martin hannett
biography by james nice

The following text is an updated and amended version of my sleevenotes for the excellent Zero: A Martin Hannett Story compilation CD on Ace Records (CDWIKD 270, 2006).

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"He was a genius. It's a word that's used too often, but there's no way it's overused for Martin." Anthony H. Wilson

Martin 'Zero' Hannett was born into a Catholic family in north Manchester, in June 1948. Raised in Miles Platting, he completed a chemistry degree at Manchester Polytechnic (UMIST), and after graduating in 1970 took a job at a lab. As a punter, he saw the Beatles and the Stones, and a hundred more besides, then booked bands while on the social committee at UMIST. Always a music head ("he was forever rebuilding his hi-fi"), Hannett also found time to play bass, and work as a soundman and roadie, and in time quit his day job to run Music Force with Tosh Ryan and others. A musicians' co-operative, Music Force booked gigs (venues included the Band on the Wall and Rafters), arranged PA hire, and also operated a lucrative national fly-posting business.

With the proceeds, Hannett and Ryan were able to purchase premises at 20 Cotton Lane, Withington, where Zero was able to realise his ambition of setting up a recording studio. One of his first commissions was incidental music for an agit-prop theatre group called Belt and Braces Roadshow, as well as the soundtrack for a science-fiction cartoon, All Sorts of Heroes, co-written with future Invisible Girl Steve Hopkins. Hannett also produced material for Greasy Bear, a project featuring C.P. Lee and Bruce Mitchell. Early in 1977 Hannett, Ryan and Lawrence Beadle further expanded by setting up Rabid Records as a vehicle to promote Slaughter and the Dogs, a glam/punk hybrid from darkest Wythenshawe, who had already contributed a couple of songs to the Live at the Roxy compilation.

C.P. Lee and John Scott later observed that: "Martin was a power freak, and as opposed to dealing with uppity musos like Sad Café, punk bands presented him with raw materials that he could manoeuvre and mould. He and Tosh at Music Force were in the right place at the right time, and being of an age group closer to the emerging punk musicians Martin was able to establish closer relations with them."

As Martin Zero, Hannett's first professional production gig came at the invitation of an infinitely superior Manchester punk band, Buzzcocks, for whom he had already booked a couple of live shows through Music Force. The reason behind his recruitment was simple enough, as singer Howard Devoto recalls: "Martin was the only person we knew in Manchester that was known as, or called themselves, a producer."

Buzzcocks recorded their seminal Spiral Scratch ep in a clock-watching eight hour package session at Indigo Sound Studio on 28 December 1976, and released it on their own New Hormones imprint (ORG 1) in January 1977. As well as being only the third UK punk record to reach the buying public, it represents the first independent, do-it-yourself, we-are-the-means-of-production release. Better still, it went to sell a miraculous 16,000 copies before being reissued through a major. Musically, also, the four song ep stands a landmark in its own right, raw and energetic, yet far more artsy and sophisticated than most of their London counterparts. The highlight is surely Boredom, two minutes and fifty-two seconds of nihilistic ennui expressed through Devoto's arch lyrics, coupled with the dumbest, smartest three-note guitar solo ever courtesy of Pete Shelley.

Spiral Scratch was light years ahead of the competition, for which Hannett must claim some of the credit, since the demo recorded two months earlier (and later released on the official bootleg Time's Up) doesn't quite measure up. That said, ORG 1 hardly qualifies as sonic architecture, since time was short, and the studio so contemptuous of Buzzcocks' raw punk noise that it afterwards erased the multi-track. As Hannett later admitted: "When you play it loud it sounds exactly as if you're right in front of the stage at one of their gigs. I was very disappointed when the Sex Pistols album came out with seventeen guitar overdubs."

Sadly, Spiral Scratch would be the only legitimate recording Devoto would make with the band, and a fortnight after it appeared he left to form the equally seminal Magazine. Buzzcocks moved on to work with another visionary Martin (Rushent), but later returned to collaborate with Hannett on the trio of undervalued singles (Are Everything, Strange Thing and What Do You Know) released by the group at the end of 1980, shortly before they split. The same year, in fact, in which Devoto and Magazine recorded their best work with Hannett, as we shall see. But already we're running ahead.

Four months later, in May 1977, Rabid released Cranked Up Really High by Slaughter and the Dogs (TOSH 101). Fronted by Wythenshawe duo Wayne Barrett and Mike Rossi, the Dogs were an opportunist glam/punk collision who hitched a ride on the coat-tails of punk. Cranked explores the joys of being high on amphetamines, but despite the speedy theme, and Hannett's involvement, it's hardly a masterpiece. Rabid subsequently signed the Dogs to Decca, but the band contrived to split a few days prior to the release of their album Do It Dog Style (ahem), and remain little more than a minor Manchester footnote. Incidently, a contribution of £200 towards the cost of recording and pressing Cranked Up Really High was stumped up by one Rob Gretton.

