I have an internet friend in New York called Henry Terepka who is in a band called Zula. They are releasing an ep this month (March. It's March already). Water Pressure is inspired by the internet sending all its stuff through undersea cables, mangling their analogue instruments with the digital world. Compressed vocals and skittering beats. Underwater, digital, psychedelia. Interesting and rather good.
Tonight The Beat are playing at Sale Waterside, a ten minute walk from our front door. It seems silly not to go doesn't it? There are two versions of The Beat on the road at the moment, one led by Andy Wakeling and the other by Ranking Roger. We are going to see the Ranking Roger version. I'm not sure if the two bands are competing after a fall out or if it's a ska franchise thing. Either way the babysitter's booked and we get to do the middle aged skank.
In this clip The (English) Beat play Rankin' Full Stop at the gigantic US festival in San Bernadino in 1983, also the occasion where Mick Jones last trod the boards with The Clash.
That was fortuitous- two days ago I posted C.A.R.'s new single Glock'd and yesterday The Asphodells remix appeared on Soundcloud. Ten minutes long with a slo-mo electro-glam stomp, a massive wobbly two note bassline, some 80s atmospherics and a cool vocal on top. There's a really great guitar riff at around six minutes fifty where the whole thing shifts a bit. I like this a lot- it beats wondering whether that dress is black and blue or gold and white.
I've been listening to the girl groups recently- thanks to Drew mainly- and The Ronettes especially, so I thought there could be no better way to bring the working week to close than with some Wall of Sound magic from 1963. Why Don't They Let Us Fall In Love was (I think) the first song Phil Spector recorded with the girls, though not the first released. That was Be My Baby. It's got everything a Ronettes song should have. Boom tish boom Spector production, layers and layers of echo and instruments and a horn section that spins heads. Meanwhile Ronnie and co sing about how their parents won't let them go steady. Perfection.
This is a gorgeous, hazy little tune from ex-Battant singer Chloe Raunet, now making music as C.A.R. (Creating Acronyms Randomly I read somewhere). Out soon with an Asphodells remix to boot.
I've come to the opinion recently that Underworld's dubnobasswithmyheadman was the best album of the 1990s. Rick Smith's keyboards and studio skills married with Karl Hyde's guitar background were complemented perfectly when they met Darren Emerson, who brought the beats from clubland. Suddenly everything clicked and their long techno-with-vocals songs found two audiences- dancers in clubs and listeners at home. Karl's lyrics, overheard on trains and snatched from passing strangers, cut up and re-arranged to fit the grooves, were partly inspired by Lou Reed's New York album , conversational and intimate. Apparently a record company man heard their stuff and told them that for 'this type of music' they either needed to get a proper drummer or get rid of the vocals. Ha.
dubnobasswithmyheadman is a journey- a cliche but true- without a weak track or even moment. Setting off with a track that sounds like a bullet train rushing through a city and a storm Dark And Long and then Mmm... Skyscraper, I Love You made turning the disc over to side two difficult. Dirty Epic, Spoonman, Surfboy, all undulating, with blissful production, headrushes, intricate drums, filthy bass and phased guitar chords. The midnight train from Romford. Cowgirl is perfect dry ice filled, back room techno. River Of Bass glides by and then the album surfaces with the beautiful, weightless M.E. Lift off and back to earth. It is an album which seemed to arrive absolutely fully formed, in no way retro, picking up acid house's freedom and promise and pushing it on, progressive and forward thinking, modern. It still sounds like that today.
This is an hour long collage of dubnobass... cuttings from the studio floor. A very smart companion piece.
Back to Pavement today and their 1994 beauty Range Life- country stylings, half arsed vocal, Malkmus taking potshots at Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots and some killer lines based on life on the road- 'you gotta pay your dues before you pay the rent'.
I think it's quite funny too that the video bleeps out the word 'fuck'.
I love this fantastic comment at Youtube, someone missing the point ever so slightly...
'I had never heard this song before but it honestly the vocals sound out of key and along with some of the chords. The vocals sound like a dying cat when he try's to hit the high notes. It is what it is and maybe they have better songs but the musicianship on this is terrible.'
The newly beardless one returned to NTS Radio last week for the latest edition of his Music's Not For Everyone show, a two hour mix of cosmische, dub, folk and all points in between. Andrew Weatherall- he has the wherewithal.
