Bad Music Era (second-wave avant-funk)

Actually Cabaret Voltaire kept on making good records all through this period (84-85-86 = BME prime-zone) - I particularly liked The Covenant, The Sword and the Arm of the Lord and interviewed them in '86, when they seemed a little lost (as did another Sheffield group, Heaven 17, also interviewed around that time)

Flipside has a nice hypnotic electro-refrain in the "Sensoria" mode



Another from Microphonies



But Cabs are first-wave industrial-funksters who just kept on keepin' on - pioneers turned settlers.

What about the real second-wavers?

Also from Sheffield, there was Hula



Also from Sheffield, there was Chakk



Also from Sheffield, there was The Box (an offshoot of Clock DVA)

Not from Sheffield, there was Portion Control...



Also not from Sheffield, there was A Primary Industry (some of whom would become Ultramarine). Sweatbox, the label they were on (RIP Rob Deacon), was a hotbed for 2nd-wave A-funk)




23 Skidoo, 400 Blows,  and Shriekback were kind of on the cusp between first-wave and second-wave (first wave I would say was Cabs, A Certain Ratio, Clock DVA)



Shriekback in their abstruse first phase, before the EST-shaped upfulness of Jam Science.



But going back to the Sheffielders



Chakk was my first cover story for Melody Maker

By that point they'd signed to MCA for a supposedly massive amount

Certainly it was substantial enough to set up the Fon studio (whence would come the early Northern house tune "House Arrest" by Krush, a huge chart hit  (you can find copies on discogs going for 13 pence!) and through which some notable bleep tunes would later be sluiced. Mark Brydon of Chakk would go on to be the music-man in Moloko, while Krush's Mark Gamble would be half of Rhythmatic, major bleepologists on the Network label.



I remember going up to Sheffield in mid-86 for my very first visit to the fair city. Kipping on the sofa in the flat of Amrik Rai, Chakk's motormouth manager (and former NME journo). Cheapskate didn't spring for a hotel!

(While I was there I also interviewed Treebound Story, another of Amrik's bands - a pleasant janglepop group loosely aligned with C86 but more instrumentally able - an outfit notable mainly for featuring the precociously proficient guitar stylings of Richard Hawley.)

Amrik was pals with, or perhaps management-ly involved with, Cabaret Voltaire - and I recall we also went around Richard H. Kirk's gaff. I remember being surprised they smoked pot - somehow it didn't seem like something Cab Voltaire would be into, a bit hippy-ish  (how naive I was in those days).

Talking of being green...  A little later there was a trip down to WOMAD to see Chakk play live, in a e mini-bus paid for by MCA.  (There was a label executive on board renowned as one of the last of a dying breed who bought coke on expenses).

Chakk were good but like all second-wave avant-funksters suffered from that sound having become formularized -  terra cognita rather than a startling surge into the unknown.

A year before, I'd in fact written a critique in Monitor of this very development: avant-funk as codified genre. From "Radical Dance Fictions", the relevant portion:

".... A genre developed based on a profound perversion of funk’s sexual tension into a different sort of het-up charge, one of unease and dread. The disco backbeat became the given, the “natural” springboard for these experimentalists with their collages of industrial decay and social fragmentation. One reason was the neutrality of disco--it wasn’t loaded with associations that rock was, it was outside pop history, so it could be used as an element in futurist music. The idea was simple--marry technology and savagery, control and madness, the cerebral and “feel”. Music embodying both the system of industrial society and the breaking free (into violence, debauchery, excess) of instincts suppressed by the system. The musicians’ ambivalent feelings towards Control and Collapse (attracted to both) is bound up with the old egghead problem/project--how to think yourself past thought, or as Talking Heads’ put it--“help us lose our minds”, “stop making sense”. Jam Science, the Shriekback LP title, is the most succinct and distressingly pat expression of the goal... 

Chakk and Hula are two current outfits who reveal both the extent and the limits of what can be achieved within this genre. The obvious musical strands--found voices; distorted, FX-ridden vocals; trails of discordant sax; somber swathes of synth; filched ethnic noises; basslines and drum patterns that bear a formal resemblance to funk but are fatally drained of sex and soul--are strung around the familiar concepts and content: cut-up theory; the ambivalent obsession with religious/jingoist fanaticism, atrocity, psychosis (via J.G. Ballard); totalitarianism (via William Burroughs’ Control). Even the titles instill a sense of deja vu--“Delirium”, “Cut the Dust”, “Tear up”, “Out of the Flesh”, “Pleasure Hates Language”. Hula’s Murmur and Chakk’s recent Peel session contain music that can emote and excite, but both groups make worthy additions to a pre-existing field, rather than enlargements or developments to it..."