Das englischsprachige "Music and culture magazine PLAN B" führte anlässlich der Veröffentlichung der MUTE BOX ein Interview mit Daniel Miller. Viel Spass beim Lesen !

Words: Louis Pattison

DANIEL MILLER



In 1977, a London film school graduate acquired a budget synthesiser and made a record that would plot a vector for the future of electronic pop. Plan B meets Daniel Miller, voice of The Normal and Silicon Teens, and architect of Mute Records.

In these archival pieces, you're supposed to start by wondering how some specific seminal tracksounded back in the dark days of 19-blahdy-blah.Not necessary here. I’ll bet you the debut seven inch by The Normal, ‘TVOD/Warm Leatherette’ –released in an initial run of 500 in 1977, on what at the time was somewhat ambitiously named Mute Records – surely sounds as stark, and as terrifying, and as exciting today as it ever did.

On ‘TVOD’, primitive percussion cracks like a chain across your back, as a desiccated voice relates a Tetsuo-style body horror nightmare:“I don’t need a TV screen/Just stick the aerial into my vein”. ‘Warm Leatherette’ is better still. Based ~on JG Ballard’s 1973 techno-porn novel Crash, it’s a landmark in electronic deviancy: human coitus conducted in the cocoon of a mangled vehicle, a fantasy salvaged from the wreckage-strewn lay-by of the human unconscious.

The voice of The Normal was a film school graduate from London named Daniel Miller. Miller, a twenty-something Krautrock fan, was not your obvious candidate for a road-to-Damascus punk conversion. More accurately, the creation of The Normal can be attributed to the collision of two independent factors: the new economy of DIY labels, as practised by The Buzzcocks, Scritti Politti, et al; and the new availability of a budget synthesiser, the Korg 700.

The Normal would only last the one single, but the shockwaves from ‘TVOD/Warm Leatherette’ reshaped Mute Records from conceptual fantasy to production line reality. It became the home of several early synthesizer visionaries – Fad Gadget, Robert Rental, occultist noise villain Boyd Rice – and, come Mute’s second generation, a broader dynasty of extremists, rock refuseniks and eventually, global pop stars.

Late March 2007. Sat in a fresh office overlooking the soon-to-be-demolished Hammersmith Palais in west London, the 56-year old Daniel Miller appears – as any still-successful label boss must –not overly preoccupied with the past. Right now, he’s enamoured by London’s Underage Club, an under-18s club run by Barry Seven from Add N To X and his 14-year-old son Sam at the Coronet Theatre in Elephant And Castle.

“There’s this band called Pull In Emergency who are just about to put out a seven-inch record,”he beams. “They’re 13-, 14-year-old kids, and they’re in touch with bands their age all over the world.”

Unusually for a committed forward-thinker, Miller doesn’t see a kid picking up something as lumpen as a guitar and yawn that it’s all been done before. Rather, he’s fascinated in the power of generational shifts – or more accurately, knows the real future is slippery and uncharitable: it shapes itself.

“Kids don’t seem to care about when a record was made, or how old the band is. They don’t care what genre it is or how the people in it met.” He grins. “You know, Suicide always goes down really well in the clubs. I’m serious. It’s very encouraging.”

So that’s the future. Let’s talk about the past.

You put your address on The Normal sleeve.What sort of mail did you get? Did anyone pickup the deviant, sexual angle?

“Sadly, no – almost from day one, I got fucking demos! That was the shocking thing, because Ididn’t see myself as a record company. I was a blokewho put out a record.”

But presumably in some way it appealed?

“Initially, no. I thought I was going to press 500and go round a few shops like Rough Trade and Small Wonder and just sell them a couple of boxes each. But I went into Rough Trade, saw Geoff Travis and Richard [Scott, of Rough Trade’s distribution arm > and played it to them to see if they wanted tobuy it. They offered to distribute it, and they said I should press 2,000. There was a writer called Jane Suck who worked for Sounds. She got hold of one of the white labels I’d left there, and reviewed it as Single Of The Century, and I was just like ‘Fucking hell, what’s going on?’

“Then I met a guy called Robert Rental at a Throbbing Gristle gig. I’d heard his single and some body introduced us. Separately, we wer e both offered a gig on the first post-punk electronic bill with Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire.

