Oblique Saturdays

A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion. 

Last week's Oblique Strategy suggestion was Be less critical more often. 

This took me to San Pedro's Minutemen and their 1984 album Double Nickels On The Dime. The Oblique Saturdays collective weighed in various critical/ non- critical suggestions- Bob Dylan's Don't Think Twice, It's Alright (Trail Of Bread), Lyle Lovett and A House (Ernie Goggins), Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis and the incredible self- taught shambling proto- punk/ indie of The Shaggs (Rongniss), Dodgy (John Medd), George Bean and The Runner Beans (Rol- deftly avoiding Alexander O'Neal), Boo Radleys (Al G), Whitney Houston (anonymous), and Mojo Nixon (Chris ZenArcade).

This weeks Oblique Strategy card reads simply this- Water. 

For musicians in the studio I can picture numerous responses to this as they change their playing, use samples and found sounds. My response was much more literal songs with Water in the title. Ironically, given the multiple heatwaves we've had this summer, the falling water levels in reservoirs, drought warnings and scorched grass, there is no shortage of water at Bagging Area. This a selection of water songs, mainly lesser heard and less well known ones...

First up, Sordid Sound System, Los Angeles via Glasgow's Optimo and a 2022 EP Neon Noir- very persuasive electronic music, chunky and percussive with watery synths. The text accompanying the EP quotes Raymond Chandler-

'I drove on almost to Malibu and then parked and went and sat on a big rock that was inside somebody's wire fence. It was about half-tide and coming in. The air smelled of kelp and glowed like neon noir. I watched the water for a while and then I pulled a string of Bohemian glass imitation pearls out of my pocket and cut the knot at one end and slipped the pearls off one by one.

When I had them all loose in my left hand I held them like that for a while and thought. There wasn't really anything to think about. I was sure.

"To the Gods below," I said aloud.
I flipped her pearls out into the water one by one. I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars." 

Falling Out Of Water

From 2020, Dreems and Shark Water, an Australian exploration into the deep blue seas on the other side of the world....

Shark Water (Abyss Mix)

Two from Factory. Kalima emerged from Swamp Children, becoming Kalima in 1983 and making several records, latin and jazz based excursions. Black Water is moody, slinky and cool and then the vocal comes in and lifts it up a level (from their 1986 album Night Time Shadows)...

Black Water

The members of A Certain Ratio were deeply involved with Kalima. In 1981 ACR put out Water Line, a 12" that is the early ACR sound honed to perfection- taut but rubbery bass, skittery drums, otherworldly production, the sense of something being not quite right...

Water Line

Andrew Weatherall and Michael Smith's Unreal City has been here fairly recently, a 2013 ambient/ soundtrack/ spoken word project, that found Andrew and Nina Walsh providing soundscapes for Michael to read passages from his book over.

On Water Music Michael finds his way into London from the Kent coast into the city and down some steps to the side of the Thames. Michael sees 'light on the water, lights from the Millenium dome... lights from the sugar factory at Silvertown...'...

Water Music

Lastly, back to the recently departed William Orbit and his 1993 evergreen Water From A Vine Leaf. Water From A Vine Leaf was remixed by Underworld not once but three times, in total well over twenty minutes of 1993 trance house techno. 

Part 1 is the go to- chopped up synth squiggles, synthetic horns, chunky drums, widescreen cinematic progressive house that deals in hypnosis and delivers euphoria. 

Water From A Vine Leaf (Underworld Mix Part 1)

Part 2 is a twelve minute trip into the Orbit/ Orton/ Underworld dreamworld, a spaced out, relatively stripped back bubbling psychedelic adventure- Beth's vocals are FXed and looped, the pace is slow, there are tropical birds, a very loose guitar line and layers of synths. Chilled restraint is the order of the day on Part 2. 

Water From A Vine Leaf (Underworld Mix Part 2)

Feel free to drop your own responses to Water into the comment box. 

In The Dawn

The countdown to the new Durutti Column album continues- Renascent, out at the end of the month- and a second song from it was released into the world recently, Scammer. 

Scammer sounds fragile, Vini's voice at its centre, whispering about things learned from his life. Around him there are washes of synths and keys and Vini's guitar playing, little runs of notes like pin pricks of light puncturing the swirl of sound. There's a prodding sound too, deep bass notes that push the song along. It's a lovely way to spend three minutes and coming on the back of the first single Liars, promises much for Renascent. 

In James Nice's biography of Factory records, Shadowplayers, he writes about Vini recording guitar tracks for what became the Durutti Column's second album, LC (Lotta Continua, the struggle continues), released in November 1981. LC is a wonderful album with several Durutti Column highlights- Sketch For Dawn, Jacqueline, Messidor and The Missing Boy (Vini's song for Ian Curtis) among them. The first Durutti Column album The Return Of The Durutti Column was created, produced and mixed by Martin Hannett out of sessions that Vini really hadn't enjoyed, but the completed album brought a new found confidence and this can be heard on LC. Vini knows what he's doing and what a Durutti Column album should sound like. 

Vini recorded the guitar parts for LC on a four track in a spare bedroom at his Mum's house on Pytha Fold Road in Withington, M20. He then went into the studio with drummer Bruce Mitchell and made the record in a couple of hours. When Vini made album that in 1981 in his Mum's house, I was living about a quarter of a mile away, a few streets to the west. Fog Lane Park which Pytha Fold Road runs onto was our playground. It is therefore the album that was recorded closest to any place I was living in at the time it was made. 

In 1981 I was eleven years old and had no interest in Factory Records or The Durutti Column. We enjoyed Madness, The Jam and The Specials and the weekly Top Of The Pops but were equally if not more interested in 2000AD, Indiana Jones, early evening Star Trek re- runs and The Empire Strikes Back. Funny to think though, at the time Vini was recording those songs, many of which I've been listening to for decades now, I was just around the corner.

In 1983 Vini and Bruce played at De Doelen in Rotterdam and opened with LC's Sketch For Dawn, Vini introducing himself to the crowd with, 'Hello, we're called The Durutti Column and I hope you like what we do'. 

Sketch For Dawn (Live in Rotterdam 1983)

Oblique Saturdays

A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion. 

Last week's Oblique Strategy suggestion was You can only make one dot at a time. 

This made me start joining the dots between One Dove and Dot Allison, Arab Strap, Wire and Dot Dash, Ry Lichtenstein, The Jam and Pete Wylie and Ariadne's Labyrinth. From the wider Bagging Area community came these dots- C with Angines de Poitrine, Ernie with The Blue Aeroplanes ...And Stones, Al G and Jonathan Richman and Vincent van Gogh, Craig with Hot Chip's Over And Over, Noone and Les Rallizes Denudes, Rol and The Teardrop Explodes, the Swede with The Beat and Ranking Full Stop, Walter with !!! and Chris ZenArcade with some lysergic dots and E.D. 209's Metre and that Robocop sample...

This week's Oblique Strategy card is this- A very small object. It's centre.

My knowledge of physics is fairly limited. Last year a friend lent me Carlo Rovelli's Helgoland,a  very readable account of the story of quantum physics. I still couldn't explain even in the simplest terms much about quantum physics but I enjoyed the ride. 

