It’s impossible to talk about synthpop without mentioning Hard Corps. If the word underrated should be applied in full, its place goes to them. Formed in 1984 by Robert Doran, Clive Pierce and Hugh Ashton, they recruited the voice of Regine Fetet, which besides being an unique singer, had a strong and audacious stage presence. They debuted with the EP Dirty/Respirer on Survival Records, an independent cult label at the time. To add some notoriety to their beginnings, the track “Respirer” was produced by electronic music production supremo Daniel Miller, owner of Mute Records.
Mixing pure pop textures in tripping synth ambiences, they developed the template of what would be called few years later as the Synthpop Wave. However, even having potential tracks like "Je Suis Passee” and playing as a support act in 1985 for The Cure and in 1988 for Depeche Mode, success proved to be elusive. Hi-Jinx that even the destiny can’t explain! When their first album was out in 1990, produced by the legendary sound engineer and producer Martin Rushent, the band had already split out.
They recently released a 2021 version of their 80’s timeless classic ‘Porte Bonheur (Lucky Charm)’ on Eskimo Recordings, in the compilation Next Wave Acid Punx, curated by Berlin-based Musician and DJ, Luca Venezia aka Curses.
JRS (The Brvtalist) and Melanie Havens did an exclusive interview with Robert Doran from Hard Corps, talking about the track rework, memories from gigs, their concepts and much more. Read below.
-Melanie Havens
Tell us a little about the song “Porte Bonheur (Lucky Charm) 2021” that appears on this massive compilation, Next Wave Acid Punx.
There are two quite different versions, a longer one and a radio one.
We originally recorded Porte Bonheur in our studio in Brixton as a demo and performed it live a few times (there is a live at the Fridge, Brixton You Tube video) and then it got refined more and recorded with an engineer called Mark Saunders onto 24 track at Blackwing Studios in London.
Blackwing was linked to Depeche Mode. This version became the radio mix and Daniel Miller joined us to co-produce the final mix in another studio in North London. I think it was called Konk and set up by the Kinks.
For the long version which is now Porte Bonheur 2021 we decided to rework it quite differently at our studio in Brixton, with a more four to the floor rhythm, pumping sequencers and a drone pad which feels more atmospheric in some ways for this version. This became the live version too.
For the 2021 release of Porte Bonheur, on the compilation, we have just added some weight and a few other SFX we felt we might have done today rather than all those years ago. So, it is different, and the mastering is very good too.
A memory from the time of some synchronicity. I had written a part in the middle of the radio version on a vocoder to emulate an opera singer and was including it in the longer version when one evening our manager John B came around with his friend’s daughter. She wanted to see a studio and said she was a singer. Everything was set up anyway so I said she could sing over Lucky Charm which was on the mixing desk at the time. Then, just before they left, I asked her, do you sing in any other style? She couldn’t have been more than 14 or 15 years old and she looked over at me through the studio glass and said, I can sing opera. I nearly fell off my seat and after a few hours she had replaced the vocoder part.
How do you feel revisiting some of the older tracks you made? Do you still connect with it quite a bit or does it sound like something from another world?
I totally connect with the material especially the earlier material, as that to me was the most exciting, investigative part of the journey. Working at that time with the Roland System 100M and eventually other Roland synths (I had a Jupiter 6) was so new, exciting and full of possibilities stretching out before us. Kraftwerk were pioneering and out on their own carving a way forward. We felt we were carving a sort of alternative, lo-fi, tougher more industrial version of Kraftwerk.
Our ethos was much more of an opposite to elitist, pomp, arrogant, show business, meaningless rock music which we despised. To us music had to have some essence or meaning at its heart. We were surrounded by cynical music business bands some very skilful but producing the equivalent of a chocolate box painting, ‘full of sound and fury but signifying nothing’.
We had no vocalist in the very early days so it was a fantastic moment when Regine joined and the machines and songs came to life. I still remember how amazing that moment was and we all knew this was the beginning of something.
