Disco Inferno: The 5 EPs by One Little Indian Records

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THE 5 EPS

DISCO INFERNO

From a promising start as a band openly inspired by acts such as Joy Division, UK experimental rock group Disco Inferno transformed itself into a breathtakingly modern band. Bearing politicized lyrics and marked by the shock of the new, they wrung the most out of limited funds and new (and untested) music-making technology. The following oral history is not meant to be a seamless story but instead a collection of particular perspectives and memories -- fitting for a band that thrived off of a beguiling sense of disorientation. My thanks to all who participated, especially Ian Crause, Paul Willmott, and Rob Whatley. Ned Raggett 3

CONTENTS SUMMER’S LAST SOUND P.5 A ROCK TO CLING TO

P.11

THE LAST DANCE P.14 SECOND LANGUAGE P.18 IT’S A KID’S WORLD P.22

The 5 EPs by Disco Inferno is available now on gatefold vinyl, CD and download as part of One Little Indian Records Totem Series. Totem Series is all about uncovering great lost classics, rarities and oddities from the archives of One Little Indian Records and it’s associated labels. For more in the series visit totemseries.co.uk.

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SUMMER’S LAST SOUND (1992) CHE RECORDS

Following the release of debut single “Entertainment”/“Arc in Round” and album Open Doors, Closed Windows the previous year, Disco Inferno put out their first EP, Science, in 1991. All of these records originally appeared on Che, an imprint of the Cheree label. The band’s earlier efforts, elegantly performed and recorded as they were, were the product of a group working out its influences-- Joy Division, early New Order, Wire-in public. But from the start of Science, most notably with the song “Waking Up” given its stark arrangement and pitiless lyrics, the band’s work began to take on a more distinct character. (Science, along with the other earlier recordings, can be found on the collection entitled In Debt.) Around the time of Science’s release, Crause told Melody Maker that he was interested in recording something in the Consolidated vein, referring to the San Francisco group for whom sampling, texture, and an overriding sense of social and political message was paramount. When the two-track Summer’s Last Sound EP surfaced in fall of 1992, it might not have seemed like such a connection was obvious. But the group were starting to approach the all-encompassing sense of critique and creation they were increasingly aiming for. It drew in not only sampling depth and subtlety, but broader cultural and social observations. Summer’s Last Sound would also be the conclusion of their relationship with the Che and Cheree labels, a split that was anything but pleasant. “If your equipment sounds mad as fuck just by plugging it in and touching it, you know you’re off to a good start.” - Ian Crause

IAN CRAUSE: I wanted to sound like the Young Gods and Public Enemy, so the idea that we were developing a slightly individual take on the post-punk guitar sound early on was of small consolation to me. I was ashamed about how backwards I thought we were. PAUL WILLMOTT: After we finished the Science EP, Ian took the brave step of deconstructing his guitar and installed a MIDI pick up. ROB WHATLEY: When Ian bought a sampler and bastardized his guitar, his energy and ideas were really fresh and exciting. He jumped head first into this new idea because, with Ian, it’s all or nothing. IAN CRAUSE: I didn’t see the sampler as having any technical limitations whatsoever. Once I put my guitar into it, I thought I’d never need to buy another effect pedal. PAUL WILLMOTT: Ian invited me round to his house one day and played me the beginnings of “Summer’s Last Sound” and “In Sharky Water”. It was a bit of a shock at first-- I knew it was a major turning point. IAN CRAUSE: We started incorporating the ideas into songs during rehearsals in late spring of 1992. Paul was the other writer and initiated a few songs, but it was in a reactionary capacity most of the time. That was one of the things which eventually broke the band up as time wore on. PAUL WILLMOTT: We had a limited budget, which allowed Rob to get a prehistoric MIDI drum kit, which would trigger randomly, and I stuck with the bass to give the songs some cohesion. Rob found it most difficult as he had to learn an entirely new discipline. IAN CRAUSE: Rob hated hitting his pads-- drum pads are hard and hurt the wrists whereas traditional drums bounce. It was also a letdown that Paul couldn’t afford a MIDI bass from the off, but we made the best of it; he did a good job. Those first rehearsals in 1992 were some of the most exciting times because it was a disorientating experience. When the guitar was connected to the sampler it sounded insane-- if your equipment sounds mad as fuck just by plugging it in and touching it, you know you’re off to a good start. RICHARD ADAMS (HOOD): “Summer’s Last Sound” is such a bold statement of 6

