Graham Massey on 808 State

 

As a member of 808 State, Graham Massey has been responsible for creating some of the UK rave scene’s greatest anthems, for making some of the weirdest electronic dance records to ever reach the pop charts, and for producing a series of albums that have consistently reached beyond the boundaries of the genre. He is also a man with deep roots in Manchester’s musical culture; before 808 State, he was involved in the postpunk alternative scene with Factory Records-associated experimental band Biting Tongues, sonic disruptors Danny and the Dressmakers and his own offbeat DIY cassette-scene project, Beach Surgeon.

In this interview, he talks about the pre-acid house electronic scene in Manchester and the vital role played by New Order, as well as 808 State’s early work with A Guy Called Gerald and the making of records like ‘In Yer Face’ and ‘Cubik’, which were simultaneously weird and physically compelling on the dancefloor.

808 State’s members had been part of various different scenes - the alternative, postpunk Factory [Records] alternative scene, then electro and hip-hop, then house. I always thought that was maybe one of the things made the music special.

Me and Martin [Price] had been through what you would call the postpunk thing, and because we were slightly older than the youngsters in the band [Andy Barker and Darren Partington], there was a wide age group. For instance, [A Guy Called] Gerald was only in his teens when he was in the band. So we were coming from completely different backgrounds.

The first band that I ever saw that had electronic connections was Hawkwind, that was the first band I ever saw live, and I found that sort of untutored electronics really exciting, the audio oscillator thing, it had a real rawness to it. And then during the punk thing, during my years on the dole, about eight years on the dole, me and Alan Hempsall from [Factory Records band] Crispy Ambulance used to spend our days together and he was a mad Throbbing Gristle head. I couldn't say I was a mad Throbbing Gristle head but I absorbed so much Throbbing Gristle during those years so it was almost like second nature, those techniques of making raw electronic music. There was there was a lot in that music, from the really savage atonal stuff to the 24 Jazz Funk Greats kind of material, which was a lot more pretty and organised.

A lot of people on the early UK house and techno scene had electro connections or postpunk connections, or both.

When we got to the rave thing, we had somebody wanted to manage us early on, a guy who ended up managing The Orb and Youth and people like that, a guy who ran [WAU] Mr. Modo Records called Adam [Morris], and he takes us down to the KLF's place and we'd hang out and I made some early remixes for Youth, one called ‘Naked in the Rain’ [by Blue Pearl] that did pretty well back then.

So were kind of hanging out in the London scene a bit with those guys, we were singing off the same hymn sheet because they'd come from that same kind of postpunk explosion, they were a similar age and were dabbling in samplers because all that stuff was new at that point - getting hold of samplers for that generation didn't happen till the mid-eighties, late eighties, you finally got to dabble with samplers because previously to that they were rare beasts and very expensive. One of New Order's samplers did the rounds a little bit in Manchester, people would borrow their Emulator. It was a big deal to get hold of a thing like that at the time.

So New Order helped other musicians in Manchester out by lending them electronic equipment?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. For instance, Alan from Crispy Ambulance, he took on a lot of Bernard's kit. You know, he bought a sequencer off Bernard that he could never figure it out, it was a Powertran thing that was built as a kit. And they had an ARP Odyssey in the rehearsal place that we had - this was an expensive piece of kit and a thing of great mystery as well. And drum machines, there were some early Roland drum machine kit, so all this stuff was beginning to enter our world, bit by bit.

There was a sound guy as well that we used to use in Biting Tongues, called John Hurst, and he was involved in [Factory band] Section 25. so he had all the Roland gear quite early on, early eighties, he had the 808 and the 303 and 101. So that that was kind of known to us round about ’84 or something like that, and if we could get our hands on it, we incorporated it into what we were doing

So while you were playing with Biting Tongues, electronics started to filter into that scene…

We were making exploratory stuff. And something that chimed with us was the Adrian Sherwood [On-U Sound] world, round about ’86, ’87. So when we first got some kit, that was a direction for us. We'd seen the Tackhead Sound System coming to town with Gary Clail and, this idea that you could do a sound system using this new technology was exciting, and that was sort of the formation of what became 808 State. This idea of a sound system in a different way. Because we were aware of sound systems in Manchester, because they were part of the Carnival in Manchester that had been around for ages.

So this is when you started Hit Squad Manchester, or was it Hit Squad MCR, I’ve seen it written in different ways. [Hit Squad MCR were a short-lived collective that included Massey, Martin Price, A Guy Called Gerald, MC Tunes, the Spinmasters DJ duo of Andy Barker and Darren Partington, plus various others.]

That was a really loose thing. It was basically one record that we made. And we had meetings in Manchester in Burger King to try and get a government grant, Martin thought he knew a way of getting government grants to make a record, because making a record would probably cost about £1,000 back then.

A lot of money at that time.

Yeah, you had to find some way of doing it. People were bringing in tapes into his record shop [Price ran the Manchester shop Eastern Bloc]. One group was MC Tunes with A Guy Called Gerald and another group was the Spinmasters, which was Darren Andrew and another rapper called MC Shine. In all there were four or five hip-hop groups that that we used to go out and do gigs with, with one set of electronic equipment, which was mostly Gerald's equipment. Gerald had all the gear early on.