Still operating under the name Martin Zero, Hannett assumed the role of in-house producer at Rabid, overseeing a string of sometimes underwhelming punk novelty records by the likes of Ed Banger, Gyro and Jilted John. Many of these low budget sides were collected on a compilation CD released by Receiver Records, The Rabid/TJM Punk Singles Collection, towards which the curious are directed, although in truth there's little here to interest students of Hannett the producer. The best of these singles was Jilted John b/w Going Steady by Jilted John (TOSH 105), a pseudonym for Manchester University drama student Graham Fellows, whose snotty tale of teenage love and loss appeared in April 1978, and in August rose to number 4 on the national chart after being taken up by EMI. An album (True Love Stories) followed in December, as well as cash-in response single credited to Gordon the Moron, again produced by Martin Zero. Fellows is today better known (in Britain at least) as John Shuttleworth, whose delightfully understated comedy continues to elevate BBC schedules. Hence one of Britain's best comics provided Hannett with his first hit single, selling over a quarter of a million copies, a feat not repeated until the posthumous release of Joy Division's immortal Love Will Tear Us Apart, which reached number 13 in June 1980. The contrast could hardly be greater.

Hannett also assisted the prolific Chris Sievey (aka The Freshies), producing their second vinyl outing Baiser, released on Rabid (TOSH 109) in 1979. Hannett first heard Sievey's songs on a session for BBC Radio Manchester, and advised Ryan to sign him to Rabid. Sievey returned the compliment, describing Hannett as "my favourite person to work with in the whole world." Despite this lavish praise, Sievey moved on to self production, and his own Razz imprint within the Rabid empire. The Freshies are best remembered for their eleventh release, I'm In Love With The Girl on the Manchester Virgin Megastore Check-Out Desk, which charted in October 1980. Since then, Sievey has found fame of another kind as Frank Sidebottom.

Between Spiral Scratch in December 1976 and his first recording session with Joy Division in October 1978, the most notable work produced by Hannett was by Salford-born poet cum troubadour John Cooper Clarke. An unlikely punk fellow traveller, Clarke began his early poetry readings in the early 1970s, and developed a visual image cloned from Highway 61 Revisited-era Bob Dylan. His first ep for Rabid appeared late in 1977, and resulted in a major deal with Epic the following year. Hannett produced several celebrated single sides for Clarke, including Psycle Sluts, Kung Fu International, Gimmix, Twat and I Married a Monster From Outer Space, as well as the albums Disguise In Love (1978) and Snap, Crackle and Bop (1980). Together with arranger and keyboard player Steve Hopkins, Hannett formed a bespoke backing band for Clarke, The Invisible Girls, and co-wrote most of the backing tracks. Indeed Hannett's involvement was a crucial factor in Clarke obtaining a major deal, despite the fact that the one-note guitar solo on Post War Glamour Girl took all of eight hours to record. He and Hopkins soaked Clarke's wordplay in cool electric shuffles and computerized patterns, described as Eno-esque by several contemporary reviewers. Indeed it's on the many Clarke collaborations that you'll hear most of Hannett the original composer.

The witty I Don't Want To Be Nice is taken from the debut 1978 album, features guest guitars from Pete Shelley and Bill Nelson, and illustrates well just how far the music had developed beyond the preceding singles. Parent album Disguise In Love was recorded at Arrow Studios in Deansgate, mixed at Advision in London, and released in October 1978. As we shall see, The Invisible Girls would also go on to back Pauline Murray (ex-Penetration) and Nico (ex-Velvet Underground) on record, and also performed live on a short co-headlining tour by Murray and Clarke in October 1980.

Punk rock had induced the birth of three significant labels in Manchester - New Hormones, Rabid and Factory, yet only the last of these (and the last to appear in the marketplace) retains any tangible cultural currency today. Hannett first worked with Factory and Joy Division on the two tracks the band contributed to the Factory Sample, recorded at Cargo in October 1978, mixed at Strawberry, and released as a double 7" ep (Fac 2) early the following year. Hannett also co-produced the contributions from the (formative) Durutti Column, but not the tracks donated by comedian John Dowie and Sheffield electro pioneers Cabaret Voltaire. Both Joy Division tracks (Digital and Glass) represented a great leap forward for both band and producer, restraining, isolating and separating the sound of the band, and elevating the raw post-punk power they produced onstage towards pure sonic architecture. Just two weeks earlier, Hannett had taken delivery of one of the first AMS digital delays, which shaped significantly the sound heard on these tracks, and also encouraged the band to embrace the synthesizer. Other favoured tricks in Zero's sonic armoury included reverb, phasing, compression, repeat echoes, deliberate overload and the Marshall time modulator - anything, indeed, that created space, weirdness and "sonic holograms".

Hannett later told writer Jon Savage: "When digital effects came in at the end of the Seventies, there was a quantum leap in ambience control. You had as many flavours as you could invent… You could whack it into little attention-grabbing things, into the ambient environment, just in case interest was flagging in the music."

On occasion that same flagging interest was his own, as Buzzcocks manager Richard Boon recalls: "Although he did have set ideas, it depended on the toys he had in the studio. And sometimes the gadgets eclipsed his interest in the music he was supposed to be producing."

