“The electronic Sex Pistols”: The Quietus on the anarchy of early Clock DVA

The Quietus has published a long feature dedicated to the wildest and least documented phase of Clock DVA’s history: the founding years, in late-Seventies Sheffield.

Smashed Glass, Smack & Dog-Throwing: the Anarchy of early Clock DVA — the title alone sets the tone (ed. by Daniel Dylan Wray) — reconstructs, through the voices of those who were there, the incendiary reputation of the earliest line-up: gigs teetering on the edge of collapse, venue bans piling up one after another, a tension that could either ignite into something memorable or dissolve into chaos. To the point that, as drummer Roger Quail recalls, the band was known around town as “the electronic Sex Pistols”.

A curious theory, the electronic Sex Pistols — and like every fortunate formula, it illuminates one half of the truth: the destructive energy, the friction with audiences, the refusal of any compromise. The other half — the research, the conceptual rigour, the vision that would run through five decades — is the story we know, and it is the one the Second Sight project documents today in all its forms: the Clock DVA double LP and Paolo Bertoni’s book Adi Newton: Second Sight, both available on the Rizosfera online shop.

Read the full article on The Quietus: https://thequietus.com/culture/books/clock-dva-history/

Second Sight LP: https://rizosfera.org/en/shop/armeuv008/
Adi Newton: Second Sight (book): https://rizosfera.org/shop/nukfm026/