Public Service Broadcasting are back with an album themed around the space race and a single called Yuri Gagarin. This should be right up my alley but the single did nothing for me at all- it was cheesy funk and seemed very inappropriate. Thankfully Richard Norris has done a remix which is cinematic and orchestral with an acoustic guitar from Ibiza thrown in for good measure. Much better. Free download too.
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.
Mark who runs Cooking Up A Quiet Storm is celebrating the blog's first birthday. He asked all the contributors to suggest one record that they'd take to a party in the basement of a dingy pub, sticky carpets worn out from dancing. The result is two mixes. My choice is on Part Two which you can play below. It's a proper party mix, ready to rock the pub, starting with Grace Jones and then taking in Soulson, The Last Poets, Afrika Bambaataa, New Order, Discodeine, Hercules and Love Affair, The Only Ones, The Cramps, Lemon Interrupt, James Brown, Nat King Cole and The Trashcan Sinatras. Just what you need for Friday night. Clear a space, move the furniture back towards the walls, crank it up, off you go.
I've shifted position on The Second Coming several times since it came out at the end of 1994. At first I loved it, despite the negative press- actually probably because of the negative press. It was so good to hear Roses songs after such a long absence. Now I feel it's not such a great record, not even a good one maybe. Looking back the band were in trouble creatively from after the release of Fools Gold. One Love, a song I do really like, was a rehash (although Something's Burning showed a road they could have gone down). The lengthy, torturous, on-off sessions for The Second Coming, the court case, the money from signing to Geffen, the distance growing between Ian and John, the increasingly unpredictable Reni, the tension between Ian and Reni and John and Reni- all these things have been documented in the last few years and all show a band ebbing away.
Breaking Into Heaven is startling and breath taking, full of deliberately cliched and genuinely funny lyrical imagery and more guitars than you can shake a stick at. A four minute introduction with field recordings, tom toms and all sorts, then the verse and chorus, full of it and on fire, and a heartspinning bridge section shifting on one heavenly chord. It has groove, it has sleekness, it is tender and tough. It's a keeper. Driving South is a Jimmy Page fest and (like Primal Screams' Rocks or Jailbird) just has to be enjoyed rather than thought about. Ten Storey Love Song, the only song that could conceivably have fitted on the debut, is a rush of chiming guitars and swooning. Three songs in and all is good.
After that things go tits up- Daybreak is a studio jam that gained vocals, they could do that sort of thing all day and probably did. Straight To The Man a B-side at best, different and a bit funky but not up to the standard they had set. Good Times is a riff, a filler. Tears is too self-consciously epic. Lyrically the lightness of touch from the debut and its singles has gone. I used to like How Do You Sleep? but usually skip it now. Your Star Will Shine is affecting, neatly played and sung, and Tightrope sounds pretty good, an actual band performance. Begging You stands out sonically and has energy to spare. But really it takes the last song to pull the album out of its nosedive. Love Spreads redeems it at the finish, a genuinely great Stone Roses rock song, with power and dynamics and a proper Roses theme (a female Jesus). They still had it on Love Spreads.
Throughout there's nothing wrong with the playing, the guitars are often superb, the drums and bass spot on, the singing is fine and in places the singing actually makes it more than just a British rock album, Ian Brown's voice roots it somewhere else. But it doesn't feel like an album- it feels like a bunch of songs finally scraped together, in a rush ironically, with a few massive high points but too much middling filler. It's overdone in too many places and it is too heavy (in many senses of the word but mainly it seems too heavy in that it is weighted down, lead footed). I think, twenty years later, it is a 6 out of 10. Primal Scream's Give Out But Don't Give Up (see yesterday) is a 7. There's a big difference. GOBDGU works better as an lp, fits together better somehow and is more coherent but it doesn't have those two or three songs of genuine brilliance that the Second Coming has.
I don't really take any pleasure in being this critical- this is a band I adored. Tellingly when they reformed for those gigs recently the only songs from The Second Coming that made it to Heaton Park were Ten Storey Love Song and Love Spreads. We'd all loved to have heard Breaking Into Heaven. They played Tightrope at the secret Warrington gig but dropped it afterwards. Everything else was jettisoned- was it down to reunion sensitivities, a band member not wanting to force a song in that they liked but no-one else did, or down to the realisation that many of the difficult second album's songs were not quite good enough?
