This was one of the more enjoyable interviews that I've done, in that it felt more like provoking reminiscences from my grandfather than any sort of formal discussion. No disrespect intended, as 808 State is absolutely legendary; it just so happens that legends tend to be pretty old. Anyway, preparation for this interview basically kicked off my obsession with early 90's electronic music, and for good reason - 808 State defined the era, pioneering acid house and shaping the sound of the scene when it was more about dancing than whatever caused the mid-decade shift to the unfortunately-titled intelligent dance music period. They were all about raves, gear by the truckload, and an earnest commitment to the spiritual component of music (particularly live performance) - stuff that, for me, age 24, lives exclusively (but vividly) in others' memories.

This interview was conducted at the Durham office of the extremely well-equipped UNC radio station during last year's Moogfest. Founding 808 State members Graham Massey (center in the above image) and Andy Barker (right) were present; we didn't discuss the other major member, Darren Partington, who was arrested for selling crack a couple years back (A Guy Called Gerald, whose album Black Secret Technology was feature here a few months back, was there at the beginning but left very early on to do his own thing). We talked about all sorts of stuff, much of which comes back to nostalgia. You can hear a quick audio sample here.

There's so much fancy audio machinery in here, I can’t help but think of how peculiar it is that certain pieces of equipment essentially come to define entire genres. The 303 and acid house, for example.

Graham Massey: It’s an interesting thing with the 303, you see, because we were very interested in the 303 for a short period of time. We made an album called Newbuild, which is one of the first British acid house albums. And then we stopped using it for a long, long time. We’d occasionally use it, but it became almost like a historical reference. By the early 90s, it was a bit like oh, the 303… that’s a bit over with, isn’t it? You could never have foreseen it’s return so many times; I remember Josh Wink’s Higher State of Consciousness almost being a revivalist 303 record, and how old is that? Incredibly old. But at the time, it was like oh, the 303’s back. And then in recent years, with the new Roland reissues and the clones and things, it’s an instrument that we do use in our live set quite a lot now. There’s been improvements to the way of programming it. It was a difficult thing to program, and we used to have a process which was just sort of trial and error with it. To get one good pattern on it, we’d discard nine. Now it’s so much easier to program the modern versions, and you can fit it in with lots of other pieces of kit. Things move on, and now it’s used as a sort of reference point. It’s the same with guitars and guitar sounds - there’s a whole culture of guitars, people referring back to classic tones. You’ve got to have this amplifier with these particular effects pedals, made in this particular year.

Music technology has always kind of been like that: this holy grail aspect of a certain piece of equipment. Hence the price of 303s on the secondhand market. They’re certainly not worth, you know, $1500, $2000? There’s plenty of instruments that we used that could have had the iconic thing, but don’t. For instance, a keyboard that we always have to hire is a Roland D-50. It was a very overused synth in the period of the 80s when Michael Jackson was doing Bad and Thriller and stuff.

Andy Barker: It’s a nightmare to program [laughs].

Graham Massey: Yeah, that’s a nightmare to program. But it’s got a classic sound to it.

Andy Barker: Yeah, lush innit?

That’s such an odd tension, too - we have so much technological advance going on with electronic music, and yet each successive generation is hell-bent about getting back to the equipment available to their predecessors.

Graham Massey: There’s a great deal of nostalgia going on right around us, at the Moogfest. Nostalgia for a time of the pioneering electronic sounds of the Moog. There’s a classic-ness to those sounds that brings with it this cultural… I don’t know if baggage is the right word, but it has a lot of meaning with the history of the instrument. And that instrument is, what, over fifty years old now isn’t it? The true groundbreaking instruments of today are generally in software, isn’t it?

That’s an interesting twist, because pieces of software don’t exactly age or become scarce like hardware.

Graham Massey: Yeah, you say that, but you know operating systems are an important part of that. I have lots of things that I used to happily use that I don’t use because the operating system is now obsolete. I know a lot of producers that run varying operating systems - they go back to really early versions of Apple just to use a particular kind of plugin. That’s quite nostalgic itself.

