Discussion:Martin Hannett

message: Martin hannett interviewé par jon savage
The school I went to was right in the middle of Grim City: Corpus Christi…
Is everybody in Manchester Roman Catholic?
No. The whole Factory thing is. 
Were you the only one, or did you have brothers and sisters?
I’ve got a brother and two sisters. My dad was a kind of engineer at Laver and Platt, about a quarter of a mile from where we lived. 
Did you move out of that area much, or did you go into town a lot?
It’s easy to walk back from town after the last bus has gone. I did the usual, zipping into town bit. Then when I was nineteen, I went to university, but because of one thing and another, I went to Manchester University, got a lousy degree in chemistry. I got kicked out of school after a first shot at A Levels. The thing was arranged so that you took then a year early and had a second shot, but after the first attempt, I got a letter from the headmaster saying, I can see no possible benefit in our continued association. I came from a very wild year, when we got into the third year sixth, none of them were made prefects, they took the prefects from the year younger.
What year were you born?
’48. Went to university in ’67.
Before that did you go and see any pop groups?
Yeah, I saw the Beatles! It started out at fairgrounds. There was a fairground just across the road from where we lived. I sounded so different then, the speakers were so much bigger.
What did you hear?
Everly Brothers, all that, Elvis. All treble and bass, nothing much in the middle. That’s what got me started, that and hearing Patsy Cline on Two Way Family Favourites.
Did the whole Beatles thing have a big impact on Manchester?
Yeah. Enormous. My cousin Barry was in a band, he was a bass player, so lying around his place was an enormous Vox amp and a Fender six string bass. It was only the second in the country, so I used to sneak in and play with that when he was out. Taking it easy. I got it out of the house once, for a rehearsal, carried it all the way up to a garage in Middleton. Then I had to sneak it back to the house before he found out it was nicked. 
Which bands did you see?
I saw the Beatles and the Stones, you name it, I saw them. Either the Odeon, or else there were loads of little clubs just off Albert Square. Every street had a club. The Beatles were really good: fast, on it. Couldn’t hear much, but it was definitely good.
When psychedelia came along, did you take lots of drugs?
No, not really, I always avoided LSD. I eventually took it, but under ‘controlled conditions’, in a nice placeé
Did it hit the university much?
It didn’t, actually, not my bit, the technological bit, UMIST. It was relatively free of it, apart from the socials committee, who were heavy duty dope smokers. We used to book Jeff Beck every week, and you knew that he’d show up once a year if you did that. We actually got the first UK Led Zeppelin gig, the first UK Steppenwolf gigé
You were on the socials committee?
Yeah, co-opted. I just sneaked in and sat down. The social sec was Chris McHugo, John Kello was in there. There’s only Kello who’s stayed with it, he was MD at Thorn for a bit.
What did you do after you graduated?
Tried to get a job for a bit, decided I wasn’t going to get a job for a bit. Decided I was going to spend some time learning to play bass properly, get a proper bass, try and get a job. Also I started mixing at pub gigs. I was with the crew of Greasy Bear, Bruce Mitchell’s group. They were unusual for the time, they used to do arrangements and harmony vocals, and the problem was getting the harmony vocals out through the terrible ten cent PA. I got co-opted to sort that problem out. Threw away all the WEM power amps, got them some proper professional amplifiers.
What were you doing just before punk? Wasn’t there a theatre record?
Belt and Braces, yeah. That was my second production. First one was a soundtrack for a cartoon some guys at the Poly did. All Kinds of Heroes. Hopkins came along and said, I’ve got to do this: help. He wrote out all the dots, and I looked after the way it sounded.
You weren’t in a band?
I was playing bass occasionally with Spiderman King, who could have been Elvis Costello if he wasn’t so stupid. Just pre-punk, the biggest thing was Sad Cafe. There were no labels then, but lots of venues. I was booking the poly, the university, UMIST, the squat, I had a little circuit, a little place in Chester, Eric’s. Got the Stranglers for twenty five quid. 
What were the record shops?
