Last month saw the release of acclaimed DJ/producer Trevor Jackson’s ‘Metal Dance’ compilation, a selection of twenty-seven tracks chronicling some the best and grooviest cuts to hit the industrial and post-punk scenes in the ’80s (read Clash’s review). From mechanical drones to dub peppered mixes, ‘Metal Dance’ digs deep to give you some overlooked gems truly worth rediscovering. Clash caught up with Jackson and some of the scene’s key players to get the inside scoop.
It’s the early-’80s. The Summer of Love and all its acid house glory is far off and a different breed of creature occupies the dance floor. The air is thick with hairspray and a feeling of unstoppable sonic exploration prevails – the fallout of punk was about to change the club scene forever. “You would walk into the Camden Palace and there would be Steve Strange, Boy George and Neil Tennant…it was like being in a mad playground.” remembers Jackson. “The most important thing to remember is that nightclubbing in Central London wasn’t what every single teenager did. It was an underground/alternative thing going clubbing… For me as a young person being interested in music and by being inspired by producers it was where all the sonic innovation was.” Innovative this collection is. Within its two discs you see the blueprint for everyone from The Chemical Brothers to Crystal Castles, beats, vocals and samples merged into one influential and hypnotic attack. Not that everyone initially loved what they were hearing at the time.
“The first show we did in 1975 kind of ended in a riot,” remembers Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk. “We did two sets and the second set was just too much for people so they attacked the stage. So we attacked back and all our mates joined in. Malander (vocals/bass) ended up getting a bone in his back chipped…but we came out of it better because our friends were tougher then the fuckers who attacked us.”
“I got criticism at the time from people saying, ‘Why are you making kebab house music?’” says dub daddy Jah Wobble. “It was a ridiculous thing to say. It was about reacting against rock. Rock was just this lumping mass.”
Undeterred, these electronic pioneers locked themselves away in studios, flats and bedrooms, battling with limited technology and resources to bust the scene wide upon, solely focused on a desire to create something new. “In the mid-Seventies we were using a few stereo tape recorders and we manage to acquire a pre-set drum machine. You couldn’t program it. All you could do was speed it up and slow it down,” Kirk reveals. “We decided the way to alter what it did was by processing the drum machine through echo machines and ring modulators. You could actually shift the groove of what was going on by really fucking up the sound.”
“With early drum machines a lot of people tried to make them sound like proper drums, like it was a drummer, whereas we didn’t,” admits Alien Sex Fiend’s Nik Fiend, “we liked the idea of a constant beat, it gets you looped in. To me, that’s what early trance dance music was trying to do, to get people looped in.”
“You would do stuff and think it’s in isolation,” Wobble picks up. “At the time you would think isn’t it nice to play around with an old cassette player or make a drone on an old wasp. Whacking a bass line down and making an ambient piece. We’re always part of lineage, like it or not.”
New soundscapes discovered it was time to take it to the streets, and as ever it was the street’s more freethinking characters that were the first to take it on. “At that time there weren’t all the different types of clubs around that you have now,” says ASF’s Mrs. Fiend. “Back then (in London) there were only a few late night clubs, so a lot of the fetish, later to-be-industrial, gay people, punks looking for something else, assorted weirdos and anyone else who didn’t fit into a particular scene ended up going to The Batcave.”
“One of my issues with that period (post-punk) is that it talked a good fight better than it delivered,” Wobble reasons. “All these great ideas got realised through dance music a bit more. Just taking those elements of texture and the rhythmic.”
“A lot of these records didn’t sound the same as each other,” adds Jackson. “People didn’t have so many obvious reference points. Most people who make records are influenced by The Beatles or Neil Young or The Rolling Stones. These people weren’t.”
Speaking to these envelope-pushing artists you discover some common ground mixed in with influences many miles apart, all rooted in a disregard for trend and the expected. “My thing at that time was collage,” Wobble says. “I was doing a bit of that in Public Image anyway and I was doing solo stuff very early on. I went down a world music route, I was fascinated by a lot of Arabic music.”
“We all grew up listening to Tamla Motown,” Kirk says, “that’s what most working class kids were listening to. Christ knows how we arrived at what we did!’”
“We were taking influences from a very wide range of stuff,” Ms. Fiend concurs, “we would listen to everything from classical to Iggy Pop And The Stooges. When we heard stuff like Depeche Mode it sounded very light-weight.”
Some thirty years later and it’s hard to imagine a world without these tracks such is their cultural importance; they helped forge a sound, scene and look that would permeate pop culture to this very day.
“Loads of people say, ‘oh you were robbed, all these people took what you did and went on to make loads of money, sold millions of records’, but that was never really what we were about, commercial success,” Kirk confesses. “It was about confrontation and winding people up.”
Wobble sums up the matter nicely: “As William Blake used to say, ‘You do it for eternity and it’s likely to come back round’.”
Words by Sam Walker-Smart
Read the full interview transcript with Alien Sex Fiend’s Nik and Mrs Fiend.
