Graveyard & Ballroom – A Factory Records Scrapbook

1980: For a while Manchester was a mythic place and Factory Records were the myth makers. There was soon to be a disillusionment because what had been sought could not be found. But the myth was as much about an encouragement to impute to a place, and a sound, something that was not there; it wasn’t so much a question of belief as of creating a city of the imagination and, for this, it was a matter of straying along the canal towpaths and being overawed by the atmosphere of warehouses and mills that seemed to rise up like quarry inclines. It was about sliding in through unevenly chained-up gates and exploring the spaces of disused factories… playing with the reverberation as if it was a massive echo-chamber and becoming queasy with vertigo whilst standing over the cold air of silent loading bays and lift shafts. Visits to Manchester were about becoming susceptible to a larger scale of redundancy and waste than that which could be experienced in the surrounding towns. It was far more monumental and elegiac.

This was no period of transition, the emptiness felt too protracted and, if there was to be no future then there was very little use in identifying with a social-system that could lay such waste and communicate such a disregard to those it was expected should look forward to conforming to it. The ‘conveyor-belt’ was the metaphor of the day and many got off it to relish being so resoundingly disenfranchised. An embittered romanticism had to imagine what could be built.

Martin Hannett on Joy Division:

“There was lots of space in their sound initially… there used to be a lot of room in the music… they were still working into this space, making sure they got into the corners… You could whack into it little attention grabbing things.”¹

Unknown Pleasures: A tentative step taken in a direction that would lead away from the rock paradigm. An austere beauty that takes the listener from the sinister and compelling objectivity of the sleeve design through to the field-recordings of smashing glass and ascending lifts. This isn’t triumphalist rock with its “180 overdubbed rhythm guitars” but a fragile psycho-social landscape that seems to want to withdraw to the periphery and remain unheard just as, at the same time, it must needs be heard. From the spaces of Joy Division’s sound, Martin Hannett, makes a stratified space infused with real-time segments and freeze-frame intimacies. Ian Curtis’s vocals move from foreground to middle, they are treated and machinised and then move closer. They are barely sung and almost spoken. The guitars are overloaded and compressed, rising and falling, occupying the background as if such a withdrawal was necessary to de-centre an expected ‘rock’ response.

On the first side of Unknown Pleasures (‘Outside’) aggression is present but its being muted and economically expended provokes thoughts of its being used strategically; offered up with an accuracy that seems to insist that there is a best-placed time when its impact can puncture the quietism. That the aggression on such tracks as these undergoes such containment also infers that its bursts are something to fear, they are a threat to civility, a source of disequilibrium that, from the perspective of a law-abiding status quo, it would be far more expedient to control. The prevailing punk rock styled aggression, audible on Joy Division’s previous Warsaw incarnation as well as on tracks like Wilderness and Interzone, became too readily co-opted as infantile and narcissistic, valorised as a ‘necessary’ social safety-valve and marketed as an expression of the overweening hatred of youthful rebellion. The gathering intensity of a track like She’s Lost Control, with its growing force of guitar overlay and echoed vocals, presents the listener with a contrast between aggression and containment which speaks of a variety of social situations that both foster and repress such strong emotion.

Unknown Pleasures is, then, a record of considered aggression that can be seen as operating on the conflictual interface between the demands of reason and those of desire. Not offering the brim-full, caricature violence of much punk means that other psychical corners can be opened up; there are decelerations that allow room for reflection, strategy and unconscious desire and these are all enhanced by new means of production making an early appearance… synthesisers and syn-drums, reverb and flange units are used by Martin Hannett and the group to the effect of enhancing space and making unobtrusive, subliminal forays into it. This coupling of previously unheard digital timbres to Ian Curtis’s lyrics allowed for an exploration of a musical dimension that had only very rarely been encountered.

With Unknown Pleasures the listener was not overcome by a forceful overloading and left to either agree or disagree with something predetermined and accustomed but was, at first, confused and disorientated. Just as the ‘natural’ and consensual sound of the prevailing punk ethos was being overturned and transformed by Joy Division and other groups like Throbbing Gristle (TG) and Cabaret Voltaire, so too did these often studio-centred experiments communicate to their listener a ‘reality’ that was no longer self-evident and pre-given, but a ‘reality’ that was emergent, ‘produced’ and pliable to manipulation. The drumming on Joy Division tracks, insistent and robotically in-time, is a further pointer towards what made Unknown Pleasures an ‘unnatural’ record that provoked fascination with its aural incongruities and, despite its bleakness, managed to conjure up a sense of enhanced scope and optimism.

When contrasted to live performances of the same tracks, Hannett’s post-production work, reportedly carried out surreptitiously in the middle of the night, shows that the listener is being introduced and attracted to hearing the studio as another instrument, or, as a meta-instrument that can transform all the components and the overall sound at the same time. The coincidence of these aural and social factors within a soundscape that also includes Ian Curtis’s lyrics and delivery is what still manages to make listening to Joy Division a powerful event. Risking over-dramatisation it is possible to describe it as a dangerous listening experience: there is an embarrassing, thinly metaphorised lyrical openness that tempts indulgence and a palpable and shared sense of emotional and physical tension especially between ‘what-is’ and ‘what could-be’.

It is not so much that Ian Curtis has anything especially profound to say, but rather that he says it without disguise and with such an openness that it arouses empathy and disquiet in the listener. In this way “Unknown Pleasures”, a recurring phrase in Proust, can come to mean, in part, that there is pleasure to be had from allowing socially-suppressed and ‘unproductive’ emotion through, but also a more insidious and problematic ‘pleasure’, again echoing Proust, that the listener is acting as a voyeur to someone elses suffering. Such tensions are fundamental to Joy Division and their contradictoriness ranges from the staged stasis of the band in contrast to Curtis’s movements through to the controlled, pin-point, almost repressed musical arrangements acting as a counterpoint to ever-threatened vocal bursts. That such tense relationships as those between desire and reason, emotion and calculation are just as much an expression of present social life as they were in 1979 means that Unknown Pleasures has lost none of its power. These are tensions whose impending syntheses are still being played-out in the listener.²

Simon Topping of A Certain Ratio on Joy Division:

“We are nothing like Joy Division. We are a funk band, truly… I mean , that is why we were formed. We would all be down at the best Manchester clubs, listening to Funkadelic, Parliament, Bootsy… these are our roots. Not fucking Iggy Pop and the Velvet Underground.”³

Forced Laugh: Of all the bands who had to labour under the Joy Division sound-alike tag, perhaps its most careless application was when it was attached to A Certain Ratio’s early dirge-funk. ACR probably did even more damage to rock than Joy Division, but with ACR the antithesis to power chords and stadia-dreams could be heard in the funk influences that followed swiftly on the heels of their first single, All Night Party. This first single, notable for doing without drums and recognisable guitar lines, made the best of swathes of phasing treble, wavering bass notes and the glaucous vocals of Simon Topping.