Pandemonium on Lapwing lane. There was one at All Saints, Black Sedan. I used to get my records from Barry Ansell, who’s Picadilly records now. He used to know what I liked, and put it aside. I was on a load of mailing lists then cos I was a Melody Maker stringer by then. I resigned cos Ted Carroll’s mob sabotaged a Motorhead gig to make that other band he had, the Gorillas, look good. Andy Harris from Granada took over. 
How did you find out about punk?
I was running that office, Music Force, and anyone who was any kind of musician used to come up there eventually, cos they’d need to rent a PA. It was supposed to be a musician’s co-operative. The Band on the Wall started when Steve Morris came back from a lifetime working on the QE2 and bought the place. I used to go to the Band on the wall in the sixties every friday, there was a band there called The New Religion: a foot operated light show. I think they eventually turned into Stack Waddy. They were good, fast and indifferent to musical values. 
I went to the second Free Trade Hall gig, in June. I thought the Pistols were very competent, tight rhythm section. I enjoyed it. I used to bump into them in the Prince on Avondale Close, by coincidence. They used to hang out there, and I did cos when I was in London I used to stay around the corner in St. [indistinct] Gardens. A useful little studio. 
I thought the Buzzcocks were great too. I was involved with Slaughter and the Dogs who I thought were barking up the wrong tree, cos they were doing glam stuff. I was really looking forward to the first Pistols record, and when I got it home I thought, oh dear, 180 overdubbed rhythm guitars. It isn’t the end of the universe as we know it, it’s just another record. I went downstairs with it and Richard Boon was coming up and I said here, have this. That was Chris Thomas, an old Beatles tape op, very straightforward, whereas when I got Slaughter into the studio, I was straight into the weird stuff: right, let’s have a tape loop! Looped guitar notes on Bitch. They didn’t mind, they went out for a walk with Rob, who was president of their fan club at the time, and bumped into Tommy Cooper, they were made up.
The first punk record I produced was the Buzzcocks, Spiral Scratch. Richard came in and said, we’ve done some gigs, we’ve been in the papers, what do we do next? So I said, you make a record next. Mr McNeish, Pete’s dad came up with the money and we went into Indigo, 16 track. Again I was trying to do things, and the engineer was turning them off when I looked round. “You don’t put that kind of echo on a snare drum!”.
It sounds like it was done on a four track.
It was never finished, I would have loved to have whipped it away and remixed it, but he erased the master because he thought it was such rubbish. I’d get that everywhere I went. I went to Strawberry as soon as I got me budget from CBS, and the chief engineer was going, Yes well, I don’t mind you coming in here and doing it, but don’t expect me to have anything to do with it. That was the Cooper Clark deal.
How did you produce the Buzzcocks record? Lots of echo on the snare, what else?
Well, no, he didn’t let me get away with any of that. It sounds like a monitor mix these days. The guitars were really trebly, I just compressed them and added more treble. 
What about the solo on Boredom, did Pete drop that in?
Um, did we go to those lengths? That’s what they sounded like, it’s a document. We spent loads of time on the drums, cos they’d been hanging out with John Punter. Anything I knew about it was either from the book, or from him. He was accessible while he was doing Sad Cafe, so I managed to get hold of him.
Did you like that punk sound?
I loved guitars. The ultimate guitar sound for me comes out of this old Panasonic portable radio in my mum’s kitchen. Astonishing. They won’t let me have it, I’ve tried everything.
How did people get that sound?
Simple overload. Fuzz pedals were cheating. Everything on eleven. Maybe a bit of flanger if you were an arty type, like McGeoch. But yeah, Les Paul guitars and overload.
Did you get involved in Rabid Records?
Yeah, I was a partner in Rabid. It was put together as a vehicle for the Slaughter and the Dogs single, and it got used till we got up to 105, which was Jilted John. 103 was John Cooper Clark, 102 was the Nosebleeds, 104 was ‘Kinell, Tommy! 
Was that a football chant?
It just came out of Eddy’s head one night when he was playing at the Band on the Wall, doing his usual climbing up the PA trick. Ed Banger was a complete lunatic, but a gentle lunatic. Came from Withinshaw, he came with the Farm Brothers, of whom more anon. Mike Farm sticks posters up for Factory. They were part of the Slaughter and the Dogs crew: Vinny, Rob Gretton, meé
Didn’t they have a mad gangster manager?
