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Tuesday 11 May 2010

New Order 'Run 2' Extended Version


Technique is perhaps the best New Order album, nine tracks of sunshine pop with the perfect mix of rock and dance. The lp was supposedly/supposed to be recorded in Ibiza, but by the band's own admission they got distracted and didn't get too much done. Stephen Morris claimed all they came home with was 'some drum tracks and a guitar solo' so they decamped after the summer in Ibiza to finish/start the album at Peter Gabriel's expensive Real World studio. And people wonder why Factory went bust.

Run was the third single off Technique, and is peak period New Order. It was remixed by Scott Litt, who chopped out an instrumental part and replaced it with a another chorus. It was then released as Run 2, in a very nice Peter Saville Bold washing powder inspired sleeve, and limited to 20,000 copies. It's relatively rare and if you see it for under a fiver you should probably buy it. The version here is the 5 minutes 22 seconds extended version, which sounds a bit like it was extended for the sake of it, but is interesting enough to the New Order collectors amongst us.

Incidentally this was the song that led John Denver to sue New Order, claiming that it was too similar to his Leaving On A Jet Plane. They settled out of court and Denver has had a co-writing credit on subsequent compilations Run has appeared on. It's hard to believe this was anything other than coincidental plagiarism but it's nice to think of Bernard, Hooky, Stephen and Gillian suffering from writer's block in the studio and someone saying 'Why don't we just rip off John Denver? Who's gonna notice?'

run2ext.mp3

1 comment:

Drums On Demand said...

Run Order is one of my favorite groups. Thanks for the article about their album!