Classic Album: 808 State, Ex:el

ZTT, 1991

It’s fair to say that by 1991, 808 State had some momentum behind them. The Mancunian four-piece had three seminal electronic albums in the bag [ Newbuild, Quadrastate and

Ninety], an EP, and a new album’s worth of rambunctious beats for the chart-straddling rapper, MC Tunes.

Never ones to sit around twiddling their thumbs, they used their next breaths to carve out more cutting edge futurism, in a city otherwise obsessed with the guitar bands of the ’60s.

“There was a crazy amount of energy back then,” says Graham Massey, who fronts the crew alongside Eastern Bloc Records’ boss, Martin Price and Spinmasters’ Darren Partington and Andrew Barker. “We were full of ideas, looking forward, and working fast. The time pressures were very acute – we had a release date for a single before we’d even written it!”

Holed away in the suburban cottage-like low ceilings of Revolution Studios in Manchester, they beavered away. All huddled over the mixing desk, they made their music in sections. “It was like, ‘This is the beginning. This is the intro section. This is the groove section. This is ‘the interruption’,” says Massey. “We ended up making pop art, in a kind of way. It was all about carving out a mood from the overloading of information.”

They were one-upping themselves, on a career high, as well as their peers in a dance scene in similar rude health.

“There was a lot of pressure to make this album better,” says Massey. “Rave culture had its own momentum by then, too. You had people making marks on the charts like the KLF, The Future Sound of London and The Shamen. We needed to push ourselves again.”

The fruits of these labours paid off, as ex:el (perhaps one of 808 State – and dance music’s – greatest albums) reached number four in the UK album charts, earning a gold disc in an era where you’d have to sell 100,000 to qualify.

“It was an amazing point in our – and British chart – history,” says Massey. “We saw it like punk and how that shifted the culture. We were going, ‘That’s old. This is new’. It was about the future.”