27 Unknown Pleasures - Joy Division

Purchased : 28 December 1983

Tracks : Disorder / Day Of The Lords / Candidate / Insight / New Dawn Fades / She's Lost Control / Shadowplay / Wilderness / Interzone / I Remember Nothing

This was bought with Christmas money in Manchester.

This of course was Joy Division's debut LP originally released in 1979 although it only charted in the wake of Ian Curtis's death the following year. Fewer of these tracks featured in the John Peel Festive Fifty compared to Closer so it was a riskier purchase from my point of view.

By and large this is more of a rock record than Closer with a greater role for Bernard Sumner's guitar and a punky anger on many of the tracks that had burnt itself out by the time of the follow up. Nevertheless producer Martin Hannett still makes his presence felt, sculpting the band's sound and taking them into new sonic territory. It's not easy listening ; there are no synth melodies to balance out tuneless dirges like "Candidate" and "I Remember Nothing" ; the synths are there to provide unsettling texture not melodic warmth. This is the sound of pre-regenerated Manchester in 1979, a decaying Victorian industrial powerhouse haunted by the ghosts of the recent past. Its young intellectuals were seduced not by the fantasy of Tolkien but the likes of J G Ballard, the prophet of bleak futures just around the corner.

Perhaps Ballard is the "guide" Ian Curtis is singing of in the compelling opening line of "Disorder" which powers along on Peter Hook's rollicking bassline. It's a classic song of urban alienation with references to "cars crashing" and "the tenth floor" (possibly of Hulme's infamous crescent of high rise flats , scene of a Joy Division photo session and a stone's throw from the club that hosted the original Factory nights). Steve Morris provides a crisp drumbeat throughout while Bernard Sumner throws in a couple of ragged and rudimentary guitat solos. Throughout, there are strange washes of sound ebbing and flowing in the background almost like whalesong or perhaps strange echoes of industrial sounds formerly heard in the disused factories in the area.

"Day Of The Lords" is much slower with a grinding ominous bassline and fractured guitar backing Curtis in full-on Jim Morrison mode. The song seems to be about bleak youthful sexual encounters but the references to "the bodies obtained" and "the car at the edge of the road" inescapably bring to mind Manchester's other Nazi-fascinated Ian, still alive in Ashworth Hospital down the M62. The synths screech in to accompany Curtis on the disturbing refrain "Where will it end ? " . It's possibly their most frightening song despite the bathetic line "Withdrawal pain is hard, it can do you right in" one of the occasional lapses into Manc-speak that had been cut out by the time of

Closer.



Then comes "Candidate" a song I've never learned to love. Gradually fading in from a quiet start the music is very sparse , a dragging beat with intermittent interjections from Hook and Sumner and jarring sounds evocative of vehicles passing nicked from Autobahn . Curtis tunelessly intones in a sedated mumble lyrics which seem to be a comment on his failing marriage -We're living by your rules, that's all that we've known".



"Insight" is comparitively sprightly once it emerges from a lenghty ambient intro full of pre metal-bashing industrial noises, Morris's crisp beat augmented by Love Don't Live Here Anymore syn-drums. Instead of a conventional chorus it has two passages of scattershot synth noises over a punishing one-note bassline recalling Pink Floyd's Astronomy Domine. The title is a bit of a tease since the lyric is elusive although the line "But I remember when we were young" alarmed his wife at the time.



She didn't like the next track, "New Dawn Fades" either, actually confronting him about the meaning of the lyric although not getting the answers she was seeking. This is a recognised classic; I recall John Peel introducing it for the Festive Fifty in 1981 (it was in the top 5) with the words "By a terrible irony most of the requests I received from Poland were for this song " (martial law having been imposed to counter Solidarity the previous month). It starts off sounding very similar to "Candidate " but then Hook imposes himself with a determined bassline and Sumner overlays a tortuous slow solo before Curtis comes in. The first verse is calm and measured climaxing ominously with the line "A loaded gun won't set you free - so you say" but the second gets angrier with each line culminating in Curtis holding on the word "Me -ee- ee" for a devastating two bars pregnant with accusation. No wonder Deborah didn't like it.

