Forty More Minutes Of One Dove

Last Sunday's One Dove mix was popular with a slice of this blog's readership and included calls for a follow up mix so due to popular demand here is a further forty minutes of One Dove, a dubbed out and spaced out selection. 

One Dove Two

• Breakdown (William Orbit Stereo Odyssey)
• Breakdown (Squire Black Dove Rides Out)
• Jolene 
• Fallen (Darkest Hour)
• White Love (Higherwatha)

Breakdown came out as a single ahead of the album Morning Dove White in October 1993, the Stephen Hague mix being chosen by the record company to push it towards radio play but the real treasure was to be found in the remixes and versions, two of which I've included here. The first is one of two by William Orbit (the other being the Cellophane Boat Mix, named after an infamous boat party in Rimini). 

Squire Black Dove Rides Out is Sabres Of Paradise at their dubbiest, an epic remix that showed how far ahead Weatherall was in 1992. I wrote about it here  a couple of years ago, on a sample spotting tip (and finding Shades Of Rhythm and Tranquillity Bass within it). In 1993 I had Breakdown on cassette single, these remixes, the Stephen Hague single version and the Cellophane Boat mix on one tape which often soundtracked the long bus journey to my first teaching practice placement in Failsworth, North Manchester. I still have the cassingle, one of the few tapes that survived various culls over the years. The song in all its versions is burned into my subconscious, from 1993 to 2023, from being a trainee teacher to one now only two and a half years from being able to take his pension. 

Jolene was a superbly dubbed out and off kilter cover of Dolly Parton's 1973 single, which eventually saw the light of day in December 1993 on the 12" and CD single of Why Don't You Take Me.

Fallen (Darkest Hour) is the original, pre- Weatherall release when the band were Dove (the soap manufacturer didn't see the funny side of their name- I've no idea if Dove the soap manufacturers knew it was a drug reference or just didn't like their copyright being infringed. Either way Dove became One Dove). Fallen came out on Soma in 1991 with two other versions, Dawn and Dusk. Legend has it Dot managed to get Weatherall to listen to it, he proclaimed it record of the year and then offered to produce their album. 

White Love is also a key One Dove song, not least the ten minute Guitar Paradise version by Weatherall and Sabres. The version here came out in the US only and then in very limited numbers as a promo 12", a remix by Jon Williams for Hardkiss, a hypnotic remix complete with chanting monks and oil drum thump of the drums and a loop of Dot's vocals. There is another Hardkiss remix, the ten minute Scott Hardkiss Psychic Masturbation version of White Love but as I'm trying to keep these Sunday mixes at around thirty to forty minutes that is a remix for another day. 

Monday's Long Songs

This bootleg re- orbited into my musical world last week, a 2021 cut- and- shut of Malcolm McLaren's Madame Butterfly and The Grid's Floatation by pflext, the two songs working together perfectly, Malcolm's 1984 marriage of opera and 80s r'n'b and hip hop spliced with Richard Norris and Dave Ball's 1990 Balearic/ ambient house classic, remixed by a then fledgling remixer Andrew Weatherall. Richard did point out in 2021 that the bootlegger pflext missed a trick by not calling it Floats Like A Butterfly. Listen here, eight and a half minutes of bliss. Pflext is Paul Flex Taylor currently based in Sydney, Australia. 

Here's the original of Madame Butterfly from '84, McLaren, Stephen Hague, Debbie Cole and Betty Ann White taking on Puccini and winning. The album Fans was six tracks long and included pieces from Carmen and Turandot over hip hop drums but madame Butterfly was the only one where he really nailed it.

Madame Butterfly (Un Bel Di Vedremo)

The McLaren/ Grid mash up led me to Paris in 1994, where Malcolm McLaren was still looking for the next big fusion, making an album celebrating the city in the form of atmospheric future jazz and synth pop with vocals from Catherine Deneuve. A second disc of remixes brought this seventeen minute ambient classic from Youth titled The Emotional Curvatone At A Given Moment In Time And Space Listen at Soundcloud or Youtube. It really is something special with Deneuve's softly spoken vocals, waves of rippling synths and endless flow. I posted it before in 2019, a year which is both fairly recent but also feels like many, many years ago. 

