Joy Division and Martin Hannett's production

Joy Division began life as Warsaw - to most contemporary ears, a fairly undistinguished, punk-inflected hard-rock band. "Digital", the group's first recording as Joy Division, sounds not a million miles from Black Sabbath's "Paranoid": a dark, fast pummel, a full-tilt dirge fusing pace and ponderousness.

Joy Division - Digital 1978


Black Sabbath - Paranoid 1970

Joy Division's use of Nazi imagery stemmed from morbid fascination; and as such, was often in questionable taste. On the mini-album Short Circuit: Live at the Electric Circus - a document of the Manchester punk scene - singer Ian Curtis can be heard screaming at the crowd, 'Do you all remember Rudolf Hess?'

Joy Division - At A Later Date (from Short Circuit: Live at the Electric Circus) 1978

In June 1978 the group self-released their first record, the Warsaw EP An Ideal for Living. The sleeve featured a drawing of a blond-haired Hitler Youth drummer boy and a photograph of a German stormtrooper pointing a gun at a small Polish Jewish boy.

Curtis was also intrigued by the mass psychology of fascism - the way a charismatic leader could bewitch an entire population into doing, or accepting, irrational and monstrous things. The early song "Walked in Line" is about those who just did what they were told, committing crimes in a 'hypnotic trance'.

Joy Division - Walked in Line 1979

Curtis' doomy baritone and obsession with the dark side often got him compared to Jim Morrison. Indeed, The Doors were one of the singer's favourite bands. Joy Division's "Shadowplay" is like "LA Woman" turned inside out, the latter's rolling, virile propulsion reduced to a bleak transit across a city that could hardly be less like sun-baked southern California.

Joy Division - Shadowplay 1979


The Doors - LA Woman 1971


"Digital", Martin Hannett's first Joy Division production, was titled after his favourite sonic toy, the AMS digital delay line. His most distinctive use of the AMS digital delay was subtle, though: he applied a micro-second delay to the drums that was barely audible but which created a sense of enclosed space - a vaulted sound, like the music was recorded in a mausoleum. Hannett also wove subliminal shimmers deep into the recesses of Joy Division's records. And he loved the occasional extreme effect: on the debut Unknown Pleasures, he miked up the clanking of an antique lift for "Insight" and incorporated smashing glass on "I Remember Nothing".

Joy Division - Insight 1979


Joy Division - I Remember Nothing 1979

Hannett demanded totally clear and clean 'sound separation', not just for individual instruments, but for each element of the drum kit. "Typically on tracks he considered to be potential singles, he'd get me to play each drum on its own to avoid any bleed-through of sound", sighs drummer Stephen Morris. "First the bass-drum part. Then the snare part. Then the high hats". Not only was this tediously protracted; it created a mechanistic, disjointed effect. "The natural way to play drums is all at the same time. So I'd end up with my legs black and blue 'cos I'd be tapping on them quietly to do the other bits of the kit that he wasn't recording". 

This dehumanizing treatment - essentially turning Morris into a drum machine - was typical of Hannett's rather high-handed attitude to musicians. But the disjointedness certainly added to the music's alienated feel. You can hear it on one of the high points of the Hannett-Joy Division partnership, "She's Lost Control", with its mechano-disco drum loop, tom-toms like ball-bearings, a bassline like steel cable undulating in strict time, and a guitar like a contained explosion - as if the track's only real rock-out element has been cordoned off.

Joy Division - She's Lost Control 1979

The Fall's peculiar brand of social surrealism

It's hard to imagine The Fall and Joy Division coming from anywhere other than 1970s Manchester. Something about the city's gloom and decay seemed to seep deep into the fabric of their very different sounds. Although he didn't identify the place by name, The Fall's singer Mark E. Smith immortalized the pollution-belching Trafford Park on "Industrial Estate", an early classic of the band. "The crap in the air will fuck up your face", he jeers. 

"That song is a very funny take on Manchester's history of having been the cradle of capitalism and then, by the 1970s, its grave", says Richard Boon, who funded the recording of The Fall's first EP but then couldn't afford to release it on his label New Hormones.

The Fall - Industrial Estate 1978

"This is the three "R"'s...Repetition repetition repetition", quipped Smith on The Fall's mission statement "Repetition". Scorning "fancy music" - the overproduced mainstream rock of the day - "Repetition" fulfilled Smith's early goal of "raw music with really weird vocals on top". The rawness was supplied by guitarist Martin Bramah's thin, wheedling guitar lines, keyboardist Una Baines' wonky organ jabs (played on the cheap 'n' nasty Snoopy keyboard, rated by Sounds as the absolute worst on the market), Tony Friel's capering bass, and Karl Burns' ramshackle drums. The freak vocal element came from Smith's half-sung, half-spoken drawl and wizened insolence.

