Hillegonda Rietveld on Quando Quango and Manchester Electronica

 

Netherlands-born Hillegonda C. Rietveld was a postpunk electronic dance music pioneer with Manchester-based art-pop group Quando Quango, an early theoretical investigator of house music culture with her book ‘This is Our House’ and is holder of probably the coolest title in UK academia, Professor of Sonic Culture.

In this interview, she talks about the chance meeting - literally involving a message in a bottle - that led to her involvement in electronic music with DJ-animateur Mike Pickering. She explains how that led to getting involved in Manchester’s alternative culture around Factory Records, New Order and the pre-acid house Haçienda club, as well as the New York dance music scene of the mid-eighties. The journey comes full circle after the UK rave upsurge when she travelled to Chicago to interview house music pioneers for her PhD and found out that they loved Quando Quango’s record ‘Love Tempo.’

Quando Quango started off in Rotterdam.

It all started with Mike Pickering going on holiday in the Netherlands, to be honest. You know, in the north of the Netherlands, you've got a bunch of islands, they feel removed from anywhere. A lot of young people used to go there for a nice cheap holiday. In one of the villages, there was a chemist who was English, possibly the only English person living on the island. How he landed on that island was because a girl from the island actually put a letter in a bottle, and this washed up on the southern coast of England, where this guy happened to pick it up. He wrote back to this girl and he ended up marrying her.

So he moved to this island and because of that, one of his family members from Manchester decided to visit him. She went there with her boyfriend and with Mike Pickering, who was one of her best mates. These three Mancunians turned up when I was on holiday there and that is how I met Mike. He knew lots about music, which felt really exciting. He ended up moving in with me in Rotterdam.

Mike always wanted to have a band, and he was like, “Well, you can play piano, that will do.” When my dad died I received some money that enabled me to buy a synthesizer.

And this eventually led you to Manchester.

A contact of mine set up a venue in what used to be a squatted sanitation plant, a water plant in Rotterdam. They had all these factory halls and a big water tower with deserted offices that were squatted as apartments by architects and creative people who were quite well-educated and who wanted to make an inspiring space in this area. They called it Utopia, and Hal 4 became the main venue, with Hal 3 as a smaller performance space.

A friend of mine was managing Hal 4 and I introduced him to Mike because Mike had contacts with music people in Manchester.. Mike started to put on nights at Hal 4, including New Order's first ever gig in Europe because he was familiar with Factory Records, and New Order’s manager Rob Gretton. On the basis of that experience, when Rob Gretton and New Order planned a new night club in Manchester, they invited Mike to become the creative director of the Haçienda. Also, Rob quite liked our little demo tape, so he said, “Oh, why don't you record something for Factory when you come up to Manchester”?

And that’s how it happened. A long story, but it all started with a message in a bottle.

Did you know what kind of music you wanted to make when you started out?

Gosh, it’s really hard to say. I mean, a part of our inspiration was this [postpunk electronic] band Vice Versa from Sheffield. Mike's mate was Martin Fry, who became involved with Vice Versa after interviewing them for Modern Drugs, a fanzine that Martin and Mike were doing.

Then Mike brought them over to record something in Rotterdam for Backstreet Records and that's when we could see how they were working with their instruments and how synthesizers were quite interesting to work with. I Ironically, at the point we started making electronic music, Vice Versa picked up the guitar and became pop band ABC.

Obviously, at that point [in the early 1980s], the electro scene was going on in Manchester. Did that have a big impact on what you were doing?

Our music-making in Rotterdam, around 1980 was more informed by what happened for example in Sheffield, Vice Versa and Human League or what happened in New York with the No Wave thing or Suicide for example, which was quite minimalist or Deutsch Americanische Freundschaft, DAF, from Germany, or some of that sort of postpunk industrial. Any kind of electronic music that came out of Europe or New York.

Later, in Manchester, Bernard Summer’s turn to the newest electronic music equipment and Rob Gretton ‘s ideas based on Toffler’s The Third Wave were important sources of inspiration.

So the first record Quando Quango made [‘Go Exciting’/’Tingle’, 1982] was released by Factory. The band was you, Mike and who else at that point?

My brother played with us live in the early days, and certainly played drums on ‘Go Exciting’ and ‘Tingle". And hats off for him to be able to play ‘Tingle’ because it's quite fast with a drum box as well, which was hard work... He had his own band, Spasmodique, so he didn't come to live in Manchester. He just came out for the recording and he did gigs with us for a couple of years as well.

