New Order - Power, Corruption and Lies (1983)

As I explained back in 2022, myself and my little group of pals were Joy Division obsessives up until this came out, or at least I was. I'm not sure whether the other two kept going. Blue Monday was fucking terrific and then somehow I became distracted and forgot to buy this, despite all that was promised by the associated Peel session. Years passed and I heard the occasional thing on the radio, but not much that grabbed me as had Ceremony and Everything's Gone Green, and I liked True Faith well enough but it sounded like an impersonation of New Order to my ears. I bought this album, almost certainly because it was in a bargain bin, but have no idea as to where, when, or even whether I actually listened to it. Surprised to find it in my collection a couple of years ago, I gave it a spin and recognised only the tracks they had already recorded for Peel. It's bollocks, and very, very boring, I decided, as you may possibly recall.

Well, I've given it another shot and have to conclude I was either wrong, or listening far too hard, or with the wrong ears. It's not a patch on the glacial intensity of Movement, which I still hold to be the finest thing ever committed to wax by any of those involved, but I realise had I not heard anything by any of those involved before this one, I probably would have given it more of a chance. The production is efficient, but inevitably leaves the songs sounding like a top of the range demo compared to what Martin Hannett did, and even compared to the efforts of whoever produced the Peel session for that matter. Also, having presumably laid the ghost of Joy Division to rest on the first one, this was a band giving it another go and finding their feet all over again, hence the slightly schizophrenic mix of material - almost like the work of two different groups, a much happier version of Joy Division, and some New York disco act who couldn't leave their sequencer alone, thus obliging the bass player to impersonate a lead guitarist on half of the tracks.

So it's an odd one, a transitional affair, I suppose, but there's a pleasantly breezy quality to it, possibly informed by the giddy delirium of a brand new day knowing you won't have to play songs where Nazi war atrocities serve as a metaphor for feeling a bit glum because your bird just found out you've been knobbing Sharon from the chippy; and I've honestly always preferred Bernard Sumner's vocal to that of his predecessor, even when he can't quite reach the note, or the lyric sounds like it needed more work.

This time last year, or possibly the year before that, I'd developed the impression of post-Movement New Order as arguably the most boring band in the world. It's strangely comforting to know that I can reach my age and still be wrong about something.

The Wurzels Are Scrumptious! (1975)

Following my reviewing a number of seventies novelty records a while back - and enjoying them - my famous friend Stan Batcow of Howl in the Typewriter dared me to tackle the Wurzels. I'll do it! I barked at the screen of my PC, partially because I'd been meaning to get around to the Wurzels for some time - not, as you might suspect, for the sake of sneering at The Combine Harvester or any of the others which regularly clogged the upper reaches of the charts in my youth, but because I remember my pal at junior school making me a tape of early Wurzels - or Wurzels rarities if you will, the Wurzels you were referring to when you told those other kids at the Blitz in Covent Garden in 1979, I only liked their first album. I'm talking about Down in Nempnett Thrubwell, Twice Daily, Cheddar Cheese and others - this had been a different Wurzels, a comedy turn for sure but with a softer, more wistful side to their music meaning even the inevitable numbers about rumpy-pumpy in the hay loft had a certain charm beyond the obligatory succession of cow pat gags. Subsequent research has revealed that I didn't imagine there having been a better Wurzels, and this line-up significantly featured one Adge Cutler who obviously left a massive hole in the group when he tragically lost his life in a road accident in 1974.

So I hunted around for anything featuring those songs I'd once loved, but a few of them didn't even seem to have been recorded by the Adge Cutler line-up, and the rest were scattered hither and thither across the back catalogue, and The Wurzels Are Scrumptious! seemed like the best bet given that I had no plans to buy more than one record. In its favour, the Wurzels play well and it sounds as though they had a shitload of fun; but really, I just fucking can't…

I'd forgotten about that seventies thing where albums purchased from your local WHSmith might turn out to be live albums if that's where the band were most at home, usually recorded in some working men's club complete with rambling introduction comprising gags and comic asides which were hopefully funnier at the time. I guess the whole point of the Wurzels was the live performance and how much cider you could knock back before passing out in someone else's field. I don't know if it's really fair for me to offer comment on this one, because even if it leaves me wishing to cancel the subscription to my own ears, this was the record they made after their most talented member had just pegged it, so it's arguably the Wurzels' equivalent of the first New Order album.