The releases that followed such as Shack-Up, Flight, To Each… and Sextet each bore a noise-component developed out of this early single and it is arguable that the inclusion of such incidental guitar detritus and atmospherics is what was groundbreaking about ACR’s take on funk. Like Joy Division they were a band of contrasts. Sharp full-kit rhythms of tight snares and stuttering, contrapuntal bass kicks were a first indication of rhythms being liberated into a beyond of the ‘bum-tish, bum-tish’ of prevailing punk drummers like the Clash’s Topper Headon, the Pistol’s Paul Cook and Wire’s Robert Gotobed. This sharpness, accentuated by a foregrounded bass heavily treated with chorus and dimensional width, was offset by wan, flat and anti-expressive vocals that were far from the theatrics of rock and the corny exuberances of disco-funk.

Like other Factory singers, ACR’s Simon Topping and, later, Martha Tilson, seemed to be playing in a zone that was disassembling the lead singer. ACR, with an early accent on instruments and instrumentals, were pointing towards a sidetracking of listener response from being overdetermined by the vocals and being attracted instead by the relative freedom of propulsive rhythms and contemplative atmospheres. On The Fox the first half of the track contains vocal couplets but, midway, these are broken into by an expressive cry of “Bop!Bop!” before the latter half of the track picks up with a rhythmically-edged funk of percussion, trumpet stabs and slap bass.

Being produced by Martin Hannett meant that the guitars were filtered through an array of studio and pedal effects so instead of hearing discernible notes or melodies what comes across is an ethereal and acerbic spectral noise winding around in the spaces between the aggressive punch of the drum and bass. Thus, on tracks like Felch and Forced Laugh, guitarists Peter Terrel and Martin Moscrop were less interested in lead-lines than in providing rhythm guitar accentuation via skim-chords of flanged wah-wah and noise generators.

Breaking with prevailing punk-induced norms, ACR were also less of a group and more of an ensemble and when playing live they introduced a multi-instrumentalism which often led to the musicians swapping instruments and positions. For punks brought-up on beat-combos the sound of a badly played trumpet, tubular and echoing, added an extra aural dimensions of what it was possible to hear and play. A foremost ACR moment, though, is seeing them on Granada TVs Celebration programme (1981), where instead of the conventional line up of punk, with its confrontational sense of being seen, the band were dispersed all over the TV studio with bassist and drummer linked together and the two guitarists knelt over effects pedals facing the walls. The cameras had to intrude on what the guitarists were doing and this had resonance with a drive towards anonymity, a rejection of stardom and a sense of actually being witness to a private space being made public.

With ACR, as well, there was, on such tracks as Winter Hill, the emergence of a conscious use of repetition that is near enough totally reliant upon rhythm: no bass line, no guitar line… just added percussion and, towards the end of the track, a funereal voiceover that is expressive of the unconscious mutterings that follow upon hypnosis or sleep.

However, the Hannett produced Flight possibly remains ACR’s finest 5 minutes. Released as a large grooved 12″ single, loud and detailed, this track, where the tensions of grounded-rhythms and weighty bass notes in confrontation with transcendental guitar noise, whispered and high pitched vocals, seems to be an aural expression of the continued confrontation of the material and the ideal.

A Certain Ratio:

“This is something that only happens in the night…”

Reach For Love: With the ground set by the likes of ACR and New Order’s Everything’s Gone Green and Blue Monday, and with the establishment of the Haçienda, dance music, then called Alternative Dance, saw a breakthrough via a Factory Records that was more receptive to the cross currents of a non rock-based Manchester scene. In ACR’s wake came the reggae band X-O-Dus, jazz-funk outfits like 52nd Street and the latino-jazz of the Swamp Children and Kalima, but, as with ACR, the latter groups veered towards a muso-instrumentalism that took less and less notice of the techno capacities of the studio that had enabled a drift away from song structures.

Textures and “attention grabbing details” such as those that Hannett had given to To Each… and which were still audible on Sextet had become more controlled and directed towards enhancing the acoustic instruments rather than creating new aural possibilities. ACR’s last Factory album, Force, showed a bewildering move towards pop and Kalima suited-up like lounge lizards could be seen at Ronnie Scotts. So maybe after years of playing in critically acclaimed groups the musicians wanted some professional recognition of being not just musicians but in Kalima’s case successful proto-jazz musicians.

But as the Haçienda slowly moved from being a venue into being a dance club so too, on the cusp of the introduction of Chicago House, outfits like Quando Quango began making specific dance records without any reference to rock. Some claim that Love Tempo and Genius by Quando Quango are amongst the first UK house records and whilst they have a minimal and repetitive edge that employs drum machines and synthesisers these are perhaps too much like sing-a-long party records ruined, when heard now, by the need to prove themselves as ‘music’ via saxophone riffs and hook-ridden pop lyrics.

However, Factory managed to hook-up with several New York producers like Arthur Baker, Mark Kamins and John ‘Jellybean’ Benitez and the mixes these made of tracks by 52nd Street, Quando Quango, New Order and Cabaret Voltaire had a much fuller, studio-orientated sound.

Of this mid 80s period, though, perhaps the standout track is Reach For Love by Marcel King; a powerful piece of electro-disco given edge by the overall synthetic power of its production… plunging bass notes, precise, fine and yet powered with an inhuman energy. Here staggered sequencer riffs both melodious and percussive propel a disco-soul vocal delivery that is a little too intense to be pop but too poppy to be taken seriously. Discovering that this track was produced by BeMusic (New Order’s Bernard Sumner) may point to a crossover coming from a direction other than the one we are tracing here, in that what Sumner may have injected into this track is a kind of rocky power minus the stringed instruments. On Reach For Love the keyboards have an edge of unaccustomed overload that provides this neo-disco record with the lasting quality of a raw and fullbodied sound that would enable it to compete with those first visceral techno outings.

Martin Hannett:

“I was struck years ago by a room full of air compressors at the Ferranti factory which was banging out this four-in-the-bar, industrial bass drum rhythm. I just stood in the centre of the room for hours.”⁴

As You Said: To be simultaneously against the times and against the techniques of the times is to be somewhere in the future… From the corner of a studio in Britannia Row a track finds its way onto the tape of Joy Division’s Closer session and from this point onwards something has changed, though just what this change entailed could not have been articulated or even accounted for. The change is unceremonious and is maybe even accidental, a brief doodle providing some light relief with no more apparent substance than a signature or a post-mark.

It is an outtake. Flotsam. An inconspicuous event, a breather form the strain of recording where the focus, worked up elsewhere in a tension of getting it right, is here, suddenly, a track without name and, perhaps, a track without too many precursors. To say the track is unwilled would be as grave an error as believing it could only be interpreted once, but the facets of its will are unconsciously motivated and lack a critically rational distance that would work it into something else… the backing track for a new ‘song’.

A synthesiser, a piece of musical equipment, chuggers into action and the possibility for rhythm and atmosphere is enhanced prior to any expectation we could have of it. That there are no vocals passes by unnoticed. Such is the overwhelming pivotal-spin that this short track induces. Its focus comes to rest somewhere around physical movement, inducing involuntary accentuations of its beat and flip-back echos. It is not ‘knowing’ like Kraftwerk or theatrical like Suicide, yet it is an inhuman track where the sound, timbres and regularisable rhythms of machines seem to cover over any creative agency.

