NEW YORK, OCTOBER 1982. MATT JOHNSON of The The is in town to make his first major label album with the hot producer du jour: Mike Thorne, midwife to Soft Cell’s recent shock synthpop hit, Tainted Love. But things are not going to plan.

“We’d been at the Chelsea loft space of a friend,” recalls Johnson, “and I’d taken this hit of Hawaiian grass – a big hit, not being used to the strength of it. I just lost it. Major panic. Then someone said, ‘Take this, it’ll calm you down.’ It was ecstasy.”

The ecstasy did not make Matt Johnson feel more normal. Neither did the Qualuudes with which he chased the ecstasy. “By the time I showed up at the studio,” Johnson continues, in no way proudly, “I was literally bumping into stuff. Didn’t know what day it was.”

Johnson thinks that, subsequently, he may have been tripping for three days (“bad tripping. Horrible, in fact”). Which perhaps influenced his decision to down tools, destroy his hotel room and take off on a drug-fuelled road trip to Detroit: “this Fear And Loathing quest to find the roughest, darkest, toughest part of America. We wanted to go to the place everyone else is scared to go. And we found it.”,

INDING THE PLACE THAT EVERYONE is scared to go, then setting up camp, is what Matt Johnson does best. “He’s a brave boy,” says his old friend, drummer Zeke Manyika. “People think courage is facing a lion with your bare hands. But going inside yourself, really being honest with yourself… Matt does it to an almost dangerous level.”

Sometimes this is a place Johnson finds it hard to escape from – “I have to go and dig him out,” says Manyika – but it has been the source of potent music for 30-plus years. This month, the native East Ender reissues the cornerstone of his reputation as a super-intense, progressive-pop ascetic. Soul Mining – now remastered lovingly for a new vinyl edition – emerged in October 1983 from the white heat of London’s post-punk milieu, pulling together an eclectic crew of musical square pegs: wry electropop pioneer Thomas Leer; confrontational collagist JG ‘Foetus’ Thirlwell; Orange Juice drummer Manyika; Squeeze’s boogie-woogie nabob, Jools Holland. “The link was really that we were all outsiders,” says Leer of the motley crew. “We were excluded from the mainstream.”

Today, the trim, constantly alert Johnson shakes his shaven-bald head indulgently at the thought of the incandescent figure he once cut. We’ve met in East London’s now-chi-chi Spitalfields, not far from the Shoreditch studio, The Garden, where Soul Mining was born, and it’s his plan that we route-march across London for late lunch at his West End club. As we go, he spices choice reminiscences from 30-40 years past with fiery jeremiads about London’s corrupt planning, endangered buildings and Western foreign policy: “My blood boils, it really does, even after all these years.”

Turning 22, and starting work on his first great album, Johnson fell in love (with Fiona Skinner, the designer of The The’s iconic raggedy logo). This being Johnson, the feelings that spilt out over Soul Mining were fear and angst as much as passion and hope.

“Prior to my then girlfriend I had a string of passionate, unrequited… infatuations,” he explains. “It was really astonishingly painful. One crumb of encouragement – the uncertain smile! – and the sun comes out from behind the clouds. One moment of discouragement and you’re in this horrible space. Terrible – giving your power away to this other person…”

In 2014, the “most painful” Soul Mining song for Johnson to listen to is The Twilight Hour: “I wanted this sense of sweltering heat, claustrophobia, emotional paranoia. The anxiety and insecurity of a new relationship. I think I got that. But the lyric – ‘cutting chunks from your heart and rubbing the meat into your eyes…’ that’s really over the top. But I was a kid when I wrote that.”

AS A KID, JOHNSON WAS PRE-PRO-grammed by rock’n’roll. It rose through the floorboards of the Two Puddings, the Stratford pub run by his parents Eddie and Shirley, where beat groups booked by his promoter uncle Kenny entertained colourful clientele including the Kray twins and West Ham footballers. By the time he was 10, living above another pub in suburban Ongar, Johnson already had a group called Roadstar playing their own songs between covers of Smoke On The Water, Black Night and Rebel Rebel. Until, in what he unexpectedly calls a “defining moment”, he was banned from riding a moped.

“All my friends had these Yamaha FS1-Es,” recalls Johnson. “‘Fizzes’ we called ’em, only 49cc. But another kid had a bad accident and my mum was adamant. I was cut off, stuck inside. And that’s when I started playing around with tape recorders. Cassette machines and the family reel-to-reel.”

Increasingly obsessed with recording, Johnson left school early at 15: “I slipped through the cracks.” His brother Andy – an original 100 Club punk and later the creator of The The’s distinctive artwork – lent him money to buy a book called So You Want To Be In The Music Business by producer/songwriter and prickly New Faces judge Tony Hatch. “There was a list of addresses in the back and I wrote to them all. Tony had said, start at the bottom, as a tea boy, so that’s what I did.”

