by Bob Stanley
Pet Shop Boys records had the clarity of line and the cleanliness of freshly laundered and folded linen. New Order’s output – though their artwork was never less than draughtsman-perfect – came over like their slightly cumbersome sibling. For a start, New Order definitely did come out of rock. Joy Division had been leftfield, and – in the hands of Martin Hannett – avant to an awesome degree, but the influence that echoes through a song like ‘Novelty’ isn’t Giorgio Moroder’s ‘From Here to Eternity’, it’s ‘Badge’ by Cream. So when Ian Curtis took his life, leaving two unrecorded songs, the three remaining members used them as a full stop and a new beginning. Their second career began with a single that topped anything Joy Division had recorded. ‘Ceremony’ (UK no. 34 ’81) was a restless ghost, a fierce and piercing piece of guitar music that Curtis must have written with posterity in mind: ‘Avenues all lined with trees, picture me and then you start watching, watching forever.’ The bass surges, rolling and wrestling with the half-dozen different guitar lines. The twelve-inch sleeve was a rich, racing green, which was somehow perfect. And so, with their youth laid to rest, New Order moved on.1
Bernard Sumner (né Albrecht) became de facto singer, and Stephen Morris’s friend Gillian Gilbert joined on keyboards. She was well attuned to their aesthetic – you only need to know three notes but you need to make them sound bigger than ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’. Second single ‘Everything’s Gone Green’ was a dizzying electronic mesh of Moroder and, well, Joy Division; anyone could dance to ‘Everything’s Gone Green’. While the British club scene was besotted with jazz funk in 1981,2 New Order were looking to the new electric pulse of New York. Post-punk had scratched around in the dirt, awkwardly adapting funk to suit its anti-rock needs, but ‘Everything’s Gone Green’ was silvery, clean, and unlike anything previously attempted by a British guitar band. Right on the fade, you can hear Sumner go ‘whoo!’ He may as well have broken into a chorus of ‘Highway to Hell’ for the culture shock that caused. These post-punk pioneers had twenty–twenty vision, were primed for the future, and when they heard ‘Planet Rock’ they were on the next flight to Newark. Dope, acid and NYC clubbing were how they got over their friend’s death; they shed their raincoats for terrace-casual clothes, Fred Perry shirts and soft leather slip-on shoes. They slept through the day and set their alarms for eleven thirty at night. Martin Hannett’s days as their house producer were over.
1983’s ‘Blue Monday’, New Order’s fourth single, had beats as crisp as apples. It physically bridged the gap between rock and dance culture in that it was only available as a twelve-inch single, the chosen format of DJs. The mood was electric blue, and the gauntlet was thrown down to every guitar-based post-punk outfit – follow us! It was a massive seller, an international hit that stayed in the British charts longer than any other single in the eighties, becoming the best-selling twelve-inch of all time, eventually peaking at number three in the UK five years after it first came out. Just to show they didn’t need Hannett and could master the space their former producer seemed to carve out of thin air, they covered Keith Hudson’s heavy dub ‘Turn the Heater On’ for a Peel session. Sumner’s spectral melodica glided over icy Korg chords with the same romantic distance as Peter Green’s guitar on the middle eight of ‘Albatross’.
In reality, New Order were hardly distant or furrowed at all. They refused to appear on British TV unless they could play live; when they finally did – playing Blue Monday on Top of the Pops – it was less like Kraftwerk’s icy precision, more like Lancelot Link and the Evolution Revolution. Gillian’s keyboard ability was akin to a schoolgirl’s first attempts at typing, and Bernard delighted in looking gormless, mouth agape, screwing with his own lyrics: ‘… and I thought I heard you squeak’.
Finally giving the NME an interview in 1985, Sumner didn’t come across as a noble artiste, or even a pop star: ‘War’s wrong, fighting’s wrong, but defending yourself isn’t wrong,’ he said, cheeks turning purple, breath turning beery. ‘If someone hit me I’d hit them back. I did think of joining up when the Falklands conflict was on. I’m a patriot, mate.’ Shortly afterwards, New Order released a live video called ‘Pumped Full of Drugs’.
They had fallen in love with the sounds at New York’s Danceteria, and after a muddled Arthur Baker-produced single called ‘Confusion’ (UK no. 18 ’83) that was as clothy as ‘Blue Monday’ was shiny, they cut the tick-tock clinical ‘Shellshock’ for John Hughes’s Pretty in Pink soundtrack and became fully assimilated into eighties pop culture: ‘Thieves Like Us’, ‘Perfect Kiss’, ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’, ‘Fine Time’, a peerless run of twelve-inch singles, all packaged in Peter Saville’s economically beautiful sleeves – New Order records were very wantable.
