Category: Missing In Action (Page 2 of 4)

Missing In Action: MARK WHITE & STEPHEN SINGLETON

While ABC continues today as a live entity under the captaincy of Martin Fry, that longevity might not have been possible without the band’s co-founders Mark White and Stephen Singleton.

White and Singleton had been members of the Sheffield experimental electronic act VICE VERSA who had released the EP ‘Music 4’; Fry joined after interviewing them for his fanzine ‘Modern Drugs’.

As they absorbed wider influences, especially ones centred around the dancefloor, they morphed into ABC, eventually releasing ‘The Lexicon Of Love’ in Summer 1982 to great critical acclaim and commercial success.

Mark White and Stephen Singleton agreed to chat about their ABC days to give another perspective to the story…

VICE VERSA were a very manifesto driven band, were ABC the same?

Mark: It wasn’t manifesto-ish, but we did have a kind of plot. We wanted to have a really strong central character who was just ‘Mr. Heartache’ so that was the kind of plot.

So was that why Martin was on the sleeves and artwork, just him in a David Sylvian in JAPAN type of way?

Stephen: We felt it was really important to have a focal point like the way that Bryan Ferry was the focal point of ROXY MUSIC. That’s the way we went with the sleeves of ‘Tears Are Not Enough’ and ‘Poison Arrow’. In the same way that on ‘The Lexicon Of Love’, there’s Martin, the girl and the gun on the stage and then the reverse of that is the engine room of that with Mark with the flowers, with me sat there like the director and David Palmer like a caretaker.

Mark: We always had a strong sense of wanting it be filmic and even with the music, we just loved John Barry’s scores for Bond and we wanted the album to have that kind of scale.

Can you tell us about the role of Anne Dudley on ‘The Lexicon of Love’?

Mark: Anne was brought in as a session keyboard player, I think she did all of Trevor’s work with THE BUGGLES.

Stephen: Yes, she came in to do some keyboards on ‘Poison Arrow’ which was the first thing that we recorded with Trevor Horn. The next one we started to record was ‘The Look of Love’ and we liked that John Barry sound and the kind of pizzicato strings on Adam Faith. We wanted to use real strings but at first, Trevor was like “oh no, string players are a nightmare” and “I don’t want to do that, we can use a string machine”.

So I took down an Adam Faith album and I said it’s never going to sound like this. So he said “ok, we’ll do it” and fortunately ‘Poison Arrow’ was a big hit, so the record company said “OK, you can do strings on ‘The Look of Love’.”

Mark: That’s a fantastic experience just being in the room when an orchestra is playing your song, it’s really moving, I genuinely felt moved to tears. It was “oh my God!”

Stephen: Anne did the string arrangements for that and we were totally blown away by it. Then it was “can we put strings on this one? Can we put strings on that one?”

Mark: Well to my shame, when we’d recorded ‘All of My Heart’ and it had all been done, I was like “yeah, that sounds great!”. But Trevor said “no, Mark, strings, strings on that one”. He literally said “it’ll be a Top 10”. I was dubious and wanted it in writing so I said “OK Trevor will you sign this then?” and he said “absolutely!” and he was right!

Going from ‘Poison Arrow’ to ‘The Look of Love’, there was definitely a move towards classic pop. Of course when you started ‘Tears Are Not Enough’ probably got lumped in with that New Funk thing that was going on. There was SPANDAU BALLET with ‘Chant No.1’, HAIRCUT 100 to a lesser extent with ‘Favourite Shirts’ and the more art funk stuff like 23 SKIDOO, A CERTAIN RATIO, that kind of thing.

Mark: I call it White Scratch Funk.

However with yourselves, SPANDAU BALLET and HAIRCUT 100, it was only one-off singles. It was a sound you didn’t really touch again?

Mark: You’re right, we didn’t take that any further. We wanted to be a lot more epic and on a much greater scale, you know this filmic idea. I mean Trevor couldn’t understand why we’d approached him at all. He was like “but you’ve got this white funk record already in the charts, what am I going to do?”; so we played him a few things and he was like “oh, I can do that”.

Stephen: We’d got into this idea that we wanted to do this kind of James Brown thing and took the inspiration from that and that was the kind of first incarnation of ABC. It was that scratchy guitar and the brass and everything and we were playing gigs round London doing that style. And then people like HAIRCUT 100 came down to see us play our early gigs and then ran away and did the same thing!

It became a bit of movement and Spandau wanted to go in that direction as well. The first Spandau thing was more synth based with Gary Kemp on synth. I think everybody then was like “oh my God, we need to get on this particular sound”. We then wanted to move away from that… we met Trevor and he was like “why do you need me to produce you?”. We said that we wanted it to sound slick, we wanted it to sound amazing. We’d moved away from that funky, simple style…

Mark: We thought we sounded like CHIC and we so didn’t!

That comes later in 1987 doesn’t it when you work with Bernard Edwards on ‘The Night You Murdered Love’? ?

Stephen: CHIC were a big influence, me and Mark went to see CHIC play at the Sheffield City Hall and at the time were doing VICE VERSA. We saw them and it was like “oh my God, that is so amazing!” We went to the gig and everybody is sat down watching. Me and Mark had bought these tickets which were at the edge of the stage but restricted view, cheapy things and we were there and we’d watched about two or three songs and we were like “oh f*** this, we’ve got to f***ing dance! We can’t sit down!” And so we got up and we were like at the front of the City Hall and people were like “Sit down! Sit down!”.

Nile Rogers came to the edge of the stage and shook our hands and said “these guys know what CHIC is all about” and let everybody get up and dance. We were there and it was like (*int Northern accent*) “Move out of way! We’re trying to watch band!”

Mark: The concert was so good, they did two shows that evening….

Stephen: We went back to see the second show as well.

Mark: We came out of it, bought a ticket at the box office and watched it all again, it was that good!

Stephen: There was another thing, there was an ULTRAVOX gig like that in Sheffield, it was on the 21st of September 1978.

Mark: At The Limit….

Stephen: I know that because there’s this guy who is an ULTRAVOX completist and he wanted to know if they had played in Sheffield, so I was thinking “yes they did, they played at The Limit”. So I consulted my diary from 1978…

Mark: That black book, it’s incredible…

Stephen: The entry said “ULTRAVOX, Limit, very good! I may now go to Manchester to see them play”. Looking back on that period, the day before, THE STRANGLERS had played at the Top Rank and THE SKIDS were going to support, but THE SKIDS got on ‘Top of the Pops’ so THE HUMAN LEAGUE stepped up and did that gig. So one night I was seeing THE  STRANGLERS and THE HUMAN LEAGUE, you would have been there as well am sure. ULTRAVOX did the two gigs at The Limit because so many people wanted to see them, they were just becoming more noticed…

Mark: Was this the John Foxx era?

Stephen: Yeah. So they were scheduled to do one show, there were so many people outside that club that they filled the club, did the show and then said to everybody “you’ve got to go home to let in the second lot of people”.

I hid in the toilet so I that didn’t get thrown out! It was like (*knock, knock*) “Is there anybody in there?” and I’ve got my feet up… I’ve got a mine of information with the diaries of who we went to see. CHIC were a big influence, they said they saw ROXY MUSIC and wanted to be the black ROXY MUSIC and we saw them and wanted to be the white CHIC didn’t we?

Where do you stand on the two different versions of ‘Tears Are Not Enough”? ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK still favours the Steve Brown single version over the album version…..

Mark: I will be honest, I skip that track. It was really hard to make it fit on the album…

Stephen: We were trying to make it fit in on the album. Trevor didn’t want to re-record it, he thought that wasn’t the right thing to do. The best version of it that we did was a version that we re-recorded for ‘Swap Shop’. The weird thing was when we recorded ‘Tears Are Not Enough’ with Steve Brown, it took f***ing ages to do, we’d not been in a big studio before and we wanted it to sound perfect of course. We were in there and we didn’t have the ability to make it really sound like how we wanted it to sound.

Mark: We just wished we’d known about the Linn Drum…..

Stephen: We’d spent so long trying to record it, it took us ages and ages to get all the parts down…

Mark: It was nervous breakdown time wasn’t it?

Stephen: It wasn’t at all enjoyable. Then we got offered the chance to go on ‘Swap Shop’, re-recorded it and it took about half an hour to do and it sounded better than the 7” single version because by that time, we’d got David Palmer in on drums which made a huge difference. We’d learned more, we’d gone through that process, that baptism of fire of being in a great big recording studio with the microscope over you and we went to RAK  Studios and did it in pretty much in one take.

And then had the brass players come down and do their bits. It was all done really, really quickly. But, originally recording ‘Tears Are Not Enough’ was not a lot of fun really for all of us. Apart from Mark, he was like “I’ll do my guitar now… chhk, chhk, chhk”, one take “I’ve finished!” It was a difficult, a learning curve for us. Steve Brown wasn’t really the best producer for us.

Mark: Up to this day, I don’t why we ended up with him. Do you?

Stephen: No, I think it was a recommendation from the record company.

He was known for some of the funk pop stuff, because he ended up doing WHAM!

Stephen: He did WHAM! Because George Michael was a massive ABC fan and wanted to sound like ABC, so then he went with Steve Brown.

Mark: We get a namecheck on a George Michael album don’t we? He was talking about London in that period and he namechecks ABC and maybe THE STYLE COUNCIL or something?

Stephen: THE JAM and that kind of thing… we had a friend called Mark Dean who had actually worked with WHAM! and we were down at Mark Dean’s house in Bushey and we met WHAM! who went to London clubs and they’d seen ABC and they wanted to meet up with us.

Mark Dean said “oh, my mates are going to come over and meet you”. So me and Martin met George and Andrew at Mark Dean’s house where we’d gone down to stay the night. Andrew said “George, play them that song we’ve been working on” and there’s a piano in Mark Dean’s house and George played ‘Careless Whisper’. And I was like “have you written that?” and he said “yeah, yeah” and I was like “are you sure?” *laughs*

I was thinking it was like a COMMODORES track that I’d not heard and he was going “no, no, I’ve written it!” and I was like “is that like one of the best songs I’ve heard or absolutely sh*te?!” I couldn’t really work it out, is he a genius or am I totally wrong on this?

Mark: He was famous for working really quickly though George, I worked with a keyboard player that he used, and George would say “just leave me alone, give me an hour” and he would come back and there’s practically a finished hit record there, a phenomenal speed of working…

What about the ABC songwriting process, was there a set method?

Mark: Jamming! Because it was band based then really….

Stephen: We were doing a VICE VERSA tour in Holland as our mate Mike Pickering had moved over to Holland. We stayed at Mike’s house and we met these guys who had a record shop and studio in Rotterdam and they were like “come with us to our studio…”

Mark: This was a key moment, because we’d got some unrecorded VICE VERSA songs that we’d been playing live… it came out as a single on Backstreet with ‘Stilyagi’ backed with ‘Eyes of Christ’.

Stephen: When we first went to the studio they were going “record something!” and we were like, “erm, well we use synthesizers and we can’t really do that”. But Martin was like “oh no, come on let’s make some music”, so I’d picked up a bass guitar and there was a little drum machine there. Mark picked up the guitar and we just started jamming round….

Mark: I remember we’d heard that Bowie had done some of the ‘Lodger’ album by just suggesting that everybody swapped their instruments and we thought ok we’ll do that. So it was like, Martin, why don’t you sing? We hadn’t heard him sing before and I don’t think he even knew he could and we just went “what the hell was that?!”

Stephen: He was just ad libbing things, vocal ideas, we were like, this is fantastic! And that was the kind of inspiration for Mark to step down from doing vocals.

Mark: This has never happened in pop I resigned as the lead singer! I’m still waiting for my OBE, it’s not forthcoming. As far as I know, it’s never happened before in history! *laughs*

Ah, Vince Clarke stepped down as vocalist for Dave Gahan in what became DEPECHE MODE…

Stephen: We’d met Martin who’d come to interview us and we kind of dragged him into being in the band. It was like “don’t worry about anything Martin, you stand at the side, you don’t have to do much. Just hit the keyboard, it’s a synthesizer, we’ll set it to white noise, and you go ‘Tish! Tish!’”.

Mark: He came to interview us for his fanzine ‘Modern Drugs’ but we both just looked at each other and said “we’re doing a gig in Middleborough in ten days time Martin, would you fancy just being in the band?” To which his reply was “but I don’t play an instrument!” *laughs*

Stephen: It doesn’t matter does it?

Mark: Literally, it was the punk age and it didn’t matter. Ok, look we’ve got a little oscillator, we’ll hook it up to a WEM Copicat and just make funny noises and it’ll be great! Am so glad we did that…

Stephen: So we did this tape in Holland and then thought this is really good and interesting, let’s work along that line and we looked for a drummer and bass player. Because we thought that Martin’s voice wouldn’t really suit the synthesized sound, we wanted that more organic sound and there was a house in Sheffield that Martin lived in with a guy called Disco John who was a DJ. The house was practically derelict…

Mark: …it was like a Coronation Street row of terraces…

Stephen: …which were due to be knocked down…

Mark: …in post-Industrial Sheffield, just all falling apart and there were just loads of places to rehearse and I’m sure that’s why so much came out of Sheffield in that period. You could get the most incredible rehearsal room for nothing!

Stephen: Martin lived there with John and in the dining room, there was his sound system and decks and we’d go into the other little room. And the way we started was just by going in there every day and just jamming around on ideas and learning to play whilst John would be practicing his DJ stuff.

Mark: The neighbours must have hated us! And then we’d go and watch THE HUMAN LEAGUE on ‘Top Of The Pops’ doing ‘The Sound Of The Crowd’… and we were like “Ooh! They’ve done alright haven’t they actually…..”

Stephen: That’s how it was. It was that kind of learning curve of playing around with ideas and thinking “this is quite a good idea, this could be a chorus” and then we’d write something else. It was like “hang on, the chorus of this song, this could be a verse” and we’d be like chopping and changing and fusing them together. We’d write lots of different things and go through this process of elimination; it was a learning process…

Mark: Teaching ourselves how to do it….