And who else? A Certain Ratio’s drummer Donald Johnson may well have played the rhythm guitar on the recording, but he has played bass with us as well. The bassline for ‘Tingle’ was hand-played on the synth, it wasn't a programmed sequence, just me doing a lot of repetitions. And on ‘Go Exciting’, the bassline is from a Roland 303.

And then ‘Love Tempo’ came after that.

Yeah, that came out in 1983. I think we recorded it in spring, and then it went to New York for a remix, which was one of the most exciting experiences ever, because we were actually present during the remix. Simon Topping came to join us because he’d left A Certain Ratio. He had gone to New York to learn to learn Latin percussion; he found a Puerto Rican teacher and learned to play the timbales and related percussion instruments.

Anyway, Simon came into remix studio with me and Mike, where we each took an array of channels that we could punch in and out to our liking, so the remix was a jam with the engineers and a lot of live editing going on, with loads of cut tape edits lying around on the floor in the end. That was a wild remix experience, Now we edit music digitally, on a visual screen rather than by ear with analogue tape, remixing feels more restrained.

And that became quite a big record on the New York club scene.

Yeah, I think people liked ‘Go Exciting’ as well. It had imagined ‘Latino’ kind-of vocals on it that I’d just made up.

The sound of those records is so exuberant, but it's also very innocent, isn't it? It’s got the feeling that you're discovering something new and really enjoying that.

Yeah, yeah. There are layers of recording on ‘Love Tempo’ - it was us, Donald Johnson was on there but also Bernard Summer, who co-produced the recording with Donald. Bernard brought in his own keyboard, I think a Sequential Circuits Prophet-5. Anyway, he just said, “Oh just play something.” And I thought we were just experimenting, you know, I didn't know he was recording it and I said, “Well, can we do it properly now?” And he’s like, “No, we've recorded it now.” So it's got some random improvised half-mistakes on there, but they sounded really spontaneous. And I think that, together with the later improvised edits, this contributed to some of that exuberance.

It was a time when bands in Britain were experimenting with dance rhythms and electronic sounds.

The whole punk-funk thing, or punk disco even. There was a crossroads that was quite interesting. I think it was in 1985, though it could have been 83, we went to an electro night at the Roxy in New York, which was like an uptown hip-hop crowd meeting a sort of downtown postpunk Anglophile crowd. So the electro-pop people and the hip-hop people met and mixed there and there were amazing breakdance teams competing with each other. In the middle of the space there was scaffolding where the DJs performed They were actually using 808 and 303 Roland equipment to beef up the recordings. But on the other hand, there were also separate dance clubs where they played quite a lot of British and also German electro-pop. So yeah, there was a kind of crossover of electro and electro pop with that sort of No Wave, postpunk thing.

It's quite an amorphous era really, I think, the early eighties. Disco was supposed to be dead or something. Rock was in a crisis. There were new, more affordable and accessible electronic music instruments. And then there was the economic shift to neoliberalism and an information society with a post-industrial economic base, which I think informed some of the sound palette we’d hear during the early eighties.

It's interesting that bands like you, and also New Order and A Certain Ratio, would go to New York and bring back these influences direct to Manchester, not interpreted via what had been written in the music papers - there was this direct Manchester-New York connection. Do you think that was important?

I think it was, I think it was particularly important for the Haçienda ; it really informed Mike Pickering’s DJ sets, for example. Those Nude nights on Friday nights in the Haçienda there where he would play all the dance imports that were sent to him directly from New York. This is how he ended up playing early house music records because the same New York promoter was also handling that from Chicago.

Those kinds of connections were important, of course also for New Order. You know, the Haçienda itself was directly inspired by New Order’s experience of New York. I think they wanted to have a type of Paradise Garage - though Paradise Garage was especially well known for its fantastic sound, while the early Haçienda looked great but did not sound so good.

It was a very interesting time - postpunk but pre-house. It was a time when anything could happen and often did. There was a lot of mixing going on.

I think some of the electro pop people had their work remixed by the hip-hop, electro people. New Order by Arthur Baker and John Robie, and also John Robie with Cabaret Voltaire, for example. So some of those music scenes were kind of crossing over, but at the same time, they were based in different life experiences. The mostly white anglophile crowd seemed to have better prospects; I don't think that for the black hip-hop artists, there were as many opportunities.

In Manchester, I guess that this was the precursor to A Guy Called Gerald and 808 State and that kind of thing, wasn't it?