The problem is partially that this sort of thing is very much woven into my childhood mythology, and as NWA were to South Central Los Angeles, so the Wurzels were to the farms and villages of my youth; and it's significant that I moved to somewhere a bit less rustic as soon as I was able. Sometimes there's nothing funnier than comparing a cucumber to a penis, or the other way round, but the comparison is arguably funnier in the moment and probably doesn't work so well in song, and a song on an album which mostly seems to be about drinking, shagging, and then laughing about it at such length that the laughter ends up sounding a bit weird. It feels akin to an episode of Esther Rantzen's That's Life* but with accordion, and a hilarious chorus of ooh arr following each alleged zinger, and maybe with the more highbrow jokes left backstage so as not to confuse anyone from that neighbouring village with which we've had an amusing rivalry since 1687; until the music stops and we get another long-winded and deeply unfunny introduction reaffirming those rustic credentials, except one of them clearly isn't from Somerset, and another really doesn't have the accent of a man whose economic status ever obliged him to wade through cow shit at 5AM on a freezing November morning. Quibbling over authenticity is usually a mug's game, but it's nice to know that whatever you're getting at least has one foot in the paddock it's milking for chuckles, even if the chuckles aren't so great as they may have been on the evening.

Somehow, I expected better.

*: One for the kids there.

New Order - The Peel Sessions (1986)

I bought this recently, having somehow spent the last thirty or so years failing to notice that I didn't actually own a copy - which was fucking weird when I realised. This was New Order's Peel session from June 1982, something which loomed quite large in my own personal mythology. Myself and my little group of pals - or the other two if you need an actual head count - had been fairly keen on Joy Division and took to scrutinising New Order's subsequent development with obsessive intensity. We bought Ceremony on the day of release, and Movement too. I bought two copies of the Ceremony 12" even though I'm fairly certain they're exactly the same record but for variant covers. We stayed up late to tape Peel, or Graham did, and each time I hear the music on this record I can still see the gold and black of the BASF blank cassette on which Graham recorded it from the radio. I think it was BASF.

These four tracks are therefore embedded in my consciousness like nothing New Order have recorded since. Movement had been an astonishing record, and this was apparently where they were headed. The reggae number, Turn the Heater On somehow made perfect sense, and the rest built on Movement and even Closer with greater emphasis on the electronics - still sombre, but somehow lighter as though acknowledging the necessity of life carrying on. The green shoots were beginning to show, and my little gang could hardly contain our anticipation of what was to come.

Then Power, Corruption and Lies emerged and I never got around to buying a copy for reasons I no longer recall. More recently I noticed that actually I had bought a copy at some point, and yet was unable to remember doing so. I listened, the disc came to the end of side two, leaving me unable to recall anything of what I'd just heard beyond that it had been dull. I still don't know what happened to this bunch, how the band which had recorded Movement turned into something with which to soundtrack a slightly zappy automotive commercial, and not least because both 5-8-6 and We All Stand were re-recorded for the offending second album. They sound incredible here on the Peel session, and so I guess this was the last truly good thing, depending upon how you feel about Blue Monday.

Such a waste.

Control (2007)

This may be a bit of a digression but I'm sure it figures given that Anton Corbijn's biopic of Ian Curtis attempts to map the still growing legend of Joy Division, roughly speaking. I read Deborah Curtis' autobiography about a million years ago so I was already approximately familiar with the territory when this turned up on Amazon Prime or one of those, meaning I finally got to watch it; and of course I was a massive fan for about six months, specifically the teenage years during which it's only right that one should fixate on the work of a specific pop group as the most important thing ever. I still remember where I was when I heard that Curtis had died. I was on a coach as part of some school trip to the Royal Show at Stoneleigh and had noticed that Love Will Tear Us Apart - which had been one of our things up until that point - kept turning up on wonderful Radio One, which seemed suspicious.

Should my tone here appear to be working its way towards the dismissive, and aside from the aforementioned six month obsession which burned bright without my actually bothering to buy the albums, I still believe their greatest material was the glacial punk of the Warsaw years, of which Unknown Pleasures seemed to represent the most refined expression; and the first New Order album which, for me, represents the best thing ever done by any combination of those people. It was more or less all over once Movement was in the bag, and, honestly, I never understood the praise heaped upon Closer - three or four decent tracks with some other stuff, albeit beautifully produced other stuff. I still see internet dwellers claiming it be the greatest, most emotionally powerful album ever recorded, and I'm happy for them but I can't understand their way of thinking. They may as well be referring to the first Splodgenessabounds album, although I could at least get my head around that as a view to which someone might reasonably subscribe. Closer sounded too much like those bloody awful live bootlegs of Joy Division bum notes, false starts, and band members failing to play the same song at the same time as epitomised by Decades, a song which, at the risk of repeating myself, is distinguished by its sounding the same when you unhook the belt from your turntable and push the record around by hand. My friend Carl saw Joy Division a couple of times as support to other, less introverted acts and has described their stage presence as wispy and underwhelming, or words to that effect. For what it may be worth, my mother saw the Beatles at the Cavern Club in the early sixties and has since described the evening as nothing special.

