Test Dept Discuss Their Formative Years and New Box Set ‘Industrial Overture’

Transmission 279: Interview with Test Dept

Test Dept are a British post-industrial group formed in the desolate landscape of early 1980s South London. In their sound and performances, they have confronted significant subjects such as industrial collapse, class warfare, and state power. Their sound was forged from the actual ruins of de-industrialised Britain, using metal sourced from scrapyards and derelict factories. This same confrontational spirit led to their alliance with the South Wales Striking Miners Choir during the 1984-85 strike, fusing raw percussive noise with traditional forms of communal expression against the policies of the Thatcher government.

Title: Industrial Overture
Artist: Test Dept
Release Date: 2025-12-05
Genres: Avant-garde, EBM, Electronica, Experimental Music, Industrial Music
Label: Artoffact Records
Description: An interview with the founders of Test Dept. They discuss forging sound from scrap, the miners' strike, and the new Industrial Overture box set.

Now, the new 4-CD box set, Industrial Overture, collects their earliest, most visceral material. The collection includes their initial cassette-only releases like Ecstasy Under Duress, alongside previously unreleased studio recordings, John Peel sessions, and live documents from their formative period. It presents the raw foundation of their sound, assembled before samplers became widely accessible. Test Dept’s work remains a document of a specific time of social upheaval in Britain, a sonic response to political and economic fracture. We spoke with founders Paul Jamrozy and Graham Cunnington about the group’s origins, their confrontational methods, and the assembly of their new archival release.

Featured image: David Altweger

How did you meet and what was the specific sound of New Cross in 1981 that made that possible?

Gray: We met when we were both living in a shared house in Forest Hill, South London, in 1979, 80. We talked about music and realised we had a connection with that. We started making music together as another band. Eventually, we left there and moved to Amsterdam for a while. Things seemed a bit dead in the UK, so we tried to go there to produce music. After about a year there, in ’81, we came back.

I came back and then Paul moved later to New Cross, South London. New Cross was near the docks in South London. In the early ’80s, the de-industrialisation process was speeding up.

The docklands was a big, desolate wasteland. Many factories, power stations, all sorts of industry was closing down and left as ruins. The metal from all those ruins was taken to scrapyards all along the river. It was then shipped out somewhere to be reused or melted down. Those scrapyards became our big source of instrumentation.

The inspiration for the music really came from that landscape. But previously we’d been interested in experimenting with sound and working with different instruments. We were interested in not using guitars, basically, and interested in making music with anything else at the time.

Anything to add, Paul?

Paul: I think that’s fairly succinct. We can talk about the politics of the era, but maybe we’ll get onto that with some other questions.

What was the first piece of scrap you found that truly became an instrument?

Gray: Probably a sheet of corrugated iron. They used to have this corrugated iron, which was a kind of wavy sheet, they used to put up on abandoned buildings and wasteland as a fence. Probably a piece of corrugated iron was the first thing we found. Then I think we got a couple of petrol tanks from these guys going around collecting rubbish, scrap metal, or anything people would throw out from their house.

They’d go around selling it on to other people or for reuse in some way. We used to have this rag-and-bone man, as they were called. They were usually with a horse and a cart. They came past with a big truck and a cart, and there was a couple of petrol tanks on there, I remember we got. They were our first instruments.

How did you end up signing to Some Bizarre?

Paul: We don’t like to talk about them, to be honest. We were trying to work independently and we put out some products as cassettes with nicely packaged, DIY kind of stuff. But we were looking to put out vinyl, which was beyond our capabilities at the time.

We were looking around and were going to sign with a few people, but then suddenly Some Bizarre entered the picture and it just seemed at the time to be the best opportunity for us. So we ended up signing to them. I’m not sure if it was the best move we ever made, but we got some interesting products out through them.

Unfortunately, that relationship soured, as it has with many of the other artists that worked with Some Bizarre. We still have ongoing issues in terms of releasing the old material, unfortunately.