What occurs instead, as with any technology, is an existentialising function of machinery where, like with a record, the self is projected into an object and both are in the process of being transformed. Any estrangement that may be audible is not so much the techno-phobic fear of an irrevocable splitting, the loss of a nostalgic ‘natural’, but a differentiation that propels even more lasting associative connections. This shift towards the future, given away unnamed, for free on a flexi-disc, undermined the determinative paradigms: not being identical … it enhanced consciousness.

Chris Nagle on Martin Hannett:

“His ‘plan’ as he used to call it, was a ‘sonic hologram’. It was something he was developing, layering sounds and reverbs.”⁵

Always Now: There is a submerged history of Factory bands. There are some that never featured on any of the retrospectives and are conspicuous by their absence on the Palatine box set. Maybe the Madchester scene and Factory’s classical music division were the force that compressed deeper into the strata the likes of Minny Pops, Crawling Chaos, Royal Family & The Poor, Crispy Ambulance, Section 25, Tunnelvision, The Wake, Stockholm Monsters and Biting Tongues.

However, the fact that these bands have eluded historification has allowed them, perhaps more interestingly, to occupy a position that is permanently out-of-phase with musical fashion and which creates a weird vertigo of tracks that, in many cases, do not sound ‘of-their-time’, but, like a deliberate mixture of tenses or contrasting film-stocks, allow for an unfixed extrapolation and a sense of history as running concurrently with the present.

These effects may in part be due to the fact that many of the early releases of these groups were produced by either Martin Hannett or Chris Nagle (engineer on Unknown Pleasures). Often there is the same three-dimensional sensation, a mixed separation of instruments that makes the music and production predominate as well as making its ‘construction’ audible to the listener. Because Nagle and Hannett often employed the technique of reducing the guitars to a position behind the bass and the drums and employing the studio as a ‘lead’ instrument it soon became a misguided common currency that all these bands either sounded the same or sounded like Joy Division.

In many ways Hannett was pioneering a genre of bass and drums and it is maybe some measure of the ‘newness’ of this sound that it caused confusion and trepidation, leading towards judgmental comparisons with Joy Division simply because they were the most popularised and ‘successful’ aspect of this sound. At the time these groups received a negative press or, more usual, no press at all and it is maybe a combination of an always Brit-pop press setting the historical agenda, Factory’s later preference for guitar-led groups and later financial wrangles, that have led to none of these tracks ever being re-released.

With Martin Hannett being himself a bassist it is no surprise that the early Factory sound was exemplified by the enhanced role of the bass guitar. Though guitar overdubs are part of the stock-in-trade of rock music, Hannett utilised the funk-pioneered use of bass overdubs as part of a push towards freeing the bass from its role as ‘time-keeper’. Thus accentuated the bass became the dynamic force in a music that was thereby given an unusual aural depth. The bass still worked to ‘root’ the sound but its prominence worked to heighten a repetition-effect that gave tracks a durable immediacy and an almost physical form of contact. These qualities are what makes much of early Section 25, such as the Always Now LP, an early encounter with a completely bass-driven minimalism. Yet rather than employing a natural bass sound, Hannett pushed the instrument into sounding like a forerunner of the bass synthesiser. By using the studio in an experimental way and by exploring the range and capacities of musical technology, Hannett wouldn’t settle with one bass sound per recording but on say, Always Now, the bass sound changes as if there is a memory-bank of possible sounds. When this is added to his other hallmark of hyped-up drums (adding very subtle reverb and echo) any listening of early Section 25, that places it next to techno, is to experience rock almost melting into a slow and sombre funk.

Always Now is also perhaps one of the best examples of the complete relegation of the guitar and whilst the rumours were that the guitarist couldn’t play, what has been created from this contingency is an atmospheric neo-psychedelic texture that led one journalist (only one ever no doubt) to offer up a comparison with Pink Floyd!

As with ACR, and such Joy Division tracks as Insight, if a listener wanted to hear the guitar then Hannett enticed you to enter into the space of the production to find it as if this was a deliberate ploy to solicit an added imaginary and critical input from the listener. Just as the bass and drum production can, with hindsight, be a herald of techno, so, the potential absence of the guitar, in line with Hannett’s fascination for new studio equipment and drum machines, is further evidence of a laid-groundwork for those later innovations in dance music that shied away from the jazz-pop pretensions of the later ACR, of 52nd Street and Quando Quango.

On Always Now and other Section 25 tracks, such as the two-bass driven Trident with its solitary high octave synth note going-off like a car-alarm, it is almost as if the future of the guitar is seen to lie either with its obsolescence or with its ever returning re-emergence as the dead weight of the ‘natural’; as the instrument of a neo-folk music whose current ‘authenticity’ lies in the valve-amplification sound of the 60s beat-groups.

Peter Hook on Unknown Pleasures: “No, we didn’t like Unknown Pleasures, and I still don’t like it. Me and Barney wanted to be much more rocky. Hannett took it right down…”⁶

Dolphin Spurt: Of all the groups who made more than a dozen recordings for Factory it is perhaps the Dutch outfit Minny Pops who received absolutely no coverage that I can recall and this even though they often supported Joy Division. What is still interesting about this group is that they were part of early 80s current that lay to rest another mainstay of the rock combo: the drummer.⁷

Even though Joy Division, Crispy Ambulance and Durruti Column had all used drum machines it was Minny Pops who were one of the first bands I came across that totally dispensed with the drummer completely in preference for a drum machine. In the interview with Jon Savage, Martin Hannett jokes about his use of drum machines being related to a “dearth of good drummers” but on such a track as Dolphin Spurt, what is noticeable is that the drum machine is going at a slightly more accelerated pace than listeners’ were used to at the time. Again Hannett, rather than hiding the drum-machine brought this to the fore and together with the bass made its timbres deliberately audible. The guitars on this and other Minny Pops tracks are mixed higher than they are with Section 25 but it is not a melodious guitar, rather it is an accentuation of the rhythm that adds noise and not harmony.

As with Section 25 and Royal Family & The Poor, Minny Pops also did something to the vocals. Accustomed as we were at the time to hear ‘singing’ it was Section 25s barely uttered and intimate vocals, the Royal Family’s mordant proclamations and the Minny Pops’s sparse ‘pidgin-english’ mumblings that drew attention to vocal conventions. On several tracks recorded for the Dutch Plurex label Minny Pops forgo writing their own lyrics and ‘recite’ found texts: Kojak sees a representation of dialogue from that 70s TV Detective to the accompaniment of a drum-machine and a stylaphone.