Stephen: We listened to a lot of Motown, the way they would put things together and Martin was a big fan of Smokey Robinson.

Mark: Around that time, we must have been crazy, we thought we’d be able to do both concepts at the same time; like continue VICE VERSA and the other side project that we’d already started calling ABC.

Stephen: We had different names, the first was RADICAL DANCE FACTION and there actually is a band called that now. I think it’s possible they stole that! Then Martin had this idea of music being a drug: “don’t take drugs, listen to music, don’t drink, don’t smoke, music should be the drug, music is a vitamin”, then we were thinking VITAMIN Z but there’s also a band that came out called VITAMIN Z.

Funnily enough, the singer of VITAMIN Z is now the manager of ARCTIC MONKEYS!

Stephen:  We were kind of like selling off these names to different bands so it was “let’s call it VITAMIN ABC”. And I was thinking, “it’s ok but why don’t we just call it ABC?”, then we’re not saying we’re a dance faction or whatever. We’re saying it’s just a name that would fit everything. Then we added the three stars to it, so it’s ABC, it’s got a logo, there’s three little stars, that’s the bands’ name and then it could be all encompassing, that’s how we did it.

The first gig we did was at Psalter Lane Art College, our friends came to see us and we’d been rehearsing the new band so we didn’t know what people would think.

But we knew when we did that first gig that it must be good, because our friends who before when we were VICE VERSA had being going “oh yeah, I like what you do”, were going “f*** me, this is f***ing amazing! It’s f***ing brilliant!”.

There were people screaming at the first gig. People were talking, “oh my God, they’re doing something different now and they’re playing guitars and it’s funky…”

Mark: Then all the record companies were chasing us, which is just the best situation you can have. You get the ridiculous situation of a massive black limo turning up, and it was the boss of CBS and Muff Winwood was there as well…

Stephen: …Dave Betteridge and Muff Winwood…

Mark: …outside this tiny little Coronation Street tumbling down house and this limo strolls up!

Stephen: At that point we’d got absolutely nothing, we were on the dole, no money whatsoever.

Mark: We would pay ourselves in cash, remember those old little brown envelopes? Where you got your wages. What were we on? £35 a week?

Stephen: When we signed the deal, we were like “we’ve got to make the money last…”

Mark: When we were on ‘Top Of The Pops’, we were getting £35 per week. Even when we went on tour after a couple of hits, we couldn’t afford the room service! *laughs*

Stephen: Yeah, we were on £50 a week then…

Mark: We gave ourselves a pay rise up to £50!

Stephen: When Muff Winwood came up to Sheffield and we played him ‘Poison Arrow’, he was saying “that’s a hit, that is, amazing!”, that’s we thought we’re really onto something.

Ok, so you’ve got your songs written for ‘The Lexicon of Love’ and you’re working with Trevor Horn. It was a happier time than working with Steve Brown?

Mark: Oh, absolutely fantastic… well I think Trevor would be the first to say that he needs songs to work with and I think that’s why he took the project on. He could hear things we couldn’t hear. But at that point, he’d not got into the habit of recording the whole thing and scrapping it and starting again. It wasn’t like that was it?

There’s a video of THE BUGGLES performing ‘Lenny’ with ABC as the backing band, how did that come about?

Mark: ‘Tears Are Not Enough’ had already been a hit and we were recording ‘Poison Arrow’ at that time. Trevor said “I’ve got a single out in Holland and they’ve asked me to appear, would you like to be a Buggle for a day?” and we were just up for a laugh. Stephen was doing a brilliant Mick Karn on that, check that out, the Mick Karn moves are all there! *laughs*

Mick Karn was your boy crush wasn’t he Stephen?

Stephen: Yeah, yeah, definitely, one of them! The song was called ‘Lenny’, the reason why it was a hit is because there’s a DJ in Holland called Lenny who made it his theme tune. I think we all wore sunglasses or something; that was a lot of fun. I don’t think the bass was plugged in though and what I was doing would bear any relation to the song! *laughs*

Mark: A short while ago by pure chance I met a girl singer, she said “Mark, we’ve got a connection! I sang on ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’”; I said are you the “woah, woah, woah” girl? She said “no, the other bit” when it all breaks down and she sings “…star, a radio star…”, so we were all sat on a sofa three ex-BUGGLES all in the room at the same time, it’s one for the books!

Trevor Horn is notorious, so how much does it become his album and how much control did you guys have?

Stephen: We’d got a lot of songs which we thought were going to make up the album and Trevor refused to work on them. There were a lot of songs that we’d been playing live and he was like “You know what? This just isn’t good enough”. We were going like “F*** you! What do you mean it’s not good enough?”.

But it inspired us and I remember him saying “You know what you need on this album, you need a ballad”. And we were going “A ballad? What do you think we are? We’re not going to do a ballad”. But we were inspired to go back… we were back in Sheffield for the weekend. We went down to our rehearsal room, then Mark came into the rehearsal room saying “You know he was going on about like he wants to write a ballad for us, well I’ve got this idea…”

Mark: ‘All of My Heart’…

Stephen: It was just the first little bit of ‘All of My Heart’, so we wrote it and went back to Sarm East and said “right, you wanted a ballad, we’ve written one”. There were a lot of things in the studio that were written and created in the studio.

‘Valentine’s Day’ was an entirely different song, it was called ‘Surrender’ and that went through a major overhaul. It was written in the studio and Martin heard the different direction of the way the music was going and wrote a totally different set of lyrics.

So it was very fresh and Trevor’s thing was the quality control on the songs. He pushed us up that notch, but things weren’t done over months, it was quick. Things changed for Trevor later on when he started spending a lot more time doing things.

With us, it was like “we’re going to put the piano on it, it’s done. We’re going to put some percussion on it, it’s done. We’ll do the vocals, they’re done”. It wasn’t a massively laborious process. It couldn’t, be there wasn’t much of a budget and time to do it.

The gestation time for all of this, from ‘Tears Are Not Enough’ to ‘The Lexicon Of Love’ coming out, it’s only about four months, something like that? That’s nothing today!

Stephen: The album was recorded over a period of about three months…

Mark: Mostly at Sarm East……

Stephen: And at that time when we were recording it, we were also promoting ‘Tears Are Not Enough’.

Mark: Everybody we were working with then was on top of their game, the studio team became THE ART OF NOISE; Trevor, Anne, Gary Langan and JJ Jeczalik the Fairlight programmer.

Stephen: The thing that Trevor could do… we’d say to him “we want to sound like something you’d hear in the American charts, like a DARYL HALL & JOHN OATES. We want it to sound incredible, we don’t want it to sound like some indie funk band, we want to take it further”.

Trevor as a producer knew these people who he could draft in. We didn’t know anybody did we? We didn’t know who the best person to play keyboards on it…

Mark: He knew really top quality musicians, he’d go “you want congas? Oh yeah, I know a guy!”

Stephen: In a way. it was a first for all of us because it was the first album apart from ‘Adventures in Modern Recording’ which was his own, he produced that album, that’s where he said how he learned his craft. It was a kind of a Trevor solo album in a way.

Mark: Before us, all he’d done was THE BUGGLES and DOLLAR…..

Stephen: …and he’d done THE JAGS…. ‘Back of My Hand’ was another one that he’d worked on, that he was very proud of. So it was a first for a lot of people and everybody was excited. These things happen where everybody is in the right place at the right time… boom!

Mark: We’d also had a really good A&R man, Chris Briggs, he just got it….

Stephen: Another important person at time was Jill Sinclair, who was Trevor’s wife. She would go in to Phonogram and say “look, you’ve got to do a video for this, this is going to be huge”.

Mark: She could kick butt…

Stephen: She kicked ass on behalf of us and on behalf of Trevor of course. I’d be going in there asking “can we have some badges made?” and they’d be saying “Hmmm, I don’t know, I don’t know if there’s a budget for that…” The problem was we were trying to manage ourselves at that time and we were going into Phonogram, seeing if we could get a budget to get a nice photographer or do a promo tour or whatever. So that was extremely useful.

The band very much embraced the video promo era, for ‘All of My Heart’, the director was more well known for his photography wasn’t he?

Mark: It was a guy called Brian Duffy who took the picture for Bowie’s ‘Aladdin Sane’ cover….

What are your memories of that video, Centre Point is in it a one point?

Mark: That’s the star of the show really! *laughs*

Stephen: I think that video was pants, crap! *laughs*

The idea that we had was that we would perform the song on a revolving stage and that would be it. Duffy wanted to use it as a showreel for getting into commercials, so there’s a plug being pulled out of the wall and blood coming down and a rose…

Mark: The trouble is, it’s so bloody expensive to make film and we never had the budgets really.

Stephen: Duffy was a great person, a great personality, really interesting but I just thought it wasn’t very good…

Mark: The difference between video and film is with video, when you record it, if you don’t like it, you go “oh, wrong idea, let’s try again”. With film, you’re committed to it and often they’re coming up with these incredible treatments and oh boy, can they sell them! They make it sound like it’s going to be ‘Gone With The Wind’ and it never is! *laughs*


‘The Look of Love’ video is awful! What are your thoughts on that?

Mark: I think that caused Trevor to nearly have a nervous breakdown. In fact he’s on record as saying “oh, f***ing hell, I’m going to have to start my own record company!”.

Stephen: I thought ‘Poison Arrow’ was great…

Mark: Julian Temple did that one…

Stephen: That fitted in with the whole concept of the band, had a story to it and was executed correctly, the kind of Technicolor aspect to it, the whole style. It had some humour in it. With ‘The Look of Love’ it was like everybody was taking us really seriously, let’s do something that’s a bit fun and it turned out like an outtake from a Benny Hill show, and as Mark said, you’re committed, you do this stuff and then you see it and you think… oh, ok!

Mark: The way the treatment was presented to us, it made it sound like it was going to be like ‘An American In Paris’, that’s how it was sold to us.

Stephen: Martin loved ‘An American In Paris’ and he was going, “that will be great!” and it ended up being a joke…

Mark: It’s deeply upsetting and you can’t do anything about it, because it’s done and already cost you a fortune.

Stephen: The Brian Duffy one ‘All of my Heart’, I thought was going to be a little bit like THE POLICE one where they had all the candles and everything…

‘Wrapped Around Your Finger’?

Stephen: Yeah, the revolving dias, with us there, Mark playing piano and I think I was going to be playing tubular bells. That’s in there for like a millisecond and then it’s back to Martin walking under the bridge, and then some girl there holding a box of chocolates. It’s like “What the f***! What the f*** is this?” *laughs*

But that’s what happened. I think that what we did when we appeared on television programs for ‘The Look of Love’, we did the dance routine, we said “let’s do this, let’s give it THE FOUR TOPS treatment”, we loved all that stuff. That was more in keeping with what we were about and it probably worked better as a video. At the time, the costs of those videos, was like “I can buy a semi-detached house for that”.

OK, let’s talk about ‘Mantrap’? We’ll get our coats? *laughs*

Mark: Ok, turn the tape off! Can you shut them up? *laughs*

Was the link into ‘Mantrap’ as a result of Julien Temple working on ‘Poison Arrow’?

Mark: ‘Mantrap’ should have been left as a live video, simple, just film the concert… no, everybody’s got these, want to be a movie director ambitions. It’s my personal project, I’m trying to buy up all the copies!

Unfortunately it’s on YouTube in six parts…

Mark: The acting in that is so wooden, it should have a fire warning on it! It’s terrible! *laughs*

Stephen: We got a budget to film a concert at Hammersmith Odeon and then somebody had this idea, “I know let’s do a little story to go with it…”

Mark: You guys like Bond, let’s come up with some sort of absurd spy theme… it looks like I spend the entire concert tuning my guitar. It was an oscilloscope back in the day, that’s what they looked like.

Stephen: I don’t know how long it takes to write a film script normally, but the script for ‘Mantrap’ was written after a concert we did in Oxford, in a pub in half an hour. “We’ve cracked it now, I’ll get somebody to work out all the dialogue”. I still get people coming up to me and reciting my lines from the film, they come up and go “Oh Stephen, why don’t we try those string players? Oh yes, I’m sorry about that Tony, come on, get on the stage! Martin, it’s the first song, ‘Show Me’”. *laughs*

Mark: Oh dear, some things can’t be undone… sadly!

Stephen: Mark doesn’t like it, I like it…

Mark: You don’t!

Stephen: I like sh*t like that I really do. I watch Talking Pictures Television and there are loads and loads of films that are like that! *laughs*

Mark: It’s YouTube! I don’t get that…

Stephen: You’re going to have to complain and get it taken down Mark…

What do you think the enduring appeal of ‘The Lexicon of Love’ is after 37 odd years?

Mark: Well, all the songs are quality and it was groundbreaking production at the time. And there’s just something about that era, it struck a chord. That whole period now is a golden one isn’t it? It seems bizarre, it seemed to capture a spirit at that time, I think that’s why. We weren’t they only ones, a lot of other people did it.

Better than ‘Dare? ?

Phil Oakey thinks ‘Dare’ is the best album of the 80s, he’s so wrong! Jonathan Ross puts him straight on that when he was on his show, did you see that? Phil says “well, we did make the best album of the 80s” and Ross says “not even Phil, you know it was ‘The Lexicon of Love’”. That must have stung! *laughs*

John Taylor of DURAN DURAN was absolutely petrified of ABC and thinking “what are they going to come up with next?” There was this story about him buying ‘The Lexicon of Love’, taking it home…..