"Neither of us felt like doing a solo gig, so we thought we’d do it together. A while later, Edwin Pouncey – or Savage Pencil, the cartoonist at theNME at the time– introduced me to Fad Gadget, who shared a flat with him. His demos were the first I guess Mute became a label when I decided to work with someone else. When I went into the studio with Frank [Tovey, Fad Gadget > to record‘Back To Nature’, it was the first time I’d been in a recording studio.”

Was there a schism between the people who wanted to use synthesiser technology for synth-pop, and the people who wanted to use it to explore, for want of a better word, noise?

“I think there was more of a schism between people who wanted to use synths in any format, and people who hated them. There was a big schism at Rough Trade in the late Seventies. There were two journalists who represented each camp, John Savage and Ian Penman. On one side was Penman, and that musically intricate Scritti Politti, This Heat side of things. And then on the other side was Savage, and Throbbing Gristle and all that. “

"There’s always schisms, though, isn’t there? Because everyone is libertarian and left-wingish, and that area of thinking is always prone to splits. Boyd Rice [of noise outfit NON > , for instance, was a huge pop fan. Loved pop music. Throbbing Gristle, those guys – there were never any issues about it. I did the Silicon Teens project [Mute’s teenage synth band, actually a Miller pseudonym > ;we also had Depeche Mode – and they thought it was fucking great. They may not have liked the music particularly, but they were like, this is cool.If we’d been doing jazzy bass lines and reggae rhythms, there would have been a problem.”

William Bennett of Whitehouse credits you with giving him his first synth…

“I met him while he was still in Essential Logic while I was on a Rough Trade package tour with Essential Logic and Stiff Little Fingers. He really wanted to learn about electronic music and stuff like that. Shortly after the tour finished he left the band and made his first record [Come’s ‘Come Sunday/Shaved Slits’ > , and I played some synth on it.I’ve followed their career, on and off. I remember him as looking like Marc Bolan, or something – a bit of a flower child, with long curly hair. It was a very out-of-place look at the time. He was very young, still finding his way.”

industrial revolutions

The early Eighties was the era of Rock AgainstRacism, but bands like DAF and Laibach purposefully played with Fascist or political iconography. Did you have pressure put on you by movements like RAR?

“I didn’t really. Obviously, we weren’t part of Rock Against Racism. And obviously, I supported the principle of it, if not necessarily the method.Later on, there were people who demonstrated outside NON gigs, and they handed out leaflets which were full of lies, and they actually managed to get one gig closed down. I generally have a very libertarian view. Rough Trade, at one point, got very politically correct – overly politically correct for my tastes. I think they banned a Whitehouse record. It was their right to do so, of course, but I didn’t agree with that at all.”

It’s hard to explain the appeal of something like Whitehouse, I think…you either get it or you don’t.

“Well, yes…what can you say? [gestures up at a poster of Laibach, done out in Fascistic regalia >. I suppose it was definitely an anti-corporate thing – at the time we were militantly anti-major. Which I think was healthy at the time, and maybe is still now. Obviously I’m not anti-major because I’m part of a major, but it’s probably still a good attitude totake, as it’s how you forge your own path.”

So what are the politics of Mute?

“It’s complicated. I came from somewhere politically that didn’t necessarily relate to how Mute was politically.I was very involved with student politics. I’ve been political all my life. I was a member of Anti-Apartheid when I was 12. I went to college at the time of the student uprising, and we were on strike a lot of the time. But I didn’t carry a lot of it forward with me. You know, I haven’t necessarily figured out a lot of it myself yet.”

You never really do, do you ?

“I have very strong political beliefs, and they’ve developed over the years. What’s that thing Ken Livingstone said? He came up with a great quote along the lines of, ‘It’s a really good thing to change your opinion’.”

That’s good. It shows flexibility of thinking.

“Sure. The whole political side is interesting, but I haven’t really talked about it that much, not to my contemporaries. It’d be interesting to look at figures like Tony Wilson and Geoff Travis, and have that political discussion again, because I’m not so conscious of it any more. I’ve become more politicised in the last 10 years, simply because of the change in the political climate. All the debates are about nothing these days. There are only two political parties, and the difference between them is slight nuances in their green policy, which is so abstract anyway.”

very friendly

How close are you to your artists? In the Eighties, a lot of Mute’s bands – The Birthday Party, Einstürzende Neubaten, for example – were people on the fringes of society. How did you equate that with the responsibilities of being a label boss?