He started at De Wolfe, the library music hub in London’s Soho on July 4, 1977: Independence Day in more ways than one. Outside, past the prostitutes on Meard Street, post-punk was happening and its agenda of anything-goes experimentalism captivated him. “The Residents, Throbbing Gristle… I saw Magazine’s first ever London gig,” he raves. “I saw Pere Ubu – amazing! David Thomas, this monstrous bloke, smashing huge chunks of metal together, like he’d emerged from an underground foundry.”

Tony Hatch was superseded by a new bible: Composing With Tape Recorders – Musique Concrète For Beginners by Terence Dwyer. Following its rubric, Johnson made an eight-song cassette, See Without Being Seen, that elicited encouraging words from The Residents’ Ralph Records label and Rod Pearce at Throbbing Gristle’s Fetish. A fledgling The The was hatched: Johnson plus Keith Laws on Wasp synthesizer (“he wasn’t really a musician, but he was really funny”) and, later, photographer Pete Ashworth on drums and Evening Standard cartoonist Tom Johnston on bass. They’d rehearse in the latter’s office in Covent Garden. “Afterwards I’d sleep in the basement on this damp mattress,” says Johnson, shivering at the memory.

Tom Johnston introduced the singer to his friends in Wire, whose 154 album he idolised, and funded a single, Controversial Subject, produced by Wire’s Graham Lewis and Bruce Gilbert. 4AD loved it, prompting an offer from Ivo Watts-Russell for Johnson to make an album. Out came the queasily atmospheric Burning Blue Soul (1981). “I was writing everything, playing everything,” says Johnson. “The other guys in The The, it was a hobby to them. It wasn’t a hobby to me. It was my life. It was who I was.”

Hearing the spooky DIY transmissions of Thomas Leer’s 1978 single Private Plane had convinced Johnson that perhaps the last thing he needed was a conventional band. “Finding out about Thomas made a big difference – the realisation that you can do it all on your own. Thomas was the catalyst.”

AND THERE WAS ANOTHER, arguably more fateful encounter. Johnson recalls his first impressions: “Big black pantaloons and a black top with a red zig-zag on it, and one of those asymmetric haircuts. He was like a small, overweight version of Phil Oakey.” This roly-poly ball of eccentricity was Stephen John ‘Stevo’ Pearce. A would-be music industry entrepreneur, he DJed the latest, most provocative electronic music at Billy’s in Soho while interning at Phonogram and hatching plans for his own recording and management empire.

“He was very young – a year younger than me,” says Johnson, “and he was like a force of nature. He kept phoning and phoning me, pestering me to do this gig supporting Cabaret Voltaire in Sheffield. But there was no money – in the end we did it for a crate of beer.”

Stevo solicited a The The track – Untitled – for a compilation he was putting together that would also feature Soft Cell and Depeche Mode, among other young turks of embryonic synthpop. The album, Some Bizzare, would promote the name of his new label and provide a launchpad for a strike on the majors. Phonogram were the first to fall – for the charms of Soft Cell and B-Movie. “Funnily, it was B-Movie they really wanted,” says Johnson. “Stevo made them take a job lot.”

Another East London boy failed by the school system – or, perhaps, liberated by its indifference – Stevo made up for weaknesses in the literacy department by sending contract demands recorded onto cassette. It was unconventional, but it worked. With a mix of hard sell and weirdo mystique, he was marketing Some Bizzare’s freaks and creeps to the strait-laced majors, and the global chart success of Soft Cell’s Tainted Love gave more power to his elbow. Very quickly, there was a whiff of Imperial Rome.

“The Some Bizzare offices had this positive, chaotic atmosphere,” recalls Johnson. “There was lots of drug indulgence. It was the early days of ecstasy. This girl Cindy Ecstasy [later to feature as a vocalist on Soft Cell’s Torch] used to bring it over. It was a whirlpool I was being drawn into.”

It was time to land The The a deal. With a catchy Some Bizzare single, Cold Spell Ahead, as bait, Stevo lured London Records to the table. Label head Roger Ames paid for a session in New York to work up a more realised version of the song with Wire/Soft Cell producer Mike Thorne. The result: Uncertain Smile.

“Somehow Stevo had wangled this without signing anything – on a handshake,” says Johnson, still with faint disbelief. “Of course, a handshake’s not good enough…”

London found themselves in a bidding war with CBS for an act they thought they’d already secured, and it was a war they were about to lose. Arranging to meet CBS boss Maurice Oberstein at Tottenham Court Road, Stevo led the label on a farcical chase that ended at Trafalgar Square, where the contract was inked after midnight, with Oberstein astride one of Landseer’s lions. More than a match for Stevo in the eccentric scam stakes, New Jersey-born Oberstein favoured incongruous hats and had made his mark in the record game in 1963, rush-releasing a million-selling disc of JFK speeches in the aftermath of the president’s assassination. “Obie was this astonishing character,” remembers Johnson. “His voice would go up and down in these startling bursts. And he’d always pretend to consult Charlie, his dog, in meetings: ‘Whaddaya say, Charlie? Charlie likes ya! We’re gonna sign ya!’”