I do know that atoms are extremely small and are the basic particles that make up everything. At the centre of an atom is the nucleus (which must therefore be smaller than an atom- right?). Atoms are so small we cannot see them, a million times smaller than the breadth of a hair. Coincidentally (and I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that nothing about this series is coincidental, it all seems to be connected), earlier this week I was wandering around the campus at Manchester University where I photographed the Humanities building, a rectangle of concrete opened in 1970. It is the picture at the top of this post. It is just round the corner from the Rutherford Building, which contains the room in which in 1917 Ernest Rutherford split the atom* and so created the modern field of nuclear physics (I once went on a course in the exact room where Rutherford made his discovery). 

Sixty seven years later, also in Manchester, Factory Records released FAC 102, Atom Rock by Quando Quango.

Atom Rock

Quando Quango were a dance act somewhat ahead of their time, Mike Pickering channeling electronic music from New York and Chicago into mid- 80s Manchester along with Gonnie and Reinier Rietveld. They formed in Rotterdam in 1980 and then relocated to Manchester in '82 when the Hacienda opened. Mike Pickering's role in modern Manchester and Factory cannot be overplayed. 

Atom Rock is a light on its feet slice of 1984, pioneering dance music with jazz and Latin influences worn on its sleeves, produced by Be Music (Bernard Sumner and Donald Johnson of ACR). That jangly, funky guitar riff is a moonlighting Johnny Marr (the birth of Electronic, Marr and Sumner's late 80s band, is this record). It's one of those songs that made Factory such an interesting record label in the mid- 80s. 'Fela Kuti meets Kraftwerk somewhere between Rotterdam and Manchester', said Gonnie of the band's sound. 

A year later there was a Mark Kamins remix, Kamins putting his Roland 808 through its paces (Kamins was the man who launched Madonna)...

Atom Rock (Mark Kamins New York Remix)

Juan Moreno's Atomism Theory came out in 2024, an eight minute ambient piece that actually sounds like it could be the sound of atomic particles and nuclear fission.

Atomism Theory

And in a nice link to Carlo Rovelli's Helgoland, in 2009 Massive Attack released Heligoland (both named after the same piece of land, an archipelago in Germany). The first single from the album was Splitting The Atom, with Horace Andy on co- vocals and Damon Albarn on keys. 

Splitting The Atom

I have several other atom/ atomic songs but I'll stop there. Feel free to split your own atoms in the comments box or make any other responses to the Oblique Strategy card- A very small object. It's centre.

* Apparently 'splitting the atom' is a poor choice of words for what Rutherford actually did. The University of Manchester's website says that Rutherford was ''the first person to create an artificial nuclear reaction... now described as 'splitting the atom' in popular accounts''

Knife Slits Water

Today is the first day of my summer holiday. Yesterday I completed my first year at my new workplace, a 6th form college in Salford after moving there last summer (I spent twenty four years in my previous school). The move has been positive for me in so many ways- a much shorter commute, a different environment, an escape from a place that I needed to get out of for various reasons- and I genuinely enjoy going to work now, teaching history and politics to 16- 18 year olds. One of the reasons I wanted to get a new job was the feeling that Isaac's death had forced so much change on us and the consequences spun off in all sorts of directions. Getting a new job would be a change I had chosen, a taking control of change. Moving jobs is a gamble at any point, in any profession but a year on I can say that for me it's paid off. And now I have six weeks of holiday to enjoy without the slight sense of fear and unease that accompanied me last summer. 

A Certain Ratio are touring in October playing two albums from their 1980s back catalogue in full, Sextet from 1982 and force from 1986. Force was the first ACR album in bought in real time, in the period when it was released. I got the compilation The Old And The New around the same time and have been following them live and on disc ever since. My copy of Force is on cassette, one of those beautifully packaged Factory cassettes that came in a book sized box wrapped in hessian with a fold out inlay card. I still have it. The imagery on the Force album- mountaineers, propeller planes, maps- really appealed to me, 

ACR have announced two new versions of the albums too, The Joy of Sextet and Force Majeure. Force Majeure is a different version of Force (recorded at Strawberry in Stockport) with eight unreleased, different studio versions of songs from the original album  plus the album's title track (which wasn't on the original album at all). These alternative versions were done with the late Stuart James, alternative arrangements and live run throughs. Martin Moscrop listened to them forty years later and thought they sounded good enough to put out as a companion version of Force. The only one available to hear so far is the FM version of Naked And White, ACR at their funk/ dance rock best, the band sounding urgent and live...

The Joy Of Sextet is a complete re- imagining of Sextet, ACR's bleak early 80s masterpiece, a record that is taut, abrasive and uneasy, the post- punk/ punk funk married to some art noise and African rhythms with vocals by Martha Tilson giving them a different edge. For The Joy Of Sextet they handed the master tapes over to Andy Meecham, The Emperor Machine, to remix and rework. 

The Emperor Machine version of seminal ACR track Knife Slits Water, Martha singing about Manchester and sex, has been released this week, an eight minute 2026 update on ACR's edgy, paranoid dance music. Those times spent playing with Talking Heads had some impact on ACR- some of Sextet sounds like a hotwired Mancunian Talking Heads. 

The Joy Of Sextet and Force Majeure can be ordered at Bandcamp ahead of a late August release. 

A Mix For Eliza

It's Eliza's birthday today. She arrived in the early hours of 14th June 2003 and turns twenty three today. This has been causing some distress- Isaac was twenty three when he died in November 2021 and in a week's time she'll be older than he ever was. It's a strange thing to get one's head around and has brought some emotions to the surface. In the years since he died we've made a thing out of the number twenty three. We've all got a 23 tattoo and it's has become a way we jointly remember him. I still spot 23s out in the wild all the time. This was the table we sat at recently, in a busy pub, the only one with seats left...

Birthdays have been tough since he died. I know I always find them tough, another anniversary to get through, another date he's missing for. Eliza's twenty third birthday has stirred a lot of grief related stuff up and these are things which I've learned you just have to go through, you have to feel the feelings and accept it for what it is. 

We're immensely proud of her and everything she's done and we will be celebrating today, just in a slightly different way from usual. 

This is a thirty minute mix of songs for her twenty third birthday. There's plenty of other music she likes but these are some of the ones that have become jointly ours.

Eliza's 23rd Birthday Mix

• The Stone Roses: Mersey Paradise
• The Charlatans: Can't Get Out Of Bed
• Ride: Cali
• New Order: Sub- culture (7" Version)
• Oasis: Supersonic
• The Kinks: Misty Water
• Half Man Half Biscuit: The Light At The End Of The Tunnel (Is The Light Of An Oncoming Train)
• Cheryl Cole: Fight For This Love

Mersey Paradise was the B-side to She Bangs The Drums back in 1989, when The Stone Roses were on their ascent and I was nineteen/. It's her favourite Roses song, one that we've sung along to in unison umpteen times in the car. The Mersey isn't far from where we live, we walk on its banks often. Upriver in Chorlton is where Ian Brown and John Squire lived when they wrote the song, maybe inspired by walks through Chorlton Ees and the water park and beyond that Didsbury where I grew up. Downstream it ends up in Liverpool where both she and I went to university, several decades apart. It's a been a constant presence in our lives in a way I only really realised while writing this. She missed The Stone Roses reunion, she was a bit too young and only really became interested a little later, something I regret a bit. 

