Past Episodes.
S1E8.
“I had no intention of starting a record label.”
Play Now
Daniel Miller: revelation vs limitation.
Published: Feb 15, 2025.
“My thing was three chords are far too many. You can just have one finger on a keyboard and make an interesting sound, which I thought was more punk than being in a traditional rock band.”
INTRODUCTION: Unless you were there, it’s almost impossible to comprehend how the punk movement of ’76 and ’77 swallowed the country whole.
The wildfire ignited by London bands like the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Generation X and Siouxsie and the Banshees reached far beyond the capital. In cities up and down the country, the flames of revolution were swept forward by a new wave of post punk excitement that would revolutionize the next wave of sound.
Inspired by the experimental pulse of bands like Kraftwerk, Can, Neu! and Tangerine Dream, fueled by a rejection of prog rock’s indulgent excess, a new generation of artists emerged who embraced a more futuristic agenda. The punk ethos of “do-it-yourself,” wasn’t just about three chords and a sneer, it was about changing the world.
Capitalizing on the rise of cheap technology, this inspired group of mavericks – from Fat Gadget to Throbbing Gristle – used makeshift instrumentation and living room recording studios to make music even more urgent and real.
In episode eight, we meet someone who rode this spiraling energy and channeled it into a lifelong passion to help artists and musicians of every inclination survive, prosper, and thrive.
RICHARD SMITH: My guest today has been in love with electronic music for over 50 years.
He’s a producer, a DJ, and a musician. He’s also the owner of one of the most successful independent record labels, which he started in 1978. He’s also been responsible for cultivating the careers of so many notable bands and musicians, including Depeche Mode, Moby, Yazoo, Laibach, Fat Gadget, The Liars, and even his own as The Normal, Silicon Teens, and Sunroof.
Please welcome to the show, Mute Records founder, Daniel Miller. Daniel, amazing to chat with you today. Thank you for being on the show.
DANIEL MILLER: My pleasure, Richard. Thank you for inviting me.
RS: You’re welcome. It’s been a long time since we’ve spoken. Something I was struck by recently was in the book you published, the visual history of Mute, your quote, “Electronic music was like punk.” I wanted to start there and understand that.
DM: I suppose my thing was, the big saying at the time – I think it was Mark Perry who quoted it – was, “All you need to do is get a guitar and learn three chords.”
My thing was three chords are far too many. You can just have one finger on a keyboard and make an interesting sound, which I thought was more punk than being in a traditional rock band.
RS: I saw someone recently say something about the state of music today, along the lines of, “You can record an album or whatever on a phone, and you can just record it in your living room, or in your bedroom,” and they presented that as something new, but then I thought to myself, it always has been that accessible.
DM: It hasn’t always been that accessible. At the time I was starting out, it became much more accessible. There were less expensive four-track machines available. I made my first record and recorded it in the bedroom. I know other people like Robert Rental, who I worked with later, his was done maybe in his bedroom, possibly his living room, but definitely at home, same with Thomas Leer.
“Looking back to those days, you think, oh, it was the limitations that really made music. But having a four-track machine where I could overdub was definitely not a limitation. It was a revelation.”
Even if it wasn’t literally at home, it was in improvised studios. They weren’t in conventional studios or recording studios. It might have been in a room in a warehouse somewhere. Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, all these people, none of them worked in conventional recording studios, so they were all done in a very DIY way.
So, that’s what makes me smile really, when people say, “Of course now it’s even easier,” but I think looking back to those days, if you look from today, backwards, to those days, you think, you know, oh, it was the limitations that really made music. But having a four-track machine where I could overdub was definitely not a limitation. It was a revelation.
Looking back now, obviously, you know, when you’re using a laptop or a phone, you’ve got an endless number of tracks, and so on. But I think the limitation is always your creativity, really. The level of your ideas. Your originality. If you’ve got a great idea, a four-track or a laptop or a phone is a great way of doing it. If you just enjoy making music for the sake of it, that’s not particularly original then. It’s the same thing, nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t make music better, is what I’m trying to say.
RS: You are one of, I think, maybe the last remaining champion of that spirit from the punk era in terms of bringing musicians along who really had something to say and championing that, and you’ve been incredibly successful at it too.
DM: I wouldn’t say I’m the only person, I think there’s more people out there. You know, Jeff Travis at Rough Trade Records, Laurence Bell at Domino, Warp. There’s still a lot of people doing really good things. I definitely wouldn’t want to think that I’m the only one. But, hopefully I’m one of them.
RS: You just made me think of one of the artists on Mute is Laibach. They, to me, epitomize so much of that originality and unique way of looking at what music is and even the way they present themselves and so on. You know, the irony, the kitsch, the satirical, the political undertones. I was interested to understand your love more from a personal point of view.
DM: I mean, all the things you just said, really. I think they make people look at themselves in a way, especially in some of their art. I really have a lot of respect for the guys in the band. Their humor is brilliant. I never have a better laugh than I have when I’m with them.
