• '» nimr necarm

most significant releases, building a modular synth and providing workshops for
how to use it, and so much more. For all of this, and for his inspirational spirit,
1
we are extremely grateful.

‘Lets Make Love Before You Die’:

References
‘Warm Leatherette’, Boredom and
Ballard, J. G. (1973), Crash, London: Jonathan Cape. the Invention of the 1980s
‘Classic Album Sundays with Daniel Miller founder of Mute Records’ (2017), Classic
Album Sundays, 11 December. Available online: http://classicalbumsundays.com/ S. Alexander Reed
interview-with-daniel-miller-founder-of-mute-records/ (accessed 26 April 2018).
Depeche Mode: 101 (1989), [Film] Dir. David Dawkins, Chris Hegedus and D.A.
Pennebaker, US: Mute Film, Pennebaker Associates.
Do It Yourself: The Story of Rough Trade (2009), [TV programme] BBC4, 13 March.
Gates, K. (2015), ‘Daniel Miller: “I Was Determined to Make Mute a Success’”. Available Anatomy
online: http://www.pias.com/blog/daniel-miller-determined-make-mute-success/
(accessed 26 April 2018). i iir Normal’s ‘Warm Leatherette’, released in November 1978 as the AA-side
Miller, D. (2018), Communication with authors, 30 April. .( MUTE 001, is anatomical. Breaking glass, steering wheel, handbrake:
Osborne, R. (2012), Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record, Farnham: Ashgate.
•HiM'iitlmental parts.
Our Hobby is Depeche Mode (2006), [Film] Dir. Jeremy Deller and Nick Abrahams, UK:
A voice. A low drilling sound and a high one. Two octaves of a Korg 700s’s
Hudson Pictures.
I' natural. Noise sculpted to resemble a kick and snare. Exactly 128 words, 44
Shaughnessy, A. (2007), ‘Some Questions, Some Answers: An Interview with Daniel
Miller’, Mute Audio Documents 1978-1984: Documentary Evidence, 4-12, London: unique. Twenty-eight statements of ‘Warm Leatherette’. Ten sentences. Two
Mute Records. hundred seconds of 4/4 across 167 measures, changelessly looping, played by
Spence, S. (2011), Just Can’t Get Enough: The Making of Depeche Mode, London: h unl at tempos drifting between 195 and 207 BPM. Repetition.
Jawbone. Ihe hook works like this:
Synth Britannia (2009), [TV programme] BBC4, 16 October.
Young, R. (2006), Rough Trade, London: Black Dog Publishing. 1 :2 |3 :4 |l :2 :3 |4 |1 |2 |3 |4 |l |2 :3 |4
Im re
— z i c i i j l Z z j i — n Z Z Z Z 1C Z Z Z IC Z Z Z 3C Z Z Z
Kick ------------------------- 1 ------------------------------------------------------ H— ir '
H igh 0

Low D

. i'- h u l l

l o w Drill

V oice “ W A R M . " ‘L E A T H E R E T T E . "

I Igure 1.1 Structure of the title hook in ‘Warm Leatherette’, S. Alexander Reed.

