Daniel Miller on Mute Records and Depeche Mode

British electronic pop music would not be quite so wonderful if it wasn’t for Daniel Otto Joachim Miller, the founder of Mute Records, early producer of Depeche Mode and music-maker as The Normal, Silicon Teens, Duet Emmo and Sunroof.

In this interview, he goes back to the DIY roots of Mute and recalls the liberating influence of punk, the joys of cheap synths and seeing an early minimalist Depeche Mode play live for the first time. He also talks about pushing the sonic limits while doing sampling experiments with the Basildon band, as well as the musical influence of Berlin and the rise of the remix.

When you were starting out, what was the first synthesizer you ever bought and what did you use it for?

My first synthesizer was a Korg 700S. Which I used exclusively on my first single [‘T.V.O.D.’/’Warm Leatherette’ by The Normal, 1978] and I also used it a lot on the Silicon Teens album [‘Music for Parties’, 1979]. I think on those two projects, that was what I used, really almost without any other synth. Obviously I still have it.

How did you put The Normal single together musically? What were the elements involved?

There's very few musical elements in it really. I used my first synthesizer, the Korg 700S, which was secondhand so it was really the cheapest synthesizer I could get. I used it for everything from drums to melodies to sounds on those songs. I managed to figure out a way of getting a kind of a kick drum and a snare drum from that synthesizer.

There’s only the drums, a kind of buzzing sound and a sort of ring-modulated glissando sound and my vocal, and that was it. As far as I can remember - it was a long time ago.

And that was all put together at home.

It was all done at home. Very basic. I recorded both of them in a 24-hour period. It was kind of punk rock. I recorded both of them in a 24-hour period. It was kind of punk rock. I was listening to the first Ramones album a lot at that time as well as Kraftwerk. As I was recording, I very much had the Ramones in my mind – the brevity, the simplicity, no solos, minimal production. There was a kind of mixture of both those influences.

You were one of a generation of independent musicians or non-musicians who started to become active around the same time, using electronic instruments as they became increasingly kind of affordable in the late 70s period. Did it feel at the time that like you were in on the beginning of something new?

Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, it did. It was a very special moment in history, I think. There were a number of other people who were doing the same things – The Human League, Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle were already recording. We were inspired by similar artists from the earlier part of the seventies like Kraftwerk for instance, or Can or Neu!, and by the liberating influence of punk where you could do anything you really wanted to. Plus there was the increasing affordability of electronic equipment, so you didn’t even have to learn three chords, just press a couple of keys and twiddle a few knobs.

All those kind of things I think came together at a particular moment in 1978 along with the DIY label explosion, where there were a lot of people doing their own releases rather than going to a record company.

There was a very specific moment in 1978 when everything seemed to come together.

Were you connected in any way to what these other people were doing?

I was operating in a vacuum. I didn’t know anybody else. There were a couple of little articles [in the music press] about Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle. But there wasn’t much music around at that time. So yeah, I  felt that there was kind of something going on that I could be part of, which was new, but I was essentially working in a vacuum.

Punk fans didn't necessarily react well to electronic music. I've read a couple of alarming stories about the violent reactions you got from punks when you toured with Robert Rental supporting [punk band] Stiff Little Fingers [in 1978].

I think there were a few things about punk that influenced me. One was the brevity, the kind of return to the energy of the three-minute single. Punk rock was very broad in some ways, you know - you had people who were quite good musicians like The Clash or the Sex Pistols and you had bands who really were coming from a more of a non-musician background, I suppose like the original Banshees and others.

But in terms of the tour that you're talking about, yeah, we had some pretty rough times. We didn’t go down well at all. There were a few gigs where we were really spat at, and bottles and burning cigarettes were thrown on stage.

But we decided to keep going, we carried on, we never gave up on a gig. So that was good.

Now it seems strange, but electronic music was considered quite divisive at that point.

I think a lot of people at the time associated synthesizers with pseudo-classical prog-rock artists like Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and punk was very much a reaction against that – although I was reacting against that too. I wasn’t a fan of that kind of music either. I think there had to be a bit of a transition phase before people actually realised that some of the new people who were using synthesizers were doing something very, very different.

The early Depeche Mode, when you first saw them play [in London in 1980], how did they actually sound?

What impressed me was the combination of the quality of the sound, the strength of the songs and the arrangements of the songs as well. They had three very simple synths, basically the three cheapest you could buy at that time – all monophonic, no presets – and a little Boss drum machine, and I thought what they created with that, live, with that very kind of minimal equipment, was really outstanding. The sounds were not particularly advanced, it was just more about the way they use the synthesizers in terms of the arrangements, it was very impressive.

Some of the bands who were considered synth bands around that time were actually rock bands with a synth. But Depeche Mode were completely committed to their synthetic pop vision.

I think the thing that was important at that point, you could buy a cheap synth. So it really opened people’s minds to other possibilities. So it was a real option for people. Depeche Mode, their previous musical experiences were more guitar-orientated. But then they made that very conscious decision to go completely electronic. But by that time, it was possible for them to do it.

Let’s talk about a bit more expensive piece of electronic equipment. You were involved in producing Depeche Mode’s albums, right up to the mid-eighties and ‘Black Celebration’. How important was the Synclavier to their transition from the early electro-pop records to this kind of more serious and more complex sound that they developed by the mid-eighties?