Side Two kicks off with another of their best-loved songs "She's Lost Control" a sort of tribute to an epileptic client of his at the employment office who died in her sleep. According to Deborah Curtis the incident disturbed Ian so much they'd wait up half the night for Ian to have a seizure whilst fully conscious. Starting with an isolated beat, Morris then uses the chattering drum sound from Pink Floyds "Pow Row Toc H" and a snare drum that sounds like a ping pong ball when he hits it to create a very odd percussive track over which Hook lays down one of his most melodic and mournful basslines. Sumner's work on the track is punky thrashing well suited to the subject matter. Curtis comes in with oceans of echo and unidentifiable background chunter caught between pathos and admiration as the girl "walked upon the edge of no escape and laughed". As the song winds up the snare is distorted further by Hannett to sound almost like a lost child's cry.

"Shadowplay" is a great driving song with its propulsive bassline and a lyric not too far removed from Iggy Pop's The Passenger. The intriguing second verse with its "assassins all grouped in four lines dancing on the floor" is possibly inspired by T S Eliot's Murder In The Cathedral . Whatever it's one of Curtis's best vocal performances switching from a weary mumble to a sonorous exclamation on the line "I let them use you FOR THEIR OWN ENDS !"

"Wilderness" is like a post-punk update of Itchykoo Park borrowing the "What did you see there " line but Curtis is envisioning the centuries of religious warfare and of course it's all too horrible. With its queasy, lurching bassline and Sumner's Andy Gill-esque guitar slashes this is a challenging listen but it's quite brief.

Stylistically "Interzone" is the joker in the pack. A survival from their early days as Warsaw, the music is a punk update of NS Porter's Northern Soul classic Keep on Keeping On and lead vocalist on the track is Peter Hook (doing a passable imitation of Pete Shelley) with Curtis singing alternate lines as a counterpoint until they concur on the line "I guess they died some time ago". The song title comes from William S Burrough's Naked Lunch (a not exactly-trumpeted connection to East Coast ironists Steely Dan here ) where the interzone was a sort of drug-fuelled dreamworld and the song's concern with looking for a friend in a dangerous landscape fits.

I never look forward to the end of this LP because the last track "I Remember Nothing " is irredeemably a dirge (at nearly six minutes long) with Curtis's vocal aggressively tuneless in a way that recalls Patti Smith at her most challenging. Neither the sludgy bass or Sumner's guitar give any melodic relief, there's just a sustained synth chord (a pale echo of Rick Wright on Shine On You Crazy Diamond) to sweeten the pill. There's also a Floyd influence in the occasional sound effect of glass breaking , the first instance of which is quite startling. The repetitive lyrics aren't up to scratch either; I'd be surprised if this was anybody's favourite JD song.

This is a review I've enjoyed doing. I've always thought of this LP as a bridesmaid to Closer and played it a lot less but I've found new things in this process and could well be returning to it more often.

26 Present Arms - UB40

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Acquired : 23 December 1983

Tracks : Present Arms / Sardonicus / Don't Let It Pass You By / Wild Cat / One In Ten / Don't Slow Down / Silent Witness / Lamb's Bread

This was the fourth of Helen's joint birthday/Christmas presents.

This was UB40's second album and therefore before the post-Red Red Wine bland out. I think most readers will have a fair idea of UB40's sound, the reggae rhythms, punchy brass, rudimentary keyboards, reliance on Brian Travers' sax for most of the melody and of course, Ali Campbell's Jamaican-inflected vocals. I can't describe the dub effects or interpret Astro's toasting properly so please use the comments box to tell me what I've missed.

We kick off with a military drum roll, a parade call then an assertive brass riff leads into the title track, a bleak satire of army recruitment campaigns some years ahead of Public Enemy's "Black Steel". The line "You'll be your mother's pride and joy" recalls "Enola Gay". It's a Faustian bargain ; trade in your humanity for an escape from the dole queue and the urgency of the music gives it real punch.

"Sardonicus" slows things down as electronic percussion and an ominous sax riff lead us to a shared vocal about presumably a politician with a fixed smile. The title refers to the medical condition leading to a fixed grin (often associated with tetanus). Its two verses are both repeated to get the point across then there's a lengthy instrumental passage complete with an unassuming guitar solo before the track fades out.