The snare’s two-beat cycle delineates quarter notes. The kick’s cycle Is four beats.
Synthesizer octaves repeat every eight. The drill sounds and the 'Warm Leatherette’
lyric return every sixteen. Daniel Miller, the Normal’s sole member and founding
kingpin o f Mute Records, explains, ‘The best punk rock... is very tightly structured’
(‘Classic Album Sundays’ 2017). The song is a grid. Powers of two.
There’s no harmony. D simply repeats. Flip the record to hear the Normal’s
only other studio creation ‘T.V.O.D.’ and it is also in D minor. Dm. Daniel Miller.
Discoverer o f Depeche Mode. The Normal’s live album with Robert Rental is
an improvisation in D. Five o f the first six songs on Miller’s subsequent Silicon
Teens album are in D.
Timbre, next. In alternating octaves and colours, a single pitch revs with each
downbeat - first a sizzle blistering with noise above 6000 Hz, then a bestial gnarl,
with bottom-heavy humming below 600 Hz.
Listen closer and the sounds play roles. The percussion’s thwap ripples:
a meaty gutpunch, the Doppler swoop o f something big coming fast. Then
and now, analogue synthesizers connote physicality: wood and metal, knobs
and plugs, the way sawtooth waves cut jagged while sinusoids undulate, bass
notes’ body-rumbling infrasound, visibly pumping loudspeaker membranes,
the way timbres are sculpted by adding on and scooping out. Contrast this
with the crystalline sounds o f computer synthesis and sampling: ‘digital’ and
‘trigger’ are thin words - fingers, not whole bodies. Jonathan Sterne observes of
sound playback, ‘critics have written o f digital audio recording - in its myriad
formats - as less “live” or less “natural” than analogue recording’ (2006:338). But
electronic music audiences understand this extends to sound production too.
(When science fiction writers of this era saw our inevitably digital real-world
future - Le Guin, Dick, Delaney - they abandoned technological what-ifs in
favour o f embodied and behavioural ones. Digital is dull.)
‘Warm Leatherette’ is material, then: feel the gear o f a speeding V8 shift from
high-torque third into smooth-riding fourth, and with every repetition comes
the suggestion o f ever-higher overdrive.
You can also hear sex in these two octaves. A wet-mouthed intake o f air
through clenched teeth, then a moan on ‘O’. Exhilaration and ecstasy. Gutter-
minded synth-pop fans might connect that first sonic spurt’s oscillated noise
with the climax of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s later ‘Relax’ (ZZT 1983), where
it manifests the imperative lyric ‘come’. The sonic upshot is polymorphous
perversity, an orgy o f robots, people and cars.
And that’s before we even hear the words. ‘Warm Leatherette’ is just one in
the convoy o f car-themed synth-pop records at the turn o f the 1980s. Yes, back
I f l \ M iihc It nr Urloir You Pit' 17
i 1 i k raft work’s ‘A utobahn’ had imagined a serene post-postwar Germany of
...Hi v. liccwaysand parallel-universe Beach Boys tunes. But ‘Warm Leatherette’
i. in . more with Gary Numan’s paranoid ‘Cars’ (Beggar’s Banquet 1979) and
* <1111 11■kx s back-to-back crash-themed singles ‘No-One Driving’ (Virgin 1980),
miIi 11mss' (Virgin 1980) and ‘Burning Car’ (Virgin 1980). Bowie’s ‘Always
i i .lilnn in the Same Car’ (RCA Victor 1977) is cut from the same Naugahyde.
lh. •.<■ numbers owed a lot to punk, but represented a new perspective - one
■'.i looked cagily to a dystopian future. They contrast with the retrospection
i mings like the Clash’s ‘Brand New Cadillac’ (CBS 1979) (a remake o f Vince
1 . 11.io r ig in a l (Parlophone 1959)): ‘Welcome to the spirit o f 1956’ bellows