We played North Country Boy at Isaac's funeral and it still retains a lot of power of as a song. I took Eliza to see The Charlatans a year ago at Castlefield Bowl and when they played it we both started sobbing. It's acted as a gateway into The Charlatans for her though and she has several of their songs on one of her playlists, often coming on straight after Mersey Paradise. Just When You're Thinkin' Things Over is one and their 1994 single Can't Get Out Of Bed is another. The album it's from, Up To Our Hips, got a bit of a mixed reception at the time- their star had waned a little in the press- but it sounds like a fine album today. 

Cali is from Ride's 2017 comeback album Weather Diaries, a gorgeous guitar song with end of summer lyrics and feel.It was one of the songs that got a lot of time in the car when we went to France in summer 2017, a long drive down to Messanges on the Atlantic coast near Biaritz. 

Sub- culture is one of those songs that cut through for her. I'm not sure where it came from- I've played it and many other New Order songs since before she was born so maybe it just seeped in by osmosis. There are various versions. My favorite is the Lowlife one but the one here is the 7" version from 1985, remixed by John Robie. 

Supersonic was Oasis' debut single back in 1994 back when they were just five likely lads from Burnage. Oasis are part of Eliza's generation's firmament, and last summer's re- union gave a lot of young people a chance to see them they wouldn't have had otherwise. We were going to go to Gallagher Hill last summer when they played Heaton Park but the Sunday evening when we were thinking about it it began raining heavily and we thought better of it. Probably should have gone- if you avoid doing things outside in Manchester due to rain you'd do very little. Supersonic is a blast, phased guitars and splintering notes over that early Oasis rhythm and a load of half- nonsense rhymes and typically Gallagher arrogance- 'I need to be myself/ I can't be no-- one else'.

Back when Eliza was much younger and going to dance classes every Tuesday night I'd take her and her friend Emma in the car, drop them and then an hour later pick them up. One of the routines of young children. For some reason, Misty Waters became a song they started singing along to, and it became an essential part of the Tuesday dance drop routine that we played Misty Water, the pair of them singing/ shouting along to the chorus. A 1968 hidden Ray Davies gem later covered by Billy Childish. 

Another car song from pre- teen years, The Light At The End Of The Tunnel (Is The Light Of An Oncoming Train), is a Half Man Half Biscuit classic, one of their greatest moments. We'd all sing the breakdown, anticipating it from the start of the song- 'No frills, handy for the hills/ That's the way you spell New Mills'. Imagine our joy when we did this actually driving through New Mills. 

The line about Eyam is evidence of Nigel Blackwell's genius- 'We both grew up in Eyam/ And strange as it may seem/ Neither of us thought we'd ever leave'. For the benefit of non- UK readers, the village of Eyam is in Derbyshire and had an outbreak of Bubonic Plague in the 17th century. Rather than risk spreading the plague the villagers sealed themselves in, an act of self- isolation that confined the disease but led to the deaths of 260 residents. 

Cheryl Cole's Fight For This Love sticks out like a sore thumb in this mix but back in 2009 when she was six it was the first pop song she really connected with and I clearly remember downloading it for her and burning it to CD. 

Happy birthday Eliza. X

Fifty Six

Today's post is brought to you in association with the number fifty six. The A56 runs past the top of our road and a mile up the road from us (heading towards Manchester city centre) it goes past the beautiful but empty Art Deco cinema in Stretford (formerly Stretford Essoldo, pictured above). 

The A56 starts out on Frodsham Street in Chester and heads east through Cheshire, past Warrington and Runcorn and then passes Lymm where it turns to Altrincham, then Sale and Stretford (it is at various points between Altrincham and Old Trafford called Chester Road, Cross Street and Washway Road). Then it runs through Gorse Hill to Old Trafford where Manchester United's ground lies to its left, skirts Hulme and when it hits town it becomes Deansgate. From there north to Salford and Bury and into Lancashire, to Colne and Nelson before reaching Skipton and eventually running out of tarmac in the village of Broughton, North Yorkshire. 

Fact 56 was A Factory Video, a various artists VHS video released by Factory in 1982, the starting point of what Tony Wilson believed would be a brave new artistic world for the record label. The Factory video production arm was Ikon (Brian Nicholson) and operated from the basement of the Factory HQ at 86 Palatine Road. For a while it was based in the cellar of Tony Wilson's house on Old Broadway, a house that in 1982 I walked past every day on the way home from school. Aged twelve, I wasn't really up to speed with what was going on in that cellar. Ikon ran their own video release series and Fact 56 was a compilation of some of those releases.  

It starts with New Horizon by Section 25. New Horizon is the final song on their 1981 album Always Now, a record produced by Martin Hannett and clad in one of Peter Saville's Factory artwork masterpieces. The advice Peter got from band member Larry Cassidy was 'something quite European, but psychedelic with some oriental influences'. 'After that', he said, 'I was on my own'. The sleeve opens like an envelope, marbled on the inside on specialist card with bold type on the front and die cut. 

Tony Wilson was right about the importance of videos and video art. Fact 56 was available to buy on VHS and Betamax. I would guess a lot of copies of both ended up in landfill in the 90s as the world went digital. There are two copies for sale on Discogs, one for £50 and one for 80 Euros which would suggest they're pretty scarce now. 

There isn't too much else about the number 56. It became a symbol of the Hungarian Uprising. Joe DiMaggio had a 56 game hitting streak. It means that I'm now closer to 60 than 50. 

This came out recently, nothing to do with 56, just something I wanted to share- Seu Jorge and Beck covering Nick Drake's River Man, a lush and very lovely bossa nova version of the song from Brazil and produced by former Beastie Boy producer Mario C. 

Oblique Saturdays

A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion. 

Last week's Oblique Strategy suggestion was Don't be afraid of things because they're easy to do.

I opted for a JFK response, his 1961 speech about doing things not because they are easy but because they are hard. Steinski and Mass Media, The Wedding Present and Lou Reed all provided me with Kennedy themed songs. 

The Bagging Area community came up with some inspired choices- PTVL went for Genesis P. Orridge with Richard Norris and Dave Ball as Jack The Tab, arguably the UK's first acid house record, Ernie went for Lowell George and Little Feat, Al G with Mansun, Rol (arriving late after some serious jet washing) with The Walker Brothers and Walter with Nick Drake and Vini Reilly.

This week's Oblique Strategy cards reads thus- Is there something missing?

A obvious choice and one which has been in my mind recently is this...

Todd Terry's remix of Missing was everywhere in 1996, inescapable and irresistible, a crossover hit that deserved to be massive. Missing is a mood in song form. 

I also thought of Dub Syndicate's 1985 album, the mighty Tunes From The Missing Channel, Adrian Sherwood and Style Scott's hugely influential dub album that opens with Ravi Shankar Pt. 1 and with Jah Wobble appearing too, goes about pushing dub into sci fi/ ambient dub territories.

Out And About

But there's more to this Oblique Strategy stuff than just going with the most obvious, word related choices. 