"Don't Let It Pass You By" is the longest track , the first half of which was released as one side of the first single ahead of the LP. There's a lengthy intro before Ali comes in to warn of the dangers of waiting for utopia, whether religious or not. The band's unassuming keyboard player Mickey Virtue comes to the fore here with some questioning synth chords then an idiosyncratic little solo. After a repeat of the second verse a sudden brass intervention brings the music to a temporary halt and Ali gives way to Astro who begins toasting to the same backing as before. Astro's repeated instruction to "burn two spliffs" seems at odds with not letting things go by. Most of his toast seems to be describing the sound of the band although the latter part has political references notably an allusion to the New Cross fire earlier that year which killed a number of black children and wasn't interpreted as a racist attack by the police.

Side One ends with "Wild Cat" a pacy instrumental led by Travers' insistent questioning sax. UB40 don't provide answers and the track fades out without resolution.

The second side kicks off with the second single "One In Ten", it's urgent bounce and frequent sax breaks preventing the check list of human misery in the lyrics from becoming too turgid. It's closing guitar solo expresses the anger at the reality behind the statistics but it also draws a line under their most militant music and the rest of the LP pursues a mellower groove.

"Don't Slow Down" was the other side of the first single and also concerns living for the moment but where "Don't Let It Pass You By" is strident , this is laid back with a warm, lazy groove. Campbell is observing the hectic lives of others from a position in the rear rather than instructing.

"Silent Witness" maintains the mellow tone with a drowsy shared vocal observing the nightscape of Birmingham where the ignored homeless roam the streets amid occasional violence. Ali rouses himself for a solo verse about the shop dummies coming to life and fleeing the scene (unlike Kraftwerk's clubbing mannequins) but it comes across as mournful and defeatist rather than challenging.

The closing track is Astro's paean to marijuana "Lamb's Bread" by far the most upbeat track on the LP. Lyrically it's ambivalent with Aatro noting "Thiefing, looting, lying, me seh dep pon the street" and if legalisation is seen as the answer it's not obvious from the words. The last verse is just an exhortation to the bass player the album concluding with the words "B-line".

We'll come to UB40 again and it's hard to pick a favourite from those I've got but this is certainly in the running.

.

25 No Parlez - Paul Young

Purchased : 22 November 1983

Tracks : Come Back And Stay / Love Will Tear Us Apart / Wherever I Lay My Hat / Ku Ku Kurama / No Parlez / Behind Your Smile / Love Of The Common People / Oh Women / Iron Out The Rough Spots / Broken Man / Tendertrap / Sex

You may have noted a bit of a hiatus between this and the last purchase , the reason being entirely practical i.e the caution of a fresher without huge parental resources seeing how far his grant (remember them ?) would stretch. This was actually bought from a stall selling cassettes in the Union Building at Leeds University for £2.99. It was also my first "percentage purchase" LP in that I knew I wouldn't like all the tracks but wanted at least two of the songs in my collection. One was the cover of "Love Will Tear Us Apart" ; at the time I was struggling to reconcile Catholic teaching with having a libido so a song which appeared to be about impotence (the lyrics being clearer on Young's version) came as a comforter. The other was the title track which I'd heard on one of Peter Powell's LP chart rundowns.

Which reminds me that this was a monster LP in its time having four separate runs at number one in 1983-4 despite lukewarm reviews. And yet Young's time at the top was very brief; just three years later his singles were struggling to make the Top 30 while Mick Hucknall ran away with the white soul crown. Tom Ewing in his review of "Wherever I Lay My Hat" mentioned how this LP was the most oft-relinquished LP of his time working in a record exchange store in the mid-90s and I can well believe that. While not attracting the same opprobrium as contemporaries like Howard Jones and Nik Kershaw, Paul nevertheless didn't manage to escape being associated with the naff pop prevalent in the mid-eighties.

His cause wasn't helped by the presentation of his solo debut. Having made a cult-y name for himself as the energetic frontman of sweaty soul revue band the Q-Tips he looks distinctly uncomfortable trussed up in an Anthony Price leather suit on the cover. Then there's the production ; Laurie Latham seems determined to distract you from hearing Paul's prime asset , his honeyed Paul Rodgers-like voice - by throwing in every contemporary sound he can think of and elongating some of the tracks to ridiculous lengths. If an album's too exhausting to listen to at one stretch that's another reason to give it away.

The first track is a case in point . "Come Back And Stay" the second big hit from the LP is nearly eight minutes long here. Originally a brief guitar thrash by US garage punk band The Nerves Paul reinvents it as blue-eyed pop soul, acceptable enough in single form but damned annoying when stretched out with hip hop drums, scratching effects, intrusive backing vocals, tubular bells, speeded -up voices and the burbling fretless bass of Pino Palladino fresh from imitating Mick Karn for Gary Numan.