The Pet Shop Boys, meanwhile, were in awe of another electro-disco underground – the proto-hi-NRG of Bobby O. Before even writing a song, they travelled to New York to track him down.
Though the sound he spawned was almost entirely confined to gay clubs, Bobby O was a straight Puerto Rican, and obsessed with boxing. His aim was to make the beats sound as tough and pummelling as punches – ‘Native Love’ and ‘Shoot Your Shot’ shared the synthesised bass pulse of ‘Blue Monday’ and (by now five years old) ‘I Feel Love’. The sound was taken up by the London club scene, which needed a new speed-fuelled soundtrack now that disco had run its course.
Bobby O’s subtlety-free productions also appealed to a segment of the northern-soul scene. While the Wigan Casino had been loyal to sixties soul, rival club the Blackpool Mecca had often played brand-new sounds that fitted the talcum-coated dancefloor. Mecca DJ Ian Levine was so taken with the Bobby O sound that he began creating similar-sounding records on his own Record Shack label – with more than a whiff of show tune, Miquel Brown’s ‘So Many Men, So Little Time’ typified a camp but bludgeoning sound, jackbooted cowboys with whipcracking snares, bashing their cowbells with a hammer. It was ugly but effective. Record Shack’s follow-up was Evelyn Thomas’s ‘High Energy’ (UK no. 5 ’84), which crystallised the sound and gave it a name.
The title of Miquel Brown’s hit became a bad joke once AIDS started to decimate the gay community;3 the politics of dancing dictated that by 1985 hi-NRG’s time was up. This was the greyer, homophobic world that ‘West End Girls’ was born into. The Pet Shop Boys, however, had reshaped the Bobby O sound to their own ends, rechannelled it with the unlikely inputs of Grandmaster Flash and Alan Bennett, and scored a global number one.
Neil Tennant had begun 1985 as the assistant editor of fortnightly pop mag Smash Hits, performing such humdrum tasks as interviewing the poorly dressed keyboard player Paul Hardcastle, dining with the dour Eurythmics, going on the road with Scottish heartland rockers Big Country; he ended the year on the cover of Smash Hits and with a number-one single. He wasn’t about to go telling the press how he was a fighting pit prop, ready to defend the Falklands with a Roland 808 in his hand. But he still sounded as far away from Phil Collins4 as Bernard Sumner’s pub talk. ‘We were always anxious to come over as not really like proper pop groups,’ Tennant told Q. ‘We didn’t want to be the biggest group in the world. We didn’t want to be seen as a world-ambitious band who wanted to have an amazing live act with a tragic band of musos behind us. We didn’t want to appear to be like Go West or someone.’
The Pet Shop Boys and New Order had come from quite different routes but their paths converged sonically in 1987 – the same year the KLF formed in defiance of pop’s descent into mediocrity, and Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley’s ‘Jack Your Body’ ushered in the house-music era – when Stephen Hague produced New Order’s ‘True Faith’ (UK no. 4, US no. 32), as well as the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘What Have I Done to Deserve This’ (UK and US no. 2) and ‘It’s a Sin’ (UK no. 1, US no. 9). The NME said ‘True Faith’ plumbed ‘the depths of disco, and approximates the sound of Pet Shop Boys … compromised in a forelock-tug towards commercialism’, while finally admitting it was ‘soul-stirring’. The Pet Shop Boys brought their heroine Dusty Springfield
out of the shadows to sing on ‘What Have I Done to Deserve This’, then produced a whole album for her (Reputation) which included the weightless, exquisite ‘Nothing Has Been Proved’ (UK no. 16 ’87), her first solo Top 20 hit in over twenty years. It couldn’t have got any better.
These records were also a commercial high-water mark for both groups. From here on, their paths diverged again. New Order dived headfirst into acid-house culture – the TOTP performance of ‘Fine Time’ (UK no. 11 ’89) could be used as an anti-advert for Ecstasy – before crumbling slowly in a most undignified manner. The Pet Shop Boys, after covering Sterling Void’s contemporary house hit ‘It’s Alright’ (UK no. 5 ’89), released the beautifully reflective Behaviour album in 1990 (sample song title: ‘My October Symphony’), before a slight lapse into self-parody on ’93’s Very called time on their imperial phase. It’s unlikely they’ll ever split – they are the Gilbert and George of pop. By the turn of the nineties both groups had done their work. Margaret Thatcher and Go West were gone. The world turned, and the KLF sensed their chance.
