A Certain Ratio - Urban Neo-Tribalism

The story of A Certain Ratio is tightly bound to that of the record label Factory Records, the driving force of Manchester's scene in the Eighties, not only because the band was among the first to be signed to it, but because from the very start it embodied the label's experimental attitude, foreshadowing the path that would lead from the bleak post-industrial climate of new wave to the explosive fusion of rock and dance that would detonate at the turn of the Nineties with the Madchester scene.

In 1978 the charismatic and mercurial Tony Wilson, already known on the city scene as the host of the TV show "Granada Reports", organized, together with Alan Erasmus, a series of concerts at Manchester's Russell Club, billed as Factory Nights. The venture would soon blossom into a full-fledged record label, named Factory in homage to Andy Warhol and his notion of reproducible art, made through production processes in every way akin to those of industry.

Wilson would soon reveal himself as the true catalyst of the city's music scene, bringing to prominence a string of figures who would go on to shape the history of independent rock, including designer Peter Saville (creator of covers, posters and artwork in a rigorous modernist style), producer Martin Hannett, and a series of bands, among them Ian Curtis's Joy Division.

When Wilson proposes that A Certain Ratio cut a single, the band is a quartet made up of Martin Moscrop and Peter Terrell on guitars, Jeremy Kerr on bass and Simon Topping on vocals. Drummer Donald Johnson, recruited by Wilson himself, will soon join the fold. The name comes from the lyrics of a song by Brian Eno, "The True Wheel", featured on "Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)".

If Factory's first release is the legendary double EP "A Factory Sample", featuring tracks by Joy Division, Durutti Column, John Dowey and Cabaret Voltaire, A Certain Ratio's "All Night Party" can boast the catalogue number Fac 5, making it one of the label's very earliest musical releases, Factory having a habit of assigning a number to absolutely everything it produced (a badge, a poster, the Hacienda club). The track, marked by a bleak guitar riff, is still fairly rough-hewn and gives little hint of what is to come, but it already introduces listeners to Topping's solemn baritone voice, a distinguishing trait of the band that would lead to endless comparisons with the far more famous Curtis.

Factory's tendency to experiment with different formats to showcase its music also accounts for the oddity of the band's next release, dated 1980, in the form of a cassette titled The Graveyard And The Ballroom, given that side A is a demo recorded on a four-track at Graveyard Studios in Prestwich, while side B is a live recording from a concert at London's Electric Ballroom. The material, which would never be issued on LP and would only reach CD in 2004, contains rudimentary versions of songs that would later turn up on the actual debut album and on singles from the same period, such as "Flight", "Choir", "The Fox". The bleakness of these early tracks reflects the surroundings and context of their first gigs, held in buildings once used for military purposes, like Sally's Army on Hulme Street, with the band dressed in paramilitary uniforms producing martial, aggressive rhythms.

More important, though, is the musical humus that encourages the band to work out its singular sonic blend: the five, fans of the African-American funk of Parliament-Funkadelic, are pushed toward the idea of black music reworked by white musicians by DJ Robert Gretton (future manager of Joy Division), who mixed punk, reggae and Northern soul at the Russell Club nights, as well as by Wilson himself, who identifies in Johnson the perfect candidate, being a drummer schooled in funk. Today the musician says he was drawn precisely by the fact that his bandmates used guitars in a rhythmic rather than rock key: "The point was that they were using the wrong instruments to produce the right rhythms. I wanted to add something to that, and then free them up, to start doing other things. The fact is, they sounded like nobody else."

Freed from the spontaneist spirit of punk, the band's members seem determined to leap over the barrier dividing it from dance music, a divide that was more ideological than musical (a slogan of the time was "disco sucks"), following in the footsteps of similar experiments carried out by New York's Talking Heads and British guru Brian Eno. The programmatic statement of intent is the 1980 single "Shack Up", a cover of a Seventies American funk classic by the Banbarras. The track is lively and succeeds both in declaring its allegiance to American urban funk sound and in highlighting the band's originality, which comes through above all in Topping's dark voice and the disorienting use of trumpet.

