In 1977, after British music producer and Mute Records founder, Daniel Miller, broke up with his girlfriend, a friend recommended he read J. G. Ballard’s controversial 1973 novel Crash, which centered around a group of people who live out their sexual fantasties around their fetish for car crashes. Soon after, Miller became “obsessed” with the story and started writing a script based on Ballard’s book.
“I was kind of obsessed by it a bit, and an old college friend and I tried to write a film script for it so I knew the book inside out,” said Miller. “There were lots of issues about the film script, who owned it, but we were doing it more as a hobby.”
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Eventually, Miller scrapped the film idea, one picked up later by David Cronenberg, who brought Ballard’s book to the screen in the 1996, and opted to capture the story in a song. “I didn’t want to throw all of that away, so I thought I’d try and write a song encapsulating it in a two and a half minute song as a challenge more than anything else from a lyrical point of view,” said Miller, who was experimenting with electronic music at the time.
“I thought that it [electronic music] was much more punk rock than punk rock was,” added Miller. “Punk rock was very much still rooted in the past. I mean, I loved a lot of it, but it was R&B really, and I thought that to really take that idea of accessibility and DIY forward, there had to be another way. You shouldn’t have to learn three chords. … I wanted to make a record that reflected that.”
Using two Revox B-77 tape machines, Miller recorded the track in his apartment and finished his Crash song, “Warm Leatherette,” under the moniker the Normal. With its electromotive pulses, screeches, repetitive honk, Miller’s lyrics capture the macabre, Warm leatherette melts / On your burning flesh, and the fixation—A tear of petrol is in your eye / The hand brake penetrates your thigh / Quick let’s make love before you die.
Warm leatherette melts
On your burning flesh
You can see your reflection
In the luminescent dash
Warm Leatherette
Warm Leatherette
Warm Leatherette
A tear of petrol is in your eye
The hand brake penetrates your thigh
Quick, let’s make love before you die
Once recorded, Miller shopped “Warm Leatherette” around, before finally getting some play at Rough Trade in London. Released as the B-Side “T.V.O.D.,” both became the first releases by Mute Records and sold 30,000 copies.
Initially formed to release his singles, Mute Records developed into a label, signing Depeche Mode, Yazoo, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Erasure, Fad Gadget, Einstürzende Neubauten, and more early on.
Grace Jones
In 1980, “Warm Leatherette” resurfaced when Grace Jones recorded it as the title track of her album, produced by reggae duo Sly & Robbie (Lowell “Sly” Dunbar and Robert “Robbie” Shakespeare). A departure from her previous more chic and hedonistic disco-doused albums, Warm Leatherette veered into some post-punk edges, new wave, reggae, pop, and other unexplained sounds.
Warm Leatherette features Jones’ androgynous interpretations of Roxy Music’s “Love is the Drug,” the Pretenders’ “Private Life,” and Smokey Robinson’s “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game,” and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “Breakdown,” which also received another verse added by Petty for Jones: It’s OK if you must go / I’ll understand if you don’t / You say goodbye right now / I’ll still survive somehow / Why should we let this drag on?
The album was the perfect precursor for her follow up Nightclubbing in 1981, Jones’ transformed “Warm Leatherette” into something more decadent than its original.
“Do what you feel, when you feel, if you feel like it,” Jones said of her own sexual orientation and preferences in a 1985 interview. “Do what you want. I do what I want.”
Photo: Richard E. Aaron/Redferns
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