How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (29 page)

B
y 1986 the word ‘indie’ had become irrelevant to Daniel Miller, who had seen Mute grow from its first
bedroom-recorded
release to a company with a multinational turnover quietly taking up its position as one of the great successes of the first wave of independent labels started in the punk backdraught. ‘In Mute’s case, it never became indie, I hope,’ says Miller. ‘I mean, indie just became a genre which in most cases was music that came out on major labels.’

Having started Mute in order to self-release his own single as The Normal in 1978, he had waited over a year before Mute’s second release, ‘Back to Nature’ by Fad Gadget. Venturing into albums a year later, Mute released three LPs in 1980, the pulsating and confrontational
Die Kleinen und Die Bosen
by Dusseldorf’s DAF, Fad Gadget’s debut and
Music for Parties
by Miller’s new ‘group’ Silicon Teens. In a studio project that recorded electronic versions of standards like ‘Memphis’ and ‘You Really Got Me’, Miller produced an album of synthetic three-minute
cutting-edge
pop. The next debut album on Mute,
Speak and Spell
by Depeche Mode, was the Silicon Teens made flesh: a real-life teenage group playing catchy electro dance pop. An immediate Top Forty success, the band turned Miller and Mute into a record company with a presence in the mainstream. The process was repeated on an even bigger international scale a year later with the debut LP by Yazoo,
Upstairs At Eric’s
. ‘Within a period of less than eighteen months I went from nothing to having two
platinum-selling artists,’ says Miller, ‘which was a bit confusing, not the kind of thing you can plan for. It was an accident, like all these things are.’

The move into albums saw Miller, who remained resistant to the idea of Mute being ‘a record company’, reluctantly start to introduce some formalities into the label.

‘I did want to avoid as much of the industry as possible,’ says Miller, ‘partly because it certainly wouldn’t work for me and my music and also, I didn’t really understand it. When the first Depeche album came out, we got an office. ‘When I started to do albums it started to get a bit more serious.’

Getting serious also involved hiring a skeletal staff but Miller was determined not to compromise on the original inspiration for Mute, a label and artist working together in contrast to the standard industry practice. ‘I didn’t want to be a normal record company situation, where it’s them and us,’ says Miller. ‘I didn’t really know if I wanted to be a record company at all but, if I was going to be one, I wanted to be partners with that person and have a proper equal relationship with them. I didn’t say to Fad Gadget or Depeche Mode, “OK, we want to do a five-album deal, we want to work with you for the next twenty years, we’re not going to do a contract,” it was like, “Let’s put out a single and see what happens.”’

Miller’s lean and streamlined philosophy was mirrored in Depeche Mode and their working methods. A quartet of boys unafraid to wear eyeliner, they danced behind their keyboards on stage with the detached confidence of youth in control of entry-level technology. ‘When we went to do
Top of the Pops
we didn’t need a van or anything like that,’ says Miller. ‘They brought everything up on the train from Basildon. It was very modern, very portable – no drums, no amps, just three synths and a microphone. None of the kind of rock ’n’ roll accoutrements
that I hated. You could just do it yourselves because it was so minimal. I think that was still part of the DIY ethos with which I’d started.’

The early run of Depeche Mode singles sounded like Kraftwerk rebooted for children’s TV, infectious and playfully teenage. The band instantly connected with an audience who recognised the energy and modernity of their sound – the wide-eyed possibilities of a New Town Friday night disco; the band were already veterans of south-east nightclubs as Depeche Mode took up near-residencies in venues like Rascals in Southend or Croc’s Glamour Club in Rayleigh.

Seymour Stein who had worked with Miller since licensing The Normal’s
Warm Leatherette
, was instantly intrigued by Miller’s description of his latest signings and was desperate to see Depeche Mode play in their natural environment.

‘The only way I could get there at the time was to fly on the Concorde, which left at about ten and got there at six,’ says Stein. ‘I called ahead, they met me and drove me up to Basildon and I did a deal with Daniel right on the spot, and all of Daniel’s early bands all wound up on Sire – Erasure, Yazoo, Assembly – and Daniel and I have remained close.’