The real turning point, however, comes from the song's relative success in America: Wilson rents a loft in New York and sends the band to record an LP in the Big Apple together with producer Martin Hannett.

The result is the single "Flight" from October 1980 and the LP To Each... from May 1981. "Flight" is one of the most significant tracks, bearing everywhere Hannett's highly distinctive touch, already at work on the celebrated Joy Division albums. The track is a long (six-minute), slow blend of funky rhythms, punctuated by impalpable keyboard touches and Topping's spoken baritone. Black music is transformed into a cold, geometric, almost metaphysical sound, an environment where Topping's vocalizing piles up in whispers and sudden distortions, merging with sonic matter now filled out by guitar parts, now thrown open into wide dreamlike rifts by the synths. It's an oneiric ride steered by Kerr's rigorous, geometric bass. Anyone familiar with the producer's work on "Closer" cannot help but find a reference point there, yet here the lesson of Talking Heads' "Fear Of Music" and "Remain In Light" also seems deeply important, albums where funk likewise grew solemn and metaphysical, probing the dark heart of a metropolis experienced as a mental landscape and a futuristic obsession.

Side B matters too: "I think the best thing Hannett ever did for us was 'Blown Away' on the B-side of 'Flight'... it was basically just a percussion track. And he took it to another level with all these layers of sound", says the guitarist today in the interview included in the anthology Early.

Hannett's touches create an absolutely spectral, harrowing atmosphere, without taking anything away from the driving power of a rhythm section of African derivation. "And Then Again", also featured on the second side of the twelve-inch (but already present in a live version on the flip side of "Shack Up"), further reinforces this with another concert of echoes, hypnotic rhythms, and sinister, disturbing sounds. These are the neo-tribal dreams of Talking Heads, champions of a new Babel of cultures and sounds, transported into a decidedly more sinister dimension, an authentic industrial nightmare, by a group with New York on its mind and, in its eyes, the landscape of a Manchester laid waste and overwhelmed by the decay that followed the collapse of industry.

Here, then, the interplay of fullness and emptiness underlying so many tracks on the debut To Each… seems to evoke the gloom of urban landscapes, with their enormous tenement blocks opening up chasms of darkness between their bodies. It's a geometry of industrial archaeology that lends solemnity to broken, jagged rhythms, while vocal interjections alternate with sounds of various kinds and deranged trumpet incursions, carrying the whole thing into an estranging, hallucinated dimension. Proof of this is "The Fox", a masterful tribal funk track where the voice soon gives way to effects and rhythmic obsessions, creating a veritable mental landscape, far removed from the physicality of Black music, and decidedly steeped in alienation and existential chill.

The mechanical pulse of "Felch", marked out by a dull-toned guitar, seems to be the offspring both of Black tribalism and of the cold, unsettling aesthetic of the man-machine, of the complete depersonalisation of the individual within the urban environment that would lead to the proto-industrial sound of Cabaret Voltaire. The track ends up derailing into a further trumpet intervention from Topping, flagging the theme of inner neurosis in a way far more musical and concrete than the rather literary approach that would make Joy Division famous. It's precisely because of this genuinely experimental, noise-oriented vocation - which often leads him to "vanish" from the track - that the singer loses out to Curtis in the contest to represent the voice of the Manchester wave, though he invests himself with a rather original, sinister charisma.

Acting as a counterpoint on the debut LP is a more decidedly rock track like "Choir", where the bass pulses, the thin rhythm guitar is flanked by a beefier riff, and the voice declaims in baritone, epic tones, at times overwhelmed by an estranging choir of white voices. "My Spirit" seems to occupy a middle ground, with the usual funk pulse broken up by the interjections of an echoing guitar.

The heart of the album, however, lies in the hypnotic liturgies of "Oceans, Loss" and above all "Forced Laugh", where Topping's voice turns as chant-like as a Gregorian psalm, while an obsessive drum pattern builds an atmosphere of anxiety and tension up to the crescendo of ever more unsettling trumpet breaks, only to collapse back into stasis. An ossianic bass and an effects-laden guitar punctuate the whole, creating a tremendously atmospheric effect.

