Portion Control - Step Forward (1984)

I can't help but feel that Portion Control have been unfairly sidelined over the years. Certainly they've had their successes, exposure, toured with big names and so on, but still the impression seems to persist of Portion Control as one of those other Wild Planet bands who never quite got where they were going. You may have heard something by them on a compilation, but nobody knows who bought the records.

Apparently it was me.

The legend of the name deriving from all three of them working in the canteen at the Houses of Parliament seems to have been a myth, but never mind. If I Staggered Mentally - as sterling a debut album as you could wish to hear - owed something to Cabaret Voltaire, Step Forward seems to have consolidated their sound into something unique, or which was at least unique for as long as it took for all those other bands to rip it off. I'm not sure there was really anything quite like Step Forward at the time, or at least I don't recall it being so. Front 242 had a more glacial edge, Depeche Mode were still in their Teletubbies phase, and Portion Control sounded like no-one else - hooligans with sequencers, and drum machines which recreated the feeling of having one's head kicked in; and the magnificent Dean Piavanni, a man who sounded like he'd just been in a fight every time he stepped up to the microphone—occasionally like he was still having one. Of course, their hard rhythmic electronics became an entire genre in another couple of years, but this seems to be where it started, and thankfully with a band who weren't scared of the occasional tune.

With hindsight, Step Forward sounds almost squeaky clean compared to the subsequently dreadlocked aggrotech cyberwarriors selling this back to us as a Mad Max soundtrack; but there's more to mood than just speed and distortion, and I'm pretty sure this lot were all reading 2000AD comic like good lads, so some of the populism rubbed off with them along with the imagery, and certainly the wit. But for the occasional invocation of cyborgs kicking the shit out of each other in some mutant wasteland, Portion Control were essentially a punk band which is why they rock. Play it loud is almost always a compensatory serving suggestion offered by those who couldn't quite get there and hope you'll mistake volume for power, whereas Portion Control were always loud, regardless of the decibels. Also, they seem to be the only band whose orchestral stabs somehow still sound startling and upsetting three decades later.