Yeah, the guitar player’s brother, a tile layer, or whatever you call them. 
Were you excited by all this activity? You were able to develop as a producer?
Yeah, it was so fast and budgets were so low then, it was done so fast. It was quite a relief when we had a couple of weeks on Closer. 
What studios did you use? Indigo to start withé
Then we moved to Arrow, which was a twenty four track, part of an ad agency in Deansgate, then took the Arrow tapes to Advision to mix, then started to record at Strawberry, but still went down to Advision to mix. If I went to Advision I’d get an engineer who didn’t have to be told eighteen times to do anything. When I was at Strawberry I’d do it myself. I got Nagle trained. 
Was there real resistance to the punk sound in the studios?
Oh yeah, total derision. And from people like the musicians in Sad Cafe, total contempt. I don’t know why, its all music. I found it much more satisfying than their constipated thing with millions of chord changes and time changes and harmonies. I’d rather have it as it comes. Make it sound like a real record. Now I’ve got this routine burned into the back of my brain, and if they work, they stay. Happy Mondays ‘Bummed’ is stiff with little Hannett licks. It couldn’t sound any other way, cos its all on the multitracké
Were you involved in the punk social scene as well?
A little bit, but I’ve always been a bit reclusive. I did used to go to Rafters. I booked Rafters, so I had to go and see what I was doing. And the Circus, I used to pop into the Circus. I’d never stay anywhere very long.
Did you actually like the punk sound, or did you get bored with it and want to do something else?
It’s hard to say. The reaction I had to Anarchy was that there was nothing very revolutionary at all about this sound. State-of-the-art guitar, bass and drums. Nothing weird about it, or particularly adventurous. 
What did you think of the subsequent Pistols productions?
I liked it, I liked the way Chris Thomas works, the stuff he’s done with the Pretenders is great. It’s very solid, and its doesn’t distract from the vocal, for instance, which is a good thing. And exciting. The guitars were exciting. 
What was your job with Cooper Clark? To do the backing?
I met a CBS stringer, Jeremy Ensor, and sent him a copy of the film soundtrack and some pieces, then we did 103 with Clark, Psychle Sluts. I sent it to Oberstein and he came up, and we went for a cheap kebab. He signed John on the understanding that Steve and I would do the tracks. 
Where did Cooper Clark come from?
Tosh found him walking down Barnall Road, dressed as a rabbit. He’d been around for years, I’d heard stuff that he’d done for Radio Manchester. He’d been doing it in pubs since 1967 at least, but he’d split up with the Monster from Outer Space and moved into a cupboard on Barnall Road. We stuck him in the basement of Tosh’s house with various people and he came out with the Psychle Sluts EP. 
Where did Tosh come from?
He’d always been around. The first time I met him was round at Bruce Mitchell’s, in ’67. He stomped upstairs, looked at me and said, you’re far too fat! and disappeared. Then King had an affair with his wife, and the next time he saw me he was going to kill me because I was a friend of King’s. Eventually he calmed down a bit and I got to know him. Music Force was where we first worked together, I used to organise his poster business as a way of paying the phone bill.
Wasn’t he prone to quite violent mood swings?
Yes, especially verbal ones. He hates Factory, I suppose because they’ve not done anything for the communityé his part of the community. He’s into video now.
Was there a Manchester elite, and people like Tosh weren’t a part of it?
No, Tosh was very much a part of things. The poster bandits used to rocket around the country at all hours of the day and night, for weeks at a time. They were like the weavers, they used to light their joints with ten pound notes, the poster men. 
Mitchell came into the office with a good idea once. He said he’d been talking to Tosh: we should get into flyposting, cos there’s loads of money in it, 10p a poster. I said, well, isn’t it already carved up? He said, yeah! There’s this guy in Birmingham, Tubby Stan. I want you to phone him him and tell him its all over for him! So I picked up the phone, spoke to this guy. You’re Tubby Stan are you? You control all the posters all over the country except for London? Well I’ve got to tell you it’s all over for you!
