European Man

“On the back of the single we wrote, ‘Electronic Dance Music … EDM; computer programmed to perfection for your listening pleasure’

“At the time we started to write about things that were relevant to us and not about love. This was about computers, or microprocessors, as we referred to them back then. At that time they were going to basically remove the need for daily labour, which is particularly timely now, when we’re in the middle of this conversation about Al in a very serious way. We were talking about a new ‘European Man’ and the idea that these microprocessors would effectively make it so we increased productivity to the degree that humans wouldn’t need to work again. Of course, it didn’t work out that way.”

[The script for the video for this was written by a young Richard Curtis.]

Shake The West Awake

“Again, we didn’t want to write songs about love. At that time, it became obvious that the Japanese industrial complex was becoming extremely powerful, and it was going to take over. And that’s what the song is about. I remember. prior to that time in England, if you went out on the street and you looked at all the cars. you’d see a Morris. an Austin. You’d see a Jaguar, you know? You’d see many a Mercedes, Rolls Royce. A Bentley, maybe. There were no Toyotas, no Honda. If you walk out in the street now. in the UK or in the US, you’re gonna see a lot of Japanese cars. You’re gonna see a lot of European cars. Not that I’m particularly a nationalist, because I’m really not. But that’s what we were writing about."

Computer Person

“Pete (Thoms] wrote this one. We basically credited all of our songs to everybody in the band. But, usually somebody starts the song or somebody writes a substantial part of the song. The reason we did that was because we felt that the band had been together for so long, that even when somebody wrote a song entirely on their own, you’re always sort of thinking about the other people, the other musicians and what they would do, so you were kind of writing for them.

“This one came from a jazz concept, from Duke Ellington. And the song is about that sort of Al mentality that we could see computers having in the future, with them learning what humans can do. And it’s the sound of a computer learning to say ’computer person’. And the music backs that up."

Alpine Tragedy/Sisters

“These two songs are together. Chris [Heaton] started those songs, as I recall. I play drums on those. They were not programmed. But, the interesting thing is that, even though they were played, I regard those drums as electronic drums, because we recorded them at the Townhouse in the Stone Room there, and they were heavily processed.

“Peter Gabriel had just played us his third album and it had the first instance of that ‘Phil Collins drum sound’ and I’m like, ‘Holy shit. That’s unbelievable.’ I knew Hugh Padgham and called him up to get that sound.

“It was the boom mic they use for talkback. which was fed through the talkback compressors on the SSL.

And it would cause a huge amount of squashing of the drums and then you would gate it so it had this incredibly sort of electronic sound.”

Face Of The 80s

“This idea came out of the New Romantic movement. I was going to the Blitz a lot (I taught Rusty the club’s DJ to drum) and it was obviously a very preening kind of thing. And somebody asked me about it all and I said it was kind of like a New Romantic thing and I think that’s where the term came from.

“I used to park my car on double yellows outside the club and I started playing a cassette of stuff I was working on to some guys I met at the bar and it turned out to be Spandau Ballet. They asked me to produce their album. Once they got their deal, everybody at the Blitz became part of this interesting time. There was an excitement running through it all. And a sort of a panic at the same time. Like, someone’s taking off. And if we don’t get on the train, we’re gonna miss it, you know? That’s what I felt. I don’t know if it was real or not, or just me.”

New Religion

“This came before any of this album. We’d recorded the original demos in a place called Southern Studios, which is a place an electronics whizz called John Loder had built with three Revoxes in the back of his garage and linked up through to his living room in his house. Crass would record there. He upgraded to a 24-track machine and we would go there to do demos because it was relatively cheap and we loved John.

“This track came about because we were in and out of clubs all the time and it was the latter era of disco, and my feeling was that it was becoming this sort of new religion. Like ‘The Church of Disco’, you know? People were starting to worship this music and the four-to-the-floor bass drum. So, that’s where this whole idea came from.”

Einstein a Go-Go

“The title came from our designer, John Warwicker-Le Breton. And John [L. Walters] had a melody he’d been messing around with and the two things came together. And, at the time we were writing it in the late ’70s and early ’80s, there was a lot of talk about nuclear war and articles about blueprints for briefcase bombs that us on the underground were fascinated by. And we had the whole Iran situation with the Ayatollah. And so, you know, the rise of religious fundamentalism, I guess. And so that’s what ‘Einstein’ is really about.

“Musically, the idea with this was not to jump back and forth too much. It was all about making something with a very simple chord sequence. And very cartoonish kind of quality to it … But with a dark subject matter.

Norman Bates

“This was John’s [L. Walters]. And that’s actually my favourite track on the album. I love it. I love that track.

“I think the record label screwed that record up, it should have been a huge hit. But it was a really weird song, a really weird choice.

“John brought that song in, and it just really related to all of us. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of what’s ‘normal’.

“It’s just a classic beat. And with that darkness. And the idea that we built off the movie Psycho saying, ‘I’m just a normal guy. My name is Norman Bates’ And the constant repetition of that.

“I don’t know if you ever did this when you were a kid, but I used to say a word over and over and over, until it sort of loses its meaning and it starts to have a kind of mantra quality about it.

“So. the whole idea of, ‘My name is Norman Bates. I’m just a normal guy,’ was obviously not true. He was obviously not normal. And that also ties into the idea of what insanity is, right? What is it?”

The Doll’s House

“This started in a soundcheck, when I started playing that beat. Then Chris joined in and we really liked what we had, so we decided to turn it into something. John, Chris and I all lived close to each other in South London and we convened at my place to work on that song.

“Chris had a very deep knowledge of all music. Especially Schoenberg and Stockhausen and the Minimalists. And he was very much into the avant-garde with his electronic group, Accord.

“So he was the one who came up with the whole idea of, ‘Look at your hands, look at your hands,’ you know, again, and again. Which I just thought was unbelievable.

“Originally, he wanted to use that as a bridge on ‘Einstein a Go-Go’, but that was our sort of pop gambit, as it were, and I really didn’t want to screw that up, you know? It would have possibly pushed it out of the commercial sort of zone it was in.”

From The Tea-Rooms Of Mars … To The Hell Holes Of Uranus

“This one is made up of the three tracks – Beguine, Mambo and Tango. And each part of it was started by somebody different in the band, if I recall. We’d wanted to use the CR-68 initially, which was the non-programmable Roland drum machine. And then they came up with the CR-78, which was a slightly programmable Roland drum machine. Warren Cann from Ultravox was the only person I knew could programme it really well. Anyway, we used the rhythm from that drum machine to lay it all up.

“And obviously, they’re really cheesy, and we wanted it to be really cheesy. We were sort of mimicking that kind of music you’d hear in wine bars of hotel lounges, with somebody playing Hammond organ with a little drum beat, playing the tango. That’s where the titles came from.

“And John had the idea of having the voiceover, like you used to get in the clubs, talking about what’s going on and everything, which I absolutely loved.”