Mark: Doing voodoo on it! *laughs*

He literally saw you as a bigger threat than SPANDAU BALLET…

Stephen: I think that at the time, we were ambitious and there was a lot of competition out there and the idea was that we wanted to be the best, that was it. We wanted to make the best album, we wanted to be the best band, we wanted to write the best songs. We knew people, we knew SPANDAU BALLET, because there was that whole scene going on…

In Sheffield there were clubs. In London there was the club scene, we’d met up with Spandau and Steve Dagger. We’d been to play the Rum Runner, we’d met DURAN DURAN. We were all around the same age and influenced by the same people, you know Bowie, Bolan, Roxy. We were the next generation, we were inspired to form bands and it was very competitive…

Mark: Have you heard the Bowie and ABC story? Ok, well, we were recording ‘The Look of Love’ in Tony Visconti’s Good Earth studio. We were down in the basement recording and the phone rings “oh, hello, would you mind if David sits in on the session?” And we were like, “David who?” And it was Bowie! *laughs*

Stephen: He kind of blessed the whole thing…

Mark: He made a suggestion for the middle of the record, because at that point, there was just a big hole, nothing going on and he said “oh, how about having someone dialling an answerphone, you could have that in the middle”. But we couldn’t really tell him that we’d already done something very similar in the middle of ‘Poison Arrow’…

Stephen: We don’t like your idea! *laughs*

Mark: This is how utterly stoked I was. We bumped into him again coming in and out of the studio and apparently I had a very erudite conversation with Bowie about Bertolt Brecht.

He’d just put out the ‘Baal’ EP and I said, “oh, I studied Bertolt Brecht for A-Level German” and we apparently had this amazing conversation, but the trouble is I can’t remember anything about it! I was so nervous and I still don’t know whether Steve’s made the whole thing up!

Stephen: I was sat there nodding my head and thinking “what are you talking about? Bertolt who?”; Bowie was going “…that was his first play” and Mark was like “ha, ha, ha, yes, you can tell, ha, ha, ha!” and they were having these in-jokes about Brecht and Weill…

Mark: I probably did say that, but I have absolutely no memory of it! He was there at the door, I was talking to him, but I blanked out for like half an hour… no memory at all, tragic, that’s fandom! *laughs*

Stephen: Another funny thing about meeting David Bowie was that he did a great Sheffield accent. I remember him hearing me speak in my Sheffield accent and he said “Ohhh or, reight thas from Sheffield are tha?”

Mark: Didn’t Bowie reply “Me fatha wo from Donneh?”

Stephen: Yes ! Hahaha…

Mark: To translate. that means “my father was from Doncaster!” …anyway, he then came to see us at Hammersmith Odeon, thank God the roadies didn’t tell us until after. Bowie came and asked to sit with the sound engineer, imagine? I would have wet myself!

Stephen: My brother and sister had to the Hammersmith Odeon show and I’d arranged to get them tickets. We were just about to go on the stage and somebody came backstage and said “somebody claiming to be your brother has been trying to get into the venue and he’s not got a ticket”. And I was like, “was he with a little girl?” thinking “f***, that’s my brother and sister, they should have had tickets” and he said “they’re outside”.

So five minutes before I’m meant to go onstage, I’m running round the streets of Hammersmith in a glittery suit looking for my brother and sister! Then I find them and I’m like “where are the tickets?” and they go “we never got given them”, so I got them in and they stood at the side of the stage. I remember playing and then looking across and Bowie was watching the gig with my brother and sister. I was still so p***ed off that my brother and sister didn’t get their tickets for the concert.

Years later my brother was up in Sheffield and we were talking about ticket scalpers and he said “yeah, I remember when you played Hammersmith Odeon and you got us tickets and I sold them for so much money”. And I was like “What? You sold the tickets? Where’s the f***ing money then!”. So he’d sold the tickets and then tried to blag his way into the concert! *laughs*

Mark: Brothers eh? F*** ‘em! You know who else was at that gig? Debbie Harry! And she came to the afterparty. My brother was trying to chat up Debbie Harry, I was very proud of him! *laughs*

Moving onto the follow-up album ‘Beauty Stab’, it’s now rather unfortunately put into the category of career suicide and self-sabotage along with works such as FLEETWOOD MAC’s ‘Tusk’, OMD’s ‘Dazzle Ships’ and THE CLASH’s ‘Sandinista’….

Mark: Rock ‘n’ roll suicide…

If you could turn back the clock, and make a different follow-up, would you? You turned into SAXON didn’t you? *laughs*

Mark: I can’t remember why, but it just seemed the most natural thing on earth at the time. Trevor was down to produce it, but had already started work with YES and then moved onto working with FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD. He had already started and scrapped about four different versions of ‘Relax’ and after about a year, we just went “look, we can’t wait”.

Gary Langan produced it, so it was still in the family?

Mark: I know, but Trevor is a different kettle of fish. Gary was a brilliant sound engineer and mix engineer.

But I honestly don’t know the answer to that, I don’t think we had a choice, that’s how it turned out.

I mean, you’re a guitarist, it’s quite natural for you. But for a saxophonist going rock is not so easy?

Mark: Well, ROXY MUSIC had a sax…..

Bowie too… I think of that as a kind of ‘art’ thing… you had the ROXY MUSIC rhythm section of Alan Spenner and Andy Newmark involved on ‘Beauty Stab’, but it didn’t quite have that kind of sound…

Mark: I’ve never been good at formulas, I can’t do them. God knows why, it might have been the influence of being on tour and playing live, possibly….

Did Martin want to rock out?

Mark: Yeah…

Was America a factor, because Billy Idol had become popular. That was always Rusty Egan’s excuse as to why VISAGE went rock as they were listening to too much Billy Idol!

Mark: I mean, Rusty Egan has done a lot of rock, hasn’t he? He was in the flippin’ SKIDS… yeah, it’s a strange period…

Were there other distractions?

Mark: Like?

Money or drugs or things like that?

Mark: No, never… we were all really clean living boys…

Despite all this, ‘S.O.S.’ is an absolutely sensational song. Can you remember the genesis of that because it does stand out like a sore thumb on the album?

Mark: Well I think the roots of that are very much in ‘Sexual Healing’. I mean it’s got an 808 drum machine pattern all through it and I just came up with some chords and it came out.

Stephen: The thing was, when we first started out as VICE VERSA, we were an electronic band. We then mutated into ABC.

Mark: Out and out pop…

Stephen: Yeah, before that there was the scratchy funky ABC. Then there was the sophisticated polished pop of ‘The Lexicon of Love’ and being kind of followers of the David Bowie school of philosophy which would go from one thing to another. We’d toured the world playing the tracks from ‘The Lexicon of Love’ over and over again and we reconvened to start on new songs and I think that we were then caught up in the music industry.

The first set of songs you write in your own little space, there’s no pressure. You do that, you get better at writing songs, so ‘The Lexicon of Love’ is distilled from lots of different songs and then you’re in a situation where you’ve had a No1 album, you’ve been on the tour, the record company are saying “we need the new album”.

Mark: It’s kind of second album syndrome, you put twenty four years into your first album and then you have six months to write the next one.

It’s a huge amount of pressure….

Stephen: Probably even less than six months… it was the next set of songs which were written. We weren’t David Bowie, people expected more of the same, but different… that’s what we did, we went in, we did those songs. We were in there with a brilliant engineer, we weren’t in there with a producer who would say “hey, let’s put the reins on this, let’s rein it back into some other place”. But I think when we were doing it, we believed in it.

Mark: Absolutely…

Stephen: We did it and we liked those songs and that’s what we were feeling like what we wanted to do at that time…

Mark: I do sometimes think about the multiverse thing, somewhere out there, there was a version of ABC that did a ‘The Lexicon of Love’ follow-up….

Stephen: Called ‘More Of The Same’…

Mark: …and we ended up being like DURAN DURAN and playing stadiums *laughs*

There’s often the question of how band dynamics get altered if just one person leaves. So did David Palmer leaving affect things?

Mark: Absolutely. He was a songwriter as well and always really into the next big thing and embracing technology as well.

Stephen: David is an incredible musician, that’s what he’s interested in, he’s interested in playing the drums. That was him and yeah, the dynamic does change if there’s four people, it’s different to there being three people.

Were you over-compensating in terms of you’re missing someone so much, you’re pushing boundaries, because you feel, “oh right, we almost need to prove ourselves more”?.

Stephen: When we were writing those songs and demoing them in Sheffield, David played on the demos and nobody was saying “oh, I don’t like what we’re doing now”. We wrote lots of different songs, we wrote songs in a country and western style, you know, songs which were more extreme pop songs…

Mark: When that album came out, we got a letter from Bono, a personal handwritten one and the gist of it was “you’re going to get ripped to shreds, but I think it’s really good and a really brave move”, which I thought was really nice at the time…..

When ‘That Was Then This is Now’ came out, there was a more expensive 12” single with a sticker which said “This record is exactly the same as the 7”. The choice is yours.” Who’s idea was that?

Mark: I think that would be our idea….

Stephen: The song didn’t really lend itself to be extended, it was as it was, that was the thing. It was like “buy whichever one you wanted”. We liked to play around with things like that, we were artists, a lot of what we did was artistic and the idea was “change is stability, change is strength, try different things”. That’s what we were about.

Mark: It doesn’t necessarily do your bank account any favours though! But I comfort myself with the multiverse idea, that in some other universe there’s an ABC that went on… *laughs*

Like a really good ‘Black Mirror’ episode where you have different pathways….

Stephen: Yeah, I’d be living in John Taylor’s house in Malibu or in Wiltshire, he’s got a very nice house I’m rather jealous of! *laughs*

Mark: What were you saying about Roger Taylor earlier?

Stephen: QUEEN’s Roger Taylor listened to THE HUMAN LEAGUE album and then wrote ‘Radio GaGa’….

Mark: How do you know this?

Stephen: Somebody told me! But I can’t really name names, it’s not fair on that person. It was a personal friend of Roger Taylor, but that’s what happened! *laughs*

Mark: I can see the connection…

Stephen: I thought Martyn Ware would know that? I thought everybody knew it, but obviously they didn’t!

Mark: I nearly dropped me phone when I heard about that…

Stephen: I left the band after ‘Beauty Stab’ and then Mark and Martin went off in a different direction with ‘Zillionaire’. In fact they didn’t go “hey, you know ‘Beauty Stab’ hasn’t really sold as many as the first album, let’s go back and do ‘Lexicon of Love Part Two’. Let’s do something different”.

Mark: You have to do something that means something to you as an artist…

Stephen: That’s how we were as people….

Mark: You may as well be working in a fish finger factory…..

So Stephen what were you reasons for leaving?

Stephen: I preferred the other universe… slightly. I went off and lived in that and the fell back to it a few years later, there’s lots of reasons… *laughs*

And Mark, how did you feel about it when he went?

Mark: It was a very stressful time. I really blame the tour, because I think we all individually went mad in our own ways. It’s what a friend of mine refers to as ‘altitude sickness’, you think you really want to be there, but when you are, it’s a different matter to deal with it. It’s tough!

Stephen: Why I left is, it wasn’t as much fun anymore. David Palmer had gone and to me it didn’t really feel like a band anymore, it felt like three individuals that through no fault of anybody’s, we’d been through so much.

You know, one minute we were rehearsing in a little room in Sheffield, working in one particular way and then we’d become famous and then we started earning some money. It changes things, fame changes people, money changes people, it can’t be helped. David had gone, the dynamic of the whole thing had changed…

Mark: In retrospect, I wished we’d all taken a year off, because we were f***ing knackered primarily and just to recharge, think about getting excited about influences and music again.

But then you got into doing ‘How To Be A Zillionaire’ quite quickly, comparatively after ‘Beauty Stab’?

Mark: I don’t know, chronology is all very blurred in my mind… I did take a bit of time off and I was going to America on holiday. I was very influenced by what I was hearing on the radio then and that’s how it percolated through. I remember hearing ‘Blue Monday’ and it was life-changing to me, I was in Austin Texas, I can remember it clearly…

You got immersed into your Arthur Baker and Shannon which comes out in ‘How To Be A Millionaire’…

Mark: Absolutely, the beginnings of freestyle…

How did you first come across that style of music then?

Mark: Because we’d always, all separately been interested in dance music from Motown through to CHIC, it just evolved into that. I remember when we played New York, putting the radio on WBLS, a really crucial dance music station back then. They were playing ‘Planet Rock’ by AFRIKA BAMBAATAA and ‘Scorpio’ by GRANDMASTER FLASH and then they played ‘The Look of Love’ remix, and I was like “oh my God, they’re actually playing it!”. I didn’t think that would really happen. Out of all that music, ‘Planet Rock’ was just so good.

Stephen: ‘Planet Rock’ was out when we were touring ‘The Lexicon of Love’, after gigs we would go to clubs in different places and that track was just starting to happen and it was so f***ing good, then GRANDMASTER FLASH with ‘The Message’ and ‘White Lines’ came out. I think we’d been in America promoting ‘Beauty Stab’, we were in New York watching the kids breakdancing on the streets and thinking this was so happening;

Mark: We saw it happening in Times Square, there were B-Boys doing that whole thing to KRAFTWERK which was just amazing.

Stephen: We went to The Paradise Garage with AFRIKA BAMBAATAA DJing and all those other heavyweight characters. That’s why I think ABC (although I wasn’t in it anymore) moved on and went in that direction; get the drum machines out, get the synthesizers out and get the samplers going.

Mark: Also, we’d worked with the Fairlight on the first album and it was obviously the future. Mind you, the minute the Emulator II came out, we bought one. No need to pay a Fairlight programmer £750 a day!

Stephen: We had the Emulator on tour along with its own roadie to repair it at every gig *laughs*

Mark: Five inch floppy disks…

Stephen: There was a lot of Emulator on the demos for ‘Beauty Stab’, Mark had played the guitar and putting it through the sampler, making the sounds up. It was primitive… did we have a Linndrum?

Mark: No. We had an 808, we also had the 303s. We bought three 303s…

Did they all get nicked? *laughs*

Mark: I repatriated them, I sold one to a German teenager for £500 or something, which looking back now is insane…

You mention NEW ORDER, there is a connection between you both. The opening track on ‘Zillionaire’ is ‘Fear of the World’, how did you do the rhythmical passage on it?

Mark: That was Fairlight…

Did you know ELECTRONIC sampled that for a B-side called ‘Lean To The Inside’?

Mark: No! David Palmer was in ELECTRONIC…

‘Get The Message’ sounds very much like ‘All Of My Heart’ if you compare the two verse parts…

Mark: I’ve heard through our Manchester connections but we’ve not been told directly that Gillian from NEW ORDER was a bit of an ABC fan.