Dutch Butterfly

Malcolm McLaren has been painted as the villain in the Sex Pistols story for many years, usually by John Lydon who commands more air time and print inches than the rest of the participants put together. Malcolm was instrumental in that band's story but his wider contribution to popular culture goes way beyond the filth and the fury and subsequent crash and burn. Following the demise of the Pistols he kept running, straight into Bow Wow Wow and then moved on again, faster and faster, intent on mashing together disparate elements to create something new. This led to at least two further moments of inspiration and musical alchemy. 

In 1983 Malcolm put out his debut album, Duck Rock. His debut single Buffalo Girls was a genuine piece of cross cultural game changing with scratching and sampling, the World Famous Supreme Team, Zulu backing singers, Trevor Horn at the production desk, a record that was key in early hip hop culture. He followed it with Double Dutch, equally brilliant and further blurring cultural boundaries- skipping chants, a zippy bassline, hi- life guitars and South African vocals. He was sued by The Boyoyo Boys for that but a Top Three hit in the UK chart must have softened that blow. 

Double Dutch

Two years later he went further and deeper releasing an album called Fans that spliced opera with modern R & B. Madame Butterfly, a version of Puccini's famous work, a genuinely jaw- dropping piece of music- Stephen Hague now at the controls, crunching 80s synth drums, flutes, McLaren's speaking voice and hugely affecting vocals from Debbie Cole and Betty Ann White. 

Madame Butterfly (Un Bel Di Vedremo)

This version, a remix by Morales and Munzibai, stretches it out for ten minutes with a much toughened up rhythm-  industrial/ hip hop drums and foregrounded metallic, slap bass and whooshing noises. 

Madame Butterfly (On The Fly Mix)

Malcolm's death in 2010 brought some correction to his story and his role in punk but there's much more to Malcolm than just the Sex store, bondage trousers and Johnny Rotten, a tale we've all heard a thousand times anyway. Double Dutch and Madame Butterfly are both moments of madcap 80s brilliance made by someone who had a hundred ideas a day and the wherewithal to follow them through. 

From Lake Geneva To The Finland Station

West End Girls by Pet Shop Boys recently topped The Guardian's countdown of The 100 Greatest UK Number 1 Singles. The article is here. Cue obviously much gnashing of teeth and wailing in certain quarters, not least in the comments below the article, often from rejected and upset Beatles fans, people crying about the 1960s and 'real' music, someone saying that West End Girls is 'plastic music for plastic times' (as if music that is real and emotive can only be made by men with bits of wood with six strings attached to them). The list and placings are neither here nor there really but well done to the writers who put this song at number 1 and Ghost Town at number 2 (and for that matter choosing She Loves You as the sole Beatles song, thus upsetting the really serious Beatles fans). It's all good fun.

West End Girls as some people said may not even be the best Pet Shop Boys number 1 single. That honour could go to It's A Sin or Heart or even Always On My Mind (and how it irritates some people that that song kept The Pogues off the Christmas number 1 slot in 1987). But West End Girls is a superb song and I have no problem with it being rated so highly. The opening seconds are an announcement, cinematic and prowling, and the release of tension when the three note bass riff comes is exciting enough even before Neil enters with his deadpan singing and rap. West End Girls made London in 1986 sound impossibly electrifying and dangerous, especially for those of us up north, and the culture clash he describes using  a variety of voices- West End Boys and East End Girls, nightclubs, dive bars and casual sex, the 'just you wait til I get you home' line, the gangland stuff about guns, police and madmen- is all brilliantly realised, inspired Neil said later by T.S. Elliot's The Wasteland and the sound and rhythms of the words of that poem. Once I also twigged in later years that the line about 'from Lake Geneva to the Finland Station' referred to Lenin's secret journey on a sealed train across Europe back to Russia, sanctioned by the Germans, to take charge of the Bolsheviks in 1917, it flipped my mind a little- a synthpop song about clubs and (to quote Neil) 'rough boys getting a bit of posh' that is also about the Russian Revolution! Neil took it up a level later on with the 'Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat' line, one of my favourite lyrics by anyone.

