deep into your ear canal. Typically fed through delay units and heavy with sustain, Kirk’s guitar arcs and recedes through soundscapes reverberant yet claustrophobic, like bunkers or underground missile silos. “Being a telephone engineer and good with electronics, Chris Watson was able to custom-build me a fuzzbox using this circuit he’d got from a magazine,” says Kirk. “So no one else had this sound.”
When it came to live shows, Cabaret Voltaire were as committed to multimedia as the Human League, but oriented more toward sensory overload. They used slide and film projectors to create a backdrop of unsynchronized, cut-up imagery: French porn, TV news, and movies. Bombarding the audience with data also related to Cabaret Voltaire’s conception of themselves as reporters. “We were more like, let’s just present the facts and let people make up their own minds,” says Kirk.
Cabaret Voltaire’s reportorial approach meant that current events leaked into their music. Visiting the United States for the first time in November 1979, they caught wind of
the impending shift to the Right with Reagan and the born-again Christian movement, which inspired their second album, The Voice of America. “We were fascinated by America but aware of its darker side. A big novelty for a bunch of kids from England, where TV finished at eleven P.M. and there were only three channels, was the fact that America had all-night TV and loads of stations. We just locked into this televangelist Eugene Scott, who had a low-rent show that was all about raising money. And the only reason he wanted the money was to stay on the air.”
Scott’s voice ended up on the classic Cabs single “Sluggin fer Jesus,” but before that came 1980’s minialbum Three Mantras, an oblique response to events in the Middle East. Its two tracks, “Eastern Mantra” and “Western Mantra,” contrasted the evil twins of fundamentalist Islam and bomb-again Christian America, “beloved enemies” locked in a clinch of clashing civilizations. “The whole Afghanistan situation was kicking off,” recalls Kirk. “Iran had the American hostages. We were taking notice. It kind of culminated with our album Red Mecca.” Purely through its ominous atmospheres and tense rhythms, Red Mecca also seemed to tap into closer-to-home turbulence. The unrest caused by mounting unemployment and police harassment of racial minorities and jobless youths finally erupted in the summer of 1981, with riots convulsing inner-city areas all across Britain, from Toxteth in Liverpool to Brixton in London.
If Cabaret Voltaire had any politics, they were of the anarcho-paranoid kind. They blended a Yorkshire-bred intransigence in the face of badge holders and bureaucrats with the sort of pot-fueled “never met a conspiracy theory I didn’t like” attitude you encountered in squatland. Influenced by Burroughs and his paradoxically depersonalized yet personified vision of Control, the Cabs developed a worldview in which power figured as a demonic, omnipresent force, a multitentacled yet sourceless network of domination and mind coercion. “Being in a state of paranoia is a very healthy state to be in,” Mallinder said. “It gives you a permanently questioning and searching nonacceptance of situations.”
Along with paranoia, Cabaret Voltaire’s other big P-word was pornography, something else Burroughs obsessively manifested in his fiction. Yet for the Cabs and other Sheffield groups, J. G. Ballard was even more important in this area, especially the hard-core, experimental short stories (or “condensed novels”) such as “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan,” and “Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy,” both of which were later incorporated into the book-length antinarrative The Atrocity Exhibition. Fusing clinically described avant-porn with Marshall McLuhan–esque insights into the mass media, Ballard probed the grotesque (de) formations of desire stimulated by media overload and celebrity worship, delineating with forensic precision an emergent psychomythology in which the deities and titans were movie idols like Elizabeth Taylor, icons like John F. Kennedy, or cult leaders like Charles Manson. Tapping into this Ballardian vision of “the communications landscape we inhabit” as a collective unconsciousness, out of which the “myths of the near future” were emerging, Cabaret Voltaire pioneered what would eventually become an industrial-music cliché, the use of vocal snippets stolen from movies and TV.
If Cabaret Voltaire were like dark-side pop art, mass culture dimly perceived through the murky prism of weed and speed, their friends the Human League were the sunny-side version of Warhol. You could imagine the Cabs watching the TV news with the sound off and a joint burning, marinating their minds in an ambient broth of catastrophe and conflict. Meanwhile, on the other side of Sheffield, the Human League were tuning in to cartoons, soaps, popular science programs such as Tomorrow’s World, and, naturally, Top of the Pops. The convoluted route by which they got on TOTP themselves is another story altogether.
CHAPTER 7
JUST STEP SIDEWAYS:
THE FALL, JOY DIVISION, AND THE MANCHESTER SCENE
GROWING UP IN CITIES physically and spiritually scarred by the violent nineteenth-century transition between rural folkways and the unnatural rhythms of industrial life, groups like Pere Ubu, Cabaret Voltaire, and, in Manchester, Joy Division and the Fall grappled with both the problems and possibilities of human existence in an increasingly technological world.