ii. 'mlrunner’ (recorded by the Modern Lovers (Beserkly 1977) and the Sex
I' inId Ii (Virgin 1979)), reminding us of trad-punk’s greaser roots.1
In 'Warm Leatherette’ and its ilk, driving indicates neither self-actualization
l.l. Koadrunner’) nor bourgeois oppression (like the Jam’s ‘London Traffic’
!'..|ydor 1977)). Instead, cars are escape capsules from the world and ourselves.
1 In uloph Doring’s 1979 punk film 3302 Taxi literalizes this: a taxi repeatedly
■I. u lug into the Berlin Wall.) Even Numan’s insistence that he feels ‘safest o f all’
in liK car is undermined when the narrator o f ‘Cars’ proves unreliable, admitting
mmfiling feels right’.2
’«l>ecifically, ‘Warm Leatherette’ highlights the violent power o f wrecks to
milk us from reality. In glorious freeze-frame, we ‘see the breaking glass’, not
fiie 'broken glass’: here’s the actual moment of impact, wherein our whole-body
disorientation frees us from rationality and self-control.3 As Ben Highmore
u i lies, ‘The crash releases the body from the constraint o f a certain attitude’
i ,'003: 59) - the attitude o f being in and o f modernity. For an orgasmic instant
we are shocked out of a universe designed to pre-empt shock.
Crash I
li K lilting that the word ‘leatherette’ originated in bookbinding, because ‘Warm
I i'.i lherette’ is literary: a rewrite o f J. G. Ballard’s 1973 Crash. Ballard’s plot
II mcerns a fetishistic social circle whose scarred and joylessly wealthy members
11 ash their cars, seeking jouissance in mangled flesh and bent metal.
Koadrunner’ written by J. Richman, Hornall Brothers Music Ltd / Wixen Music UK Ltd.
t airs' written by G. Numan, Universal Music Publishing Limited.
Warm Leatherette’ written by D. Miller, Blue Mountain Music Ltd.
IK Mute Records
Miller read it in 1977 and was inspired. ‘I’d been working on a film script for
Crash with a friend. Nothing came o f it, but through working on that, I had a lot
of visual ideas, and I condensed what was in my head into that song’ (Majewski
and Bernstein 2014:133). (Bookmark, incidentally, how he uses the word head -
it will come up shortly.) For all that Miller’s ideas may have been visual - he was
an assistant editor at the independent channel ATV - some key wordings persist
across the adaptation from book to script to lyric.
Miller sings o f the cars ‘luminescent dash’, and correspondingly, o f Ballard’s
four uses o f ‘luminescent’ in the whole novel, three precede the word ‘dials’,
an alliterative synonym for ‘dash’. More forensically, when Miller wrote, ‘The
handbrake penetrates your thigh’, he was looking at page 178: ‘I moved my hand
from her pubis to the scars on her thighs, feeling the tender causeways driven
through her flesh by the handbrake’ (Ballard 1973: 178). Furthermore, in that
same paragraph on that same page, the word ‘leatherette’ makes one of three
appearances in Crash. Verbal suggestibility is part of Miller’s artistry: even in
christening his label, ‘I was working in a cutting room, an editing room, I saw
this word Mute everywhere. I liked if (Gates 2015).
lyrical genealogy matters here because it underscores a resonance between
Miller’s idioms and ('rash's language. Reviewers of the novel consistently note its
relentlessly clinical tone (Ballard studied medicine); as Jean Baudrillard writes,
'all the erotic terms are technical ... a functional language’ (1994: 115-16).
Feeling lies only in the triangulation of human anatomy and machine parts.
So it is remarkable that Miller uses this same code when he describes playing
