Reed First Pages

4. Northern England 1. Progress in Hell Northern England was both the center of the European industrial revolution and the birthplace of industrial music. From the early nineteenth century, coal and steel works fueled the economies of cities like Manchester and She!eld and shaped their culture and urban aesthetics. By 1970, the region’s continuous mandate of progress had paved roads and erected buildings that told 150 years of industrial history in their ugly, collisive urban planning—ever new growth amidst the expanding junkyard of old progress. In the BBC documentary Synth Britannia, the narrator declares that “Victorian slums had been torn down and replaced by ultramodern concrete highrises,” but the images on the screen show more brick ruins than clean futurescapes, ceaselessly "ashing dystopian sky- lines of colorless smoke.1 Chris Watson of the She!eld band Cabaret Voltaire recalls in the late 1960s “being taken on school trips round the steelworks . just seeing it as a vision of hell, you know, never ever wanting to do that.”2 #is outdated hell smoldered in spite of the city’s supposed growth and improve- ment; a$er all, She!eld had signi%cantly enlarged its administrative territory in 1967, and a year later the M1 motorway opened easy passage to London 170 miles south, and wasn’t that progress? Institutional modernization neither erased northern England’s nineteenth- century combination of working-class pride and disenfranchisement nor of- fered many genuinely new possibilities within culture and labor, the Open Uni- versity notwithstanding. In literature and the arts, it was a long-acknowledged truism that any municipal attempt at utopia would result in totalitarianism. #e theme dates back to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 post–October Revolution novel We, Fritz Lang’s 1927 %lm Metropolis, George Orwell’s postfascist Nineteen Eighty-Four of 1949, and the art of George Tooker, whose 1950 !e Subway illustrated urban technology’s underbelly of sadness, paranoia, and discon- nect. During industrial music’s %rst years, the wider trope would hit fever pitch with J. G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High Rise, David Cronenberg’s %lm of the same year Shivers (also titled !ey Came from Within), and George Romero’s 1978 zombies-in-the-mall think piece Dawn of the Dead. 59 /50s5.#/22%#4%$02//& Reed_Assimilate.indd 59 3/2/13 5:36 PM In intellectual and artistic circles of the late 1970s, it was almost universally understood that industrialization was artistically and personally limiting. In 1977, French economist Jacques Attali wrote a book called Noise: !e Political Economy of Music, which is arguably the most in"uential piece of Marxist mu- sicology of the last %$y years; in it, he argues convincingly that even though industrialization and capitalism originally gave rise to the middle classes who enabled musicians to support themselves, the musicians ultimately became commoditized, and through repetition—both structurally in their music and in the mass industrial reproduction of their recordings—their art lost its mean- ing and instead began to reinscribe corporate power. Young artists in 1970s northern England didn’t need science %ction or aca- demic theory to feel the weight of institutional power and cyclicity. Musician Martyn Ware of the Human League and Heaven 17 frames it in terms that are both industrial and spatial: “It really forced you into a choice whether you were gonna accept being a small cog in a relatively small wheel or whether you were gonna try and burst out of there.”3 It’s worth asking here not just how Ware and other musicians burst out but how they even recognized that doing so was a possibility. Writing of industrial music, noise scholar Paul Hegarty asserts, “Modern, technologized industrial society controls our minds, acting as a limiter on ex- pression and attainment of potential.”4 #e trouble with mind control, of course, is that the controlled are unaware of it. One function of industrial music is that it seeks through caricature and cut-up to correct this by exposing the face and the methods of this institutional control. Taking a cue from Burroughs, some think this reframing is a metaphysical act; Genesis P-Orridge writes, “No mat- ter how short, or apparently unrecognizable a ‘sample’ might be in linear time perception, I believe it must, inevitably, contain within it (and [make] accessible through it), the sum total of absolutely everything its original context repre- sented, communicated, or touched in any way.”5 Similarly, the Ha"er Trio writes, “A well-made sound recording of a place (or a person or a thing), nevertheless, contains a fragment of the ‘soul’ of that place (person or thing).”6 #is approach suggests that when an artifact of social control is cut up, its source is magically disrupted. A less supernatural explanation, however, is that in sampling and cutting up, the disruption of time brings the voice of control to the fore while shedding its content. In this way, it can serve as an all-points bulletin to alert listeners to the insidiousness of its source. If the likes of Cabaret Voltaire and #robbing Gristle experienced the sur- rounding signs of northern England’s industrialization as limiting, then we shouldn’t merely hear their music’s burnt-out soundscape as just a vague re"ec- tion of the city, assuming that somehow geography “shapes” music. Instead, we 60 ASSIMILA TE /50s5.