I was listening to Primal Scream's Give Out But Don't Give Up recently. I saw it in a charity shop for 50p on cd and bought it. It's handy to have vinyl lps in a digital format sometimes, if nothing else for listening to in the car. It took me quite a while to get around to buying it when it came out in 1994. As a follow up to Screamadelica it seemed so retrogressive and while I'd bought and loved the Rocks single it just didn't yell 'buy me' at me in 1994. At the time the press labelled the band Dance Traitors and listening to it now it is difficult to disagree except that in hindsight Screamadelica is the odd one out really. Given the extensive touring the band were doing, the drug intake and the opportunities they were presented with it's probably no surprise they indulged themselves with every rock cliche imaginable. From the William Egglestone Old Glory cover onwards this is early 70s US rock, in velvet trousers, snakeskin shoes and silk scarves. The two openers Jailbird and Rocks are both fine Stonesy rockers, good dirty fun with big Throb riffs. The ballads are all ok too but there are too many of them and crucially none of them are as good as Screamadelica's Damaged. To these ears the only two songs that really move things forward are the ones done with George Clinton- Funky Jam and the title track. Funky Jam is exactly what it says it is but has got some clout. Give Out But Don't Give Up is marvelous- sultry, woozy, head spinning funk with lovely vocals from Denise Johnson, dirty guitars and Clinton's atomic touch.
Having said this, criticisms and all, I enjoyed listening to it. It sounded better now than it did back then, twenty one years ago. The question that then struck me was, bearing in mind the somewhat parallel late 80s and early 90s careers of Primal Scream and The Stone Roses, is it better than The Second Coming?
When Mick Jones parted company with the first line up of Big Audio Dynamite (Don Letts, Greg Roberts, Leo Williams) he shed quite a few of his fans. But BAD II had some good moments that went unnoticed except by the hardcore. In 1990 the band released Kool Aid, an album with a supremely ill advised cover. Even at the time, this didn't look good.
It certainly put me off buying it- I remember seeing it in HMV on Market Street and deciding to spend my money elsewhere, which at the time was not difficult. I caught up with both albums many years later. In 1991 many of the Kool Aid songs turned up in slightly different form on The Globe. Rush and The Globe were both good singles but the real sweet spot was Can't Wait/Live. On Kool Aid Can't Wait is half cooked. By the time of The Globe version it's gained a much bolder string sample, the house influence is even clearer, Mick's vocal is further forward and sonically it's just much better all round.
Apologies for the lazy nature of this post especially re: the videos, but I don't have either song on the hard drive and it's half time during the United- PNE game.
Pavement. Box Elder. Ragged and slack with the Malkmus drawl.
The Wedding Present. Box Elder cover version. Tighter and more trebly with the Gedge growl.
Pete Wiggs (of St Etienne) put together the soundtrack to a film celebrating a lost London (from the 1950s through to the 1980s). If it was a London that ever really existed at all. It was screened at the Barbican last year and Pete's soundtrack came out in December. The Youtube clip below shows a London of coffee shops, Routemasters, the Festival of Britain, jazzy instrumentals, raincoats and twin sets. A long-vanished world from before when most of our pop culture existed, well over half a century ago.
This is the trailer for the film. Whimsical and nostalgic. Whimsey and nostlagia, coupled with hyper-modernity and instantness (instantanaiety?), seem to be the flavour of our current times. Anyway, regardless, I like this.
During the First World War the navy painted their ships in these beautiful, modernist, black and white geometric patterns, to camouflage them and confuse the enemy about distance.
There's been a lot of love shown recently in our part of the blogosphere for The Wedding Present, and quite rightly too. They provided so many of the songs we used to career round the students union and indie disco dancefloors too. I saw The Wedding Present play live several times during 1988-1989 and they were always good. Brassneck is a belter with buzzsaw guitars, tub thumping drums and Gedge's northern growl.
I've just got around to watching a programme I taped on the BBC about New York in 1951, the epicentre of the new world and of a revolution in art, rejecting the conformity of the post-war, consumer world. Jack Kerouac, Jackson Pollack, James Dean and the Actors' Studio were all very familiar to me but good to watch. Thelonious Monk wrote Straight No Chaser in the same year. I'm no expert when it comes to jazz. The bass and drums sounded pretty good all these later, but almost a cliche of what bebop sounds like. The piano playing was something else entirely. This version for TV is from 1965.
Love Corporation was the acid house alter ego of Ed Ball (of The Times, Creation Records etc). This is a long, loved up Weatherall remix with bells and whistles and breathy vocals.