Darren [Partington] once described the shop [Eastern Bloc] as some kind of magnet for all these misfits into strange music, and the place that brought them together was the record shop - a place they could go and meet each , where they got to talk - and so things coalesced around that.

There was another record shop called Spin Inn, which was much more to do with American import records. Eastern Bloc was a bit more of a mixture but it moved in on Spin Inn’s territory by importing American dance music. But it also specialised in a lot of other stuff - all that British electronic stuff that was knocking around and a lot of Belgian electronic stuff, I remember them having a New Beat section.

They had Detroit records as well. I think some of that early British electronic music, we were attempting to do a Detroit thing; that was kind of music that got us really engaged, the Detroit stuff and the acid house stuff. Eastern Bloc was a shop that covered all that ground. And therefore people met up in there.

Acid house had this massive resonance in Manchester, what was it that really caught the imagination of musicians there?

I think acid house caught the imagination because it was its own little world, it was alien, it just sounded so twisted and so out-there that it really connected to people that had grown up on alternative music. I remember going to see the Chicago House Revue in Manchester, they acted like the Temptations or something when they were playing on stage, there was dance moves, there was that tip of the hat to the Motown thing in a way, you could see the culture had grown out of that that thing. But that wasn't the thing that attracted the guys in 808, it was more that stuff that was really wacky you know, things like the Gherkin Jerks [offbeat late-eighties house music project by Larry Head, alias Mr Fingers].

There was also an input from electro, because that had a total machine rhythm thing going on.

I was aware of electro, those Street Sounds [electro compilation] LPs were everywhere, and that was really big with the young guys in the band. That was the soundtrack to that early hip-hop world that they'd grown up in. I wasn't the big hip-hop head in the group at all, you know, but everyone had a background in it.

You were lucky in Manchester because you had good radio.

Yeah. Stu Allen was the man. [Allen hosted the ‘Bus Diss’ dance music show show on Piccadilly Radio.]

‘On the Wire’ [alternative/electronic music show on BBC Radio Lancashire hosted by Steve Barker out of Blackburn], that was going as well.

Yeah, yeah. When we [808 State] first started going, when it was me, Martin and Gerald, Steve Barker was the first person to take an interest in it. And [BBC Radio One presenter] John Peel as well, round about the same time. But yeah, ‘On the Wire,’ I  remember us making a trip up to  Blackburn and doing the radio thing there. So yeah, he was on it early.

We did an ‘On the Wire’ Christmas special gig in 1988, with Tackhead, an On-U  Sound thing at the Ritz in Manchester. It was quite a weird gig, actually. A Guy Called Gerald was booked as well. Basically back then, depending on who was around, we would go out as A Guy Called Gerald or 808 State, sometimes the two things were the same people. There was also people like [members of Manchester electro-soul group] Chapter and the Verse in Gerald's group, and sometimes Colin [Thorpe of Chapter and the Verse] would play keyboards in 808.

Early on, it just depended who was there on the day, because nobody had a mobile phone, everything just was a little bit more spontaneous, and you sometimes had to gather a group to do something. And listening back to tapes from back then, they were covered in rapping, it was like acid house with rapping on.

It was kind of on the cusp of two eras…

There was this blurring of all this stuff. And we'd be doing support slots for ACR [A Certain Ratio] and [indie rock band] Inspiral Carpets, so again, it was like these worlds colliding, it wasn't this neat and tidy tribal thing, you know?

Was it that iteration of 808 that made [1988 album] ‘Newbuild’?

Yeah, ‘Newbuild’ was me and Gerald and Martin.

Was it all made live, or how was it done?

Some of it was done directly to two-track, some of it was multitracked, and one tune uses the Atari computer. So it was a bit of a mishmash, but we did do it in a weekend, the whole thing. So you know, it wasn't planned out that much. There were things like we just ran out of tape because things like that were expensive, multitrack tape, so we filled one multitrack tape and then we did some stuff on two-track simply because we'd run out of multitrack tape. So it was really kind of bashed together.

[1989 album] ‘Quadrastate’ was a lot different…

‘Quadrastate’ was done over an uncertain period of time. One track got done here and two tracks got done there. And in fact, quite a few tracks that we did at that time didn't end up on the record, which later appeared on a thing called ‘Prebuild’ [an album of material recorded in 1987-88 but only released by Rephlex Records in 2004], which was a sort of compilation. So there were some tracks where we got into a studio in the middle of the night and knocked something out.

And then Gerald was having success with ‘Voodoo Ray’ so he started sort of going missing a lot of time and it all became a bit fragmented, and then the other guys from Hit Squad, Darren and Andrew, we were doing some music for them. I think there's one track on there [‘Prebuild’] that started out as a Spinmasters tune. So it was all a bit of this, a bit of that. It was almost like a band that was falling apart.