The Fall - Repetition 1978

On Live at the Witch Trials, the group's 1979 debut, "Underground Medecin" and "Frightened" evoke the positive and negative sides of amphetamine abuse: the rush that lights up your nervous system ("I found a reason not to die", Smith exults, "the spark inside") versus the hyper-tense twitchiness of stimulant-induced paranoia.

The Fall - Underground Medecin 1979


The Fall - Frightened 1979

In 1981 Smith talked about the downside of "taking a lot of speed" over a long period: "you start looking in mirrors and getting ulcers". But The Fall carried on writing songs like "Totally wired" and covering sixties amphetamine hymns like "Mr Pharmacist".

The Fall - Totally Wired 1980


The Fall - Mr Pharmacist 1986

The "pharmacist" in that song is a drug dealer, a street punk peddling "energy". The Fall were obsessed with the double standards surrounding drugs - the way some chemicals are proscribed while others are prescribed. Training as a psychiatric nurse at Prestwich Hospital, Baines came back every day from work and disgorged stories about the mistreatment and neglect she'd witnessed - including the use of downers to pacify the inmates. 

Her talk filtered into Smith's lyrics: "Repetition" refers to electro-shock therapy (after you've had some, alleges Smith, you lose your love of repetition), while The Fall's 1979 single "Rowche Rumble" got its title from Hoffman La Roche, the pharmaceutical multinational who dominated the market for antidepressants.

The Fall - Rowche Rumble 1979

Pills feature in Bingo-Master's Break-out", the title track of The Fall's debut EP, not as a way of coping with soul-crushing mundanity but of escaping it permanently. A guy whose job is organizing other people's recreation - the bingo master - looks into his future and, seeing only encroaching baldness and years "wasting time in numbers and rhyme", opts to end his life with a handful of pills washed down with booze.

Macabre and hilarious, "Bingo-Master's Break-out" typified The Fall's peculiar brand of social surrealism.

The Fall - Bingo-Master's Break-out 1978

Equally important as subject matter was rock culture. Song after song skewered the platitudes and pieties of hipsters: "It's the New Thing", "Music Scene", "Mere Pseud Mag Ed", "Look Know", "Printhead" (the last about an obsessive music-press reader who gets 'dirty fingers' every week perusing the 'inkies').

The Fall - It's the New Thing 1978


The Fall - Music Scene 1979


The Fall - Mere Pseud Mag Ed 1982


The Fall - Look Know 1982


The Fall - Printhead 1979

One of Smith's most famous pronouncements was his description of The Fall themselves as 'Northern white crap that talks back' (in "Crap Rap 2" from Witch Trials).

The Fall - Crap Rap 2 / Like to Blow 1979

"Fiery Jack", the Fall's fourth single, offered a coruscating portrait of one of Manchester's finest sons, the hard-bitten product of five generations of industrial life. Fiery Jack is a forty-five-year-old pub stalwart, who's spent three decades on the piss, ignoring the pain from his long-suffering kidneys. Surviving on meat pies and other revolting bar snacks, Jack is an inexhaustible font of anecdotes and rants. The music sounds stubborn, incorrigible - a white-line rush of rockabilly drums and rhythm guitar like sparks shooting out of a severed cable. Speed might just be another of Jack's poisons, judging by his refusal to go 'back to the slow life' and lines like 'Too fast to write/I just burn burn burn'. Based on older blokes Smith had met in Manchester pubs, Jack was 'the sort of guy I can see myself as in twenty years', he told Sounds.

The Fall - Fiery Jack 1980

Cabaret Voltaire's classic first singles

The group's debut record, Extended Play, was released by Rough Trade in October 1978. Somewhere between 1977 and 1979, the classic Cabaret Voltaire sound took shape: the hissing high hats and squelchy snares of the rhythm-generator; Chris Watson's smears of synth slime; Stephen Mallinder's dankly pulsing bass; and Richard Kirk's spikes of shattered-glass guitar.

Everything coalesces on singles like "Silent Command" and "Seconds Too Late" to create a stalking hypno-groove feel somewhere between death disco and Eastern Bloc skank.

Cabaret Voltaire - Second Too Late 1980

On other singles - "Nag Nag Nag", "Jazz the Glass" - there's an almost charming sixties garage-punk feel, the fuzztone guitar and Farfisa organ vamps recalling ? & The Mysterians or The Seeds.

Cabaret Voltaire - Nag Nag Nag 1979


Cabaret Voltaire - Jazz the Glass 1981

You can hear the chill wind, the icy silver-machine whoosh of Kirk's guitar sound emerging on "The Set Up" on the debut EP.

Cabaret Voltaire - The Set Up 1978

Another Cabaret Voltaire hallmark was dehumanizing Mallinder's vocal via creepy treatments that made him sound reptilian, alien, or, at the extreme, like some kind of metallic or mineralized being. On "Silent Command", for instance, Mal's vocal bubbles like molten glass being blown into distended shapes.

Cabaret Voltaire - Silent Command 1979

Visiting USA for the first time in November 1979 inspired the sophomore album The Voice of America: the band caught wind of the impending shift to the right with Reagan and his born-again Christian constituency.