I'm away for the next couple of days on a school trip and not back until Friday evening. Have fun, feel free to avail yourselves of the facilities but please don't make a mess.
I'm joining a few recent musical dots again- on Saturday I posted Orbital's Chime. Orbital's epic and beautiful Halcyon had a backwards vocal part sampled from Opus III's It's A Fine Day (sung by Kirsty Hawksworth, a big hit in 1992). It's A Fine Day was originally written and recorded a cappella by Jane and Barton and released in 1983. Edward Barton wrote it while living in Hulme, Manchester and it was sung by Jane Lancaster (his girlfriend). A haunting little song.
Just watching this Happy Mondays gif loop on and on makes me smile. Better follow it up with some Happy Mondays. On Monday.
Many people think Loaded was Andrew Weatherall's first remix but it wasn't- Hallelujah, done with Paul Oakenfold, was the first to bear his name. I love the opening- the belted out vocal and the monks singing followed by the massive bassline and then those piano chords.
I'd been meaning to post this for a few days and hadn't got around to it, and then Ctel shared it via This Is My Jam which has prompted me to sort it out. A classic Andrew Weatherall remix from 1991 of Finitribe's 101, stomping, crunchy and good enough to eat. Bez in full flight on top of a hotel in Spain just seemed to fit.
Saturday morning and you may need reminding how good this lengthy Orbital song is. If you don't know it, you're in for a treat. According to legend the Hartnoll brothers recorded the original version of this onto cassette for a total cost of £1.
A month or two ago I posted Stella by Ultramarine, a beautiful acid-house moment from the Essex pair. There are a multitude of different versions of Stella. The one I shared with you previously was the album version from their Every Man And Woman Is A Star lp (every home should have one). This one is a Balearic beauty too- squiggly synths, lazy beat, acoustic guitar strums and that feeling of endless possibility that the best music from this period had.
I've been feeling a bit uninspired this week and busy with work stuff. Then driving home last night this shuffled onto the car's stereo- This Is The Day by The The. Compared to a lot of Matt Johnson's stuff it's pretty subtle, those lovely observational lyrics, the wheezy rhythm and that gorgeous accordion. And compared to his grand geopolitical songs and denunciations of religion it shows that sometimes it's the little human touches that make a song connect. This is the day, her life will surely change.
About two years ago I posted a snippet of an Andrew Weatherall remix of a Mugwump track called Until You're Worth It. The remix was a deep, bubbling, bass-led affair with the man himself adding a vocal line, intoning 'under the water, under the water'. It sounded like it could have been remixed in an undersea kingdom.
The original is a much lighter affair, funky but understated, with a falsetto vocal reminiscent of Prince. Both have finally been released this week and after forty eight hours of being unable to log in to Beatport due to password issues I now have it. I can't find an embeddable version of the Weatherall remix currently (I think it's a Beatport exclusive) and can't really give it away as a download so soon after release, so you've just got the original to listen to here.
Before Timothy J Fairplay was making music as Timothy J Fairplay (and Junior Fairplay and one half of The Asphodells) he was a member of Battant. Led by the striking looks of frontwoman Chloe Raunet, they were about to release their second album when they were hit by the death of member Joel Dever (at the age of just twenty five). Radio Rod is post-punk inspired, driving bass, staccato guitars, jerky and attention grabbing.
Sunday night- a time for important developments in the music world, current affairs and hair care regimes. Sit down, if you're not doing already- this is big.
Andrew Weatherall has shaved his beard off.
Wait- there's more. The beard is for sale on ebay. I'll repeat that. The beard is for sale on ebay.
At the time of writing it has four bids, the current high bid is £1.24. You can keep track of this here until the auction ends in eight days. And bid if you want to. I should point out none of the bids are mine. I mean, what would you do with it?
Andrew Weatherall's on-and-off radio show Music's Not For Everyone (currently on NTS Radio) returned last week. Eclectic is putting it mildly. This one has a fantastic new Asphodells remix of C.A.R. at around the forty-six minute mark. There is also quite a bit of post-punky stuff, Wild Billy Childish, reggae from Horseman, mad disco from Bombay, the cosmic Cavern Of Anti-Matter, some deranged surf, a synth-fest from The Advisory Circle, Howe Gelb and Matt Berry. Weird stuff abounds.
Ideal for your Sunday morning pottering about. If the player hasn't embedded (Mixcloud can be a bit crap like that) there's a link here.