I was born right into the software era - by the time I was aware of it, digital audio synthesis was a given. Coming from an analog musical background, what was particularly enticing about digital music making for you?

Graham Massey: Connectivity of the instruments. The Roland system - we didn’t see it as singular instruments, we saw it as a system. The 808 or 909 drum machine that could then fire a trigger into the sequencer of the Roland 101 mini-synthesizer. We could use the drum patterns to fire the sequencer, and the very tight locking of time was super-satisfying. It locked together in this kind of… like no band could. The funk was in it, you know? You could put the bass in all the correct gaps, the timing was tight. Not being a trained keyboard player, that polish that it gave to the music was very satisfying. You could freeze time with it.

I’d come from a band culture, where you all get in a room and wait for everybody to tune up, and then one guy might be in a weird mood or another might not show up. It was a very long process working with bands, and they always disintegrated. Technology was hugely liberating at the time, it was no wonder that everyone had this future hat on. You wanted to keep some elements of band culture in it, just to keep it organic. There was the Kraftwerk model of very clean, clinical things - that’s ok for a while, but you wanted to start putting some humanity into the equation. That’s why we came up with things like Pacific State - you’re looking for a voice in electronic music, so put a saxophone on it. It’s those balancing elements that give a very technological and yet human vibe.

With access to all these new sounds and techniques, who or what were you looking to for inspiration or direction?

Graham Massey: You can say that we were pioneering the genre, but if you went to a nightclub at that point in time there would have been plenty of music. There was a slight shift in that music to a more alien-sounding, atonal rejection of the music rules. A lot of the house music in the mit to late 80s was based on r’n’b, so it was vocal-led, had piano things that were derivative of gospel, had verse-chorus kinds of structures. Even dropdowns are just a middle eight in another form. They were musical structures from a previous time.

What I really liked about acid house is that it completely threw all that out of the window; it become much more to do with the avant-garde tradition of experimental electronic music, but it was danceable. The trouble with the experimental avant-garde music is that it might entertain the head, but this was full body entertaining. It was a social music as well - people were there, people were dancing, it brought people together. It was very important that it was a social music, and not a music that was unfriendly and repellent. But it had both elements, it was social and repellent. It was fabulously rebellious, and had the spirit of all rebellious music. It was almost like a political music, because it was alien and it was a time of alienation for people that lived in our town. The political climate at the time was that you couldn’t feel at home in your own town. This outsider feeling, it was a bonding place for people that felt pushed out of a different life. It was political, in a way, in that it brought people together in that. It was a soundtrack to alienation.

How do you think that, say, the unease of Britain at the time manifested itself in the music? Is it in the songs themselves, or is it what the music provides a respite from?

Graham Massey: It’s both. It’s the way social music works - when you’re in a massive warehouse full of people, that atmosphere from the music is both bonding and putting everybody into a sort of psychotic state, almost. You couldn’t play just any old music at those raves, could you?

Andy Barker: It was like escapism, wasn’t it? It was like people getting together and basically enjoying themselves without having to think about what’s going on in the world at that time.

Graham Massey: It had to block things out, didn’t it?

Andy Barker: Yeah, it was switch your brain off, let’s go.

Graham Massey: And it also had to block out history, because it didn’t have any historical references. That was important.

Andy Barker: There was nobody there telling you what you should be doing in your music. We can do this, because nobody’s done it before!

I suppose it helps that the sonic palette you were working with was essentially the sounds of the future.

Graham Massey: Sure, but having said that you can go and find 303s in earlier music. It’s there, but it’s not used in that way - exposed, pushed deliberately out of tune. I don’t think we tuned any of the keyboards until about… 1995 [laughs]. There’s some horrible clashes in there, listen to an album like Newbuild and you can’t say what key it’s in. It’s in all keys.

How would you go about trying to capture the rave experience in an album without reducing it to a collection of singles?