Stein and Miller’s friendship allowed Mute a direct route in to the States, where Mute’s releases found an immediate audience in a market starved of electronic experimentation. Miller was able to self-finance Mute with international sales from the beginning, a system that allowed his ideas about the autonomy of Mute, and its ability to operate as a partnership between himself and his artists, to flourish. At every opportunity Miller sought to cut out the middleman. ‘Certainly in the early days there were no managers around,’ says Miller, ‘no lawyers, and that made life a lot easier and nobody seems to have come out of it for the worse, because I’m still working with a lot of those artists today.’

For the third Depeche Mode album Miller, as the band’s producer, was interested in exploring the energies he had put into The Normal. Interested in a harsher electronic sound, the band and Miller approached John Foxx, whose album
Metamatic
, released in the second week of the decade, had defined the possibilities of marrying songwriting with electronic abstraction, a sound that was coalescing into an Eighties pop avant-garde. Foxx suggested they work with his engineer Gareth Jones who had helped him record
Metamatic
and been closely involved with the specifications of Foxx’s new purpose-built electronic studio, the Garden. ‘John had hooked up with a bunch of artists,’ says Jones, ‘and they took a warehouse in Shoreditch in Holywell Lane and John took the basement.’ By the early Eighties, Shoreditch had seen little of the regeneration plans that were starting to reshape the likes of Covent Garden and Soho. With a still-regulated City locked into a pre-globalised financial market, the East End was a hushed environment after office hours at the weekend and one of the few areas of London that still contained bomb-damaged side streets. ‘Shoreditch was a desert then,’ says Jones. ‘It was pretty much empty. John put together this studio and I helped him on the technical side. He was trying to do something minimal and clean-lined. No crystals in glass cases or carpets on the wall and all that kind of thing – John’s very stylish, a trained graphic designer.’

The opening of the Garden studios drew the synthesiser scene’s more adventurous artists. ‘British Electric Foundation came there to do
Music of Quality and Distinction
, vol. 1’, says Jones ‘I remember hearing Tina Turner’s voice coming up from the basement.’

Miller and Depeche Mode were equally keen to explore the Garden’s possibilities and at Foxx’s suggestion invited Jones to become co-producer on the sessions. Jones, whose kaftan and
painted nails were at odds with the black-clad minimalism of the Mute aesthetic, was nevertheless hired. While completing a series of projects in between tracks for Miller and the band, Jones was spending increasing amounts of time in Berlin. Working with a series of Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW, New German Wave) bands, Jones had been using the city’s legendary Hansa Mischraum studios, or, as David Bowie christened it for ‘
Heroes
’, ‘Hansa by the Wall’, a state-of-the-art recording studio as rich in realpolitik as in shiny programmable equipment. Miller, paying a visit to Jones while in Berlin to see Nick Cave, realised the studio was also a cost-effective location for completing the Depeche Mode record.

‘The view from that building was roughly where the lookout towers were, very atmospheric,’ says Miller. ‘We worked it out that for the band to fly to Berlin, live and record in what at the time was one of the most high-tech studios in the world was cheaper than to do it all in London. It was half Gareth’s idea and half the fact that I was there with the Birthday Party.’

Having relocated to Berlin to regroup for what would be their last days as a band, the Birthday Party found themselves the toast of a city with a rich bohemian seam and squat culture that welcomed them as returning heroes and was able to attend to their every dissolute need. ‘The Birthday Party living in Berlin had a big impact on the music scene,’ says Miller. ‘Berlin already had some really interesting bands, Neubarten and Malaria and those kind of bands, but Nick being there was quite influential, then it changed really rapidly.’

‘The Deutschmark was cheap against the pound and Berlin was subsidised by the West German government,’ says Jones. ‘Loads of artists were in Berlin at the time … they still are … Recording Depeche there was really doable, and everyone loved it and then we ended up mixing three albums there back to back.’

Einstürzende Neubauten along with Non ensured Mute’s early release schedule was peppered with acts from the international electronic cutting edge (literally, in the case of Neubauten). Having connected with the group while in Berlin, Miller released Neubauten’s
Strategies Against Architecture
. A compilation of live performances and early tapes, the release was the band in their rawest state. The group’s use of plant hire, industrial soundscapes and collages of scrap machinery colliding into itself had an immediate influence on the newly relocated Depeche Mode.