intent. It’s the blueprint for everything they did and it’s one of those rare pieces of music that sounds like nothing else that had come before. ROB WHATLEY: On “Summer’s Last Sound”, Ian played water and birdsong on his guitar, I played birdsong and marching sound effects on the pads, and Paul’s sliding bass lines were just immense. IAN CRAUSE: The song’s title refers to the fact that, in England, the first sign of impending cold weather at the end of summer brings gulls inland, where they come to scavenge. It is a song about the decay I saw around me in London during the recession of the early 90s. It felt quaint to think of it during the boom times of the 90s and 00s, but I strongly suspect that what will come to pass in London-- and much of the UK as well as the U.S.-- over the next five to 10 years will make the early 90s look like a holiday camp. PAUL WILLMOTT: Rob and I would only hear the words in the recording studio once Ian had put his voice to tape; we could never hear them in rehearsal as we always rehearsed way too loudly. Ian’s shyness manifested itself in the fact that his voice is nearly always very low in the mix. It wasn’t just because he wasn’t the greatest singer. I think it was due to his lack of confidence with his words. IAN CRAUSE: I can remember seeing footage of neo-Nazis firebombing immigrant hostels in the newly liberated East Germany, and the thing my parents told me about how being Jewish means you can never permanently call anywhere home hit me with a force I’d never felt. Seeing neo-Nazis on TV murdering Gypsies shook me profoundly. PAUL WILLMOTT: On reflection, I think that this was Ian’s therapy. IAN CRAUSE: Now, I see how Muslims in the UK are being scapegoated in almost exactly the same way as Jews were in the 30s, so some level of chaos is by no means inconceivable in the coming years. Nothing appears to have been learned by the lessons of the last century, which is extremely ominous. So, the song is about flight. PAUL WILLMOTT: Ian was making [the viewpoints in his lyrics] available for public consumption, but I think it was a necessity for him. If possible, he would rather not share it with anyone, and to discuss it would be truly abhorrent. So I became less involved with what he was singing about and more focused on the atmosphere we were creating. 7

We accrued a sports bag full of CDs and tapes from the record store I was working at, and we would spend a lot of time working through each rehearsal trying to build the right portfolio of sounds for each idea. Rob played the dancing footsteps, which were taken from a sample CD. The narrative aspects of the sampling was paramount. IAN CRAUSE: The coda at the end of “Summer’s Last Sound” was my attempt to do what Ian Curtis started doing in 1979 with songs like “Atrocity Exhibition”, “Komakino”, and “She’s Lost Control”. I was trying to write the conclusion of the song out in widescreen and make it an explication of what had been touched on in the previous verses. I only heard “Summer’s Last Sound” for the first time in maybe 12 years when we were mastering it, and it actually moved me when it got to the end, which surprised me hugely. I’d completely forgotten that ending. I’m proud of that coda, but it slightly saddens me that I wrote it when I was only 18. It sounds so world weary. So bereft. BEN HOLTON (EPIC45): “Love Stepping Out” is definitely up there. I love the balance that is struck between the fluttering beauty of the guitars, the distant sounds of church bells, and the sharp-tongued lyrics, bitterly addressing a country in decay. IAN CRAUSE: “Love Stepping Out” was never one of my favorites. We were working on it at the same time as “Summer’s Last Sound” and some of the tracks from [1994’s] D.I. Go Pop, and those sounded so much more exciting. PAUL WILLMOTT: My overall memory of “Love Stepping Out” is one of panic. We’d spent time developing these songs into something that we were really excited about, and then we got into the studio… CHARLIE MCINTOSH (PRODUCER): I recall it being a bit of a learning process for us all as some of the kit we used just arrived brand new and boxed at the studio. We tried to work out how it was going to work with a 16 track and an Atari 1040 ST sequencer. Tricky. PAUL WILLMOTT: I think it took at least four nights of recording and editing Ian’s guitar part alone for the two tracks on that single. The computer would crash continually. IAN CRAUSE: Once I’d cut the proper pickup off my guitar, I wished I hadn’t because I had to find a replacement guitar sound and there wasn’t much to choose from. There were no virtual instruments then and not even much in the way of sample CDs for that 8

kind of thing. So the “harp” is from a floppy disk of an acoustic guitar which came free with my Roland sampler. I thought it sounded terrible at the time, but listening back to it at the mastering session recently, it sounded really good-- strangely silky and unreal. ANDREW SWAINSON (DESIGNER): Summer’s Last Sound was the first time I was given something other than a sketch to use because Ian had done this colorful, naive painting for the cover. It was the right thing to do because the music had taken such a leap in direction, but I have to admit that I wasn’t that taken with it initially. PAUL WILLMOTT: We were aware that the recording was costing more than we had bargained for and Nick [Allport] and Vinita [Joshi] at Che had difficulty comprehending our technical problems. This was compounded by the fact that they thought it was all a little unnecessary and that they were indulging a whim. IAN CRAUSE: From the minute I told [Che] I wanted a sampler they seemed uncomfortable. They were working with groups like the Pooh Sticks, who tried to get Charlie to make a record without any reverb on it because they thought it was “artificial processing.” They had come from a much more indie, C86 set of sensibilities. I thought it was bollocks. And I didn’t need to ask Paul if he thought the same; in the van, Paul and Rob used to listen to pirate stations broadcasting rave and jungle music around north London, speeding up the rave tracks they’d danced to the night before and sticking their own drums on. It was fascinating listening to it develop over the course of about eight months. PAUL WILLMOTT: There had been tension between ourselves and Che, and Ian had taken to heart a comment from Vinita when she referred to a sampler as “a synthy thingy.” IAN CRAUSE: I just thought that was pure stupidity. It really made me sick, and I didn’t forget it. It was like an insult. They were basically telling me what records I could or couldn’t make and my attitude was that they could fuck off from that day onwards. VINITA JOSHI (CHE RECORDS CO-FOUNDER): I do know the difference between a synth and a sampler! And I have no recollection of “synthy” or “sampler” conversations! I do remember both Ian and Paul crashing at our place all the time, and Ian saying he was selling his pedal rack and how they were going to change the sounds, and Rob triggering samples from the drums. 9

