No. 31: David Harrow part 2

Claymores, Sabres and Helloween with another dip into a wild life.

Hi everyone, thanks as ever for reading and signing up, and thanks for the brilliant and thoughtful responses to our epic chat with Richard Russell, and of course to the Terror Danjah transcript and pics – which we very much hope served as a fitting tribute to his sorely-missed brilliance.

We’re following up those two epics with another long one. As you’ll have seen from our previous chat, David Harrow has a lot of story to tell, and is quite adept at telling it. Once again, we recorded this one on Zoom from his studio in LA, him smoking away and – bamboozlingly for someone who manages to make sometimes an album a week and hold down a teaching job – seemingly with all the time in the world to anecdotalise. I had a winter bug which I was self-medicating with a couple of bottles of Goudale so I was happy to let him take it where he wanted, not really steering him to key events or anything, then suddenly I checked the clock, 90 minutes had gone and we’d only added an extra eight years on to his story.

But ye gods, what years. And what an insane amount of creative insight we covered too. This kind of meandering through studios, raves and reggae dances is exactly what we cooked up Bass, Mids, Tops to cover in the first place, and it is full of the detail that makes up the very fabric of culture, as well as some rather startling bits of colour. Techno, dub, jungle, spaghetti westerns, AIDS, heroin, swords, bullet trains, an extremely unexpected diversion into 80s power metal – it’s all in there. There’s a little bit of ping-ponging back and forth in time, partly because of my fuzzy interview technique and partly because by his own admission we’re talking about the haziest phase of Harrow’s life – but actually going back over this, once again it holds together. So once again, get yourself a drink of something, sit down, and dive in...

So the thing is we left it on such a brilliant cliffhanger but we'd sped ahead of ourselves a bit – because we left it as like “Woohoo acid house has arrived” but actually we'd missed out the whole mid-80s because we had kind of gone from your work with Anne Clarke and hanging around with the industrial guys so there was no mention for example of On-U...

Yeah, OK – but if we are going back there, there has to be there has to be this little side thing of why I'm in America... And that's that was when I was in Berlin, there was a Joseph and Art¹ who were two American DJs that ran a record label in in San Francisco called Razormaid who were part of that kind of record pool thing. You know, back then you'd, you know, DJ signed up to record pools and they would get specialist remixes sent to them, right?

Yep! They're legendary, and the “razor” in Razormaid is because they did tape edits, actually chopping up the reel to reels with razors...

Exactly, they were great at editing. And they were massive Anne Clark fans. And also there was a couple of other things that I'd done in Berlin at that time that were, you know, Fou Gorki², Leningrad Sandwich³, things that I produced with different Berlin acts around that time. So they had come to Berlin to do something in Hansa studios where I used to work sometimes. Of course, you know, they're legendary Hansa studios, right? Probably one of the reasons I actually went to Berlin in the first place is Hansa studios because you read it on the back of the David Bowie record recording enhancer studios and you're like, ooh, Hansa, right? But really Hansa was Schlager.

Drinking songs.

Just German drinking music! But anyway, they had come to San Francisco to do to Berlin to do some remixes and they were massive Anne Clark fans and kind of fawned all over me and got me in to do some stuff in their sessions in Berlin – and then said, “Hey, do you want to come to San Francisco and work for a few months?” And I'd never been to America, so I was like, “Sure, let's go!” So they put me up in this fantastic, beautiful house... They were the first kind of gay conservatives I'd ever met – conservative with a kind of small c you know, just sort of... well, you know, just regular middle-class middle-of-the-road people in terms of politics, tastes, people right? Just regular people. At that point, I've got gay friends in England or Germany whatever but they're always like alternative, out there, sort of thing but these folks were definitely like a little bit more corporate than I'd ever known, and ran a sort of factory of in the studio every day, recording, doing lots and lots of music all the time.

But this was the unique environment of San Francisco, presumably, where they had essentially had gay life normalised for what, 15 years by this point?