his synthesizer: it affords a ‘direct connection between your head and the tape’
(Dynaudio Professional 2016). Elsewhere he speaks o f the ‘very directness]
between the brain and the instrument’ (Ableton 2016). Bodily metonyms for
musical ideas - ‘head’, ‘brain - link with mechanical metonyms for the execution
of those ideas - ‘tape’, ‘instrument’.
Perhaps more remarkable than Miller’s creative impulse are the countless others
then and now who have found the product of this resonance so appealing - those
who’ve joined ‘the car crash set’. ‘Warm Leatherette’ is a curious hit. The story:
Miller brought a tape to the counter of Rough Trade records, and when Geoff
Travis listened to it on the store’s tape deck, journalist Jane Suck, who was standing
nearby, ‘just went berserk when she heard it - she thought it was Lou Reed’s new
record’, according to punk historian Jon Savage (King 2012: 25). She later called
it ‘single o f the century’ in Sounds (Majewski and Bernsteein 2014: 133). On
the spot, Travis offered Miller a £300 deal to press 2,000 records, which grew to
7 i■/» Make I ove before You Die' \n
10,000, and eventually the song moved 30,000 copies - not including sales of the
■n plus compilations it appears on. ‘Warm Leatherette’ (and its A-side ‘T.V.O.D.’)
iit Imu. cd comparable 1978 releases by Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle
dnnn the Normal supported live). Cover versions proliferate - most famously
1-i a e Jones (Island 1980), but also in live performances by Duran Duran, Nine
In. h Nails and Mute’s own Laibach. And the Normal spawned countless rip-offs
ilia best Is the Distributors’ ‘TV Me’ (Distributors Records 1979)).
Ilia reasons for ‘Warm Leatherette’s endurance go beyond anatomy and
in. miry. ’Ibis chapter argues that the song locates an attitudinal tipping point
in genre, tone and time. In its dance floor cool, it has allowed audiences to make
.adless but meaningful claims about their individual and subcultural roles in
i hanging world.
A central concern here is boredom. The song’s structure, topic and posture
I', i lormatively stage boredom as an experience. Miller’s vocal affect is a good
iiult's; his thudding ‘let’s make love’ is the most deadpan romantic overture in
|M,p history. ‘I wanted it to be as dispassionate as possible’, he says (Majewski
uni Bernstein 2014: 133), and indeed the boredoms circulating in ‘Warm
I ' ithcrette’ connect to musical questions of history and style. The song collides
i" 11 circa - 1978 strains of cultural boredom: an introspective engagement with
imlhlngness (pioneered in mid-century art) and pent-up youthful nihilism - the
griii tli of Mute Records is the avant-garde crashing into punk. At stake is how
i.nng people were adapting to a future both hyper-stimulating and hypnotically
lull the 1980s and everything after.
Boredoms
In call something ‘interesting’ situates it near a border: on one side lies
ihr bewildering (too unknown) and on the other, the boring (too known).
I 11 'i i iencing the interesting, we pull it slowly over that border: marvel, appraise,
tht'ii know and then discard. Over time, we call this learning, living or progress.
Uni occultist Austin Spare was onto something when he wrote, ‘Knowledge
i« hut the excrement of experience’ (2001: 90), because both individually and
. iill u rally, as we consume the once-bewildering, digesting it into the now known,
ue leave behind us an ever-growing pile of boring shit.
Worse, our post-enlightenment addiction to meaning and novelty conflicts
ilhi i ily wllh the normalizing mandates of biology, economics and law, which
 'I cl's Make Love Before You Die' 21

