Some distributors championed the label from (or near) the very start. Cabaret Voltaire had been a dance group pretty much from their inception, and while TG never abandoned the shock tactics that had UK tabloids calling them “wreckers of civilization,” the quartet also had a pronounced poppier side that manifested most prominently on the Giorgio Moroder tribute “ Hot on the Heels of Love.” The genre’s only constants were a position oriented more toward deprogramming and mobilization than toward punk’s simple confrontationalism, a marked preference for non-standard instrumentation (especially electronics and found percussion), and, often, a dancefloor-friendly m.o. Industrial music was hardly a new thing by 1983: its origins lay in mid-’70s London and Sheffield, with Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire as its first visible practitioners. Released in 1983, the Endless Riddance EP provided Wax Trax! with its second club hit and the beginnings of what would soon become, for better or worse, its reputation as a label devoted primarily to industrial dance music. After hearing Front 242’s “ U-Men” single, Nash (who by way of gross generalization, tended to be the label’s visionary, while the more down-to-earth Flesher focused on nuts-and-bolts matters) went after the quartet with a vengeance.
The EP sold 10,000 copies, won the love of countless DJs, and secured a couple overseas licensing deals. Jourgensen ended up calling his project “Ministry.” While “I’m Falling” generated enough interest in Ministry’s first single to keep people listening, B-side “ Cold Life” ended up becoming Wax Trax!’s first hit. The latter did just that, at Hedden West Studios with four other musicians and engineer Iain Burgess, a UK transplant who played a crucial role in shaping the city’s early punk sound.
After hearing a home-recorded demo for “I’m Falling,” Nash encouraged recovering new waver Al Jourgensen to further develop his ideas. The first breakthrough came from their own backyard. And 2) The Wax Trax! retail outlet’s burgeoning destination status provided the perfect platform for their efforts. Nash and Flesher might have ended up like dozens of other late-20th Century music retailers who started labels – a few releases to their credit, a few thousand copies of each in their garages, and any number of hard-earned lessons about the difficulty of maintaining a record label – if not for two things: 1) Lifelong Anglophiles, they’d learned all they could from the likes of Rough Trade, Mute, and Factory Records.
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