‘Warm Leatherette’ and the synthpop road to Mute records

Posted On February 8, 2025February 8, 2025

Before Sheffield’s Warp Records scored the experimental techno underground in the 1990s, the UK’s most essential electronic label was Mute. Centre stage of the early ’80s synthpop explosion along with Some Bizzare and Factory, Mute would grow to international stature, helping deliver some of alternative music’s biggest names from Depeche Mode, Einstürzende Neubauten, Goldfrapp, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Fever Ray, and Moby.

While studying film and television at Guildford School of Art in the late ’60s, Daniel Miller began to fatigue from rock and pop’s stodgy slow down away from the initially exciting garage rock and began to look beyond the British and American charts for the new musical vanguard. Miller’s creative nose led him to West Germany, where groups like Can and Amon Düül II were proving themselves psychedelia’s true successors, crafting experimental cuts of progressive free-form rock coated in primitive electronics. Hooked, Miller befriended the person in charge of imports at Oxford Street’s Virgin Records shop and, over the years, eagerly exposed himself to Faust, Neu!, and crucially, Kraftwerk.

Two important things happened in the late 1970s, which led to a fortuitous convergence for Miller. Punk’s meteoric impact brought much-needed accessibility to music, tearing asunder the social barriers to forming a band and lighting a fire underneath the stale rock that Miller had abandoned years before. Second was the affordability of synths. While dabbling in lo-fi musique concrète at his college’s studio facilities, real electronic music had been out of reach due to the original synthesisers’ exorbitant prices and room-occupying sizes. The Minimoog and ARP 2600 ushered in a new era of portability for budding synthesists who could at least save up the money to choose between a car or a synth.

“…I started to make electronic music, and I thought that it (electronic music) was much more punk rock than punk rock was,” Miller told Electro Diskow in 2012. “Punk rock was very much still rooted in the past, I mean I loved a lot of it but it was R&B really and I thought that to really take that idea of accessibility and DIY forward there had to be another way. You shouldn’t have to learn three chords and I just thought, apart from my love of electronic music I actually thought it was the next step on and I wanted to make a record that reflected that.”

Saving the money from working overtime as a film editor, Miller bought a second-hand miniKORG 700S, a TEAC 2340 reel-to-reel tape recorder, and hired a Space Echo tape delay unit for the day to cut his first single. Inspired by JG Ballard’s dystopian Crash and informed by the limited peripheries of his DIY bedroom set-up, Miller adopted the alias The Normal and conjured two slices of terse, minimal synthpunk inspired by the avant-garde electronics of Cabaret Voltaire and Robert Rental. While the pulsing ‘TVOD’ served as the single’s A-side, it was ‘Warm Leatherette’ which proved to be The Normal’s most celebrated and enduring cut, a hissing, fizzing snap of taut unease illustrating the song’s wry, thematic explorations of car-crash fetishism punctured by stabs of atonal monophonic squall.

Such a unique single required a label with an extremely open mind. Making some pressings and initially shopping his single to Small Wonder and Lightning Records, it was the then-fledgling Rough Trade on Portobello Road which took a punt on The Normal’s debut single, agreeing to distribute and pressing 2000 copies. Needing a name for his new label, Miller remembered the cans of film with no audio he’d worked with as an assistant editor, which would be labelled ‘mute film’, and decided on Mute Records as a sly nod to his day job, ‘TVOD/Warm Leatherette’s catalogue number ‘Mute 1’ and the label’s first-ever release.

The single did better than expected, ultimately selling over 30,000 copies. It was played by John Peel on his BBC Radio 1 show, and covered by Grace Jones two years later. Mute hit the ground running, signing the influential Fad Gadget and issuing his ‘Back to Nature’ as Mute’s second single, forming the virtual synthpop group Silicon Teens and striking synthpop royalty with Yazoo and Depeche Mode, the latter selling out stadiums in America by the end of the ’80s.

Mute is UK independent music’s greatest success story, still operating today and releasing albums by electronic music’s contemporary cutting-edge from Desire Marea, Ben Frost, and KÁRYYN. While Miller and his creative ventures have never been clouded by nostalgia, any overview of Mute’s groundbreaking back catalogue still finds The Normal’s little single from over 45 years ago towering with its pioneering shadow.

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