Few electronic musicians or producers can claim to have stayed relevant for over four decades. Notching up a career that has continually blurred boundaries and includes experimental post-punk classics, early British mutations of acid house, dance floor hip-hop jams, rave anthems and collaborations with Björk and UB40, 808 State cofounder Graham Massey is one of them. He's been part of the fabric of the Manchester music scene since the mid-'70s, when he took his first steps in music as part of an art rock band whose work is lost to history. Since then, Massey has been in constant flux musically, building a vast catalogue that includes as many experimental oddities and freewheeling fusions as commercially successful club anthems and chart-bothering pop singles.

His musical breakthrough came in 1979 when he joined Biting Tongues, a post-punk outfit who would sign to Factory Records six years later. His love of tape loop experiments and recording technology led him to enrol in a studio engineering course—one of the first of its kind in the world—just as the first Chicago house records were arriving in Manchester's record shops. When he met the co-owner of Eastern Bloc record shop Martin Price and local dancer-turned-acid house maker Gerald Simpson in 1987, it set in motion a chain of historic events: countless improvised live performances, the recording of one of the earliest expressions of UK acid house (Newbuild), the production of the much-copied and still hugely influential "Pacific State" (one of dance music's most emotive anthems) and a clamour from major labels to sign the band that became known as 808 State.

During the '90s, 808 State was one of the world's leading dance acts. Their trademark sound, densely layered and laced with memorable melodies, appealed far beyond the confines of dance floors. There were club anthems of course—"Cübik," "Olympic," "In Yer Face" and more—but also hip-hop and hip house cuts with MC Tunes, and a dynamic live show that was as innovative as it was life-affirming for those in the audience.

As part of Resident Advisor's RA2122 birthday celebrations in Manchester, Massey gave us an insight into his creative process with a demonstration of how 808 State made—and later reworked—"Cobra Bora" (a video of which you can watch below). Before that, he sat down in front of an audience and discussed his life in music, his approach to production and his love of improvised performance.

Graham Massey speaks at Art of Production live at RA’s 21st birthday programming in Manchester.

We'll get on to 808 State in a moment, but I wanted to start by discussing the start of your musical journey. You were a member of various little bands in the late 1970s, right?

Yes. While I was at school in the mid-'70s—at the point when punk was beginning to happen—my friend was walking around with a Black Sabbath cross on. He played fretless bass and I was very impressed by his musicianship. He invited me into his band. They only ever did cover versions of the music of Gong, which was a progressive psychedelic rock band. Our first gig was on the Queen's Silver Jubilee day in 1977. We played three gigs that day at street parties, playing psychedelic, weird music in funny time signatures. It was a great vibe and a brilliant starting point in terms of learning music.

When did your interest in recording and producing music begin?

We all came out of the '70s, and there was a craze back then where everyone got a tape recorder for Christmas. On our street, there were four or five [kids with] tape recorders. Then we started taping the tape recorders. We were all amateur recorders, doing little field recordings and things. There were two records that everyone had in our neighbourhood. I'm exaggerating, of course, but everybody seemed to have Camembert Electrique by Gong, a 49p bargain from Virgin Records, and The Faust Tapes by Faust, which is a sort of anything-goes, musique concrète-style musical collage. That was our common ground. When I became part of the band Biting Tongues, we used a lot of tapes in our music.

There's echoes of what people like Cabaret Voltaire were doing across the Pennines, experimenting with tape loops and guitars in an attic.

Yeah. A lot of Sheffield bands are unique, and Manchester was like that too. Each band in Manchester had its own identity. No one was particularly following a trend post-Buzzcocks and all that kind of thing. A few streets away from where we are now is 50 Newton Street, where the New Hormones label had their office. The most important thing in that office was the photocopier, and the person in charge of that photocopier was Steven Morrissey.

