(Soft Cell veteran Marc Almond’s brief cameo as a smirking hospital visitor marks the only appearance of another human.) The video’s marriage of artful surreality and gut-wrenching realism helped make it the Museum of Modern Art’s first music video acquisition. Directed by Coil founder and Throbbing Gristle alumnus Peter Christopherson, it features Coil’s John Balance, first as an AIDS victim in the final weeks of his life, then as a dead person being wheeled around by Christopherson, who was dressed as a hospital orderly. But the video provided more than enough spectacle to compensate. The first ever AIDS benefit release, the track was far too slow for any approach to dancing not rooted in comedy. Generalist DJs championed the label, often going out of their way to find places for its less danceable releases.Ĭoil’s cover of Soft Cell’s cover of Gloria Jones’s “ Tainted Love” is a prime example. People with only a passing interest in dance music, as well as those who normally cared only for the same, bought new releases on sight, confident that at the very least, they were getting something fresh and engaging. Wax Trax! had attained their foremost – if not only – goal: as with the bigger UK independents, the strength of the label’s brand transcended the appeal of any individual artist or combination of artists. They definitely had an aesthetic and a strong identity.”Įarly on, that identity became a major selling point in itself. From what I could tell, they never had anything even vaguely resembling a business plan, but they made up for the lack with passion. We’d hang out at the store, go to shows, stay up all night, feel awful the next day. Thanks to our mutual love of ’50s furniture, Roxy Music, David Bowie, the electronic music of the time, art – so many things – we bonded from the start. “Jim was the store’s buyer,” he continues, “so we had this strange symbiosis, buying and selling back and forth from each other. Now a dealer of mid-century modern furniture and music memorabilia, Eliof became one of the label’s most ardent (and effective) evangelists as the driving force at mid-sized distributor Twin City Imports. “I think we started doing business with Wax Trax! right around the time of the Divine single,” Richard Eliof remembers. Some distributors championed the label from (or near) the very start. Cabaret Voltaire had been a dance group pretty much from their inception, and while TG never abandoned the shock tactics that had UK tabloids calling them “wreckers of civilization,” the quartet also had a pronounced poppier side that manifested most prominently on the Giorgio Moroder tribute “ Hot on the Heels of Love.” The genre’s only constants were a position oriented more toward deprogramming and mobilization than toward punk’s simple confrontationalism, a marked preference for non-standard instrumentation (especially electronics and found percussion), and, often, a dancefloor-friendly m.o. Industrial music was hardly a new thing by 1983: its origins lay in mid-’70s London and Sheffield, with Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire as its first visible practitioners. Released in 1983, the Endless Riddance EP provided Wax Trax! with its second club hit and the beginnings of what would soon become, for better or worse, its reputation as a label devoted primarily to industrial dance music. After hearing Front 242’s “ U-Men” single, Nash (who by way of gross generalization, tended to be the label’s visionary, while the more down-to-earth Flesher focused on nuts-and-bolts matters) went after the quartet with a vengeance. The EP sold 10,000 copies, won the love of countless DJs, and secured a couple overseas licensing deals. Jourgensen ended up calling his project “Ministry.” While “I’m Falling” generated enough interest in Ministry’s first single to keep people listening, B-side “ Cold Life” ended up becoming Wax Trax!’s first hit.

The latter did just that, at Hedden West Studios with four other musicians and engineer Iain Burgess, a UK transplant who played a crucial role in shaping the city’s early punk sound. After hearing a home-recorded demo for “I’m Falling,” Nash encouraged recovering new waver Al Jourgensen to further develop his ideas.

The first breakthrough came from their own backyard. And 2) The Wax Trax! retail outlet’s burgeoning destination status provided the perfect platform for their efforts. Nash and Flesher might have ended up like dozens of other late-20th Century music retailers who started labels – a few releases to their credit, a few thousand copies of each in their garages, and any number of hard-earned lessons about the difficulty of maintaining a record label – if not for two things: 1) Lifelong Anglophiles, they’d learned all they could from the likes of Rough Trade, Mute, and Factory Records.

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