Nevertheless, we have this big fucking legend to contend with, and so here it is in bold monochrome, for the sake of mood or possibly false modesty, because no-one could possibly live up to that level of hype, which tends to become cemented in place during one's teenage years. Yes, they were briefly amazing, but so were plenty of others at the time. Joy Division distinguished themselves with a genuinely troubled vocalist who wrote ponderously poetic lyrics drawing from outsider literature, tastefully removed from obvious showbiz affectations and the idea that actually this was just a pop band on stage playing their moody songs for your entertainment. Pay no attention to the glittery curtain but just look at that ominously abstract album cover with its ostentatious lack of information or fart jokes. Classy!

Each time I encounter the legend of Joy Division, I remember Jamie Reid's characteristically sarcastic acknowledgment, as reproduced in Fred and Judy Vermorel's Sex Pistols book.

The last few years have seen an increase in this cult of vampirism, of which the Viciousburger is only the latest example. Vampires are noteworthy for consuming star corpses in the form of burgers in the mistaken belief that some of the star's charisma will rub off on them; sadly, as you can see, these attempts are doomed to failure and these cultists deluded. The cult is said to have begun in the fifties with Deanburgers: these were very rare, and contained bits of Porsche wreckage and sunglasses - those cultists still alive who tasted them say they were tough but tasty. Perhaps the worst outbreak of vampirism in recent years before the Viciousburger scandal was the Presley burger scandal of 1977. The scandal was discovered when an attempt was made to steal Presley's body from the grave by occultists: the body was already stolen! It now appears that it was minced down and turned into the bizarre cult food, Presleyburgers. These are said to be very expensive ($1000 a throw) and high on fatty content, but it still didn't deter the thrill seeking showbiz crowd: Mick Jagger was said to have eaten several before his recent Wembley concert. Heavy prison sentences imposed in Canada on Keith Richards, another vampire, stopped the spread of this disgusting cult, but with the present Viciousburger scandals, it seems to be flourishing. And even now, there are unconfirmed reports of Curtisburgers, gristly burgers with hints of rope and marble.

Control attempts to tell the story of a real band - four seventies lads with some knowledge of football who liked a pint, enjoyed sexual intercourse, and went to the toilet just like the rest of us; and it attempts to tell the story in terms of the legend of the same, hence the silly black and white footage; and it attempts to balance the legend of Ian Curtis as damaged, brooding seer with the reality of his actually being a bit of a twat in certain respects - as are we all from time to time. The end result is beautiful in the sense of almost everything the similarly vacuous Ridley Scott has ever produced being beautiful, but as with Ridley Scott, we're essentially watching a Hovis advert that thinks it's Jean Cocteau's Orpheus. It pushes the obvious buttons, beyond which there isn't actually very much there because the band already said all that they had to say on the records.

This isn't to say that Control is a bad film so much as that it's more or less pointless. There are worse ways to spend two long, long hours of your life, but that's hardly a recommendation. As I sat watching this with my wife, Oreo - our free range house bunny - hopped over to the side of the cabinet upon which the flat screen telly is sat, to resume eating a handful of cilantro stems we'd given him earlier. He sat up and stared at us, nose going as always, with one green stem after another slowly disappearing upwards into his face; and somehow his bunny lunchtime seemed more profound and more honest than anything happening on the screen.

It cost six million quid to make too.

Incredible.

Joy Division - Still (1981)

I spent about six of my late teenage months so deeply immersed in Joy Division that even now, nearly forty years later, I have no idea whether they were really any good. I'm old enough to have enjoyed them when Ian Curtis was alive, when their records were still on Factory, and tend to disregard the testimony of anyone arriving at the party more recently because it will usually be pure dog shit, the usual recycling of Ian and the lads stood looking mysterious in front of the Parthenon because they've just been reading Camus. You know, they had their moments, but get a fucking grip.

Oddly, I never owned any of their albums. I had the singles, and my friends, Pete and Graham, had the other stuff, so I taped it and spent what little money I had on records I wouldn't be able to get from Pete or Graham. It was quite exciting when Graham got hold of a fourth or sixth generation tape copy of what we referred to as the Warsaw bootleg featuring all the stuff which never made it onto any of their official records, and which was at least as good, often superior despite the ropey quality. Still, which both Pete and Graham snapped up on the day it came out in that cloth bound gatefold hardback format, was almost as exciting, not least because it featured better quality recordings of certain tracks from the Warsaw bootleg.