‘I was working with Neubauten at the same time, so metal sampling was a big crossover thing,’ says Jones. ‘I introduced the samplers to Neubauten and then I introduced the metal noises to Depeche. I was a bridge between the two camps.’

‘We became friendly with Neubauten,’ say Miller, ‘even though I’d known them before … and Martin [Gore] got very friendly with Blixa, and Diamanda Galás was living there too.’

Hansa’s state-of-the-art outboard technology, the E-mu Emulator and the Synclavier, allowed keyboard-triggered samples and were programmed by the band’s newest and most technically gifted member, Alan Wilder, who had replaced Vince Clarke. Wilder, Miller and Jones were becoming hypnotised by the possibilities of Hansa’s equipment. Absorbed in the process of making an album from samples and the minutiae of time codes and programming, Miller, as producer, was the most integral and involved person in the studio. ‘Daniel did masses of synthesiser sound design. He was incredibly hands-on,’ says Jones ‘making sounds on synths, orchestrating and arranging Martin’s songs, he was doing all of that big time.’

However fertile and seductive the atmosphere in Hansa, Miller still had a record company to run and found his time severely divided. Back in London, Vince Clarke was repeating
his songwriting success with his new band Yazoo. Their debut album
Upstairs At Eric’s
had slowly climbed the charts, and was now at no. 2 in the Top Forty.

‘Yazoo was going through the roof during
Construction Time Again
,’ says Jones. ‘He was on the phone doing all this Yazoo stuff a lot of the time as well.’

As well as keeping an eye on the sales of
Upstairs At Eric’s
Miller’s time on the phone at Hansa was often spent on lengthy calls to Rough Trade, who were having problems with the success of the release.
Upstairs At Eric’s
may have only been Mute’s seventh album release, but for Rough Trade Distribution it was the biggest release they had ever had to handle. ‘The first Yazoo album did unbelievably well very quickly,’ says Miller, ‘and basically Rough Trade’s cash flow at the time didn’t allow them to pay us.’ With a hit on their hands Rough Trade, despite enjoying a record turnover, had lost control of their ledger and Mute was effectively paying for Rough Trade’s running costs against which the distributor ran up a substantial six-figure debt.

‘We were lucky, because we had another distributor as well, Spartan, and we were selling records internationally so it wasn’t like we were relying on Rough Trade 100 per cent for our livelihood, but it was a huge amount nevertheless,’ says Miller. ‘It didn’t actually put us in danger but it did make me cautious about lots of things … if I was a proper businessman I would’ve said, nice guys but I shouldn’t really work with them.’

Miller’s loyalty to Rough Trade would be tested again a few years later when the stakes for Mute and the entire Rough Trade enterprise would be even greater. Experiencing periodic crises in Rough Trade’s accounting was still, for all its successful label partners, the price worth paying for remaining independent.

As a producer and a director of a record company, Miller found himself torn between the attempt to harness the vision
and creativity of the band and the market realities of releasing the record once it had been completed. ‘Obviously I was
flip-flopping
,’ he says, ‘wearing my record company hat and wearing my co-producer hat … two very different hats, often there was a dialogue when I was basically arguing with myself.’

Though putting him under considerable strain as both the band’s producer and MD of their record company, Miller’s relationship with Depeche Mode flourished. As someone at the heart of their recordings, he was sensitive to their ideas and steered the band away from their early synth pop into a darker and more experimental identity. A normal record company might have fired an A&R for such acts of commercial suicide – turning a chart band into something weird. The luxury of Miller and Depeche Mode’s relationship ensured they could bypass such considerations and attempt to define success on their own mutually agreed terms. Miller, true to his idea of Mute being a partnership between label and artist, was happy to risk creative expression over the fix of a quick hit.

‘With Depeche particularly, I ended up doing things as a record company which if I hadn’t been involved in the studio I probably would not have done,’ says Miller, ‘and I think, on reflection, that was probably a good thing. We often put out tracks that were not very commercial as a first single. That actually did us a lot of good but probably didn’t make a lot of sense as a record company decision. It was one small part of the many things that’s kept them going, that we didn’t always go for the commercial jugular straight out of the box.’