Warm Leatherette
By The Normal
When you are a musician, generally, you like to share what you create with everyone. This thought can have multiple ways to develop. The way you end up choosing will usually depend on your ego. Someone is just interested in genuinely sharing with others what came out from an idea, song, or sound, only for the pleasure of sharing it. Someone else wants to do it for commercial purposes instead. Someone else mainly wants to make money and have success.
English music producer Daniel Miller probably belongs to the first category I mentioned. There is a quote from an interview with one of my musical heroes, Ian MacKaye, founder of Dischord Records and leader of hardcore/punk-rock bands Minor Threat and Fugazi, that always recurred to me. He said: “… if you are a band with a new idea, a completely new idea, there is no new audience for new ideas because the new ideas have not been thought of yet. How could there possibly be an audience for it? And that is where the free space becomes absolutely important and necessary…”.
We could extend this quote to practically everything. Skepticism, or lack of interest in anything new, like new technologies, new political visions, and new music, is a normal reaction to facing the end. As an artist, you have to find your way to create that new space for your new ideas. My parents initially found Nirvana too loud, Radiohead too sad, and Jeff Buckley too complicated. Now, after listening to them and becoming familiar with their sound, they love them. You need time to process new things.
The Normal was an electronic music project by Daniel Miller, and it was a punch in your face. Miller bought his first Mini Korg 700S and a TEAC four-track reel-to-reel tape recorder to experiment with new musical styles in the late 1970s, apparently because he wasn’t too attracted by the punk rock music scene and was too lazy to learn guitar chords. He found synthesizers easier to approach.
In 1978 The Normal released the first single, T.V.O.D./Warm Leatherette, including an address on the cover. Probably because of its industrial beats and minimalist lyrics, Miller chose to release it with his record label Mute Records. Thanks to the distribution through Rough Trade Shops, the song became a cult hit, and its success helped Mute Records to have a bright future.
Other musicians immediately started sending demo tapes of similar music to the address they found on the single cover, trying to join the label. Mute Records featured several prominent musical acts on its roster in the following years, such as Depeche Mode, M83, Einstürzende Neubauten, Goldfrapp, Moby, New Order, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, to name a few.
As we noticed in many of our Electronic Music History articles, a considerable number of electronic music acts had to use this same DIY (Do It Yourself) approach. Mute Records rapidly expanded, and Warm Leatherette was covered in the following years by many musicians, including Grace Jones, Chicks on Speed, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and Duran Duran.
