Today is the first day of my summer holiday. Yesterday I completed my first year at my new workplace, a 6th form college in Salford after moving there last summer (I spent twenty four years in my previous school). The move has been positive for me in so many ways- a much shorter commute, a different environment, an escape from a place that I needed to get out of for various reasons- and I genuinely enjoy going to work now, teaching history and politics to 16- 18 year olds. One of the reasons I wanted to get a new job was the feeling that Isaac's death had forced so much change on us and the consequences spun off in all sorts of directions. Getting a new job would be a change I had chosen, a taking control of change. Moving jobs is a gamble at any point, in any profession but a year on I can say that for me its really paid off. And now I have six weeks of holiday to enjoy without the slight sense of fear and unease that accompanied me last summer.
A Certain Ratio are touring in October playing two albums from their 1980s back catalogue in full, Sextet from 1982 and force from 1986. Force was the first ACR album in bought in real time, in the period when it was released. I got the compilation The Old And The New around the same time and have been following them live and on disc ever since. My copy of Force is on cassette, one of those beautifully packaged Factory cassettes that came in a book sized box wrapped in hessian with a fold out inlay card. I still have it. The imagery on the Force album- mountaineers, propeller planes, maps- really appealed to me,
ACR have announced two new versions of the albums too, The Joy of Sextet and Force Majeure. Force Majeure is a different version of Force (recorded at Strawberry In Stockport) with eight unreleased, different studio versions of songs from the original album plus the album's title track (which wasn't on the original album at all). These alternative versions were done with the late Stuart James, alternative arrangements and live run throughs. Martin Moscrop listened to them forty years later and thought they sounded good enough to put out as a companion version of Force. The only one available to hear so far is the FM version of Naked And White, ACR at their funk/ dance rock best, the band sounding urgent and live...
The Joy Of Sextet is a complete re- imagining of Sextet, ACR's bleak early 80s masterpiece, a record that is taut, abrasive and uneasy, the post- punk/ punk funk married to some art noise and African rhythms with vocals by Martha Tilson giving them a different edge. For The Joy Of Sextet they handed the master tapes over to Andy Meecham, The Emperor Machine, to remix and rework.
The Emperor Machine version of seminal ACR track Knife Slits Water, Martha singing about Manchester and sex, has been released this week, an eight minute 2026 update on ACR's edgy, paranoid dance music. Those times spent playing with Talking Heads had some impact on ACR- some of Sextet sounds like a hotwired Mancunian Talking Heads.
The Joy Of Sextet and Force Majeure can be ordered at Bandcamp ahead of a late August release.
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