I wrote a book chapter about A Guy Called Gerald, ‘Voodoo Rage: Blacktronica from the North’ [in the collection Black Popular Music in Britain since 1945] for which my research made a journey back in time and ended up with his trajectory that involved breakdancers and jazz dancers..

His sound on records like ‘Voodoo Ray’ doesn’t come from going to the Haçienda and hearing a house record then going home and trying to imitate what he heard. In terms of the culture he was part of, his sound comes from before that.

Also because of the new equipment. He’d bought an Akai sampler and was faffing around with it, trying out what the equipment can do, just like we did with Quando Quango. It's like, “Wow, we’ve got this equipment, what can you do with it?”

I mean, before we had a drum box, I had this synthesizer, a Korg MS-20 that had a patchboard on the front, and it had a low frequency oscillator (LFO), which can make this kind of weird, pulsing kind of sound. And so these pulses really made up our early rhythm tracks. When we did our first gig in Rotterdam, I don't think the audience really knew what to make of us. We just had this kind of backing tape with LFO pulses, and then we just did a bit of vocals and a bit of banging on timbales, punctuated by our saxophones playing three notes in unison kind of thing.

Quando Quango weren’t really electro-funk or electro-pop.

I don't think we ever categorised ourselves. But there were arguments about out direction. I'm an art school person. Mike is a pop and Northern Soul person. Two very different worlds really. He wanted to make pop records. And I just wanted to experiment.

This made actually quite a good strong collaboration because our music had some kind of poptasticness combined with weird sounds. On the one hand, I think the ambition was to sound like a Northern Soul band and on the other hand, the ambition was to sound like Suicide and DAF and to have that kind of minimalism in there.

The electronic music scene of that time - one thing that's very clear is that there were very, very few women involved. Very few indeed. In the postpunk scene you had the Raincoats, you had the Slits, the Bush Tetras and Delta 5, but for electronic music at that time, you didn't have the same number of women involved.

I don't rightly know why. It may well have something to do with the way that electronic instruments were being marketed. If you look at the earlier history of electronic music, important pioneers were female. The reason why I felt inspired to buy a synthesizer was because I happened to be in studio with Vice Versa, and they happened to be male; everyone in the studio was, in Manchester and Rotterdam; actually I was the only woman there. But that was my introduction to electronic music making - yes, you can actually do stuff with a synth and it's really not that hard. But you do have to have those kinds of connections to be inspired and to get started.

If you look at magazines that market instruments, then you would actually see those instruments being marketed to a mostly male audience. Just like the PC or home computer that was introduced in the late seventies, early eighties, to a young male audience, similar to how during the sixties the hi-fi was marketed to a male audience . It seemed that the hi-fi was marketed for men to get away from the family and to escape in their own fantasy world.

Anyway, the PC was introduced for young men to play games,. If you look at how games are designed, a lot of them seem to have a male user group in mind. It's interesting, you know - electronic instruments are not made that visible to a female consumer group. That's what I think. I think all this has something to do with the way that men and women are addressed by electronic instrument companies.

Quando Quango did the one album, then you finished.

Doing the album, on a personal level, was dramatic. But I'm very stubborn and I really wanted to have the album done before we would split up, I really felt that it needed to be completed as a music project. As a marriage it just didn't work out.

Moving to Manchester was really quite difficult for me, and Mike was very busy with the Haçienda. My dad had just died just before I came to Manchester as well. All these kinds of things. And yeah, then there were the disagreements about how to go forward with the music.

What you did became part of the musical foundations for Manchester’s acid house period.

Well, it was only in hindsight, it was only when I was doing my PhD, and I was in Chicago doing interviews for it with house music producers that I realised that there was a good reason why I was doing a PhD on house music and why I was interested in this topic.

I didn’t really realise how big ‘Love Tempo’ was in US clubland until I did my PhD and I went over to Chicago. People I talked to in Chicago just thought it was quite wild and different. When I interviewed Vince Lawrence, who claims to have recorded the first house record, ‘On and On’, he said that he heard ‘Love Tempo’ when he was about 16 and felt very inspired by it and thought, “Wow, if that is possible, then I want to try making a record.”

I think for club people in Chicago, ‘Love Tempo’ kind of fitted into an idea of European import weirdness. I ended up making another record with Vince as a result of all that.

Interview by Matthew Collin for ‘Dream Machines’, February 24, 2022.

Photo courtesy of Hillegonda C. Rietveld.