PAUL WILLMOTT: Around this period we met Mike Collins , who was to be our manager up until the band split up. He had managed Wire and Blur. At that time, the record company had been organizing everything for us and we desperately needed independent management. I think Nick and Vinita felt threatened straight away, as they realized that Mike’s main focus would be to take us to a larger label, which happened quite quickly. IAN CRAUSE: After we recorded Summer’s Last Sound, Che promptly went into receivership, having talked us into signing a contract which committed our future recordings to the label’s financial backers, whether they wanted to release them or not. VINITA JOSHI: I don’t remember anything to that effect. Why would we want anything to go to the backers? After Che went down, I bought the rights to the early Che stuff, which included the Disco Inferno back catalog, but that wasn’t paid for by the backers anyway. PAUL WILLMOTT: Although we felt extremely indebted to Cheree and Che, Mike convinced us that he would be able to get us a deal with either Factory or Rough Trade, which was something that we could only dream about at that point. Joy Division and New Order had been a huge influence for Ian, and I had been a huge Smiths fan. IAN CRAUSE: Rough Trade had to buy us out. We were lucky [Che’s backers] heard our music and thought it was unsaleable shit, I guess, or our luck might have been even worse.

A ROCK TO CLING TO (1993) ROUGH TRADE

A Rock to Cling To-- released in June 1993 and featuring the title track backed by the lengthy instrumental “From the Devil to the Deep Blue Sky”-- was the band’s first release on Rough Trade. With its core role as clearing house and distributor of the overwhelming number of DIY efforts that emerged in the UK in the late 70s, followed later by its smash success as the home of the Smiths, the label had become legendary several times over but had collapsed and partially reconstituted itself by the early 90s. Recorded at the same time as the songs that would eventually form the band’s 1994 album D.I. Go Pop, A Rock to Cling To found the group continuing to push their guitar/sampling hybrid to wherever it might take them. GEOFF TRAVIS (ROUGH TRADE FOUNDER): I was really taken by Disco Inferno’s sound and by the fact that they seemed to be reaching for something new in guitar music. I remember being intrigued by Ian and beguiled by the intensity of his vision. IAN CRAUSE: We were so dumbfounded at the noise that was coming out of our instruments it took us a while to get a handle on what we were hearing, let alone thinking in terms of how any records would be structured. We weren’t a studio band, we were a pub band, so everything we were hearing was through a loud, cheap vocal PA. PAUL WILLMOTT: “A Rock to Cling To” is very much part of the Go Pop sessions, and I think it was initially intended to be part of that album. IAN CRAUSE: I remember thinking at the time that I would then be in my twenties, 11

albeit only by a week, before I finally got to make my first proper record. I thought I was running out of time, which seems ridiculous now. All the songs at that time were live recordings apart from some vocals: the whole of D.I. Go Pop, Summer’s Last Sound, all of it. We plugged all our audio outputs into the mixing desk, Charlie sent it to tape, and we played a few takes until we were happy. It did strike us all when we’d manage to salvage some kind of sanity from the noise and made a recognisable song. PAUL WILLMOTT: Prior to Go Pop and A Rock to Cling To we had done our recording in a traditional piecemeal fashion, instrument by instrument. This was fine when recording with guitar, bass, drums. With the introduction of samplers, we felt that a better process would be to record the MIDI direct to the sequencer. Due to the limited nature of the technology and our understanding of it, the whole process became extremely labor intensive. IAN CRAUSE: The relationship between what our hands were doing and what our ears were hearing had changed. A couple of years after this, when Paul had a MIDI bass, we were rehearsing upstairs under the railway arches and a scream came through the PA that was louder than everything else we were playing combined. We all froze in terror. It was one of the most genuinely shocking sounds I’ve ever heard; it sounded like a soul trapped in hell. I remember looking at Paul to see if he’d put something on his bass that he shouldn’t have, but he had the fear of a dying man in his eyes, real terror-- he was as surprised as I was. He dropped his bass before scooting off downstairs whereupon he refused to return for a good couple of hours. Rob seemed equally shocked. After we’d established that neither of us was playing anything-- we did a kind of NYPD “put your hands up where I can see ‘em” thing to prove it-- we both went to join Paul. I don’t know if any of us knows what it was to this day, but it’s telling that we couldn’t be sure if the sound of a soul screaming endlessly in agony was just someone playing a wrong note. PAUL WILLMOTT: “A Rock to Cling To” was the first time we had experimented with using blocks of sampled music from other bands. IAN CRAUSE: It’s the character of the material you sample that defines what comes out the other end. “Summer’s Last Sound” was from an old cassette tape of British birds 12

