Clock Dva

Sheffield, the leaden heart of England, its rooftops blackened by soot and its alienating cycle of lives. A steel conglomerate, where existence is marked by the metallic clang of heavy industry and the roar of great stamping forges. Sheffield, capital of stainless steel and engine of the Industrial Revolution, where the desolation of factory assembly-line labour merges with a rebellious, anticonformist yearning. Not the primitivist kind found in punk, though. Perhaps due to a futuristic spirit dictated precisely by the landscape and its sounds. Perhaps due to an ancient rivalry with London. "London burning they all shout/ But I wouldn't even piss on it to put the fire out" was the caustic anthem with which local band 2.3 mocked the Clash in "(I Don't Care About) London". The fact remains that, as Phil Oakey of Human League revealed, "there wasn't even a single punk band in Sheffield". And "in the city's garages," recalls Simon Reynolds, "young people were tinkering with synthesizers, tape recorders and rudimentary drum machines". Sheffield didn't know it yet, but from its radioactive slag one of the most creative music scenes in the history of British music was about to sprout.

Amid crumbling basements and old abandoned factories, an unstoppable creative ferment spreads. The backdrop is still the noise-rock liturgies of industrial music, which guru Genesis P-Orridge was detonating in London with his Throbbing Gristle. But the horizons stretch even wider. They could chase the anarchic dreams of the old Dadaist pioneers of Zurich (Cabaret Voltaire). Or they could push the clock hands even further forward, toward an undefined future where the robotic electronics of Kraftwerk and jazz-funk grooves let themselves be dragged by the martial basslines of dark-punk toward a menacing, destabilising avant-garde. As in the case of Clock Dva.

The name itself, after all, says it all: a moniker inspired by Anthony Burgess's famous novel "A Clockwork Orange", which inspired Stanley Kubrick's film of the same name: the clock symbolises the mechanical surrealism of time, while Dva (meaning "two" in the Russian-derived slang spoken by Alex and his droogs) evokes numerology and cabalistic lore. The "Clockwork Orange" operation (book, film and soundtrack) had an enormous impact on English culture of the time, particularly in futuristic Sheffield. As Reynolds recalls, "The Dignity Of Labour", the title of the Human League's second EP, was the mural featured in one scene of the film, and Heaven 17 took their name from an imaginary pop group mentioned in the book, while Carlos's soundtrack lit the electronic spark for swarms of young local musicians. Among them was also Adolphus "Adi" Newton, formerly of Future, the original nucleus of fellow Sheffield residents Human League. A tireless artistic factotum, juggling music, projections and installations, in multimedia performances not too far removed from those of Throbbing Gristle. And it was Genesis P-Orridge himself who facilitated the first official recording of the psych-jazz-industrial jams under the Clock Dva name, titled "White Souls In Black Suits" (1980).

A year later, "Thirst" refined that sound, increasingly freed from industrial conventions and increasingly infused with funk beats, psychedelic aromas and wave-inflected shadows. But just as the group was gearing up for lift-off, the tragedy of bassist Stephen James "Judd" Turner's fatal overdose upended all their plans.

Newton, however, did not give up. Having reassembled the band around a new line-up (Paul Browse on saxophone, John Carruthers, future Banshee, on guitar, Dean Dennis on bass and Nick Sanderson on drums), with the crucial contribution of producer/keyboardist Hugh Jones, he managed to land a contract with the forward-thinking Polydor, which yielded the album of rebirth. Because "Advantage" would forever set the coordinates of a unique sound of crucial influence on subsequent generations, while also securing the band a decent following, thanks to more accessible and clean-cut compositions that were nonetheless no less unsettling and futuristic than those that had built its legend. A peculiar electronic dark-dance, scarred by harmonic and noise-based devices of every kind.

If the early Dva were "a right mess: junk, violence and tape recorders", as Newton himself admits, the "Advantage"-era band was a tight, mature outfit that – beyond just being frightening – knew how to write songs. If not a concept album, then at least a noir film. Set in a rainy, nocturnal Paris that has lost its soul and sunk into an icy chaos. A sordid universe, populated by outcasts and beautiful losers, tortured heroines and dark angels. All chasing an impossible salvation.

The shadowy “Tortured Heroine”, sinuous and chilling, booms with deep gloom, opening the dance floor of this catacomb-like discotheque, drums and drum machine hammering out the rhythm. Like restless zombies, “Beautiful Losers” writhes along, its unsettling brass blares heightening the sense of estrangement: Ian Mackay's sax (Roxy Music) still teaching a masterclass. A sound that detonates in all its explosive charge in the danse macabre of “Resistance”, a possessed electric gallop à-la Sisters Of Mercy, which Newton delivers with epic swagger, in turn teaching a great deal to swarms of disciples (first and foremost, Wayne Hussey's Mission).

It's a sensory experience even before it's a musical one. You breathe in a sense of eternity (“Eternity In Paris”), yet remain trapped in a bottomless well, where claustrophobia (the obsessive drumming, the hypnotic bass lines à la Mick Karn) and despair (the lacerating scratches of horns and guitar distortion) let only scattered shreds of romanticism filter through (the female vocalizations, the faint glimmers of keyboards).

Newton intones his melodramas in a cavernous register with mounting emphasis (“The Secret Life Of The Big Black Suit”), backed by dance beats and an orgy of manipulated tape loops. It's tribal cyber-punk, jazz from beyond the grave (reaching its ultimate apotheosis in the spectacular noir cabaret of “Dark Encounter”, over 7 minutes of murky horns and deathly siren voices), rhythm that shatters and recompacts into an indistinct mass of sounds and noises. Clock Dva aren't interested in the mere layering of sources: like expert dissectors, they debone them and graft them onto new sonic skeletons, turning, for instance, the funk of “Breakdown” into a hypnotic ode to alienation, or the ethno-jazz of “Noises In Limbo” into a mechanical ballet for androids.

Even the Velvet Underground's “Black Angels Death Song” doesn't escape this fate, transfigured here into an apocalyptic trance amid walls of synths and the electric discharges of the drum machine. “Poem”, on the other hand, is the freezing calm after the bomb: spectral, liquid, almost atonal ambient music. A piece of classical austerity, with Newton's biting timbre declaiming sparse, desolate verses.

Remixes of the two singles “Resistance” and “Breakdown” round out the CD edition (with a tracklist different from the original vinyl, which featured 8 tracks instead of 12).

But the album's success wouldn't be enough to quell the restlessness of the tireless hacker Newton, who, after disbanding the group in 1983, moved to Holland to launch a new musical creature (The Anti Group Communication Project), only to reunite Clock Dva in 1988, right in the midst of the cyber-punk epic, steering them toward even more rhythmic and obsessive electronic research, which would culminate in another gem, “Buried Dreams”.

“Advantage”, however, would remain the perfect formula: the alchemy capable of ferrying the intuitions of Sheffield's industrial pioneers toward a modern, all-encompassing sound, one in which every genre boundary was finally torn down.

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30/09/2012