Did he object to this?
No, he just folded up and went away. Very strange. Terry the Pill, the guy that controls London, obviously comes from the same era as Tosh. The Pill was a dead giveaway.
Did the poster wars get quite heavy?
That was all later, after I was out of it. The heaviness came in the early eighties, when Tosh really wasn’t arsed with it, let it dissipate, and Farles and another guy ended up squabbling over it. 
The rival gangs rip each others’ posters down, don’t they?
Not when we were controlling it, cos there were no rival gangs.
How did you get stuff, did the record companies approach you?
We approached them, we just steamed straight into them, and told them they had to do this particular kind of marketing because the bands like to arrive in a town and see their posters all over the place. It made sense. I think Red Star owed its enormous burgeoning in the late seventies to the number of posters that were going all over the country.
How did you come across Joy Division?
Terry Mason used to come into the office looking for a PA, and I went to see them one night supporting Slaughter at Salford Tech. They were really good. The PA broke down, and Steve and Hooky busked for about fifteen minutes. One of the things that drove me to drum machines was the appalling quality of drummers, and Steve was good, so immediately they had a red hot start.
They were different from punk. It might have put me off if I’d seen them in that Warsaw, Leaders of Men period. I’d never even played that record till I heard it on Substance last year. 
So what was different about them?
There was lots of space in their sound initially, before Bernard started falling asleep over polyphonic synthesisers, there used to be a lot of room in the music. And they were a gift to a producer, cos they didn’t have a clue. They didn’t argue. The Factory Sampler was the first thing I did with them. I think I’d had a new AMS delay line for about two weeks. It was called Digital, it was heaven sent.
When did the technology go over from analog to digital?
When it became workable. The ideas were always there, but at the end of the sixties, a digital delay line was implemented using these things called shift registers, which were enormous, unreliable, and used too much electricity. When little bits of memory started to arrive, those clever guys at AMS stuck ‘em in a box. 
When did all that stuff come on line?
One of the reasons I went to Advision was they had lots of delay lines, cos they were tied in with Feldon, the equipment distributors. When digital effects came in at the end of the seventies, there was a quantum leap in ambience control. You had as many flavours as you could invent. You could use machines, and that’s been the biggest change in the last ten years, the enormous flood of digital effects. It started off with cheap digital delays, and now its cheap digital echoes. For #485 you can get the latest Quadraverb that does four digital things at once: delay, chorusing, reverb and equalisation. They’re gifts to the imagination, really, you can do all those difficult things without getting out of your chair. Ultimately, what difference do they make? It’s still difficult to simulate the sound of the echo chamber that Lee Hazlewood used. Their echo chamber was one of those forty foot aluminium grain silos with a loudspeaker in the top of it. There aren’t many programmes for aluminium grain silos. 
So this technology really worked for a group like Joy Division, who were about space anyway?
You could wack it into little attention-grabbing things, into the ambient environment, just in case interest was flagging in the music. 
So you put in a lot of this stuff on Unknown Pleasures?
Unknown Pleasures was half of the classic Hannett patch, I didn’t have enough to do it on both left and right. I use basically the same patch these days, its a very controllable space. I can take it down from a cardboard tube to a cathedral. 
You used syndrums as well, didn’t you?
Syndrums were just coming out then, and Steve bought one and had a good look at it. When the Simmons stuff arrived, he must have had one of those kits.
What did you do on the fourth track on the first side, where there’s that lifté?
That’s a lift. 
How did you see your job with Joy Division? Were you trying to make it dream like, or simply more spacious?
Just trying to make it appealing, all round. To realise some of its potential. The gig at Salford was very important. It was a very big room, and they were very badly equipped, and they were still working into this space, and making sure they got into the corners. When I did the arrangements for recording, they were just reinforcing the basic ideas.
There wasn’t much guitar overload on the record.
No, that was just a bit of a problem. It gets to the point where it induces listener fatigue more than anything else. There are some fairly distorted guitars in there.
Didn’t you go on the board at factory?