The music that you’ve created has become very influential and timeless. Why do you think that early-mid 80’s sound continues to resonate with so many different generations?
I love the fact it is still selling and the feedback we get is very warming. We felt at the time we were very different from other bands and were doing what we wanted to do. If you listen back to many other bands that defined the time, there is a very regimented square feel to much of their ‘electronic’ music. In some ways that has characterised it of course, but also the reason was the quantising was so tight and restrictive, it made everything seem robotic.
We wanted the machine repetition but also a stronger groove or feel and would obsess and manually adjust the midi notes for all the instruments if necessary to get a ‘feel’ long before the age of quantising became as it is today. I suspect Kraftwerk were doing the same.
If you defined electronic music back in our day (electronic music stretches back long before us of course) it was music created by sequencers and analogue synths and recorded onto tape or using a SMPTE code, run live alongside the tape machine. Analogue synths developed into FM and digital synths, tape moved over to digital recording, sampling times increased massively as memory became cheaper, and more complex sequencers were brought out year upon year.
Today the sequencers are totally at the heart of virtually all recording, the computers run the studios, sampling and digital recording have merged into one and synths of all types including analogue, FM, wavetables and beyond are in software format and affordable. Even ambience and guitar amplifiers can be emulated incredibly too.
So I think the music still resonates because it is the heart, soul and beginning of the technology explosion that spawned most modern genres including Pop, Trance, Hip Hop, Drill, Trap etc etc.
How did you start up in music, your very first contacts with an instrument and so on.
I left a beautiful small town in the Cotswolds to live in Brixton, south London because I was obsessed with music. However, I couldn’t even tune a guitar and so I hung around the music scene in London and roadied for the odd band until getting the chance to do some live mixing. God knows how that sounded but it set me off into the realms of being a sound engineer.. soon I was running the Brixton studio built into the basement of the house I shared with Hugh and many others. After one recording session with I think, Blancmange, I thought I could do this! There was a Roland SH-09 and a sequencer so I started to play with it and realised I had a basic talent. At the time I was also working as a co producer with an experimental composer / musician called Mark Beer who was the son of the eminent professor of cybernetics and a huge influence on Brian Eno, Sir Stafford Beer.
Mark introduced me to Enos oblique strategy cards and we made an album for Rough Trade totally using the cards.
When Mark heard what I was doing on the SH-09 he wanted to sing over it and so we formed a group and called ourselves the Silent Types, for one EP with the sax player from a band called Metabolist, Anton Roach. The single was released on a Belgium label called Double Dose and got record of the week in New Musical Express! I felt I had something to offer after all and within a year Hard Corps was also being formulated.
What bands from the time you were active did you relate the most?
Kraftwerk totally and other likeminded bands such as Depeche, Pet Shop Boys, the Human League and so on. And I have always loved reggae music especially the haunting melodies, the breakdowns and experimental dub. Pre Hard Corps I recorded many reggae artists and learnt the art of dub. I liked bands or singers with attitude and would listen to any style if it displayed that feeling or a strong emotion. Didn’t matter if it was rock, soul, funk or reggae. Having Irish roots I also loved laments and bands like the Chieftains or the Pogues.
What are the best and worst memories from your live gigs?
I don’t know if they are good or bad to be honest as they were all experiences, so doing a warm up tour of Scotland before embarking on the Depeche tour, we did a gig in Dunfermline with a driver hired by our then manager, Steve M. The gig was about ten minutes from the hotel but the driver was so wasted on brandy and cocaine by the end, it took two hours to find our way back. It’s a small town and we were driving through countryside! He kept muttering I know I know I am a c*nt. So his name for the rest of the tour was Imac*nt.
The first gig in Italy with the Cure was very stressful as none of the digital equipment worked when we set up for a sound check. The Cure’s road crew hated synth bands and didn’t like us so when I asked one of the road crew if he could help, he just smiled and said did you put silicon in with the equipment? I said no, why? And he explained quite cheerfully it was well known amongst the crew that travelling over the mountains caused condensation and the gear was soaked.