As for his studio regime, musicians were actively discouraged from entering the control room, or participating in mixing, and the air conditioning deliberately lowered to zero (!) if ever they dared. It helped that the layout of the desk at Strawberry only allowed two pairs of hands on the faders: Hannett, and his engineer of choice, Chris Nagle. Nagle, who frequently found himself served as a de facto mediator between Hannett and the bands, recalls: "Martin tended to tape everything, rehearsals and run-throughs included, and took delight in mistakes. None of the other engineers at Strawberry were willing to work with him. On our first day, I was informed that 'the first rule is that there are no rules.'"

Joy Division/New Order guitarist Bernard Sumner later recalled in the NME: "Martin didn't give a fuck about making a pop record. All he wanted to do was experiment. His attitude was that you get loads of drugs, lock the door of the studio and stay in there all night and you see what you've got the next morning. And you keep doing that until it's done."

Hannett himself was unwilling or unable to define his trademark style, telling Orr: "A certain disorder in the treble range? I don't know, I can't tell you."

Soon afterwards Hannett accepted a free transfer from Rabid to Factory, and in April 1979 recorded Joy Division's groundbreaking debut album Unknown Pleasures at Strawberry in Stockport, a state-of-the-art 24 track studio owned by 10CC. Strawberry Studios boasted a particularly good sound, due largely to an expensive Westlake system imported from the States, and would remain Hannett's studio of choice throughout this period. Cargo, owned by John Brierley and situated 20 or so miles north of Manchester in Rochdale, represented a cheaper alternative (with only 16 tracks), but for all that remained popular; Arrow and Pennine, the other main studios in Greater Manchester at the time, were seldom used by the producer.

The cost of recording the monolithic Unknown Pleasures exceeded £10,000. Although singer Ian Curtis seems to have appreciated the radical studio transformation effected by Hannett, the surviving members of Joy Division - Peter Hook (bass), Bernard Sumner (guitar and keyboards) and Steve Morris (drums) - were famously ambivalent. Sumner: "We played the album live loud and heavy… We felt that Martin toned it down, especially the guitars. The production inflicted his dark, doomy mood over the album; we'd drawn this picture in black and white, and Martin coloured it in for us. We resented it, but Rob loved it, Wilson loved it, the press loved it, and the public loved it. We were just the poor, stupid musicians who wrote it."

Adds Hook: "It was more Bernard and I that hated it, because we were used to standing in front of the amps and feeding off the power. Martin made it more subtle, and I think if anything at that age we weren't subtle… That was part of the education Martin gave you. If Bernard and I had made Unknown Pleasures it wouldn't have been as long lasting, or have the depth… Martin saw himself as a catalyst, he didn't always pretend to be a nice guy."

Without Hannett's vision, Joy Division would have sounded much like the shelved Warsaw album from early 1978 and the Peel sessions recorded for BBC radio, which tell their own story. Transmission was recorded at Strawberry in August 1979, and rush-released the song as a 7" single (Fac 13) to coincide with an extended tour supporting Buzzcocks through October and November. It's unarguably one of his finest productions, and was the most dynamic Joy Division record yet, although oddly the single was a comparative flop when first released, initially selling only 3000 copies of the 10,000 pressed. Many around the band and Factory had imagined that the 'dance dance dance to the radio' refrain would guarantee airplay, and a chart hit.

Radio sessions aside, over the course of about eight separate recording sessions Hannett produced every studio track released by Joy Division, including subsequent singles Atmosphere and Love Will Tear Us Apart, and their icy second album Closer, recorded in March 1980 at Britannia Row, the hi-tech London studio established and owned by Pink Floyd. Hannett rated Closer as his most 'mysterious' production, but elaborated no further. The death of singer Ian Curtis in May 1980 hit him hard spiritually, and perhaps contributed to his subsequent decline. Nevertheless, the peerless Joy Division catalogue remains the body of work for which Martin Hannett will be best remembered.

Orchestral Manouvres in the Dark released just one single on Factory before signing to Virgin subsidiary DinDisc, Electricity appearing as Fac 6 in May 1979. The single has a convoluted history, since no less than three different mixes appeared on 7" between the two labels, with only one of these helmed by Hannett. A quirky electronic duo from Liverpool, the obvious synth-pop appeal of OMD was probably appreciated more by Lindsay Reade than her then-husband Tony Wilson, and the band considered too overground for an independent label. At first Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys tried recording Electricity and flipside Almost with Hannett at Cargo, but the triangular relationship between band, producer and label boss proved fraught with difficulty. OMD disagreed with Hannett's vision of Almost as a slow lament, and disliked aspects of his mix of Electricity, another song which all confidently expected would crack the national chart. McCluskey later complained: "Our version of Almost was really tight and poppy, but he'd laid it back and covered it in echo. It was a pop song and he turned it into this totally lethargic ballad."

McCluskey elaborated to John Cooper of Scream City fanzine in 2006: "Hannett was weird and scared the hell out of us! At one point he just climbed under the desk and went to sleep... We had a bass drum which was basically a synth tuned down, and he was putting it through all these graphics and we thought, 'this is taking bloody hours, what the hell's going on?' We hated both the versions that were done. As you might expect, it's very ambient and he's selected certain of the tracks to be more important than others, and a completely different vision to the one we had. Almost was a very tight, kinda bouncy little organ-driven piece, and he added all this reverb and echo and made it much more ethereal. I have to say it took me months to get my head around it."