Is there something missing?

Stephen Morris, drummer in Joy Division and New Order and authentic nice chap, has described the three surviving members of Joy Division in the pub after Ian Curtis' funeral. They sat their nursing their pints, not knowing how to talk to each other about death, suicide and loss, young men on the cusp of something big that has been wrenched away from them. A planned American tour cancelled. The second half of 1980 suddenly looking very different from what they envisaged. 

'See you on Monday then', one of them said as he left. 

'Yep, see you on Monday'.

Because they didn't know what else to do, they reconvened at Joy Division's rehearsal space in Little Peter Street and tried to make music as a trio. In Jon Savage's oral history, This Searing Light, The Sun And Everything Else, they each talk about the difficulties of making music with something (or someone) missing. Ian Curtis, frontman and lyricist, the object of attention at gigs, 'one of those channels for the gestalt' (said Martin Hannett), the intense and distinctive singer who set them apart from their peers, was gone. It was more than just missing a singer- he was a mate too and he was the rehearsal room ears and the editor. When the band jammed, Ian would pick out the parts that were good, get them to play that bit but put it with this bit and repeat it. 

They struggled on obviously- we all know the story. Ceremony (the last Joy Division song) and Movement (the last record they made with Martin Hannett). Movement is a sound, post- punk songs with a Hannett tone, but it lacks tunes. Apart from Dreams Never End (sung by Hooky ironically), nothing on Movement sticks in the memory for long. It's an album I have to play to remember what it's like. 

Dreams Never End

In 1981 they appeared on Granada TV, sonically moving forward with Gillian Gilbert on board but visually, physically, they all behave like there's still something missing. This clip has them playing, tentatively, five songs from Movement and Ceremony. The crowd, all local fans, look like they know this too. There's an absence, the band and the audience both feel it. 

They got there in the end of course. Discos in New York and Everything's Gone Green showing them a way out. 

Everything's Gone Green

Vini Reilly, mentioned above, had his own response to the missing boy...

The Missing Boy

'There was a boy/ I almost knew him/ A glance exchanged/ Made me feel good/ Leaving some signs/ Now a legend'.

Other bands have struggled with missing members. Is there something missing?

In 1998 R.E.M. tried to regroup following Bill Berry's decision to leave the group (a brain aneurysm onstage during the Monster tour being a key part of his decision). Bill admitted last year in an interview that he 'didn't regret it at the time but... sort of regretted it later'. Michael Stipe, Mike Mills and Peter Buck experimented with vintage synths and drum machines and eventually made Up but it nearly broke them. Bill Berry wasn't just the drummer, he wrote songs too- the beautiful Perfect Circle for one and worldwide smash Everybody Hurts for another. Without Bill they were destabilised, nothing worked the same way. Michael Stipe memorably but none- too- convincingly commented, 'a dog with three legs is still a dog'.

Daysleeper

In 1985 The Clash, or what was left of them, released Cut The Crap. Topper Headon had gone in 1983 and Mick Jones was sacked by Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon (and Bernie Rhodes) in 1984. 'We fell to ego', Joe remarked. This Is England may well be up there with the rest of Joe's songs but the much of the rest of Cut The Crap most definitely has something missing. Mick Jones. Topper Headon. 

This Is England

Strummer's 1985 state of the nation address evokes strikes, unrest, police brutality, unemployment, divisive right wing politics, war in far off places, poverty, racism, protest, marches, football and asks 'when will we be free?'. 

Feel free to drop your own responses to Is there something missing? in the comment box. 

To Brussels With Love

We're off to Brussels today, an early morning flight to the Belgian capital for a half term break, three days and two nights. We haven't been to Brussels before but it looks like it has plenty to offer- preliminary research indicates no fewer than nineteen record shops as well as plenty of establishments serving Belgian beer and frites. Waffles. The Atomium. The European parliament. Lots of Art Nouveau, Art Deco and Modernist architecture and design to gaze at as well as art galleries and museums. 

Also, some very local and musical connections. Brussels is the home of Factory Benelux and Le Disques Du Crepuscule, and the latter still operates out of the city re- issuing Factory albums. LDDC was set up in 1980 by Michel Duval and Annik Honore with James Nice taking over the running of the label more recently (James is the author of Shadowplayers, the definitive Factory biography). 

In 1979 Le Disques Du Crepuscule released a cassette titled From Brussels With Love, a deluxe tape package in a plastic wallet with twenty one tracks including several by Factory artists- The Durutti Column, ACR, The Names and Martin Hannett- along with Brian Eno (an interview), Harold Budd, John Foxx, Michael Nyman and more. 

The Durutti Column were on From Brussels With Love twice, Sleep Will Come and Piece For An Ideal. The second of those is just two minutes long, Vini's guitar ringing out loud and clear with piano and some percussion. 

Piece For An Ideal

Factory's association with Brussels was pretty deep and Factory acts often played in the city, usually at Plan K, a five story arts venue in a former sugar refinery on, appropriately enough, Rue de Manchester. In 1979 Joy Division played there with Cabaret Voltaire and William Burroughs. Burroughs headlined- Ian Curtis approached Burroughs, a hero of his, for a chat. Burroughs told him to fuck off. Ian was suitably chastened apparently. 

On 13th August 1981 Durutti Column were recorded playing live in Brussels, a gig which included Vini's song For Belgian Friends, one of my favourite DC songs. It was included on last year's expanded and remastered Return Of  The Durutti Column re- issue, along with Conduct, Self- Portrait and Sketch For Summer. You can hear all those at Bandcamp and the live version of For Belgian Friends is here. 

In 1983 The Durutti Column were filmed playing For Belgian Friends live in Madrid, Vini and Bruce Mitchell in sparkling form. 

In 2020 Aficionado, the Manchester based, Balearica/ anything goes label, released a four track EP with a cover of For Belgian Friends by Dream Lovers as one of the quartet of songs, a sleepy, entrancing cover of the song that is worthy of standing alongside Vini's original. 

Forty Minutes Of January And February Songs

A month ago I had the idea that at the end of January I'd put together a January mix, songs with January in the title or lyrics, and then maybe repeat throughout the rest of the months of the year. For one reason and another it didn't happen and now it's February. No problem, I thought, I'll just roll January and February together, and do that. It turns out I have not very many January songs and even fewer February ones- the only February songs I could find were Lou Reed's Xmas In February and Billy Bragg's 14th Of February and neither really fitted with the vibe I started the mix with. I extended February's reach into Valentine's Day and that, no surprise, made it much easier. All of which is a long winded way of saying here's a forty minute mix of songs about January and February. 

Forty Minutes Of January And February Songs

• The Orb: Perpetual Dawn (January Mix 3)
• M- Paths: January Song
• The Durutti Column: Requiem For A Father
• My Bloody Valentine: Soon
• Lizzy Mercier Descloux: My Funny Valentine
• Charlotte Gainsbourg: Deadly Valentine
• New Order: 1963
• Half Man Half Biscuit: Epiphany (Peel Session)

Perpetual Dawn is an Orb classic, remixed twice by Andrew Weatherall in fine style. For their album Aubrey Mixes: The Ultraworld Excursions, released and deleted on the same day in 1991 The Orb remixed songs from Beyond The Ultraworld, finding new shapes and sounds for seven essential early Orb tracks including the January Mix 3 version of Perpetual Dawn- early 90s ambient house at its best.