Last post in the join-the-dots sequence of this week and it's a hop,a skip and jump from DJ Shadow on Monday to Kate Moss today. Kate collided with pop culture in 1990, the Third Summer Of Love issue of The Face magazine (Spike Island, rave, De La Soul etc) and a football and music fashion shoot in April 1990 (E For England, World In Motion etc). I had the Brazil jersey from the range she's modelling above and wore it to Spike Island. Since then she's floated around the music world, dipping in and out. Yesterday's post included Jack White's Raconteurs. Jack has at least two connections to Croydon's supermodel- in his primary band, The White Stripes, Kate starred in the video for I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself, an ace, raw cover of the Dusty Springfield song. Your enjoyment of this video will depend on whether the prospect of Kate Moss pole-dancing in her underwear interests you at all.
Ahem. Moving on.
Another of Jack's projects, The Dead Weather, saw him playing drums behind Alison Mosshart, whose day job was singing in The Kills. I've posted Baby Says before but that's no reason not to do it again. Stunning song.
Alison's musical partner in The Kills is Jamie Hince, Kate Moss's husband. She sang vocals on Primal Scream's 2002 cover version of Some Velvet Morning (originally sung by Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra). This song, and the Disco Heater Dub version which followed it, were produced by, and you knew this was coming surely, Andrew Weatherall. I'm not sure it's any of those involved's finest hour but there you go. I've more or less managed a Dry January- no, not alcohol, that would be stupid- a Dry January of no Weatherall and no Clash/BAD etc. Abstinence until today.
DJ Shadow >>> UNKLE >>> Richard Ashcroft >>> The Verve >>> The Good, The Bad And The Queen >>> Dangermouse >>> Gnarls Barkley.
I really liked Gnarls Barkley's number one worldwide smash Crazy. Dangermouse and Cee Lo Green made some memorable Top Of The Pops appearances (the one where they dressed as air crew springs to mind). Back in 2006 the mash up was all the rage. This one, I don't know who did it, splices Gnarls Barkley with The Raconteurs (Steady As She Goes).
We saw a band at a fiftieth birthday party last weekend- the band were much younger than us, mid-to-late 20s. Their go-to cover versions were largely early/mid 2000s- The Strokes, The Raconteurs, Arctic Monkeys, White Stripes, Black Keys. It said something culturally- these kids, their references, are post-20th century. Rave on.
Simon Tong joined The Verve as guitarist when Nick McCabe left and then stayed on when he came back (awkward! as the youngsters say). When in 2006 Damon Albarn put together a supposedly nameless band around himself, Paul Simonon (coaxed out of painting to pick up his bass again) and Afrobeat drumming legend Tony Allen, Tong came on board too. The Good, The Bad And The Queen was a very English sounding album (despite Tony Allen on drums)- Dickensian almost, songs summoning up London murk, dark, damp streets and noise coming out from behind half closed doors. This song, the album closer also called The Good, The Bad And The Queen, opens with pub style piano and closes with all of the players racing each other to get to six minutes plus ending. The album was produced by Dangermouse but doesn't really sound like it.
I've decided to play join-the-dots this week. Monday was DJ Shadow. Yesterday was DJ Shadow as part of UNKLE with vocals from Richard Ashcroft. Today is Richard Ashcroft as singer of The Verve. Plus those strings at the end of UNKLE's Lonely Soul would segue very well into today's song.
History is from A Northern Soul, The Verve's second album. Their early singles were great records- huge, fluid, sunscraping psychedelia, with 'Mad' Richard claiming he would fly and believing it. By the time of A Northern Soul they'd cut down the sprawl to more a concise, more classicist, song oriented thing. I blame Oasis. History is a stand out song- a sweeping, desperately, achingly sad string section, an acoustic guitar and Richard bemoaning his lot, world weary, bummed out, alone and full of self pity. It's a song for wallowing in (but not for too long, it's not healthy).
Richard channeled metaphysical poet William Blake for the first verse. Blake's London goes...
I wander thro' each charter'd street, / Near where the charter'd Thames does flow. / And mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
Richard has it as...
I wander lonely streets / Behind where the old Thames does flow / And in every face I meet / Reminds me of what I have run from.
He layers it on- living is for other men, three is company, how he loved and how he failed, you and me we're history, nothing left to say, living with me is like keeping a fool. This longer album version finishes with 'I've got a skin full of dope' part, which- let's be honest- may be the crux of the problem. She may have left 'cos you were always stoned Richard.