Similarly, on Berlin by Crawling Chaos, a film-noir styled narration with its disenchanted tones and world-weary intonations is preferred to a more lyrical approach. Just as punk with its ‘direct speech’ may have provided a platform for these experiments and later seclusions of the vocals⁸ a majority of punk bands were more often than not so gesticulatory and full of an attention-seeking pride that they didn’t undermine that main locus of rock: lead singer syndrome. With Minny Pops and Section 25 there is a kind of reluctance to sing at all, as if it is more a conditioned response than a necessity and it is further borne out by a rise of instrumental tracks that occurred during this period on Factory: Babies in the Bardo, Trident, Sutra, Programme for Light (Section 25), Live on a Hot August Night (Crispy Ambulance), The Gas Chair (Crawling Chaos), Winter Hill, Below the Canal (ACR) most of Durruti Column and later through Biting Tongues’ Feverhouse soundtrack and Compressor single.

Though these proto-techno tendencies of the music of early Factory (the rise of the bass and drums, the phasing out of the guitar, the lack of a need for vocals and performance, the studio as instrument) can’t be attributed to a sole cause called ‘Martin Hannett’ but to a whole group of indices that includes punk coming into interaction with increasingly advancing and available music technology it is, when we are forced to listen to the sheer reactionary and nostalgic music of Brit-pop acts like the Stone Roses, Oasis, Blur, Verve etc, impossible to locate these early Factory records in a mainstream rock tradition. Though particles of this genre were picked up by the 80s label 4AD it seems as if these approaches to music share more of a ground with what came to be known as ‘industrial’. Like this genre these early Factory records found themselves in an uneasy parallel with music industry versions of rock and pop, as if, through a combination of often morbid and introspective subject matter, they acted to expose and counter a jubilant, celebratory and thoughtless music that had little interest in reflecting upon itself.

Common criticisms of the Factory sound as being “doomy and gloomy” can be read as an avoidance of the darker and self-critical aspects of life and therefrom are indicative of an expectation that music should remain an escapist entertainment. Rather than singing about happiness and fulfilment the larger portion of Factory lyrics are about failures of communication and subjective fragility that communicate a malaise and a warning to their listeners. If Punk provoked anger at social injustice, then many of these records centred on the emotional costs of this social injustice and, maybe further, acted to keep in mind the subjective component of emancipation and domination.

Ivan Chtcheglov:

“You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist.”⁹

Haçienda: There are many Situationist references around Factory Records that range from the obvious (Haçienda) to the tenuous (Stockholm Monsters named after Swedish youth riots of 1956?). Most would be agreed that this influence stems from Factory impresario Tony Wilson who had met short-lived SI member Christopher Grey at Oxbridge and once flashed a copy of the Situationist International Anthology during a Factory documentary, Play At Home, on Channel 4 (1984).

The closeness between Tony Wilson and the long-term Factory act the Durutti Column may suggest that this group’s mainstay, Vini Reilly, shared Wilson’s enthusiasm: on A Factory Sample Reilly lists ex-band members in terms of ‘Exclusions’ and includes, as his image contribution, the Situationist Group’s ‘Two Cowboys’ graphic. There was the sandpaper album sleeve after Debord’s book Memoirs and Wilson’s management alter-ego, in a reference to the French student uprisings of 1968, was called Movement of the 24th January.

These connections between Tony Wilson and a popularisation of the Situationists was made explicit by Factory’s sponsoring of the ICA’s SI exhibition catalogue in 1989 and by hosting the 1996 SI conference at the Haçienda. However, most people within a post-situationist milieu would more than likely view Wilson and Factory with suspicion: he has been a long term TV presenter with Granada and a music industry mogul via Factory Records (albeit a company that went into receivership, appears to have kept minimal financial records and seemed more interested in ‘sacrificing’ its wealth on buildings and ostentatious interior design).

To all extents and purposes Wilson occupies a position within the ‘spectacle’ but it should not be forgotten that Guy Debord’s one-time publisher Gérard Lebovici was just as similarly involved with the entertainment industry through his activity in French cinema and publishing. Contradictions such as these are fruitful for discussion for they keep alive the issues about how best to promote and popularise revolutionary ideas: from within or from without? Can a particular social context be more conducive to these ideas than another? Is it more fruitful in the media, at the workplace, or in a club? Can music and cinema be revolutionary? What wider, transversal effects can a slight shift in cultural paradigms have? These contradictions also reveal something about the ‘establishments’ people are fighting against. What contents will it co-opt and why? How much is allowed through? Where does censorship begin? In sleep or at the end of an assassins rifle?

It is easy to discount the likes of Wilson and Lebovici and it is made easier, even comfortable, by their being identified and dismissed as middle-class: such contradictions, capable of containing a political charge, are thus defused. For most people, seeing a copy of the SI Anthology as a subliminal flash-frame image on TV, going to a nightclub called the Haçienda or listening to a Durutti Column track is hardly a call to revolution but it is a means of keeping ideas of social change at least symbolically active and, just by thinking of advertising and the tight control capital wields over its ‘self-image’, we cannot deny that forms of ‘symbolic warfare’ are more than necessary.

There is always a danger that those committed to revolutionary action forget how it was that they arrived at their position or, similarly, how that position needs to change and adapt to differing conditions and potentials. There is a cumulative effect where every little counts and in every social context. The claim that Factory, as ‘pop-situationists’, have watered down situationist ideas is maybe to infer that these ideas have a privileged area of application and whilst ‘recuperation’ is a process that can’t be ignored, it too often seems to revolve around an ‘individualised’ response and a classification and hierarchic ordering of an action or intention. The former occurs through the idea that an action, a track or a reference only has one intentioned meaning: if Tony Wilson flashed the SI Anthology this is in order that he accrue some trendy radical chic to his label. But this would be to feel certain of the reason the book is displayed and from there to control and feel certain of the response of viewers when the follow-through can hardly be predicted. What occurs here is that too much weight is granted to the action of an individual who is judged according to an individualised criteria of motives that has a too definite idea of what actions rank as ‘premier league’ when revolution is concerned. The judgmentalism that is often inherent in claims of ‘recuperation’ is, moreover, one that whilst seeking sole possession of a text’s use, also elevates it into the status of a religious icon.

Royal Family and The Poor:

“As General Eisenhower so candidly explained… the present economic system can only be rescued by turning man into a consumer, by identifying him with the largest possible number of consumable values, which is to say non-values or empty, fictitious, abstract values…”¹⁰

Vaneigem Mix 1: Though Tony Wilson has not, as far as I am aware, made any detailed references to the SI’s influence on Factory he has expressed an interest in music’s role in propelling youth unrest. What should be stated is that music is not revolutionary per se but carries with it many presuppositions of an awareness of a need for social change; not least in terms of its activation of desire in the listener, its opening up of unconscious and imaginary terrains and its proclivity towards social interaction. It can be rhetorical, propagandist and a source of optimism and hope, and from jazz scenes through anarcho-punk to rave and techno, music has always been attached to counter-cultural and political movements, exacerbating dissatisfaction with the status quo and working the contradictions between ideas of reality and what it could be transformed to be.

In the time since Punk and the first wave of independent labels like Fast, Rough Trade, Zoo and early Factory what has occurred is the demise of manufacturing and traditional labour-intensive industries and the rise of the service and cultural sectors. This has reached such a point that it is claimed that there are more members of the Musicians Union than the National Union of Mineworkers and the Labour Government is establishing cultural task forces and the like in order to maximise, protect and increase the profits of the music industry.