M- Paths release ambient/ electronic music, sometimes for Mighty Force and sometimes on their own label. Now down to the core figure of Marcus Farley, who also records as Reverb Delay, this track came out a year ago, at the start of January 2025, an archival M- Paths recording for the new year.

Tony Wilson, TV presenter and founder of Factory Records, was also from 1978 the manager and friend of Vini Reilly. When the original band version of The Durutti Column split in 1978 Wilson decided that the future for Durutti was Vini Reilly and whoever else was around but that Reilly was such a talent that he should make Durutti Column his own. Wilson also decided that he would put all Durutti Column records out on Factory and that he would manage DC/ Vini along with fellow Factory founder Alan Erasmus. Wilson formed a management company on the 24th January 1978 and called it The Movement Of The 24th January, borrowing the name from the Situationist students who formed their own International Movement on 22nd March at Nanterre University 1968 (Mouvement 22 du Mars). Here is a copy of the letterhead Wilson designed for his company...

Requiem For A Father is from The Return Of The Durutti Column, the debut album released in January 1980, Vini's guitar playing and Martin Hannett's echo and delay devices and synths in perfect harmony, Vini playing a song for his Dad and Hannett making a rhythm out of a digital machine that sounds like a cat purring close up. 

My Bloody Valentine have been never very far away this year to date, their songs soundtracking much of January 2026. Soon is from Loveless in 1991, a track that did things with guitars that genuinely hadn't really been done before. Kevin Shields' guitars following Vini Reilly's is exactly where my head is at right now. 

Valentine's Day is less than a week away lovebirds. 

Lizzy Mercier Descloux was a French punk, friends with Patti Smith and Richard Hell, published Rock News and moved to New York where she set up ZE records with her partner Michael Esteban. Lizzy released several albums, minimalist punk/ No Wave, wrote poetry and painted, retired to Corsica to write books and lived a full and varied life. She died in 2004. Her cover of My Funny Valentine, the Hart and Rogers song, is from her 1986 album One For The Soul which had Chet Baker guesting on some of the tracks including this one. 

Sticking with French artists, Charlotte Gainsbourg released Rest in 2017, her fifth solo album and one that dealt with the death of her father Serge and alcohol addiction. Deadly Valentine was a single and is dramatic synth pop with a lively throbbing bassline and feathery vocals.

1963 is from the B-side to 1987's New Order single True Faith, a giant in their back catalogue. 1963 could have been a single in its own right. Bernard's lyrics are peculiar/ awful (delete according to taste). 'It was January/ 1963/ When Johnny came home with a gift for me'. Bernard once spun a line that the song was about JFK and Marilyn Monroe arranging for Lee Harvey Oswald to shoot Jackie Kennedy so they could get together but Oswald shooting the wrong person. Bernard may not have been entirely serious- Marilyn died in 1962 so at the very least his chronology's off. Producer Stephen Hague thought it was about domestic abuse. Whatever the lyrics deal with, the music is New Order 1987 magnificence.

Half Man Half Biscuit recorded Epiphany for a Peel Session. It starts out with Nigel Blackwell narrating a chance occurrence on a Friday in July that then unfolds in surreal Blackwell style taking in Dictionary Corner, black apes gibbering on dark lawns, a lime Dyson, a date in Parbold (near Wigan), a crossed telephone line, a sickly foal, a straggle haired girl called Karen Henderson, songs recorded for a a hospice, bus outings, Billing Aquadrome and busking at Embankment Tube before concluding 'January the 6th. Epiphany'. 

Shadowplayers

I bought this book just before Christmas and read it through January, a new edition of Shadowplayers: The Rise And Fall of Factory Records by James Nice, originally published in 2010. It's a really good read, an in depth and thoroughly research history of the label with a wide cast of players present, both via interviews by Nice and already existing ones. There are contributions from all four members of New Order, Martin Moscrop of ACR, Alan Erasmus, Vini Reilly, Mike Pickering, Peter Saville, Lindsay Reade, Liz Naylor, Dermo, Larry Cassidy, Gary Newby, Bez and Shaun Ryder, Leroy Richardson, Paul Mason, Paul Morley and Jon Savage who in different ways all offer insight and explanation. Those who have gone- Ian Curtis, Martin Hannett, Tony Wilson, Rob Gretton, Vincent Cassidy, Annik Honore- are all well represented by archive interviews. 

James Nice is a fan of Factory. In the mid- 80s he founded his own label, LTM,  inspired by his love of Factory and re- issued some out of print Factory records. More recently he began managing of the Factory adjacent labels Le Disques Du Crepuscule and Factory Benelux and has worked on re- releases records by the Durutti Column, Section 25, The Wake, Quando Quango, ACR and others. He's invested in the label and loves the art it created. Shadowplayers isn't a fan account though and in some ways is a very necessary corrective to some of the less reliable, if more entertaining accounts that have grown since the labels demise, the 24 Hour Party People film and book among others (enjoyable though both were to a certain extent). Nice's history goes some way towards puncturing some of the myths and at times questions the received versions. One of Tony Wilson's most celebrated quotes is the old, 'When forced to pick between the truth and legend, print the legend'. Nice most definitely leans towards truth over legend. 

He traces the label's origins and tells the story chronologically from 1978 to 1992, roughly in three parts: the early days and the Joy Division story; the early- to- mid 80s (a mix of groundbreaking records, sleeves and productions coupled with some questionable A&R decisions and a largely empty nightclub); and the later years, when Happy Mondays gave Factory their much longed after second big selling act and their drug consumption/ lifestyle began to influence the label  and the way it was run (and Wilson particularly), a nightclub suddenly at the epicentre of a youth culture explosion and the financial mismanagement that brought about Factory's collapse in 1992, a process that sped up when a potentially lucrative deal with London Records (oh, the irony) was scuppered by Wilson's own admission and producing of a piece of paper from 1978 that read, 'the musicians own everything, the label owns nothing'. Factory had almost literally nothing to sell and had huge debts run up by the acquisition/ development of three properties (one of which, the offices on Charles Street, would generate no income). 

It's as much about the other bands as it is about the big two Joy Division/ New Order and Happy Mondays- those records and artists that span the Factory catalogue numbering system, from the ever- present Durutti Column and A Certain Ratio to James, The Railway Children, Section 25, Stockholm Monsters, The Wake, Kalima, Cath Carroll, Crispy Ambulance, Kevin Hewick and Northside. 

Dirty Disco *

Wilson is quoted as saying that Gretton was far better at A&R than he was and Wilson's track record supports him. In the late 80s, at a crossroads in the label's history with debts and crises mounting (gang violence inside the Hacienda, drugs, police and council attention) Tony Wilson signs The Adventure Babies and The Wendys. He also spends £250, 000 on a Cath Carroll solo album- a lovely album for sure but never likely to recoup that money. The chaos that the Mondays brought to the label, the lifestyle and shift in sound, turned Factory upside down,. The Mondays were a generational band on the one hand, capable of creating incredible records- Bummed, Pills 'n' Thrills- but also one that Tony Wilson bought into so deeply that the lifestyle and promotion of it, that it threw the label off and unbalanced them. 