Andy Barker: We never thought of any album as a collection of singles, did we? We’d start an album, and we’d set out to do an album. If there were singles on it at the end, that was a bonus. It wasn’t, right, well this is gonna be the hit.

Graham Massey: It was kind of structured in a side a, side b way - there was a certain amount of tradition that had come from album culture, you know. Getting the opportunity to make an album was a rare thing, so it was important to use the twenty minutes a side in a meaningful way. For instance, the tapes that we recorded on were a certain length and ran at a certain speed, which dictated how much music you could do. The tapes were expensive, weren’t they, these big two-inch things. So if you had a minute left at the end of the tape, you wouldn’t waste it. So a track like The Fat Shadow on 90, this little thing which is essentially a drum machine ran at all kinds of different speeds with all kinds of random patterns in it that sounds like a piece of John Cage music, was meant just to fill that little bit of tape at the end of it. Albums used to have those little filler tracks, almost like b-side culture. I love that, when you’ve got a seven-inch single where it really didn’t matter what you put on the other side. That opened up a freedom in music, these special little private spaces for experimentation.

Andy Barker: That doesn’t exist with the formats nowadays, does it? You don’t have a reason to put an extra track on anything.

Graham Massey: It doesn’t have the context. You can put any old shit on the internet nowadays, there’s no special place [laughs].

Andy Barker: Like the end of tape thing, if you had a 12-inch vinyl you could fit three tracks - let’s do three-odd tracks on the back of it, or else it’s a waste of space.

Graham Massey: And there was a freedom in it! Another one of our tracks, Cubik, was a b-side, wasn’t it? Oh, we need a b-side. Let’s write a b-side. And with that freedom, that track really popped out. We released that on Tommy Boy as a b-side, and it got played enough in the clubs in New York that it bounced back to England onto the dance charts. We had to re-release the single, flipped around [laughs]. The dance floor chose that one.

So the limitations of the equipment and the medium ended up shaping the composition.

Graham Massey: Yeah, and another thing about Cubik is that we wrote it on a MIDI guitar. You play different shapes on the guitar than you would on a keyboard, especially if you’re not a very good keyboard player. So you have your habits, and playing something on the guitar comes out completely different than it would on a keyboard. Plus you can do the different tunings on the guitar to get different patterns that way. That was an interesting experiment in a new techno toy that we’d gotten that day.

In what way was your approach to making an album distinct from how you’d go about a live performance?

Andy Barker: We didn’t really have a target, did we? We had the idea that we ought to do an album, but we didn’t really have a target. It would slowly mutate as it went along - we’d finish a track and move on to the next, which was liable to be completely different.

Graham Massey: I think one of the things that was driving it was the technology. We’d just got hold of things like samplers, and we hadn’t finished exploring them by the time we were making the album. It was a super inspirational piece of equipment, the sampler. Imagine when that was new! The possibilities seems endless.

Andy Barker: It was like you had god in a box.

Graham Massey: You felt like it would never run out of ideas, in terms of being able to bounce ideas off of the thing. The sequencing thing, too, was getting better all the time. The rave scene was super exciting, but the technology thing was super exciting as well. Things were appearing on the market, and we were in the position to get hold of them because of some moderate success.

It’s funny how you’d usually think of those as being opposites - a rave is about the mass of people, whereas when you get a new piece of technology you’ll often be alone, totally engrossed in the machine.

Graham Massey: It’s different now, with the internet, with the sort of nerd camp where everyone can share news about new equipment. Back then, there were a few magazines that disseminated the technology. Music Technology magazine, for example, which was a very forward-thinking magazine. It was the only magazine in our newsagent that had people like Derrick May and Juan Atkins on the cover. These guys were important to us, and this magazine would treat them with respect by putting them on the cover. We got a cover early on, and A Guy Called Gerald got one as well. They formed the culture, these magazines. Like punk had fanzines, we had Music Technology and Sound On Sound.

I guess it’s similar to how buying music would have been at the time - much more of an event because you hadn’t learned all about it prior.