They try to be controversial. Well, they are controversial in a good way. The classic one for me is they used the John Hartfield collage of a swastika made from axes. John Hartfield was a socialist, and a lot of people said, “Oh, you must be Nazis,” because of that. They didn’t understand.
It questions people’s perceptions about what you are, and obviously it’s an anti-Nazi symbol, clearly an anti-Nazi symbol. Yet people who didn’t understand it thought it was a Nazi symbol. I think that people aren’t prepared to learn about things, and they just take things at face value and make wrong judgments.
I like that way of getting people to think in a certain way. So, they grew up in a communist or socialist system. Which they critiqued, but also, on one hand, they critiqued it in a positive way, and on the other hand, they critiqued it in a very negative way. Which is typical Laibach.
For instance, they were put in jail for some of their slogans. Then they were celebrated by the government. So, it’s this whole kind of controversy which changes people’s perceptions.
“I think that people aren’t prepared to learn about things, and they just take things at face value and make wrong judgments.”
RS: One other band I wanted to talk about a little bit was Depeche Mode. What was it when you saw them that first time? The Fad Gadget concert, back in the early 80s?
DM: It was 1980. October 1980, I remember somehow.
RS: What was it that you saw in them at that moment? Do you remember?
DM: It’s pretty clear. As you rightly said, they were supporting Fad Gadget at the Bridge House pub in East London in Canning Town, and from the first few notes, I realized that they were really great pop song writers.
It was very minimal set up. Like just three very basic synthesizers and one drum machine, there was no backing tapes or anything, and they made an incredible sound, very well-structured sound. They were very young, 17, 18 years old.
One of the things I liked about them, one of the things that I found interesting was they were the first generation of young bands who had the choice of getting a guitar or a synth for roughly the same amount of money, and they decided to go the electronic way, and there was just song after song. I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing.
Every song was great, they had great harmonies, great arrangements. Fairly basic but sounds that worked. Dave, in those days, he was the youngest member of the band. He had a little under light to make him look gothy, and he stood stock still with his mic set.
They came on pretty early, so it wasn’t full yet. The audience that was there were mostly their friends, and the other thing I noticed was, and it was unusual for that time. They weren’t watching the band.
“There was just song after song. I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing.”
They were just dancing as though they were in a club. Although it was mostly their friends, I saw some connection between them and their audience. That is quite unusual. That connection with the audience is something that’s continued right till now.
RS: I know at that time there were bands like OMD and Human League and slightly different bands like Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle, that whole movement of electronic versus guitar-based music and being the opposite to London bands like The Clash and the Pistols. Was that part of it?
DM: Well, no, I loved the music, but I felt like it was a bit revolutionary in a way because they were so young, and they’d chosen electronic instruments. Because even though the people like the Human League and the Cabs and all the other ones you mentioned, they were a little bit older, but these were proper teenagers.
They had this kind of scruffy. New Romantic look, which was not very well realized. They were just kids from Basildon. I thought they weren’t trying to be cool. In the same way as people like Spandau Ballet or Duran. They’re just like, kids really. Playing great music. Unpretentious.
I honestly couldn’t believe what I heard I went to see them backstage if you can call it that. Had a little chat to them. They started to be a bit cool then, a bit off-ish, which wasn’t their kind of thing. But they played in the same venue the following week and I went back again, just to make sure I wasn’t, I wasn’t kidding myself.
“I just went backstage and said, ‘I’d really love to put a single out,’ and they said, ‘All right,’ then we shook hands and that’s what we did.”
So, in the end, I just went backstage and said, “I’d really love to put a single out,” and they said, “All right,” then we shook hands and that’s what we did. It was just everything, you know, the way they were arranged, which was basically down to Vince (Clark).
They had the cheapest synths you could purchase at the time. Looking back, you’d think that was a limitation, but for them it was like a revelation because they could make all these new sounds and not have to be good musicians to play.
RS: They obviously were talented, clearly, and had something.
DM: Absolutely. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing, really. Amazing songs, really brilliantly arranged. That was it.
RS: It seems, and this is me as an outsider. But if I think about the bands on Mute, like Throbbing Gristle and then Depeche Mode and Yazoo and Erasure and so on, there’s Cabaret Voltaire and Laibach. There’s such diversity. I know you have a love of electronic music, but I’m curious where this championing of people who are not quite doing it the same as everybody else. You have this real love of diversity. Why?
DM: All my teenage years were in the 60s, and I was, even then, I was very, very picky. I wasn’t one of those people who said, “Oh, I love all kinds of music.” I said, “That Beatles’ single is really good, but that one’s shit. “You know, and then I went from that to slightly more psychedelic things for a bit.
Then I got bored. British music seemed to be going down a road I wasn’t that keen on, more self-indulgent. Then I got into the Krautrock, German artists, more experimental music. So that, that was my musical history, my musical education if you like. So, all those things are part of what I like, from pop music to something that’s very different.