which I got for about £3, whereas “A Rock to Cling To” came from a rock album. I hadn’t intended to sample chunks of music, but the temptation was too great. I think the only other time we did that was with Iggy Pop’s drum riff later on [for “It’s a Kid’s World”]. PAUL WILLMOTT: I remember not being particularly happy with the results. I didn’t think it was a move on from the previous single. I thought that parts of the song sounded clumsy and it lacked dynamics. Both Ian and I had read the KLF’s How to Have a Number 1 and, bizarre though it may seem, that definitely had an effect on the way that we approached this batch of songs, and the title Go Pop reflected that. IAN CRAUSE: It’s a turning-point track between the adolescent angst of our school band and the later, more ironic tracks, which I still feel are generally much better. ANDREW SWAINSON: By the time that we came to do A Rock to Cling To, just as the band had moved more into samples and electronic sounds, I’d started doing work on the Mac. I did things a little differently this time, using photographs as the starting point for the images rather than the paint, ink, and paper we’d used before; I was trying to do the same thing visually that the band were doing with sound. I also kept the images quite low resolution to give away their digital origin, another nod to how the music was being produced. PAUL WILLMOTT: “From the Devil to the Deep Blue Sky” was live, but it was more influenced by the long song structures that Bark Psychosis were putting together at the time. They had some impact on us giving ourselves the freedom to build something without the parameters of a three-minute pop song. IAN CRAUSE: I spent a lot of energy trying to get my guitar to be an accurate replica of a chainsaw on “From the Devil to the Deep Blue Sky” but fell some way short. I wanted to be able to keep revving it like a petrol motor until it sparked into life, but it sounds tiny; it should have sounded big. [In a 1994 interview, Crause described the song as a slow demolition of the idea of religious structures moving into a newer phase of openness and contemplation.] I did have that rather cocky hatred for religion whilst I was young. I no longer fear religion, but I do still fear religious people. I find early Christian history fascinating, but that’s where it belongs: history books. 13

THE LAST DANCE (1993) ROUGH TRADE

Appearing in fall 1993, The Last Dance was in many ways a profound change from the group’s previous releases. Following sessions with Charlie McIntosh that were rejected by Rough Trade, the band worked with a different producer for the first time-- Michael Johnson, most famous for his engineering work with New Order, with the further assistance of engineer John Rivers-- and included an alternate version of the title track, along with two more originals. Ranging from the serene sonic calm of “Scattered Showers” to the extreme frenzy of “D.I. Go Pop”, the EP’s centerpiece is the title song itself, showcasing the band both at its most tensely propulsive and, thanks to a powerful lyric on the oppressive weight of political and cultural history, its most cutting and observational. As critic Tom Ewing once said in naming it his second favorite single of the 1990s, “[it’s] their wisest, most moving song... on the impossibility of making something new in art and on the need to try and do so anyhow.” Meanwhile, the responsibility for sleeve design changed from Andrew Swainson to British design firm Fuel, establishing a new visual identity for the band which has continued to the present day with the new cover created for The Five EPs. GEOFF TRAVIS: Why did I ask for “The Last Dance” to be re-recorded? I honestly cannot remember. PAUL WILLMOTT: Initially, I felt like [working with Michael Johnson] was a betrayal to Charlie. IAN CRAUSE: It did feel strange. And I think [Charlie] was a bit hurt, but our manager rallied us, and we did it. It was definitely the right thing to have done. 14