Graham Massey: You can go one the internet now and find old issues of those magazines and look at the classified ads in the back and weep [laughs]. Everyone had bought all their DX7s and everything, and so you could see the prices of people getting rid of their analog gear. It’s funny to see how they were marketing the new synthesizers to a completely new style of musician - band musicians, or rock musicians. Somebody should do a thing on the keyboard in rock bands. When we used to go in to buy synthesizers, there was always some guy playing Jump on the demonstration keyboard. It was pretty limiting, wasn’t it. Toto, or something like that [laughs].

You mentioned that you had to make an album. Obviously you were supporting yourselves - you sell an album, you go on tour - but was there an element of making the live experience available to people who were unlikely to make it to Manchester to see you guys? Making sure that the music was preserved beyond the moment in which it was performed.

Graham Massey: That’s interesting, because I sometimes hate it when you get phone footage and it’s a bad representation of the experience. Sort of like [makes hissing static noise]. It doesn’t do us any good, it’s of no interest to anybody, and it reflects badly on the band because the numbers are small. It’s irritating, really. In recent gigs, everything is live-streamed, and it’s quite distressing for a musician to be unable to go back and correct the mix. You really feel vulnerable. Sometimes you miss the sub-bass things, you get an odd mix.

Andy Barker: You don’t get that feeling like you was in a live venue, because most people are streaming on their phones, listening through a tiny speaker, and you’re not feeling the amount of sub-bass that was in that room. You’re missing out on something.

You could see the album as an opportunity to correct the record in that regard.

Graham Massey: It’s funny that you put it in that way, because I’ve not thought of it that way - there are so many people that can’t access a gig since we don’t do that many, but that want to access it. That you should try and provide that experience. But that takes money.

We think with blinkers on sometimes - it’s enough to just delivery the thing in a working way, to get a response from the audience. From my point of view, you really have to be in the room, you have to be committed to the experience. We both have to be committed. That whole experience of the rave thing for us was so 100% connected when audiences committed fully and when bands committed fully. The whole spiritual nature of the rave kind of thing just went up. It was such a thing we got accustomed to, and when we discover it now it’s never at things like day-to-day clubbing environments or a gigging circuit. You’ll get it at certain aspects of a festival - if you’re in a tent, you’ll find it. The dynamics of the spiritual connections of music in a thing like a festival are interesting to me, you know? It’s not about size, it’s about the connectivity of audiences.

Andy Barker: Sometimes an audience can be too big, can’t it? It just fails. When there’s a hundred thousand people in front of you, it just won’t work. It’s not intimate enough.

That’s interesting too, because the same music in the same place isn’t guaranteed to replicate an experience. Suppose you headlined Glastonbury in 2017 and 1997 - those would be two entirely different experiences.

Graham Massey: Yeah, we did it in ‘93, was it? We were the last band on, and it was before they televised it. We don’t have a photo of it, we don’t have any footage of it.

Andy Barker: That was an experience though, wasn’t it?

Graham Massey: Yeah, it was an amazing experience, but we were talking about disseminating that experience to other people and we completely failed. There’s no record of it.

Andy Barker: But the people that were there remember it, and they remember having an amazing night. If you go see one of your favorite bands playing in a medium-size venue, you walk out and you just think what a great night that was. And you can’t emulate that feeling. Well not yet, maybe technology at some point can give you that feeling. But you can’t emulate that by watching a stream on your phone.

Graham Massey: It’s a souvenir. Like buying a DVD, isn’t it, it’s a souvenir. There was somebody on our website a couple weeks ago, some guy who was getting married to this girl… they’d met at an 808 gig and had a particular memory of some sort. It was something where this memory of it being recorded by one of the guys on our forum was significant to this guy’s fiancé who had died. [I've spent quite a lot of time on 808State.com and elsewhere trying to find what exactly this was referring to, but haven't yet - Corrigan] They are kind of souvenirs of an emotional experience, so they do have that kind of value. I didn’t realize that until that point, when someone wrote actually, there’s video of that! It was significant that somebody had saved it for him. I know why people do that - I am here, now.