Next up comes "Love Will Tear Us Apart" at a relatively acceptable five minutes. Having learned to love the original in the intervening years I'm now embarrassed about ever thinking this was the superior version. Young uncoils a very tightly -wound song and flattens it into an arid slab of stadium rock with clod-hopping synth drums and a galloping bassline that prefigures the awful King. Young himself sounds hammy rather than emotional. It finishes with some very-dated Fade To Grey spoken vocals from Dagmar Krause. It's awful, let's quickly move on.

Next we have six minutes of his breakthrough hit "Wherever I Lay My Hat" . Undeniably Young did a good job in replacing the chauvinistic bravado of Marvin Gaye's rather throwaway original with a regretful mea culpa and was duly rewarded with his only number one single but this version means we have to put up with that gurgling bassline for twice as long.

"Ku Ku Kurama" is the first original on the LP written by his guitarist Steve Bolton (otherwise severely under-employed on this LP). The phrase is apparently meaningless and so is the song. Young surrenders this one completely to Latham who buries him in tricks and a severe over-helping of his chavvy backing singers the Fabulously Wealthy Tarts who do mock - Oriental "Me I know nothing" responses over a plodding beat.

It's then a relief that "No Parlez" stills hold good. Originally an obscure song by prog rocker Anthony Moore about marital breakdown, Young turns it into a gothic tour de force. The production is still too much with completely unnecessary scratching effects but the song is compelling enough to transcend its setting. The chorus is a relentless massed chant of "You hate your children to rise, still you put the hammer in the hands of the children" with Young ad libbing over the top to great effect. For once , a few splurges in the middle eight apart, Palladino sounds in thrall to the song, his twists and turns complimenting the mental tortures of the protagonist.

Immediate disappointment follows with "Behind Your Smile" a Young co-write with former Q-Tips organist Ian Kewley. A tuneless misogynistic song delivered over ceaseless electronic percussion chatter, the only enjoyable bit is a brief Hammond solo towards the end.

Side Two carries on where we left off with an extended version of Young's lukewarm take on Nicky Thomas's "Love Of The Common People". It's the most faithful of the covers but doesn't really suit his voice, Young gabbling his way through the lyric though mercifully not attempting a Jamaican accent. After two timewasting minutes of Linn drum and vocal effects ,the song proper bumbles along on top of faux-ethnic glockenspiels - the sound favoured by uncelebrated contemporaries, the Thompson Twins.

The misery continues with "Oh Women" another song by Nerves mainman Jack Lee. It only lasts three and a half minutes but that's more than enough. The lyrics are utterly vacuous , Palladino and the Tarts are at their most intrusive and it has some of the ugliest keyboard sounds of the decade. The sudden ending is a great relief.

Then we have seven and a half minutes of "Iron Out The Rough Spots" an obscure Booker T and the MGs song. With those glockenspiels to the fore again this sounds like The Thompson Twins do Lee Dorsey complete with occasional Rock Lobster keyboard squeals. And typing that makes me realise that that's who the Tarts are aspiring to be with their "kooky" interjections. Needless to say they fall well short of the mark.

Some relief now appears with "Broken Man" a Young/Kewley composition brought over from the Q-Tips. Here, Young and Latham invoke the spirit of another British singer from a decade earlier, Colin Blunstone, dismissing band and tarts for a synthetic string setting. Young takes the opportunity to soar vocally (and distract from the clumsy words) but he hasn't Blunstone's litheness. Nevertheless it's a welcome interlude.

Another Kewley/Young composition follows with "Tender Trap" by far their best song. It musters a nice sense of urgency greatly helped by Palladino's apparent absence and more or less keeps the Tarts under control. Two plaintive trombone interventions by Rico Rodriguez put a quality stamp on the track and belatedly show what a genuinely sympathetic musician could have added to Young's music. It's just a pity the track is marred by the horrible drum sound.

The album's late rally ends abruptly with six and a half minutes of the execrable "Sex" (the last and least of Jack Lee's contributions). It encapsulates everything that's wrong with the LP as a whole - a non-song (vaguely reminiscent of Heaven 17's "Play To Win" ) with trite lyrics, produced to within an inch of its life with a new sound or production trick with nearly every bar. I can honestly say it's one of the worst pieces of music in my collection. And Young should be ashamed of himself for recording a line like "You'd better give me what I want cause that's what I've been waiting for ".

