Credit: Dangerous Minds / Clock DVA

Sheffield’s Clock DVA was formed in 1978 by Adolphus ‘Adi’ Newton and Steven ‘Judd’ Turner. You could categorise the group’s sound, highly adventuresome even for that fabled era, variously as industrial, post-punk, new wave or what Newton himself once described as “devolved bebop”. They used standard rock guitar, bass and drums augmented with tape loops, synths, squealing horns and elements of musique concrète.

I’ve always thought Clock DVA got unfairly overshadowed by Cabaret Voltaire. Not that it was a competition.

Sheffield seemed to have an endless supply of weird geniuses back then. Cabaret Voltaire. The Human League. Heaven 17. ABC. Somehow, all this futuristic music was coming out of a city famous for steel and rain.

Funny place, Sheffield.

The group was associated with Throbbing Gristle, as Industrial Records released their cassette White Souls in Black Suits. Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H Kirk and Stephen Mallinder were sometime musical collaborators with Clock DVA as well. That alone ought to tell you something.

Any band orbiting around TG and Cabaret Voltaire was almost certainly not interested in writing three-minute pop songs.

Clock DVA always struck me as jazz musicians trapped inside a science-fiction movie, or maybe beatniks with synthesisers.

William Burroughs fans.

Late-night weirdos.

Take your pick.

Their records could be funky, paranoid, sexy, abrasive and strangely cinematic, often all in the same song. There was always something slightly noir-ish about Clock DVA. You half expected Humphrey Bogart to wander into one of their records carrying a saxophone.

Over the years their sound became closer to the “body music” of groups like Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb. They were quite prolific through the mid-’90s. Apparently they are active again as of the summer of 2011.

Funny thing about Clock DVA: everybody I know who loves them really loves them. They were never huge, but maybe they were too strange.

Maybe they arrived too early.

Maybe that’s the fate of most genuinely original bands.

Who knows?

Their influence ended up being bigger than their record sales. You can hear bits of them in industrial music, darkwave, techno and all sorts of electronic hybrids. Like so many cult bands, people tend to discover Clock DVA backwards. First it’s Joy Division. Then Cabaret Voltaire. Then Throbbing Gristle. Eventually somebody says, “Oh, if you like those guys, check out Clock DVA.”

And down the rabbit hole you go.

Below, Clock DVA perform a fantastic live version of ‘4 Hours’ at the Futurama Festival in Leeds in 1980.

Futurama, by the way, was one of those gloriously odd post-punk gatherings where Joy Division, The Fall and Cabaret Voltaire shared bills with bands that looked and sounded like they had crash-landed from another planet.

Clock DVA fit right in.