A Short History of Documentary Evidence 1991 - 2011
Musically, and most definitely financially, my world
changed massively on 22 June 1991. That was a warm and sunny English
Saturday. As I did on most Saturdays, I went into Stratford-upon-Avon
town centre with my mother and sister. Earlier that week, 'Chorus'
by Erasure had been released. 'Chorus' was
the first single to be taken from Erasure's new album, also called
Chorus. By 1991 I was hooked on Erasure and I had decided that they
were my favourite band, without question. Elsewhere I still had
dubious musical taste, was still buying up ostensibly chart pop
with all its attendant horrors, but Erasure were my favourite band
by far.
I'd liked Erasure since 'Sometimes', but only as
much as I liked anything else I heard on the radio if I'm honest;
it would be tempting to say that my fandom had started when that
track was released, but in truth I was ten years old in 1986 and
I'm not into revisionist personal histories. I do, however, recall
Vince Clarke and Andy Bell performing
'Chains Of Love' on Saturday morning TV in 1988 and thinking 'I
really like this band,' but not so much to enter the competition
on the show to win their entire back catalogue; a shame really,
as winning that competition would have saved me a lot of money on
buying up their releases later on.
A few months later, my father came home from his
factory job with a home-recorded cassette of Erasure's The Innocents
and I grabbed it out of his hand before he'd even had a chance to
listen to it himself. That tape was rarely off my Walkman after
that, never mind the fact that the remix of 'River Deep Mountain
High' cut off a quarter of the way in, and so when 'Drama!', Erasure's
first single from Wild! was released, I was straight down
to Music Junction in Stratford-upon-Avon and grabbing a 7"
copy down from the racks to the left of the till. A 7" of 'You
Surround Me' and the cassette of Wild! arrived courtesy
of Father Christmas that year; at the time my collector tendencies
had not yet kicked in and I didn't see the value of buying the 'Blue
Savannah' and 'Star' singles; why did I need to? Those songs were
included on the album. And as for those LP-sized 12” versions
of the singles? Surely that was pointless also; why did you need
the 7" single just on a larger disc? If I could go back in
time and offer my younger self some advice it would be thus: 'Buy
every format of every release. Don't ask why. You will save money
in the long term. It doesn't matter that there isn't a CD player
in the household yet. Trust me.' I did, however, listen to the B-sides
of 'Drama!' and 'You Surround Me' (the sampleadelic 'Sweet Sweet
Baby' and the gently layered '91 Steps' respectively); my parents
had drummed into me that B-sides were generally pointless, and usually
rubbishy filler tracks at best, but I just wanted to hear more and
more Vince Clarke / Andy Bell music and the B-sides fulfilled that
need.
Thanks to my local branches of WHSmith and Woolworths,
both of which at the time had expansive cassette racks, between
the release of Wild! and the 'Chorus' single in 1991, I
had bought Wonderland and The Circus, the albums
that preceded The Innocents. I was poised and ready for the release
of new material. 'Chorus' didn't disappoint, though I still fail
to see, pre-internet and at that point not being an Erasure Information
Service member, how I ever knew it was coming out; I do recall one
performance before the single was released, on a Saturday night
comedy show called Paramount City, which saw Andy and Vince performing
with a load of showroom dummies around them; looking back, with
that distinctly analogue sound, it was such an obvious Kraftwerk
connection, but I didn't know that at the time.
Anyway, back to that Saturday, the weekend after
'Chorus' was released. I was in the Woolworths in Stratford-upon-Avon
town centre with my mother and sister and I had paused in front
of the singles rack. With 'Chorus' expected to do pretty well in
the UK singles chart, it was sat on the upper rows of their singles
section. I think I was only looking at that rack to check in on
whether it was expected to chart highly, but instead I found myself
with the 12" single - my first 12" single - in my hand
and paying the £3.99 that was, even then, the going rate for
the format.
Pulling the white inner sleeve out at home, and
poised above my parents' crummy record player, out fell a 12”-sized
brochure which landed at my feet on the carpet. I stuck side A of
the record on, instantly warmed to the entrancing Youth-mixed Pure
Trance version of 'Chorus' and began unfolding the brochure, fully
expecting to throw it into the dustbin shortly after. That brochure
was called Documentary Evidence. An example of
a CD-sized version is included above.
At that time I had no knowledge of Mute
apart from seeing its linear 'M' logo on Erasure releases, and certainly
wasn't aware of founder Daniel Miller's musical
legacy. In truth, I found the whole Documentary Evidence booklet
utterly confusing. I was used to chart pop music, and yet here was
a brochure listing out records by bands I'd never heard of. In my
naivete, I had never considered the possibility that bands might
exist outside of the realms of the chart, or that there might be
some bands that actually didn't necessarily aim for success at all,
and certainly had no awareness of independent music. I watched the
Chart Show on ITV most Saturday mornings and thought the 'indie
chart', like so many people did, represented a particular style
of music and not a reflection of the fact that the records themselves
were released via an indie label. The list of bands and artists
in that pamphlet was enthralling, even without the remotest idea
over what they might actually sound like - Fad Gadget,
Nitzer Ebb, DAF, Nick
Cave, Cabaret Voltaire, Laibach,
Einstürzende Neubauten, Renegade Soundwave
and so on. They sounded mysterious, edgy, uncompromising, exotic,
dirty somehow, and the accompanying monochrome images just reinforced
that view. I was learning German and twentieth century European
history at school, and some of those artists somehow seemed to tap
into my awareness of the German language and my incorrect notion
of Germany itself. Rightly or wrongly I assumed that I'd just not
noticed these artists in the charts, and - and at this I still cringe
at my younger self - that the music these artists made would sound
just like Erasure.