It's a great dance record as well as a great pop single. The 12" carried the Dance Mix as the A-side to make the point. There's a seven minute mix from the 10" release which comes in more slowly with a lovely, twinkling piano part before lift off at one minute thirty and a great rap with extra lyrics in the breakdown. When I saw them play Blackpool Empress Ballroom a couple of years ago they played a sleek modernised, upgraded version of West End Girls. Maybe the sign of a great song is one which can be re-figured and remixed, pulled apart and reassembled, and sound equally good in multiple forms and formats. Chris Lowe's music is superb, keyboards, synths and drum machines, the full shebang. Producer Stephen Hague must take a share of the credit too. The earlier Bobby Orlando version just doesn't have the same menace or sex appeal. Not that it's bad by any means, it just isn't quite there. Hague finds the drama, depth and sheen that it needed, pushing it all out front but with layers of intricacy. The video is a big part of the song's success too, Neil and Chris stalking the streets of London, Neil in front in long black coat and Chris hatless (for the only time) and sulky (like every time thereafter). It established the deadpan, standing still delivery as they fade in and out in front of shuttered shops.



In 1986 the release of Disco, a six song remix album with some blinding songs and versions not least In The Night and Paninaro, included the nine minute Shep Pettibone version of West End Girls. More cowbell.

West End Girls (Shep Pettibone Master Mix) 

In The Night, let's not forget, was used as the theme tune to the BBC's Clothes Show and lyrically dealt with French proto- Beatniks in Nazi occupied Paris and the nature of resistance and collaboration, ultimately criticising them for their existential angst preventing them from engaging with the real life struggle. Paninaro was about an Italian 80s youth subculture with a preference for expensive casual wear, boating shoes and Italo disco. 'Armani, Armani, ah- ah Armani'. This collision of interests and lyrical concerns with modern music is one of the things that marked them out as being different from the pack and one of the biggest things I've got from them.

With fortuitous timing Neil and Chris have recorded a new version, a 2020 lockdown take on West End Girls. Seek and with an air of sadness, West End Girls and East End Boys shut away and in isolation.

You Took My Time And You Took My Money

New Order in the summer of 1987. I was seventeen and was listening to the True Faith single repeatedly that summer, thirty two years ago (Substance, the singles compilation came out in August 1987 too). The band played True Faith on Top Of The Pops and it rose into the top five the week after. They played live, as this clip shows, broadcast recently on BBC4's re-runs of Top Of The Pops. The re-runs are deep into 1987- and it has to be said it was a year of largely terrible music on the nation's favourite chart run down show- most of the episodes can skipped through in minutes with your finger on the fast forward button on the remote control. The week New Order appeared they shared the BBC canteen and dressing rooms with Sinitta and Spagna. This version is, as you'd expect, less sleek and produced than the Stephen Hague single with Hooky's clanging bass more prominent (glorious as the single is) and has a truncated guitar break. I've posted this clip before but watching them the other night I thought it was worth doing again. True Faith is a song I don't get bored of.



True Faith is a New Order tour de force, a single aimed at selling copies in large quantities- earworm keyboards and boom- bash metronomic drumming providing the rush, a song pitched in a sweet spot between pop, indie and dance. Hooky complains in his autobiography Substance that they'd left nowhere for his bass playing in the mix (but he found his way in) and that the only shot of him in the video is his left foot. Bernard was talked into changing a lyric to ensure radio play (altering 'now that we've grown up together/now they're taking drugs with me' to 'now that we've grown up together/ we're not afraid of what we see'). The song feels like a group effort whatever everyone's actual contributions were. I think I read somewhere that Deborah Curtis, Ian's widow, said she couldn't listen to New Order after Ceremony, it was too much following Ian's death, but with True Faith she could listen to them again and enjoy it- which tells you something about the way the song was received and something about the distance travelled from 1980 and Closer to 1987 and True Faith. I love it- partly because at seventeen years old you're so susceptible to these things and partly because it is in some way definitive New Order. It would make it onto any New Order compilation I'd put together.

