The 5 Best Zoviet France Albums

An introduction to the pioneering North English industrial group

In the late 1970s, Northern England was a dark and desolate place.

The falling demand of steel, the North’s main industry, a global recession and intense inflation had desastrous effects on the region’s economy.

In decaying cities, unemployment and poverty fostered an atmosphere of descent and discontent.

Out of this bleak environment, a truly new cultural movement emerged.

Industrial music got created right there, in doomed cities like Hull and Sheffield. The music of Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire mirrored the apocalyptic mood of their hometowns.

Founded at the end of the 1970s in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Zoviet France were inspired by that first wave of industrial pioneers.

By designing their group as an anonymous collective, they refused the music industry playbook. For years, they didn’t give concerts, grant interviews, do photoshoots, or feature on compilations.

It was the pre-internet age. Nobody knew who they were, what they looked like – nothing.

Like The Residents before them, Zoviet France simply did not seem interested in celebrity worship culture.

Essentially a project of two self-declared ‘non-musicians’ – Ben Ponton and Robin Storey – and a rotating cast of collaborators, the group members lived together in a house in Newcastle’s poor West End.

No member was a schooled musician, though Storey had studied at art school in Sunderland. They were inspired by avant-garde composers John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, but also felt connected to 1970s Krautrock bands like Neu! and Can.

Starting out with a classic line-up of guitar, bass, and drums, they mainly improvised and manipulated their recordings with tape loops and editing techniques. Soon they started building their own instruments, but also added synthesizers, samplers and other analogue electronics into the mix.

Throughout the 1980s, Zoviet France made a slow shift from their early industrial works to an idiosyncratic style of dark ambient and psychedelic drone music, inspired by folk musics from the global south.

In 1992, Robin Storey left Zoviet France to start his solo project Rapoon, while Ben Ponton kept carrying the band name with Mark Warren. Ponton’s post-break-up ZF releases sounded different to their earlier work though, as he made the switch from analogue to digital recording techniques.

In the late 2010s, interest in the band’s 1980s material peaked again with lovingly remastered vinyl re-issues of their classic albums and archival releases from that period.

One aspect that always appealed to fans of underground music was their laborious packaging – many of their tapes and records were housed in non-standard sleeves, using special materials like roofing felt, tin foil or tarpaper.

These limited collector objects weren’t part of a marketing strategy, but rather born out of the DIY spirit of the 1980s tape-trading scene. Some of their unusual packaging ideas proved quite unpractical in usage.

Their music has aged surprisingly well, even more so as we’re living through an era that can feel as bleak and apocalyptic as the time when they first started making music.

Most Zoviet France records are long out-of-print and cannot be found on streaming services.

Here are five of their best albums, including links to inofficial fan uploads on YouTube.