One of punk’s lasting breakthroughs, taken up by the first wave of independent labels, is the inference that music is a sector of political struggle, but not solely in terms of propaganda. It can lead to notions about control of production, not only of products infused with a maximum of divergent and idiosyncratic meaning where mediations and suppressions of what is acceptable are minimised, but to the production of a social-self at odds to such “economisations of consciousness.”¹¹

One common pro-Situ objection to the idea of music’s being political is its very insertion into the ‘industry’, that it manufactures and sells for profit a range of consumer objects and that these consumer goods are themselves a source of mystification, sublimation and oppression. Just as this can encourage a ‘transcendent’ failure to engage with the political-charge of ‘actually-existing’ capitalism, the idea of a purchase being the alienation of some ineluctable human essence is to infer that a sold object has only one quality (its being a commodity) when, as former SI-member Asger Jorn has demonstrated, there are other qualities or values that are at play. One of these is Jorn’s idea of “counter value” or “artistic value” where, instead of limiting value to exchange value and the concomitant imposition of iron-clad commodity-relations, Jorn speaks of value not “emerging from the work of art” as if it is an innate property, but being “liberated from within the spectator”, from a “force which exists within the person who perceives” a painting, a movie, an installation, a record.

Jorn, putting it grandly, adds “artistic value, contrary to utilitarian value (ordinarily called material value) is the progressive value because it is the valorisation of mankind itself, through a process of provocation”. Jorn is attempting to look for cracks in the “reign of the commodity” and by moving his survey towards spectator or listener reaction he is asserting that response is not necessarily controlled or contaminated by commodity-relations, but that it is the variable that could release latent energies that have the potential for change. This is not to deny that the majority of manufactured music is nothing other than a commodity pure and simple, but the important point is that this is what it sounds like: commodified, system-built and market-researched, these are products that sell themselves in terms of their being aligned to already established concepts and motivations and which diminish the potentially disruptive oscillations of the variable i.e the role of a sense of nation in Brit-pop.

Record labels like Fast and Factory were working these areas in a way that could be called ‘subversion of the product’. Though these strategies were seen as ‘arty’ (and much of this was encouraged by Factory which itself talked about producing objets d’art and which also gave platforms to other forms of activity such as film-making, installation, books etc.) such condemnations were more indicative of a first response to an unfamiliar provocative approach.

This approach was one that was concerned with drawing attention to the process of commodity-production that lay hidden behind records that not only sounded different from others but were presented differently as well. There were no barcodes and each single and album announced itself as a product in what can be interpreted as an effort to bring to light the prevailing mode of production and consumption of mass-produced goods that always present themselves as something other than a product: foodstuffs selling lifestyles and automobiles selling social-position.

But, by announcing themselves as products there was an inferred difference, a challenge even, to the values of a mass production charged with the production of personal life and subjectivity. These products were aware of their revealing insertion into such circuits, and these weren’t records made to the standardised patterns and moulds of mass consumption but were charged with a countervailing idiosyncrasy; a self-expression made public and social that did not conform to expectations, but made products that contained a “sensuous human activity” that was then transmitted into other fields-of-use. The product was not there as a ‘distraction’ that subliminally imposed its logic but was something with which to interact and explore and, in many cases, learn from. It wasn’t leisure or work, entertainment or art, but some imbrication of these which acted to create a response and “liberate a force”.

Being a counterpoint to standardised products also entailed a departure from the rock paradigm by means of the packaging and design and, though the art-work by the likes of Peter Saville, Trevor Johnson, Martyn Atkins etc., is a major factor in making Factory records ‘collectable’, these were designs that were obscure enough to entice imagination and provoke political thought: there were no images of the bands, no names of personnel, no consistent logo, no lyric sheets, no equipment lists. A Certain Ratio’s first single even came with the words “a paper and vinyl construction in an edition of 5000” and a Minny Pops single was designed with a detourned Phillips logo.

There was then, at least initially, a deliberate parody of musical enterprise as a corporate business in that Factory was surreptitiously revealing itself as the producer of manufactured goods and its work force (musicians) were the invisible suppliers of its surplus value. This relationship between Factory and its work force was made visible (or staged) in the previously mentioned Channel 4 documentary. Here, on footage that would have ordinarily found itself on the cutting-room floor, a group of Factory musicians were filmed, in the Haçienda, arguing with Tony Wilson about contracts and royalties. When this is taken with the words “occasional labour in culture” that appeared on the liner notes of A Factory Sample, it becomes possible to suggest that the much unacknowledged, yet underlining and persistent presence of music industry exploitation, was here, theatrically revealed.

Even so, such an interpretation can only too easily be contradicted by other anecdotes and facts. Before it went into receivership Factory was one of the North West’s more high profile companies and one that, within the music industry, had an international status through attendance at various music industry symposiums and panel debates. Involved in the redevelopment of Manchester, Factory’s design aesthetic became something of a model for the burgeoning 90s leisure industry of wine bars, cafes, clubs and restaurants and its records are now remembered more for their sleeves and packaging than for the overall interaction of music, production and image.¹²

However, the ironies of product subversion are disturbingly offset by a quote from Tony Wilson about Ian Curtis’s suicide: “He wouldn’t have told me he wanted to die young because he was my investment…”¹³ Is this an expression of the bitter fallout of recrimination or a case of corporate parody becoming no longer parodic?

Royal Family and the Poor: “How many more suicides?”

Vaneigem Mix 2: The most explicit and unadulterated references to the Situationist International made anywhere in the back catalogue of Factory Records can be heard on the three tracks that the Liverpudlian band Royal Family & The Poor recorded for the Factory Quartet compilation: Vaneigem Mix, Death Factory and Rackets. With the first of these we are confronted by a track where the vocalist presents a montage of paragraphs from Raoul Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life that reveal strategies of consumption as a means of reviving a post-war capitalist economy through the creation of needs and expectations that have been accelerated by advertising.

In a similar vein to the Gang of Four’s Damaged Goods on Fast, but more communicative of disgust and a need for revolutionary violence, the Royal Family produce one of the most blistering indictment of capitalism heard during the punk and post-punk period. With all three Hannett produced tracks utilising the Factory sound of upfront proto-funky bass, hi-hat punctuated percussion and cacophonous guitar layerings of low-mixed analogue delay feedback, the Royal Family could leave their vocalist to send a barrage of situationist invective onto dumbfounded teenage listeners.

Vaneigem Mix, incomprehensible on a first listen, stood out as both angry and rational at the same time (a kind of praxis) and what may have sounded like a spontaneous outburst soon revealed itself as needing countless listenings so as to crack its theoretical code. It is here where many people first encountered the writings of the Situationist International and it was enhanced by the added musical accent, the phrasing and unwavering conviction of the voice that drew you towards wanting to understand and learn from what was being said. Though this has yet to culminate what was striking at the time was how record-buying was revealed as political: “Already the idea of ‘teenager’ tends to define the buyer in conformity with what he buys”.