PAUL WILLMOTT: The approach with Michael was different. We had a period of pre-production, something we had never done before. We booked in to a rehearsal room in Walthamstow, East London, and spent a couple of days largely putting together a drum track with his drum machine. I think Ian embraced it more than I did purely for the New Order connection. I was a little unsure as it seemed to go against what we were working towards. But once we got in to the studio, it became more exciting. IAN CRAUSE: Along with Second Language, The Last Dance was probably the most painless time in the studio. We were in a semi-rural location in the Midlands. Rob and I even managed to go out for a long countryside drive one evening, which would have been out of the question in [London] unless we wanted to see a wild kebab wrapper in its natural habitat. MICHAEL JOHNSON (PRODUCER): I always found [working with bands inspired by Joy Division and New Order] to be a positive thing. It meant they were open to my ideas and weren’t suspicious or too wary about my methods and suggestions. The bands always had plenty of originality, so they were trying to do their own thing, too. IAN CRAUSE: When Michael suggested something, we just did it. I probably flinched when he said Rob should play a normal drum kit again but I wouldn’t have said anything. The pre-stated aim was to let him take us away from our rehearsal-room sound into a pop sound. It’s probably safe to say that we entered Planet Normal during these sessions and did what everyone else was doing. PAUL WILLMOTT: “The Long Dance” was actually the original version, and Michael wanted to play around with [it]. We had the studio time booked, and this is something that he had previously done in the New Order sessions. We had been against the idea of remixing ourselves prior to these sessions, but working backwards to get “The Last Dance” didn’t feel like we were remixing anything. IAN CRAUSE: I thought it was a bit tacky. I was never a massive fan of even the New Order 12” remixes. The other guys wouldn’t have had any qualms about it as they were both well into dance music. Now, I think it’s a pretty good track and Michael did a great job. DEAN SPUNT (NO AGE): “D.I. Go Pop” is a song I can listen to 50 times in a row 15

and not get sick of. There is so much to decipher and read into. An amazing piece of music. HARI ASHURST (PRIZES, DOUBLE DENIM RECORDS CO-OWNER): “D.I. Go Pop” has that effect where on first listen it races ahead of you before you can arrange it into something that makes sense. I had the same feeling listening to Loveless for the first time-- listening to it loudly almost triggers motion sickness. PAUL WILLMOTT: “DI Go Pop” was essentially put together like a garage band. It’s a My Bloody Valentine sample pitched across Ian’s guitar with the unpredictable fret release firing off samples at a much higher pitch by chance, giving it an even more chaotic feel. IAN CRAUSE: That sample does make you jump, doesn’t it? I sometimes dreaded starting it off, especially when it was coming through a full PA. It’s like waiting for a firework to go off-- you know the bang’s coming, it’s just the waiting for it that does your nerves in. I can’t remember the exact lyrics, but we were starting to laugh between ourselves about our lack of success and I was also beginning to increasingly think of us as a cartoon band to reflect our total hopelessness, which I got from Paul, who was the chief giggler. So you pretend it wasn’t that important all along, even though it’s killing you. Cartoon purgatory would be where this obviously made-up tale put us: a world of black irony. PAUL WILLMOTT: “Scattered Showers” was the first track that was put together with myself doing the majority of the sampling on an Akai S3200, but it’s a missed opportunity. It creates an interesting atmosphere but doesn’t really do anything. The guitar makes it sound too ethereal. There are songs that we could have been braver with, such as this. If we had treated this in the same way as “Lost In Fog”, whereby there is no true root of traditional instrumentation, the result could have been realized to a greater level. IAN CRAUSE: “Scattered Showers” was driven by a sense of absence. It was all stuff about conformity and a black storm coming to instill fear into those who were complacent. It’s vague and hazy, adolescent. There’s possibly something beautiful in it, but it is too long. 16

ANDREW SWAINSON: The last time I saw them in person as a band was when I found out that they had gotten someone else to do the new sleeve artwork. I was gutted at the time, but I still bought D.I. Go Pop! FUEL (DESIGNERS): We were contacted by their manager Mike Collins, who had seen our work through a piece on us in The Sunday Times magazine and thought our aesthetic matched that of the band. IAN CRAUSE: At first, [Fuel] used to call us in and have a chat about some ideas theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d had, but after a couple of releases we were so headfucked by their covers that we just let them do exactly what they wanted. I have always thought we had some of the best record sleeves of the 90s. In that period, Fuel are about the only people Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m aware of who equaled those extraordinary Factory and 4AD sleeves from the 70s and 80s. FUEL: We wanted to design a bold logo for the band to give them a strong identity from the start. The original symbol dates back to the 1930s and has a simultaneous clarity and ambiguity that complimented their sound. We worked with images by the photographer David Spero, who we knew from the Royal College of Art. His landscape photographs were quite unusual for a record sleeve at the time; they were beautiful images of nothingness. The direction of the logo changed with each sleeve to suit the image and echo the idea of sound traveling in different directions. Both the music and art had an ambiguity about them; the band had taken a step into a creative unknown, and the covers reflected this. IAN CRAUSE: We left the studio expecting to work with Michael again, but then [producer] John Coxon turned up through his Rough Trade connection and, unlike Michael, who lived in the North West, he lived and worked near Old Street in London, which meant we could get into the studio within the hour by train. So we gave it a try.