If the catalogue list of releases was intriguing,
the accompanying text (by Biba Kopf aka Chris Bohn, former NME
editor and current editor of The Wire) totally threw me.
It talked about punk, it spoke in artistic terms I barely understood,
it described Nitzer Ebb's sound as a 'putsch', a word I only knew
in the context of 1930s German revolution. Once I'd got over my
confusion, it was through that text that I became aware of Vince
Clarke's background in The Assembly, Yazoo
and, most challenging for me, Depeche Mode. At
that point I hated Depeche Mode, in spite of not having heard anything
outside of 'Personal Jesus' and 'Enjoy The Silence'; that hatred
was less about the music and more about the fact that a girl I didn't
like in my class was a fan. All of a sudden I felt like I needed
to like Depeche Mode.
That sense of not just wanting to, but
needing to listen to Mute material has prevailed to this
day. From that day in July 1991, via snaffling up the releases by
Yazoo, Assembly and Vince-era Depeche Mode, on through a tentative
purchase of Nitzer Ebb's Ebbhead and Fortran
5's Bad Head Park in quick succession, I found
myself totally immersed in the Mute back catalogue and largely leaving
the claustrophobia of the charts behind; Inspiral Carpets'
Revenge Of The Goldfish was next; I first got into punk
thanks to buying the early albums by Wire at university
in 1996; got into all sorts of dance music thanks to Moby
and Plastikman; got into tortured singer-songwriter
blues thanks to a performance of 'Red Right Hand' by Nick Cave And
The Bad Seeds on Jools Holland; fell in love with guitar music in
a major way thanks to Sonic Youth and Foil
whilst at university; developed an attraction to noise and avant-rock
thanks to Einstürzende Neubauten and Labradford
respectively; and fell in love with London thanks in part to Komputer's
reverential 'Looking Down On London'. And so on. Only my interest
in jazz as a genre seems to have not been informed by my primary
love of Mute, although I have Mute to thank for keeping my ears
questing for new things to listen to (and I do in fact have a solitary
Sun Ra record just because Blast First put out an edition of his
Space Is The Place).
Regrettably, I still own barely a fraction of the
releases on the label and its various offshoots, and with the advent
of responsibilities (both financial and familial) it seems harder
and harder to justify an obsession that's extended from my youth
to my mid-thirties. Nevertheless, I retain the (possibly hollow)
ambition to own every single Mute release ever issued. This site,
named after the brochure that fell out of the sleeve to my copy
of 'Chorus', is my attempt to document my obsession and in doing
so perhaps become a useful resource for any like-minded fans of
this eclectic label. Only once have I given up this obsession, and
that came with the birth of my eldest daughter in 2005; music just
didn't seem important for a few years after that, and for a while
I earmarked most of my Mute collection for sale, but something inside
persuaded me not to follow through on that notion. However, when
I did start buying music again it was mostly non-Mute, and that
period is best documented by my now-defunct Audio
Journal blog. Around 2009, by now with two wonderful
daughters, I once again felt compelled to write about Mute. That
need became fully formed whilst watching Depeche Mode performing
at London's O2, whereupon I found my Mute mojo again. This site
has swelled again since that point.
I started this site in 2003, commencing with a review
of Vic Twenty's 'Text Message',
released on Daniel Miller's Credible Sexy Units
once Mute had been swallowed up by EMI. The reviews here follow
no particular pattern, though I try to review new releases as quickly
as possibly after they come out, and sometimes I'll try and cover
off a lot of releases by some artists in quick succession. In addition
to reviewing as many things as regularly as I can, I am also trying
to refresh and update older reviews as well. All of this is generally
done whilst commuting backwards and forwards from my home to my
office in London, on flights to and from Edinburgh or very late
at night. This site is therefore perpetually a work in progress,
and may prove to ever be thus, and I apologise to anyone hoping
to find it more complete than it actually is. I do, however, hope
that in some small way it raises the mystique of Daniel Miller's
mostly successful musical vision from 1978 onwards, through financial
difficulties, through its rescue by EMI and on into its defiant
return to independence in 2010. Also, whilst I consider myself a
writer
(and I will finish my tentative novel one day, I assure you), I'm
clearly not a professional music writer; therefore whilst I try
to write impartially about this incredible music, I often slip into
personal recollection, emotion and so on. I only half-apologise
for that. I more completely apologise for my lack of skills as a
web programmer.
Along the way I've had the great privilege of being
able to interview numerous people who have released records on Mute,
or who have had a hand in its development, or who have simply worked
with artists on the label. These can be found collected in the Interview
Series section of this site. I've also had the privilege
of receiving promos, working demos and support from time to time
from artists, Mute itself, and some of the labels who have also
put out records by Mute's artists (Cherry Red and
Cooking Vinyl being two). Generally though, this
site reflects my own personal collection of Mute and connected material.
Its progress is thus entirely dependent on how much money I spend
on Mute releases, new and old.
Thanks also to those who have offered support and
feedback over the last eight years, with a special thanks to recent
support from Chris, the Davids (Fleet, McElroy, Law), Jürgen,
Yolanda and Jorge for the retweets and suggestions. Without your
comments I'm sure I wouldn't bother.
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