I suppose three good tracks for £2.99 isn't bad value but it did introduce some seriously bad music to my collection.

24 Closer - Joy Division

Purchased : 1 July 1983

Tracks : Atrocity Exhibition / Isolation / Passover / Colony / A Means To An End / Heart And Soul / 24 Hours / The Eternal / Decades

This was purchased appropriately enough in Manchester on the way to an open day at Preston Polytechnic, necessary because the campus in Poulton-le-Fylde I'd been to in January for the entrance interview was closing down that summer.

It wasn't without some trepidation that I put it on. Would the songs that sounded so compelling at low volume in December have the same impact on a sunny evening in July ? Or, since a reconciliation with my estranged friend Michael was already being arranged at this point , would my previous loathing for them be re-established ?

The album opens with "Atrocity Exhibition" a track anchored by Steve Morris's drum clatter with an insidious mixed-down bassline and churning guitar noise forming the backdrop to Ian Curtis's visions of Hell, a visit to a Victorian mental asylum, a Roman circus and possibly the Holocaust. At regular intervals our complicity is invited - "This is the way step inside" . This can be taken as an invitation to the rest of the LP - one man's private torments unveiled for those with the stomach to see it through. Curtis's voice now sounds vulnerable - the stentorian Morrisonesque baritone wobbling and cracking - given nowhere to hide by Martin Hannett's dry as tinderwood production.The title comes from a book of self-contained prescient pieces by JG Ballard about the effects of mass media events on the individual psyche although it's believed the lyrics were completed before Curtis actually read the book.

Talking of Ballard the next track "Isolation" brings to mind his other contemporary disciples in pop, John Foxx and Gary Numan. It would sit very easily on the former's "Metamatic" album released earlier in the year with its rigid metal beat, skittering synthesisers and bald repetition of the title as chorus. Stylistically it's a bit at odds with the rest of the LP but helps disprove the notion that Joy Division were working in a vacuum away from other influences. Lyrically Curtis mines the seam of childhood trauma that Tears For Fears would take to the top of the LP charts three years later.

"Passover" is a provocative title for a band criticised for flirting with Nazi imagery. The dry sound of the first track is back but the band sound enervated as if they're just waiting for Morris's relentless beat to stop. The sparse backdrop allows Curtis's lyric to take centre stage with that amazing declaration "This is the crisis I knew had to come destroying the balance I'd kept" an opening line like no other in rock music. We'll never know whether he's referring to his marital difficulties or the worsening of his epilepsy though the line "Back out of my duties when all's said and done" suggests the former.

Throughout the track he sounds weary and parched ; this is someone who's not expecting to find any manna in the desert.

The next two tracks let the rest of the band off the leash with Sumner's Pil-like guitar prominent and allowed a brief mournful solo at two points in "Colony". Hook and Morris serve up a brittle but aggressive rhythm that defies any melodic construction, Curtis summoning up his best Jim Morrison howl as he decries the surrender of a child to a mental asylum , a deep-seated fear for anyone with a mental health complaint. We know what sort of colony he has in mind here ; the word doesn't need to be uttered.

"A Means To An End" allows Peter Hook , rather constrained elsewhere , to lead the track with a trademark descending bassline. With its sledgehammer beat and fractured guitar it has a rather Gang of Four feel to it. Curtis returns to a writing style found more on the first album using rhyming couplets on this song which seems to be an epitaph for his marriage particularly the last verse about retirement to warmer climes "Where dogs and vultures eat" although the tone is mournful rather than contemptuous.

Side Two is not without its angry moments particularly on the second track but overall there's a more placid reflective feel to the music. We know that it's the most dreadful peace of all that he's got in mind and its intriguing that the rest of the band go along with this although Tony Wilson said on a Factory documentary that Curtis's mistress Annik Honore was alarmed by the recent lyrics and he dismissed it as Art.

"Heart And Soul" kicks it off , Hook's bass full of foreboding soon joined by low frequency synths and Morris's unrelenting drums. Curtis comes in with copious echo which makes him sound like he's intoning the grim mantra "Heart and soul, one will burn" from some monastic ruin far from the Manchester studio where the others are anchored. There's now a fatalism in the lyrics -"Existence well what does it matter" that gave Honore justifiable cause for concern.