It sounds decent in 2021, mostly, but this lot could never have lived up to their absurdly inflated reputation, forged as it was in the white hot intensity of a thousand acne-spattered bedrooms. They rocked hard back when they were called Warsaw, and Unknown Pleasures and the singles captured the magic of their better Black Sabbath impersonations, but Closer amounted to maybe half a decent album, and New Order's Movement was probably the best thing done by any combination of these people.

Still is two albums, one of them being at least as good as Unknown Pleasures, or would have been had they included something better than the ropey cover of Sister Ray. Unfortunately the other album is live. To be fair, it's about as good a Joy Division live album as you're ever likely to hear, but nevertheless suffers from the same problems as most of their other live recordings, the fluffed notes, the missed cues, and Decades, a song which carries the distinction of sounding exactly the same when you disconnect your turntable and push the record around by hand with one finger on the label. That said, it's nice to hear the Curtis version of what would become New Order's Ceremony. In fact, they probably should have slapped that on the end of the first disc instead of Sister Ray and made it a single album.

Did I mention that we have a tribute act called Joyhaus here in San Antonio? I gather it's one bloke with a drum machine and he covers songs by Joy Division and Bauhaus. Doesn't that just say it all? One day it will be possible to separate the music from their frankly fucking ridiculous legend, but sadly that day is still some way off. They had some nicely moody songs which sounded just right when you realised that some fellow teen was never going to grant you access to his or her underpants, but they really weren't the messiahs. They weren't even particularly naughty boys.

Siouxsie & the Banshees - Superstition (1991)

This, on the other hand, was mostly chug but it fills a gap in the collection. My girlfriend owned a copy back in the early nineties and she used to play it a lot. All I recall of this is a vague impression of Superstition not making much of an impression on me, but I'm a list-making completist at heart so I wanted to see whether it would sound better with the benefit of hindsight, or whether my aforementioned first impression had been accurate; and it seems that it had indeed been more or less on the money.

Should it need stating, Siouxsie & the Banshees tend to make more sense if you think of their career as parallel to that of Roxy Music - which was probably who they were listening to back when everyone else was banging on about the Dolls and the Stooges - in which case, Superstition was probably where they entered their smooth period as did Roxy with Avalon and the like. 1991 was apparently all about those shuffling baggy types, seemingly obliging everyone else to make themselves appear ridiculous by claiming there's always been a dance element to our music, and so on top of the technological studio smoothery, Superstition was the Banshees demonstrating that they too were mad for it, as the kids of the time would have it.

Well, maybe not, but this record does chug quite a lot, and there's the peculiar use of a Schoolly D sample on Kiss Them For Me - although I'm probably just showing my ignorance of what is either some preset drum pattern or something Schoolly D nicked from elsewhere.

So, is it actually a bad album?

Not really. It creeps up on you after a while, which is mostly the songs taking their time to emerge from Stephen Hague's efforts to make them sound like New Order; but emerge they eventually do, and the differences slowly become apparent, allowing the ear to hear something beyond what initially resembles an hour long version of Dazzle. Silly Thing sadly isn't a cover of the Cook and Jones classic - and Lordy what I would have given to have heard that - but was the first tune to break cover, revealing Superstition as more than simply Kiss Them for Me plus eleven b-sides. The whole is too slick, too smooth and too electronic - as the Banshees themselves apparently thought - but remains a lesser record by what was still a great band, the Banshees equivalent of a stadium-era Simple Minds album, which I propose as someone who nevertheless quite liked stadium-era Simple Minds.

New Order - Movement (1981)

Something or other had given me cause to wonder what those other New Order albums were like. It seemed strange that I'd never bought any of them, given how much I liked the first album. Then having a quick look on the racks I realised that actually I had bought a couple of them, specifically Power, Corruption and Lies and Technique, and with no idea as to how or when they came to be in my collection. I listened to Power, Corruption and Lies, and I already knew Age of Consent from somewhere, so the first side sounded familiar, and yet side two didn't for some reason. Otherwise, the best that can be said of Power, Corruption and Lies is that it sounds like a demo by one of those promising local bands featuring a bass player who clearly wanted to be Peter Hook, which was actually most local bands at the beginning of the eighties.

Technique was even worse, if marginally better produced, sounding like something you would hear played during the commercial for the new Nissan Micra. I'm not sure if New Order enjoy any sort of repute as the most boring band of all time, but they probably should do.

So where the fuck did it all go wrong?

I vividly recall the buzz surrounding Joy Division before I ever heard any of their music. Then one day my friend Graham got hold of Transmission, so I went around to his house for a listen.

It started off well.