In 1979, we took a tape of Biting Tongues songs to that office and they put us on at this venue they ran called The Beach Club. They showed art cinema because there was nowhere else for it in Manchester. One floor was the art cinema and upstairs there was a small gig venue about as big as this room. New Order did their first experimental post-Joy Division gig there, for instance. Biting Tongues got regular gigs at this place and we got to know the people behind New Hormones. They offered to put a record out and connected us with a guy called Stuart James. He was a producer at Piccadilly Radio and just the fact that he had the title producer meant that we trusted him, because we didn't really know what a producer was.

That's interesting. As a band, you were working with a radio producer rather than someone like, say, Martin Hannett [record producer]. Did you learn much from him technically or about the way the production process works?

I didn't learn anything particularly technical, but I do remember having to get used to the experience of going and recording music. We were used to music in rehearsal rooms, where the drums are just crushingly loud and you can't hear what you're doing. It's a confused world that you're in and you're trying to force ideas into this huge noise. In the studio, you could control that. Then, discovering echo and reverb is a magic thing. You came out of the studio with something that almost sounded like a record and that was a big deal. Every time we went into the studio it was important and focused. When I think back now, many of the studios in Manchester were quite ramshackle places that had hardly any gear. I've just been for a pint in Northern Monk on Tariff Street—that's where we recorded a lot of the early 808 State stuff, in that building. In fact, if you go to the toilets there, that's where the control room was.

People might not know this, but you actually enrolled in one of the first studio engineering courses in the world.

Yes, at a place on Tariff Street. I'm not sure whether it was the first, but it was certainly one of the first.

When was that?

The course started in 1985 and I enrolled in '87. It was a one year-long course and many people started with enthusiasm and dropped off. It was a real bunfight to get time in the studio—you really had to fight for time. I did things like caretaking, looking after the studio overnight and we got a lot of work done under that guise. It was about getting experience on a [mixing] desk and working with tape recorders. It was all very tape-based when we started. That was the big thing, though that year they bought an Atari ST with a sequencer and an early Casio sampler. That was like the keys to the magic kingdom!

Was it trackers at that point, pre-Cubase?

Yeah, I think the software was called Pro 24, but we had a thing called Hybrid Arts Synth T-Track. We did the first bunch of 808 State tracks using that, which was quite primitive. I can't say I understood it greatly other than the fact that we could play keyboards into it and then play them back at different speeds. It probably had capabilities, but we were too busy and too impatient.

This was at a point that was arguably on the cusp of great technical change. But there was also a big element of improvisation with hardware in the way that 808 State came about. I think we should talk a little bit about that.

It started with me meeting Martin Price, who was older than me and ran Eastern Bloc Records. I ran a café across the road from Eastern Bloc, and the guys who worked there used to come in and hear the weird music I was playing. We formed a bond over records. They would bring records in and Martin in particular was very generous with his records—if he got evangelical about a particular tune, he'd be giving copies away the whole time. He also knew how to pull people into that shop. He was a raconteur and a big character who filled the space.

Kids used to take tapes of tunes they'd made into the shop, and a lot of it was hip-hop. For instance, MC Tunes and A Guy Called Gerald were a team, and Darren [Partington] and Andy [Barker], who later joined 808 State, were the Spin Masters with a rapper called MC Shine. They both took tapes into the shop, and because Martin knew I'd started this studio engineering course, he was funnelling them to me. We sort of started a production team.

You don't need to go into a lot of detail, but there was a record pre-808 State with all of these acts on, called Wax On The Melt, which was funded by someone at the shop raiding their savings account.

Yes. That record is awful!

When we last spoke, you told me that making acid house was just something you tried after mostly making hip-hop.

That's right. It was just, "let's give it a go." With hip-hop, we did little gigs around the North West in weird places like Wrexham Football Supporters Club or above some pub in Bolton. At the end of these live sessions, because we had Gerald's TR-808 and TB-303, and other bits of kit all linked together, we had the gear to make acid house so we just gave it a go. We were hearing a lot of acid house on Stu Allen's radio show, which was really important locally.

Stu sadly passed away a few days ago.