With the English setter’s approval, The The were a major label act and Johnson was happy: “CBS had Dylan, Leonard Cohen. They were like the Manchester United of record labels.” There was enough money to leave home and to make a record with a bigger budget than the £1,800 that Burning Blue Soul had cost. In the debit column, “things were getting a lot druggier, a lot weirder”, culminating in the disastrous drug-sabotaged New York album session and subsequent jag of AWOL slumming in Detroit.

“We arrived back in London pretty sheepish. The label must have thought, ‘Who are these animals?’ They’d had a bidding war and all they’d got were these two tracks – Perfect and Nature And Virtue.”

Apart from the dubious news value of a David Johansen harmonica part on Perfect, the tracks were sub-par, with none of the grit and power that Johnson had lodged in his head. The The had to regroup, and to do so Matt Johnson would need a little help from his friends.

ON THE EASTERN BORDER OF London’s finance sector creep, in the shadow, literally, of one of Matt Johnson’s hated new skyscrapers (Goodmans Fields – “Redefining City Living” apparently) Zeke Manyika greets MOJO in his local pub. Born in Zimbabwe and educated in Glasgow, where he connected with the group who would make his name – Orange Juice – the drummer’s introduction to the more challenging face of London’s post-punk scene could hardly have been more off-putting.

“I shared a flat off the Edgware Road with Jane Rolink, the secretary at Some Bizzare. And I came home from an Orange Juice tour dreamin’, as you do, of my own bed,” he recalls. “I open the door of my room and there, in my bed, all in leather and boots, snoring like mad after God knows what: Nick Cave, Blixa Bargeld and Jim Thirlwell. I had to sleep on the sofa.”

Thirlwell – from Melbourne, Australia, but in London since 1978 – had lent his unconventional skills and confrontational attitude to art-punkers PragVEC and avant-garde soundscaper Steve ‘Nurse With Wound’ Stapleton, before releasing singles as Foetus Under Glass (Spite Your Face/OKFM) and You’ve Got Foetus On Your Breath (Wash It All Off) and an album, Deaf (1981), all on his own Self Immolation label. He was also a regular attendee at The The shows. “He kind of stood out,” recalls Johnson, “what with the green bouffant hairdo. I used to sidle over to Keith [Laws] and say, Chicken Head’s here again.”

Eventually, Johnson and Thirlwell would meet at a party thrown by their mutual publishers, Cherry Red, and bonded over a shared passion for tape manipulation. “Later on, we became blood brothers,” adds Johnson. “On acid.”

Together they cooked up a live happening: Johnson and Thirlwell joined by a rotating cast of Manyika, Thomas Leer, Marc Almond, Edwyn Collins, Stephen Mallinder and others in a ‘supergroup’ residency at Wardour Street’s Marquee. “It was bit like dropping an acid tab and joining the circus,” recalls Leer. “Strangely, the memory that keeps popping into my head was one night during an interval seeing Nick Cave and The Birthday Party drinking in the corner and turning round to see Matt at the bar talking to Lionel Bart. It was a pretty weird mix on and off stage.”

Soul Mining’s unlikely cast was coming together. Producer Paul Hardiman – Mike Thorne’s deputy on Wire’s fractious, brilliant 154 – was tried out on a mix for the New York version of Perfect, and felt immediately right. So did John Foxx’s brand-new studio in Shoreditch, The Garden. “I walked in the door and I loved it immediately,” says Johnson. “There’s something magical about that building. Shoreditch was quite rough. People found it threatening – dark, underlit, a bit scary – but being from that part of London it didn’t bother me.”

Manyika was late for the first session (“Three days late!” says Johnson, laughing) but set Soul Mining’s adamantine tone with the vicious assault of his drum part for I’ve Been Waitin’ For Tomorrow (All Of My Life). “It was like I was possessed,” recalls the drummer. “I could see Matt in the control room, going crazy.” Leer brought his haunting keyboard approach to The Twilight Hour. Paul ‘Wix’ Wickens interpolated the wistful accordion that makes This Is The Day more of a wish than a promise. Thirlwell added clattering, syncopated percussion to the epic, Africanised closer, Giant. Johnson orchestrated them all. “I’d never come across anyone so focused,” says Leer. “Matt was disciplined about himself, but where others were concerned he was very open and receptive to ideas.”

The album’s centrepiece was a case in point. Conceived as a custom-made 12-inch, the Mike Thorne-produced, London-funded original of Uncertain Smile featured a flute and sax break by NY sessioneer Crispin Cioe. The album version required something different.