It seems that on this record Hannett managed to work on a crossing between rock and ambient that with Joy Division he had only managed to hint at (tracks like the - admittedly minor - "Candidate" and "Autosuggestion" come to mind), given that band's hot-blooded, granite-like nature and its decidedly more rock-oriented background. A Certain Ratio, by contrast, are more abstract, pliable, experimental. This latter quality is one often forgotten in the recent post-punk revivals, which tend to rest on the effectiveness of many songs from the era while neglecting the more focused research into sound, into the hypnotic qualities of the marriage between Afro rhythms and electronics - that is, between ancestral trance and futuristic trance. The true manifesto of this attitude is "Winter Hill", which closes the LP, an apocalyptic, possessed charge driven by an African rhythm section as tribal as it has ever been, over which echoes of distorted voices rise up like a possessed, menacing mantra. It's a chilling track, one that manages to evoke Conrad's African "heart of darkness" within a fierce, nocturnal urban setting on the brink of catastrophe. A true masterpiece of the album, it could be compared to similar experiments carried out by Brian Eno ("My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts") and New Order ("Denial"), but above all by industrial-area groups like Cabaret Voltaire, underlining thereby a closeness to the more esoteric, almost neo-pagan side of contemporary research into rhythm - parallel to, but sharply distinct from, the paths leading to the dancefloor, even an alternative one.

It seems that the production work originally carried out by Hannett in New Jersey was actually destroyed due to an engineer's mistake, forcing a second attempt in Manchester, one the band considered less successful. To Each… and "Flight" nonetheless remain a testament to the fundamental role played by the producer in the first chapter of Factory's musical history, the one coinciding with the post-punk epic.

Around this same period comes perhaps the most surreal episode in the band's history, when they receive a request to become Grace Jones's backing band for a cover of the Talking Heads' "Houses In Motion": the answer, naturally, is a refusal, staying true to Factory's independent spirit.

Another notable track is the January '81 single "Do The Du", once again as fresh and energetic as it is sharp and geometric, a marriage between the relentless grind of the rhythm section and the singer's existential spleen. The more measured "Waterline", released the same year, introduces a few variations that anticipate the second LP, Sextet, from 1982. Meanwhile, time spent in New York leads to an encounter with vocalist Martha Tilson, who joins the band (now a sextet), as well as a deeper exploration of jazz and Cuban rhythms, pushing the use of percussion to new extremes. A track like "Skipscada", complete with rather silly whistles and bells, is a clear symptom of this.

The band seems to be moving towards shaking off Factory's strong brand identity, this time rejecting producer Hannett's input and choosing the path of self-production. The sounds thus become warmer and more physical, as shown by the rhythmic, percussive emphasis of "Gum", though this also reveals the dangerous tendency to turn the original geometric sensibility of their early days into a formalism as austere as it is sterile.

Overall, the album moves more decisively towards an intellectual, white funk sound, already hinted at by the singles, leaving behind the unsettling stasis of the debut.

Meanwhile, as the band spends time in New York, the sonic landscape is changing, with the birth of rap, hip-hop and electro, the success of Africa Bambaataa, the explosion of the DJ figure and of venues hosting DJ sets, creating a musical revolution built on early forms of tape manipulation, remixes, and the extension of tracks aimed at prolonging dancefloor ecstasy. Africa and urban neo-tribal style are also in vogue in the world of imagery and art, with the success of Jean-Michel Basquiat, championed by none other than that same Warhol with whom this whole story began. New wave gloom is about to give way to decidedly more hedonistic and energetic combinations, and the Factory label adapts magnificently with two decisive moves: the creation of a club in Manchester, the Hacienda, in emulation of New York's Danceteria, and the release of "Blue Monday", the revolutionary electronic track by New Order (the former Joy Division, orphaned by Curtis's suicide).

The standout track on Sextet, and also the band's last major single, is "Knife Slits Water", which revisits a slow charge in the vein of "Flight", but where electronics have become a genuine sonic body (note the metronomic pulse of the drum machine) rather than a mere play of effects and disturbance, over which Tilson's voice delivers a robotic spoken-word performance, similar to Laurie Anderson's on "Big Science" (another pivotal moment for electronic music being the success of her "O Superman").