So that’s, that’s how the roster is reflected in a way. I don’t think about it intellectually.
RS: You obviously see somebody, hear somebody, even with your own music, you’re inspired and driven by I’m guessing the making, ’cause you’re a producer and a DJ and a musician. So, it’s the making, I think. from my perspective, looking from the outside, that seems to really drive you.
DM: The process of making music is something that I’m very interested in and I enjoy being involved in, in some way or other, and maybe helping other people realize their vision, musical vision, through my experience of the process.
RS: It sounds corny, but you’re like the artist’s artist in a way, because you’re not like, let’s say Tony Wilson, right? The real Svengali type. He had obviously championed people who were up and coming equally. But you’re, you’re very much behind the scenes, less in the public eye, perhaps.
“The process of making music is something that I’m very interested in and I enjoy helping other people realize their vision.”
DM: We came from a very different place, but we ended up in a very different place as well. At the same time, I suppose his love, my love of electronic music was mirrored in his love of Manchester music. Do you know what I mean? It was something he wanted to grab hold of and really promote partly because of the North South divide and it not wanting everything to be London centric.
He was Mr. Manchester as well. It was about the music, but it was all about the culture of Manchester generally as well. So, I suppose that was his passion and obviously some really great groups came out of that. He was the one who was, who gave them the platform and that’s fantastic.
He was very much front and center. He was a center forward. I was the center half.
RS: I love that analogy.
DM: Chopper Harris or something like that.
RS: And the other team was like the mainstream music industry.
DM: Yeah, I guess so.
RS: Did you have a relationship?
DM: The first encounter was when he was doing his show, his TV show, he played my single. He played Warm Leatherette, and so I just phoned him up to say thank you, basically. And then I met him, the first time I met him was when I was playing live with Robert Rental, who’s another independent electronic artist. We did a little tour, 3 dates, I think, with a band called Pragvec, who invited us on.
We played at the Russell Club, which was then called The Factory, and he was there, and he was very excited because he was showing me the artwork for the first EP, which was with Cabaret Voltaire, if I remember exactly. He was just literally starting out at that point, very, very shortly after I released my single.
Then independent labels started to have hits and I think we were exchanging a lot of information about what the best way to do certain things was because none of us, whether it was Jeff Travis or Tony or Martin Mills, who had more experience in a record shop. It was exciting because we didn’t know really know what we were doing and yet we were having hits.
The majors didn’t really like that because they felt that having a hit was their territory You know, we were fine when we were nice little independent labels. If we had any bands who were interesting, they could sign them if they thought it was going to be a hit but now, we were getting the hits ourselves.
There was a whole part of the market that was closed off to them in a way Anyway, they were trying different tricks with the chart rules to make it more difficult, but we were more imaginative than them in the way we abused the chart rules. So, over the years I met him a load of times, we got on very well.
RS: I love the full circle of that. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about it, but from that first single with Cabaret Voltaire, who are now with Mute and with Joy Division on that EP, who obviously became New Order, and then amazingly are now part of Mute too. It’s, there’s this, you may not see it this way, you’re continuing that legacy of his in some ways.
It’s sort of an amazing full circle in some ways.
DM: I do feel that up to a point. I think those artists, need to be taken care of. They deserve to continue. It’s just really important. Those things stay in the public eye, and yeah, I know what you mean.
I did say when we did the New Order signing a while ago now, a few years ago, and I said, “I really hope that Tony and Rob Gretton,” – obviously both of them passed away by then – “approved.”
RS: I don’t know if it’s true, but there was this quote, I remember from Rob Gretton, where he said, Tony Wilson is saying something like, “Why don’t we sign to London Records?” And Rob Gretton says, “Because of the name, right?”
DM: Yes, of course, yeah. Manchester Records, yeah. That’s fair enough, I get that. That’s very Rob Gretton.
RS: It segues into something I was interested in which was that over the years, you’ve given a lot of bands and artists the opportunity to find an audience for themselves and help them grow.
What I find amazing about that is that you don’t always put success first, meaning you believe you’ve got to get something out there in order for people to, to pay attention to it.
I was interested to know, have there been any failures? Because it seems you’ve had a lot of … success is a big word to use in this context … but have there been instances where you’re like, “Oh shit, we should have never done that.”
DM: There are different matrices for success. Obviously, there’s artistic, creative success. Personal success and there’s a balance between all of them. For me, there’s no point having commercial success if you’re not having creative success. It’s like commercial success. It’s obviously really important.
“It was exciting because we didn’t know really know what we were doing and yet we were having hits.”
We have to pay for recording time. We must pay for staff and things like that, overheads So yeah, there has to be a certain level, but it’s always the priority for me and my team, I suppose, because it drips down from me, that without the artistic success, then nothing else ever happens for us as a label. So, it’s quite possible we make an amazing record with one of our artists, but it’s not commercially successful.
