album? single? // Warm Leatherette
I don't own this, which is frustrating, and until
very recently I'd never even heard of it, and consequently my life
was much more simple because now I need this. This project,
and by extension my entire Mute Records collection
is fundamentally incomplete. Its very existence is near-mythical,
like some sort of Umberto Eco mystery (without Templars
but with assembled musical auteurs), with only a handful
of very worthy, possessive Depeche Mode fans and
tight-lipped Mute insiders having claimed to have heard it, and
some of the artists included denying their very involvement.
The myth is that ten years after Daniel
Miller launched his Mute Records label in 1978 with 'T.V.O.D.'
/ 'Warm Leatherette' under his alias The Normal,
Mute organised for artists then 'signed' to the label (no Mute artists
have ever had contracts) to record a version of 'Warm Leatherette'
for a compilation that the label would put out to celebrate their
tenth anniversary. Those artists included Depeche Mode, Erasure,
Wire, Renegade Soundwave, Diamanda
Galas, AC Marias and Nitzer Ebb.
Other sources suggest that Fad Gadget and Yazoo
also recorded versions. There's also evidence of Non's
Boyd Rice having recorded a version, an updated
version of which tantalisingly appeared on the Short
Circuit edition of Mute's Vorwärts
in 2011. Given that the Mute roster at this point was at perhaps
its broadest, who knows whether the likes of Nick Cave,
Barry Adamson, I Start Counting
/ Fortran 5 and many others were involved as well.
Sources say that the whole 'album' is said to be
somewhere between just ten and seventeen minutes long, and the whole
thing is said to be of mixed quality. There is a chance it wasn't
even an album, but an extended version of the track with sections
included from each artist (if Non's version was indeed among these,
this would explain why the backing track sounds almost identical
to Miller's version). According to those sources, if an artist wasn't
available, they sent in a sample. The story is that Mute wanted
to release this, but because Alison Moyet appeared
on the track – which seems almost impossible to believe, given
that she'd severed ties after Yazoo's You And Me Both –
there were difficulties getting her label to agree to this. Then
again, someone I spoke to who joined Mute a year after, and who
seems to know about most things Mute even from before his time,
had never heard of it. Vince Clarke doesn't remember
it, and neither does Colin Newman from Wire.
A month after Daniel Miller's Invisible Jukebox feature
in The Wire earlier in 2011, the magazine issued a correction
to a comment that they'd made about Short Circuit being
something of a birthday celebration for Mute, going so far as to
say in the correction that the label don't do anniversaries; that
casts doubt on why Miller would encourage this ten year celebration
of his first single.
But then there's the small matter of an audio fragment
that one of those worthy Depeche Mode fans posted online, like a
French dancer lifting her skirt just a litle. That fragment clearly
includes Alison Moyet's unmistakeable voice intoning 'See the
breaking glass / In the underpass' twice before Vince Clarke
mutters 'warm leatherette' over the pulsing backing track,
which gets more frantic at that point. After an interlude (a grainy
demo of Yazoo's 'Only You', but again just a frustrating fragment),
that frantic backing track seems to continue with a Nitzer
Ebb section (hence the classically Ebb hyper-arpeggiated
synths). That sequencing would tend to reinforce the idea of this
being a cover of the track, rather than an album. (An all-star Mute-style
Band Aid anyone?) Either way, that audio clip definitely suggests
that this really did happen.
Either way, unless Mute decide to return to their
vaults and release this properly, this seems set to become one of
those mythical, heard-by-only-a-selected-few recordings with sketchy
details attached that really deserves to see the light of day. In
a year when the entire Beach Boys SMiLE sessions have appeared
officially, surely it isn't beyond impossible. But maybe that's
my frustration manifesting itself as optimism.
unknown format:
A compilation of covers or one long version of 'Warm Leatherette'
possibly including contributions by:
- Yazoo
- Depeche Mode
- Erasure
- Nitzer Ebb
- Wire
- Renegade Soundwave
- Diamanda Galas
- AC Marias
- Laibach
- Fad Gadget
- Non
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