TOA 2018 Speaker Spotlight: Mute Records’ Daniel Miller
With over four decades in the music industry, Daniel Miller led the influential Mute Records with its roster of impressive clients including Depeche Mode, Nick Cave, and Arca, as well as releasing his own cult favourite singles and DJing. Ahead of his Fireside Chat at TOA 2018, we caught up with him to find out where it all began.
Mute Records was originally set up to release your own TVOD/Warm Leatherette single. How did that happen?
I mean, I didn’t really set up a record label, I just wanted to put out my own single. It was a great period in musical history: people were looking for the spirit of punk, but through different forms of music. I felt like electronic music was more punk than punk rock, in the sense that you didn’t really have to be able to play any instruments at all in order to be able to make music. It was the beginning of the DIY movement in the UK and the states, and so I thought hell, I’ll just put out a record. I was trying to say that the electronic movement was accessible and could be done by anybody and didn’t have to be the pompous prog-rock electronic music that had been going for a few years. I thought it was a good way of showing that some bloke who doesn’t really know what he’s doing can make a record in his bedroom for nothing and put it out.
About a year after that I met an artist who I wanted to release, and that’s how the label really started.
Things then exploded when you started working with Depeche Mode. How did you manage it?
When I started working with Fad Gadget, I was working on my own, I didn’t have an office or anything. By the time I started working with Depeche Mode we were a bit more established and I had one other person working with me. We made a commitment to Depeche, which was “we’ll do the very best we can, we’ll do one record at a time, and at any point if you don’t feel it’s working you’re free to explore other avenues”. And in turn they said, “No, we really wanna stay with you, let’s all try and make it work together.”
They became popular very quickly way beyond anything else I had worked with. And so I had to learn fast and build a team around me of people who knew more about it than I did. I’ve had the luck to work some really good people. If I look back on it, I don’t really know what happened or how I did it, I just remember being in hyper-accelerator mode for a long time.
How much of Mute’s strength was in the label’s ability to build those really close relationships with your artists?
It was very important. I didn’t wanna push the label as a label, I was much more interested in supporting the artists and creating a creative space for them. With Depeche in particular we were very close because I co-produced the first five albums, and so we were in the studio together and became friends. Some artists needed less input from the label, some needed more. I felt it was an artist-led label, and we worked with very different artists with very different needs, and we tried to be as sensitive as possible to that.
You worked with Nick Cave from the very beginning of the Bad Seeds. Did you have a sense of what he was on the cusp of in those early days?
It’s always hard to look back and know if I ever thought that Nick Cave or Depeche would be where they are today. I don’t think I ever looked much beyond the next record. The most important thing was to make sure that each record was better than the last, that we did the best possible job we could promoting and marketing it. If you asked me in 1980 when I first saw Depeche play to 15 people in the back of a pub, would they be playing stadiums in 2018, I would have said, “What’s 2018?” It’s beyond any possible kind of comprehension. But that’s the way it happened!
And alongside Mute, you also DJ?
I had three stages of DJing in my life. First when I was in my very early 20s, working in a ski resort playing pop music for tourists. Many years after that I did an experimental DJ project called DJ X DJ with Seth Hodder. That was just the two of us playing loops from dubplates, 4-decks, and it ran its course. And then a few years ago Karl O’Conner (Regis) had a party at Berghain and invited me. I mean, playing Berghain on your first techno DJ set is like playing your first football match at Wembley Station, it’s insane. And I’m still doing it, still enjoying it.
You’ve worked in the music industry for over forty years. Is there any particular aspect of technological change that you can put your finger on as having the biggest effect?
Well, it’s been so seismic. It’s hard to know where to start. Obviously the two key dimensions are creation and distribution, and that’s where things have changed beyond recognition.
I made my first record in my bedroom on a 4-track tape machine. Now people are making records in their bedroom with the most sophisticated digital equipment you can buy, which is pretty much the same equipment or same software that somebody in a top-end studio would be using. And distribution’s become very accessible. It’s an amplification by a million-fold of what we were doing in the late 70s. People are still making records in their bedrooms and distributing them, but it’s done in such a way that makes it so much more possible, sophisticated and easy.
In a sense that started with the DIY movement of the late 70s. It’s like taking the power away from the labels and doing it yourself. And a lot of people don’t need record labels! I started out as an artist without a label and I was very happy with that. But sometimes you want that support team to help make sure you’re making the best music without having to do all the work surrounding it. There is a need for record labels for certain artists, but not for everybody.
You’ve also spent a lot of time in Berlin over the last few decades. How do you feel having watched the city change to where it is now?
I live half of the time in Berlin. I’m there a lot, and quite a lot of our artists live there. The city is still dynamic, that’s the most important thing. It’s changed massively, some things for the better, some things not quite so good. But it feels like there are pockets of Berlin where you can still do whatever you want culturally and musically and artistically, for not very much money.
It’s been gentrified, a lot of it — where I live it’s really changed. But what I love about Berlin is that it’s still possible to live a creatively energetic life. When I compare it to London, it feels so much more relaxed as a city. The majority of people who live in London are in survival mode. It’s so expensive, it’s really hard to get around. It’s a great city, but it’s hard to live in, and when I come to Berlin it’s almost like coming to the countryside.
You can see Daniel Miller — and many more incredible speakers — at Tech Open Air 2018 in Berlin. Buy tickets here.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Written by Mikaella Clements.