Stephen: We were all roughly around the same age and had the same influences and stuff…

Mark: Stephen, you used to go over to Manchester a lot….

 Stephen: I used to go to the original Factory club in Hulme. One night I was out in Sheffield and there used to be a band called MANICURED NOISE. I’d been to see them play in Manchester and then I was on this street in Sheffield, there was these lads there and then this girl from MANICURED NOISE and I was like “oh hang on, I saw you play in Manchester, last week, you’re in that band MANICURED NOISE!” And the other lads were laughing going “ooh, she’s got recognised but we’ve not!”.

And I went, “well, who are you?” and they were like “we’re in a band, we’re playing Sheffield tonight, we’re called JOY DIVISION, we’re playing at The Limit Club…” , so I went down to see JOY DIVISION play there with about twelve other people, although since there’s been about twelve thousand that said they were there!

Mark: Like the infamous SEX PISTOLS at the Manchester Free Trade Hall. Everybody was at that…

Stephen: Martin Fry was at that and Mike Pickering. There was people in that era, all going to the same kind of clubs. I used to go across to Manchester to Pips and The Ranch. There was a great scene in Sheffield and this was like when I originally met up with Mark, we used to go to a club called The Crazy Daisy and The Top Rank Suite. It would be us, THE HUMAN LEAGUE and HEAVEN 17, a very small number of people… all the people that then formed bands. The same thing happened in Manchester with JOY DIVISION, THE SMITHS, MAGAZINE and BUZZCOCKS.

Mark: I was too young to be going over to Manchester then, he’s a bit older than me!

Stephen: I’m slightly older than Mark and I was a completely bad influence on him when we actually met. I steered him down another path of life really….

Mark: When you’re that age, just a few years can seem an immense difference…

Stephen: THE HUMAN LEAGUE were older than us and I remember when we first met them, Phil Oakey was married and I was a f***ing virgin! It was like totally different…Martyn Ware had a beard! *laughs*

Mark: More importantly, they had jobs, could afford to buy very expensive Roland synths…

Stephen: We had Korg MS20, a Micropreset and a Minipops drum machine and we were influenced by the same things. But we were younger and poorer and they had jobs and wives and girlfriends and things! *laughs*

Mark: I was still school!

Stephen: He was still at school with his copy of ‘Warm Leatherette’ and Thomas Leer’s ‘Private Plane’…

Mark: There was a book that came out ‘Beats Working For a Living’ by Martin Lilleker and he interviews Jarvis Cocker in it, well he went to the same school as me.

There’s a bit where Jarvis says:“I remember going past the sixth form block and the strangest electronic noises coming out, I later discovered it was Mark White playing ‘United’ by THROBBING GRISTLE” *laughs*

Stephen: Jarvis was from the next generation and a little bit younger than us.

Mark: PULP were playing gigs when VICE VERSA were playing gigs….

Stephen: They started when they were really young!

Are we on ‘Alphabet City’ now? At this point there seems to be a conscious decision to do an ABC pop album again…how calculated was it?

Mark: The lead song on it was ‘When Smokey Sings’, we enjoyed writing that and even just from the demos people were going “that is a hit”, so we did more like that….

So Stephen, were you missing it when the guys started having hits again? Did you ever feel like “I wish I was part of this again”? What was your feeling?

Stephen: What kind of happens is you leave a band, but you’re not going to NOT listen to what they’re doing, you can’t avoid that. I thought ‘When Smokey Sings’ was great, I really liked the ‘Zillionaire’ album as well. I’m a music fan, I am not going to go “Oh, I don’t like that” because I was once in it and now I’m not. I didn’t think “Oh my God, I want to rejoin ABC!” or whatever because I was just doing my stuff at that time.

I didn’t really think about it that much. I was happy to be working in studios and doing things, productions, writing and stuff. Doing my thing as it were.

Mark: Mr Singleton, I wish to inform you that your interview to work in the diplomatic service has been successful! *laughs*

Stephen: Put it this way, I don’t think Mark and Martin would have been going “Oh my God, what’s Stephen up to?”.

Mark: I mean you wouldn’t if had been like all Top 10 records all the way, I’m sure I’d have a thing to say about it as well!

Stephen: “Oh hi Mark, how you doing? I’ve just done a song for MADONNA”. That’s the way it was, I was doing a different job, you know, you change your job or whatever, your vocation. You don’t then go “I wish I was I back at this place doing that job”, you’re in a new job, you’re living in that particular moment.

Mark: But, factually with ‘How To Be A Zillionaire’, it totally bombed in England, but was quite successful in America. ‘How To Be a Millionaire’ was a Top 40 hit, ‘Be Near Me’ is still the biggest ABC hit in America we ever had. So that took away the pain of that a little bit, I couldn’t believe it.

You know this thing that people say “Ooh, you’ve got to slog around America playing live”, you don’t! We just got a phone call, “guys you’ve got to come to L.A. They’re playing your record on the radio, it’s a top 10 radio hit”. I had no idea and that was good. There was a bit more continuity to it for me, it was really nice that the Americans liked ‘When Smokey Sings’ as well.

So you’re high on all of this and of course there’s a game changer in the world, which is House Music and effectively you dump your guitar for this new form….

Mark: I loved all the really seminal early stuff, it was so minimal…

What were your views on things like Acid House?

Mark: It was just Year Dot, it was Year Zero and it came along. The North was playing this stuff a lot before the South and there were great clubs in Nottingham, The Haçienda in Manchester and Jive Turkey in Sheffield. They were playing all this stuff in ‘85/’86 and it was quietly bubbling away.

It was actually David Palmer who said there’s this great club called ‘Shoom’, “You’ve got to go! It’s in a fitness centre in Southwark”. So I was into that in the beginning, it was incredible scene, the energy in it was fantastic. It changed everything for me and it’s really when I stopped listening to pop music completely.

But the 90s rather passed me by, I call it my musical coma period. I didn’t get Britpop at all, was never into any of it and the Indie sort of stuff.

Did you like the House thing Stephen?

Stephen: I’m into dance, going out dancing and clubbing. I think that scene though is like you had to be there, that’s what it was about. I think if you were listening to it on the radio, it doesn’t quite work quite the same. You had to be in those clubs and taking those drugs, whatever, to appreciate it and feel it. It was a movement…

Mark: I think it was the last movement really. We’ve gone into complete stasis and stagnation, I don’t really understand…

What is your opinion on the music industry now, positive and negative?

Mark: It’s over, the big mistake is very little new talent is getting signed and developed.

Worse than that, it’s actually now messages from accountants and focus groups in the head offices of wherever to the A&R department saying “create that for us, we want something that sounds a bit like Taylor Swift or whatever, who’s this age and is going to appeal to that”. It’s literally the accountants have taken over.

Pop music by algorithm or design committee…

Mark: It is, when we were signed it was because somebody got to hear about you. “There was a hot new band in Manchester, there’s a lot happening in Sheffield at the moment” and the word would get out and it was real and people found out about it. I don’t think that’s happening…..

Stephen: Well the world’s changed beyond recognition….

Mark: It’s the internet isn’t it?

Stephen: When we were making music, we did that because there was nothing else to do. There was like three television channels, television would go off air, like goodnight, here’s the national anthem. On Sunday, shops in the cities were closed. It was a totally different thing, and that’s what we did, we created our own world and that world was between us.

We were like a little gang and other people in bands were like that too. ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN, ASSOCIATES, all little gangs making their own peculiar version of what they saw as being pop music, the image… we were the people that came up with the ideas, it wasn’t the record company saying “hey now guys I think you should etc…”

When we first were doing ABC, we were into cycling gear and sportswear. PET SHOP BOYS came to see us at The Embassy, their idea was to wear cycling gear and they came to see us and then just went “we’ll have to forget that idea!” *laughs*

We then dropped the cycling gear and went for the showbiz look with the gold lame suits and all that, these were ideas that didn’t come from the stylist or the record company. When Martin first had the gold lame suit made by Colin Wild just off Carnaby Street, the record company Phonogram were kind of like horrified… “you’re not going to wear that on Top of the Pops! What the f***?!”

They didn’t understand it, but they did understand it the next day when everybody was phoning up to do an interview with the guy who wore the gold lame suit. We were the people that came up with those ideas and concepts and sleeve designs.

Mark: I don’t think that’s happening now.

Stephen: We don’t know do we?

The creativity is spread thin, you made music to be your escape to create. The idea of creation for kids now is for them to have an Instagram account and do selfies…

Stephen: I also think in a record company nowadays that if they’ve got an act and they delivered a big hit album, they’re not going to let that act then go off in a completely different direction and say “we’ve done this now and the sleeve is going to look like that”. They wouldn’t allow it! It would be like, “no you’re not, you’re going to work with these people”.

When record companies were making enough money through the new acts that would emerge, they’d go “hey, you know what? Let them do what they want, they’re the artists”. And sometimes those off the wall projects would hit big. The world just isn’t like that anymore.

Mark: Also, the money’s gone out of it. Because everybody thought, “oh right, it’s all going to be about streaming”. Now, the amount of money I see from streaming… a friend of ours told me that ‘The Look of Love’ got five million plays one year on Spotify. So I got in touch with the accountant and said “what are the Spotify royalties?” and he said “Mark, we’ll look into it for you but it won’t be as much as we’d have to charge you for investigating it”.

In other words, Taylor Swift put it perfectly when she said that her Spotify royalties wouldn’t pay for a Sushi dinner once a month and she’s one of the most played artists out there. So, it’s not sustainable that, is it? We’re being ripped off!

Kids these days are expecting music for free and that’s quite sad….

Mark: My nephew who likes music, I was shocked to find that he’s never bought a record in his life. I said “what do you do then?” and he said “oh, I just make a YouTube playlist and stream it”.

Stephen: It’s the same with my boy, he doesn’t buy records, some of his friends do.

They’re buying vinyl like kids would build a kind of train set or whatever. It’s like a little hobby, it’s not the way when people do it and interact with music and artists anymore. It’s changed beyond all recognition.

Mark: It really has, I’m really worried about it. It’s not sustainable anymore as a career, so people will not be going into it, they’ll be choosing something else. You know, we were at least getting regular money weren’t we? It was a job…

Stephen: Yeah, that’s the way it worked and now it’s a different thing. Now a record company isn’t going to take a chance on a new act, they’re going to say “let’s do a fortieth anniversary edition of this and we’ll plonk it out on blue vinyl and we know how many fans this band has got. So we will press up a thousand and we know we’ll sell that, that’s it”. It’s nothing, it becomes something totally different to what it was. We’re dinosaurs, it’s sad to say…

On a more cheerful note, are you two into creating any music now that you’re sort of back in each other’s life again.

Mark: Absolutely! We’ve re-booted VICE VERSA and we’ve been writing. We do it because we love it.

What ultimately would you like to do with it to get it out to the public?

Mark: That is the problem, I don’t even know what constitutes a hit record these days? What do you look at? Which is the chart? It’s not clear anymore….

So you’re recording stuff and it may see the light of day at some point?

Stephen: We work just like we worked when we first met and we’re excited about making music. We’re the same people aren’t we?

Mark: The same funny old buggers as we were! I met Steve when I was sixteen, it’s incredible! *laughs*


ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its sincerest thanks to Mark White and Stephen Singleton

‘The Lexicon Of Love’, ‘Beauty Stab’ and ‘How To Be A Zillionaire’ by ABC are still available on CD via Mercury Records

https://www.facebook.com/Vice-Versa-Electrogenesis-806726912703189/

https://twitter.com/vvanthology

http://www.discogs.com/artist/248815-Vice-Versa-4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_Versa_(band)

http://www.sheffieldvision.com/aboutmis_bands_vv.html


Text and Interview by Paul Boddy and Chi Ming Lai
Photos courtesy of Mark White and Stephen Singleton
4th May 2019

Missing In Action: HARD CORPS

HARD CORPS were like a piece of a jigsaw that didn’t quite fit.

Utilising aesthetically entrancing KRAFTWERK-like electronic minimalism, produced by the legendary Martin Rushent and Daniel Miller, but restrained by a major label record contract that meant that they never fulfilled their true potential and only belatedly released one full length album ‘Metal & Flesh’ in 1990. Clive Pierce, Hugh Ashton, Rob Doran and Regine Fetet were a candle that burned exceedingly brightly, but still left a small but none the less important legacy of synthetic music which could give their German counterparts a run for their money.

Tracks such as ‘Je Suis Passée’, ‘Dirty’ and ‘Porter Bonheur’ still remain classics of their genre with the band supporting DEPECHE MODE and THE CURE before dissolving a few years after their conception.

HARD CORPS vocalist Regine Fetet cut an enigmatic, but controversial figure by infamously disrobing during their DEPECHE MODE support slots; but tragically passed away in 2003.

Clive Pierce kindly spoke about his tenure in HARD CORPS with additional contributions from band members Hugh Ashton and Rob Doran.

What were your individual musical influences?

Hugh: The first records I recall being bought on my behalf were Neil Sedaka’s ‘Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen’ and ‘Runaway’ by Del Shannon. This latter track featured the sound of a Musitron, an early electronic keyboard with a powerful ‘unworldly’ sound jumping out of the recording which made me aware of the emotional power of ‘sound’. Other examples of this would be ‘62’s Joe Meek produced ‘Telstar’ by THE TORNADOS which was a bit ‘cheesy’ but listen to that Clavioline, another great pre-synthesizer electronic keyboard and DELIA DERBYSHIRE and the BBC RADIOPHONIC WORKSHOP’s ‘Dr Who Theme’.

Rob: Probably my first subconscious feeling that music was powerful, was in secondary school when a cool American kid with hair down to his arse joined. He introduced me to THE DOORS and I especially loved the track ‘Unknown Soldier’ which I played over and over again. I loved its political message and even then, the blending of found sources within music which I have been a fan of ever since.