The third album, Urban Hymns (Bittersweet Symphony excepted) is one-paced, radio rock, far less interesting and obviously far more successful.
DJ Shadow and James Lavelle spent ages putting together Psyence Fiction, a guest vocalist heavy post-hip hop album in 1998, packaged beautifully by Mo Wax. It was long, it was a kind of 90s psychedelia, it was a bit overwrought and it was a bit over-worked. Some of the tracks pulled it off though. This one with The Verve's Richard Ashcroft managed it- those portentous strings at the end sound both over-the-top and rather good.
Nothing says 1996 musically to me quite as much as DJ Shadow's Endtroducing. Someone said to me a little while ago that what this album needed was an MC, someone rapping all over those perfect urban innerspace soundtracks. I could not agree. This song is particularly good, a headphones classic.
I've always been a little suspicious of Kitty, Daisy and Lewis, they seemed too perfect by half- three siblings, all young and good looking multi-instrumentalists doing doo-wop, r 'n' b, swing blues and country, a bit too Later with Jools. I found this yesterday. The fact it is produced by Mick Jones may have caught my eye. No Action starts conventionally enough with piano and voice but the chorus chucks in some Chic bass and disco strings which swell about while the singer (Daisy or Kitty) complains about a lack of bedroom action and jealousy.
This is good. Black Rivers are the new band of Andy and Jez from Doves. Have Doves split up? Jimi Goodwin had a solo album out last year which I haven't got round to listening to yet. Or are they 'on hiatus'? Dunno. Anyway, Black Rivers are releasing an album soon and as a taster for it there's a remix by Richard Norris, full of electronic soundscapes, pulsebeat rhythm, a bit of phased cowbell, a disco bassline, an 'into the forest' vocal refrain, some ascending 80s keyboards at the end- it all goes by in a warm haze for seven and a half minutes.
New Order split up, sort of, for the first time in the late 80s, splintering into several bands who all sounded a bit like New Order. After ten years together they needed some space from each other. Depending on who you believe a) Bernard had had enough of Hooky's habits and wanted to make music without having to have his bass on everything b) Hooky thought Bernard was a big-headed, lead singer who was trying to take over the band to make dance records. And so began the intermittent sniping at each other which, despite a massively successful reformation in the mid-90s and again in the early 2000s, has led to New Order touring and making records without Peter Hook. And whatever he's done and however he behaves, it doesn't really seem like New Order without Hooky on bass.
Bernard and Johnny Marr recorded a handful of great singles- Getting Away With It and Get The Message- and their first album was a good 'un from start to finish. Having abandoned The Smiths Bernard had to coax the best guitarist of his generation into playing the guitar at all on the debut. The rough and funky guitar break on Feel Every Beat, last song on the album, make 'em wait, is signature Marr. The song also has Barney rapping and getting away it. Just about.
Hooky formed Revenge/took Revenge. He claimed Johnny Marr had promised to work with him first and then left him in the lurch. Now, now children, play nicely. Revenge's debut single was also good, full of sparkling guitars and NO-esque keys and singing. I don't have it on the hard drive at the moment and can't be arsed ripping it so it's video only. The album had a few moments too but nothing as fresh as 7 Reasons. 7 Reasons had an opening line as arch as anything Barney could come up with... 'It's good to be young and gifted again, to see if it all happens twice'.
He went on to find more chart success with Monaco (with David Potts). I was less fussed about Monaco and don't own anything by them- they sounded like a photocopy of New Order. A photocopy of a photocopy of New Order. But I don't begrudge Hooky that. I saw Revenge playing at Cities In The Park, in Heaton Park, in 1991. They played in the middle of the afternoon and sounded like a dance Sisters Of Mercy. Electronic played later, with both Pet Shop Boys turning up. They were much, much better.
Stephen and Gillian shrugged, tutted and then got on with making music as The Other Two. Their debut was also a little slice of joy. Sounds a little dated now I think. Kylie should have covered this. It is in lots of ways a long way from Transmission.
Factory lost New Order and gained three sub-bands, none of whom (Electronic excepted occasionally) could match New Order's record sales. Then Factory went bust, waiting and hoping for the band to put an lp out in time to save the label but it didn't happen. Electronic, Revenge and the Other Two had all put out their records on Factory. By the time they kissed and made up, Factory was gone.