Oh yeah! 100% there were couples living together and living normal lives, I was often the only straight person – wewould go out to dinner every night and I was often the only straight person. I remember meeting a cute girl at one dinner being like, wow, I'm in there because I'm the only straight guy here, heh. But San Francisco that period, really early 80s, was fantastic, so exciting and they were the first professional DJs that I'd ever met or been around before too. There was boxes of records, I'm like, “Oh you've you put numbers on the front, what's that?” “Oh well that's the BPM.” I'm like “Well, you got letters too,” and they're like “Oh yeah that's the key” and I remember thinking, wow I didn't realize people did that...

Then seeing them DJ two, three hour sets, San Francisco clubs were an eye-opener and you know I was just happy to be connected to that, and just to be doing anything really. We had to do full take recordings of percussion and keyboard parts and also sequence things and stuff like that and I was just in my element, having great fun. We'd do things like the last Sylvester recordings. And I wrote a few songs like when we had some time in the studio there, recorded a few things that came out on Razormaid, that were kind of... how can I say, not really out of my league, out of my genre, but way more commercial and way more sort of... well... San Francisco than I'd usually do, right? It was a real experience for me.

So they were right on the cusp of the Euro electro that you were doing already and what was remaining of disco, right?

Absolutely. And some alternative, you know. It was that period of time that everybody had to sort of have dance remixes of things, right? So they often took those dance remixes, things like Depeche Mode⁴ and stuff like that, and then re-edited them. And they made vinyl of all this stuff that was sent out. The covers and everything were fantastic. I've still got a full set on my shelf out here. You know, those are money on discogs now, right? They got so popular. You know, all of this was in that quasi, not really legal zone because it's record pools, but they became so popular that the artists and record labels started sending them their material to remix. Remember that New Order, Blue Monday with the bits cut out of it? So the Razormaid stuff was all like that, but also, it spelt “Razormaid” if you had the entire set. Some serious artwork. And I'd never seen people doing that too either, you know, all the work involved in it, right? The graphics, the presentation, all that sort of stuff too was amazing.

Then the last week I was there, a friend was going to the hospital to see what this weird rash on his leg was. And... within six months, most of the people I'd met there were gone. Ummm... that, you know, we, we don't... You this epidemic we just had? We've been through an epidemic before. Yeah. It just didn't affect everybody. You know, I'm there, shocked, 20 people I knew died of AIDS. And then a friend will be saying, “I went to my 75th funeral,” right? Just in months, it's a different world. The whole community had just decimated in this tiny period of time. So, you know, that was... brutal. But that trip opened up a lot, being in America and seeing these horizons that went on forever and just going, “Yeah, I kind of like the vibe here. There's something about this is like really cool.” Anyway, it was a little bit of a hint of what was coming. That thing of music where it's either a total reaction of what's happened before, or it's, you know, little pieces of this and little pieces of that in a new genre, right, like how soul and salsa had gone into disco... and partly also how technology changes it.

Of course the person who was really fucking blowing the fuses of everything in the middle of all that – and sadly relevant talking about the decimation of AIDS – was Patrick Cowley.

Oh yeah, yeah so great, and like I say, I had never been exposed to that kind of music. What had become, I guess, post-disco is kind of interesting. You know, Berlin was pretty dark, you know, and there were clubs that played kind of that kind of stuff, so there is a crossover, but it was weird again being in an entirely different city and in a nightclub and hearing my tunes being played and, you know, there's people dressed in police outfits who may be police, right, or might be just a guy in an outfit. It was, again, an education, and soaked in a little bit, because like I said before I'd always liked disco, you know, we were all supposed to just like the Sex Pistols, but I definitely bought “boogie-oogie-oogie 'til you, you just can't boogie no more,” right?

Incredible record! And Malcolm McClaren loved disco, too, and really lots of the punks probably did... if they could admit it...