1 I’m politely ignoring all of their gloomed-out first album, Movement. Like the Cure’s 1982 album Pornography, Movement was harrowing to the point of tedium. Both albums appeared just as the raincoat-wearing post-punk scene was splintering: some (New Order, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Cure) moved out of the shadows and into primary-coloured pop; the likes of Bauhaus, the Sisters of Mercy and Southern Death Cult kept their heads down and fostered the goth movement.
2 Though the clipped, freeze-dried funk of records like Beggar and Co’s ‘(Somebody) Help Me Out’ (UK no. 15 ’81) seemed to have little to do with Sam Cooke or Marvin Gaye, pirate stations like Invicta and Kiss held them in high esteem. Clubs like the Goldmine in Canvey Island, and the Lacy Lady in Ilford played Philly soul, jazz funk, Salsoul and new records from New York and Miami that kept the slap-bass, late-disco boogie sound alive. For advocates of this continuity disco it was simply called ‘soul’, and was celebrated at the annual Caister Soul Weekender, which started in 1979. What you would never, ever hear on these stations or at these clubs or weekenders was electronically derived dance music.
3 Until September 1982, when the name AIDS was first coined for the disease, it was more commonly called GRID – Gay Related Immune Deficiency. This was a boost for homophobia, and early victims like Patrick Cowley received little sympathy outside the gay community.
4 ‘A song like “Why Can’t It Wait until Tomorrow” is a pretty cosy song, but it’s got a nice feeling to it, and I get the required reaction from people.’ Phil Collins, NME, 1982.
PART FIVE
57
CHICAGO AND DETROIT: HOUSE AND TECHNO
I lost control, I saw my soul.
Adonis, ‘No Way Back’
In January 1987 a record by Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley made number one on the UK singles chart. There was no video, there wasn’t even a biog on Hurley for DJs to claim, brow furrowed, as their own research. Heck, there was only one black-and-white photo of him, which Channel 4’s Chart Show held on screen for a full two and a half minutes to accompany the dark, relentless clatter of ‘Jack Your Body’. People were appalled, they genuinely didn’t know what the hell to make of this record. ‘Jack Your Body’ was monotonous, little more than a bassline and a dustbin-lid rhythm, with Hurley’s odd, disembodied, processed voice repeating the title. It was also intensely physical, unnerving, robotic, a future shock.
Within days, Radio 1’s Peter Powell took the brave step of retiring, explaining that if ‘Jack Your Body’ could get to number one, he just didn’t understand modern pop music any more. A fortnight later George Michael and Aretha Franklin stemmed the tide and soothed conservatives by knocking ‘Jack Your Body’ from its perch with the clean, airless soul of ‘I Knew You Were Waiting for Me’,1 but it was too late. The cat was out of the bag, and 1987 joined the shortlist of years credited with a sea change in pop.
As hip hop had developed unheard outside of the South Bronx, so house grew in an isolated, post-disco pocket. Chicago’s Warehouse, with Frankie Knuckles as the club’s main DJ, had existed since ’77 and, like New York’s Paradise Garage, it started to redefine disco when the barbarians were at the gate, stripping things back to the primary colours of rhythm and soulful, almost gospel vocals. Both clubs had a largely gay, black clientele.
The Warehouse had been the more radical of the two clubs, and at the turn of the eighties began to gently shift away from a Philly sound into something more clinical, still song-based but with the pulse of the drum machine at its heart. New York-based disco labels Prelude, West End and Salsoul had merged the sweeping strings of Philadelphia with the tortured gospel heat of soul singers like Loleatta Holloway, and this was the sound Knuckles’s spiritual crowd craved. An evangelical DJ, he had mixed Martin Luther King speeches into the Salsoul sound, and one of his most-played records, Holloway’s piano-driven ‘Love Sensation’, would become a working model for house.
As disco died out completely and R&B slowed down, Frankie Knuckles started to play reel-to-reel re-edits of old disco records,2 extending them with the help of a Rhythm Master (the box built into most electric organs to help the suburban Reginald Dixon keep time). A local record store called Imports Etc started to label records with an ‘as played at the Warehouse’ sticker, which was soon pared back to ‘the ’House’, and a new genre had been tagged.
In the early eighties house was in a half-frog, half-tadpole state. American disco was gone, but Italo disco records – Doctor’s Cat’s ‘Andromeda’, Klein and MBO’s ‘Dirty Talk’ – kept the flame burning, building on disco’s electronic side. Sparse and highly synthetic, they were easy for Chicago DJs to beat-match. On the extreme edge was an Italian compilation of pure rhythm tracks called Mix Your Own Stars. The most popular track was called ‘119’ – it was nothing more than a Roland drum machine’s bass drum, snare, tom-toms and a handclap. And it played at 119 beats per minute. It was an achievable sound for Chicago’s budding producers to mimic.
