THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN

A guest series by Fraser Pettigrew (aka our New Zealand correspondent)

#16: A Certain Ratio – Do the Do (Casse) (FACUS 4 – 1981)

With all due respect to Crispy Ambulance, A Certain Ratio were definitely the second-biggest thing on Factory Records after Joy Division/New Order at the beginning of the 1980s. At least in my world they were, mediated as it was through friends and the NME. Despite their embrace of funk music and penchant for wearing shorts on stage, ACR were inextricably linked to the grey Manchester aesthetic that drove us all to raid second-hand shops for dead men’s suits and gaberdine raincoats.

Admittedly, ACR’s funk was not exactly of the joyous get-up-offa-that-sex-machine variety. It wasn’t as terrifying as The Pop Group’s torture chamber shriek, but their stripped back minimalism along with Simon Topping and Jez Kerr’s flat monotone vocals ably conveyed the same sense of grim-up-north dreary post-industrial desolation and angst that we were getting from Joy Division, the Bunnymen, and the likes of Cabaret Voltaire and Comsat Angels across the Pennines.

I’m pretty sure I owned this EP by the time I saw ACR supported by Josef K at Valentino’s night club in Edinburgh in February 1981, which means I must have been pretty quick off the mark since it was only released in January. I also had a copy of their earlier 12” single Flight/Blown Away/And Then Again, which is amongst the best things they ever did.

This four-track American release is up there too. Its key attraction was the inclusion of Shack Up which had been released as a stand-alone 7” single on Factory Benelux earlier in 1980 but had disappeared from shelves by the time I heard about it. Shack Up was, of course, a cover of a genuine funk tune, albeit a stupendously obscure one. Originally the song, split in two, made up both sides of the only single by an ephemeral group called Banbarra that coalesced briefly in Washington DC in 1975 around the composers Moe Daniels and Joe “Bunny” Carter and a bunch of session players. (One of those players, guitarist Lance Quinn, also played on Gloria Gaynor’s Never Can Say Goodbye but may be better known as co-producer along with Tony Bongiovi of two classic new wave albums, Talking Heads ’77 and Can’t Stand The Rezillos.)

I always thought that ACR must have been fabulous connoisseurs of rare funk to have known about such a relatively minor one-off underground disco club hit, but in fact it’s even more improbable than that. ACR apparently discovered the song not from the original but from a cover version on the self-titled 1978 LP by a group called Rokotto, all gull-wing collars and massive flares, afros and spaniel’s ears haircuts. Shack Up sat alongside songs called Moonlight Dancin’, Boogie On Up and Get On Down. Rokotto hailed from that legendary epicentre of urban black American dance music, Dundee. I swear I’m not making this up.

Compared to either Banbarra or Rokotto, ACR’s version of Shack Up sounds like virtually all the funk has been drained out of it by some mystical process of musical decaffeination. As a paean to extra-marital cohabitation it conveys all the sex appeal of moving in with a bus-spotting Mogadon addict. For sure, you can dance to it, and we did, like scarecrows in a gale, but you have to remember that for all our desire for a good time, an excess of enthusiasm was frowned upon amongst we of the monochrome set (the cultural moment, not the band). ACR’s bloodless funk was therefore the perfect soundtrack to our repressed passions, allowing us to party on without losing our cool.

Shack Up opens the ‘Hipside’ of the EP, technically side two (side one is the ‘Flipside’) and is followed by Son and Heir, unarguably the most dismal song ever committed to record – twice. It’s a new version of the track Crippled Child on The Graveyard And The Ballroom cassette released in February 1980. The original title gives more of a clue to the content, relating the hopes and desires of a new father turning to anguish and agonised rejection when his son is born disabled. The music pre-dates ACR’s drift into dance rhythms and grinds to an abrasive conclusion over the screams of “now I want him to die”. An unwelcome glimpse into someone’s personal hell. Surely once was enough.

The ’Flipside’ tracks are both classic ACR funk, but the mood is scarcely any lighter on opener Do The Du(Casse), another re-recording of a Graveyard And Ballroom track. Altogether now, sing along: “My heart was just an open sore / Which you picked at ’til it was raw / It bled away my existence / Shrivelled under your insistence.” The song then ends on the frankly disturbing couplet, “I flayed your flesh with insistence / I drew your blood with consistence.” Raises the ante on Venus In Furs for sure.

Lastly The Fox, another lyric from a lonely place wedded to a rugged simulacrum of Sly and the Family Stone, it would reappear at the beginning of side two of ACR’s first proper studio album To Each a few months after this EP. The album take isn’t much different from the one here.

I remember the gig in February 1981 as a suitably intense affair, the band typically unshowy on stage, focused intently on their instruments, the crowd focused intently on the (non)performance and not dancing much despite the obvious invitation of the music.

When To Each came out in April it passed me by, possibly because of poor reports or maybe just other priorities. When I did catch up with it much later I would agree that it was a little underwhelming given the expectations created by their 1980 singles and live sound, but is hardly a dud. With second album Sextet in January 1982 however, there was a definite sense of arrival. In spite of the addition of Martha Tillson’s ethereal vocals and the echoey trumpet blasts straight out of Bitches Brew, there’s a palpable warmth to the funk largely felt through Jez Kerr’s much improved bass playing. As the band themselves put it later, they were catching up with the ability of their one ‘proper’ musician, drummer Donald Johnson, and Sextet has a cohesion that To Each perhaps lacked.

Later in 1982, I picked up Guess Who, a plodding synth-based track stretched out with unvarying tediousness over both sides of a Factory Benelux 12” single. It didn’t exactly whet the appetite for third album I’d Like To See You Again. I borrowed a copy of the LP and found most of it disappointing. It felt as though ACR were moving towards more of an imitation of dance club music rather than a reinvention, but despite their evidently improved musical competence, they weren’t giving me anything I wasn’t getting much better from Sly or Stevie Wonder or Off The Wall.

Many felt differently and ACR have sustained a long career in the club scene without ever losing the alternative tag. For sure, they were never going to be rivals to Prince or Rick James however much I felt they were simply aping mainstream styles. But for me, ACR were at their best doing what the best of post-punk did, fusing confrontational punk or avant-garde art with popular forms and creating something unique that would pioneer new varieties of pop, house, techno, and industrial music. This FACUS4 EP sits in that sweet spot, occupying the always interesting space that lies in the crossing between one world and another.

Do The Du(Casse)

The Fox

Shack Up

Son and Heir

Fraser