Yes, they're having a big tribute show soon over at Bowlers. It's amazing how important he was to people. The outpouring of emotion at the news of his death was amazing. He influenced a whole generation of Mancunians to get into all different forms of music, not just Chicago house but also electro and urban soul stuff. He was connected to Spin Inn Records, which was Eastern Bloc's main rival. Because of him the town was pretty clued-up about music.

Manchester has always been a city obsessed with music. When I met Martin, he was an obsessive, and I was an obsessive in a different way. There was all this nightlife stuff going on. The Hacienda gets a lot of credit, and it was an amazing place, but it wasn't the only place—Manchester was and still is a very diverse city with different small nights. It's the way that all of this rubbed together against each other that made that period at the end of the '80s so exciting.

You used improvisation in Biting Tongues as well. In terms of those early 808 State sessions, how did it work? For example, how did the recording of Newbuild pan out? How much of that was based on improvisation?

It was almost totally improvised. There was one track we made using the Atari ST and that sounds totally different to the rest of it.

Was the rest of it done via hardware connected by MIDI?

Yes. That's what we were doing at the gigs as well. It was at a time when warehouse parties were just beginning, and they were very low-key. There was a guy up the road in Ancoats who ran a road rider dispatch company. He knew Gerald and me, so he'd rope us in for birthdays, New Year's Eve, that kind of thing. We'd take a tabletop full of Roland gear and we'd just set off. We had no tunes. There were sequences in some things that we'd re-use and we'd always have a crack at "Confusion" by New Order as a kind of fencepost in the set, but mostly it was just getting the gear going and then making it up for an hour. Indeed, in recent years, when we've done a thing called Rebuild, it's just a tabletop of analogue gear. No computer, just jump off the cliff and see what happens.

Was doing those sorts of improvised, hardware-driven gigs a way of learning about what worked on the dance floor, or did you already have an instinctive knowledge of that? I'm interested in whether you learned about arrangement and what elements worked on the dance floor from seeing how people reacted—how a DJ might traditionally read the dance floor.

I don't think there was ever a point where we were working the dance floor. It was coming from a much more functional place, though we were trying to have a party, you know.

Sure, but even then, you would still have some knowledge of what you thought might work. For example, certain sequences, drum programming or fills.

I was around some other people at the studio who were serious about house music. This was a time when Farley "Jackmaster" Funk was number one, and Steve "Silk" Hurley was having hits, these jacking records. In the dance music world, back then, there was still that culture from Northern soul of weekenders and staying up all night. Some of the Chicago house music fitted right into that tradition.

The people at Spin Inn, that was their culture. and they were quite protective of it. A person like me who had come from a noisy, punky background, was viewed with suspicion. But we were also coming into electronic music from things like Tackhead Sound System, the On-U-Sound collective, which was big at the time, and the idea that you had a sound system and you played all your own music for three hours. That's what me and Martin were aiming at. Gerald was different because he had his own thing going on. He came from the dancing culture—breakdancing and footworking. It was a bit of a Venn diagram when we met, because we were all from different worlds. I don't know whether he understood where I'd come from, or anything to do with the music I'd been involved with, but as you said, improvisation was key.

When I was growing up, we played music for like five hours on end—like CAN, who all lived in a house and played music all day. That's where I come from. When you apply that to dance music and twiddling with technology, it's the same approach, thought process and journey.

When 808 State became successful, you signed to ZTT Records and focused a bit more on albums. Did the working process change and if so, what did it change to? Were the starting points different?

It's astounding how much we got done in a short period of time once there was a bit of money behind it. Studio time was difficult to get, and it was expensive, so you had to save up for it if you weren't backed by a well-financed label. With the first Biting Tongues album, we did the first side one year and then ran out of money. Then we did side two the following year, and again ran out of money. It took three years to come out because of financing issues. Then with ZTT, it was like, "What can you get done by Christmas?"