#/22%#4%$02//& Reed_Assimilate.indd 60 3/2/13 5:36 PM can understand the industrialness of their music as a speci%c reaction against the perceived control, as an attempt to disarm it by postering its sonic mugshot onto freely traded cassette tapes and through club PA systems. #at these bands came from industrial cities also makes sense, as they were closest to the real signs of industrialization, authoritarian control, and their negative e'ects. Not only were the old steel mills hellish and the new highrises faceless, but together they contributed to a lurking cultural and %nancial depression—one that the government attempted to answer with ubiquitous o!ces that arose to employ a generation of laid-o' workers and despondent students. #e government’s presence on every street was the up-close reality to which English industrial music responded. 2. The Original Sound of Sheffield In considering industrial music within industrial geography, let’s forgo the conventional wisdom of beginning the narrative with #robbing Gristle—for whom Hull and London were as much a base as Manchester—and instead look to the city of She!eld and its progeny Cabaret Voltaire and Clock DVA. Cabaret Voltaire—and indeed She!eld’s modern pop legacy—starts with Chris Watson, born 1948. Introverted and gi$ed in all matters technical, Wat- son had come to idolize Brian Eno, a philosopher king of tech geekery and the keyboardist for Roxy Music, whose concerts Watson had twice attended as a student. Watson experimented for two years with tape decks in a lo$ at his parents’ house in the suburb of Totley with the goal of “making music without musical instruments,” and by the time he met fellow Eno devotee Richard Kirk in 1973, he had already begun building oscillators from mail-order kits.7 Wat- son’s work as a telephone engineer helped pay for this do-it-yourself electronics habit. Watson and Kirk together began dedicatedly creating and mixing weird noises, initially just exploring technology and sound aesthetically, but eventually they con%rmed a mutual desire to create something more out of the clatter. Kirk recalls, “Any kind of noise looped up would do the job more or less. And then we’d perhaps record some percussion, slow it down or speed it up to make it sound a bit disturbing or whatever, a bit di'erent,” to which Watson adds, “#e loops would become songs. We would produce these tape collages, oscil- lator sounds, found sounds.”8 Kirk played a cheap clarinet and eventually took up guitar “because we didn’t want to be completely arty and obscure.”9 In late 1973, they recruited singer and sometime bassist Stephen Mallinder, a buddy from Kirk’s days as a troublemaking fourteen-year-old skinhead in the late 1960s. Northern E ngland 61 /50s5.#/22%#4%$02//& Reed_Assimilate.indd 61 3/2/13 5:36 PM Cabaret Voltaire, who took their name and much of their inspiration from Dada and surrealism, presented themselves as aloof and foreign, so much that NME journalist Andy Gill wrote in 1978 that “Cabaret Voltaire could have been spawned in any city, and quite probably in a non-urban area, too. #e geographical locus counts for little in the nexus of possibilities which brought about Cabaret Voltaire.”10 But even though experimental sound art is itself not an exclusively She!eldian notion, Gill mistakes the high-concept Dada behind Cabaret Voltaire’s name for the preconditions of their music. It’s telling that Mallinder was recruited because, according to Kirk, “Mal was the only person we knew who didn’t have a Yorkshire accent and we thought, ‘Oh we might as well get him to do some of the vocal stu'.’”11 Similarly, faced with the lack of recording studios and electronic equipment commercially available in Shef- %eld, they stepped outside the typical channels of rock self-development and formed an uneasy alliance with She!eld University’s music department. #e faculty couldn’t tell if the youngsters were academics in training or just punks, but they nevertheless allowed the trio to use its small electronic studio, which included an EMS VCS3 synthesizer. #ese moves weren’t taken with indi'er- ence to She!eld, but in spite of She!eld.

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