Another memory was seeing a huge Wembley Arena sign, Depeche Mode and special guests Hard Corps. The road from experimenting in a small room in Brixton to Wembley made me feel we had come a long way. Short lived feeling but stayed with me.
Could you tell us about the concept/ideas/essence of your lyrics/compositions?
We all had different backgrounds, musical tastes and reference points. Thankfully, we could bring these ideas together and absorb them into the conceptual template of Hard Corps, which as I explained earlier was fundamentally to be the opposite of most rock or pop of the time, meaningless, chocolate box, pompous, elitist, overblown bullshit.
Even though we were using machines to create we had to invest a soul and meaning to the creation. Anyone can create something using a machine. Today there are millions of loops, samples and templates available on the internet. Putting a few of these together can give you, on the surface, a song. But what it cannot do is what all good artists and creatives understand, and that is to create the atmosphere that glues the music together. The atmosphere that is real but at the same time, conceptual. Call it feel, magic, fairy dust, whatever, we know instinctively what it means, but cannot analyse it scientifically!
My approach has always been to visualise sound as an atmosphere or an image.
With Regine Fetet, you had all the elements you needed in a singer/performer. Do you think the band could have made it bigger? Was there anything holding you back?
Regine was a very complex woman and disliked hypocrites and bourgeois complacency. She actually lived in the world of her songs and probably wanted fairy tale love but with each time this was a possibility she had an urge to throw a huge stone into the calm lake. ‘We met crawling to the way out..’ ‘When the flesh gets cut off the bone it is not the end, I will meet you again’ (Metal and Flesh) ‘Imagine what could have been said lying side by side..’ (After describing the peep show environment in Desolation Land, the us and them, who is in control, she asks in the middle section, what would it have been like as proper lovers?).
A true artist Regine was driven by her beliefs and internal struggles, like all of us, shaped from childhood, with little compromise to the world outside especially if she saw it as hypocritical. She forged her own style of dress, lived on her own in a flat in the then notorious Brixton centre and seemed fearless. She didn’t play the music business game as it was often a threat to our initial concept, but sometimes as in the Art of War or playing chess teaches you, retreat is also a very attacking principle when done properly. So, to keep your friends close but enemies or potential enemies closer is not a compromise but a diplomacy and the best way to get people in the business for instance onside and fighting for our project. Regine tended to mistrust these people and see things more literally than that.
She wrote simple lyrics on the surface but it was a surface pressing down hard on a very deep box of emotional turmoil. Her lyrics have an immense depth but it is not my place right now to attempt to explain some of the issues she had to contend with in her short life.
The tour with Depeche Mode in 1985 would have been the breakthrough for Hard Corps if we could have accompanied them to the States. I loved Depeche and they would often watch us sound check, we had such a similar love of electronic music in its pure form. But this was their big year, the one when they cracked America and we, the support band, were too controversial. They couldn’t risk the adverse publicity and that was that.
Strangely enough, why the Hard Corps didn't end up signing with Mute Records?
Slight correction, we were Hard Corps not the Hard Corps. The Hard Corps is an awful American band that came out soon after us.
We signed to Rhythm King which was an off shoot of Mute. And Daniel Miller co-produced Respirer and the Lucky Charm radio version, with us, although Martin Rushent recorded the backing tracks to Respirer.
I have to ask - do you still listen to Hard Corps a lot?
I do occasionally as it meant a lot and still means a lot to me. I don’t feel the project has completed yet and there is a film ready to be made with Dirty as it’s theme and then people will visit our limited catalogue and Regine, Clive, Hugh and myself can finally be recognised 😊 I am an eternal optimist.
Aside from music, are there any other creative areas/art forms that you’re interested or even active in?
I draw cartoons, meditate, been studying a style of kung fu called Yiquan for about 20 years now and I have a Wing Chun dummy in my garage to practise on.
What’s coming up next for you and anything else you would like to mention.
Clive and I are exploring ways we can work together and so I genuinely hope we can come up with something soon.