Clive: After a long time coming, when it was hand-me-down time, I found myself the proud owner of a box of 45s and an old Volmar valve record player that my brother used to own. I think I was more captivated by the machinery than by the music itself at the time, but still within that box of 45s I would as a young child be spinning tracks like ‘You Really Got Me’ by THE KINKS and ‘Telstar’ by THE TORNADOS.

Prior to the eventual meeting with Regine, how did the band members come together and what were their individual backgrounds?

Rob: I met Hugh in the 1970s in Brixton and lived in the same large Victorian house. Eventually I ran the recording studio (which we called Mekon) which was built in the basement of the house and became a sound engineer / designer with the punk group Hugh Ashton had formed called THE SKUNKS.

Clive: One day I answered an advertisement from a band based in Brixton, South London called THE SKUNKS. They described themselves as a sort of punk group, not exactly what I envisaged myself getting involved with, but I decided to give it a go because again they mentioned that they had a record deal and a connection with Pete Townsend of THE WHO. Within minutes of starting my audition, I could visualise myself quite happily being involved with them fully.

Only just recently I became aware that they chose me because of two main reasons, all of which centred around a Roland CR78 drum machine. The first was I didn’t object or feel intimidated by the use of one. A lot of drummers saw these machines as a threat to their livelihoods and considered them as just a poor imitation. Secondly, I was actually able to keep very good time alongside one.

Hugh: Having replaced our old-style rock drummer with the metronomic Clive Pierce, we changed our name to CRAZE and started incorporating a new hybrid sound. This led to a record deal with EMI and in ’79, we released the single ‘Motions’ with an instrumental B-side ‘Spartans’ which started getting played at Steve Strange and Rusty Egan’s freshly opened New Romantic hangout at The Blitz in London’s Covent Garden.

Once you had formed as an act, what did you hope to achieve together?

Clive: Speaking personally, it was a break from all that had been before. For a start, it marked the end of looking at myself as just being a drummer within a traditional group structure and the hierarchy that came with that.

Rob: We found the machines enabled us to break out of our previous musical roles. Being only a machine-based band initially narrowed our options musically, but at the same time as we developed into electronic musicians, widened our musical palette. Perhaps we were KRAFTWERK’s rough and noisy neighbours!

Hugh: So with Rob and Clive equally happy to join in this marriage with these powerful new toys, we started to evolve the working methods that would sustain us over the coming few years. It was now ‘81 and apart from seeing KRAFTWERK (whose new masterpiece ‘Computer World’ album showed they were still leading from the front) on their long awaited tour, it did not really matter what other musicians were up to. We were quite happily lost in our own bubble.

How did you go about integrating vocals into the band?

Hugh: A guy called David Porter came in to do vocals and managed to get us a support slot to play at the Marquee Club in Soho. In preparation, he brought us copies of some of the latest gay disco tracks (Patrick Cowley, Bobby O etc) which we copied and changed a bit and then he wrote new ‘songs’ on top and we were ready!

Except how could we recreate it live? This was to become a perennial challenge in the following years and not just for us but for many early 80s electronic acts.

David had hurriedly plucked the name HARD CORPS (which was a sort of opposite of SOFT CELL who had recently gone to No1 with ‘Tainted Love’) from a shortlist of possible names I had in my notebook. Thus under the gaze of a few disgruntled and confused rock fans being subjected to a weird reimagining of gay disco… HARD CORPS was born!

At the Marquee Club, David even had an open mic ‘dispute’ on stage with the giant rocker Fish from MARILLION which we by then we were able to enjoy from the audience. Although I don’t think David ever went back on to a stage again and we were more than happy to disappear from the opprobrium and back to the womb of our studio not to re-emerge without a more compelling reason to surface again. So what next?

So what did happen next??

Hugh: The answer was to arrive at a party we were giving at our HQ. Someone I did not know well came up to me and basically said “there is this girl here who you really should meet, she is looking for people to work with because she wants to sing and she is … different and I think she might suit your music!” So off he goes and back he comes with Regine. Well she was just 29 but she looked pretty fine… a gaunt figure with a fine-featured almost medieval visage below a fiery red mane of hair shaved away at the sides and a dead fox (or was it a ferret) draped across her shoulders. She spoke, suggesting she would like to revisit with a cassette of her ‘work’, with a mysterious clipped French accent with almost Germanic overtones (Une Vosgienne!).

She felt hard to refuse and so without much to lose, it was agreed she would return. So she came back to the studio and we found that a song she had already written about a lovelorn petrol-station attendant worked well with a backing track we had recently recorded and ‘Dirty’ was born. Intrigued by the way it all seemed to combine, we found we could create several more tracks that combined tracks we had already prepared with lyrics Regine had already written. So with this ‘flesh’ now added to the bones, the monster HARD CORPS was now truly born.

With Regine now on board, what made you decide to go for a completely electronic aesthetic?

Rob: It was different, a challenge, new, revolutionary, the future, a break from the pompous masturbation of endless dull guitarists and hypocritical rock music. It was two fingers to bland corporate American music. It had a vitality not seen since punk, it was European and it was pioneered by the excellence of KRAFTWERK.

Hugh: So basically we had virtually no outside influences on the music we were making at that time other than late 70s GIORGIO MORODER and KRAFTWERK. Regine was also not really influenced by other writers or singers. She was just very keen to express herself creatively to balance her life…

How did the demos you were creating around this time metamorphose into actual singles?

Hugh: So around 1983, Steve McGowan offered to take our recordings around some record companies. Having got some positive feedback, he effectively became our manager and developed the strategy that led to ‘Dirty’ being pressed as a white label and then being picked up by Survival. We then got an offer to debut at a party in June ‘84, organised by Steve Strange and Rusty Egan who still had a strong presence in London’s clubland.

Steve then secured Polydor’s interest and squeezed a complicated ‘album’ deal out of them that was supposed to give us creative control over all aspects including music production, press, artwork etc which we signed hoping we would keep some control whilst accessing the resources of a ‘major’ record company… a decision we would sooner than expected come to regret.

Whilst Polydor seemed agreeable to us self-producing ‘album’ tracks, they predictably wanted to gain exposure with a single release and wanted to find a producer who could add cache and supervise recording in a ‘proper’ studio rather than our admittedly ‘semi-pro’ basement in Brixton. We were suspicious, but when they offered up Martin Rushent, we were tempted into agreeing given his achievement producing ‘Dare’ for THE HUMAN LEAGUE a few years before. So we recorded ‘Je Suis Passée’ at his Genetic Studios in Reading, Berkshire.

How was the experience of working with Rushent?

Clive: Firstly it was a “pinch yourself” moment for me. I remember quite vividly on the final mix of ‘Je Suis Passée’ sitting alongside Martin at the mixing desk with him riding the 16th delays on a fader on the eight to the bar bass sequence part and me also riding a fader on 16th delays on my middle range sequence part and just bouncing and grooving off each other as the track exited what we affectionately called the ‘crunchy middle break bit’ and thinking to myself “what the f*** is occurring here?” There I was, Little Clive From The Block playing what was effectively duelling banjos with the oddball genius bearded bloke; the one that looked totally out of place in the pictures on the back cover of one of my favourite albums of all time ‘Love and Dancing’. Nuts. Completely nuts!

Martin also monitored extremely loud recording as well as mixing. I was used to working in our Brixton studio on a couple of Auratone speakers, only switching to Tannoys in short bursts to test out the energy of a track for fear of upsetting the very nice lady who lived next door. Martin would have me pinned against the back wall from the blast from the speakers with every bass drum beat hitting me square on in the solar plexus.

Over the space of a few days, it wore me completely down to the point of suffering what I can only describe as mild shellshock. I spent an afternoon in the group restroom on the sofa staring into space and physically shaking much to the amusement of Hugh and Rob, but I felt totally f**ked. I progressively got better but had to request a lower level of playback and take regular breaks from the audio barrage from then onwards. Strange really as I had previously played the drums in various groups with stage monitors pumping sound straight at me, but this was quite different and incessant. I still wince at loud music all these years on… very weird!

Rushent’s huge impact on the production of the songs of THE HUMAN LEAGUE is well documented, what do you feel he brought to the sound of HARD CORPS?

Clive: What we hoped Martin would be able do was to refine and flesh out our sound beyond the point we were physically able to manage ourselves down in our resident basement studio in Brixton and that he did. To also help coax and winkle out the best from Regine who although one of a kind, was never a vocalist in the traditional sense of the word.

She was by nature very hit or miss at the best of times but as much as this could on the one hand be intensely frustrating for us, on the other it could incredibly rewarding when a line or word would emanate from her that was not in any textbook but just sounded right within the context of the music. It was spotting them that was the skill. Martin having worked with the technical brilliance of Shirley Bassey and at the other end of the spectrum Joanne Catherall and Susanne Sulley and their “Working as a waitress in a cocktail bar” performance, I would say was a perfect choice for us.

As you started to record and produce songs for HARD CORPS, how did your relationship with Polydor develop?

Hugh: A profound problem for us was that we had signed thinking we would self–produce an album in our own studio and now we were being cajoled by Polydor into a scenario involving ‘expensive’ names to produce our music and promos. This made the whole project subject to the typical major record company ploy of promoting a single (or two if you’re lucky!) and delaying an album until you have a ‘hit’ and then making the album or otherwise if not, they just drop you.

Given how much they had just spent on one song (combined with the advance we now owed more than £100,000), their position was understandable, but we had spent some years recording enough tracks for an album which they had heard and had originally approved.

As Martin Rushent was now in the throes of a divorce, our A&R man Malcolm Dunbar scouted around for another ‘name’ and to his credit, gained Daniel Miller’s interest. This was quite something since at that time Daniel was steering DEPECHE MODE to international status and was not in the habit of working with people outside of his Mute stable of artists.

So in short, it was an offer we could not refuse and ‘Respirer’ duly ended up being completed with Daniel producing. So now we had two of the best ‘electronic’ music producers in the UK both helping on our track, not to mention Daniel was using Flood as his engineer. A stellar cast and indeed a great honour for us… the only trouble being ‘Respirer’, whilst being a ‘strong’ track was not really, in common with most of our tracks, obvious ‘hit’ single material.

It’s hard not to compare HARD CORPS with PROPAGANDA, especially with tracks like ‘Respirer (To Breathe)’, was there any kind of rivalry or kinship?

Clive: Absolutely none whatsoever in either rivalry or kinship. I only became aware of them initially when I visited a friend of mine who was an eclectic buyer of slightly alternative music, CABARET VOLTAIRE, PSYCHEDELIC FURS, NEW ORDER, FLOCK OF SEAGULLS etc. He played ‘Dr Mabuse’ to me and I immediately thought FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD and I was right.

Now who doesn’t like FGTH in small doses, but the formulaic sound of the ZTT production machine just becomes really tiring after a very short space of time to my ears. Not enough rough edges for my taste and far too manipulated to feel any affinity towards. I can see the comparison you make with ‘To Breathe’ though.

The band did a session for John Peel in 1984, how was that experience when at the time the BBC engineers there were more used to dealing with Indie-style guitar acts?

Clive: Yes, it was a very sterile experience for both parties. The chaps at the BBC by nature were very institutionalised and it was record it and ship it out, and we felt the same. Naively, I personally thought John Peel would be popping his head in and out the studio during the recording but he didn’t. A time constraint dictated that we have some of the instrumentation pre-recorded at our Brixton studio and we would only play certain key components live on the sessions.

There was a rather funny moment when the BBC engineer, I think it was Mike Robinson said he had heard some nasty distortion on our track ‘Dirty’. We hadn’t spotted it and so he rewound the tape and ran it past us again. “There!” he gestured pointing at the monitors. Again none of us reacted as we hadn’t heard anything untoward and looked at each other quizzically.

“One more time please Mike” we asked starting to feel a bit amateurish at not having his depth of perception in the distortion spotting department. “There, there” he said again now standing up out of his chair in order to point closer to the speaker in a bid to home in more precisely to identify it for us. Again we couldn’t react to him until it then dawned on us simultaneously that the distortion he was trying to alert us to, was in fact a sound we had generated in our studio by feeding a delay back into itself and allowing it to get to the point that it started to break up.

We had lovingly crafted the distortion he was trying to point out to us as a defect. I don’t think we had the heart to tell him he hadn’t grasped the concept of the track and why should he but on a trip to the free vend coffee machine, the three of us had a good old giggle about it!

With much of Regine’s lyrics being in French, did you come under a lot of pressure to record totally in English?

Clive: For sure, albeit after we had signed with Polydor. Regine however was no Vanessa Paradis. If you put on the Bardot and sing all cutey, then you can get away with quite a lot as you pander to the stereotypical image most ignorant Brits have of the French, but Regine did not fit that model in the slightest. Her vocals and lyrics came from the scars of her life. They could not be delivered in a contrived way. What came out was what you had to work with and unfortunately working her art in the UK was always going to be an uphill struggle whilst singing in her native language.

Prior to Polydor and the “assault” on the charts, she could have sung in Martian as far as we were concerned. The language was not important to us. It was her personality, her realism and her honesty that mattered. She was flawed but in an intoxicating way to our ears to others this was not always appreciated as much.

What was the reaction when ‘Dirty’ was released as a single in 1984?

Rob: Extraordinary! We thought we were far to leftfield for that kind of interest and were totally unprepared for that amazing response.

Clive: It was very favourable, we attained record of the week in the NME and things snowballed from then onwards.

What kind of image did the band try to cultivate?

Rob: We tried to create a hard machine world with the macho men lined up along the back of the stage and the gentle flower symbolised by Regine pushing through the metaphorical concrete. As usual it became quite controversial!

Clive: The image I reflected on stage was purely a theatrical statement based on how I felt in regards my relationship to the music. I saw the musical phrases I played as having gender. Some male, others female. It felt honest and right to have both those represented in the way, I portrayed myself, a hard edge and a sensitive edge, both of which I possessed. I also think there was a degree of wanting to escape the everyday me who in reality was a rather average guy.

Hugh: I remember I had to deal with a panic at Polydor which involved being hauled in front of John Preston, the new CEO. We had performed at Islington Town Hall in London and we backline boys had decided to wear some 1950s surplus store ex-police motorcyclist’s jodhpurs as a uniform to emphasise our differences to normal casual rock band attire. They were reminiscent of those worn in Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’ and seemed to us to capture in an amusing way (to us anyway), the sort of ‘retro-futurist’ vibe.