We had to get an album together from the end of August to get it out by Christmas, so the pressure was on—but in a good way. Now we could get in the studio, but the North West was having a music explosion at this point, so it was really hard to book time in studios. It was when the big studios were still running, so we'd find ourselves in Sarm Studios in London, which was owned by our record company. I think we were aware that it did seem a bit funny that they would give us money to go into the studio, and then they would take that money and put us in their studio. But it was a very good studio, with very good engineers. I definitely learned a lot from being in places like that.

What was your biggest takeaway from working at Sarm with those engineers? You were someone by that point with some studio engineering experience who was used to being quite autonomous.

By that time, we were a group of four people, and I was used to being the engineer—and therefore being very hands-on. When we ended up somewhere like that, I took my engineering hat off, which was good and bad, as far as I'm concerned—because to be hands-on is to make a record work. On all the early records, I had a very good idea of what it should sound like, and then you're in a place like Sarm, that's almost an institution like Abbey Road used to be. The engineers are trained there, and there's a protocol. You rub up against that. And there were points where I found it really frustrating not to be driving the bus.

That's quite different to how many of your contemporaries were working at the time—people who had little bedroom setups or had built their own home studios. You used different studios, not just Sarm in London, but FON in Sheffield and many others. Did you have pieces of kit that you'd take with you to sessions?

We'd definitely take the hardware. They'd just have walls wrapped with outboard stuff that wasn't really that important to the records, because we were coming straight out of the boxes. It was a ready-formed sound, and we were using keyboards that were being universally used by other people. I was saying to someone the other day that if you were using something like a [Roland] D-50, Michael Jackson was also using one on his records. There was a common ground of sounds and presets that crossed genres. I find it interesting that everyone had a TR-909 going on, but the diversity of music made with it was wide. We were all using a language. It's what you could do with the language, how you fit it into a dance floor situation and what you had to say.

The percussive elements that went into creating 808 State’s "Cobra Bora."

As a group, did you spend a lot of time trying to make the sounds you were using, particularly with the riffs and hooks and lead lines, sound different? Were you tweaking or sampling things and changing them, or using presets?

I think we were in the reverie of the technology at the time, which meant you could have more of everything. When I listened back to some of the 808 State tracks now, they're so dense. There's maybe two drum machines and some breaks, so rhythmically they were very dense, but that was exciting at the time, because it hadn't happened before. We'd moved from minimalism to maximalism at that point in time. Many textures we were building up were brand new. It was new territory. You'd go out on a Friday night and you'd hear the records that had dropped that week and it was like, "Wow, I've never heard a thing like this before"—something like "French Kiss" or Marshall Jefferson's "Open Our Eyes."

Things like that were doing weird, emotional things to you. Those records were very emotional, not bland biscuits that just fit together. Everything had an emotional impact, so that was our agenda. If you could change the atmosphere in the club, that was a goal that you would chase. Trying to make tracks exist within their own individual environment.

You were also mixing the records. Given the denseness of the layering, was it difficult to get the clarity of sound you wanted?

I'm not sure I was great at it back then. In recent times, when you can get hold of stems and redo things, you're more in control of the mixes. It's amazing what you can do now, but back then it was more about the emotional impact than the technical side of things. That's what I was striving for. I think our best sounding record came out in 1996, the album Don Solaris. That's because we worked and worked and worked on it. It was a very expensive record. I don't think we could ever make a record like that again. It was just a point in time.

What made it so expensive? The equipment used, or the amount of studio time?

Both of those things, but also using a really good engineer called Al Stone. We worked with him at a place called the Wool Hall in Bath. Van Morrison owned it and used to come in in his helicopter. We did some of the mixing at Olympic Studios, and when we went there Al was fiddling around with this track and we were like, "What the hell is this?" It was the first Spice Girls single. He was doing those kinds of top-level pop jobs.

