A Short History of a Certain Ratio

A Certain Ratio were the second band to be signed to Factory Records. This was the label that, along with Rough Trade, championed the artist's freedom of expression. In practice this meant funding for the bands but allowing them to develop musically as they wished. This idea was central to A Certain Ratio. They were a band who pioneered their own take on northern soul, jazz and funk. They did this while signed to a label that was making a name for itself with post-punk bands like Joy Division and the lesser known Durutti Column. Factory did things differently than the rest of the music industry. In these terms A Certain Ratio were also punk. They too seemed to have their own specific agenda that confronted accepted values and industry rules. There's was not the world of Joy Division. There's was the world of Funkadelic, Earth Wind and Fire, Parliament. Not the Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop.

It was in the clubs of the seventies like the Twisted Wheel that Simon Topping, Jeremy Kerr, Peter Terrel and Martin Moscrop got their kicks. This was the northern soul scene of speedy all-nighters that survived well into the eighties. It was the same kind of scene that was key to the musical education of Paul Ryder and the Happy Mondays, of Ian Brown and Mani of the Stone Roses. The hedonistic center of Manchester was northern soul. This was before 'Madchester' and baggy. The only places to go were seedy all night clubs full of seedy all night people in a seedy run down city. Joy Division sung about it in their own brutally honest and edgy way. As did A Certain Ratio, but they made it possible to dance in the seedy club and gain some separation from the seedy city.

The band's debut single was "All Night Party" which was followed by a monster of a groove in 1980. It was called "Shack Up" and was a cover of an international club favorite put through the harsh and edgy Manchester blender. It's a celebration of hedonism and the harsh realities of urban cultural decay made by the dispossessed for the dispossessed. There were stabs of angry guitar wrapped up in an electro-funk groove. When the band played it live they used trumpets and wah-wahs, flying in the face of punk music. Yet it was punk in attitude.

A Certain Ratio went to New Jersey to record their album "To Each...". This was where hip-hop was the new punk. They took Factory's in-house producer Martin Hannett with them. What stands out on these recordings are the startling tape-loops of Peter Terrel and the ultra precise drumming of Donald Johnson. The album paved the way for a series of EPs and 12" which have been described as cold funk. The highlight of which was "Knife Slits Water" about night-time urban violence.

By the time 1982 came around Terrel and Topping had left and it was the drummer Johnson who took over the reigns. He led the band away from the pioneering earlier work towards a more commercial jazz sound. They made one more album for Factory. Yet it was the band's role in Manchester's famous and hugely influential Hacienda Club which perhaps provides A Certain Ratio with their most important legacy. Their songs were played at the Hacienda when the likes of the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses were just starting out on their own roads to stardom. A Certain Ratio were contemporary's of Joy Division. They helped introduced Chicago House music and funk and dance beats to the newly danced-up New Order. A Certain Ratio seem to have been airbrushed out of the history of Manchester music. That timeline goes from Joy Division to New Order to the Happy Mondays. But it was A Certain Ratio who freed the beat in independent music. They put the "Mad" in "Madchester".