Amid the shifting styles, certain constants remain that make Factory and its roster of bands great: the work ethic of true working-class sons, the drive to experiment, the artisanal spirit in which the business of production is carried out (for years Wilson would sign no real contracts, working with his bands purely on trust). A Certain Ratio delve ever deeper into dance territory, setting aside their more experimental edges and opening up to various Latin and Brazilian rhythms as well as reggae, mindful too of Moscrop's youthful listening in South Africa.

I'd Like To See You Again, in October '82, brings the party rhythms of "Touch" and "Saturn", and marks Simon Topping's last appearance on the band's discography.

This closes the important chapter in the history of A Certain Ratio, with the departure of a figure who seems to embody the contradictions of a decidedly original band, but who never seems able to reap the rewards of what he'd sown. Above all, the singer appears to have suffered from the similarity of his vocal timbre to that of Curtis, which only ever earned him negative criticism: "We were always accused of being morbid when Simon sang," Moscrop says in an interview. There's no need to point out how tragicomic it sounds to read such a statement in a 2000s music scene where Ian Curtis clones thrive and multiply, from the admittedly worthy Interpol to the far more irritating Editors.

As for the music too, the genuine rock-dance fusion that would transform Manchester from a grey industrial city into the capital of euphoria by the late Eighties, with the Hacienda turned into a slice of Ibiza transplanted up North, would see other bands take the spotlight, from New Order's "Technique" to Primal Scream's "Screamadelica" (a true musical anthem to the ecstasy explosion) right through to Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses.

In the early Nineties, however, the party would end for Factory, overwhelmed by the Hacienda's debts and by a musical management no longer equal to the situation (for one thing, they'd let the Smiths slip away), swept aside by a music landscape in which Wilson's naive spontaneity now seemed out of place.

A Certain Ratio survived through various lineup changes and increasingly anonymous albums (Force from '86, the last one on Factory, Good Together from '89, Up In Downsville from '92, Change The Station from '96) right up to the present day, but the only notable development was Topping's involvement in the city's house scene with the band Quando Quango.

While the new wave revival rages on, aided also by the dark times of the 2000s, and Factory is celebrated on film (Michael Winterbottom's "24 Hour Party People"), especially for its most high-profile heroes (Anton Corbijn's "Control" on Ian Curtis), and so-called punk-funk finds new life with !!! and Lcd Soundsystem, it's only right to also remember a band like A Certain Ratio, rather overlooked but well worth rediscovering.

Between 2004 and 2005, all of the band's classic albums were reissued, accompanied by the anthology Early, which collects the singles from their debut up to '85.

One last mention must go to the legendary Tony Wilson, whom this writer remembers introducing New Order in Turin with a line along the lines of "fuck U2, this is New Order": he passed away in 2007, and we could use more enthusiasts like him to help revive the fortunes of former industrial cities.

In the 2000s, however, A Certain Ratio rediscovered the pleasure of playing together, even performing in the United States for the first time since 1985 on 16 November 2008, headlining the Part Time Punks festival at The Echo in Los Angeles, and releasing a new studio album, Mind Made Up The Same (2008), on which the band sound in fine form, with Donald Johnson contributing vocals on some tracks. Still led by figures such as Martin Moscrop, Jez Kerr and Denise Johnson, the British band deliver a feisty opening track in "I Feel Light", with a tight riff and a rhythmic freshness worthy of their golden years, paired with refined, restless arrangements. It's a combination explored elsewhere on the record too, as on "Very Busy Man" and the title track, while "Rialto 6" almost sounds like a 1960s spy-story theme. Denise Johnson's contribution to "Down Down Down" is invaluable, with an arrangement driven by clavinet, while "Teri" takes us straight back into Durutti Column territory.

In 2018, Mute Records began reissuing the British band's back catalogue, also releasing acr:set, a collection of mostly older tracks plus two previously unreleased ones, one of which ("Dirty Boy") was recorded with Magazine's Barry Adamson and features a recording of Tony Wilson.

Next came the box set acr:box, a kind of retrospective marking the band's 40th anniversary, also celebrated with a tour.