SECOND LANGUAGE (1994) ROUGH TRADE

Second Language, produced by John Coxon of experimental music duo Spring Heel Jack, found the trio synthesizing their own past and present to a newly remarkable degree. On the surface, it showed a partial return to the straightforward guitar-led songs of earlier days, though the depth and rich detail of their sampling was improved. Meanwhile, Crause’s lyrical concerns continued to address larger issues with a strongly personal touch. Praised by Melody Maker’s Neil Kulkarni upon release in spring 1994 as a supreme example of the band’s ability to “create the sound of living today there in your headphones,” for many it remains the high point of Disco Inferno’s career. JOHN COXON (PRODUCER): I was told about them by Geoff Travis. He played me “The Last Dance” and I thought it was like a slightly ramshackle New Order. My initial impressions were mixed-- I thought the singing was earnest and affecting, the recordings a bit confused and disorganized. PAUL WILLMOTT: This EP is probably the most realized moment in the catalogue, the coming together of ideas in a coherent pop structure. IAN CRAUSE: It’s the only record we made with two samplers. I had my Roland sampler and Paul had just bought an Akai sampler and a MIDI bass as well as a Fender VI bass with Rough Trade money. He told me he wanted to move from bass playing into sampling and that this would enable him to get a real handle on writing, which I later realized he hadn’t really done. This caused a lot of the resentment I felt later on. 18

PAUL WILLMOTT: There were a couple of key things that gave the Second Language sessions a particular sound-- for one, we wrote the songs together with the express intention of releasing them as an EP. IAN CRAUSE: I was expecting these songs to be the start of [1996’s] Technicolour but our poor sales meant any second Rough Trade album was delayed. So by the time we went in to record, we knew we would be doing an EP. JOHN COXON: When [engineer Mads Bjerke and I] met the band, we immediately liked them and their attitude. They were very open minded; Ian perhaps less than the other two, but he seemed to have a clearer view of what he wanted to achieve in the recordings. PAUL WILLMOTT: We booked a lot of time at our rehearsal studios and worked intensively over a period of a few weeks, working the samples up collectively in the rehearsal room. Listening back, the EP has a general feel of confidence about it. We were becoming better musicians with a greater understanding of the technology. It is also the sound of Ian falling in love with his Rickenbacker; in many ways Ian had become a frustrated guitarist whilst working with samples. IAN CRAUSE: I learnt a lot about guitars and amps from John Coxon. He talked to me about pickups quite a bit and used to play us things like AC/DC and Mark Stewart records to try to rock us up a bit. The loud guitar solo on “Second Language” was his idea. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to do the old Pixies/Nirvana distortion thing but when he suggested it, it was immediately obvious that it was the right thing to do. We were only really half an experimental band and that was because I had this obsessive idea, which I still have, about making the world come to life on a 3D soundstage, which never happened at the time. Really, if it hadn’t been for that we probably would have been more or less a melodic guitar band through and through. So that guitar solo was a moment when one of those tricks that melodic guitar bands use all the time suddenly revealed itself to us. JOHN COXON: I played him AC/DC’s “Let There Be Rock”, but I didn’t want to “rock them up.” My thinking was: If you have guitars, they should sound good-- not too skinny and indie. I didn’t like the Rickenbacker sound. Ian was right though, it’s perfect for these recordings. And I wanted the samples to have a physical sound. 19

PAUL WILLMOTT: All the samples on “Second Language” and “At the End of the Line” were being triggered by Rob. The background was supposed to sound like memories flashing past: whole scenes and opportunities disappearing through Rob’s hi-hat. IAN CRAUSE: As the “Second Language” solo comes in at the end of the last lyric, the guitar seems almost to scrub and scour the words away-- the sound physically imitates one of the underlying sentiments of the lyric. It’s a standard pop song mechanism, but these standard mechanisms must have evolved because they often work to great effect. GLEN JOHNSON (PIANO MAGIC): I named my record label after “Second Language”. It’s the perfect marriage of experimentation and melody. IAN CRAUSE: “The Atheist’s Burden”, obviously a play on the “White Man’s Burden” of rulership, was just about waking up early one summer morning-- which I seldom did-and feeling that awe-inspiring cleanliness and sunlight that you get even in inner London. If I’m left alone I do have a natural wonder about the sky. When I was in primary school at the cusp of the 80s in North East London, I used to look up at the sky a lot. It was very different. I swore for a long time that we used to get cloud patterns that we no longer get-Nordic, thundering grey clouds blown fast across the sky on windy autumn days, shards of sunlight thrown through them like they show in religious visions. They are the ones that made the biggest impression on me. Now that I’m seeing these clouds again and living quite close to where I grew up, I realized the reason they had disappeared was because I spent most of my adulthood living in parts of London where the sky is largely invisible. The reference to atheism is a bit of a juvenile dig in response to the rather idiotic ideas commonly propounded by the religious: that atheists, by having no organized religious faith, have no appreciation of the joy in anything, including man or nature. That is rubbish as even this little pop song shows. The title was an add-on afterwards. PAUL WILLMOTT: I fucking hated the title, I thought it was terribly pompous. RICHARD ADAMS: “At the End of the Line” is their high water mark for me, where they marry the beautiful cascading guitar melodies to the willful experimental edge. They were never afraid to throw a spanner in the works. 20