"Twenty-Four Hours" is a remarkable song for the band's (in particular Hook) empathy with the lyric, paraphrasing the despondency of verses two and four with plangent bass and sparse drums then thrashing about with hopeless fury in the more purposeful verses one, three and five. There's an astonishing beauty in Curtis's naked "Oh how I realised how I wanted time " as Hook descends the scale behind him.

"The Eternal" is a synth-driven ballad taken at funereal pace with Hook's bass prodding a Gothic synth drone into life. Every other beat is a processed splash in the sea of rustling synth noises out of which a plaintive electric piano melody sometimes emerges. Curtis sings as softly as his baritone allows of watching presumably a funeral procession pass by his house "possessed by a fury that burns from inside" . The last few lines of the song seem a mournful recollection of childhood spent in the garden in blissfully purposeless action.

That seems like the end but we have another track to go. "Decades" begins with the same catching drum sound as Pink Floyd's "Pow R Toc H" then a rhythm guitar leads into a harsh metallic synth riff. Curtis enters early , announcing the arrival of young men who've seen something terrible (the Allies at Belsen possibly) and realised the human condition - "We saw ourselves now as we never had seen" . After he's finished the Gothic synth is back heralding for the first time an OMD -like melody line over a rock drum beat and Curtis's sad refrain "Where have they been". This is abruptly curtailed for another short verse about enervation -"now our heart's lost forever" , then a final Gothic flourish before the chorus returns, Morris and the synths taking us out after Curtis's last line.

This of course was the end. There were compilations to come but Joy Division never entered a studio after this album was finished , Curtis's two last songs having to be recorded by New Order. It is of course part of " the Canon" and I'm not going to dissent from that. It cast a shadow over rock and pop which led numerous artists over the next two years - OMD, The Cure (twice), Teardrop Explodes, Echo and the Bunnymen, Ultravox, Japan, U2 - to attempt something similar and its shadow persists to this day, Young men and women of an intellectual persuasion still regard Ian Curtis as a sort of secular patron saint, the man who looked into the abyss and left a testimony for them.

It's not a record I always want to listen to but it never dates and thirty years on you can still be impressed by its vision, unique sound and the awful circumstances that gave birth to it. As the first record of my adulthood it was a damn good choice.

23. Power Corruption And Lies - New Order

Purchased : 11 June 1983



Tracks : Age Of Consent / We All Stand / The Village / 5.8.6. / Blue Monday / Kwi* / Ultraviolence / Only The Lonely* / Leave Me Alone / The Beach



* Alternate title on cassette. "Kwi" is more widely known as "Your Silent Face" and "Moon Over Moscow" as "Ecstasy"





This is a milestone purchase, the last to be bought in Oldham on a Saturday morning but more importantly, the last album of my schooldays with just two A' Level History exams to come in the subsequent week, before the life stage begun in September 1969 came to an end. It was rather appropriate then that the acquisition of this particular LP also marked the final end of a childish, face-spiting resentment towards its creators.





That was also related to the back story referenced in the early reviews. When I first met my friend Michael in April 1979 he was totally green about music despite being only a few months younger than me. He could only cite Roxy Music as a group he liked and struggled even to name any of their songs. This seemed to be a golden opportunity to become a taste-shaper but I had reckoned without his older sister and my enthusiasm for music only drove him towards her record collection. That was standard early 8os student stuff - Psychedelic Furs, Human League , Echo and The Bunnymen, Buzzcocks and above all Joy Division. Not being a Peel listener all I had to go on was "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and later "Ceremony" which I disliked for not being able to discern the lyrics and their avoidance of conventional melody and structure. Michael was at best indifferent to most of the things I tried to turn him on to - Spandau, Ultravox, Kate Bush - seemingly only going with me on bands if she'd greenlighted them eg OMD which enraged me all the more as did the enthusiasm of the cooler kids at school for the same music. So Joy Division/New Order became a pet hate increasing all the more as our friendship deteriorated, heated debates about music becoming one of the symptoms. The irony was that the seemingly final break at the end of 1981 threw me into a mood that made me much more receptive to their music. The thaw began with "Temptation" in May 1982, progressed with John Peel's Festive 50 in December (the last year he did an all-time version because of his listeners' conservatism) where I heard songs like "Decades" , "The Eternal" and "Dead Souls" for the first time then really ended with "Blue Monday". Helen, who had heard all my tirades watched this process with amusement.