"A big novelty for a bunch of kids from England, where TV finished at eleven o'clock and there were only three channels, was the fact that America had all-night TV and loads of stations. We just locked into this televangelist Eugene Scott, who had a low-rent show that was all about raising money. And the only reason he wanted money was to stay on the air", says Kirk. Scott's voice ended up on the Cabs' classic single "Sluggin for Jesus".

Cabaret Voltaire - Sluggin' for Jesus 1980

1980's mini album Three Mantras was an oblique response to events in the Middle East.

Its two tracks "Eastern Mantra" and "Western Mantra", contrasted the evil twins of fundamentalist Islam and born-again Christian America, beloved enemies locked in a clinch of clashing civilizations.

Cabaret Voltaire - Eastern Mantra 1980


Cabaret Voltaire - Western Mantra 1980

"It kind of culminated with the third album, Red Mecca. It's not called that by coincidence. We weren't referencing the fucking Mecca Ballroom in Nottingham!", recalls Kirk. 

Purely through its sonic turbulence and tense rhythms, Red Mecca also seemed to tap into closer-to-home issues: the urban riots of summer 1981, unrest stoked by mounting unemployment as Thatcher's deflationary policies kicked in, then ignited by insensitive policing in inner-city areas.

The Human League - The Dignity of Labour

The Human League's second release for Fast Product was a tribute to 'the worker'. The Dignity of Labour consisted of four electronic instrumentals inspired by the Soviet space programme. Each offered a different slant on a central concept: the extent to which 'modern technology depends almost entirely upon the worker'. In this case Russian miners toiled deep beneath the earth's crust, excavating the coal needed to make steel, the steel in turn being turned into gantries for Yuri Gagarin's spaceship. Gagarin appears on the EP's front cover as a splendidly isolated figure walking across a Moscow square to receive a medal for being the first human in outer space.

The EP came with a free flexi-disc, which documented - in true Brechtian fashion - the band and Last debating the sleeve's image. At the end Oakley makes a brief statement about the concept EP's theme: individualism versus collectivism.

The Human League - The Dignity of Labour (Bonus Flexi Disc) 1979

"You couldn't live in Sheffield and not be aware that the industrial era was crumbling", says Last. "So, on one level, the records was a totally serious hymn to the dignity of workers, but at the same time it was imbued with many levels of irony, doubt and alienation". Despite its timely resonances and atmospheric, ahead-of-its-time electronica, however, the EP's pensive instrumentals confused most 'Being Boiled' fans.

The Human League - The Dignity of Labour Part 1 1979

After the EP's release Last believed there was no point in putting out a third League single on Fast and decided to secure a major-label deal for the group. Approaching the big companies again, The Human League pitched themselves as the Next Big Thing in music: a wave of positivity after punk's nihilism and outrage.

"Blind Youth", the first song on their demo tape, ridiculed fashionable doom-and-gloom mongers, especially people who depict modern urban life as some kind of dystopian nightmare. 'High-rise living's not so bad', sings Oakey, a dig aimed equally at J.G. Ballard and The Clash. 'Dehumanization is such a big word/It's been around since Richard III'. Firmly rejecting punk's 'no future' posturing, The Human League exhorted the blind youth of Britain to 'Take hope...your time is due/Big fun come soon...Now is calling'.

The Human League - Blind Youth 1979

The early sounds of The Human League

With singer Philip Oakey on board, the Human League shifted decisively in a pop direction with songs like "Dance Like a Star", a lo-fi, cobbled-together counterpart to Summer and Moroder's "I Feel Love". At the start of the song, Oakey taunts, "This is a song for all you bigheads out there who think disco music is lower than the irrelevant musical gibberish and tired platitudes that you try to impress your parents with. We're the Human League, we're much cleverer than you, and this is called 'Dance Like a Star'".

The Human League - Dance Like A Star 1977

The Human League's debut single "Being Boiled" was released in June 1978 with the slogan "Electronically yours" on its cover.

Philip K. Dick's influence is all over early Human League. "Circus of Death", the B-side of their debut single, was partly inspired by Ubik, while "Almost Medieval" from the first album, Reproduction, is based on Counter-Clock World, a novel in which time goes backward.

"Circus of Death" was once described by Human League co-founder Martyn Ware as "a subliminal trip through all the very trashiest films". The story involves an evil clown who runs a nightmare circus and uses the sinister mind control drug Dominion to pacify the population, with Steve McGarrett from american tv series Hawaii Five-O flying in to the rescue.

The Human League - Circus of Death 1978


The Human League - Almost Medieval 1979


As part of their newfound appreciation for conveyor belt pop and epic schmaltz, the Human League started to work up all-electronic cover versions of sixties classics like the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling". That song was both a crowd-pleaser and a striking gesture, almost transgressive. "No one did covers really. During punk, you were supposed to do original material", says Human League co-founder Ian Craig Marsh.

The Human League - You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling 1979