There’ve been a lot of things that have not been commercially successful. Again, it depends on what you mean, what is commercially successful.
If you have an artist. I’m not going to name any names, but say you have an artist who’s doing pure noise. Okay. Commercial success would be if we sold a thousand copies.
If you had a band who did pop music and only sold a thousand copies, that would probably be a disappointment. So, it’s relative. It’s also relative to the costs. If somebody who’s the noise artist can do everything in his home, in his bedroom at home or her bedroom at home. With a low cost then it makes sense to sell a thousand records.
But it doesn’t make sense to sell a thousand records if you’re in a studio for three months that costs a thousand pounds a day.
RS: It’s an interesting nuance, because like you said, you know, you’re in the, you’re in the business, the music business, but your approach is very unique. You’re very much a cultivator versus an administrator.
I’ve always been really impressed with your approach to marketing. And again, that’s a super general topic, but I think of like Moby. I always thought Moby was a massive success because people picked up on it, and put it into advertising, but I believe that was actually something that just came from you, from Mute.
You were like, why isn’t Moby, why isn’t this album popular? And there’s this real savviness, and it just makes me think in many ways, you’re an industry unicorn, you’re somebody who is not afraid to take risks.
DM: Your first opinion, your first kind of analysis is correct, really. When, Play, came out, it took a year before people cottoned on to it really. We released four singles before anybody even knew about it. It was crazy.
We didn’t think it was going to be as big as it was, but we all thought it had real potential, but people weren’t picking up on it. Maybe it was the timing, who knows. But by the time the fourth single came out, it was a different story.
Regarding the advertising, you know, using music for ads, it was still a time when a lot of musicians and labels, including us, we were very wary about using our music in advertising.
The first time it was used the late, Brian Griffin, the photographer, who was a good friend of Mute. He did the first five Depeche Mode covers. But he got into making commercials, and he was a huge music fan and he did a car ad and he wanted to use another one of our artists for the music, which was Pansonic, who are very experimental electronic thing. We were very excited about that. The agency were okay with it, but it went to the head of the car company, and he said no.
So, Brian had a copy of Play in his editing suite. So, he put that on. He used Find My Baby for the ad, I think that was the first use of the music. Then somehow it became the sound of the car advertising.
I don’t know how that mental, root works. Music supervisors who do TV or ads, they need somebody else to be affirmative of a style. So somebody who’s been brave enough to do that, in this case Brian, it always takes one person to take that first step.
RS: I think as an outsider, there’s an element of your approach to musicians and giving them an opportunity to record and release, et cetera, it’s very much willing to take that risk as it were, or to say, believe in them and say, this is stuff people should be aware of. Then people grab onto it.
DM: Don’t get me wrong. We’ve had our failures, but never anything I’ve regretted doing. But you probably don’t know about the failures, you’ve never heard it either.
RS: So, going way back no. Why did you want to start your own label? I know the way Mute came about. To certain extent, it’s somewhat legendary. You recorded Warm Leatherette, on a four-track in your mom’s house, then Fad Gadget sent you a tape, and then you went to see Fad Gadget and Depeche Mode were playing, and then you started Mute Records.
DM: That’s kind of the right order, not quite right. When I put out my first single, I had no intention of starting a record label. I just wanted to put out a single because it was DIY and just after punk, and I was always into music, and I was starting to get into making electronic music in my bedroom.
So, I thought, why not? Just put something out. Nobody’s gonna buy it, doesn’t really matter. And it turned out to be, in that world, that sort of alternative world, relatively successful. Which kind of confused me. I was starting to get demo tapes because I put my address on the sleeve. There was nothing that I particularly liked.
Then I met Fad Gadget through a mutual friend. Really liked what he did. We got on very well, and so that was the beginning of Mute as a label, when I started working with Frank.
Then there were a number of other artists before Depeche. There was DAF, which was the first album on Mute, Die Kleinen und die Bösen, and we did a Robert Rental single, we did Silicon Teens, which was really my project.
Then I met Depeche. Who were supporting Fad Gadget at the Bridge House in Canning Town. So that’s just like a short version of your story, slightly different.
“I was very bored with most of the music that was coming out of the UK and America, it had becomed so self-indulgent.”
RS: So, not at that time, but a little bit before that you were living in Switzerland. You were working as a DJ and then you came back to England to be part of the punk scene. Something you said that interested me was that you thought that the punk music was quite conservative, but you liked the ethos. So, what did you like about punk?
DM: There’s a couple of things. I didn’t come back to the UK to be part of the scene. I was never part of any scene really at that point. But the job had finished in Switzerland, April. So, I came back to London. I’d been reading about punk and the kind of excitement around it. I was super excited about it.
Soon after I got back, I was listening to John Peel, and as I turned the radio on, it was in the middle of a song, and I had no idea who it was. I thought, God, this sounds great. It sounds like Neu! a little bit.