u ho never arrives. More proximal to Miller was avant-garde superstar John

< ngr, who wrote, ‘In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try
a lot four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually
mi. discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting’ (1961: 93). Powers
.1 two, Cage’s legendary 1952 work 4 ’33” confronted audiences with ambience,
impelling them to orchestrate their own quiet boredoms.
Miller certainly knew o f Cage. As a film professional, he would also have
!•uown o f Andy Warhol, whose unboring boredom this interview reveals:

Google Books incidence graph of the phrase boredom between 1900 and 2000 from the corpus English with a smoothing of 2 ( I [Joseph Gelmis]: You’ve said, ‘I like boring things’. How can entertainment be
boring?
Figure 1.2 Google Books incidence graph of the phrase ‘boredom’.
W [Andy Warhol]: When you sit and look out of a window, that’s enjoyable.
(.; Why, because you can’t figure out what’s going to happen, what’s going to be
minimizes risk. It is easy to imagine a breaking point between these opposing
passing in front of you?
forces, where a systemic need for the known reins in and overtakes our romantic
W: It takes up time.
yearning for the unknown: when we surrender to nausea that is equal parts G: Are you serious?
famine o f novelty and feast o f coprophagia. W: Yeah. Really. You see people looking out of their windows all the time. I do.
Ballard saw this in his crystal ball. Facing a moderated future of homogenized (Goldsmith 2004b: 168-9)
materiality, he said, ‘I could sum up the future in one word, and that word is
Warhol ventures into relevant territory with 1963’s ‘Orange Car Crash Fourteen
boring. Ihe future is going to be boring’ (Svendsen 2005: 83, my emphasis). And
111licit which repeats a photo of an accident, compelling viewers to search for the
'Warm Leatherette’ evinces a time o f pronounced boredoms. If Google Books
iidlest variance from print to print, inspecting detail at levels that dehumanize
is any indication, 1978-80 occupied a boredom crest, where the word appears
1 Im ages’ content, tangling separate crises of perception and empathy. Warhol’s
1 11
more often in print than any years before or after (Figure 1.2).
I'Hi I 4 films similarly problematize boredom into action: Eat (1964) is forty
The decades since have produced many studies on boredom, recently including
minutes o f Robert Indiana eating, Sleep (1963) is 321 minutes o f John Giorno
Elizabeth Goodstein’s 2004 Experience Without Qualities, Lars Svendsen’s 2005
.l. cplng, and Empire (1964) is a motionless 8-hour shot o f the Empire State
A Philosophy of Boredom and Eldritch Priest’s 2013 Boring Formless Nonsense, as
Building. All are filmed at twenty-four frames per second, then perversely slowed
well as scholarship probing boredom as it relates to subjects as varied as modern
in sixteen. Warhol quipped, ‘If they can take it for ten minutes, then we play it
art, Aboriginal metaphysics, Candy Crush and bestiality. Nearly all acknowledge
i**i fifteen’ (Warhol and Heckett 1980:154). (Incidentally, the same period places
that boredom as such was not identified widely as an experience until about
Ballard in the midst of writing his trilogy o f variations on the apocalypse: The
1780, and that it is not one single state, but a class o f them. Prominent among
I >1 owned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), The Crystal World (1966). If
individuating criteria is whether a boredom is productive or non-productive,
they can take it for one novel, then we write it for three.)
reframed here as unboring boredom versus boring boredom.
Viewing Empire, scholar Scott Richmond is ‘bored to tears, bored beyond
l.. .n Ing it. And, once I can no longer bear it, the norms of cinematic engagement
dissolve. The film certainly doesn’t live up to them, so why should I?’ (2015: 22).
Boredom II: Unboring boredom
Ifils is part o f Warhol’s vision: it induces action that creatively discards routines.
We wonder, notice our bodies and minds, and reframe our perceptions.
Martin Heidegger argues for the value o f ‘profound boredom’ to incite assessment
Boredom empowers the strangely productive arbitrary. Stepping into the
and governance o f our perceptions (1995:74). In Samuel Beckett’s 1949 play
liisl person, I query my pdl library for com pelling instances o f ‘boredom’.
Waiting fo r Godot, characters meditate on passing time, waiting for someone
22 Mute Records '/ cl's Make Love Hefore You Die' 23