IAN CRAUSE: With “At the End of the Line”, I was trying to be the Young Gods. It’s one of my favorite tunes of ours. One of my best guitar parts, for sure. It’s contemplative and sad, a song of mourning. My friend, who’s a signed musician, contacted me a few years back to ask me how to put together a similar guitar set up to the one I used back then. And then he said it was mad when he tried it; musical beauty is not guaranteed by its use! DEAN SPUNT: “A Little Something” is a perfect song. It is as if the Buzzcocks got terribly sad, lost their drummer, and had to power through it. PAUL WILLMOTT: “A Little Something” might be my favorite Disco Inferno track purely because of its silliness. IAN CRAUSE: It’s one of our best recordings, maybe because it’s short! It’s one of the first where Paul played his MIDI bass instead of a normal one, and I did that Velvets thing of just guitar and vocals holding the center with painted sound around it. PAUL WILLMOTT: We had great fun using a newly acquired sound library. Samples such as biting an apple, corking a bottle, thunderstorms, and a pitched sheep’s “baaa” on the bass. We also borrowed the main melody from a Professor Playtime children’s cassette, which is in the background on the chorus. IAN CRAUSE: There would have been a lot more bass-less songs had we not split up. I think the constant presence of a bass guitar was getting on Paul’s nerves more than mine. He loved playing his sampler through his MIDI bass. PAUL WILLMOTT: Music snobs tend to take themselves incredibly seriously, and a track like “A Little Something” is a two-fingered salute at any delusions of grandeur. It was a bit of a flip to the post-rock/shoegazing thing that most bands within our demographic were dealing with; it’s evident we were enjoying what we were doing on that song.

IT’S A KID’S WORLD (1994) ROUGH TRADE

Released in fall 1994 and also produced by John Coxon, It’s a Kid’s World featured two songs from other releases: the hyperactive title track also ended up on the final Disco Inferno album Technicolour and the concluding “Lost in Fog” had already been heard earlier in 1994 via the double disc compilation Ambient 4: Isolationism, curated by musician/writer/future leader of the Bug, Kevin Martin. The engagingly humorous instrumental “A Night on the Tiles” was the otherwise unavailable number. The disc would prove to be the final EP release of Disco Inferno’s existence. JOHN COXON: I prefer It’s a Kid’s World -- less guitar, more chaos, more original, less of the obvious references. The whole band, Ian particularly, were more relaxed during the recording. BEN HOLTON (EPIC45): “It’s a Kid’s World” is a perfect slice of insane pop music, cheekily sampling from unlikely sources, creating a head-banging wall of fun noise, and yet still delivering a strong message through the lyrics. Genius. BEN JACOBS (MAX TUNDRA): The first time I heard “It’s Kid’s World” I didn’t realize it was them. I love the sheer lack of genre and target audience of this mysteriously troubling-yet-floor-friendly track. Like all the best songs, it sounds like the writers don’t give a fuck about anything else around at the time, and thus it remains new-sounding to this day. PAUL WILLMOTT: “It’s a Kid’s World” coming together was based solely around the fact that we had picked up a Themes from Children’s BBC CD, which had these 22

potentially wonderful samples. We tried a number of different drumbeats before we settled on the Iggy sample, which sounded right straight away. I don’t think we were aware of the familiarity of “Lust For Life” until much later on. IAN CRAUSE: Iggy Pop’s people were really good about it, too. PAUL WILLMOTT: The bridge in the track contains a number of samples whose origins I no longer remember, with the exception of “The Blue Danube”. I was working on an idea to take sounds of similar timbre and pallet and an idea of “random sampling.” It was the opposite aesthetic to the narrative sampling which had been the original focal point. IAN CRAUSE: Paul and I certainly had grown up with the idea that it was perfectly natural to treat the music as artistic expression and couldn’t quite understand why other people our age looked at us askance. Musicians in their mind were there to entertain and not surprise or make anything that didn’t work for them on first hearing. Especially in places like London or Manchester, people would stand there with their arms crossed. PAUL WILLMOTT: “It’s a Kid’s World” ended up on Technicolour purely from the fact that the band was breaking down and we needed to get the required number of tracks to finish it. IAN CRAUSE: The aim [with “A Night on the Tiles”] was simply to tell a story in sound. The Avalanches pretty much did this towards the end of the decade-- I was kind of gutted about five years later when I heard “Frontier Psychiatrist”, but I don’t know if we could have done anything as good as that. At the same time, I wanted us to become a proper pop group, as Paul and Rob both wanted, possibly more than I. I also wanted us to turn into the kind of group equivalent of Carl Stalling, the guy who wrote most of those Warner Bros. cartoon soundtracks from the 30s to the 60s and who has a fair claim to be considered one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century. PAUL WILLMOTT: The idea was a comic picturebook. A bar scene, a chanteuse singing, albeit slightly wonkily, as she’s put through an LFO. IAN CRAUSE: That decadent Piaf sample, sounding like what I imagined a Weimar-era booze den would sound like, was the start of the story. 23