The result was that the first issue of Fac 6 featured the original demo version of Electricity produced by OMD's manager, Paul Collister, replaced by the (superior) Hannett mix when the single was reissued by DinDisc in September. By then, incidently, Hannett had become plain Hannett, having dropped the Zero appellation. Later still, a second edition single on DinDisc substituted new versions of both tracks taken from their debut album, on which the Hannett versions were remixed to sound harder by the band. Confused? Rest assured, however, that the take on this compilation is the correct 'Cargo version', as OMD completists prefer to call it.

Other notable Hannett productions for Factory include The Durutti Column, whose The Return of the Durutti Column (Fact 14) was released in January 1980, on which Hannett provided electronic backing for Vini Reilly's airy, minimal guitar sketches. The album was recorded in under a week at Cargo during August 1979, and was purposefully minimal, with only one rhythm and one backing track behind Reilly's signature Les Paul guitar. According to Anthony H. Wilson: "Martin arrived with these great big black cardboard fronted machines, synthesizers. For two days, the Monday and Tuesday, Martin did nothing but create strange rhythm/noise tracks. Occasionally Vini would strap on the guitar and play some notes onto the tracks. But it was hard to get Martin to notice as he pored over the primitive electronics. By the second night Vini had had enough."

The resulting album was perfectly realised, correctly ambient and inventive music. Reilly told rock weekly Sounds: "Martin and I didn't sort of click together at first, but we worked as a team and I really liked him in the end. On the album he just played about with knobs, he's not at all technical [sic]. He got synthesized drums and things for me. Also, some of it was spontaneous. Sketch for Summer was made up in the studio because he's managed to get these bird noises on the synthesizer." To the NME he revealed: "Martin reproduces echoes, finds a rhythmic pattern on the synthesizer. I gave him twenty tracks and he selected the ones he could work with best. I didn't really hear the album from playing the pieces until the finished plastic."

The initial pressing run of 2000 came in a Situationist sandpaper sleeve, and included a bonus 'test card' flexi disc featuring two Hannett solo pulses, First Aspect of the Same Thing and - naturally - Second Aspect of the Same Thing. Fellow Factory hands Section 25, Stockholm Monsters, John Dowie, ESG, Royal Family and the Poor, Crispy Ambulance, The Names, Minny Pops and Tunnelvision all also benefited from Hannett's studio expertise, as did the more overtly funky A Certain Ratio, whose 12" ep Flight in October 1980 is another landmark Hannett production, notably the cistine vocals on percussive workout Blown Away.

During this period Hannett's favoured studios remained Strawberry in Stockport and Britannia Row in London. Legend holds that recording of Ratio's debut album To Each… at EARS in East Orange, New Jersey, in October 1980 came to grief after the resident engineer inadvertently zeroed the desk settings, but the reality is that Hannett disliked the studio, which lacked any of his beloved digital delays, and was glad to seize any excuse to remove the tapes to Manchester and mix the album in the familiar surrounds of Strawberry. Sadly, the finished recording was not all that it could have been had the band stayed at home, while Hannett's preference for recording each element of the drum kit separately hardly suited the propulsive rhythmic style of drummer Donald Johnson. Guitarist Martin Moscrop also struggled with the infamous instruction to "play faster, but slower." A Factory Shareholders Report from January 1981 described the stand-off thus: "Hannett vs. Ratio result = bitter draw."

Had Hannett produced other non-Factory Manchester bands - Ludus, the first Passage album - the results might have been spectacular. That said, beyond Joy Division his best work would be with yet another Manchester band. Magazine were already two albums into their career before former Buzzcock Howard Devoto recalled Hannett for their third, The Correct Use of Soap, released by Virgin in May 1980. By Hannett's own estimation Soap was his best technical production, and it remains his most significant work outside the Factory catalogue. The sessions took place at across number of London studios, as well as the band's own rehearsal space (with the aid of the Virgin 24 track mobile), and was mixed at Britannia Row. Stand-out tracks on this masterwork include Because You're Frightened, Stuck and the sublime A Song From Under the Floorboards, as well as a stiff cover of Sly Stone's Thank You, which offers further evidence that Hannett still hadn't quite mastered the art of record funk grooves. Having taken a critical drubbing for the perceived Pink Floyd-isms of Secondhand Daylight, Magazine decided to push forward John McGeogh's angular guitar, and mix Dave Formula's virtuoso keyboards a little lower. Hannett's style suited the new approach perfectly, and the sessions also generated a slew of non-album singles and b-sides. The song included here, The Light Pours Out of Me, is a re-tread of a key track from the first album, co-written in 1977 with Buzzcocks cohort Pete Shelley, hidden away on the flipside of the non-album single Upside Down, also released in May 1980. Of the Soap era singles, only Sweetheart Contract managed to dent the charts.