Delightful **

It's also a reminder of how cutting and brutal the music press could be in the 80s. Nice presents umpteen critical accounts and reviews of Factory nights, gigs and records from the contemporary press, showing how Factory rarely had across the board approval during its lifetime. Manchester's own press- City Fun et al- were often hyper- critical. The four national music papers too. From their end Factory refused to promote or plug, refused to advertise the records ('if they're good enough, people will find them', was Wilson's belief). New Order refused to talk to the press and gave one interview a year in the mid- 80s, willful sabotage of their own sales due to a mistrust of the press. Some Manchester bands avoided the label, keen not to sign for Factory. Factory was divisive as well as cool- something that has been forgotten in the time since the collapse. 

Hymn From A Village ***

The contemporary view of Tony Wilson, in Manchester and beyond, is that he built the modern city and was a universally loved figure. The book calmly outlines events and people, showing rather than telling. You gather that by 1989, Wilson's ego could run out of control, as seen on the Hacienda trip to the USA titled Wake Up America You're Dead!, where they offended a panel of American house/ techno pioneers (which included Keith Allen posing as a pharmaceutical expert), Wilson reveling in the image he was creating, portraying the Mondays as musicians and drug dealers. I say this as a fan of Tony Wilson by the way- but a more realistic portrait of him and popular views of him at the time is drawn by Nice here than in some accounts of the Factory story. 

All the stuff of the legend is there too, some of it debunked- Saville's groundbreaking and beautiful art and inability to meet deadlines, Blue Monday and the cost of its sleeves and groundbreaking sound, Strawberry Studios, Unknown Pleasures, Martin Hannett's production, drug consumption and fall out with Factory, the Russell Club, The Hacienda, Dry, the Charles Street offices with the floating Ben Kelly table, the Festival of the 10th Summer, the guns and gangs and violence that overwhelmed the club and the label in the late 80s/ early 90s, the tensions that rose in New Order that led to their split, all of this and some very necessary and important minor stories too. It's a thorough and very readable account. 

We see Factory now through the lens of coffee table books of sleeve art, exhibitions, box sets, posters, films and documentaries, merchandise and re- issues. I'm as guilty of this as anyone in my own way. I too buy the merch and re- issues, go to the exhibitions, write about the records and contribute to the Factory nostalgia industry. In contrast, while adding to the pile of Factory books James Nice gives us a richly detailed, clear eyed and largely un- nostalgic account.  

In one part towards the end of the 80s Bernard Sumner recounts how New Order were praised for doing things 'the Factory way' or 'the New Order way', deliberately choosing the more difficult, more obtuse, less commercial route. Sumner says that he and the band realised that doing things 'the Factory/ New Order way' had cost them a massive amount of money and made life difficult for them when it didn't have to be. He wanted them to become a less truculent, less arty band, more commercial and more conventional, playing the bigger gigs, for more money. At that point, I thought while reading it, 'the experiment in art by a bunch of Manchester Marxists' (to quote Wilson) started to come to an end and was eventually replaced, after 1992 when Factory finally collapsed with a bunch of creditors that included friends and family, by something less interesting but more beneficial to the musicians. 

Shadowplay ****

* Dirty Disco is a slice of mutant post- punk grind by Section 25, the Blackpool band who singed with Factory and released their debut album in 1981, produced by Martin Hannett at Pink Floyd's Britannia Row studio in London and clad in an absurdly beautiful and lavish Peter Saville sleeve. 

** In 1985 Factory released this Happy Mondays single, Delightful, produced by Mike Pickering, a song that gives a hint of what lies ahead although clearly the band are still finding out where they are going. 

*** Hymn From A Village was by James, the lead song on their James II single in 1985. James were still a four piece at the time, a unique and visionary band who left for a major label and who I don't think ever sounded better than on this song. 

**** Shadowplay is from Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, as I'm sure you know, the album that made the reputation of band, producer, sleeve designer and record label. 

Mostly I Just Drift

Some ambient music for Thursday- very much the kind of sounds that are doing it for me at the moment. First, a new old track from Robin Guthrie and what he refers to as an orphan track, one that was recorded in 2012 for his album Fortune but that didn't end up on that album and was put to one side and forgotten about. Imagine having something as beautiful as Her Name Is Dulcinea sitting around unreleased for over a decade. The beauty of the Bandcamp model is that individual tracks can be released easily and sent out into the world. Her Name Is Dulcinea, all shimmering haze, celestial drones and cascading guitar lines, can be found here.  

Over in the USA ambient- Americana trio SUSS put out a new track at the start of November in collaboration with Six Missing (TJ Dumser), six minutes of fragile psychedelia called Old Mission- an after hours, dream state piece of music that unfolds at its own pace. Find it at Bandcamp. 

The day after Old Mission came out they slipped Traverse onto Bandcamp too, another piece of ambient country- Traverse is more Western sounding but still ambient. Find it here. There's something quite beguiling and totally cinematic about the idea of an ambient Western, cowboys and ranchers drifting around under darkening prairie skies, fires and coyotes and endless space while this music plays. Slow cinema, going nowhere, ruminative. Like The Durutti Column's Situationist cowboys/ philosophers... 

Cowboy 1: "What's your scene, man?"
Cowboy 2: "Realisation"
Cowboy 1: "Yeah? I guess that means pretty hard work with big books and piles of paper on a big table."
Cowboy 2: "Nope. I drift. Mostly I just drift."

More on that here. 

Four Years

Four years today, at quarter to two in the afternoon, Isaac died at Wythenshawe hospital. He was 23. That it is four years seems barely possible- time goes so quickly in some ways. I can transport myself back into that room in the hospital very easily- it's probably not a good thing to do too often. In the time since he died I've noticed that the grief, the thing, the ball of darkness, the knot in the stomach and the ache in the chest, can replace him, engulfs him (and me)- he, Isaac, gets lost inside it. Which isn't right.

It's difficult to remember that sometimes because the loss takes over, but it should be about him, remembering him and who he was, the things we did and the things he said, the good times. We are able to do that now- we sent some time in a cafe yesterday laughing about the things he used to do, him and Eliza when they were both much younger and smiling at photos of the pair of them. It's nice to be able to do it but it becomes much harder in November. Anniversaries are still hard. I'll be glad to put this month behind me. 

Isaac touched many, many people when he was alive and he continues to do so even now, through photos and memories on social media. Photos previously unseen by us still appear. Short video clips Eliza made of him I've not seen before pop up. Sometimes on these clips he looks so close you could almost reach out and touch him. Recently a friend I've never met said this about him, 'His smile lit up many a soul, so many that he hadn't even met'. It is lovely to think of him having a long afterlife in photographs, still lighting up the lives of people all this time later. 

We played Sketch For Summer at Isaac's funeral, 17th December 2021. Vini's guitar playing and Martin's production never sounded better than on Sketch For Summer, the opening seconds of electronic birdsong and then the primitive drum machine entry and those guitars. Sketch For Winter is different but equally affecting and seems appropriate for today. 