Yeah, initially it was a partnership, and we talked about how to incorporate, which is always just around the corner for a partnership, so I said hey, Tonyé and I ended up with twenty percent, initially, of the equity. We worked it out and that worked out roughly the same amount of money as a four percent royalty rate. So there I was, and that’s the only reason I did it, and it turned out to be the most stupid thing I ever did in my life. When I wanted to turn it back into the twenty three percent of the equity that it had become, into a four percent royalty rate, I was told to go and screw myself. I can’t remember who the team were that were acting for Factory. They eventually managed to reduce the paper value of Factory less than a hundred thousand pounds, which as we all know is a fairy tale. 
Do you think Factory did put something back into the community by doing the Hacienda?
If. It was marginal, if at all. I mean, I’m not allowed to go into the Hacienda. Because it upsets me so much that I become violent and deranged. At the time, I wanted to spend a little money on R&D, for the purposes of making more records. I didn’t want it to become a vehicle for one bunch of fucking megastars, and a few people who manage to crawl up Tony’s arse at the bar in his club. 
Were you still doing Clarky?
We did three albums for CBS, and we managed John, he drifted away to Stevenage, to take drugs. There was a female, too. His man in the Barbican.
Were there a lot of drugs in Manchester in the late seventies?
A lot? I don’t think so, no. I didn’t get into a lot of drugs situation till about ’83. 
So it was mainly speed and dope. Was there much smack around then?
I don’t know, I’ve always been a rather solitary smack abuser. I think there are loads of people doing it, but I don’t know many of them. It’s hard to have a social life if you’ve got a problem like that, though. Even people who get completely off their trolley smoking freebase look down on smack. 
When did you start doing smack?
It must have been ’78 or ’79. Not a loté well, I suppose it got to be a lot cos your tolerance builds up. Just enough. As Anthony Burgess says, they took away our opium and gave us beer and football. What a pity. You forget there was a big opium culture in Britain, especially in the North West. The climate predisposes everyone to chest complaints, and of course, number one dope for bronchitis is opium. It dries up the excess secretions.
Did Joy Division becoming a big hit change everything? Did you start to get more commissions?
Not really, cos I’m based up here. I used to get courted by record companies, but it just went completely over my head. I never thought of doing anything I didn’t like, you see.
Was it a disadvantage being in Manchester, communications-wise?
Yeah, there’s an awful lot of incest goes on, and intrigue and stuff, and I never had a manager. Well, I had a manager for about five minutes once, and he billed Arista twice for the same session and disappeared!
You think the music industry is a real cowboy industry?
Yeah, of course it is. 
Did the independents make any difference, or were they just baby versions of that?
They just got absorbed, eventually they all got plastered with the same flavour wallpaper. Ten years later, there is maybe an improvement in the looseness around record companies. People like 4AD I admire very much. Good attitude, whereas Wilson I don’t understand at all. Fucking total mystery. A classical division? Why didn’t he look at the feasibility? It’s an easier way to lose all your money than just about all the other things he’s tried. All those musicians’ fees, for a start, and then the diminutive sales. I want him to have some money left when I drag him into the Court of Human Rights, in 1993.
You’re not going to do that, are you?
He’s pinched my intellectual property. He made the company worth nothing, and gave me twenty three percent of it.
[end of side one
éI considered that if you want to start a scene, you can rent a room, see if it works first.
Is that when that period ended for you, when you left Factory?
Yeah, I was left in that apartment where you met me, not doing much. Hopping over to Europe occasionally to make another flop. 
You did Nico didn’t you?
Yeah, poor old mum. And the Psychedelic Furs. I could have the Furs back if Richard would change his mind. You know they’re all back together, the original ones. I did two of the tracks on the first US album, it made meé about four grand. S’alright. They’re back with the engineer I used on the original Advision sessions.
I remember coming down with Susannah on the night Joy Division played their last concert. We walked out of the gig, didn’t know it was going to be the last. Why did Ian kill himself? 
It was an accident wasn’t it? Thirty two barbs and half a bottle of scotch. I never saw the inquest. It totally did my head in, that. I was in the Townhouse with the Buzzcocks, and for some reason I wrapped the session up, rocketed back to the hotel, threw everything in the boot of my car, drove home to Manchester, got home at ten, was enjoying a coffee and Tosh phoned and told me. That was the day after. Monday morning. 