Then there was a place where normally there would be a solo, and there was no solo. I thought, this is amazing, what is this? And then it turned out it was the Ramones. That was my first contact with punk rock, and I found conventional instrumentally, but very unconventional in the form.
That Ramones album, I just went straight out and bought that album. I was in love with that record. Then the first English British singles started coming out, the Pistols, The Damned, and it was an exciting time.
I was very bored anyway, but by that time I was very bored with most of the music that was coming out of the UK and America, it had become so self-indulgent, and this was the opposite of self-indulgent in a way. It was self-indulgent, but not self-indulgent, it’s not self-indulgent musically.
I just became very excited by the whole scene, and then the DIY thing really started, and there was quite a group called the Desperate Bicycles, and they did an article, I think it was in Melody Maker, on how to release your own single, basically.
I thought, this is pretty exciting. But by that time, punk, the music side of it, didn’t really move. It went in different directions, basically. It either carried on as it was, which was boring, or it carried on to Public Image Limited, which was great.
So, it was diversifying, and it felt like people were really open to listen to new things. For the first time in forever, basically. I’d always been into electronic music, and it inspired me to buy a synthesizer and a tape recorder which was a very important moment which didn’t just affect me but affected a lot of other people too, The Human League, OMD, Soft Cell. It was a moment in time which was super exciting in terms of people’s openness to music. It was a time when synthesizers became affordable for normal people.
Before that they were very expensive and the Japanese synths were starting to come in, Korg and Roland especially, and they were coming on the secondhand market. So, it was the beginning of post punk electronic music, shall we say. The interest in it, the distribution method through independent distributors like Rough Trade, and you didn’t have to go to a recording studio to make it.
So, all that happened in a short space of time. All those people, including me, I mean, I didn’t know anybody at that time. I didn’t know Cabaret, Voltaire, or Throbbing Gristle, or The Human League. I didn’t know them. I didn’t know them. I was just doing it off my own back, but everybody was doing a similar thing – all inspired by similar musicians, especially German musicians, like Can and Kraftwerk and Neu! Inspired by that and then through the filter of punk.
RS: Coming out of that, and I’m going to jump forward a little bit from there, what is it about techno that you love? Because I know you still DJ. Occasionally. What is it about techno that you love? Is that a true statement?
DM: I love it because, first, most importantly, it’s got to work on the dancefloor, because if not, then it doesn’t really work at all.
So, within those parameters, within that parameter, to make something that’s original electronic music is quite hard. There’s a lot of techno which isn’t very good. In every genre. The really good stuff is where people have used the limitation of techno, or the strictures of techno, and used that in a very creative way with electronic music.
So, you know, you basically only ever have two or three things going at once, maybe four or five maximum going at once, sonically, and you have to make them all work together.
There are a lot of techno producers who also into experimental music. So, they’re using the techno format to experiment with electronic music, which I think is really interesting I actually don’t really like the term electronic experimental music, but that’s another question.
One of the most experimental bands of the 70s was ABBA. The term experimental music now means, unlistenable, pretty much. But it’s not about the output. It’s about the input, the experimental inputs, and ABBA used a lot of very interesting techniques in the early 70s, Recording techniques, to achieve their sound.
Like using different speeds of tape, playing backwards and all sorts of really interesting things, and they were all experimental in the sense that they were experiments. The definition of an experiment is it either fails or succeed.
If somebody said to me about Sunroof, the band, my project with Gareth, and I said, experimental music, they would immediately think, oh, it’s not very listenable.
It may not be very listenable, but that’s not because it’s experimental. It’s because of the input that we put into it, not the output that comes out. It’s just one of those words, let’s say, lazy words.
RS: I love that. It makes a lot of sense. I think it gets more to how music is made versus the labels and genres that things get thrown into. Sometimes when I’m researching a band or whatever, sometimes they get categorized in so many different categories. I’m like, which category actually are they? So, it becomes almost nonsensical to a certain extent.
DM: Yeah, I mean, there’s the sub-genre of the sub-genre. God knows how many, I have no idea.
To me, I know exactly what I mean by techno. I can’t put it into words, but I know when I hear something, to me that’s techno, and to me that’s not techno. I know that pretty immediately.
RS: I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about this, but where do you see the birth of techno coming from? Is it through bands like Can and Kraftwerk, John Cage, Cabaret Voltaire, OMD, all the above?
I don’t know if it’s something you’ve ever thought about.
DM: There are definitely techno artists or producers who were, who are fans of that music. I think there’s a bit of a lineage. Before there was techno, this is like going back in the mists of time, there was EBM, electronic body music. People like Nitzer Ebb, DAF, Front 242, a lot of things like that.
“I didn’t know anybody at that time. I didn’t know Cabaret Voltaire, or Throbbing Gristle, or The Human League. I didn’t know them. I was just doing it off my own back, but everybody was doing a similar thing.”