The Synclavier was very important. It could have been another kind of sampler, but we chose the Synclavier. It wasn’t polyphonic. I mean, Martin [Gore] also had an Emulator as well, which was very important. The Synclavier was monophonic but had a much longer recording time, and also had a much higher kind of fidelity. So the longer recording time gave us opportunities to record longer samples, basically.

We didn’t sample from records, we went out and sampled with [engineer-producer] Gareth Jones who we were working with, he had a portable recorder and we would go out and just record sounds, lots of different sounds. ‘Pipeline’, for instance, on ‘Construction Time Again’, all those sounds were made from field recordings and then reconstructed  to create that sound. And even the vocals we did as a kind of field recording outside.

We were in Shoreditch [in east London] working in John Foxx’s studio. Shoreditch at that time was a very different place, derelict basically with a lot of opportunities to get great sound in scrapyards and things like that. And we even recorded Martin’s vocal by a railway in a scrap yard and you can hear the trains go by.

We were also recording in London in Westside Studios and it had quite a big car park and it was it was Guy Fawkes’ night. And Gareth and I, we did mic placements along the car park, four or five mics, and then let off rockets across the mics and recorded them on a multitrack. And then we put those into the sampler. So we were doing a lot of things like that.

Were you trying to avoid presets - preset drum sounds and that kind of thing.

Generally, yes. I mean, we did use drum machines a bit. We were very into pushing the technology as far as we could. Generally we tried to create all the sounds from scratch, which is more interesting and much more fun, whether it was a drum sound or a bass. And if we wanted a polyphonic sound, we would just do one part of the chord and then and then record the next part of the chord and then the next part of the chord with slightly different sounds so it had very different texture.

Martin did get a very early PPG [Wave Synthesizer] and we use that quite a lot on ‘A Broken Frame’. But I think that was the thing that put us off presets, because that had presets, and we would just sit there going through the presets, listening to different sounds, and it was very boring and uncreative really.

You did some of this work in that mid-eighties period in Berlin - was the city chosen for the connection to Bowie and all that?

There were a number of reasons. Gareth, who we worked with on ‘Construction Time Again’, was just in the process of moving to Berlin. He was working in Hansa Studios, that legendary studio, that's actually went Bowie recorded ‘Heroes’. But Bowie wasn’t necessarily the reason we went there. It had a very high-tech mix room and a really good combination of different kinds of studios. And because of the nature of the economy there, the exchange rate was good.

There was also the idea that Berlin was a 24-hour city. I mean, in London, you remember back in those days, if you remember, the licensing laws were very strict. So everything basically closed at 11. We tend to work quite late. And so in London, you’d finish work and you’d think, ‘Oh, let’s go for a drink.’ And of course you had nowhere to go for a drink. And in Berlin we could go anytime we wanted. And it was a great musical scene there and obviously a very special atmosphere.

Do you think the Berlin experience affected the nature of the way Depeche Mode made music and the way they looked at making music?

Yes, in a subtle way, I would say. I mean, they were already into artists like [Einstürzende] Neubauten and so forth before they went there. Of course, they then ended up meeting Neubauten and Blixa [Bargeld] used to come down to the studio and they used to hang out. 

I don’t think you could say their sound changes because they were in Berlin – they’d already recorded the album by that time. It was already recorded, we just mixed it there. I couldn't put my finger on really.  I think that living in a foreign city, they kind of matured, you know, it gave them very different kind of perspective.

I want to ask a more general question about the importance of 12-inch remixes. Mute did a lot of them in the eighties. How important were remixes for 12-inches as a format for exploring new ideas in electronic music?

I think they were important, especially in the early days, yeah. I mean, we did our own remixes at the beginning. So we’d finish the mix of the track and then we would just do extended bits and edit them and stuff like that. And I think the original kind of remix concept was more like an extended version with the drums up, more clubby, quite basic but quite open for experimentation as well, which we did.

The first person who did a remix for us outside our group was Adrian Sherwood. And he did an amazing mix of ‘People are People’, which is called ‘Are People People’. And then as time has gone on, because the band are fans of other electronic musicians, it gave them the opportunity to work with them.

Do you think some of the records that Mute released in its first decade had an influence on the development of techno in America?

I think that scene was an influence on the original Detroit techno, yeah, no question about that. But I think that's more a question for those artists rather than for us.

About Mute in general - the label has kind of continuously straddled the divide between what could be called art music and what could be called pop music. Is that something that you always sought to achieve? Or just something that’s part of your personal aesthetic?

It’s partly my personal taste - a lot of it’s my personal taste. But I like to think that even the so-called pop music that we've put out is art.

You know, there’s this term experimental music. I don’t think there’s such a thing as experimental music. I think there’s experimental processes in the making of music, whether it’s ABBA or Kraftwerk. I mean, ABBA were very experimental. When people talk about experimental music these days, what they really mean is unlistenable music, or music that’s difficult to listen to. So I think all the artists that we've worked with, whichever genre they happen to be in, have been very experimental in their processes.

With Depeche, as an example, we used a lot of experimental processes to make those records. I think with them, it was very much like, ‘OK, these are great pop songs, we could do them in a so-called conventional way or we could really push the sonic envelope’, and I think in that period, me and the band were very much into the idea of using strange or unusual sounds in a pop music context.

Interview by Matthew Collin for ‘Dream Machines’ on October 13, 2022. Thanks to Wolfgang Tillmans for helping to make it happen.