However we had not anticipated members of NITZER EBB being at the front of the audience dressed in long leather SS type overcoats. It led to a review in the music press where the reviewer was concerned that she had stumbled on some sort of ‘neo-fascist’ gathering. Preston wanted reassurance that his company had not signed something politically malodorous. I had to reassure him this was not the case and in fact the gig had been organised by Rock Against Racism which might have explained the reviewer’s sensitivity!

The band’s performance of ‘Je Suis Passée’ on ‘The Tube’ is still transfixing, can you say what happened in the lead up to this appearance and why Regine looks so stressed and distant?

Clive: Well, we missed our flight from Heathrow to Newcastle. I can’t recall exactly why, but whatever the reason, it was quite inexcusable. TV appearances when you are in your infancy as a group do not throw themselves at your feet very often. We managed to get a later flight from Heathrow to Teeside Airport a good thirty odd miles from the TV studio so had to jump into a cab and tell the driver to put his foot down to get us there. Fortunately our gear had gone up the day before and was already partly set up when we arrived to sound check.

After the sound check I (as I usually did) drifted off to have a look around ‘The Tube’ set and take as much as I could in before the show started. I really had no idea that during this time Regine had had an argument with our manager. I never knew until a long time after the show that this is why her performance looked so stressed. She was actually brooding live on TV. I just thought she was just being her normal self and took no notice of it!

The bit where Rob and yourself turn their backs on the audience, tweak the Rolands and glance at each other is probably one of the coolest things in a live electronic music performance, was that pre-rehearsed?

Clive: Yes is the simplest answer to that! It was the routine that was required to carry out that part of the track. The turning of our backs to the audience was not intended as snub to them at all. The System 100M by nature is rather plain looking viewed from behind so we opted to have the modules with their flashing LED’s facing out towards the audience for the drama. Consequently when we had to change any settings, it meant having to turn our backs to the audience.

DEPECHE MODE’s Black Swarm Devotee fanbase was notoriously antagonistic towards support bands, were you aware of this prior to playing with them?

Clive: No we weren’t aware of them at all. Even if we were, it wouldn’t have bothered us in the slightest. We actually would have revelled in a bit of antagonism, but I can’t say that on the ‘Music For The Masses’ tour, we noticed any animosity from the devotee DM fans.

The worst it ever got for me on the DM tour was actually backstage at the NEC in Birmingham.

There are long periods of spare time on tour pre-concert and the chance to have a bit of a kick around with a football was a good way to while a bit of time away and stretch those legs from the tour van. Rob and I were just passing the ball around when a couple DM roadies walked by. “Wanna game lads, HARD CORPS v DM?” and I said, “Yeah alright”. So down with the jumpers for goalposts and off we went. Within a short while (which normally always happens) a few others joined in on each side including Martin Gore and we had a five a side match on our hands.

Now it was all good natured and sporting, that is until one of the DM roadies took it upon himself to tackle me so ridiculously hard that he almost broke my leg in the process. I wasn’t prepared for that level of aggression from him in what was essentially just a friendly kick around and certainly not two hours before I was due to go on stage. I thought “you complete f**king tw*t!” That tackle could have spelled out the end of my DM tour.

When he next got the ball, I made it my mission to dish out a bit of retribution and hit him twice as hard as he had hit me. He went down but immediately got up and before we knew it we had squared up to each other snarling and swearing with fists about to fly. That was until Martin Gore stepped in between us before things got completely out of hand and managed to calm it down a bit!

What was your opinion about Regine’s dress sense on the DM support tour, do you feel that there was something wilfully self-destructive about it or was it a natural kind of ‘punk’ aesthetic for her?

Clive: Regine was a law unto herself. If she wanted to do something, she would do it regardless of what anyone said or recommended to her. That was her strength as well as her weakness.

The DM tour came at a time where we were as a unit struggling to keep the momentum going and sort of had a fatalistic attitude going into it. Perhaps a few years prior to the DM tour, I might have questioned the sanity of how far she was taking it but on this tour, I thought if we go down we may as well go down in flames…. which is what happened in the end! Retrospectively looking back on it, I can fully understand how her antics rendered us a liability to both DM and their promoters.

I for one, even though I am far from being a prude would have been seriously pissed off if I had gone to a DM concert with my young son or daughter and saw the support group’s front woman with her private parts out parading around on stage. There are lines you do not cross and even though I ashamedly had no regard for that line back then, I regret having been party to Regine being allowed to cross it. It cost us the European leg of the tour and perhaps the American leg and signalled the end for us.

Hugh: The first concert was in Newport in Wales and the concert promoters were furious because parents, who had accompanied their young teenage children, were suddenly confronted with a French Stripper! We had recruited a private detective friend to manage us for the tour and he had to deal with the fall out. So Regine had to sign a letter for the tour promoters, promising specifically not to expose her nipples again. So she did the rest of the tour with a rubber band across her breasts inscribed with the word “censored”.

Did you ever at any point say to her, “look let’s tone things down a bit”?

Clive: Yes! When you have 15 minutes or so before going on stage and the promoter won’t allow you to go on unless Regine signed a disclaimer stating that she would not disrobe on stage. Regine refused to sign the disclaimer but eventually after us pleading to her, signs it with a scrawl and then goes on stage and disrobes anyway!

Hugh: We were not offered the European leg of the tour despite Martin Gore’s stage attire being remarkably similar to that which Regine revealed when she removed her orange raincoat!

You also supported THE CURE, do you have any memories of this experience?

Clive: We were very fortunate to be published by the same company as THE CURE were and as a result were offered the slot on ‘The Head On The Door’ tour. The chance to tap in to THE CURE’s following was not to be sniffed at and all of us having a healthy respect for them and their music was an amazing opportunity.

Little ole hard CORPS on the same bill as THE CURE… wow the thought blew me personally away. A lot of my mates were ardent CURE fans and I just couldn’t wait to tell them the news. It was all very exciting!

In Torino, Italy we played our set to half a crowd as most of them were still in the bar areas. I don’t remember which track we were performing but we probably weren’t being very well received by the crowd as all manner of objects were being hurled at us. I got hit on the head with a couple of coins and a boiled sweet which fortuitously bounced down on to my keyboard.

Being a boiled sweet fan (who isn’t?) I unwrapped it and popped it in my mouth and gave a thumbs up in the general direction the gift horse had originated from. Hugh was less fortunate. This whole carrier bag of something was lobbed at him. What a shot. The handle managed to impale itself on one of his drumsticks stopping him in full flow. We lost a bar or so of beats as he untangled himself from his plastic nightmare and we finished the rest of our set dodging used Tampax etc!

As I left the stage, I grabbed the bag as I was curious to see what was in it. It was a whole packed lunch. Sandwiches, a packet of crisps and an apple. So if the person who threw it at Hugh ever reads this, I hope you went home hungry that night you bastard!

The band eventually split, was there a particular straw that broke the camel’s back or a series of contributory factors to this?

Clive: We fizzled out rather than split. As touched on previously, the death warrant had been signed when we became too difficult to handle anymore after the DEPECHE MODE tour. We had effectively painted ourselves into a very bleak corner. I think any comradery we had forged since the time Regine joined forces with us had evaporated and we met less and less to work on material, eventually just naturally drifting off our separate ways.

After all of the various recording sessions and singles, the album for Polydor never saw the light of day, why was that?

Rob: If we had released an album on Polydor, they would have been obliged to enter the next year of the contract so it became economically political. In other words, it would have cost them more investment than their accountants were prepared to budget for.

With your electronic aesthetic, you seemed on paper to be an ideal Mute Records band especially with the Daniel Miller link, do you think things could have turned out differently if HARD CORPS had been on a more sympathetic label?

Clive: I really believe we should have adopted the album band model and not been so wooed by the lure of a major label. We could never have been a commodity that would have sat comfortably on ‘Top Of The Pops’ churning out catchy tunes. Polydor were throwing serious money at us and had every right to demand chart contending ditties, but we just didn’t have them in us nor the personality to carry that pop star act off.

When HARD CORPS dissolved, what kind of career did you pursue afterwards?

Clive: My father was a self-employed builder among other things and I had worked alongside him off and on ever since leaving school to help pay my way. When we split, it was really game over for me. So much time was put into the project that I was left well behind my friends’ career wise. They had become civil servants, accountants, estate agents, policemen and were already well into paying mortgages off. I had virtually nothing in comparison to them.

So I just completely turned my back on music and knuckled down working with my father. We made a very good team with me supplying the strength and he the experience. I loved every moment with him. It was around this time that I became a father myself and my focus from then onwards was to provide security for my daughter.

Rob: I wrote and produced music and sound design for Film, TV and radio commercials.

Hugh: In ’92, I joined THE SUN KINGS and using the same equipment as HARD CORPS, we had an enjoyable time through the rest of the 90s doing our take on sort of ambient-techno incorporating our love of 60s psychedelia and 70s ‘German’. We released three albums ‘Hall of Heads’ on G.P.R in 1994, ‘Soul Sleeping’ on Blue Room in 1997 and ‘Before We Die’ released on Chill Out sometime after we stopped in ‘99.

Although HARD CORPS’ body of work is pretty small in comparison with many of their contemporaries, why do you think there is an enduring interest in the band’s work?

Clive: I think we were a truffle in a forest of chanterelles. Not to everyone’s taste but never the less rare and pungent in an appealing way to those who like their musical bouquet a little different.


Dedicated to the memory of Regine Fetet

ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its warmest thanks to HARD CORPS

‘Radio Sessions’ is available as a download direct from https://hardcorps.bandcamp.com/releases

‘Clean Tables Have To Be Burnt’ is also available via Minimal Wave Records as a download album from the usual digital outlets

‘Metal & Flesh’ is available from Sub Culture Records at https://subculturerecords.bandcamp.com/album/metal-flesh-remastered

http://www.hardcorps.co.uk/

https://www.facebook.com/hard-CORPS-217860235015406/

https://soundcloud.com/medora-music


Text and Interview by Paul Boddy
27th December 2018

Missing in Action: FASHIØN

Photo by David Bailey

Of all the acts from the Synth Britannia-era that were deemed as “most likely to make it” FASHIØN were surely a safe bet to succeed.

With an image that could rival JAPAN, they certainly looked the part and latterly with album/single covers featuring the work of iconic photographer David Bailey, they had the design aesthetic nailed too.

With their second incarnation featuring vocalist / guitarist Dave “Dee” Harris, synth player Mulligan, Martin Rechi on bass and Dik Davis on drums, the band evolved from an indie / post-punk sound into a far more electronic and potentially commercial proposition.

Zeus B Held handled production duties on their second album ‘Fabrique’ and helped cultivate a more electronic sheen with the band. Although the album cracked the 1982 UK Top 10, singles from ‘Fabrique’ didn’t fare so well, with the tracks ‘Love Shadow’, ‘Streetplayer (Mechanik)’ and ‘Move On’ all failing to dent the Top 40.

Shortly after the release of the album, Harris left the band and was replaced by Troy Tate, formerly of THE TEARDROPS EXPLODES.

So why didn’t FASHIØN achieve their full potential? With the UK music-buying public now fully embracing more pop-oriented and teen friendly marketed bands such as TALK TALK and fellow Birmingham residents DURAN DURAN, it could be argued that with their sophisticated blend of funk and electronics that the band was just too ahead of their time.

Regardless of the circumstances surrounding their lack of commercial success, FASHIØN left behind some real quality Simmons drums-driven funk electronica and with some of their vocoder usage, even gave KRAFTWERK a run for their money.

Also notable was the band’s embracement of the 12” remix format; FASHIØN were certainly one of the pioneers of the extended single format and their alternative versions are definitely worthy of investigation. Anyone searching for a recommendation to check out the band’s back catalogue should look no further than a comment on the Discogs website which says: “Decadent techno-funk just made for cruising the slick, night streets of Berlin at 4:00am in your DeLorean”.

Dave Harris kindly spoke about his experiences playing in the band, working with Zeus B Held and also subsequent projects including a link-up as ZEE with the late Richard Wright from PINK FLOYD.

What was your musical background prior to joining FASHIØN and who were your formative influences?

Prior to joining FASHIØN, I had various bands, starting with an acoustic band in the early 70s called INDIAN RUNNER; we won the folk side of the ‘Melody Maker’ Rock / Folk contest in 1974, from there I formed various funk and R&B bands like BUMPERS & FERRARI featuring Jaki Graham on vocals.

After that I joined THE ITALIANS and this happened to be where I met Dik and Mulligan at a Birmingham gig. Musical influences right from the start have always been mainly R&B artists, apart from THE BEATLES (of course), JIMI HENDRIX, STEVIE WONDER, RUFUS & CHAKA KHAN, MARVIN GAYE, BB KING, JONI MITCHELL and many more…

FASHIØN existed in an earlier incarnation before you joined, how did you go about hooking up the band?

As mentioned, Dik and Mulligan, turned up at an ITALIANS gig and after playing we were chatting and they explained that they were starting a punk band, I was the dinosaur at that point!

I said good luck and within 6 months they were supporting THE POLICE on an American tour… a few months later there was an ad in the Melody Maker looking for a front man guitarist, I recognised by the wording that it was FASHIØN, so I thought, I would go along.

We got on great! We both had something the other party wanted, I needed something more electronic and out of the norm, and they wanted a singer, writer and player. So it worked, kind of strange at first but we knew we could make something out of it.

Being Birmingham based, how much of a rivalry (if any) was there at the time between you and DURAN DURAN?

None really, the other guys knew them pretty well because DURAN DURAN used to rehearse at The Rum Runner too. I came from across town and until then didn’t hang with those guys. I met them a few times afterwards and it was always cool.

The band’s striking imagery / design played a huge part in how they were perceived, how did working with David Bailey occur and what was it like being photographed by such an icon?

