348
Way back in the early 1980s, a trend arose for smashing pieces of metal and organising the resulting sound into ambient urban soundscapes or dance tracks. Berlin’s Einstürzende Neubauten arguably kicked it off, but in short order the availability of new-fangled sampling technology had Fad Gadget (“Collapsing New People”), Depeche Mode (“People Are People”), SPK (“Metal Dance”) and others incorporating post-industrial metal-bashing into their tracks. One of the originals was London’s Test Dept, who reversed the trend by starting as a hammer-wielding group and moving into dance music. This was their first single, released by Some Bizarre to an unsuspecting public in 1983.