8 posts tagged “sheffield”

With all the buzz about an Obama/Clinton (or Clinton/Obama) "dream ticket," the time is ripe for posting Cabaret Voltaire's "The Dream Ticket."  Recorded in 1983, it is arguably their earliest mastery of American-style electro, overlaid with their unique Sheffield sound.  It was released as a single on Virgin, but somehow never ended up on any of their Virgin albums (not counting CD reissues).

Apparently there is a Red Bull Music Academy, not a bricks-and-mortar institution but a nomadic series of seminars and workshops with prominent (?) musicians and DJs, with a distinct electonic bent.  The great thing is, many of the talks and interviews are available on Academy's website, including one with Cabaret Voltaire founding member Stephen Mallinder: Quicktime video and text transcript here, audio podcast here (scroll down).  There's another one of Adrian Sherwood!  And the late, great Bob Moog!

Now, about that other "dream ticket," here's how the dream would go: Hillary Clinton on the Democratic presidential ticket, and the Democrats win the election, and then... nothing changes at all!  Like the 2006 midterm elections all over again.  No thanks.

Here I've been going on about Sheffield and the great industrial dance music of the 80s and I haven't even gotten around to Cabaret Voltaire yet, arguably the godfathers of that whole scene.  So to remedy that, here's the video for what is probably their best-known song, "Sensoria"--

This video was a pre-show staple at the 9:30 Club, and it got a lot of play on the college radio station, too, even though there was no station copy: everybody had their own.  I recently read Industrial Evolution: Through the Eighties with Cabaret Voltaire by Mick Fish for a more-or-less firsthand account of CV's ascendancy.  (More-or-less because Fish lived in London and only visited Sheffield on the weekends, where his childhood friend Paul Widger was his connection to the music scene.)  It's a real DIY success story, because as Fish tells it, neither of the core duo of Richard Kirk and Stephen "Mal" Mallinder knew how to play any instruments when they started, and the vocal duties fell to Mal, who also didn't know how to sing.  He developed an odd octave-jumping rap style for their first major-label album (The Crackdown, 1983) which, while effective for one or two songs, became rather grating after a whole album.  He used the same style for "Sensoria" from the follow-up album, Microphonies (1984), but thankfully came up with some variations for the rest of the songs.  CV had left their own Sheffield studio, Western Works, to record The Crackdown in London; Fish maintains this was a good move, giving the duo an outside perspective on their music and spurring some artistic growth.  Of their return to Western Works to record Microphonies, he writes:

Microphonies had the feel of a band having second thoughts about commerciality.  By recording under their own stem again at Western Works, it meant a return to the rougher more home-made approach of their earlier material.  Obviously in Paul's opinion this was not altogether a bad thing.  He tended to prefer the idea of the Cabs as a kind of electronic garage band rather than a dance act.  But many others viewed it as a step backwards.  It seemed that after a flirtation with the big time, they were still hovering on an island of indecision between the indie and mainstream seas.

Alas, they hovered until it was too late, and mainstream success slipped away from them even as they finally secured major-label support in the US.  That said, I think Microphonies is superior to the rather monotonous The Crackdown, and they kept up a high level of danceability and creativity for a few good years.  Their huge catalog of both experimental and dance-oriented electronic music is an impressive legacy.  Since their breakup, Mallinder resurfaces with new music very rarely, but Kirk has produced tons of music under a small army of pseudonyms and through myriad collaborations.  Come to think of it, I've got a lot of catching up to do on that.

"Sensoria" has been blessed with a reference in a Jonathan Carroll novel, A Child Across the Sky (IIRC): it is the opening theme music for an arts radio show hosted by one of the characters.  I think.  That reference alone should keep it bubbling around for decades to come.

Here starts at last my Crooners thread, and I will state right here at the beginning that no songs posted will contain the MMc Factor.  In this case MMc stands not for Microsoft Management Console, but Michael McDonald.  Just as there are certain flavors I can't stand (wintergreen), and certain smells (whatever the key scent in scented toilet paper is), and certain textures (eggplant), so are there sounds I don't like, and one of them is Michael McDonald's voice.  That is the sound I call the MMc Factor.  Other singers have it, too, and that has prevented me from liking music that I would have enjoyed otherwise.  XTC is a prime example; I have a hard time getting past Andy Partridge's MMc Factor.