Their next album of new material, ACR Loco (2020), was their first record of fresh songs in 12 years, and features three of the band's original members – Jez Kerr, Martin Moscrop and Donald Johnson – alongside the session players from the group's current live lineup. It's a record that reveals all the craft of this seasoned ensemble, but also a genuine desire to still put themselves on the line, hinted at by a disorienting opening track like "Friends Around Us", which swings between blues-rock, funk and drum'n'bass, echoed by another highly groove-driven track, "Bouncy Bouncy", which winks at acid-jazz, while Madchester echoes resurface on tracks like "Yo Yo Gi" and "Supafreak". There are also softer moments, such as the almost romantic "Always In Love", and even a dance number ("Berlin").

But this new chapter for the band, still built around the founding trio (Donald Johnson, Jez Kerr and Martin Moscrop), seems to have given A Certain Ratio's adventure fresh momentum, as they try again three years later with 1982 (2023). The album kicks off strongly with an explosive opening trio of tracks: from the psychedelia of "Samo" to the wild rhythm of "Waiting On A Train" and on to the dancefloor cadences of the title track, bolstered by valuable contributions from rapper Chunky and vocalist Ellen Beth Abdi.

And while "Tombo in M3" stretches out into more expansive, atmospheric territory, rhythm once again takes charge on driving romps like "Constant Curve" and "Holy Smoke", which once again prove the good health of a band that seems unwilling to surrender to the passing of time.

And so, at the start of 2024, A Certain Ratio announced their new album, their thirteenth studio record, It All Comes Down To This. Produced by Dan Carey, head of the Speedy Wunderground label (who has also worked with Black Midi, Kae Tempest and Black Country, New Road), it will be released on 19 April via Mute. "We wrote the album while the world was in turmoil, and it still is," commented Martin Moscrop. "If you think about climate change, corporate warfare, the environment, Trump in power, Johnson, the war in Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, it really all comes down to this. It's probably the most political album we've ever made."

Just a year on from 1982, A Certain Ratio return with their thirteenth album.

Accustomed, over their long career, to surrounding themselves with session players and collaborators, on “It All Comes Down to This” ACR decide to pare things back to their original core, partly setting aside the modus operandi tied to the period of intense experimentation in which their adventure began.

So the circle tightens around longtime members Jez Kerr, Martin Moscrop and Donald Johnson, though they're joined at the production desk by Dan Carey, a man who knows a thing or two about bands that colour outside the lines.

From the meeting of Dan Carey and ACR, who had already worked together on the 2021 remix of “Down and Dirty”, comes a desire to abandon, at least in part, the funk, setting aside the slap bass to try to strike a fresh compromise between new melodies and the muscular rhythms that have always defined their sound.

The album kicks off strongly with the one-two punch of “All Comes Down to This” and “Keep It Real”: the guitars soar, jagged and scratchy, propped up by Donald Johnson's powerful drive and by synths that push their way into every pause and suspension.

When the beats slow down, the sounds darken and the atmosphere turns suffocating in the murky trip-hop of “Surfer Ticket” and in the anxious dub of “Bitten by a Lizard”.

But on “It All Comes Down to This” shifts in climax are a constant; so while a few rays of sunshine creep back in amid the airy synths of “God Knows”, it's on “Where You Coming From”, driven by Jez Kerr's bass, that you can almost feel the contagious euphoria of 90s Madchester shining through.

On “Estate Kings” it's Donald Johnson who takes the mic to tell tales of the Manchester of his past, while Martin Moscrop's trumpet embroiders jazzy threads, and if the closing “Dorothy Says” might sound, title-wise, like a nod to the Velvets, its soft, swaying groove confirms every suspicion.

Ultimately, it's sheer variety that gives “It All Comes Down to This” its strength, and even though the risk of déjà vu always lurks around the corner, the pairing of Dan Carey and ACR proves a winning one.

Excellent work from the producer, who has managed to bring out the best in a band still hungry to put itself on the line.

Indeed, echoing the infectious refrain of “Out from Under”, the album's sole concession to funk, “Groove with the rhythm, it's always giving”, ACR still have plenty left to give.

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