There are quite a few interesting documentaries about techno. There’s the Frankfurt School, who said they invented techno. Obviously, there’s Berlin, post wall, techno. I think it’s really hard to say, I think you could in a way go back to I Feel Love, by Donna Summer.
Georgia Moroder. People like DAF, Nitzer Ebb, who used sequenced dance music, and Front 242. It’s hard to put your finger on it. Who was the first techno artist? There’s a lot of different versions.
RS: It was less about who was the first. It was more, and I think you answered the question probably, a combination of things. There are so many different influences coming together.
DM: House music probably came just a bit before techno, and again, it was the availability of the tools to make it. That was the key thing. These people were not making records in big studios with very expensive equipment. They were either making them at home or in very cheap studio spaces. That’s a good question, to which I don’t really have an answer.
RS: You touched on Sunroof, which is a project you’re doing right now. You just had an album out for Sunroof. It’s the fourth in a series?
DM: Third. Third album’s just about to come out.
RS: One of the things I love about doing this podcast is that it has taken me down many new avenues of music and discovering Sunroof. It was revelatory. It is beautiful music, and something that occurred to me though was, and you’ve worked with Gareth Jones for a long time, that it must be hard to be objective about your own music.
DM: We don’t think about it when we’re making it. I’ve worked with Gareth since the early eighties. We worked on three Depeche records together as producers. He’s produced many Mute artists after that, and he still is, actually just produced the last Yann Tiersen record.
We’re very guided by practical issues. Time being the main one, we’re both busy people doing our day jobs, so there’s very little time we can actually get together.
When we do, we just patch our modules and start playing, and then if we hear something that’s good, we press record for five minutes and then carry on. We use a technique which I learned from photography, because I’m a keen amateur photographer as well, street photographer. I’m not very good, but I’m keen.
A lot of street photographers, and maybe other kinds of photographers as well, they don’t look at their pictures for three months after they’ve been taken, because when you’re taking a photograph or you’re in the studio or whatever you’re doing, there’s a specific set of circumstances or feelings that relate to what you do.
So, you might have a headache that day if you’re in the studio or you felt great that day. Then if you try and judge the music, you’re always using those feelings. That’s not very good if you really want to judge it. So, we didn’t listen to the music for months afterwards. Then we did, we were both very surprised by a number of things.
One was how good some of it was. How bad some of it was but interestingly, I think that we couldn’t remember doing it and we couldn’t remember who did which sound. It became like we were an audience rather than a producer and I think that’s a really good way of doing things, It’s not always practical in the music business because you want to get the album out.
But for us there was no real pressure for that. You just get to hear it objectively. It’s fun and depressing at times.
RS: You still DJ a little bit and you’re producing and making music and so on and so forth and running a company.
DM: We play live sometimes as well. Which we enjoy very much.
“I love it because, first, most importantly, it’s got to work on the dance floor, because if not, then it doesn’t really work at all.”
RS: What motivates you? What drives you?
DM: I’m lucky that I can do those different things first of all. If I was just running the label, if I was just a musician or just whatever a DJ, I think my interest would wane quite quickly. But because I can pick and choose a little bit what I do, obviously with the label I have a lot of responsibilities which I take seriously, and that’s always the priority.
But what motivates me, I don’t know, I like music, I love music. But there’s very little music that I love. Does that make sense?
RS: Yeah, 100%.
DM: There’s a lot of music that I don’t love. And that’s always been the case, even when I was just a teenager. I had a very small record collection, and I still have, and people go, where’s your record collection? I still don’t really have a big record collection at all, because I’m not that interested in music that I don’t love.
From a Sunroof point of view, performing something live in front of an audience, it’s exciting, especially the kind of thing we’re doing, which is very improvised. So, you’re never quite sure how it’s going to work out. It’s just exciting. Same with DJing, different, very different, but trying to see how you’re relating to an audience musically, I think, is really exciting.
In terms of a label, trying to find something that’s new or very original or very special and working with the artist that makes that kind of music is really exciting and watching that develop.
Artist development, for me, is really exciting and we’re not the kind of label that does a one off single to see how it goes. You commit, we really commit to a long-term relationship. So that’s exciting. That’s really exciting.
RS: I read that you had a dislike for Britpop, and I wondered what you thought about the Oasis reunion.
DM: Britpop. It’s not that I disliked it. I didn’t like it. But it became ubiquitous at a certain point. I think Oasis are really good as a band, really good songs, but there’s so many, so-called Britpop bands, and you couldn’t get on the radio, you couldn’t get on into the press, it was all about Britpop.
Blur, is a really great band, but there was so much rubbish that kind of polluted, in my opinion, the media. It was a difficult time for us, and I don’t really hate it, it’s just that I hated the way that people excluded, pretty much excluded all other kinds of music at that point. I knew Noel Gallagher very well before Oasis because he was a roadie for Inspiral Carpets. We always got on very well and if I ever bumped into him, wherever it was, it was hardly ever, we always had a good chat.