After the tightness and focus of this track, the next, Death Factory, revealed itself as purposefully rambling, shoddy and ‘not good-enough’. A track made up of slogans including “Work ’til you die, Work ’til you die… in Death Factree, Death Factree” it stops and starts, and splutters into action as if it is the situationist slogans that are making the musicians express their agreement through a use of sound rather than words. The self-destructive implosion of this track, its undermining of the accepted rock structures of tight composition, communicates the group’s refusal to see themselves as ‘musicians’ and is mirrored by the short Dirge tracks that preface each of the three main cuts: a synthesiser and drum track that opens the side in-tune but by the end is out of tune and out of time, falling over itself.

The last track, Rackets, contains many lines that undermine the certainties of a prevailing left-consensus and, in criticising all that was and still is held dear as ‘radical’, opened up a chasm that posits revolution without actually naming it: “Like communism, like anarchism, like punk, like reggae…Socialism is a racket / It’s how you hide your submission to the dominant banality, it’s how you conform whilst appearing to oppose”. As one friend commented at the time: “what’s left?”, and it is no surprise that live reviews of a band, with purposes other than being ‘rock stars’ and who attacked the sacred cows of career and social purpose, were not exactly complimentary or at all willing to engage in deciphering what they heard.

As with Death Factory, which relates to Throbbing Gristle’s use and popularisation of the same phrase,¹⁴ Rackets also raised the spectre of social-despair and firmly lodged its cure as belonging in the manifold arenas of social insurrection: after asking “How many more suicides?” and listing various media-icons such as Marilyn Monroe, Sid Vicious and ending with Ian Curtis, a short percussion-punched phrase lists riot zones: “Bristol, Brighton, Amsterdam, Soweto”. This mentioning of Ian Curtis’s suicide located it as an act informed by extreme disillusionment and worked, in this context, to counter the myth-making that inevitably surrounded it: journalists had raised Curtis to the position of a rock music martyr. For the Royal Family, Ian Curtis was suicided… there were reasons at play other than the purely individualistic interpretations of its being the act of a troubled genius, reasons that brought in the wider implications of capitalist social-relations. Instead of being defeated and bemused by this suicide the Royal Family seem to be positing it, and other suicides, as a source of anger: the absence of a locus of human relations… the impoverishment of self-expression and inter-subjective communication…an alienation mediated and propelled by records and icons of all types.

Though, with Art On 45, this line up of the Royal Family made only one more record (a total of 25 minutes of recording!) this continued in the vein of the tracks on A Factory Quartet. Being a parody of the then currently successful disco-medley records of ‘Stars on 45’,the Royal Family backed such provocative couplets as “from Auschwitz to the Ritz, from heaven to the blitz” with a disco backing complete with a four-to-the floor beat, handclaps and slap-bass.

What became of Andrew Windsor, Nathan Windsor and the rest of the Family is anyone’s guess, but, however proclammatory their tracks were, they differed from a thousand anarcho-punk bands simply by the way they left room in the sounds and the words that encouraged participation and propagation, and whether this was in seeking high-and-low for a dictionary big enough to include the word ‘Vaneigem’ or writing the lyrics out on an exam paper, what occurred was an imperviousness to the powerful manipulations of any propaganda or sect, and an eventual receptivity to those strains of emotional anger that occur in the densest of theoretical texts.

Karl Marx on Closer:

“It is only when man’s object becomes a human object or objective man that man does not lose himself in that object. This is only possible when it becomes a social object for him and when he himself becomes a social being for himself, just as society becomes a being for him in this object.”¹⁵

Colony: Ian Curtis’s suicide was as complicated and unglamorous as any other. There can surely only ever be a myriad of reasons for a suicide but in the most general terms it is possibly about an increasing severance of social ties: a diminishment of those very real links between the deeper parts of unconscious subjectivity and a wider social world . In some ways a suicidal frame of mind could be the epitome of what is called ‘bourgeois individuality’, a self isolated amidst the filtered voices of others where the centrality of its own experience (feelings of guilt and shame which are reactions to self-expectation and the expectation of others) is heightened to such a degree that it is life- threatening. In inaccurate terms it could be said there is an individualistic overloading and a decrease in a trusting communicativeness that would restrengthen the social ties. This isn’t to suggest that there is some selfish deficiency in suicide but that very real paradoxes of social experience exist between condemnations of a narcissistic self-centredness and the prevailing social-logic of people being in ‘possession’ of their own individuality.¹⁶

A further paradox can be seen as that between the need for the expression of deeply felt personal subject-matter and the way that such expression is not only seen as socially taboo but is furthermore seen as the domain of specialists who are ‘trained’ with the ‘right’ vocabularies and techniques. Without delving into Ian Curtis’s personal life and being personally specific it is possible to see that the political relevance of his lyrical and vocal contribution to the Joy Division sound lies somewhere in such a terrain, one that has an unacknowledged relevance for political and revolutionary activity where, to quote Bataille, “A kind of timidity, of bad conscience, of shame, takes hold of minds at the idea of the lack of value, the lack of weight, — compared with the concerns of communist politics — of what engages them personally.”¹⁷

It is a major aspect of capitalism’s social function to maintain alienated and detached spaces of communication where human relationships are filtered and processed by means of role models, societal expectation, the behavioural formalities of professionalisms and by cultural-political forms etc. Boundaries are established that limit possible communication or, as with certain responses to Ian Curtis’s lyrics, provide judgmental barriers that declare that it is not poetry or good writing, nor is it good singing. This is to miss the point and expect that communication must take an aesthetic form that can, to some degree, diminish its impact. The personal expression of deeper layers of subjectivity is, in the capitalist colony, commodified and controlled by means of the various psycho-therapies in a mishmash of analyst fees and privacy… and, crucially for this piece, by much of the music industry, through the faultless expressions of ‘singers’ specialised in expressing stereotypical emotions that act as surrogates or replacements for our own. These deeper layers, the idioms of desire, can then come to be commodified too and the result is the commodification of human-relations and a lack of having any need to express anything about ourselves because it lacks the analyst’s penetration or the poet’s poise. Such a disinclination not only creates the subjective imbalances of the suicidal frame-of-mind, but, is indicative too of the pathological certainty of ideologues and, closer to common experience, the inability to affirm a common goal with other people.

