Clock DVA, more than anyone except perhaps their fellow travellers Cabaret Voltaire, reflected the industrial heartbeat of Sheffield. Literally so.

Their pioneering 1980 debut, White Souls in Black Suits, defines industrial music, with its dark, disturbing atmosphere and evokes the literal and psychological decay that followed the closure of the city’s steelworks and the subsequent loss of manufacturing jobs.

“We set out to form a new sound combination,” says Clock DVA’s Adi Newton today. “To combine acoustics and electronics, merging the German electronic wave with the edge of The Stooges, the avant-garde of the French GRM Musique Concrète, and the pioneering audio-visual creativity of The Velvet Underground. To create a harder form of electronic music with real energy.” 

The pantheon of great music from Sheffield, ranging from Joe Cocker and Def Leppard through The Human League and ABC to Arctic Monkeys and Pulp, rarely remembers to include Clock DVA.

They formed in Sheffield in 1978, inspired equally by science fiction, Russian constructivism and beat literature, creating a sound that combined electronic sci-fi soundscapes with screeching guitars and strangled squawks of saxophone.

They soon became part of an underground scene that included Cabaret Voltaire, whose Western Works studio was where they recorded their debut – in a single day! – and Throbbing Gristle who released it on their Industrial Records label… on a limited-edition cassette.

The group built up a fierce reputation as one of Sheffield’s most ferocious live outfits who could melt minds and charge the atmosphere of a room with their wild and unpredictable performances; just as their album had been put together from eight hours of improvisation.

Theatrical events, they incorporated visuals ranging from 8mm and 35mm film to slides and, in the mid-to-late Eighties, early digital computer graphics.

The album line-up comprises Newton (voice, synth, clarinet, bowed electric guitar, and tape treatment), fellow founding member Steven James Turner (bass treatment), David J. Hammond (guitar treatment), Charlie Collins (saxophone, flute & percussion), Roger Quail (percussion), and Simon M. Elliott-Kemp (synth).

One album track, Anti-Chance, was a collaboration with the Cabs, using random tapes from both bands to create an audio cut-up piece inspired by the techniques of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin in literature.

White Souls In Black Suits is about to be released on CD by The Grey Area Of Mute in November, making the album available for the first time in 35 years.