Yet as color-depleted and harsh as these postindustrial cities in England and Ohio were, it was possible—perhaps essential—to aestheticize their panoramas of decay. Hence the attraction and resonance of J. G. Ballard’s writing for bands from Manchester and Sheffield. In his classic seventies trilogy of Crash, Concrete Island, and High-Rise, the traumatized urban landscape serves not only as the backdrop but also, in a sense, the main character of the novels. Similarly, Ballard’s earlier short stories and cataclysm novels obsessively conjure an eerie, inhuman beauty from abandoned airfields, drained reservoirs, and deserted cities. In the same way that Pere Ubu romanticized the Flats of Cleveland, Ballard waxed lyrical in interviews about the “magic and poetry one feels when looking at a junkyard filled with old washing machines, or wrecked cars, or old ships rotting in some disused harbor.”
Assimilating the bleak Ballardian atmosphere of 1970s Manchester into their sound, Joy Division made music poised on the membrane between the local and universal, between the specifics of a period and place and timeless human fears and longings. The Fall did something quite different, creating a kind of social surrealism, a drug-skewed vision of Mancunian proletarian existence that brought out its submerged currents of grotesque absurdity and the uncanny.
In the late seventies, Fall singer Mark E. Smith rode his moped past an industrial estate called Trafford Park en route to his job in Manchester’s docks. Legend has it he often passed a young man, dressed in a similar-looking donkey jacket, on his way to work. It was Ian Curtis, future front man of Joy Division. “That was a bit spooky, they both looked quite like each other,” recalls Una Baines, Smith’s girlfriend at the time and keyboard player in the Fall.
Joy Division and the Fall had plenty in common. They shared similar backgrounds (upper working class meets petit bourgeois), similar education (state school, but “streamed” for white-collar work), similar jobs (Mark E. Smith was a shipping clerk, while Ian Curtis, Joy Division’s guitarist Bernard Sumner, and bassist Peter Hook all did clerical work for local government), and loved the same sort of bands (the Doors, the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, Can). Yet despite rehearsing in the same building and even playing on some bills together, Joy Division and the Fall never acknowledged each other’s existence. As if by unspoken agreement, they engaged in a taciturn struggle to be the defining Manchester band of the postpunk era. “We never spoke to each other!” laughs Martin Bramah, the Fall’s guitarist. “I think they’re great now, but at the time the Fall and Joy Division were definitely contending.”
Fronted by singers who exuded a shamanic aura, Joy Division and the Fall conveyed a sense of strangeness and estrangement that travels far beyond the specifics of time and place. Yet it’s hard to imagine them coming from anywhere else but 1970s Manchester. Something about the city’s gloom and decreptitude seemed to seep deep into the fabric of their very different sounds. Although he didn’t identify the place by name, Mark E. Smith immortalized the pollution-belching Trafford Park on “Industrial Estate,” an early Fall classic. “The crap in the air will fuck up your face,” Smith jeers. “That song is a very funny take on Manchester’s history of having been the cradle of capitalism and then, by the 1970s, its grave,” says Richard Boon, who funded the recording of the Fall’s first EP but couldn’t afford to actually release it on New Hormones.
“Grim beyond belief” is how Jon Savage describes his first impressions of Manchester as a Londoner relocating there in 1978. That bleakness endures today in pockets, even after a late-nineties redevelopment boom. A partial face-lift has dotted the city center with flashy designer wine bars and slick corporate offices, but the old nineteenth-century architecture abides. The somber, imposing edifices testify to the pride and prosperity of Manchester’s self-made industrial tycoons. The dark red brickwork seems to soak up what scant d
aylight emanates from the typically slate gray skies. Those who venture outside the town center will encounter indelible residues of the city’s past as the world capital of mechanized cotton manufacture: railway viaducts, canals the color of lead, converted warehouses and factories, and cleared lots littered with masonry shards and refuse.
By the 1970s, the world’s first industrial city had become one of the first to enter the postindustrial era. The wealth had evaporated, but the desolate, denatured environment persisted. Attempts to renovate only made things worse. As in other cities across the U.K., urban planners razed the old Victorian terraced housing. Long-established working-class communities were broken up, the “slum” residents forcibly rehoused in high-rise apartment blocks and public-housing projects, which soon turned out to be unintended laboratories of social atomization. For Una Baines, this redevelopment figures as a kind of primal trauma. She remembers “my mum crying on the corner of the street when they knocked down our row of houses in Collyhurst.” Frank Owen of the Manchester postpunk outfit Manicured Noise fulminates, “Those planners should be hung for what they did. They did more damage to Manchester than the German bombers did in World War Two, and all under this guise of benevolent social democracy.”
In the prepunk seventies, Manchester seemed to have all the bad aspects of urban life—pollution, eyesore architecture, all-enveloping dreariness—with barely any of its subcultural compensations. “There really was nothing going on until punk,” recalls Boon. “The industry was dying, the clothes were dreadful, the hair was awful.” Manchester’s starved souls grabbed for whatever source of stimulus or sparkle they could find, be it fashion, books, esoteric music, or drugs.
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