I bought the cassette version of this because it had "Blue Monday" on it whereas the vinyl version didn't. It also had a track listing but I later became aware that two of the titles -as noted above - were not the generally accepted titles for those songs. If anyone can explain the reasons for this please use the comments box.





I loved the record for its sound and played it a lot that summer but its appeal started to fade after "Confusion" proved they had feet of clay and their long-delayed embrace of the music press exposed their lack of care about lyrics since Ian Curtis's death. Even though I've loved most of their subsequent work particularly the LP immediately after this one, I've never really revisited this one before now seeing it as no more than a staging post on the road towards better things. Helen played it once and pronounced it samey and boring.

This was New Order's second album and they decided to produce it themselves following the failure of their first LP with Martin Hannett, a disaster zone of half-written songs and murky sonics. The second problem was immediately solved as can be heard on the opening track "Age of Consent" which begins with a signature melodic bass riff from Peter Hook before Steve Morris's drums and the guitars come in. The sound is crisp and well separated. Then Bernard Albrecht/Sumner comes in ; where Hannett had buried him deep in the mix to try and disguise that he wasn't Curtis here he's upfront , raw and imperfect from the start . He's really straining on the chorus of this vaguely suggestive song which goes on a bit too long though there's some nice synth work reminiscent of "Love Will Tear Us Apart" in the instrumental passages.

After that bouncy opening track, "We All Stand" is slow and dolorous with Sumner singing of endless travel towards a soldier "waiting for me". The music is vaguely reminiscent of the beginning of the "Shoestring" theme. Hooky works overtime here with a bottom layer of sludgy fretless bass over which he plays mournful melodies on his six-string. Again it's too long at over 5 minutes.



"The Village" is more synthesiser-based and is quite similar to "Temptation" . It is also by far the happiest song the band had recorded to date with Sumner declaring "Our love is like the earth, the sun, the trees and the birth" and one of the first to have a verse/chorus structure. Unfortunately it's melodically boring.



"5-8-6 " is an early version of "Blue Monday" which possibly explains why the latter was left off the vinyl album. It begins with a much slower drum pattern then some squelchy bass synth noises but eventually that familiar bass pattern asserts itself. Arguably it's a more coherent song with Sumner spurning a former lover who wants to try again.



I can't imagine anyone reading this is unfamiliar with "Blue Monday" itself so let's just note that it follows next on the cassette version and retains a certain power despite its overuse and being an awful song as opposed to an impressive piece of experimental music to test out a new drum machine.



"Kwi/Your Silent Face" which opens Side Two has been used as backing music for sports coverage quite extensively. It's largely played on synthesiser with bass and guitar only colouring in the middle eight and is relatively slow and stately. The lyrics evoke a sense of stasis until the bathetic last line "Why don't you piss off ? " which is eternally jarring. From time to time Sumner plays a simple melodica riff. Yet again it's far too long, the last couple of minutes are just a repeat of the middle eight.



"Ultraviolence" restores a sense of urgency and has distinct echoes of Joy Division's "Atrocity Exhibition" with Morris using both acoustic and electronic percussion to create the necessary drum clatter. The lyrics are the nearest approximation to Ian Curtis's style on the LP with Sumner dolefully intoning "Everybody makes mistakes " in the last verse. It 's also the first track that doesn't outstay its welcome.



"Only The Lonely/Ecstasy" is virtually instrumental , the vocoder interjections being unintelligible which again sees Hook playing a melodic riff while the synths handle the rhythmic duties. This must be one of the first references to the drug of the eighties in pop music, the product of the band's ventures into New York clubland. Again its relative brevity works in its favour.



"Leave Me Alone" begins with a descending bass riff soon mimicked by processed guitar which gives the track a very melancholic feel. The words on the other hand seem to be a sly pop at their public image especially the line "You get these words wrong every time" which reminds me that many of the trays in the refectory I would shortly become familiar with had JD lyrics carved into them. Much later Hooky would admit that the rest of the band paid little attention to Curtis's lyrics until long after his demise.

The vinyl version ends there but on cassette we get "The Beach" an instrumental version of Blue Monday that adds very little to the original.

I still see this as an interesting, occasionally impressive, work in progress rather than a great album in its own right. New Order would make much better records in the future but here they're still removing bits of shell from their feathers.