How did the collaboration with the South Wales Striking Miners Choir actually begin and what was the miners’ reaction when they first heard your sound?

Gray: The collaboration with the South Wales Striking Miners Choir began when we got a benefit in Deptford, South London, to raise money for the mining cause, for the strike, and to support the miners. Our sound person, Jack Bulchin, who had an old passion for Welsh choirs, there was a tradition in the South Wales Valleys of male voice choirs, beautiful voices singing, thought it would be great to get a Striking Miners Choir.

We inquired, but there were no choirs of just striking miners because they were made up of the whole community, and part of the community was probably police and judges on the other side. So there was no Striking Miners Choir.

They decided to form one from different valleys and come together with only striking miners. They came up to New Cross, Deptford, and did this concert together. They were quite blown away because a lot of them hadn’t really been far out of the valleys and they certainly didn’t know London that well, especially South London, which was quite a desolate sort of place at the time.

I think we had a connection. Our work was very passionate and very physical, and they felt it was like going back to work. It was like when they were at work. So they kind of found that funny and connected with it, although maybe it was a bit too loud for them.

Was the early industrial scene a community or a collection of isolated cells?

Paul: I think it was more… I wouldn’t say there was much of a community, really. That idea of “industrial,” even as a genre, has developed over time. It’s something you’ve talked about recently.

Now every genre has so many sub-genres, so it’s difficult to pinpoint all of them. But now we have industrial techno, we have different types of what you call industrial music.

I think a lot of the dark wave even, this stuff has merged into a movement which comes very broadly under the term industrial. The term “industrial” actually came originally from Monte Cazazza, who was an American industrial artist who was a friend of Throbbing Gristle. And he coined the term “Industrial music for industrial people.”

Throbbing Gristle took that on. And maybe the first wave of what you now call industrial music… I suppose we would come around in the second wave. And there have been many waves since.

I think there’s probably more of a collective spirit now than there was in the early days. I think people tended to be… I suppose when you’re making music, you tend to focus on what you’re doing. You don’t really pay attention too much to those around you, or maybe doing similar things.

I think there’s an element of competitiveness. But I think that now it is much more of a collective and a community than it was in the early days.

Gray: Yeah.

Paul: We’ve just come from the Wroclaw Industrial Festival, and that certainly had a much more collective approach from both the organizers and from all the artists involved. It was very friendly. A lot of good communication from people and a lot of people supporting each other, and different artists supporting each other; much more of a crossover than there had maybe been in the past.

Is the kind of collective political art you created with the Ministry of Power still possible today? What do you think?

Gray: I think it’s very difficult in today’s environment. Firstly, the Ministry of Power was formed to put on big productions in usually abandoned spaces. In the ’80s, there was a huge amount of them everywhere.

You could get into them somehow, officially or unofficially, usually unofficially, but not always, and then put stuff on. But now those buildings aren’t there, because all the real estate in London, and probably everywhere, is too expensive to have buildings lying empty. So you can’t take these places anymore. They’re just not available.

Also, the funding for some of those is not available either. I think there’s funding for big productions, but it usually goes quite mainstream and goes to the established people, and doesn’t really go to people like us or people we’ve worked with. Whereas in the ’80s, there was more access to funding. Often we put on events with very little money, but it was possible because we could get the building for free and get favours from other artists and people. To do things now, you’d have to do it all properly, pay everyone. I don’t know, it’s very difficult, I think, to have the same big-scale collective ideas, unless you have really big funding from above.

In Britain, and I’m sure across Europe, that’s not really available anymore.

Paul: Yeah, I mean, I think also the way that the media has developed and changed… I think people are… social media is a tool for connecting and communicating with people, but I think it’s also very isolating. People want to be far more individualistic these days and not quite so open to collective work.

That’s maybe a bit of a generalisation, but I think despite all the new media, in some ways it’s possibly even more difficult than it was before we had all these types of new media connections. Yeah.