I type ‘BOR’ and behold: choreographer George Balanchine describes being
suBORdinated to time; Negativland waxes on musical BORrowing; Carl Jung
tests psychology’s BORders; a Zen koan admonishes us not to belaBOR emotional
experience; DeBORah Campana analyses John Cage; David Tudor plays the
same Stockhausen piece over and over during a concert in GreensBORo. As
Dostoevsky cries, ‘What inventions can boredom not lead to!’ ([1864] 1993:16).
Heidegger, Beckett, Cage and Warhol’s belief in boredom’s productivity was
threefold: first, it deepens and aestheticizes features we ordinarily overlook.
Second, it compels us to structure time and embodiment in the absence of
stimulus. Third, as above, it provokes action for action’s sake - not as escape
from boredom, but a wandering within it.
For these thinkers, professions of faith in boredom came well before their
careers were up (all were in their thirties). They came well before the century
was up, too. This matters because the fourteen years between 1964’s Empire and
1978’s ‘Warm Leatherette’ are culturally very long ones. The time frame is vital
here. Eldritch Priest historicizes:
Being bored is not the ride it once was. Throughout the second half of the
twentieth century, boredom bored so many holes in the body of every genre,
every medium, every performance, and every criticism, that it bled its promise
of bliss into ever-narrower furrows of distraction. The problem with boredom
now is that the rituals o f bloodletting that go by the name ‘boring art’ are largely
indistinguishable from the practices of everyday life. (2013: 34)
industrial realism: ashes of 1960s optimism and post-war sermons demanding
, • ititude for government, old buildings, schools, police, parents and jobs. The
■« Pistols excoriated that suffocation, lyrically - ‘No Future!’ - and visually: the
i1 Pretty Vacant’ sleeve (Figure 1.3) foregrounds city buses to Nowhere and
iintedom.
Punk declares war on slow and easy death. Daniel Miller’s inspiration was
iiit Desperate Bicycles’ self-explanatory ‘The Medium Was Tedium’ (Rutter
'M I 38). Similarly paving the way for Miller was the Buzzcocks’ 1976 demo-
| ip opener ‘Boredom’, which became an early hit of Rough Trade’s distribution,
tin- Adverts’ ‘Bored Teenagers’ followed (Anchor 1977). Far from neutral
t o. in.ilion, boredom was illness and death. Destroy All Monsters’ debut song
ic.lt d rants of doctors being unable to cure ‘bored-ills’ (IDBI Records 1978).
in 1479, GG Allin sneers on his first single ‘Bored to Death’, that he’s sick of
•hi. sick of himself and bored to death (Blood 1979). That same year Iggy Pop
i.. lares that he is sick when he goes to sleep and when he wakes, all because - as
tin titular lyric says, ‘I’m Bored’ (Arista 1979).
Grail Marcus elaborates, ‘In modern society, leisure (What do I want to
i i today?) was replaced by entertainment (What is there to see today?). The
i •at iilial fact of all possible freedoms was replaced by a fiction of false freedom:
it was boring’ (1990:47). The boredom punk diagnoses lurked in architecture.

Priest offers no exact turning point, but that shift ‘throughout the second half
of the twentieth century’ centralizes the Normal’s position atop the boredom
crest: when unboring boredom loses viability. Kenneth Goldsmith affirms this
timeline: ‘It’s no wonder people bailed out of boredom in the late 70s and early 80s
to go into punk rock or expressionistic painting’ (2004a). Was postmodernism
over just as it was beginning? Ballard himself remembered it similarly in 1984:
‘In many ways, time didn’t exist in the sixties, just a set o f endlessly proliferating
presents. Time returned in the seventies, but not a sense of the future. The hands
o f the clock now go nowhere’ (Frick 1984). A tear of petrol is in your eye.