Ian Curtis, like many other people who are not necessarily singers or writers etc, often shows, however ironically, that such commodification, such alienation from personal expression and self-reflection does not have to be the norm.One line from Sound of Music seems to be indicative of an approach that Curtis seemed to be embracing: “I’ll… show you all the out-takes”. Like the drumming mistake on the Still version of Passover, Curtis gives an indication of the method that isn’t one: that he is not a specialist in the sense that he is a writer or a lyricist… but a person similarly struggling with self expression and self and social understanding which often comes up against barriers and obfuscations, takes wrong turnings and makes mistakes. In this way Ian Curtis was an autodidact and being ‘self-taught’ meant that he was not trained in the decorums of restraint. This has the paradoxical effect that his seemingly negative lyrics also carry the positivity of being resistant to the norms of the colony: through Joy Division, Curtis communicated at a level or depth that opposed the prevailing inhibition and control of such communication.¹⁸

This is the social risk of exposure and to engage with Joy Division is to be open to just such an intense invocation of the personal element becoming revealed (or decoded) as a rightfully social phenomenon: as listeners we are drawn to that which is beyond our own experience and, in the case of Joy Division’s lyrics, what we find is a space between ‘what-is’ and ‘what-could-be’, a space of desire that posits ‘ourself’ as at similarly receding distance from ‘fulfilment’, as processual. Part of what can be seen as a ‘morbid fascination’ with such tracks as Isolation and Heart And Soul is the very estranged sensation, not limited to Joy Division or indeed music, where we see subjectivity as an object and crucial to such a self-distancing is the insertion of ourselves into a social that, so we’ve been shown, is exterior to us.

Howard Slater, March 1998

1. Interview with Martin Hannett by Jon Savage, Vagabond No.1, p. 29-34. 1992. ↩︎
2. In Ian Curtis’s lyrics there are many such tensions between ‘what-is’ and ‘what-could-be’ and whilst these could, if a strictly ‘biographical’ approach is taken, be solely related to his personal life it would be too easy and a-political to suggest that these have no social applicability. On Komakino there is the line “The vision has never been met”. On She’s Lost Control the added lyric: “I could live a little in a wider line” and on Wilderness: “Tried to find a clue, tried to find a way to get out!”. At a point during Curtis’s most profound lyrical moment, on Candidate, constriction becomes social constriction as the sense of a desired social transformation of possibilitites meets the immovable blockage of reification: “It’s just second nature/ It’s what we’ve been shown/ We’re living by your rules/ That’s all that we know”. A non-reified life, one not conditioned by tradition and socially constructed immobility is an “unknown pleasure” as is an attempt to get beyond such conditioning. The reputedly Tory-voting Ian Curtis sides with the revolutionaries! ↩︎
3. Quoted by Mick Middles in From Joy Division to New Order: The Façtory Story. p. 127. Virgin 1996. This is a hugely disappointing book that eschews any analysis or engagement with Factory tangents in favour of a kind of rock bio-pic of New Order. Though New Order are integral to a drift away from rock music, especially with the series of early 80s singles that ended with Confusion, the attention their music has already received means that they will be treated peripherally in this scrapbook. ↩︎
4. Martin Hannett on Radio 1, September 1979. Quoted by Dave Simpson in his Joy Division piece ‘Torn Apart’ in Uncut No.7. December 1997. ↩︎
5. Interview with Chris Nagle by Dave Simpson, ibid. ↩︎
6. Peter Hook quoted by Mick Middles, ibid, p. 115. ↩︎
7. A history of the drum machine — from its role as a stand-in for drummers to its utilisation in unleashing physically unplayable rhythms — would make interesting reading and it’s not possible to proceed with this scrapbook without mentioning, in this connection, the likes of Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, Eric Random, Robert Rental, Suicide, Kraftwerk etc. Of these Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle are a lot more visible than the likes of Minny Pops and as this is about Factory a digression here is not possible other than stating that the Cabs featured on Factory’s first release; Eric Random, a Manchester musician, provided the excellent beat-box sound on Durutti Column’s Madeleine and that TG had connections with Factory acts through live gigs arranged by Final Solution. However, TG, with their bass, drum-machine and sound/noise guitars are very much forerunners of this early, proto-techno, dissolution of the rock sound, perhaps more so than the rest in that they deliberately agitated against rock song structure via extemporisation, film soundtrack and psycho-social synth-pop. ↩︎
8. Hannett’s production of New Order’s Movement is a good example and whilst this is in part dictated to by the bands’ quandary of replacing Ian Curtis it is also equally indicative of the growing sourness of the ‘front-man’ myth. In Mick Middles’s book, ACR singer Simon Topping is described by Tony Wilson as reacting to the suicide by moving back “into the music, back from the front of the stage”, ibid, p. 151. ↩︎
9. Ivan Chtcheglov: Formulary for a New Urbanism. Situationist Anthology, p. 1. Bureau of Public Secrets 1981. ↩︎
10. Raoul Vaneigem: Revolution of Everyday Life, p. 50. Rebel Press/Left Bank Books 1983 . Quoted by the Royal Family & The Poor on Vaneigem Mix – A Factory Quartet (Fact 24d. 1981). ↩︎
11. Asger Jorn: Critique of Political Economy [unpublished draft translation by Unpopular Books 1996]. Jorn adds: “This process of manipulating consciousness becomes a social duty… a weight of inert ideas which exclude any variation in consciousness beyond the established system”. Any variation from models marks a step in the direction of ‘what-could-be’ ? ↩︎
12. The February 1998 “Destroy” exhibition of punk and new wave design held at the Royal Festival Hall featured much Factory material. Whereas one of Factory’s original design motivations may have been to make a consumer-object into a more widely available ‘work-of-art’ and hence partially subvert the product in terms of an increase in quality, the rising centrality of distinctive design for capitalism means that, in this context, these records take on a desociated aesthetic value that outstrips their use-value. Where once they had been anonymous, unattributable and socially dispersed they are now reconvened as ‘covers’ linked into already-established reputations. Looking at them through the eyes of a curator you see them as collectable commodities that have become artifacts from the history of design and then, looking at them through your own eyes again, you see them as having always carried an
    ‘added-value’ which may have induced the urge to buy them. A successful marketing strategy for a company that never advertised? ↩︎
13. Tony Wilson interviewed by Deborah Curtis for her book Touching From A Distance, p. 104. Faber & Faber 1996. In relation to Ian Curtis’s suicide it is worth mentioning that Deborah Curtis stresses the amount of gigs that Joy Division were performing in the year before his suicide. Whilst no one can be blamed for this it must surely lead to a further souring of the rock and roll myth: the drive for success, the self-exploitation of cultural workers in pursuit of a modicum of glamour. For Ian Curtis the stress must have been heightened by the way that night after night he would be performing songs with an intense and ‘dark’ lyrical content and to some extent, through performance, was reliving the experiences and thoughts that inspired them. The distance between himself and a writerly alter-ego, between himself as ‘subject’ and a ‘subject of the statement’, was an ever-diminishing one and is as much part of the function of celebrity status. ↩︎
14. The subversion of pop by means of its coming to focus on a death paralleled by a “life lived as survival” is put to disturbing effect by Throbbing Gristle who titled one track Beachy Head after the place near Brighton which became ‘popular’ as a place to commit suicide. Similarly the track Distant Dreams, with its mild synth-pop harmonies features a dark lyric about time-passing that plays upon unconscious fears of death. Not apt subject matter for pop music but all the more disturbing for its appearance in such a musical context. I am reminded also of New Order’s Blue Monday, one of the first proto-techno dance records whose release was met with discussions about whether its title referred to a youthful suicide pact in California or to the practice of a nineteenth century rural work force to take Monday off after a weekend of boozing. ↩︎
15. Karl Marx: Early Writings, p. 352. Penguin 1975. ↩︎
16. Joel Kovel in The Radical Spirit expresses this more succinctly: “Ours is a society which has a peculiar form of self-experience. The individual person conceives of him or herself as separate, cut off, and a problem; as a project to be fulfilled”, p. 16. Free Association Books, 1988. ↩︎
17. Georges Bataille: The Accursed Share, p. 329. Zone Books,1993. ↩︎
18. The whole area of the unconscious and music deserves separate treatment. Here we can say that music is perhaps a “mode of registration” of the unconscious which interferes with the adoption of a stable self-representation (i.e. Curtis as autodidact and the conflictual content of the lyrics). The unconscious is commonly seen as subsisting prior to language and hence, I believe, it is this facet of subjectivity that is more receptive to music/sound. The threat it poses as ‘primitivist’ or ‘instinctual’ (cf. Curtis’s stage performances and the emotional force of delivery) makes it a taboo area – it is irrational, disruptive and in need of interpretative control. However, the lyric/music interaction of Joy Division, is perhaps indicative of Joel Kovel’s idea of the unconscious which he offers is not some “set of memories, fantasies etc that a person has within him… but… something that is evoked and occurs within an intersubjective field..”. ↩︎

