“Warm Leatherette” by The Normal

"Warm Leatherette" was the work of one man, Daniel Miller, operating as the Normal, and in 1978 it came out as the flip side of "T.V.O.D.", the project's only single and the very first record on his Mute Records label. The B-side is what people noticed, so later pressings put it up front.

Miller built it in his apartment with a Korg 700S synthesizer spitting sawtooth waves and a pair of Revox B-77 tape machines, and it sounds every bit as cold and cramped as that: a clanking, airless synth-punk pulse with a deadpan voice laid flat on top. The words come out of J. G. Ballard's controversial 1973 novel Crash, a book Miller had once tried to turn into a film script with a college friend; when that fell through, he squeezed the idea into a song instead. Then he hawked the record round independent shops, Rough Trade in London among them, where it got played to customers.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.