During that period in the '90s, and even a bit earlier, one of the things 808 State did that was different from a lot of your contemporaries in dance music was work with vocalists—people like James Dean Bradfield of the Manic Street Preachers, or Björk fairly early in her career. How did you approach these collaborations? Did you look to write songs in a traditional manner—words and music together—or did you just create tracks and ask the vocalists to write to them?

I think each one was a different scenario. For instance, Björk had been listening to a lot of our music and wanted to start thinking about beats in a different way. She called us out of the blue and we met on the set of The Word, that famous Friday night show. She had a cassette with her of what eventually became Debut. It was trumpet, trombone and saxophone versions of things like "Anchor Song" and "Violently Happy." There was no singing on it at that point.

We had an empathetic feeling, so we rang her up the next day before she was due to fly back to Iceland and asked her if she wanted to stay and get into the studio with us the next week and have a go at something. We had this track called "Qmart," which was a weird waltz-time free jazz monster of a track. She said, "I'll have a go on this one." What ended up on the record was her first take, which was completely improvised. A real goosebumps moment.

Given your love of improvisation, you must have loved that.

Oh yeah, it absolutely ticked all my boxes. When we recorded "Ooops" with her, that was a totally different scenario. She went away and wrote lyrics to something quite structured, which had a melodic lead and a groove. It had room on it for a vocal. Once the vocal was in, we restructured it around the vocal. So it wasn't like we sat down and wrote the song, unlike the time I sat down [with her] and wrote "Army Of Me" together. We did that in my friend's studio, which was a little terraced house with a studio in it. We did that in something like two hours. It's such a simple tune that it's a good lesson: it's not all the big ideas that work the best. This was quite a punky idea, almost throwaway really.

Does inspiration always come easy to you or do you get creative blocks? If you do, what's your approach to get round that block?

I do get creative blocks, but I didn't in the days when you knew where a track was aimed at. So whether it was for the radio, the clubs, as a B-side or whatever. In modern times, when all these tracks go up on Spotify on a daily basis, I do struggle sometimes. The context is way too blurry for me. It's like I don't know what a track or a song is for.

Also, in the days of paying for studio time by the hour or day or week, you had deadlines which focused the mind.

When you had a studio for the day, there was no pondering. Back then you had to write everything down—what equipment you were using, what the settings were and so on—because it was the only way to be able to return to the track to work on it more or change the arrangement. Now you just press save and come back to it when you have more time or are feeling more inspired.

The technology has changed so much, and so rapidly, since you started with 808 State.

I can remember when Pro Tools came out and you could move big bits of sound around and manipulate whole passages of music. We were always into editing and used to edit a lot of our tracks with razor and tape. There were people like Chep Nunez in New York who were edit artists and they were very inspirational. The Latin Rascals too. They'd mess with the format and deliver surprises. Another guy I was really into was Teo Macero, who used to produce Miles Davis's '70s stuff. He'd record people in a room jamming for hours on end, and then form the composition out of the tapes. We were talking about Newbuild earlier and that was very much the thinking we used with that: record a load of jams and then dissect it in the editing. When Pro Tools came out, it made all that so easy. You could easily manipulate and restructure things really easily.

Has your creative process changed over time?

Actually, I still value playing music in a room to people, with people, as the highest and most rewarding aspect of music. I think it's a holistic thing. To actually have a community of musicians like we do in Manchester is such a blessing. To be together coming up with ideas is great. There's muscle memory there. With making music on the computer, it's almost like slowed down improvising. You can have a look at an idea, go back to it later and manipulate the thought process behind it. What's beautiful about the moment of creating stuff on the spot is that you're surprised by it, and it delivers to the whole room.

It's still very much about music, not technology. The technology keeps changing and people think that I'm really interested in that. They're just tools at the end of the day, and to me a violin is just as important as a modular synth. I'm not as big a synth nerd as people think I am. Having said that, if people have seen pictures of our studio, it's a hell of a collection, though most of it is junk. I'm 62 now and, to be honest, I'm over fetishizing technology. Now what I'm after is new experiences, like playing in weird places to new audiences. That's what excites me.