Was it totally unexpected?
Yes and no, because he’d tried to do it two weeks earlier, tried to kill himself, ended up in hospital and was released into the care of Tony and Lindsay, who dropped him off at his wife’s house the day he died. He thought everything was a mess, and he wanted to organise himself before he went to the states. 
Joy Division were special, weren’t they? The interesting thing about Ian for me was that onstage he was totallyé
- possessed. It was me who said, touched by the hand of god, to a Dutch magazine. They like to remind me, you know, occasionally.
Where did it come from, was it just within him?
He was one of those channels for the Gestalt. A lightning conductor. He was the only one I bumped into, in that period.
Do you think Rotten was, in a different way?
I couldn’t tell, I never got close enough to him. One of the things I noticed about the Pistols’ organisation, it worked in that hierarchical way, to keep you away from them. You couldn’t just bump into this slavering monster, could you?
At the Leigh Festival, they were so fucking good. Remember that fucking disaster?
Yeah, about four cars parked in a field. Durutti Column sounded good through the loudspeakers, I’d just finished the one with the tweety birds on ité
Were you interested in the other Manchester bands of that period?
The Fall, for instance? The Fall went straight over my head. I remember a long conversation with Kay Carroll, who wanted a record out fast, but also wanted to trawl through hours of dialecticé
You didn’t have any sympathy for all that?
Not a lot, no. It’s a kind of North Side weirdness that I don’t understand. Prestwich weirdness!
Were you aware of Mrs Thatcher and everything?
Of course, I used to spend hours in the car with Clarky. We had Radio Four on, and when Radio Four went away, you had the World Service. We could see the banana republic, floating above us. 
Did you feel anything when Thatcher was elected?
I suppose I was a bit preoccupied, and I hoped it would go away. It was about 1984 when it really dawned on me. The Miners’ Strike. It could have been during the Falklands. 1984 it was confirmed. It changed everything. 
Do you think that upsurge of energy you got then was the product of a particular political and social situation?
I hope its something that happens periodically, that it’s got an inevitability, cos I’ve been through two of them, three of them if you count Elvis.
Four of them if you count Acid House. Maybe we won’t. There seems to be a new psychedelia happening though, some of the acid house stuff is very good.
Extending the equipment, again. Its what Wilson says: this quantum leap in the equipment that you’re always trying to ram down my throat. The first time I saw one of these guys use an S900 sampler, for instance, he had every fucking square byte of memory doing something, a plug in every hole, the thing was hopping away. Pushing it to its limits, which I suppose is what I was doing, when I first got my hands on a big board. There wasn’t an inch of it that wasn’t doing something.
What were the Closer sessions like?
A bit fraught, from the point of view that Ian was having lots of fits, but basically very workmanlike. All the little bits and pieces were taken care of.
The last Buzzcocks was a bit chaotic, wasn’t it?
The last one was, yeah. Totally chaotic. We lost the bass player for three days while he went to a race meeting, for instance. Then after the sessions, he just got on a plane to New York and disappeared completely.
They were in a bad state by then.
I think they must have been, they were certainly wired, and from what I learn from Diggle’s direction these days, it was fraught. Fun, fun, fun. But I’d gone a bit self-absorbed by then, we were at the Townhouse because I could make one of those consoles jump through a hoop, you know?
Do you think Happy Mondays are like a punk group? Or are they something different?
They’re something different. The music is harmonically interesting rather than linearly interesting. It’s built onto something that I enjoy very much, which is the dead solid groove that they get. Sometimes they’re into that groove within thirty seconds of getting onstage. A perfect opportunity for a wall-of-sound merchant.
Do you think that punk was linear?
Yeah, I think so. Harmony was a dirty word. Any harmonies you got were stark, to say the least, except for the odd exception, like Siouxsie. They were interesting. Terribly snotty, though.
Posted on October 30, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Brilliant read, thanks for posting that FalconArrow98 (discuter) 16 avril 2020 à 21:22 (CEST)
thread_title: Martin Hannett interview de Jon Savage 29 mai  1989