Mulligan was a really good artist so we had control of our marketing in that side of the field, and it was very distinctive. Bailey came about when the Arista marketing department came up with a competition which hooked us up with Olympus cameras (who Bailey was promoting); so a camera shoot arose from that.

I was a major fan and it was a fantastic opportunity to work with him, and there was an amazing amount of work that day. He seemed to think I resembled an American Indian and referred to me as “Oi! F***ing Geronimo”… how could you dislike him…

THE HUMAN LEAGUE Mark II and their producer Martin Rushent tend to get all the kudos for the alternative / remix versions of their songs eg the ‘Love & Dancing’ album, yet FASHIØN were at the spearhead of this too. Whose idea was it to embrace the 12” format to such a degree?

I would have to put the initial idea down to Zeus, but it was something that evolved.

From recording the original track, to eventually mixing a single and an album version and then whilst the mix was still up on the desk (full recall was not available then, by any means), we would run through a few times to get a rough idea of what we were going to do and then we would go for an all hands on mix.

Panning, muting, delay and reverb FX etc, all straight to ¼” tape and finally edit the ¼” tape or not if it worked out ok. It sounds like mayhem and it is hard to recollect exactly. Zeus and I have had many a conversation recently about how good some of them turned out, considering the equipment available at the time! It’s hard to pick a favourite, possibly ‘Do You Wanna Make Love (at 4am)’?

You were an early advocate of the Roland guitar synthesizer, how did you integrate this into your sound?

It came about, because of its being. There is only so much you can do with guitar FX so when it was offered to me, it made complete sense. It was pretty limited in what it did, but when combined with the Sennheiser Vocoder (which Zeus introduced me to), the possibilities were opened up, though that was something that had to be on tape when playing live.

ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK recently interviewed Zeus B Held, how important was he in the overall sound of ‘Fabrique’?

For me, he became a major part of the sound of the band. It was great to have a strong, experienced keyboard player / producer. I found a soul mate as soon as we started work in the studio, which meant that I could expand the compositions and Zeus could cover it.

The band’s production and use of electronics (including vocoder and extensive Simmons drums usage) was hugely technical sounding, how did this translate into your live performances and did it cause any problems?

There were 2 hugely different stages, gigs before the album and after… before we realised the album, the sound was pretty raw, a couple of sequencers and the rest live (no MIDI), but we still managed to create the crossover of funk and the music style of the time.

This was quite fitting, coming out of the punk era.

After the album everything changed (still no MIDI), so we did have to rely on a 4 track tape machine, that had the sequences, vocoder etc and in the end some backing vocals, which I had hit heavily on the album. The Simmons was no problem, Dik played to a click track. Hard work but I think worthwhile, so the audience got a good reproduction of the album.

‘Love Shadow’ is a superb lost single of its era, why do you think it underperformed in the charts?

Thank you very much for that. I loved the track and felt it was perfect for the time, especially with Gina X doing the spoken vocal in the Mid 8. There are a lot of factors that might have caused this. I can’t go too deeply into what was going on. We had a small advance but a large recording budget from Arista which is what we requested, because we knew the album was going to take more than the normal time and expense of a band’s first album. Therefore we didn’t have the finance available to do what record companies did at that time, and I think they had lost faith in our management…

Zeus B Held gave his opinion on why FASHIØN never quite hit the heights that they were feted to reach, what is your personal viewpoint on this?

Very hard to answer. I do think that FASHIØN had more of a cult, rather than teenage girl fan base. Also I didn’t and still don’t compose in a pop style à la DURAN DURAN. I think that comes from growing up when bands could survive on selling albums, and so you used to look to the second or third album before you started recouping. That time had gone. Plus you needed confident management to back you.

ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK remembers hearing a FASHIØN Radio 1 ‘In Concert’ and being really surprised / shocked to hear a new vocalist (Troy Tate), was this the general reaction by the band’s fans?

I had no idea at the time, it’s only in the last few years that I have seen a couple of videos of that line-up, but now having met people on social media, they seemed to be quite surprised at the new members and sound of the band.

What are your best memories of being in FASHIØN?

Well I think signing a worldwide recording deal with Arista was pretty amazing and my publishing deal with EMI, something I had worked for, for many years. The first major gig we did was in the Botanical Gardens in Birmingham, we had set it up so the staff of Arista London could all come and see their latest signing. It was very pleasing. And of course when we played the Birmingham Odeon, a gig I used to go to as a youngster growing up.

Photo by Peter Ashworth

The one-off project you did with the late Rick Wright from PINK FLOYD as ZEE and the album ‘Identity’ is an intriguing one. How did you link up with him?

FASHIØN was doing a small tour of East Coast America. I met up with Raff Ravenscroft (sax player of ‘Baker Street’) in New York and he mentioned that Rick was looking to start a band and record an album. I knew I was ready to split from FASHIØN. So when I got back to London, Rick and I got together and after a few meetings with other players, we decided to do the album together as a duo.

Being a primarily a synth-based album, this must have been a risk to undertake for Wright?

For both of us! I was amazed to be working with a musical icon, and we both were excited at the prospects of what we might come out with. We started by demoing with piano and acoustic guitar and we were going along ok, when the elephant in the room (that of using synthesizers) was brought up.

In retrospect, although it didn’t achieve commercial success, do you think in places ‘Identity’ sounds ahead of its time with its extensive Fairlight usage?

Yes, the Fairlight was still fairly new to the industry and not used to its full capacity except for Orchestra stabs, pan pipes and some vocal samples. We managed to form a connection with Syco systems, who were the agents in Britain. It was at this time we were given a Beta version of Page R, Fairlight’s sequencing software, which gave us a complete new way of composing.

Yes we did use it extensively, I would have to say a little too much, but I would agree, that the album sounded ahead of its time apart from the Floyd fans who weren’t going to like it, however it turned out!

It seems now though thanks to social media and the world being so much smaller, there are a lot of Floydians who did like it at the time and still do. Which brought me to thinking about digitising and tweaking the masters of ‘Identity’,to be called ‘Identity 2017’ when it is released in the near future.

What other musical projects did you pursue post-FASHIØN and ZEE?

After ZEE, I started record production along with my good friend Tim Palmer. We had met during the ‘Fabrique’ recordings and had got along great to the point that we would go into studio one in Utopia studios and record sections and even complete tracks to get the album finished. ‘Let’s Play Dirty’ being one.

We next produced LIMAHL’s first solo album after him leaving KAJAGOOGOO and various other bits and pieces, before I met up with Paul Fishman who was in RE-FLEX); we formed a working partnership writing recording and producing other artists, which goes on to this day.

Are there any acts that you rate at present?

I rarely listen to the charts right now, but a couple of bands that spring to mind are KING GIZZARD & THE LIZARD WIZARD and KNOWERS.

You are currently working with Zeus B Held again and a ‘Fabrique’ re-release has been mooted, what does this entail?

Yes, very excited to be back together and planning a new album and hopefully live work.

The FASHIØN album is going to be all the tracks we released and the dub versions, again digitised, so we could get a little more control over the masters.

Zeus and I may do a couple of remixes on that as well; it depends on the legalities, now that Sony owns the catalogue. That aside we have started to work on a project that will be called FABRIQUE, it’s a move way from FASHIØN and we wouldn’t use that name because of the other FASHIØNs that have gone before, but it might be a nod to how FASHIØN 1981 may have sounded in the present. We shall see in 2018!


ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its warmest thanks to Dave Harris

The compilation ‘The Height Of FASHIØN’ which includes tracks from the ‘Fabrique’ album and various remixes from the Dave Harris era is released by Cherry Red and available on CD via the usual retailers

The ‘Fabrique’ 4CD deluxe boxed set including the original album, extended mixes, dub versions and a 2019 live performance by Dave Harris and Zeus B Held at Birmingham Global plus photos plus signed certificate of authenticity and 60 page booklet is released on 31st Janaury 2021, pre-order from https://www.musicglue.com/fashion-fabrique-deluxe/products/fabrique-deluxe-box-set

https://www.facebook.com/fabrique1981/

https://www.discogs.com/artist/47966-Fashion


Text and Interview by Paul Boddy
16th November 2017, updated 26th December 2020

Missing In Action: WHITE DOOR

Hailing from Stoke-on-Trent, WHITE DOOR formed from the ashes of prog rock combo GRACE.

Led by the sensitive vocal presence of Mac Austin, he was ably backed by the Davies brothers Harry and John on synths.

Coinciding with the sinewave of Synth Britannia, the trio began to gain artistic momentum and signed to the independent Clay Records.

WHITE DOOR released one critically acclaimed album ‘Windows’ in 1983, produced by Andy Richards who was later to find fame and fortune working with the likes of FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD, GEORGE MICHAEL, PROPAGANDA, GRACE JONES and OMD.

Despite press support and national radio airplay, being signed to an indie label with limited financial resources meant that any initial promotional momentum was unable to be sustained. The record also proved to be difficult to find in the shops. In a competitive market, WHITE DOOR thus suffered the same fate as other new acts of the period such as THE MOOD, FIAT LUX, B-MOVIE and FATAL CHARM, reaching only a limited audience despite the quality of their music.

Although sounding of its time, with songs such as ‘Love Breakdown’, ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘School Days’, ‘Windows’ still stands up as a long player, so much so that in 2015, Swedish synthesist Johan Baeckström covered the latter two tracks as B-sides to his solo single releases. Baeckström went one step further when he and DAILY PLANET bandmate Jarmo Olilia invited Mac Austin to provide lead vocals on ‘Heaven Opened’, a tune from their new album ‘Play Rewind Repeat’.

With renewed interest in WHITE DOOR, Mac Austin kindly chatted about the band’s brief flirtation with the pop charts and more.

GRACE were a prog rock band before things mutated into WHITE DOOR becoming a synth based ‘New Romantic’ act? What led to you heading in this direction?

Myself and Harry studied Graphics at Art College together where we formed a band called JIM CROW and spent most of our time learning to play our instruments and how to write songs until we finally finished college and all went our own ways. We then went on to form a second band called GRACE with some of our musical friends.

GRACE was a massive leap up from our first band and was after a few years of playing the circuits signed by MCA Records and released a debut album ‘Grace’. The band was put in the prog rock or folk rock categories, I think because our songs were long and like GENESIS while like JETHRO TULL we had a flute player.

GRACE played live constantly, did some TV with TOYAH and released a live album which was very well received but the band was caught in the massive punk movement which was sweeping the country at the time. The record companies signed bands with little ability but loads of attitude and ditched the old school bands like GRACE etc who were out of fashion and a lot more expensive to produce and record.

We were all frustrated with the lack of support and PR from MCA and they said only punk was selling now so GRACE folded.

We had been listening to some of the new electronic bands which were coming through from the introduction of new synths and drum machines been invented by Roland etc. John, Harry’s brother had a synth and so we got together and started to write songs with this new sound.

Were there any acts that were specifically influencing WHITE DOOR?

I particularly liked OMD, TALK TALK, JAPAN, TEARS FOR FEARS, PROPAGANDA, JOHN FOXX and CHINA CRISIS. These were the influences on WHITE DOOR plus we still loved the big melodic sounds coming from GENESIS, YES, ELP, JETHRO TULL etc.

I have always loved the songs and melodies of 10CC, THE MOODY BLUES and THE BEATLES. Like
these bands, I feel WHITE DOOR produced songs with good melodies which could be reproduced on an acoustic guitar and still be a good song.

Of course, when you listen to say OMD, JAPAN, ULTRAVOX, THOMAS DOLBY or TEARS FOR FEARS, there is a link to prog aesthetics don’t you think?

Absolutely, there is the dressing up, dramatic chorus, keyboard heavy sound and showmanship that was a big part of prog. It was a progression from prog rock and glam rock.

Holly Johnson from FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD said the best live concert he ever saw was GENESIS’ ‘The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway’, I think there was a big influence on the New Romantics from the progressive bands, though some may say there wasn’t.

Bands from the New Romantic movement became closely associated with the use of synthesizers to create rock and pop music. This synthpop was prefigured in the 1960s and 1970s by the use of synthesizers in progressive rock, electronic art rock, Roxy, Bowie etc.

Did of you ever get into Ian Anderson of JETHRO TULL’s synth heavy ‘Walk Into Light’ album?

JETHRO TULL was a massive influence on us all from the GRACE days, we all saw the live ‘Aqualung’ tour and were amazed. Harry was a particular fan with playing the flute so his writing, playing etc always leaned to a ‘Tull‘ feel.

‘Walk Into Light’ was as you say a very heavy synth sounding album and strong instrumentally, though I don’t think it was his best lyrically, I think he had been influenced by the new synth bands around at the time. Still a very album good though.

You had the benefit of Andy Richards producing and Julian Mendelsohn engineering ‘Windows’ which does explain the high quality of the production. How did this come about because both became quite ubiquitous not long after they worked with WHITE DOOR?

Memories differ on how Andy became to be involved in the project. He was a friend of the band having been playing in bands at the same venues as GRACE and living close to us in Stoke. He had played in SAD CAFÉ, a fairly successful Manchester band and THE STRAWBS taking the keyboards where earlier Rick Wakeman and Blue Weaver had sat, quite a responsibility.

We would turn up at Andy’s house with very basic demos and spend long days with him on his mini grand piano working out the arrangements and programming.

Once the melodies were in place, Andy would add his magic to it. We also did the same with the ‘Flame in Your Heart’ single which was recorded twelve months after the album. ‘Windows’ the album was recorded in Manchester, then Andy insisted we use Sarm studios for mixing and post-production where Julian Mendelsohn, an Australian record producer, audio engineer and mixer who worked with Elton John, Jimmy Page, Bob Marley, INXS, LEVEL 42, Nik Kershaw and Paul McCartney took the album to another level. A good decision for WHITE DOOR and Andy, who after impressing everyone at Sarm with his skills became a regular there, assisting them on FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD and many more great artists.

Andy, I believe, has been involved with film scores of the last 10 years including a few Tim Burton ones. Julian was the house producer at the great Sarm West so for the next few years after they produced music for big artists from different styles, never really having a genre of their own.