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.
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.
While we're doing Joy Division and New Order let's have Frente!'s much loved cover version of NO's Bizarre Love Triangle (from 1994). It's good sometimes to hear familiar songs done differently- this is very sweetly sung with an acoustic guitar picking away. You could call it twee if you wanted to. I think I would.
The hole in the ground in the photograph was The Hacienda, Whitworth Street. What other city in the world would have allowed one of the most important parts of its cultural history to be demolished? The view at the time was 'we are not sentimentalists, tear it down'. Now there's a pretty nasty apartment block on the site called- yes, you guessed it- Hacienda Apartments.
Here's the 1986 original of Bizarre Love Triangle. Epic in every way.
This shot shows Joy Division sitting on a low wall near the cenotaph, in St Peter's Square, Manchester. A cenotaph which the city council have recently moved several hundred metres away. Quite disorientating when you first encounter it unexpectedly, on foot.
Jah Division made/make dub versions of Joy Division songs- that's a very niche interest. Even more bizarre is the claim that they are (allegedly) Russian Rastafarians. Hmmm. Their dubs are tense, wired, spacey versions of songs which were pretty tense and wired in the first place. Well worth giving a spin.
In chapter three of his autobiography (Chapter And Verse) Bernard Sumner describes the destruction of the street he grew up on in Lower Broughton and the displacement and resettlement of family, friends and neighbours to tower blocks and flats.
'Everything had gone, even the school had been pulled down. It was as if someone was actively trying to erase my memories. All the parts you could feel, touch, even smell, they were all gone and would never come back.... I don't think it's a coincidence that this is when I got even more into music, because what happened around that time has really influenced the music I've made. I think that you can hear the death of a community and the death of my adolescence in my contribution to the music of Joy Division'.
With Joy Division the focus is often on Ian Curtis' lyrics (and what they say about his state of mind) but clearly for Bernard the chord progressions and guitar lines had an actual content too, the guitar playing was about something.
This recording of Transmission at Les Bains Douche, from December 1979, is astonishingly good- full of power and energy, Bernard's guitar distorted and furious, Hooky's bass pushing and pulling. Stephen Morris' drumming has to be heard to be believed. Transmission (Live at Les Bains Douche)
I found a long forgotten folder on my hard drive, called Adam Music From Laptop- some songs transferred over from a work laptop back in about 2007. Tucked away in it was this song by The Matinee Orchestra. I think I downloaded it from their MySpace page (MySpace!). It's got a bit of Penguin Cafe Orchestra about it, a bit Henri Mancini maybe, a little Belle And Sebastian. Acoustic guitar, skewed trumpets, a sweetly sung vocal. Ice cold lemonade on a sunny day. Sunday morning music.
Harriet Andersson starred in yesterday's cover star Ingmar Bergman's 1953 film Summer With Monika. I saw this still and others from the film and thought, phew, blimey etc.
This has just come out on 12" vinyl, Richard Sen's Songs Of Pressure. Driven by a massive bassline with sound system dub effects all over it. There's an even more dubbed out Asphodells remix on the other side that I posted last year. Richard Sen started out as a graffiti artist, recorded as Padded Cell and Bronx Dogs, djs and remixes, and collects pine cones which he classifies and displays according to size, shape and colour. I may have made that last bit up.
Towards the end of last year I posted a song called Hunters In The Snow by Paresse which went down very well with some of you- a slow moving, atmospheric house track with a throbbing bass, that conjured up images of hunters and snow. Many, many months before I also posted Paresse's The Night before You Came, which was futuristic, quite Bladerunner. I found Paresse's Soundcloud page the other week which doesn't give away much information (Paresse is Ivan Berggren from Stockholm, Sweden) but does have a good number of songs, a couple of remixes and some lengthy radio show mixes. The most recent upload is this one, Phantoms Are Waltzing. It's John Carpenter-esque, but as if Escape From New York had happened in Scandinavia. There are some lovely distorted synth sounds on this.
I'm also taken with this one, Trans Am, still pretty slow with a hint of disco...
They don't make 'em like Lee Hazlewood anymore do they? That kind of man's man, with his moustache, baritone voice and Western trappings, but with an outsider's edge. A lot of country with a bit of easy listening and some psychedelia, a bit underground but with a pop touch. Sincere but done with a wink. This is a smashing little tune (and a way of life).