Sketch For Winter

The Durutti Column's first album, The Return Of The Durutti Column has been re- issued recently, an album made by Vini Reilly and Martin Hannett in 1980, the pair put together by Tony Wilson. Hannett sat with his new toys, various digital echo and delay devices and a drum machine. Vini played bits of guitar but was largely ignored by Hannett who was deep into the new machinery. Occasionally parts were recorded. Eventually Vini walked out, frustrated and pissed off. Hannett completed the album and when Vini was presented with it, it sounded completely new to him- he didn't like it. Like Joy Division before him, he grew to love it, as Joy Division did with Martin's production on Unknown Pleasures. 

Thirty Minutes Of Ambient Guitar Music

I'm not sure what it says about where my head is at right now but I'm being drawn back once again to the sounds of Vini Reilly's guitar and with that to the idea that guitars can make ambient music. A couple of albums have come my way in the last year that slot right into this- Kevin McCormick's Passing Clouds and Thought Leadership's Ill Of Pentacles. It may be no coincidence that both of the guitarists behind these albums are from the Manchester area (Kevin is now residing in Mobberley, a village not far south of Manchester and whoever Thought Leadership is lives in Edgeley, Stockport). Vini Reilly's guitar and echo and chorus pedals have been making their hard to pin down but spellbinding sounds since the late 70s when he was placed into a room with Martin Hannett and they came up with The Return Of the Durutti Column. I first heard Durutti Column's music in 1987 and it's been close to my stereo ever since. Vini has retired, his health poor since having three strokes back in the late 00s but his legacy as one of Factory Records' true geniuses is secure. 

This mix pulls together some Durutti Column songs ('silly little tunes', according to Vini) along with Kevin McCormick and Thought Leadership and the former Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie who has been releasing ambient guitar tracks onto his Bandcamp page for some time. A chilled and slightly melancholic autumnal ambient guitar mix for late September 2025. 

The world is a shitshow and a bin fire. Trump and Netanyahu lie and deceive from the stage at the United Nations. Farage lies about immigrants. Starmer follows Farage down a path that can only be a dead end. Racists hoist flags from lampposts and paint roundabouts. Life seems to get a little bit worse every day. But we still have music- and we will have it long after Trump, Netanyahu, Farage and all the rest of them have shuffled off the stage and disappeared. 

Thirty Minutes Of Ambient Guitar Music

• Durutti Column: Sketch For A Manchester Summer 1989
• Robin Guthrie: Mountain
• Kevin McCormick: It's Been A Long Time
• Kevin McCormick: Alone In A Crowd
• Thought Leadership: III
• Durutti Column: A Room In Southport
• Durutti Column: Royal Infirmary
• Michael Hix: Pure Land

Sketch For A Manchester Summer starts with the rain falling, taped from the door of Vini's West Didsbury home thirty six years ago. It rains quite a lot in Manchester- you might have heard. The synth that bubbles away with the rain is joined by Vini's guitar and for a couple of minutes a rainy Mancunian summer is the only place to be. The song is tucked away on an album of rarities, sessions and unreleased recordings, The Sporadic Recordings- some of them were done at Sporadic Studios, Manchester. CD only, now fairly rare. 

Robin Guthrie's guitar lit up Cocteau Twins and for the last few years he's released all sorts of music onto his Bandcamp page, including lots of ambient guitar pieces. Montain was recorded in Brittany, France in 2022, a track Robin refers to as an 'orphaned track', one which didn't find a place at the time. Released on Bandcamp a year ago, September 2024.

Kevin McCormick made several albums of guitar music in Manchester in the late 70s and early 80s. His work was lost for decades and then rediscovered and re- issued in 2021 on the Smiling C label. In 2024 Kevin released a new album, Passing Clouds, one I can't recommend enough. It's Been A Long Time is from it. Alone In A Crowd is from an album recorded with David Horridge, Sticklebacks, polished at Stockport's Strawberry Studios after initial recordings on Kevin's  four track home studio. 

Thought Leadership's Ill Of Pentacles came out on cassette and digital in 2024 and then on vinyl via Be With this year (all gone, I missed out too). It's a wonderful album, recorded at home in Edgeley, Stockport and other than that there's very little information. It was recorded in January 2024 with guitar, pedals and drum machine and the tracks are numbered I to X. 

Snowflake is from Short Stories For Pauline, a lost Durutti Column album recorded in November 1983 that could/ should have been Vini's fourth on Factory. A Tony Wilson A&R oversight saw it shelved in favour of Without Mercy (the song Duet from Short Stories was expanded into Without Mercy). Tony got it wrong- Short Stories is a Durutti Column masterpiece that finally saw the light of day on Factory Benelux in 2012. Worth the wait. 

Royal Infirmary is from 1986's Circuses And Bread, Vini and drummer/ manager/ friend Bruce Mitchell joined by John Metcalfe on viola and Tim Kellett on trumpet. The piano/ guitar interplay on Royal Infirmary is next level Durutti Column beauty. 

Michael Hix released an album as Wonderful Aspiration Of The Source, a guitar only ambient/ cosmic instrumental ten track album that came out two weeks ago. Hix is one of the founders of Nashville Ambient Ensemble. Find it here. 

Forty Minutes Of Cabaret Voltaire

Cabaret Voltaire, Sheffield's pioneering industrial noise/ post- punk/ electro outfit, have announced a tour this November with gigs in their home town, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and London and are promising a gig that will take in fifty years of CV music. They formed in Sheffield in 1973, Richard H. Kirk, Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson and were a genuinely trailblazing band, innovative and influential. Some of you may have noted that founder member Richard H. Kirk is no longer with us. He died in 2021. The decision to tour without him (and Mallinder and Kirk had not worked together for some time when Richard was alive) has caused some dissent among the fanbase, some people saying that without him it's not Cabaret Voltaire while others and the two surviving members want to pay tribute with one last run around the block and blast the music out of big amps into small(ish) spaces. I guess you pays your money and you takes your choice. The gigs are sold out anyway. 

Cabaret Voltaire were uncompromising. Initially they wanted their music to be difficult and to piss people off. They were happy with confrontation. They also wanted to make music without musical instruments and at first used reel to reel tapes, sound collages, oscillators and home- made kit. Later they brought traditional instruments in- bass guitar, guitar, clarinet. Their early punk/ post- punk connections with Joy Division and Factory, Rough Trade, Throbbing Gristle, Clock DVA and via their Sheffield recording studio Western Works brought them press, gigs and a record deal. Chris Watson left in 1981 and Mallinder and Kirk carried on as a duo, navigating the 80s and becoming more accessible, more commercial, eventually finding common ground with 80s synth based artists and the electronic/ acid house scene. You can find a potted history of the various twists and turns here. I thought a Cabaret Voltaire Sunday mix was well overdue and there's a lot of music to go at so this doesn't do much more than scratch the surface...

Forty Minutes Of Cabaret Voltaire

• Yashar (John Robie Mix)
• Don't Argue (Dance)
• Just Fascination (12" Mix)
• Thank You America (Kevorkian Bonus Beats)
• Sensoria
• Sex In Secret
• Colours (Club Mix)

Yashar is from 1982, originally appearing on a CV double disc 12" pack. A year later John Robie's remix came out on Factory, one of Factory's key mid- 80s singles (Fac 82 on Factory, FBN 25 on Factory Benelux). The sample that opens it- 'there 70 billion people of Earth- where are they hiding?'- is from the American TV programme The Outer Limits, a 60s sci fi/ horror/ mystery show. Yashar then judders and skips through the next seven minutes, 80s industrial electro, horns, synths, the chanted title- amazing stuff.  