PAUL WILLMOTT: Cats drinking in the bar meowing at each other, other cats getting involved, things getting a little more heated-- a punch is thrown, the retaliation-we now have an all out bar brawl. The music steps up a pace to reflect the escalating scene. Bottles are broken, tables overturned as the fight escalates. The police are on their way. Things continue apace as the police arrive, the cats scatter, with the exception of a couple of bruised soles left to face the music. End of scene. IAN CRAUSE: It was originally called “Cats and Alcohol Don’t Mix!!”. JOHN COXON: “Lost in Fog” is amazing, one of my favorite recordings I’ve ever been involved in. It begins with the cosmonaut burning up live on the radio, desperate and moving. The record develops from there, the voice becoming lost in events beyond its control. IAN CRAUSE: “Lost In Fog” is the view from high above the earth looking down at it, hence the image of tracer fire flying in paths. The basic idea of the song fits an archetype which I would guess must come from Dante’s Paradiso where he stands high above the earth, his vision bordered by Jerusalem and the Straits of Gibraltar, which were apparently the limits of the known world to him, and discusses its conflicts, calling the earth a threshing ground, with all its obvious connotations of separating the wheat from the chaff. Bono also quite obviously nicked this wholesale for “Beautiful Day”, I’m sure, which is why I love that song. PAUL WILLMOTT: The wavering sound that you hear at the start and the end of the track is Rob. It was a supposed sample of ambience from inside the cockpit of a space mission. IAN CRAUSE: This was the only other song where we all played digital instruments. Paul played the thrum of the engines and I played the sound of a sonar blip on my guitar, which passed for radar. It was a great moment of satisfaction to me that we’d finally got to the stage I wanted after a few years of waiting, with all of us playing sampled instruments to create an actual soundscape for a song-- it was going to be the first example of another degree of shift in the band’s sound, taking us further away from electric instruments. Only none of us knew we were going to split up soon after, so it never turned out that way. 24

-Following the theft of their equipment and leading to a replacement setup that moved the band’s sound towards more familiar sonic territory, Disco Inferno continued live and studio work into 1995 before splitting. Technicolour was posthumously released the following year. Ian Crause released two solo singles in the late 90s before turning towards other activities and interests, including a move to Bolivia where his family now lives. Recently, he has spent time working on a new solo musical project and exploring possibilities as a producer for “anyone whose work I find exciting.” Paul Willmott played with as Transformer and Lisp, and continues to record. He currently lives with his family in Kent and runs the Cloth Ears craft site with his wife. Rob Whatley works in London and plays out “more for enjoyment” while also living with his family. Over time, the band’s full-length work was reissued, while the Mixing It EP, capturing a radio session appearance from 1994, was formally released in 1999. Otherwise, the remaining EPs remained unavailable until the recent release of The Five EPs. IAN CRAUSE: I used to try to work out what [the band] meant creatively. The best I could ever come up with was that, from 1993 onward, I was zigzagging between experimenting as far as the equipment would allow us to go and creating streamlined innovative pop music. PAUL WILLMOTT: The only publication that really gave us the time of day was Melody Maker and the only radio play that we had was from John Kennedy, who was then on a local radio station whose listeners were in the double figures. ROB WHATLEY: Towards the end of Disco Inferno’s existence, the music was starting to sound more polished, but I could sense that things were getting a bit tense internally. And there was certainly a lot of frustration about our coverage. IAN CRAUSE: I saw a great TV show about Rough Trade a while back, and while it was great to see them doing so well it did make me a bit sad to see that the official history of the label now treats the years between 1991 and 1999 as [non-existent]. Geoff would still be the only person I would approach with new music outside of just selling it myself, though. Whether he would actually want me to foist my shite on him is a different story. 25

GEOFF TRAVIS: Over time, Ian either lost confidence or direction, and there was a long and painful and hugely expensive period when very little got finished. It was frustrating for me because there was never any momentum that we could find a way to harness. The group were ignored and yet they did not really know how to help themselves to change this. They were not really part of any voguish movement that would have given that crop of journalists a chance to place them. They seemed to be in their own universe. IAN CRAUSE: Everyone involved was counting on one thing breaking overground and then every young hepcat in the UK simultaneously throwing up their arms and crying: “Hey Daddy-o! This is the new sound!” How long we would have had to have kept going for this to have happened-- or even if it would have happened at all-- I couldn’t say. We failed completely. If you told me that we have some kind of measurable following now, I would tell you I will believe it when I see it. PAUL WILLMOTT: We had a good dynamic and worked through ideas well together. I would have been interested to see what kind of response there would have been if we had tried to work some new material [now]. It certainly would have been less of a headfuck with the way that technology has changed. ROB WHATLEY: I’d like to think that we made a small dent in the music world. I do miss the day-to-day events of being part of something interesting. I have not listened to anything by us for ages, but got a copy of The Five EPs and listening to it put a smile on my face.