I was very happy for him because he was very talented, I don’t mean he was a talented roadie, but he played guitar and stuff, so that was good.
And the reunion, I don’t like the way they did the ticket pricing. Yeah. You know, the reunions, you know, if people want to go and watch it, great. People enjoy it. Great. I don’t have a problem with, it’s like the Stones. The Stones carry on. I personally, I have seen the Stones live, but that was a very long time ago. I’m personally not that interested in seeing them anymore.
I was a big fan back when I was a teenager, but if they want to do it and people want to see it, fantastic.
RS: It gets into something that I was interested to know what you thought. These days, platforms like Spotify and Apple Music are driving much of the music industry and I read a lot about how musicians struggle to make a name for themselves.
Do you think that’s true? Or is it the same as it ever was? Meaning, it’s always been hard for bands to make a name for themselves, to break through, and so on.
DM: It’s always been hard. It’s very difficult. The way people listen to music now is completely different to how they listened to music when I was growing up, or even 10 years ago.
That can be quite difficult for an artist who makes a great album, but people are into one track and they’re not really interested in the album. But in a sense, that used to be like that. You might have one hit off an album, or one single that was on the album, and nobody would buy the album. There are always gatekeepers.
“It’s not that I disliked it. I didn’t like it. But it became ubiquitous at a certain point.”
There are a lot more ways of getting your music out there these days. Incomparable to when I started. But there’s also a ton more music. So, it evens itself out. I think a lot of the music is Okay, maybe 50 percent is just not very good. It doesn’t interest me, 40 percent is okay. But not exceptional and there’s like tiny percentage at the top which is exceptional and that’s always been the case. People can get all sentimental about the charts of the 60s but if you look, there was tons of crap, frankly, in the charts in those days.
I think that there’s good positive things about Spotify and Apple Music. I think the fact that your music will be up there, not forever, there’s no forever, but long after it would be available in a conventional record shop. I think that’s great. And for some people, over time, you can make some money as an artist like that.
You might not have a huge record, but over time, that builds up over five years, for instance, it starts to build up possibly. So, I think that’s the positive thing. Your music as a musician is out there for many years to come. You get paid very little per play, but sometimes people, if they like the record, like the song, and they play it a lot then you might get a bit of money and if people if you’re like Ed Sheeran or somebody like that you make a fortune. More than you would ever have made by selling records. There are a lot of nuances in that.
RS: It’s like that very misunderstood English expression swings and roundabouts.
DM: Swings and roundabouts? It’s like comparing apples with oranges.
RS: You’ve been developing a limited edition, build it yourself Mute Synth, which seems really exciting. You seem excited about that from what I’ve read, and I’m curious, do you see that as blossoming into something where Mute Records is making synthesizers?
DM: No, not really. We made three of the Mute Synths, I think it was three, quite a few years ago now. But they were stand-alone machines, really. But then because I’m very into modular synths I got to know some of the manufacturers.
There was a great company called Future Sound Systems, based in Bristol. We did a couple of modules together. We never built anything ourselves, but they would wire those modules with basically what I thought would be useful. I’d like to do more of that, actually, but it’s time and there are so many great modules out there.
There are thousands of really good modules. I don’t know what I could come up with that would really be an improvement on something that’s already there. So many great modules out there at the moment.
RS: It’s so tangential to the music industry, but at the same time, it’s so integral. It’s a little bit, and this is a strange analogy, maybe, but Apple making a car, it’s like, oh, wow, what would that look like, that would be really cool thing. Because they have so much experience in terms of making amazing things. So, with Mute Records, you, Mute, making a synth, it’s like, oh, that would be an amazing synth. That’s super kind of pedestrian.
It makes me think about AI. And I don’t know if you, how that is impacting how you feel that’s impacting music, in a good or bad way. If it’s something you even think about.
DM: I do think about it a bit. I think it’s swings and roundabouts.
RS: Ha ha ha ha!
DM: AI in terms of, say, music software, is fantastic what AI can do. It really takes it to another level. When I heard a track, it was like a demonstration rather than a commercial project using an AI version of Dave Gahan’s voice on a track that was designed to sound like Depeche Mode, the track, the voice was pretty sadly pretty close.
You could tell the difference, but it was close. The track wasn’t nowhere near as good as a Depeche Mode track. Now, that’s something obviously that’s really on everybody’s radar of course. Voice over actor or whatever, broadcaster, musician, say okay, I want a track that sounds like The Beatles and then you get something that sounds like The Beatles. Maybe. But it’s not The Beatles.
There are all these things about copyright and do you own your own voice and it’s very complicated. I don’t really want to get into the weeds of that because I just want to respond to it really. There’s not much I can do about it.
But there’s definitely positives about AI in the production of music rather than the composing of music and maybe in the composer music for certain kinds of things. I have no idea.
RS: Going back to punk, in your opinion, do you feel that punk was the last cultural revolution?
