The History Of All Truth

Stephen  Morris is about to put his view of life in Joy Division and New Order into the public domain to put alongside Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook’s versions (for the record Barney’s was pretty disappointing, his account of his younger life growing up in Salford was interesting but after that it became a boring read. He skipped most of the 1980s because he thought people would find him describing how they made their greatest records dull and then spent the last two chapters detailing the collapse of relations with Hooky. Hooky’s books were scurrilous, entertaining and full of the sort of details that I did want to read but his frequent references to Bernard as Twatto show how big the distance between them is and put downs of Gillian were unnecessary).

Stephen Morris’ drumming is a massive part of the sound of his two bands. His travails with Hannett while recording Unknown Pleasures are well documented but clearly paid off. His synth drums on She’s Lost Control are wonderful and the drum sound and drumming on Transmission b-side Novelty are among the best I’ve ever heard. Early New Order singles and albums are full of brilliantly recorded drum parts, as much part of the NO sound as Hooky’s bass, the homemade kit keyboards and Barney’s vocals- all of which are perfectly demonstrated on this 12″ single from April 1984, a high point for the band, the record label and the 1980s as a whole.

Thieves Like Us

As if giving their fans a magnificent standalone single wasn’t enough they coupled it with a gem of a b-side too, opening with Hooky’s brilliant bass and some spikey guitar playing from Barney and another of his fragile vocals. Then the wall of synths come in. Lonesome Tonight, with it’s pisstake title, is a masterpiece.

Lonesome Tonight

The lyrics of Lonesome Tonight are classic early New Order, that mixture of written to rhyme with personal point of view suddenly switching into something portentous- check the change here in the first verse from ‘you turned your back on me’ to two lines later ‘the history of all truth’

I walk along the street
I look into your eyes
I’m pleasant when we meet
I’m there when you go home
How many times before
Could you tell I didn’t care?
When you turned your back on me
I knew we’d get nowhere
Do you believe in youth
The history of all truth
A heart that’s left at home
Becomes a heart of stone

Stephen’s take on events should be interesting. He often comes across as the most thoughtful and considered member of the surviving members of Joy Division. He’s doing a short book tour to promote it with a Q and A session conducted by Dave Haslam starting at the Dancehouse in Manchester next Thursday and then going to Liverpool, Hebden Bridge and Newcastle (which looks a bit like a New Order world tour itinerary from 1985). Tickets for the Manchester event are here if you fancy it. See you there.

Dave Haslam is a Manchester mainstay since arriving in the city in the early 80s- DJ at the Hacienda and the Boardwalk, gig promoter, journalist and author, record label boss (Play Hard) and cultural commentator. From 1980 onwards, if something was happening in the Manchester area, the chances are he was involved or present. His latest book Sonic Youth Slept On My Floor is out now in paperback. Well worth reading if you want to peek inside Manchester’s music scene as seen and lived by Dave from 1980 to the present. Someone described it as ‘the literary equivalent of a brilliant chat with your best mate’ which is a good take on it and it’s refreshingly ant-nostalgic too.

Monday’s Long Song

This came out back in 2013 and I posted it back then and again in 2014 but it was among the piles of records that I was sorting through when the big sort out/Kallax construction took place recently and I thought it would fit this series perfectly. Beachcombing is a fifteen minute collaboration between New York composer Peter Gordon, a man who worked with Arthur Russell and Laurie Anderson, and Nik Void and Gabe Gurnsey of Factory Floor. Beachcombing sounds a bit like a 45 rpm record slowed down to 33, the pitter-patter of a drum machine, slow and warped tones, woozy almost inaudible vocals from Nik and waves and surges of analogue, modular synths and sweet bursts of saxophone. It  builds and holds a trance-like state that is easy to get lost in and if it doesn’t improve your Monday morning, I don’t know what will.

Beachcombing

 

April’s Not For Everyone

It’s that time of the month again when Weatherall rifles through his big box of songs…

The tracklist can be found here. The picture comes from a series of photographs taken by Carolina Sandretto who set out to document the lost world of Cuba’s cinemas. More here.

Way To The Show

Solange, Beyonce’s younger sister, has an album out called When I Get Home, that is beginning to sink into my consciousness. It is definitely based in modern r’n’b but has some psychedelic soul and woozy, cosmic, jazz angles, a set of songs that are short and sketchy and which flow by in a dreamlike state, lines of vocal repeated, Moog riffs, choruses that sort of flutter about, Stevie Wonder-esque Fender Rhodes piano parts, songs about politics and identity and strange shifts in tone- but it all hangs together and despite looking like a long slog when viewed through the nineteen song track list, the album doesn’t feel like it at all. Invigorating and inventive and requiring some attention but also likely to still be being played in months to come. This one keeps me clicking back to the start.