“I can’t remember who suggested Jools,” says Johnson. “It might have been my A&R, Annie Roseberry. But I can see him turning up, about four in the afternoon, all in his bike leathers. He had a playback, not even the whole track, and he just laid that down. There was one drop-in, that’s all. Jools told me years later that he gets asked more about that than anything else he’s ever done.”

HOLLAND’S PIANO SOLO – JAZZ AND YET NOT JAZZ, a sympathetic commentary on Uncertain Smile’s melancholy chords – epitomised the sui generis serendipity of Soul Mining. Pop songs with tape cut-ups, African chants and boogie-woogie joanna? Unsurprisingly, there was some bemusement on its release. “The initial chart positions were pathetic,” says Johnson, “but it kept ticking over, hung in there. Word of mouth, really. Muff Winwood at CBS said I was their Tom Waits. A curio…”

Not helping sales, the curio refused to tour, but agreed to all the interviews CBS could arrange. “We did one video, for This Is The Day, the worst video I’ve ever seen,” he grumbles. “I was going for the Tim Buckley afro. It was directed by a guy called Tony Dow, who went on to do Only Fools And Horses.”

Outraged by the US label’s unilateral decision to tack the incongruous Perfect to the end of his perfectly-paced meisterwerk, but emboldened by the increasingly imperious Stevo, Johnson developed what he calls “a hard-nosed attitude” to CBS. And when it came to discussions about Soul Mining’s follow-up, the thinking was, If you don’t ask, you don’t get. “I had three names down as a producer,” says Johnson. “Holger Czukay, Brian Eno and Tom Waits. Eno came back lukewarm. Holger we didn’t hear from. But Tom Waits said, ‘Come over to New York.’ So I sent him demos – Heartland and Out Of The Blue – and we hung out for a week. He thrashed me at pool, took me to the Ear Inn in the South Village, although he wasn’t drinking – just soda water and bitters.”

Finishing Raindogs, firing his manager and about to become a father, Waits had too much on to helm what would become the android agit-pop onslaught of Infected, but encouraged Johnson to produce himself. “He’s a very gentle, very sincere man,” says Johnson. “He told me: ‘Always take your little notebook and your pen everywhere. That’s your butterfly net.’”

Back in Britain, the Some Bizzare stable was growing, mutating. Soft Cell, The The and Cabaret Voltaire were joined by Einstürzende Neubauten, Test Dept, Swans, Psychic TV. “It was the best record company in Britain at the time,” says Johnson. “We were this big gang, going en masse to gigs together.”

They were golden days for pop subversion, but sometimes even Stevo wondered if he’d taken on too much. “Stevo had this big house in Hammersmith,” says Manyika. “But he got it in his head that the artists were spending too much time in there, that it was a bit too comfortable. That’s when he took all the doors off the toilets.”

MEANWHILE, MATT JOHNSON’S ’80S SPIRALLED upwards. Infected emerged in 1986 to huge accolades and bigger sales (peaking at 15 in the UK) but still Johnson refused to tour, promoting the record with thematically-linked films. “I never had interest in all that celebrity stuff,” he observes. “What you have to go through to get your music to an audience.”

Experiments with marketing accompanied experiments in lifestyle, as in preparation for 1989’s rock-hewn Mind Bomb, he went on a diet of organic grapes, distilled water and magic mushrooms. One evening, God seemed to appear to him in his living room. “He was in a strange place,” nods Manyika.

But this time, Johnson did tour, with a powerful band that reunited him with ex-Smith Johnny Marr, whom he’d first met in 1981. But relations with erstwhile ally Stevo had soured: “Partly it was the drugs and the paranoia. As night follows day, paranoia follows drugs. And things got pretty bad.”

In 2014, Soul Mining’s cast are – for the most part – in a positive place. Thirlwell, his vodka and speed days in the past, composes works for orchestra. Manyika, kept busy by Amersham dance cosmopolitans Faze Action, hopes to involve Thomas Leer in a project he has brewing. Stevo is seeking to reboot Some Bizzare but is convinced that the record industry plots to foil him. His former charges find him hard to communicate with.
Johnson himself has emerged from recent label trials (his terms of severance with Universal, who released the most recent The The album, Naked Self, in 2000, are bound by a gagging order) to record compelling soundtracks for the films Tony (2011) and Moonbug (2013), evoking the ghostly qualities of Burning Blue Soul. An authorised biography is due next year.

“You have to go through the fire to get to the light,” he reflects. “It surprises people, when they meet me, to find that I’m fundamentally an optimistic person. But at the same time you can’t ignore the dark side. I’ve always been fascinated with that. Dive in, and confront your demons. I have to do that to get to the bliss.”

This article originally appeared in issue 249 on MOJO.