Metal box music for disco metalheads

A confession: in recent times I've been picking up the odd secondhand copy of the Fabric "metal box" CDs. Those mixes - live or otherwise - the club's been putting out intermittently since 2001. Two recent purchases here: 

The materiality of Fabric

And others here, including the excellent The Glimmers mix (FABRICLIVE 31) from 2006:

Do you need a bag for your box?

So yeah, man, I'm shelling out £1 or £2 of my (not) hard-earnt money to get these metal container things and the CDs inside. And why would I do that? For one thing, the music's pretty good. Mixes by Rob Da Bank, Martyn, The Glimmers, Krafty Kuts, A-Trak, Brodinski and others. Producer/DJs I might otherwise never have checked out. Fabric, a place I've never been to, appears to have good quality-control and I guess I "trust" that their stuff will be decent. (I notice, meanwhile, that the DJ Neffa-T has a similar view, saying in a recent interview that he used to buy Fabric mixes because he "trusted" them). But OK, it's more than that. I must admit I'm a sucker for these extremely well-packaged items. The metal boxes are light but well-made. Inside, there are nicely-presented liner notes as well as a robust, snappily-designed cardboard CD container thing in a fetching shade of dark turquoise. It's all vaguely Factory Records circa 1980 quality. Hmm, what is this slippery slope I'm on? Have I turned into a (gulp) collector? I suppose I have, but only in a limited way. There are apparently 200 (or more?) different Fabric metal box CDs and I'm not exactly intending to hunt them all down. The magazine archivist James Hyman recently talked about "the collector's burden". The "responsibility of maintaining" a collection, of "finding a purpose for it", and also knowing when to stop it becoming "all-consuming". Yeah, that way madness lies. No, I'm happy just to pick up the odd Fabric box every now and then from a charity shop. Casual collecting. But those metal boxes, eh? Yeah, undeniably I think I like them because of the instant association with PiL's mighty second album. I don't - needless to say - have the actual metal canister version of Metal Box, and I've never particularly liked the idea of owning one of these impractical things. The canisters apparently rust, it's hard to get the records out without scratching them (shades of Durutti Column's notorious sandpaper sleeve), and each side of the three 45rpm records plays for only around ten minutes. Fuck that, man! And also, as I found with the hessian cardboard covers to Joy Division's Still, the clunky nature of such novelty packages can easily become something vaguely objectionable. But nevertheless, the supremely powerful white-dub whine of Metal Box continues to revererate down the decades. And it turns out that this is music very close to home. Er, yes, because as Dennis Morris recalls, the Metal Box canisters were made at the Metal Box factory in Hackney (across the road from his old secondary school), a location that just happens to be in the very same street (Urswick Road) where I've been living for the past 25 years. Yeah, man, me and PiL go way back. So here's the factory in question (just about), just before the wrecking ball turned it to dust:  

Post-punk demolition (pic: Alan Denney)

At the time - the dark days of early Thatcherism - the closure of the Metal Box factory was evidently a real blow to the borough of Hackney, with 350 people losing their jobs. On this site today there's a drive-in private housing complex called Sutton Square, supposedly an "award-winning" design but one that's always registered with me as an ultra-naff Brookside-type development in a vaguely postmodern style. Truly horrible. If I was attempting a half-hearted psychogeographical blog about this traffic-strewn zone of Hackney, I suppose I'd now say something about how, every time I walk past Sutton Place, I fancy that I hear the sinister sounds of PiL's Death Disco/Swan Lake wafting toward me on the wind. But, er, I don't. Nope, that's all gone. These days, the closest I get to a spooky echo (sort of) of Lydon/Wobble/Levene's masterpiece is when I'm in a charity shop in London and I spot another CD in the Fabric metal box series. Which is maybe how it should be. At its best, the music in this series bears comparison with what PiL put out in 1979. In other words, I reckon there's a nice sonic carry-through in these metal containers. Metal box music for disco metalheads.