So with that out of the way I'll segue from Sheffield into Crooners with a Sheffield crooner, John Stuart.  Richard Hawley is currently riding a wave of popularity in the UK as the "Sheffield Sinatra," but in 1987 he played guitar behind velvet-voiced ex-Chakk singer John Stuart on Stuart's only solo single, a cover of Seals and Crofts' "Summer Breeze."  You will never hear a lusher version:

(There's that unmistakable Designers Republic graphic style again.)  Rounding out the backing band, billed as The Heavenly Music Corporation, are Dee Boyle (drums, also from Chakk), Darrell de Silva (sax), Jon Quarmby (keyboards), Justin Bennett (percussion), and Heather Allen (backing vocals), with production by Rob Gordon. 
Alas, that was all from The Heavenly Music Corporation as such.  Stuart would go on to be a member of the Lovebirds (with Hawley) and Magic Bullets.  He now lives in Barcelona and continues making lovely music as one-half of Forgetting, and on his own as, once again, The Heavenly Music Corporation.  (Hooray again for MySpace!)

Back once more to Sheffield and Damon Fairclough's "Destroyed by gods" annotated musical tour.  Fairclough writes:

As the Designers Republic made their first assault on Sheffield's graphics/music interface - in tandem with Leeds' Age Of Chance, it has to be said - they seemed to usher in, or at least popularise to a degree, an age of shouty slogans, sub-graffito clamour and statements smartly-dressed: 'Release the heat'; 'You can live forever'; 'Work Buy Consume Die'.

"Release the heat" comes from Chakk's first single, "Out of the Flesh," released in three mixes as a 12" on Cabaret Voltaire's Doublevision label in 1984.  Mark Brydon's rumbling, elastic bassline is really the song's central motif, echoed by Sim Lister's sax, then there is the other shouty slogan, "Out of the flesh, out of the flesh, taste the sweat!",  followed by the vocal "Ooooh oo-eee-ooooo ooooh" referenced by Fairclough, and bashing along above everything is the gated snare turned up to eleven that marred nearly every single song of the 80s.  Listen closely to the four-tap drum bit at the beginning of the song: isn't that the sound that MTV used between ads and clips for years, along with samples of "There Is No Love Between Us Anymore" by Pop Will Eat Itself and "Peace Sells" by Megadeth?

The way I recall it, music journalist Amrik Rai was so taken with the Sheffield scene in general and Chakk in particular that he started a record label in Sheffield, FON Records.  FON released Chakk's second single, "You," then Chakk got signed to MCA, got a huge advance, spent it all (?) to build FON Studios, added John Stuart as a second vocalist, recorded their album for MCA, Ten Days in an Elevator, the album tanked (it just wasn't that great, they completely lost whatever it was that gave their independent singles a sense of urgency), released two more singles on FON, one as Chakk ("Timebomb," which did recapture the spark) and one as the backing band for South African band Swanhunters ("Bloodsport") (why did a band need a backing bad?  I never understood that), then split up.  FON released a John Stuart solo single ("Black and Blue" backed with a gorgeous version of Seals and Crofts' "Summer Breeze").  Mark Brydon became a producer and then formed Moloko (way too camp for me) in the 90s with singer Roisin Murphy (now a solo artist, recently seen bashing her head on a chair on PerezHilton.com); other members joined other bands that I've never heard at all.  In other words, it all just fizzled out.  But it was great fun there at the beginning!  You can stream a few more Chakk songs at the Chakk MySpace page.