It was all based on what studio time we could get. Luckily I was like a caretaker at the studio at the time. There were cheaper studios, there was a load of stuff coming out of this place called the Kitchen that was in the Crescents [now-demolished housing estate] in Hulme. And none of it sounded great, if you know what I mean. MC Tunes did some stuff in there, but it didn't have any oomph to it. Getting your records to sound kind of big and boomy  like the New York stuff was a bit of a puzzle at first, it took a bit of working out, to try and get anything near that big speaker-filling sound with the equipment.

Once you got hold of samplers, though, that unlocked that door a little bit because you were actually taking some things off produced records, like a kick drum or something that actually sounded big already, you know? So it was a learning process with the new equipment. When I think about it now, going back to things like ‘Newbuild’, luckily the Roland equipment just sits nicely together, you know, it doesn't put too many frequencies together that result in [sonic] mud. But there's a lot of other experimental stuff we did back then that is incredibly muddy and horrible, that you wouldn't want people to hear, because it's like your first attempt and using bits of equipment that didn't sit together nicely.

Because you didn't have time to work it out in the studio.

Yeah, well, it's like ‘right, you've got four hours’, so bang, you’ve got to finish it. It was very intense, you know,

Once 808 signed to [producer Trevor Horn’s record label] ZTT [in 1989], the sound took a kind of quantum leap. It moved forwards quite significantly.

Yeah, we could afford a better studio and we could be in there for a longer period of time. But we still wrote in the studio, we didn't write outside of the studio too much. We might have written some in the old studio and then tarted it up in the big studio.

The [808 State] album ‘90’, for me, is one of the classic British acid house albums – I mean acid house as in the culture rather than the musical form. It seems to come from that total immersion in that culture that we were so lucky to be living through at that point.

We wanted it to be an album, to have little weirdy tracks that are sort of throwback to things like Hawkwind albums where [oscillator player] DikMik would get his own track, these little miniatures. Things that you would never put on a 12-inch or play in a club - a lot of the music is not terribly club-friendly.

Some of it is rather odd, in fact,

But it’s come from being in clubs, and it's come from messing around with the technology of the day; a lot of it is brand new keyboards and stuff. So we were very excited about something like a [Roland] D 50 that we just got our hands on. I remember from then, it was like, “This sounds like exactly like a Michael Jackson sound!” Because it literally came straight out the box. So we were sort of playing with that idea and taking it somewhere else.

It has all these eighties electronic soul samples - Thelma Houston [‘You Used to Hold Me So Tight’] and that one from Prelude, ‘What I’ve Got is What You Need’ [by Unique] – it’s like some kind of sample history of Manchester club life pre-acid house in a way.

This is definitely like some guy that owns a record shop [Martin Price] and has a big history of that music, it was kind of his forté knowing this stuff and how it would fit into this music. He just seemed to sort of know that it would fit, or he'd just have a bag of records with him the whole time.

But of course, with having DJs in the band as well, there was the chance to go 'wicky wicky' over it all the time too. A lot of the samples were cut out because it was just too intrusive at times. You had that sampladelic thing around in the culture then, Bomb the Bass and all that, and having a sampler meant that everyone was trying to put bits and pieces in, so I remember trying to pull it away from that, make it a more melodic record.

They used to play a lot of Latin music at the Haçienda and that was something that excited me, and I was trying to incorporate more complex rhythms into house music on album tracks like ‘Cobra Bora’ along with the ravey brass stabs and the keyboard sounds that echoed back to jazz fusion.

There was so much Latin music that gets left out of the story of the Haçienda. Because Friday night, there was this dancing culture and there were dancers who turned up to the Haçienda to ‘do dancing’. It wasn't just shuffling about in an E’d up way, that thing came later.

 ‘90’ was a very atmospheric record, as was ‘Pacific State’ of course, but you were also making these peak-hour rave bangers like ‘In Yer Face’ and ‘Cubik’ at the same time.

It's weird in hindsight, because ‘Pacific’ would get played in the clubs, you definitely heard that out. ‘In Yer Face’, Manchester City have been using it at matches over the past few years…

And they were hits, they were in the pop charts, these really rather strange records.

They were on daytime radio! That’s the thing I’m most proud of in a way, that it actually moved the music somewhere really new, and it just shows you that people are happy to listen to innovative music, like in the seventies when you had all the weird Bowie and Hawkwind and proggy stuff in the charts. There was room for everything there, and people would embrace it and it would become part of British culture.

People's ears did open up to strange and advanced music at that time.

The feeling of getting this stuff on [BBC prime-time pop chart show] ‘Top of the Pops’ and getting this stuff on [BBC] Radio One - all of a sudden, the door was open to it, it was really peculiar!

This late eighties period was also a time when musical experimentation and social experimentation going hand in hand. 

I don't know if you can just put it down to drugs, I don't know if you can just put it down to spaces. But certainly in the Haçienda, there was a place big enough to encompass all walks of life, it was a level playing field in terms of social groups, and there was a sort of change in sexual politics, it wasn't the courting ritual anymore; that changed.

I think everyone felt that at the time that a page had turned and the music had to reflect that, to have a sense of futurism. Practically every week, there was some new advancement in the technologies that we were using to make music, which changed the way we could make music.

Interview by Matthew Collin for ‘Dream Machines’, June 7, 2022.

Photo courtesy of Graham Massey.