Once There Was No Time Just Once

A Certain Ratio at Band On The Wall on Saturday night, the end of a tour where they've played a pair of their 80s albums in full, Sextet and Force- something they've not done before and won't do again. They start with Sextet, their third album, released on Factory in 1982 when they were young men in their early 20s. Martin Moscrop tells us just before the end that revisiting these songs and albums forty years later has been a strange experience, getting themselves into the heads of the 21 and 24 year olds who made them. The recent tours have seen ACR play a mixture of songs from their recent albums and 'the hits' (favourites I suppose rather than hits). Tonight there will be no Shack Up, no Won't Stop Loving You, no Do The Du. A different ACR experience. 

Sextet doesn't sound like a forty five year old record as played live. They start with its first song, Lucinda, minimalist post- punk jazz/ funk of 1982, Martin on drums, Don on slap bass, Jez centre on keys and bassist Viv playing guitar and singing Martha Tilson's vocals, the 1982 monochorme Lucinda in blasts of colour (like Sextet's vivid orange and green sleeve). The rest of the album is brought to life with Don back behind the drums, Viv on bass and Martin swapping between guitar, percussion and trumpet. The trumpet is the key sound on many of the songs, Martin transporting a 70s Miles Davis sound, two note refrains, to early 80s and mid 2020s Manchester. Knife Slits water is full sounding punk funk and Rialto is urgent and alive. Jez introduces Waterline, added onto the end of the first set, as 'Andy Weatherall's favourite ACR song' and the band push and pull its weird off kilter funk around, funk rhythms and jazz atonality with their Thin Boys punk attitude. 

A fifteen minute gap and ACR come back for Force, the 1986 album with Jez's vocals and lyrics more central. 'I didn't like Force when it came out', he says, 'I didn't know what these songs were about... I do now'. 

Force was ACR moving towards a more commercial sound, a dance rock/ jazz hybrid with verses and choruses, the chillier, bleaker themes and tones of their early songs now coloured in with splashes of mid- 80s fluoro. Only Together and funk bass epic Bootsy open the second set, Mickey Way- a long time fan favourite- is another jazz trumpet funk tune, Martin's trumpet and the synths and keys all ascending as the bass slaps and twangs away. Force was the first ACR album I bought in real time on release, so it's always been a big one for me. ACR playing it tonight doesn't feel like mid- 80s nostalgia or a revivalism, it doesn't particularly evoke 1986. Manchester's changed beyond recognition in the four decades since then. The band aren't the people they were then. Nor are we. These are those songs, redone for now. 

And The She Smiles is dedicated to two much missed women, Denise Johnston and Danielle Moore, and then the Force set is expanded with album's title track (not released at the time) and The Runner (from 1986 but originally released on Italian label Materiali Sonori as the Greetings Four EP). Both sound great, hyperactive and driving, busy but cut through with the Factory feel. 

The Runner

They finish as they usually do with the Manc- Brazilian percussion workout Si Firmi O Grido, all those cowbells, congas, whistles, drums and bongos bouncing around the old venues walls. 

A Certain Ratio have released new versions of Sextet and Force. Sextet has been reworked by The Emperor Machine, 2026 updates of 1982 songs and Force has been re- issued in alternate versions, never heard before. The Joy Of Sextet is here and Force Majuere is here.