What made 2014 the right time to come back?

Gray: Well, we started trying to come back from 2010 onwards. We started to look at making a book and also doing some remixing of old material. In 2012, we did put on a performance in Belgium, but we didn’t feel it went as well as we’d liked, so we gave it a rest for a while.

Then in 2014, we connected with the AV Festival in Newcastle, and they commissioned a new work from us. And that was a film, which is On the River. 2014 was also the 30th anniversary of the miners’ strike.

The issues that led to the miners’ strike and the defeat of the miners, and the society we’re living in now—the fragmentation of society, the rampant free-market world, is the world we’re living in. That was directly related in the UK to the defeat of the miners, and why the miners’ strike was so important. So we felt we had to mark the 30th anniversary, but also to give the indication that we’re living in the aftermath of that.

Some of those communities that were destroyed in the miners’ strike are still destroyed, and even more so, ripe with drugs and crime. They were abandoned by the Thatcher government. And really, not any government since has helped to make it better, which also leads to the rise of the far right, because the distribution of wealth has just gone one way, upwards to the richer, and it’s not going to create a good political atmosphere.

We did this film On the River as a commission, and it was using our old archive from the strike. Also, we went to archives around Newcastle to get old footage, and the history of the miners and everything like this. We presented it on the river, with the audience on boats that came past and stopped in front of the screen on the River Tyne, with speakers and a big screen with a big PA. The structure that the film was on was the last remaining infrastructure of the mining industry in the North East. Trains used to come on with the coal and load onto the boats. So that was significant for that reason. That was the impetus for us to reconfigure.

But we reconfigured as an art collective, an art piece, rather than specifically music. We made music for it, but we made film. We wanted to re-establish that we weren’t just a band. We were doing lots of different things. The book was also still in development. It took about five years but was eventually released in 2015.

Then we decided to go out from 2015 onwards as a small band, and that expanded over the years. Now we’re back to working as a duo for the time being.

Beyond the scrap metal, what has been your most essential piece of studio equipment?

Paul: I would say the sampler, really, in the early days. It was quite a revolutionary tool for us. Graham could possibly talk more about that technically.

But early sampling was our way of using electronics in a very experimental way that worked with using DIY found materials.

Gray: Yeah, definitely. Field recordings and also recording certain things specifically for a purpose in the composition and just experimenting with it. When we went into the studio, the first time in a big studio was for the Compulsion 12-inch.

But after that, our first album, Beating the Retreat in Jacob’s Studio, was the first time we had time in the studio to experiment and explore. From there, we developed our way of working studio-wise, which was very different to live. We couldn’t really create what we did live in the studio.

It just didn’t come across the same way. So, we decided to use the studio as an instrument. As Paul says, we used early samplers.

Well, early on, sampling wasn’t… on the first album, it wasn’t invented. So, we used a hold on a delay machine to create loops and threw that into the mix. We were doing sampling before the sampler came out a year or two later.

A few years later, I mean, there was a Fairlight, but nobody could afford that, and also an Emu, I think, came out a few years later.

But anyway, so yeah, sampling definitely, but it was using the studio as an instrument to create a different atmosphere from the live thing. The recorded project was to do one thing and then the live thing was to do another. Some crossover, of course, but not always.

Paul: And what was it? The first sampler was the Akai?

Gray: It was the Bell BD-80, which we had.

Paul: And then what was the first Akai that we used?

Gray: The first Akai we had was… oh yeah, the Bell BD-80.

Paul: BD-80, there.

Gray: And the first Akai we used was the S-900.

Paul: S-900, that’s it, yeah.

Gray: That was quite a bit later. That was in the late ’80s, early ’90s. It was used by early hip-hop producers and stuff.

But I agree, sampling was a big thing because it enabled us to put in sounds that otherwise wouldn’t be used. Now it’s so easy to use a computer to create sounds from everything.