New Routes

It’s only a matter of weeks, days really, since I discovered Mark Peters’ Innerland album- a record that has barely left my turntable- and now it’s been followed by a remixed version, released last Friday, titled New Routes Out Of Innerland. Which is good news for exploring more new music and hearing new versions of his ambient- comische- Northern- shoegaze but will likely be bad news for my bank balance. The eight guitar led instrumentals on Innerland have been reworked by a variety of people- Andi Otto, Olga Wojciechowska, Brian Case, Moon Gangs, Odd Nosdam, E Ruscha V and Jefre Canta-Ledesma- but the remix of choice right now is this one by Ulrich Schnauss.

All the remixers above are worth investigating further if you’ve the time (and the money). If you’re fond of the works of Tangerine Dream and sci-fi soundtracks you’ll probably enjoy this album by Moon Gangs (a pseudonym for pianist William Young).

Delving further I found this album by E Ruscha V, bubbling synths and a melodic, sunny side up disposition, beamed in from Los Angeles.

Teenage Birdsong

A new track from Four Tet, a melodic, blissful and optimistic instrumental that harks back to his Rounds album but also shows that he rarely stands still, that he’s always looking to move things forward. Short and sweet and springlike.

Khasha Macka

More from the magic fingers and ears of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. His Black Ark Studio had a four track tape recorder. Max Romeo said Scratch had another eight tracks running in his head. Black Board Jungle came out in 1973, recorded with The Upsetters, is a contender for first dub album, separating the instruments with drums and bass in the left channel and guitars and horns largely in the right. This song, Khasha Macka (a reworking of Prince Django’s Hot Tip) is a wonderful trip. Check the splashy cymbals and the part at three minutes where he drops everything out to foreground the bass.

Khasha Macka 

Rockin’ In The Back Yard

Back to work today after a fortnight off, so it’s a deep breath, time to gird one’s loins and get back into it. Reorganising my records recently led to me discovering various things I’d forgotten I had including a 7″ of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s 1978 song Roast Fish And Cornbread, four minutes which on their own mark Scratch out as some kind of musical genius. The son opens with him singing ‘clip clop, cloppity cloppity cloppity cloppity high’ as the offbeat riddim rides in, a cow’s mooing utilised as part of the rhythm and Scratch further singing to his own beat- ‘dreadnought and peanut, roast fish and cornbread… skanking in the backyard’.

Roast Fish And Cornbread

Looking For The Boys Again

I’ve spent some of the week just gone addressing storage issues- records and CDs, but mainly records, spilling all over the room and a shortage of shelf space. An Ikea Kallax shelving unit has been purchased and assembled and the order has been restored. Several years worth of record buying has been filed away- some of the ones at the back of the oldest unfiled stack of records dated back to 2012. The situation has now been resolved with all parties happy.

In a box of CDs, mainly discs given away free with music magazines, I found a freebie the long departed Select magazine, dating from December 1999. The CD was a tie in with Xfm (when I hear Xfm Manchester in the barber’s they seem to only have the songs of three artists and those artists are Oasis, U2 and Arctic Monkeys). Select did some really good CDs with remixes, B-sides and exclusives that were often worth hanging on to. This CD is not one those CDs so I couldn’t work out at first why I’d bothered to save it and why I still had it two decades later.

All the songs are radio sessions and the list of bands is a mixture of late 90s mainstream indie (Travis, Stereophonics, Reef, Gomez, Catatonia), American indie survivors (Sebadoh, The Flaming Lips, Guided By Voices, Mercury Rev), Suede, Skunk Anansie and two bands that I don’t know (Seafruit and Merz). None of which explains why this CD must have escaped several culls in the last twenty years. I can only assume it was this- Shack, live in the Xfm studio, playing Mick Head’s description of desperately trawling through Kensington, Liverpool, looking for heroin.

Streets Of Kenny (Xfm Session)

Bringing Me Back To Life

Here’s an Easter treat for fans of A Man Called Adam, who’ve made their 1998 classic Easter Song available for free from their Bandcamp page- and seeing as we’re currently basking in some sunshine and warmth this piece of Balearic summer fits perfectly. The special edition includes not just the radio edit of Easter Song but the Cafe del Mar version and some dubs and soundscapes, three lovely short instrumental versions to accompany it, seven tracks to celebrate the rolling away of a stone, Oestra, the hiding of chocolate eggs or just a long bank holiday weekend. It’s all here.