Boredom III; Boring boredom

Punk, as Goldsmith suggests, rails against boredom with rage unknown to

Cage and Warhol. This boredom was youth’s disdain for their inherited world’s t iHtirr 1.3 Sex Pistols, ‘Pretty Vm ant* (Virgin 1977). Designed by Jamie Reid.
 M Mule lu't ortl.\
politics and media - all ‘practices o f everyday life’, to quote Priest (2013: 34).
For teens and twenty-somethings, there was no need to meditate on Warholian
tedium; it loomed everywhere.
Thus Ballard’s prophecy: ‘It’s possible that my children and yours will live in
an eventless world, and that the faculty o f imagination will die’ (Frick 1984).
He continues, ‘die or express itself solely in the realm o f psychopathology’,
echoing Guy Debord and the Situationists’ faith in lunacy. Craziness emerges
as a good alternative to the ubiquity o f boring boredom - the kind o f craziness,
for example, that craves car-crash sex. As Svendsen writes, ‘To transgress this
boredom, man goes in for ever more extreme transgressions’ (2005: 84). The
most oppressive boredom spawns the most resplendent depravity.
For all his landfill nihilism, Ballard saw himself an ethicist: ‘Crash is cautionary,
a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more
persuasively to us from the margins o f the technological landscape’ (Baxter and
Wymer 2012: 5). Far from admonishing the perversions he portrays, he warns
against the incipient reality that gives rise to them. His enemy is the dehumanizing
glow emanating from every surface - like boredom-as-sickness, emanating even
from within. That is literally the subject o f ‘T.V.O.D.’: ‘I don’t need a TV screen / 1
just stick the aerial into my skin / Let the signal run through my veins’.4
This prescience is why, in a world o f cell phones and the ‘internet o f things’,
‘Warm Leatherette’ and Ballard persist: over a dozen new renditions o f the song
have materialized since 2010 alone, and responding to the 2016 US presidential
election, the Guardian published Bea Ballard’s ‘How My Father, JG Ballard,
Foresaw Our Strange Present’ (2016).
Crash II: Coolness
When twenty-six-year-old Miller made the song, ‘I was listening to the Ramones
and I was listening to Kraftwerk’ (King 2012). Musically, the track is neatly a
fifty-fifty hybrid o f the two. And as we have seen, it also marks their cultural
crossroads: punk’s devil-may-care rage and the 1970s electronic scene’s avant-
garde intellectualism. This hybridity - a prototype for Mute Records - is why
we hear both boredoms in the song: one is patient and strange (the powers-of-
two structure, the way its repetition draws our attention to timbre), while the
4 ‘T.V.O.D’ written by D. Miller, courtesy Mute Song Umited.
7 w ‘« Moke Love Hcfort’ You Die' 25
other Is jittery and bland (the suffocation o f its tempo, the way it can strike us
In the wrong mood as annoying). We can map this tension onto two visions
ioi humanity that ‘Warm Leatherette’ suggests. One last time, Crash helps us
n tlculate them.
One ostensible tragedy o f Ballard’s novel is that even in the double ecstasy
nl i mshsex, the characters remain in a mechanical world o f boring boredom,
i.l nothing ultimately stops them from at least trying to feel, no matter how
illmippointing the outcome. Repetition.
Accordingly, there is a way to hear each lyric in ‘Warm Leatherette’ as
mi|i ic ntlally approaching humanity by approaching the body as the machine drives
li imt: first we see, then feel, then the car melts on us, enters our eyes (a natural
i'| u nlng) and ultimately bores a hole into us forcibly. In this view, despite being
. I.,nl and fucked, we centralize our human selves. Even unfulfilled, our willingness
in ash again tells us there lies something romantic in the promise. Critics Fred
11
Hulling and Scott Wilson write, ‘Jouissance remains postponed, but the recovery
. 11Hs possibility, its fantasy, constitutes the occasion for the reappearance of desire’,
which they align with self-actualization (2003: 87). ‘From being a mechanical
nllure of diminishing returns’, they continue, ‘sex is transformed by the crash and
Im nines, again, a liberating experience. Maybe’ (2003; 87).
( oncerning this pointed ‘maybe’, there exists a radical alternative reading o f
i tosh through the productive lens o f unboring boredom. Here we don’t resist,
Inil Instead focus on the sensation of reorganizing ourselves and our world from
ivlihIn: not chasing life, but exploring lifelessness. Here, characters aren’t fleeing