They all come out of the closet now and say, “Yeah, we all liked this and we all liked that, and we loved a bit of this,” but you just didn't talk about it, right?

And San Francisco also had the remnants of the previous subculture as well, I mean it was trippy, right? You know, a lot of that stuff was hallucinogenic music and the gay culture there had lived hand in hand with Haight Ashbury.

Right, but actually I don't think I really knew much about that at the time, you know? I was in my little bubble. It's the same thing with touring, too, which has been so much of my life. My kids say to me, “Have you ever been to so-and-so place”? And I'm like, “Yeah.” “Right, well, what was it like?” “Well, uhh, I have no idea.” You know, we went to the hotel and to the venue and then back to the airport, right? Or we drove through into a parking lot and stayed there for several hours. You know, that was touring life, right? But no, I got to spend a bit of time in San Francisco and see a little subculture of San Francisco too, which again, was sort of on the cusp of a big change... So this all goes into my sort of mental mixing palette.

So you had a taster of DJ culture a good while before you got invited to acid house parties, but what else was in the mix through that period?

Well, I had met Jah Wobble... I'd come back to England, I'd done these few albums with Anne Clark, she gets a great record deal, and I get... royalties. You know, it's interesting, we've actually been chatting recently, because we have to kind of talk every now and again about things that get licensed. And she's had a few illness issues. And, you know, when you have those kind of serious things, it puts things into perspective a little bit, you think, mm, yeah I could probably stop being a dick about things. So yeah, I'd moved back, we'd done a last Anne Clark album. They had given me an apartment, you know the YMCA in Centrepoint? The top floor of that were like long term residential kind of apartments. So you could rent for three months. And I think Virgin Records put me up there for like six months or something like that, to do an Anne Clark album. I didn't really have anywhere to live so doing an album was quite a good excuse to have an apartment in the center of center of London for six months!

And I'd also done this stuff for Southern Records⁵, I'd gone up to Southern Studios and had learned how to use a Fairlight. It's this big prototype sampling system. It's where the word sample comes from, in fact. Because you could only record about second and a half information into it. So you couldn't record a whole piece of music, they described it that you could just record a sample of it. And that's where that word originates, I think. So I've done a few sessions up in Southern, doing programming their Fairlight, which I think had belonged to Al Jourgensen, I'm not sure. And then a studio out in Whitechapel for Drum Theatre⁶, the one of them Virgin Bands. So, Fairlight stuff.

And I'd met Wobble and he wanted to put the Invaders Of The Heart back together with a new lineup. And I was I was a big Wobble fan, so I was like, “Yeah I'd love to be your keyboard player!” I wasn't a very good keyboard player, though. I wasn't like a great piano player in any way. I was a good programmer. I could like, make up things and I could do what I now think of in terms of musique concrète, right? I was really interested in tape loops and found sounds and all that kind of stuff, but didn't have the technology of big facilities back then or the ability to do it. Then some of those early samplers gave you an opportunity to do that kind of thing, make little interesting loops of stuff, so I did a lot of those kind of things. And... I think I made the mistake of thinking I was... a valued permanent member of the band.

But we did an album⁷, which involved... well, we spent a lot of time with Wobble, you know, looking back on it, we never looked after one another, nobody looked after each other in those days, nobody thought about anybody's mental health, or any of that stuff, you know, and Wobble, as I'm sure he would say, had struggles with alcohol, and at that period had stopped drinking. But it was still white-knuckling it, you know, in a fragile position. And we were just like, “Oh, yeah, whatever.” I loved a drink, we all loved a drink and there's always drugs around. Always drugs, you know, from as long as I can remember. And I never expressed a preference. I quite liked them all. And I can remember people pressuring Wobble, “Go on, have a drink, have a drink, go on, have a drink.” And, well, I was going, “Oh, that's kind of funny,” you know, I'm just looking back on it going, [grimaces] yeah. We could have way be more supportive, but, you know, real men didn't express their feelings. You know what I mean? I don't know about you but that was my world.