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Interview ‘I’m trying to recreate that chemistry’

A Certain Ratio’s JEZ KERR tells Neill Mudd why they’re back on the road with a retrospective album of their distinctive 1980s music

MANCHESTER’S A Certain Ratio (ACR) used to share rehearsal space with Joy Division in a dingy room at the back of Little Broughton’s Rialto cinema, where bassist Jez Kerr had once seen Bambi as a child.

“I was the first one in after they’d taken all their gear out. When the lights didn’t come on, I was primed for it being a prank. My bass amp was in the middle of the room and I felt this thing on the top of it,” he recalls.

The “thing” was a pig’s head and the fuse for the lights was down its throat.

“They learned a lot of their tricks touring with Buzzcocks,” laughs Kerr. “But I think Joy Division were pretty much the masters.”

While it’s difficult to picture Messrs Curtis and co as purveyors of top-drawer buffoonery, it always seemed that ACR were having fun and the just-out album ACR:Box, a four-CD career-spanning retrospective accompanied by a British tour, serves as a timely reminder of why they were Tony Wilson’s favourite Factory band.

“Tony loved the band and made it possible for us to develop in the way that we did,” says Kerr.

“Very few bands get that opportunity and have that support. There wasn’t loads of money but when you wanted to do a record, you could do a record.”

ACR never quite seemed to receive their due at the time, despite the startling punk-funk prescience of songs like Knife Slits Water and Blown Away.

But Kerr is philosophical. “What usually happens is, you get successful then you all fall out. It becomes very difficult when you have to be making a living. When you look at it in that way it just completely ruins the picture.”

The current line-up retains core members Martin Moscrop and Donald Johnson who recorded what’s still Kerr’s favourite album by the band, 1982’s Sextet: “We produced it ourselves, all we had was an engineer. We recorded and mixed in a month and only had maybe two songs when we went in there.

“There was no planning. The chemistry between the people created that album, I’m trying to recreate that now.”

While other Factory acts dressed in regulation post-punk grey and black, ACR sported a healthy outdoors aesthetic.

“We used to delight in the fact we were a punk band but there was not a razor blade to be seen,” Kerr says. “We dressed in suits from Oxfam because we didn’t have any money.”

For one of their first gigs in London, two nights at the Moonlight with Joy Division in 1980, they went to the legendary Camden army-surplus store Laurence Corner and bought khaki shorts. “Nowadays your stylist would do all that.”

ACR:Box gathers singles, remixes, demos and rarities including some tracks previously forgotten — Martin Hannett’s instrumental mix-down of Talking Heads’ Houses in Motion, recorded for an abortive collaboration with Grace Jones, is there.

It all still sounds incredibly fresh, a gleeful car-crash of dub, funk, industrial, ambient, bossa nova and punk. The band were definitely onto something.

“We didn’t really think about that,” says Jez. “We were just so into what we were doing. There was no thought about what it looked like to the audience and where we were going with it.

“I’m always trying to get back to that, trying to create a situation with the music where nothing else matters. And that’s a very difficult state to create.”

ACR have been waiting 40 years for their time to arrive but tomorrow has finally come.

ACR: Box is released on May 3 and is available from mutebank.co.uk. Tour details: sonicpr.co.uk.

 

 

 

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