But back in the day, we were using tapes going all the way around the room to create huge tape loops or the AMS delay with holding longer loops, and the Bell for holding loops up to one minute, I think, or two minutes maximum.

Paul: And live, obviously, our first kind of technology that worked then was the Portastudio, which gave us a whole much more capability. The Portastudio.

Gray: The Portastudio, yeah. It was like a four-track tape machine, but with a cassette. Now you get digital versions, but it’s basically a little mixer with a tape machine.

You could record four tracks, but we used to record onto it and then bounce across into more tracks.

What can you tell us about the direction of your new album? And will it be influenced by the current political situation of the world?

Paul: Well, we’ve been working on different ideas for a while, and we were trying to get away from things being too didactic, really, and trying to open things out to be a bit broader, more philosophical in a sense. So there is certainly that element about it, which also becomes quite personal in certain elements.

It is very difficult to ignore the politics of the world. But at the same time, things are shifting so quickly that I think it is very tricky to deal with politics if you’re doing something like an album or a project. In a year’s time, if you’re too didactic, if you’re too specific about certain things, the ground has shifted and then things become a bit fixed in time, a bit dated.

So obviously, we are looking at things, but we are trying to be more careful in the way we deal with some of these issues, and maybe try to look at a bigger picture. There are global trends happening; the whole world has shifted rightwards and to a more authoritarian leadership. Maybe that will all collapse, or maybe it will just get more extreme over the next year or so.

It’s very difficult to tell at this point in time. But the world is obviously a very volatile and dangerous place. It’s difficult.

We’ve done a lot in some of our recordings, like the fuckhead, the remixes using politicians and speeches and stuff like that. In a way, it was used in a satirical way. But these days, because of the… I suppose what you call the infantilism of some of the big political figures, it’s very difficult to take the piss out of them, because they actually take the piss out of themselves far more.

They’re not actually bothered about it. As long as they’ve got publicity and they’re in the media, they don’t really care anymore about any criticism of what they say, because they immediately will dismiss it and just say it’s an untruth, or there’s no such thing as truth, whichever way you look at it.

Gray: Or it’s anti-fa, or far-left, you know.

Paul: So that kind of criticism of politicians on a satirical level… they do it. It also becomes quite tedious, I think, for us or for other people. We hear these people speaking all the time, we hear their idiot voices. We don’t want any more of that.

So in that sense, maybe we try to avoid that so directly.

Gray: Yeah.

Paul: If that makes sense.

What does your new label, Artifact, understand about Test Dept that others might not? And what does the four-CD box set contain? How did you choose the tracklist for it?

Gray: We feel Artifact have understood Test Dept’s history and appreciate not just the history, but the artistic integrity and everything about us. So we feel at the moment like it’s a good match. The new box set is the first archive material we’re releasing on Artifact.

It’s from very early releases we made by cassette only, the history cassette, and then Ecstasy Under Duress, which was also first released on cassette and then on CD, but it hasn’t been available for many, many years.

Then there’s some studio material and John Peel sessions which have not ever been released, demos we did in studios or recording setups, and also other studio recordings. Then there’s a live version of the tour we made in ’85 with the Atonal festival and at the Markthalle in Hamburg.

We chose them… there was lots of other material because we have many, many cassettes from that time, but we were trying to choose the stuff that was best representing it and also sounded the best. A lot of the material was only recorded on a Walkman on cassettes and it doesn’t come across.

We did a good remastering for that, but it needed quite a lot of work. And Paul Lavigne did the mastering on that. So it was really what would come across best, and also not to repeat ourselves too many times. There are some things with the same title, but we tried to show either that it was a development or a different version done in a different way. There’s the raw, very raw, early live stuff, some of it quite experimental.

And then there’s other stuff we did in the studio, which changed quite a lot. So that’s how we chose it, really: the best material we could get from that period without too much repetition.

It should be out in late November. It’s called Industrial Overture, which is four CDs of different times from the early days.

Photos courtesy of Test Dept

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others