Quando Quango NME Interview

WHEN TO QUANDO AND WHEN TO QUANGO

BASICALLY, IT takes two to Quango, a fun new way of maintaining 'Love Tempo' without ever  having to look your partner in the eye.

The Quango is the most devastatingly appropriate form yet devised to fit that peculiar hybrid of disco and detachment coming out of Manchester. It is not so much a semi-detached disco, the stuff of urbane Northern soul dreams, as a demi-monde disco, which draws more from the No New York of Chance than the rocksteady Funhouse New York of Baker.

It is droll bordering dreary, worldly wise and just a touch weary; yet, like many city pleasures, it is immensely addictive once you've adapted to its sense of time. In the case of Quando Quango's Factory 12" 'Love Tempo', that means falling in behind a hopalonga cowboy rhythm - sort of honky-tonkin’ disco - and keeping apace the electronic breaks, while a saxophonist/vocalist Mike Pickering drily exhorts you to have a good time.

It might only take two to Quango, but Quando Quango can number anything between two and five. The nucleus of the group consists of Mike, who also manages Manchester’s Hacienda club, and Dutch girl Connie Rietveld. They are presently joined by Simon Topping, who returned to Quango after leaving A Certain Ratio to study latin percussion in New York, and bass player Barry Johnson, brother to ACR's drummer Donald.

They formed three years ago, when Mike met Connie in Rotterdam. At the time he’d just gone onto the Dutch dole after a stint of cleaning windows for a living. Being unemployed entitled him to musical tuition at the expense of the government; thus he learnt sax. Connie, meanwhile, a veteran of Dutch orchestras, spent her time de-learning everything she knew by switching to electronics.

Rotterdam was then one of the most open houses in Europe. Z’ev, Chance, Suicide, Tuxedomoon and various No New Yorkers passed through, some staying awhile, living and working in Utopia, a club cum living/working space set up by Mike. It was the first corner of a European circuit far more receptive of ideas than a fashion bound England.

“At that stage in England everything was totally closed,” says Mike, “but it was great then in Holland. You got everything...."

"We used to get all the underground magazines,” Connie concurs. “All the American and German imports, everything from DAF to Suicide. It was really international.”

It did have a dark side, namely an equally restrictive anti-commercial snobbery, which began to impede QQ once they started formulating their early tape loop/sax experiments round 4/4 and more conventional figures. By then Mike had already received a call from New Order's manager Rob Gretton, asking him to come back and manage the Hacienda.

From Manchester they pursued a New York hotline with Factory co-workers 52nd Street and, later, New Order, building for themselves a club following, which their 'Love Tempo’ 12" is currently capitalising on.

Just as holidaymakers return from Eurodiscos with ‘Blue Monday’ ringing in their ears have sent New Order yoyoing back up the charts, so too could Quando Quango follow them, if only enough Anglo exiles in New York come home to spread the word.

The Mancunian dance FACtion, it seems, is too steeped in Factory myth and legend for British ears to take its disco motives at face value. Broader minds abroad, however, have no problems heeding its straightforward calls to the dance floor. 

Chris Bohn