After the Warehouse closed in ’83, Knuckles moved on to the more upmarket, soulful Power Plant, but it was the Music Box across town, on a Saturday night with DJ Ron Hardy, that took the Warehouse sound into deeper waters. The crowd got younger. The look was paisley shirts, solid-colour baggy slacks and slippy, shiny shoes; the haircut was a high-rise flat top called a pump. Because Frankie Knuckles’s re-edits weren’t available in the shops, kids started to make their own approximations. One of the most inspired was a Prince fanatic called Jamie Principle, who stayed home, never going out to clubs, and worked on his own brand of house. His tracks would get played out by Knuckles at the Power Plant off reel-to-reel tapes: his 1985 recording ‘Your Love’ – later to become a huge hit with Candi Staton’s a cappella ‘You’ve Got the Love’ grafted onto it – was played off a tape for a whole year before it was released on vinyl. Rich, dark chords worked like a ghost echoing the spirituality of Knuckles’s Warehouse sets, and the sense of space was enormous. By the time the NME’s Stuart Cosgrove wrote a piece in 1986 entitled – with reference to the ongoing battle between indie- and black-music-supporting writers on the paper – ‘The DJs They Couldn’t Hang’,3 Chicago was dancing to a beat entirely of its own making.
So how did house fundamentally differ from disco? Like hip hop, it was built on new technology. Cosgrove found Chicago’s record shops to be crammed with European electronic import singles. Like Knuckles, Ron Hardy had disciples who used cheap new technology to make tapes or cassettes of new music for him to play at the Music Box. The Kurzweil and Fairlight keyboards used by Trevor Horn cost thousands, but for less than $2,000 there was the Ensoniq Mirage, a polyphonic sampling keyboard. Jesse Saunders was first with the primitive ‘On and On’, which came out on Vince Lawrence’s Mitchbal label;4 Chip E. used a Boss guitar sampling pedal (retailing at just $200) to make the ESG-sampling ‘Like This’. Unlike disco, this wasn’t music made by musicians, it was made by clubbers for clubbers. The distance between self-
starter impulse and execution was, as it had been with punk, rapidly diminished.
Secondly, the sexuality was blunt. It may have been expelled altogether from early hip hop, but in house it was blatant – that rush to orgasm was clear in its ebbs, flows and jump cuts between dark chords and uplifting piano breaks. Then there were the titles of house records: with ‘jack’ short for ejaculate, records like ‘Jack Your Body’ and Hercules’ ‘Seven Ways to Jack’ lacked Chic’s sensuality. So they made up for it with deep, often melancholy basslines and sparse minor-chord keyboard lines (Fingers Inc.’s ‘Mystery of Love’). In this hi-tech, low-drama paring down, ethnicity, roots and sexual orientation were slowly rendered insignificant.
Stuart Cosgrove’s NME article had been about a very local scene. The beauty of ‘Jack Your Body’ is that its UK success is still largely inexplicable – why not Kenny ‘Jammin’’ Jason’s ’87 club classic ‘Can U Dance’, with its infectious, distorted ice-cream-van hook? Or Raze’s similar but superior, more atmospheric, more definitively house single, ‘Jack the Groove’? The sense of confusion it caused among the rockist media was fabulous – where was the ideology? Call this a revolution? It’s just ear candy. It was, instead, raw electricity.
When the House Sound of Chicago albums appeared in the UK,5 the monochrome pictures of Marshall Jefferson and Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley were reminiscent of Delta blues singers, or the deep-soul singers simultaneously anthologised on the Charly label: grainy, lost, a parallel and exciting America, nothing to do with Flashdance or Baywatch or ALF. Where did they come from? How could this have been going on while Steve Wright in the afternoon was playing Johnny Hates Jazz? They were unknowable. Such mystique.
It turned out that Marshall Jefferson had been a postman and a Led Zeppelin fan, firmly in the ‘disco sucks’ camp. But there was a cute girl who sat next to him at the post office, and she went to the Music Box. He tagged along one night, just to see her body in action, and had the closest thing he’d ever experienced to a religious visitation. Two days later he spent $9,000 (post-office workers in the US got easy credit as they were virtually unsackable) on keyboards and studio equipment; within a few weeks he made the terrifying ‘I’ve Lost Control’ (credited to his sleazy cohort, Sleezy D); within a year he had cut the ultimate house anthem, ‘Move Your Body’.
