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Wednesday 15 June 2022

All Day

When I worked at HMV in the early 90s the shop's assistant manager and another colleague were both massive fans of Ministry, the American industrial/ metal band led by Al Jourgenson. Occasionally, when the boss was not in and it was getting close to closing time, they would clear the shop of the final few shoppers by putting some Ministry on and turning the volume up. Within minutes the shoppers would rush to the tills to pay for their items, the shop would empty, we could pull the shutters down and head home, another day in the retail industry successfully completed. 

In the early 80s Ministry started as a synth- pop outfit and evolved into full blown grinding industrial metal. Jourgenson also served time as the frontman and leader of Revolting Cocks and Lard and featured heavily in Lollapalooza in the early 90s. At some point in the mid 80s he crossed paths with Adrian Sherwood and Sherwood remixed All Day. Sherwood was working on Keith LeBlanc's solo album Major Malfunction at the same time as producing Ministry's Twitch and a lot of the rhythm tracks got shared between the two. All Day came out as a single in 1984 with Sherwood's remix coming out on Twitch in 1986. 

All Day Remix is a superb example of the cut and paste approach of both Jourgenson and Sherwood, with sampled voices, synths and juddering drum machines, plus that general sense of the tension and unease of the times, the mid- 80s of Reagan's America and Thatcher's Britain, and it's not a million miles from either New Order or Depeche Mode. 

All Day Remix

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Life was 'hard' in the 80's. Revolting Cocks- No Devotion, Chakk- Out of The Flesh, Swans-Greed, Hula-Stalks of Shattered Glass, Test Dept-F**ckhead, etc. What were we thinking? Ha!
-SRC

Webbie - FootieAndMusic said...

That is a very, very decent mix.