In mi lorn, but surrendering to the godless world’s decree that they are merely
■i|i)cc ts. They become cut-ups and anagrams until meaning and identity dissipate:
ii In the only role available when everything is flattened by late capitalism’s one-
iliniensional measurement - the dollar-sign. The progression o f grammatical
subject* across the lyric traces this:
Person: ‘see’
Person: ‘feel’
Ihlng: 'Warm leatherette melts’
Person: ‘can see’
Ihlng: ‘tear of petrol’
living: ‘hand brake’
in ginning to end, the song models a progression away from subjectivity -
(i"iu person to thing, (This resemble* Baudrillard’s take on Crash.) Here the
26 Mute Records
protagonist is not a person, but a worldly state of affairs to which personhood
is irrelevant. A few writers (first Ernst Jiinger and more recently Diedrich
Diederichsen) even suggest that real humans should consider embracing non­
subjectivity: ‘become a thing, an object buffeted to and fro’, says Diederichsen
(2012: 34). Enjoy the submissive ride.
Crash and ‘Warm Leatherette’ are different artefacts. One is a novel and the
other a pop song; one inspires incredulous brooding and the other, dancing;
one sublimates the body into the mind and the other subsumes mind into body.
In Ballard’s book, content is stretched too thin, repeated too prosaically, and so
stripped of attitude that, despite its polysemy, it cannot conjure punk’s brazenness.
Thus treatises on technology and boredom usually engage with ‘serious’ art, not
seven-inch records. For the length of a pop song, though, audiences can suspend
critique in favour of cool.
So ‘Warm Leatherette’ doesn’t recap the book so much as flash its cover -
reviewers suggest Crash makes for better namedropping than reading. In punk’s
grab-and-go symbolism, the song is teenage materiality playing brash with
mature tragedies - like Sid Vicious wearing a swastika. The song doesn’t care
to tell us which interpretation of Crash it favours. And the dancing hairsprayed
kids did not ask whether they were supposed to be romantics or post-human.
Yet they answered, in their own way.
Reflection in the luminescent dash
Music and literature help us construct our identities subconsciously: we are
pulled towards one song but not another; we dance this way but not that. We
therein make interpretive decisions, ascribing unspoken meanings that emerge
in clothes we wear, friends we choose, drinks we order. The Normal belonged to
the electric soundtrack of a dozen subcultures burgeoning at the Blitz Club, F
Club, Mudd Club and Danceteria, each barely aware of its distinctive worldview.
As Anthony Haden-Guest recalls, ‘Warm Leatherette’ was, with Bauhaus’s ‘Bela
Lugosi’s Dead’ (Small Wonder 1979), one of the two songs heralding a new youth
era (1997: 98-9). Before anyone invested in words like new romantic, gothic or
futurist, the values guiding our varied readings of Crash and ‘Warm Leatherette’
wordlessly congregated nascent tribes.
Wanna find post-punk subcultures who heard in ‘Warm Leatherette’ a last-
chance bid for individual expression? Look to the kids who saw the Cure’s
7 rM Make Low Refore Yon Pie' 27
■i ettleen Seconds tour a year later. Here ‘Let’s make love before we die’ nears
inn Issey’s most Byronic longing. Romantic rage against boring boredom.
Wanna find fans who got off on hearing in ‘Warm Leatherette’ an anti-human
.in Li. Ily? Start by asking who bought LPs by Dome and This Heat in 1980. Here
Muipoken is a trolling challenge to the squares, where the irony o f the band
h ime Is manifest: sex in car crashes? This is Normal. (Think Ultravox’s ‘I Want
i.. He ,i Machine’ (Island 1977), or Ministry’s ‘Everyday (Is Halloween)’ (Wax
11 . si 1985)), Remaking the self in response to unboring boredom.
i Kersimplifications, yes - nobody is quite so deterministic - but the semiotics
.mg true, and they illustrate how ‘Warm Leatherette’ advertizes through curt
milncss several possible valences. Ramones/Kraftwerk. Punk/avant-garde,
i 'i Imi d/Warhol. Crashing to rouse the soul or to kill it. Here coexist all these
mi .inlngs, all these audiences, and here lies the power o f ‘Warm Leatherette’ -
"ii whose shoulders (and with whose funds) Mute Records was built.
Anil just as all these reactions are embodied in the listenership that the
..... ml and Mute have fostered, the worldly challenges that spawned them have
*'lily grown harder to ignore. It was 1978 and the future had already arrived.
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