The pace that technology was moving at during this time was staggering, so what sort of synths and instruments were WHITE DOOR using?

The synth on the WHITE DOOR album was the Jupiter 8… the drum machine was an Oberheim DMX. I don’t know the sequencer, I just know it was analogue.

I recall a Fender Rhodes piano on one track. There was Simmons drums and various bits of acoustic percussion like tablas and shakers. Fretless bass of course, alto and tenor sax… flute. I don’t know if there was anything else used at Sarm, but I am sure stuff was added there which I have forgotten. It was state of the art technology then, so we thought it was amazing, but it’s a lot better now I think.

The ‘Windows’ single got BBC Radio1 airplay but wasn’t a Top40 hit. How do you look back on how that all played out?

All the singles got some BBC airplay, but ‘Windows’ the single was picked as the Simon Bates show’s ‘Record Of The Week. It was the top BBC Radio 1 show, so it got played every morning at 10am, getting it to 60-something in the UK charts.

It was amazing exposure from which we got interviews, magazine write-ups, and fan mail and with a couple more weeks of plugging would we believe have easily made the Top 40.

Unfortunately Clay Records had run out of money so could not carry on plugging the single so the airplays stopped. We were told we needed a major label and a couple were very interested and we were about to sign to one major label when it was revealed that Clay had signed us to an American label, Passport Records, for a couple of years, so the deal was off because major labels always want worldwide rights.

The beautiful synthpop of ‘Jerusalem’ is almost choir boy like, what inspired that?

‘Jerusalem’ was written after I saw a small film of young Jewish children praying for the return of their sister who was being held in Palestine.

Is the subject matter of ‘School Days’ veiled in metaphor?

‘School Days’ was inspired by a classic British book ‘ Goodbye Mr Chips’ by James Hilton, the story of a tutor in private boys school during the years of the First World War. Boys in their black gowns and ties seeing their older friends leaving to go to war and most never returning was a very emotional but true story.

‘Where Do We Go (From Here)’ was quite a frantic and inventive take on synthpop, might that have made a good single?

Yes Chi, I agree ‘Where Do We Go’ is a very catchy instant tune and it would have made a good single. I think it would have been the next single after ‘Windows’ if we had carried on.

‘Windows’ only had eight tracks on it, but WHITE DOOR recorded a host of non-album singles and B-sides that seem to explore a variety of styles. ‘New Jealousies’ sounds like SPARKS and ‘Kings Of The Orient’ recalls a more synthy ROXY MUSIC. Did it take a while to settle on a sound or was it your intention to be as diverse as possible?

I don’t think it was our intention to be that diverse, it was a bit of finding our sound from all the influences that we were listening too.

You did one more single ‘Flame Of My Heart’ with Andy Richards which sounded like BLANCMANGE running into FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD. It’s quite mighty but just as WHITE DOOR were finding their stride, you disbanded. Do you have any regrets?

Yes, a few regrets but Clay Records closed and we were without a record company with no-one wanting to sign a band who were tied to a contract in America, so could not offer world rights. We thought let’s start again and GRACE was reformed, producing 4 albums in the ‘90s.

How do you look back on WHITE DOOR now? Is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?

Our one regret is if we had received better advice before we signed that American contract, that major deal would have been signed and who knows?…

‘Windows’ has attained cult status over the years and got a CD reissue on Cherry Red in 2009. But when did you first get the impression that the album might have reached a bigger audience than you first thought?

The feedback on the album was mostly very, very good so we knew it was a good product, we lacked the investment to promote it the way it needed so we hoped that word of mouth and reviews would get it out there. Maybe if we could have toured the album, it may have gone more mainstream, but unfortunately we did not have the backing for that.

I remember being told by some record producer that Andy Warhol’s famous New York club Studio 54 were heavily playing ‘Love Breakdown’ which gave me hope that it may become a cult album and grow to a bigger audience. In the last 10 years, we have had more feedback on the album and WHITE DOOR than ever, obviously the Cherry Red release helped.

So what did you think when this Swedish guy Johan Baeckström starting covering your songs?

We’ve had quite a few people doing remixes and alternate versions of the songs but when Johan messaged me about covering our song and played the track, it was “wow this is more like White Door than White Door”. Johan had got this off so well, it brought tears to my eyes…

Then when I heard Johan and Jarmo’s own material as DAILY PLANET, I realised these guys were real talented people and into the kind of melodies and music we were into with WHITE DOOR. I was so pleased, it re ignited the flame (in my heart).

You sang ‘Heaven Opened’ on the new DAILY PLANET album ‘Play Rewind Repeat’, how was it to work with Johan and Jarmo?

It was a real honour to be part of this album with these lovely guys and ‘Heaven Opened’ is such a great song, I can’t thank them enough. This is such a great album and everyone I play it to loves it, I have a couple of WHITE DOOR fans who swore it was WHITE DOOR.

Has there been any renewed interest in WHITE DOOR since ‘Heaven Opened’ appeared on the DAILY PLANET album? Would you ever consider doing anything under that name again?

There are people now asking about WHITE DOOR reforming, we are working on new material and with the help of Johan and Jarmo, there will be a White Door product next year.

What else have you been up to musically?

We are still playing occasional gigs with GRACE, who still have a good following, while also I am also doing some semi-acoustic sessions with Harry, John and Dave Edge (GRACE guitarist) which we really enjoy.

The new WHITE DOOR material is sounding great so hopefully that will open up some live shows next year. I’m looking forward to going over to see Johan and Jarmo when we finally finish this project.

And what sort of music are you into now?

I’m into all music really but I do love melody and good lyrics, from folk to heavy rock… if it has a good tune and lyric, I will listen to it. Peter Gabriel, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, OMD, Paul Simon… these are some of the people that inspired me to be in music.


ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its grateful thanks to Mac Austin

Special thanks also to Johan Baeckström

‘Windows’ is still available as a CD from Cherry Red Records at https://www.cherryred.co.uk/product/windows/

https://www.facebook.com/whitedoorband/


Text and Interview by Chi Ming Lai
5th July 2017

Missing In Action: YOUNGER YOUNGER 28s

Combining musical template of THE HUMAN LEAGUE with lyrical wit of PULP, YOUNGER YOUNGER 28s were the shining light in synthpop during an era full of dour landfill indie like TRAVIS following the fallout from Britpop.

Released in March 2000, their only album ‘Soap’ was a cutting tongue-in-cheek satire on class aspirations and dreams.

Fronted by a Teddy Boy version of Phil Oakey in Joe Northern aka Ashley Reaks, YOUNGER YOUNGER 28s were a terrifically entertaining live act.

Backed by his very own Joanne and Susanne in Andie and Liz who were recruited from the Academy of Contemporary Music, there was a bizarre twist with instrumentalist Jimmy Dickinson formally being a member of heavy rockers LITTLE ANGELS!

17 years on, ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK managed to trace Ashley Reaks somewhere in the city of London; he kindly chatted about the period when he “was nearly a crap pop star…”

Despite time passing, the concept of YOUNGER YOUNGER 28s still seems quite bizarre, how did it formulate? A strange story of course!

Strange indeed! Me and Jim played together in post-LITTLE ANGELS band B.L.O.W. and when that finished, we tried writing together. He was writing music for computer games under the name YOUNGER YOUNGER 28s and was into THE PRODIGY. I was writing punk and post-punk type songs so initially we were a sort of punky dance act.

We did a cover of ‘A Forest’ by THE CURE and we wrote our own song around it ‘Sugar Sweet Dreams’, which kick-started a whole new direction.

Why did Jimmy want to do synthpop all of a sudden?

At some point Jim played me some demos he’d done pre-LITTLE ANGELS and they were synthpop-esque, so it was always waiting to come out.

Who were the key influences on YOUNGER YOUNGER 28s?

Well obviously THE HUMAN LEAGUE were the template. I remember asking Jim to make ‘Teenage Mum’ sound like THE COMMUNARDS or ERASURE when I brought the song to him. Stock Aitken & Waterman and Trevor Horn were in there somewhere! As a teen, I liked the bleak Northern bands like CLOCK DVA and CABARET VOLTAIRE as well as the miserable lyricists of punk.

Was having two female vocalists alongside your comedic Northern droll always part of the plan?

No – neither me nor Jim were singers so we needed all the help we could get. Liz and Andie sang on the early demos of ‘Julie’ and ‘Teenage Mum’ and it worked well, so they stayed!

When did you realise the concept of YY28s might actually have legs?

When we started gigging… very quickly we had celebrities and music business people at our gigs. I think they liked the comedy of the live act after all the seriousness of Britpop.

You got signed to Richard Branson’s new label V2 and had STEREOPHONICS as label mates, what was it like being on the label?

Personally I think it was a bad choice and I’m not sure V2 really wanted us on the label (though they did want our manager to sort out some problems they were having at the time). We’d have been better going with one of the smaller labels that were interested in us at the time

The first single ‘We’re Going Out’ attracted some attention and radio play…

Putting ‘We’re Going Out’ out as the first single was a bad move in hindsight. The band all wanted ‘Sugar Sweet Dreams’ to be the single, but V2 and the industry were convinced ‘We’re Going Out’ would be a huge hit. It wasn’t!

‘Sugar Sweet Dreams’ was a brilliant album opener, sort of PULP FICTION meets THE HUMAN LEAGUE’s ‘Sound Of The Crowd’?

Musically I definitely remember referencing ‘Sound Of The Crowd’ and ‘A Forest’ by THE CURE on ‘Sugar Sweet Dreams’. It was probably the first track we did and we should have continued down that musical path a bit more but got seduced by POP!

‘The Next Big Thing’ was a wry observation of reality TV talent shows and wannabe culture a few years before Pop Idol / X-Factor etc?

The idea that being famous, in itself, will somehow make us feel good and paper over all the cracks is such a seductive belief and has almost become the new drug of choice. Personally, I was always interested in the life that was falling to bits alongside the illusion, including my own.

Was ‘Gary’ based on a true story?

Let me have a listen and I’ll get back… ‘Gary’ was another figment of my imagination but based loosely on some of the characters I’d come across whilst playing the Northern Working Men’s Club scene over the years in various bands. There was one particularly rough club in Wigan where the DJ was a ‘butch-as-hell’ transvestite and we shared the dressing room with the female strippers, their ‘fanny spray’ and their very protective ‘boyfriends’

There was a dispute with V2 about the ‘In Between Days’ cover being included on the album against your wishes. But how did you come to record it anyway?

‘In Between Days’ was never intended to be on the album as it was a ‘concept’ album and didn’t fit.

V2 persuaded us to record a cover as a last ditch attempt at a hit but they dropped us before it ever went out as a single.

I assume they thought that as they’d paid for the recording, they would add it to the album.

In hindsight, it’s a shame the superb B-side ’Karaoke Queen’ wasn’t on the album in place of ‘In Between Days’? Was that another true story or your imaginative mind?

‘Karaoke Queen’ would have fitted well onto ‘Soap’, but for one reason or another didn’t make the cut. Again it was loosely based on an ex-girlfriend of mine who would get ‘hit on’ by both sexes in dodgy clubs whilst I hovered around uncomfortably.

You ended up on open air bill in Nottingham with THE CORRS, E17 and JIMMY NAIL in Summer 1998, playing second from bottom-of-the-bill. It was quite surreal occasion cos I witnessed it, what are your memories of the day and how do you think YY28s went down?

I enjoyed that gig and seem to remember us going down ok though you might tell me otherwise! My main memory was I gave a backstage pass to a guy we’d met on our travels and he proceeded to get very drunk on the free beer and was kicked out for trying to get into THE CORRS dressing room. I denied any knowledge!

Was there a moment when you perhaps realised that things weren’t happening for YY28s and people didn’t get it, that some found the lyrics too condescending?

I remember a meeting at V2 where the marketing team had absolutely no idea what we were about and had been telling the radio shows that we were “a step up from STEPS”!

When ‘We’re Going Out’ didn’t chart, the whole buzz around the band seemed to disappear immediately and it became pretty clear that the label weren’t going to continue to push us.

I didn’t realise how many people thought I was condescending in my lyrics and looking down on the less fortunate. I’d spent years wasting away on the dole in haze of dope smoke in a small town, so I was writing about myself and my life and the desperation I (and my friends) felt on a daily basis.

There was a letter in the Melody Maker or NME one week accusing me of patronising the emotionally damaged in the song ‘Valerie’, where a lonely man seeks refuge in porn and is only capable of a fantasy relationship with one of the models in an ‘adult magazine’. That could easily be me! I think people assume that if you’re in the public eye, you must be happy and emotionally balanced – nothing could be further from the truth, in my case at least!

‘Two Timer (Crap in Bed)’ was issued as a promo but was never officially released and that appeared to be the end of YY28s. What actually happened?

‘Two Timer’ was actually one of the earliest songs we wrote and recorded – an electro re-write of the punk one-hit-wonder ‘Jilted John’. I don’t know why it was never released or on ‘Soap’…

How do you look back on the ‘Soap’ album now and its context in the grander scheme of popular culture?

I haven’t listened to ‘Soap’ in a long time, but I’m glad we made a brave record that was completely out-of-step with everything, which seems to be my forte.

Do you have any favourite songs from the album?

I always liked ‘Dirty Harry’ and ‘Sugar Sweet Dreams’

So what are you all up to today?

I’m making music and art at a rate of knots… 10 albums in the last 5 years!

Jim is teaching music production at Bath University and works with new artists.

Liz is running her own PA business, working with dogs as a trainee trainer and has her first baby on the way.

I don’t know what Andie’s up to…

If you had your time again, is there anything you’d have done differently with YY28s?

Signed to one of the smaller indie labels that were chasing us early on, and released ‘Sugar Sweet Dreams’ as the first single.

Cheers for this, Ashley 🙂


ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its warmest thanks to Ashley Reaks

‘Soap’ was released on CD by V2 and can be occasionally found for sale on eBay and Amazon

http://www.ashleyreaks.com/

https://www.facebook.com/ashleyreaksart/


Text and Interview by Chi Ming Lai
22nd April 2017, updated 12th May 2019

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