In September 1981 Devoto told a journalist from Dutch magazine Orr: "Martin moves in his own mysterious way. A lot of musicians find it hard to work with him, because he doesn't communicate very well. He sits like Buddha behind the mixing desk, untouchable." However, Devoto doesn't recognise the picture of Hannett as a bullying autocrat or anarchic fascist, and in fact Magazine called many of the shots while recording and mixing Soap. Perhaps this was because Virgin were footing the bill, whereas Hannett was a shareholding director at Factory and thus felt able to adopt the sometimes confrontational role of catalyst in relation to 'his' bands. Whatever the truth, Magazine and Hannett would remain together for their swansong album Murder, Magic and the Weather, when Devoto told the NME: "We lent on him a bit more with Soap, I think. Martin can have maybe too characteristic a sound. But with Magic he was left pretty much to do it himself, though I think he's improved even in a year."

By now Hannett was being hired by bands outside his immediate Manchester circle, although not always with conspicuous success. In late 1979 he recorded a version of Oh Lucinda (Love Becomes a Habit) with The Only Ones, the London-based new wave guitar band lead by Peter Perrett, but the track remained unreleased, and their patchy swansong CBS album Baby's Got a Gun (1980) was instead produced by Colin Thurston (who Magazine had employed before switching to Hannett). Since Perrett was an inveterate drug user, and Hannett had by now developed a heroin problem of his own, it's hardly surprising that the sessions foundered. This superior version of Oh Lucinda remained on the shelf until it appeared on the 1992 anthology The Immortal Story. The band cut three albums all told, but remain best known for their classic debut single Another Girl, Another Planet.

Hannett's collaboration with Irish band U2 was more successful. Their second single, 11 O'Clock Tick Tock, was produced by Hannett at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin at Easter, and released by CBS in May 1980. At the time, the young Dublin band were cultivating an interest in darker atmospherics, Bono citing Joy Division and Bowie's Low album as major influences at the time. Hannett's landmark production on Unknown Pleasures was the principal reason that U2 chose to record with him, and the band first met Hannett in London during sessions for Closer. However the chemistry between Zero and U2 produced less spectacular results, partly due to techno-geographical constraints, and partly to Hannett's interest in drugs.

In their detailed 2006 retrospective U2 By U2, the band and manager Paul McGuiness provided further insight into Hannett's working methods (and foibles):

The Edge: "We played Martin a demo of 11 O'Clock Tick Tock. He wasn't impressed with the demo, but he said he liked the song."

Bono: "Martin Hannett was a genius. He had worked with Joy Division, who were our favourite band at this time. He looked like Dr Who, and he was into technology. He had harmonizers and things we had never heard of."

Paul McGuinness: "He didn't think much of the facilities [at Windmill Lane], and there were some special pieces of equipment he made us rent from London and ship over."

Larry Mullen Jnr: "He was asking me to do a click track... I wasn't sure if I could play in time with one. I must really have done Martin's head in. He listened to the track over and over again, constantly playing it back. I think he was highly medicated and as the session went on he became more and more incoherent. Despite his condition, he did a great job.

Adam Clayton: "Martin was sort of like a big, cuddly garden gnome. He was very laid back but, with hindsight, I think he was probably out of it all the time - there was a fair amount of smoking of dope."

Paul McGuinness: "Martin was pretty moody. I remember him coming out of the bathroom in my flat with a bottle of some kind of cough medicine. He said: 'Is this stuff legal in Ireland?' and promptly drank the whole bottle."

The Edge: "The mix took a while, as he had his own trademark drum sound, which was made by putting the snare drum through a period effects unit called a time modulator. I remember he carefully turned all the settings down to zero after he'd finished so our engineer wouldn't see what he had done."

Bono: "The record sounded more like him than us in the end, but it's brilliant and better for it."

Paul McGuinness: "Martin Hannett would have produced the U2 album [Boy] but he was committed to mixing the live sound for Joy Division in America. Then Ian Curtis killed himself and the tour never took place."

The Edge: "I think he was devastated."

Thereafter the group recorded with Steve Lillywhite in the producer's chair, and neither of the Hannett-helmed tracks appeared on their debut album Boy in October 1980. Thus Hannett and U2 remain an intriguing What If?

Indeed it seems that Hannett and CBS artists mixed like oil and water. After recording their eponymous debut album with Steve Lillywhite, in May 1980 the Psychedelic Furs recorded four tracks with Hannett for a proposed ep: Soap Commercial, Susan's Strange, Dumb Waiters and So Run Down. The tracks were recorded in London and mixed at Strawberry, without the band. Singer Richard Butler later told Jamming magazine: "We tried out Martin Hannett because I really liked the way that the John Cooper Clarke album sounded. But we didn't like it. It was too murky." And, it seems, too close to Joy Division. Despite this, however, Soap Commercial and Susan's Strange were added to American pressings of the debut album, and appeared as b-sides in the UK. Like U2, however, the Furs opted to work with rival producer Steve Lillywhite.