Don't Argue was a 1987 single, produced by the group and Adrian Sherwood. The vocal sample is from a 1945 American propaganda film directed by Frank Capra at the dawn of the Cold War, a film called Your Job In Germany aimed at US soldiers stationed in post- war Germany. Don't Argue is as accessible as CV got in some ways, a fusion of industrial and synth- pop. 

Don't Argue then appeared on Code, their album from the same year along with Thank You America. The Thank You America (Kevorkian Bonus Beats) were remixed by New York legend Francis Kevorkian, stuttering beats, handclaps, echo. Cold War dread and paranoia, fears about the USA and nuclear weapons- it's almost like we've gone nowhere since 1987...

Just Fascination was a 1983 single, the B-side to Crackdown. Some Cabs menace and unease but not coupled with funk/ dance rhythms, with sequencers and keys. The album The Crackdown came out on Some Bizarre, the duo making their way through the UK's independent record labels one by one. The vocals are getting clearer and clearer, more willing to be heard. 

Sensoria came out in 1984, a single from the Micro- Phonies album. Sensoria is thumpy, crushing mid- 80s synth, pounding dancefloor energy, men and machines in sync. The poster for the single is one of the posters on Ferris Bueller's bedroom wall in the film about his day off. 

Sex In Secret is from the very first Factory Records release in 1978- the first music release that is. Fac 1 was a Peter Saville poster. Fac 2 was a double pack of 7" singles, with music from Joy Division, The Durutti Column, John Dowie and the Cabs. It was re- released on 1990's Listen Up with Cabaret Voltaire, a cassette compilation out on Mute that pulled together tracks from various one off releases- NME cassettes, videos, flexi- discs and a couple of unreleased tracks. 

Colours was from 1991, a seven track mini- album. By the early 90s Mallinder and Kirk were separated by distance, Kirk in Sheffield and Mallinder in London, and both threw themselves into acid house and solo/ collaborations. Kirk made the first Bleep Techno record as Sweet Exorcist along with DJ Richard Parrot, the mighty Testone 12", a definitive 1990 record. Colours is acid house, bleepy and light on its feet, a day glo version of the Cabaret Voltaire sound. 

Soundtrack Saturday

The pair of recent New Order Sunday mixes and yesterday's Fadela, a single released on Factory Records in 1987, have led me to Salvation! Directed by Beth B, Salvation! was a 1987 film, black comedy about an evangelical/ televangelism sex and blackmail scandal, starring Viggo Mortensen, Exene Cervenka (of Los Angeles punk band X) and Stephen McHattie. I've seen the film once, way back in 1988 at a film night when I was a student at Liverpool university and I honestly couldn't tell you much about it- a very of its time film I think. 

The soundtrack however is a different story. It was released on Factory's Benelux label and its sister label Le Disques De Crepuscule and featured five New Order songs, four of which only ever saw the light of day on the soundtrack until the New Order Retro box set in 2002 included Let's Go on John McCready's disc. 

Let's Go

Let's Go is very New Order in 1987, shiny and bright, sounding like it could easily have been an album track on 1986's Brotherhood, not quite a lost gem perhaps but a missing New Order song all the same. The five songs were all recorded for the film- Touched By The Hand Of God was deemed worthy of a full Factory release as a single in 1987, remixed by Arthur Baker and released as FAC 193, the follow up to True Faith which was a big hit that summer.

Touched By The Hand Of God

In the Retro box set booklet Stephen comments that Touched... was a 'land speed song- writing attempt', written for the film, a case of sit down and write a song in a day. In Substance Hooky says he arrived at the band's Cheetham Hill studio first and wrote the juddering synth bassline on his own. Bernard turned up and was impressed enough to want to turn it into a song. The way Hooky describes this suggests that gaining Bernard's approval was important in the summer of 1987. 

The other three songs are Salvation Theme, Skullcrusher and Sputnik. Skullcrusher is short, bass-led, some feedback running through it and a gnarly Sumner guitar solo, a curio in the NO back catalogue.

Skullcrusher

As well as New Order the soundtrack has songs by Arthur Baker, Cabaret Voltaire, The Hood (the musical outfit for legendary New York doorman and party promoter John Hood) and Dominique (Davalos, an actor and musician, best known for her role in Howard The Duck, a film I had entirely forgotten about until now), and Jumpin' Jesus (Baker and Stewart Kimball with actor Stephen McHattie on vocals). Of all of these Cabaret Voltaire's Jesus Saves is the keeper, a 1987 industrial synth pop moment. 

N'Sel Fik

My recent interest in things Moroccan/ North African and my longstanding love of Factory Records come together today in a post to end the week. In 1987 Factory released a record by Fadela, a 7" and 12" single (Fac 197) a song called N'Sel Fik- a fusion of synthpop and rai. It's always felt like a bit of an outlier in the Factory back catalogue (a label with enough outliers to be going on with, one which would happily release a single on a whim if one of the key movers at the label liked it enough). 

N'Sel Fik 

The version I have here is a shorter one than the Factory release, four minutes as opposed to seven one (and there was also a three minute promo version for radio stations). In 1987 Factory also put out True Faith and Touched By The Hand Of God by New Order, the NO compilation Substance, 24 Hour Party People by Happy Mondays, and a slew of singles by Miaow, ACR, The Railway Children, Kalima, Biting Tongues and Durutti Column. N'Sel Fik sounds nothing like any of these.

Fadela were a married couple, Chaba Fadela and Cheb Sahraoui. The song was one of the first rai recordings to be widely released in Europe. Factory licensed it from Parisian label Attitude who originally put it out in 1986. I've long wondered how and why it came about and with a little bit of internet sleuthing found out the following...

Mike Pickering, Hacienda DJ, Factory A&R and recording artist (Quando Quango) heard it being played in the Harem club in New York, a club run by Mark Kamins (an NY legend who helped shape the city's club culture and sound in the 70s and 80s and who played an instrumental role in launching Madonna's career). Kamins had a lot of Eastern/ Turkish/ North African influences going on at harem. He'd have Turkish musicians playing live while he spun early house records. M/A/R/R/S came down one night with a white label of Pump Up The Volume and Mark mixed the vocal of an Egyptian singer into it- M/A/R/R/S went back to London and sampled the voice for the final cut of their single.Harem became hip and Kamins shut it down a year later after New Order played there. 

If you want a much more detailed post about the story of Fadela and N'Sel Fik this blog, Hawgblawg, can fill you in. It's written by a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arkansas who has published a book on the Palestinian Revolt of the 1930s.

Mike Pickering was so taken with N'Sel Fik he took a copy back to Manchester and told Tony Factory should license and release it with a Pickering remix. It's not an easy or especially cheap record to track down now- I have it on the Palatine box set but have never found a copy of the single on either 7" or 12". The hunt is all part of the fun though.