“The bands that came through that period, that were on the edge, always had members of the band that were more grounded.I don’t think The Birthday Party could have really existed without Mick Harvey, who was kind of the rock – he was Nick Cave’s collaborator, they’d known each other since they were kids. Even Blixa [Bargeld >, for all his kind of outsiderness, he’s actually a very pragmatic, practical German businessman.Me personally, I’m often in the same space as those people on a personal level – I would find it pretty rigorous to hang out with some of them, but on a professional level somehow we’ve managed to get through.”

When you first met Depeche Mode, did you anticipate their future trajectory?

“Of course not. They were obviously a pop band, and I suppose I thought they could be successful. The thing that appealed to me, they were part of the next generation. There was the generation that was me, The Human League, Cabaret Voltaire – we’d been to art school, we’d read Ballard and Phillip K Dick, we were knowing. But this lot were 17, 18, and their references were The Human League, The Normal. They were kids who had £100 and bought a synthesiser, not a guitar. That, to me, was revolutionary. I’d imagined it – that was the idea of the Silicon Teens, and Depeche were the realisation of that idea. They were a great pop band, I thought. But obviously I had no idea – you don’t beyond getting the next lot of records pressed.”

Which Mute artists do you feel were overlooked?

“Fad Gadget was overlooked, really. He was known, but the commercial success he could have had passed him by. Maybe it was too early. Maybe he changed too quickly. He was reinventing all the time, too fast for the audience. Yazoo certainly weren’t overlooked. Nick Cave certainly wasn’t overlooked. Boyd Rice was probably looked at just about the right amount.” [laughs >

Are you still often in contact with Boyd?

“Oh yes, he’s still on the label. He’s a tiki consultant now. ‘Tiki’ – it’s this sort of Hawaaiian, South Sea islands aesthetic. He took over the bar of the Radisson hotel in Denver and turned it into a tiki bar, everyone drinking out of coconuts and really bizarre cocktails. Boyd still makes tons of music and he’s a great guy. He hasn’t changed really – he’s a sweet guy with a great sense of humour.”

That’s funny to hear, given his public persona…

“When people are performing, they aren’t always themselves. That’s not the point. I mean, it’s part of them, it’s not acting – that’s important, there’s some artists who you get the impression are just acting – but that’s not Boyd. I’ve always said that people’s sense of humour is always in direct proportion to the darkness of the music they make. You can have such a laugh with Laibach, and with Boyd, and with Nick. The dark, bone-dry Australian humour, the Eastern European prankster-ish word play – you've got to remember Laibach grew up under a Communist regime, so they've learnt all about how to use words, how to play with words, twist things in a funny way."

You can still get away with stuff in literature that’s forbidden in music.

“That’s because it’s considered low art. Pop music is, anyway. People can’t always see those extra dimensions.If it’s pop it’s got one dimension, so therefore if you’re wearing a Nazi uniform you must be a Nazi. But if you’re an actor standing on a stage in a Nazi uniform, you’re not a Nazi. You know what I mean?”

It’s also to do with rock’s obsession with authenticity, being ‘real’…

“Like, authentic to what? It’s bollocks really. For me, my family were all refugees to this country before the war.They came from Austria, they were actors, and they were very into satire. That had a bit influence on me. My father was a Jew, but he had no qualms about putting on a Nazi uniform, if it was an acting job, and he did it with humour.I hate authenticity. I think we were going to do some sort of ‘Inauthentic for 25 years – Mute Records’ logo.”

Mute are releasing a 10CD compilation,Mute Audio Documents, which compiles the label’s first six years of singles.

You get a weird feeling listening to it: not how much the label has changed, but how much it’s stayed the same. How echoes of viciousness and lust, fizzing wires and the strange frequencies still ripple through the most recent Mute releases – Throbbing Gristle’s The Endless Not, Maps’ We Can Create, Motor’s Unhuman.

This, here, is fake DIY: inauthentic ‘til death.