Another one-off single produced by Hannett at this time, Rebecca's Room by East London punk/psych rockers Wasted Youth, would be disparaged by the band as "too futurist." More successful were sessions with Basement 5, an innovative post-punk combo fronted by photographer Dennis Morris, who produced a kind of political Futurist Dub and allowed Hannett to indulge his love of guitar overload to the max. The band also featured former 101-ers and Public Image Limited drummer Richard Dudanski. Basement 5 recorded the album 1965-1980, mini album In Dub and the single Last White Christmas for Island in 1980, all of which was produced by Hannett and later compiled on a retrospective CD.

Although this marked the first occasion on which Hannett worked with a band he didn't already know on a personal level, both were both at their best on In Dub. Of the parent album 1965-1980 the producer told Oor magazine: "You have to play it very loud to enjoy it fully. It was the most difficult production, I must say, the heaviest. It was eighteen degrees in the shade, the end of August. As I recall it has been the most physical album that I've ever done. Made me feel like I'd been carrying bricks around. Heavy work. Putting the bass lines in the right place. But it was good."

In 1980 Hannett also worked extensively with Pauline Murray, whose previous vehicle, County Durham punk band Penetration, had split in October 1979 after two albums on Virgin. Murray first approached Hannett in February 1980, impressed by his work on Spiral Scratch, Jilted John and Unknown Pleasures. Together with former Penetration bassist Robert Blamire, she went on to record three singles and an album with Hannett producing, Pauline Murray and the Invisible Girls appearing on Illusive in October 1980 and climbing to 25 on the national album chart. The epic sci-fi single Dream Sequences appeared a few months earlier in July, and made 67. For the album sessions the Invisible Girls included Hannett and Hopkins as well as Vini Reilly (Durutti Column) and John Maher (Buzzcocks). It's a complex album, and one not always given a fair hearing at the time due to Penetration-based punk prejudice. Instead the all-star cast of Invisible modernists fashioned a very different sound: light, spacey, modern dance-pop, yet with a dark, angular underside. Thundertunes and Mr X nod towards the kind of brittle electro-disco that Hannett would record with New Order a few months later, although overall the album was probably too pop for an alternative audience, while too ambitious to crossover into the mainstream.

Interviewed by NME during the album sessions at Strawberry in July 1980, Murray revealed: "He just seemed to have the knack of putting everything in the right setting. He works in a totally different way to any other producer we've recorded with. He doesn't even re-play the songs on the tape very much. He has it all in his head… He's a weird bloke but we work really well with him. I had been stuck in a rut and I needed someone like that to show me some sort of light. Martin was just the right person."

The Invisible Girls (including Hannett, Hopkins and Reilly) even risked spoiling their studio tans to back Murray and John Cooper Clarke on a short joint tour in October 1980. Hannett performed only with Clarke, the Sounds reviewer present at the Newcastle show noting that Zero was "seemingly making up guitar fills on the spot like a degenerate, seated, chain-smoking Segovia." Never entirely comfortable onstage, Hannett found that he was unable to stand up and play bass at the same time, and so preferred to perform sitting down.

Hannett remained Factory's in-house producer throughout 1980 and early 1981. From Brussels, The Names enjoyed a long working relationship with Hannett which endured for three singles and an album between 1980 and 1982. Indeed the band continued to work with Hannett long after Factory's heavy financial investment in The Hacienda club soured relations between label and producer. Dark and brooding, Nightshift was recorded at Strawberry in August 1980, and released as a 7" single (Fac 29) in November. Hannett, a bassist himself, lent Michel Sordinia his own metal-necked instrument for the session, and made good use of the toy xylophone provided by guitarist Marc Deprez. For keyboard player Christophe den Tandt, his abiding impression is of a visionary producer who valued ideas over virtuosity, and sounds over technique. On one track, Hannett physically shook Deprez's guitar as he played. As a result of Hannett's studio style, the band wrote and selected songs for their 1982 album Swimming on the basis of what he might do with the material as a producer, rather than the underlying merit of the songs themselves. As a result the album featured few uptempo tracks, and sounded more like a second album than a debut. Incidently, the CD issue of Swimming on LTM includes both the issued version of Nightshift flipside I Wish I Could Speak Your Language, and the pre-mix version which the band took away from Strawberry when they left, the pair offering a unique insight into the way in which Hannett could transform a track in the mix.

Released on Factory Records (Fact 45) in August 1981, Always Now by Section 25 is often remembered more for its extravagant and costly Peter Saville packaging than for the music it contained. Which is hardly fair, for the grooves of the record wrapped inside the waxed card pochette and marbled inner sleeve contained some excellent music, and some of Hannett's most atmospheric work. A three-piece from Blackpool, SXXV then comprised brothers Larry and Vin Cassidy on bass and drums, and guitarist Paul Wiggin, the trio tending to alternate between spaced-out psychedelic jamming and a brand of austere, dirty disco redolent of Metal Box-era Public Image. Friendly Fires combines the best of both genres with an unsettling lyric about area bombing in Cambodia, and like Closer was recorded at Britannia Row, in February 1981. A contemporary review in Dutch magazine Vinyl offered that "Hannett has managed to drape exactly the right wrapping of echoes and effects around the few, unsteady doubtful notes which the group produces", which exaggerates to make the point. Although the band switched from Hannett to Bernard Sumner (as Be Music) as their producer after Always Now, the album represents a landmark for both.