Peter Saville created a beautiful sleeve, the falling leaf painted gold against the blue background, the leaf idea coming to him as he sat in his car and one fell onto his windscreen. The single was followed by a remix 12" with an alternative Saville sleeve, a remixed version of the song, a different mix of 1963 and also this Shep Pettibone dub.

True Dub

New Order toured in 1987 too, at home and through the USA (the US leg being the scene of much Hook and Sumner debauchery). The graphic on the tour t-shirt below is very 1987.

Last year Denise Johnson, backing singing extraordinaire, released her own, more emotional reading of the song, done acoustically.

Johnny Don't Point That Gun At Me

Johnny also showed his face in New Order's epic 1987 song 1963. Having recorded one of their highest high points in True Faith, a song destined to put them into the charts, New Order put 1963 on the b-side in what must be one of the strongest singles of the 1980s. And so 1963 got a bit overlooked. It was released in its own right in 1995 and got a video too (with Jane Horrocks in it). As a purist I don't quite count that release as a 'proper' New Order single. Although I like Jane Horrocks and the video.

In the song Bernard's lyrics start out 'It was January, 1963,when Johnny came home, with a gift for me'. Events take a turn for the worse. Soon enough Johnny changes from being 'so very kind, so very nice'. He comes home with another wife and eventually Bernard sings'Johnny, don't point that gun at me' and a shooting occurs. Producer Stephen Hague has called the song 'the only song about domestic violence you can dance too'. Bernard has suggested that the song is, like yesterday's post, about John F Kennedy. Accordingly, in the song JFK arranges for a hitman to kill Jackie so that he can 'do one with M. Monroe'. Lee Harvey Oswald shoots JFK by mistake, leading to Jack Ruby bumping off Oswald for doing such a bad job and causing Marilyn to commit suicide. Barney has his chronology askew here- Marilyn actually died a year earlier and JFK was shot in November '63 not January. But then I've never been sure Bernard was being entirely reliable in this explanation of the song.

The 1995 version of 1963 was re-worked by Arthur Baker (and isn't nearly as good as the magnificent 1987 version but I don't have the original on the hard drive at the moment so you'll have to put up with it).

The Small Hours Are Hard To Face

I've no doubt I will keep coming back to One Dove as long as I have the strength to lift the arm onto the vinyl or press play. Morning Dove White is one of the 90s high points, one of Weatherall's too. This was their poppiest moment, soft, sublime and enveloping- even Stephen Hague can't ruin it. It doesn't have as many of the gorgeous dub textures that are all over the album but it should have been a big hit. I don't remember seeing the video before, Dot and the boys miming in a pub/club. The bit where they get projected onto the pool table is a tad dated but no matter.

Spooky

My previously unplanned Joy Division-New Order week continues. I can't imagine Republic is anyone's favourite New Order album, despite its magisterial Regret single. It was made against the backdrop of Factory collapsing (as sung about in Ruined In A Day). When Republic came out it was not on Factory but, irony of ironies, on London Records. Side one of Republic was decent enough- Regret is the last truly great song they recorded, World (The Price of Love) is a good dance tune, Ruined In A Day's alright. Spooky, co-written with producer Stephen Hague, stood out. It was also the final single released off the lp, and had a variety of remixes. I'm not sure New Order have been best served by remixes (a few outstanding ones excepted). The handful of remixes of Spooky passed muster though especially the ones by Fluke. They tweaked Spooky into a really classy, shiny, sleek piece of techno-pop.

Spooky (Magimix)

In 1993, not long after this was released and when we had just started courting I put this on a mixtape for the future Mrs Swiss. It had a hand drawn and written cassette inlay card and everything.

The picture above shows one of the more bizarre promotional appearances the band made. A Top Of The Pops slot to sell Regret was done live via satellite link up from the Baywatch beach. New Order mimed the song while surrounded by buffed Californians playing volleyball and frisbee. The smasher of the Berlin Wall David Hasselhoff looked on.