The Human League was the first Sheffield band I ever heard: switching radio stations to WHFS in 1982 to check out the "new wave," "The Things That Dreams Are Made Of" is one of the songs that made me a convert.  That wacky synth playing under the lines "Everybody needs love and adventure, everybody needs cash to spend" (I'll try to transliterate it: reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet--- deeeowwwrrrr) lodged in the pleasure center of my brain and became my unconscious benchmark for new-waviness:

I was aware of Heaven 17 at the time (thanks to a younger and hipper girlfriend) and knew they were a Human League splinter group, but I didn't yet know that the best work of both factions was already behind them.  1980's Travelogue album is a monolith of analog-synth futurism, though it took me some years to find that out.  The schism occurred after that album; Phil Oakey retained the Human League name to pursue a more pop-oriented sound, the first result being 1981's Dare! album and the ultimate synthpop hit, "Don't You Want Me."  Was that a blessing or a curse?  The ubiquity of "Don't You Want Me" provoked a major backlash that took the League years to recover from; they never did catch that spark again (except for "I Love You Too Much," a minor gem that was completely overlooked), nor did they manage to leave the taint behind.  "Human"?  Blech.

One of the curiouser bits of Human League history is the early membership of Adi Newton, who soon left and went on to form ClockDVA: completely anti-electronic in its early incarnations, Newton reinvented ClockDVA as a "digital sorcery" band in the late 80s and picked up the thread of dark futurism begun by the Human League a decade earlier.  ClockDVA's Man-Amplified album sounds like it could be the evil twin of Travelogue...  but I'll stop my stream of consciousness there and save it for another day.

Update: less than an hour after I posted this, I discovered that the Human League are doing a short tour of England this fall, with a hometown gig at Sheffield City Hall on December 7.  Once again I am watching the Sheffield scene from thousands of miles away.  C'est la vie.

Following up on the "bands with a self-titled theme song" thread from two posts ago, here is Sheffield band Chakk with "Chakk Theme."  It did not appear on any Chakk release, only on the Audio Visual LP companion to Rob Deacon's Abstract Magazine 6, a 1985 Sweatbox Records release.  "Chakk Theme" is mostly instrumental, with nothing for singer Jake Harries to do except shout "Chakk" once in a while (I don't think second singer John Stuart was in the band yet); it may be the straight-ahead grooviest track they ever recorded:

I frequently ponder my fixation on the music of Sheffield from the 80s.  Was it really that special, or am I just exhibiting a symptom of middle age, whereby the favorite music of one's youth or young adulthood is elevated onto a pedestal and becomes the "best ever" that no contemporary music can possibly equal, leaving one stuck in an outdated aesthetic, listening to oldies and decrying the crap that passes for music these days?  I think I'm safe on the latter count; there's enough music I like coming out all the time that I don't have time to listen to it all, so I don't really care about the crappiness of the music I'm not listening to.  That leaves the first part of the question to deal with: was the Sheffield music scene in the 80s special?  Observing it from afar, participating vicariously, it seemed special to me at the time.  Back then, and even to this day, I had never been part of a local music "scene," mainly because I never lived anywhere where there was more than one band making music that I liked (often there was less than one band making music I liked), and I never had the initiative to start one.  But across the ocean in bleak, postindustrial Sheffield, bands like Cabaret Voltaire, Hula, Chakk, ClockDVA, The Box, The Human League, and more were funking, bleeping, and skronking up a storm.  I am pleased to report that it wasn't just romanticization on my part, there really was some magic happening there, and it has been chronicled in several books and at least one film, Made in Sheffield.  And thankfully for the cash-impaired, Damon Fairclough has compiled a comprehensive mp3 mix of Sheffield bands, Destroyed by gods, and paired it with extensive commentary on each track, available for free download and reading from his Noise Heat Power website.  He paints a firsthand portrait of Sheffield as revealed through its music scene, and manages to make me nostalgic for something I never actually lived through in the first place.  Chakk are represented in Fairclough's mix by their first single, "Out of the Flesh" (from a FON reissue not the original Doublevision release).  Martin Lilleker, who has written two books about Sheffield music (so far), drops an interesting Chakk tidbit in an interview with Pete Mella:

People actually moved to Sheffield because of it, that's why Chakk ended up forming a band in Sheffield specifically, because of the music. They'd heard the Cabs [Cabaret Voltaire], and would go to the city where that music was being played. Quite a lot of people came to Sheffield University for that very reason.