What follows is a short introduction by Howard to the first upload of this article to the web on Frank Brinkhuis’s site (no longer accessible):

Frank Brinkhuis suggested that a personal introduction to ‘Graveyard And Ballroom’ would be a good idea and I could maybe start off by saying that I was born in Preston, near Manchester and was growing up around the time of Punk, playing in bands and bunking off school to hang out in the library! In many ways the small label scene of Manchester (Factory, New Hormones, Rabid etc.) was the North West’s version of the punk scene and without going into too much detail I’ve always considered that what was called ‘new wave’ contained much more than the often overhyped and London-centric punk scene. Though I was a bit young (12) to get to the first Factory club I did see Factory acts like Joy Division, Section 25, New Order, Durrutti, ACR and Factory records where always available in the local shops (I remember exchanging The Clash’s triple album Sandinista for a Minny Pops single!).

That Tony Wilson was a TV presenter on Granada and promoted bands like ACR and Joy Division also helped to raise Factory’s profile in the North West and spur my interest in the scene around Factory. In many ways this was a scene that was local to the North West without being parochial and this helped to increase a sense of identification with the label and the ethos of the music. We were familiar with crumbling industrial architecture with rain, gloom (!) and the recessesion of the early 80s and we were also searching for something intellectually stimulating: poetry, politics, drugs.

Perhaps it could be said that Factory and their version of punk gave working class kids like me the confidence to pursue ideas, books and creativity without becoming a student or going through the education system. Afterall Ian Curtis was a self taught lyricist and that he had read stuff like Kafka and J.G. Ballard was as much an inspiration as the music he was a part of.

I also think this introduction is a good idea because this article, running-off a long standing enthusiasm for early Factory, does tend to get a bit theoretical in places. I hope that readers are not put-off by this, but see it more as an insight into the way that Factory Records prompted a long standing search amongst radical and artistic ideas. They were not afraid to be ‘pretentious’ and likewise I was not afraid to get ideas ‘above my station’.

I further think that, too often, music is treated solely as an entertainment when it definitely effects us in emotional and intellectual ways. Musicians, being involved in the practicalities of making music, are rarely interested in conceptualising what they do and this maybe feeds into the way we, as listeners, relate to the the music. Worse, I think, the media and many music-writers tend to shy away from taking their enthusiasms in a conceptual direction maybe fearing it won’t sell magazines or that it will put people off. I remember reading a totally bemused review of The Royal Family & The Poor that contained so much journalistic bitterness and superiority when it was simply a case that the journalist had failed to understand what the Royal Family were up to! I think this kind of attitude maintains the status quo and part of the joy of websites such as Frank’s and other ventures like fanzines and ‘independent’ labels is that they provoke people in creative directions.

Anyway, Joy Division made me think and when I heard that the Heart And Soul CD-set was coming out I thought that I should lay other writing projects aside and confront an obsession with early Factory that had persisted with me through an 80 and 90s passion for techno and electronic music. I couldn’t help hearing the ‘sound’ of techno in some of the albums and singles I had played over and over again… Dolphin Spurt, Dirty Disco, Winter Hill… and when I looked at who had produced these records it was always Martin Hannett’s name that looked up at me. So, I wanted, in my own way, to give Martin Hannett his due.

Whatsmore I had read the book by Mick Middles, From Joy Division To New Order: The Façtory Story, and like most of the other books (except Deborah Curtis’s Touching From A Distance) it left me really dissapointed. I felt that a whole swathe of Factory bands had been neglected and it was this that also spurred me to give some thought and consideration to some of those bands who I had liked equally to Joy Division. The media had vastly neglected the likes of Section 25 and Minny Pops covering them as sub-standard versions of Joy Division (I heard from an artist friend that the trendy electronic outfit Add N To X have been raving about Section 25).

However, having said this, there are bands who I have not covered in this version of the article. In the future I would like to include more on Crispy Ambulance, the Stockholm Monsters and Biting Tongues and having recently met Gonnie Rietveld of Quando Quango maybe there is scope for more research, even though at present I feel like I’ve said my piece.

Moving on a bit I was also amazed that Mick Middles’s book about Factory contained no reference to the Situationist International. This group of French and Belgian artists and theorists had inspired Tony Wilson, and their modern brand of Marxism gave Wilson food for thought about such concepts as ‘commodity’ and ‘spectacle’ and about how it is possible to subvert capitalism.

Punk was about rebellion and though Wilson has stated that he is “a fan” who just uses “slogans and references” from the Situationists, he also remarked that “if you look at the intersections between British pop and situationism, you see that we are responsible for references to and popularisation of situationist ideas.”(*) I can safely say that Factory was my entry into such ideas which were expressed so well by the Royal Family & The Poor line up on A Factory Quartet and on their 12″ single Art On 45. Anyway this political aspect of Factory had always intrigued me and the second part of this article takes a look at this area.

To round up this introduction I’d like to inform readers that I did send a copy of this article to Factory for them to comment on any inaccuracies but I received no reply. I wasn’t expecting a response but if anyone who reads it would like to comment I will include their comments and credit their input if it should occur that I return to work on this piece. Maybe this is also the place to send out a plea to anyone willing to sell a spare copy of Section 25s Charnel Ground – how did I ever loose it?

Best wishes and with thanks to Frank for uploading this article on his site,

Howard Slater

*) The Hacienda Must Be Built, Aura Publications, School of Humanities, University of Huddersfield, Queensgate, Huddersfield, HD1 3HD.

• Other texts by Howard Slater on datacide-magazine.com
• Table of content of Break/Flow 2
• All articles from Break/Flow 2
• Flint Michigan interviews Royal Family & The Poor from 2010 on the Mute site

• Originally published in print in Break/Flow 2 in 1999
• Online on
• Republished online on our site March 2025

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