"He made you sweat," recalls Larry Cassidy, "but he was dead good, streets ahead. Even if I was playing a cheap bass in an expensive London studio." Adds Vin Cassidy: "He encouraged us to expand on what we originally thought we were going to do in the studio. And he told me the most important sound to him was the sound of the snare drum."

Manchester quartet Crispy Ambulance had already released a 10" on Factory before graduating to record with Hannett in January 1981, who produced two long tracks for a 12" released on Factory Benelux (FBN 4) in June. Both The Presence and Concorde Square were recorded at Cargo, and are archetypical Hannett productions with dazzlingly bright guitar and snare. Contrary to popular myth the band sound nothing like Joy Division; indeed Rob Gretton disliked the long 'Gregorian' outro on Concorde Square so much that the band found themselves exiled to sister label Factory Benelux. Singer Alan Hempsall had already seen Hannett at work in the studio when Joy Division recorded Love Will Tear Us Apart at Pennine a year earlier. Of their own session, he recalls that Hannett showed little interest in the recording itself, and was reluctant to allow any of the band to travel down to London for the mix at Britannia Row. Eventually Hempsall alone was permitted to attend.

Like the debut ACR album To Each…, and the sole 7" ESG recorded for Factory, New Order's debut single was recorded at Eastern Artists Recording Studio in New Jersey. Both Ceremony and In A Lonely Place were latterday Joy Division songs, and recorded at EARS in September 1980 by the trio of Peter Hook, Steven Morris and Bernard Albrecht, a few weeks before Gillian Gilbert came on board to play keyboards and guitar. As such both tracks represent an end as much as a new beginning, and like To Each… would have benefited from being recorded in Manchester. Nonetheless the pair remain timeless classics. The single appeared in 7" (Fac 33) in January 1981, followed in March by a 12", and later a second 12" with a re-recorded version of Ceremony, with Hannett still in the chair.

Hannett produced New Order's often maligned debut album Movement at Strawberry in 1981, along with the glorious non-album singles Procession and Everything's Gone Green - the latter marking their first true foray into electro-disco. Taken as a whole, these sessions generated some excellent material, and Everything's Gone Green pointed the way forward, but Hannett's style did rob several songs of their spark, particularly Chosen Time and Senses. Moreover New Order were fast losing patience with Hannett's chronic predilection for re-takes, and hard drugs. As a result band and producer parted company, New Order recording their next single Temptation (issued in May 1982) themselves. Arguably this was a false start, since the version released lacked the hard techno edge of Everything's Gone Green, which would not return until Blue Monday.

Hook told The Face in 1983: "He taught us what to do very early on. We learnt the actual physics of recording from him, although we could have learned it from anybody. But in the end there was too much compromise from both sides." To this Sumner added: "Producing ourselves we get much more satisfaction. We know what we want and we can do it. With Martin the songs often turned out different, sometimes better, sometimes not."

New Order were the third major Factory band to drop Hannett in favour of self-production, after Durutti Column and A Certain Ratio, and their rejection inevitably hurt. The situation was further complicated in that most of his fellow Factory directors - Gretton, Wilson and Alan Erasmus - managed these very same artists, and sided with their bands. The final straw, however, proved to be The Hacienda. During 1981 Rob Gretton and Tony Wilson began to formulate plans for a Factory club venue in Manchester, which would open as the high-tech Hacienda (Fac 51) in a converted boat showroom on Whitworth Street in May 1982. The initial cost was in the region of half a million pounds, supplied in roughly equal shares by New Order and Factory - money which Hannett felt should have been invested in state of the art recording equipment, including a Fairlight sampling keyboard. The result was a bitter schism, and a lawsuit issued by Hannett in April 1982 and subsequently assigned a unique Factory catalogue number: Fac 61. The action dragged on for almost two years, and came close to closing the label, as well as depriving Hannett of royalty-derived income and new work. Eventually Fac 61 was settled in January 1984, in terms that remain obscure.

Today, Wilson believes that the decision not to fund a Fairlight robbed Hannett of the chance to pre-empt Trevor Horn. While the claim may be dubious, it's undoubtedly true that Hannett's career embarked on a downward trajectory during 1982. His last Factory-related production (for the time being) was the final Names single, The Astronaut, recorded in Brussels in October, and released on Les Disques du Crepuscule. For the rest, his productions covered a disparate array of minor records, including singles by original bass n' drum duo Urban Shakedown, art-nerds Kissing the Pink and (far better) a fine re-tread of All Tomorrow's Parties by Nico and the Invisible Girls, the former Velvet Underground icon by then living in Whalley Range and sharing a heroin habit with partner John Cooper Clarke. Most of her regular backing band, incidently, were drawn from Fall splinter group The Blue Orchids. Sadly, by this time Hannett's own drug habit was out of control, resulting in five years of narcotic exile. I met Hannett for the first and last time in 1983, when my then tape editor (Jon Hurst) would pop round to rent his Revox tape machine for a fiver a day. Hannett was simply a mess - unkempt, overweight, and trapped in a chemical stupor at ten in the morning. Truly the years 1982 to 1988 saw Zero at his lowest ebb. Legend holds that Hannett had long wanted to own a pet monkey; the closest he got was a monkey on his back.