Fairclough's written piece is the online equivalent of liner notes; remember all the text that used to come with an album, or a CD, that you could read while listening to the music to enhance the experience?  I tried listening to a Rhino Records podcast once, but the guy wouldn't play the music until he was done talking about it, slowly, and I couldn't sit through it.  The beauty of liner notes, and the 21st century equivalent that I'll call "blog accompaniment," is that you don't have to stop the music to get the information.  And it doesn't get any better than Destroyed by gods.

I'm not done with Chakk--I like them more than Fairclough does--but I'm done for today.  Stay tuned for more at a later date.

My first Hula post was quite rudimentary, as it was just my second post on Vox and I was still trying out the system.  My statement that they were my favorite band of the 80s still stands; their mix of drum machines and real drums (courtesy of Nort), powerful basslines, vaguely futuristic-paranoid lyrics, and tape manipulation was downright exciting.  Much of Hula's music has been reissued in digital format, available from iTunes, Rhapsody/Real, eMusic, and the Cherry Red website.  However, there are two gaping holes in the reissue series: the 1985 double LP 1000 Hours, and the 1987 LP Voice.  Voice is arguably their masterpiece (but so is Murmur), with side one a suite of five songs that each segues right into the next one, not quite variations on a theme but containing a certain cohesion, one of the best whole album sides ever.  The third song on that side is "Cut Me Loose," an unabashed dancefloor number with a few bars of a sly Chic-like bassline.  "Cut Me Loose" was also issued as a 12" single, adding a dub version, two live versions of older songs, and the studio-recorded "Burn It Out," presumably an outtake from Voice.  Why it was taken out is a mystery to me, it fits in perfectly with the rest of the album.  Maybe it was recorded later.  Here it is:

I love that synth riff!  Sour Eden is an excellent Hula website; eight live tracks from John Peel Session are available as free mp3s on the Audio page.  There are also MySpace pages for Hula, bassist John Avery, and drummer Nort's band Yonni.  A Sour Eden newsbite from last December mentions a possible reunion of Hula in 2007; I hope it happens!

Eric Random (Ramsden) had quite an interesting musical trajectory in the 80s.  He was from Manchester, but after hooking up with Cabaret Voltaire he became more closely aligned with the Sheffield scene.  His first recordings for New Hormones consisted of simple drum machine patterns, basic synth noises, and manipulated tapes, but he began incorporating, on one hand, Middle Eastern and dub styles, and on the other hand, more insistent rhythms, especially after adding drummer Graham "Dids" Dowdall.  This musical journey culminated in 1987 in what I think of as "The Great Lost Worldbeat Album," Ishmael, on FON Records; "lost" because it has never been issued on CD, an oversight I find astounding.  Random weaves Middle Eastern modalities with rock structures and rhythms, acoustic instruments with electronics, danceability with meditation.  In short, it's a masterpiece.  Here is the first track, "Cherish":

I love that bongo/flute jam in the middle!  The album cover doesn't translate well to digital format, it is actually very striking.  "Ishmael" is printed in white-on-white Arabic-style letters using a mask technique, i.e. the cover is glossy except for the letters.  The only thing wrong with this album is its length: only six tracks (one a cover of Collin Walcott's "Hey Da Da Boom") for roughly half an hour of music.  If only there had been more... Eric Random has remained active, sort of, so I suppose I should track down some of his newer material.

I could participate in the Sheffield scene only vicariously, from across the Atlantic, through reading the weekly UK music papers.  I remember reading Amrik Rai's highly enthusiastic review of Hula.  He was so enthusiastic that he founded the FON Records label in collaboration with Mark Brydon of Chakk (coming to the blog soon, maybe).  Hula was already signed to Red Rhino, but FON picked up some closely associated bands (Chakk for one, obviously).  Now that was a label whose every release was a must-buy for me; up until The Funky Worm, that is.  FON records were easy to spot by their distinctive black-and-white-striped spine, which just lapped onto the front cover.  Now that I think of it, and have done a quick Google search, very little of the FON catalog has made it to CD, except what I have ripped from vinyl for myself.  And you!