DM: I don’t think punk was the last. I think dance music was. It’s huge. That really came after punk, late 80s, and now it’s huge, which I think is incredible. Of course, now that the diversification of music through streaming, it makes it less easy for one particular genre to be predominant. So, the answer to your question is I have no idea.
People ask me questions like, “Oh, what do you think the future of music is?” And I really don’t know.
RS: It’s a really fair point. And it’s not a wrong answer. There’s not a wrong answer. It’s a really fair point. It’s just something that fascinates me. And it’s less about the music because I don’t see, I don’t see a correlation necessarily between punk music and the music of today.
It’s more what you said earlier about the ethos and the do it yourself attitude and how it enabled yourself and others to get into what you love to do and so on and so forth.
DM: I think you can trace, you can trace things like techno, I think, for instance, you can trace back to punk in a way, but a lot of the people who are making techno wouldn’t have any clue about that.
But you can trace it back to Kraftwerk and you can trace it back to punk. A lot of punk musicians were into bands like Can. John Lydon famously applied for the job as lead singer of Can at one point. People like Hawkwind, who I loved as well. Not a typical British band at the time, and Neu! and a lot of punk musicians, before punk was punk, were into that kind of music.
It all, it all feeds into each other, even if people aren’t conscious of it. There are a lot of people who are, who are one person labels right now, for instance, putting out a couple of singles. And that’s very much part of the punk ethos.
“I heard a track using an AI version of Dave Gahan’s voice on a track that was designed to sound like Depeche Mode, the track, the voice, was pretty sadly pretty close.”
Musically, yeah, I guess so. The bands who sound like they could have been punk bands, maybe. It’s about energy as much as the actual musical content. It’s about the energy of punk at a point where music was very stayed and very boring and self-indulgent and punk came like a massive shot in the arm. Will there be a type of music that comes along that has the same effect that punk had or that? Or psychedelia had or the 60s pop thing had, very hard to say, very difficult, I think, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen.
RS: One last question before you have to jump. Something I was curious to about was the Miller Zillmer Foundation, there are some really amazing things happening. It would be good to hear a bit more about that because I thought it was a really interesting thing you are doing today.
DM: Yeah, it’s me and my wife Diane. She’s a visual artist, photographer, video artist, painter, and I think at some point we just felt we’ve got between us and the people we know, there’s quite a lot of talents there, and how do we put those to use in a way that’s not just about us, us creating, but somehow use that to bring people together in a different way.
So, we started out with a couple of projects, one of which was a modular synthesizer ensemble, who existed before us, we didn’t create that, but that existed before.
It’s run by an Austrian guy called Gammon, and I’d seen that, and I always found it incredibly moving, to see. It’s basically young teenagers from 10 to maybe 15 or something like that. And he contacts schools or different youth organizations looking for volunteers who want to be part of this ensemble and he’ll meet them in the morning and they have no musical experience normally they don’t play any other instrument and he has like I think it’s 12 or 14 little modular setups, right, and he’ll teach them how to use those, and then they’ll make a piece, compose a piece together.
And then in the afternoon, they’ll perform it live. So, it’s remarkable. It’s really very moving. I remember the first time I saw it. It was with a couple of hard-bitten modular synthesis, and we were all really in tears. It was just incredible. So, when we decided to start the foundation, that was one of the projects I wanted to support, and we still do, and that’s a really wonderful experience for people.
Then we did these online artist residencies, where we put out a call saying, “Hey, if you want to participate in this workshop.” It’s like a residency online, people wrote to us and we got a lot of applications and we picked four artists from different disciplines with four artists who we thought would work together.
We interviewed them online and then we put them in a space, a digital space. We gave them a stipend for three months, and in that period, they produce something as a group, and it was, and it was incredible.
It was a social experiment as much as an artistic experiment, watching these people from different countries, with different disciplines, who had never met, coming together to work and play. It was really satisfying. It’s a bit like putting a band together, basically we said, “Okay, make an album in three months.”
Then there is a number of other projects that we’re supporting as well. There are some very long-term projects. We work with an organization called EAST, but what they’ve done in the past is they rented a train in East Africa and put artists in there, it’s very similar concept to our residencies, but it’s all done in a train.
The train goes through Africa and they pick people up on the way, artists. They work together on the train and then in the end they have an exhibition. I think it’s a brilliant project. Again, it’s not a project that we invented, but it’s one we’re supporting, and we’re working with a gallery space in Berlin.
We’re putting on an exhibition for one of our artists there in the spring. It’s all moving along. It’s not a good time for things like this financially. But we have some generous donors who help keep it going, a lot of really good supporters and it’s something that we find very enjoyable worthwhile satisfying all those things.
RS: Brilliant. I’m going to let you go and say thank you. It’s been a wonderful to chat with you. Thank you.
DM: Yeah, lovely. I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve enjoyed talking about myself.
RS: As we all do. All right. Thanks.
DM: All right. Bye, bye.