The most notable Hannett production during this dark period was the debut single by The Stone Roses, the first release on the Thin Line label in September 1985. Released as a two track 12" single, the entire 13 song Strawberry session has since emerged as the bootleg Garage Flower, and includes raw early versions of future generational greats such as I Wanna Be Adored, Here It Comes and This Is the One. It seems the band were less than enamoured with the results, singer Ian Brown later telling journalist Nick Kent: "We went with him in 1985 and he produced the first version of I Wanna Be Adored, and a bunch of other stuff. Riffs that weren't songs. It was a disaster. He was only half there." Indeed on at least one occasion Hannett walked out of the sessions, and it would be another four years until the Roses broke through.

For Hannett, the only album projects during this period were for French singer Armande Altai (1983), and a respectable set for Island pop hopefuls Blue In Heaven in 1985. More intriguing, perhaps, was Stations, an unreleased project featuring Steve Albini recorded in Nashville in 1983. And what if Hannett had gone into the studio with The Smiths?

Although Hannett's early session with the Stone Roses in 1985 washed out, his collaboration with the Happy Mondays during 1988 and 1989 thankfully triggered a late return to form. Previous Mondays records had been variously produced by John Cale, Mike Pickering and Bernard Sumner, but it was Wrote For Luck, released as a single (Fac 212) in October 1988, which paved the way for the Madchester chart breakthrough the following year. The single preceded the album Bummed, also produced by Hannett, and recorded at Slaughterhouse in Driffield, then mixed at Strawberry. Steve Hopkins contributed piano, and Factory were obliged to accept the band's new producer of choice (although past animosities remained).

By now Hannett had kicked heroin, but was now drinking heavily. According to Shaun Ryder, the Mondays fed him copious amounts of 'disco biscuits' (ecstasy) the keep him off the demon booze. Of the Mondays, Hannett told John Savage: "They're something different. The music is harmonically interesting rather than linearly interesting. It's built onto something that I enjoy very much, which is the dead solid groove that they get. Sometimes they're into that groove within 30 seconds of getting onstage. A perfect opportunity for a wall-of-sound merchant."

Hannett went on to produce the celebrated Madchester Rave On ep, which - thanks to new dance remixes - rose to number 19 on the UK national chart in November 1989. The success of his stint with the Mondays saw a cleaned-up Zero once more in demand behind the desk, resulting in a flurry of work which included Stones cover She's A Rainbow for World of Twist, a kitsch pop unit lead by the late Tony Ogden, and Get Better for New Fast Automatic Daffodils, both judged late arrivals for the Madchester trend in 1990. During this period Hannett also produced several sides for a couple of underrated acts on the One Little Indian label, namely the single Quick As Rainbows by Kitchens of Distinction and several mixes for The Heart Throbs. His final production was for The High, the band featuring former Stone Rose Andy Couzens. None of these sessions scaled the heights reached at Cargo, Strawberry and Britannia Row during his heyday a decade before, but it was solid work nonetheless.

Martin Hannett died in Manchester in April 1991. He was 41. Having overcome his heroin habit he had begun drinking to excess, which served only to accelerate his declining health. As a musician, he left behind little true solo work aside from the Fac 14c flexi disc distributed with The Return of the Durutti Column, and a lone instrumental piece (The Music Room) included on the celebrated Crepuscule cassette package From Brussels With Love. Both artefacts were recorded in 1979, after which time Zero seems to have been either too busy or too stoned to compose more music beyond that used by John Cooper Clarke. It's a shame that his skills as a musician and writer remain largely unheard, and unsung.

In fact it's a sad story all round. As a producer, Hannett's dazzling golden age was relatively brief, lasting from the autumn of 1978 to the middle of 1981. Too controlling and wilfully Mancunian to sustain an orthodox career, and tied to his native city for long periods by drug dependence, Zero Hannett was never likely to have eclipsed Trevor Horn. But he was a true visionary and genius, and for once his nemesis Tony Wilson exaggerates not a jot.

James Nice
December 2006

This essay would have been much harder to write without the aid of the splendid Hannett online resource maintained by William Alberque and Anna Brykman. I conducted a number of specific interviews for the DVD documentary Shadowplayers, including Richard Boon, Vin and Larry Cassidy, Howard Devoto, Alan Hempsall, Peter Hook, Martin Moscrop, Chris Nagle, Vini Reilly, Michel Sordinia, Christophe Den Tandt, Simon Topping, Anthony H. Wilson. Colin Sharp also filled in several significant gaps in my knowledge. Thanks also to John Cooper of Cerysmatic, and Tony Rounce at Ace. The lengthy interview with Hannett by Jon Savage from May 1989 reproduced in the booklet of the And Here Is The Young Man CD was also helpful.

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