'Is it an instrumental or something?' I asked after about a minute.

'Yes,' said Graham, straight-faced and enjoying my confusion.

'Radio… live transmission,' crooned the unusually deep voice at last, after what seemed like an absurdly lengthy introduction, then again, 'Radio… live transmission.'

'So there is singing,' I said happily.

'Yes, but that's it.'

'What? You mean that's the whole song, just those words?'

'Yes,' said Graham, trying not to laugh. 'That's the whole song.'

Obviously it wasn't, but the impression endured; and whilst I liked Joy Division enough to tape everything, even the bootlegs Graham occasionally got hold of, for some reason I never bought their records. At least, I had the singles, but not the albums. Curtis always sounded like a man doing a comedy deep voice, and it always seemed to get in the way; and I found Closer somehow empty and underwhelming, just nicely arranged marble statues not actually saying very much; and yes, Joy Divison were great, but…

Movement felt like the first proper Joy Division album to me, the one where they got it right - a perfect blend of pseudo-classical melancholia and the more wistful, cautiously uptempo moods which began to emerge on Closer, but were drowned out by a certain Orson Welles impersonator. Sumner's vocals are relatively weak but they suit the music better, at least on Movement, doing a job without ever dominating or upsetting the fine balance. Of course, it's terrible that it should have taken a death in the family to get them to this place, but then none of us are going to live forever, so it is what it is. For my money, Movement is magnificent and as such remains the greatest album made by any of those involved, not least Martin Hannett; and from now on I just won't think about what came after.

Nagamatzu - Shatter Days (1983)

When I first moved away from home I was sharing a house with one Reuben, a sculpture student from Ipswich. Happily we had similar musical tastes centred around shared appreciation of a cannily programmed drum machine, tastes which allowed us to present a united front against the third member of our household, a painting student named Kevin who was into jazz and real music, whatever the hell that was supposed to be. We all got on fine most of the time, but occasionally we'd argue.

'Synthesiser!' Reuben would spit as an expletive as Kevin shuffled back to his room and all that proper music he listened to, Pat Metheny or whatever.

Anyway, at some point Reuben slung me a tape of a group called Nagamatzu. I'd never heard of them. 'They're from Ipswich,' he told me. 'You might like them.'

I did, and I kept an eye open ever since, somehow missing them each time they resurfaced - not that they were exactly putting themselves about. So for much of the last thirty years, Nagamatzu have remained more or less that band which I taped off Reuben from where I stood, even as I'd seen the name of Lagowski - one half of Nagamatzu - crop up in numerous fanzines without realising there was an association. When Shatter Days was reissued on vinyl, seemingly out of the blue, I accordingly nearly quacked my pants with excitement. I hadn't even realised it was called Shatter Days.

It's just four tracks, supplemented by a few things contributed to compilation albums around the same time, but Lordy it's powerful. It's also of its time, as the unfortunate qualifier would have it, in so much as I'm pretty sure that's a Roland TR606 I can hear spanking out a typically android rhythm, and as a fan of both Joy Division and the Cure, these are probably the sort of bass lines I would have played through my flange pedal, had I owned a flange pedal; but before I present an impression of something which sounded like a hell of a lot of other backcombed material of 1983 vintage, Nagamatzu put vaguely familiar elements together in a combination which greatly exceeded the sum of the parts. It's not so much that they ever sounded like either New Order or the Cure as that this is what New Order and the Cure should have sounded like but didn't, because New Order turned into some sort of extended Trevor Horn remix and the Cure were always better as the Joy Division you could eat between meals without ruining your appetite, before it went all self-consciously Alice in Wonderland.

Anyway. Other bands - fuck 'em. Shatter Days still effortlessly strikes that fine emotional balance achieved on only a couple of New Order records, somewhere betwixt the sun bursting joyous from the heavens and a vague memory of once having felt like slashing your wrists at a bus-stop in Huddersfield, a sort of bitter-sweet euphoria for want of a less comical description. What seems astonishing is that they achieved such an effect by such apparently minimal means, chugging bass riffs and just a couple of notes with which to render something that essentially does the same job as Michaelangelo's Creation of Adam. This one really is a masterpiece.

The Sound - Jeopardy / From the Lion's Mouth / All Fall Down ...Plus (2014)

Here's an odd one, at least from where I've been stood. I was most certainly sentient between 1980 and 1982 - spanning the original release dates of these three albums - and not only was I sentient, but I was possibly at the most rabidly teenaged stage of my record collecting, a period during which I could pick even a Classix fucking Nouveaux album from the rack and wonder to myself what it sounded like. These years also happened to be the only time of my life during which I managed to keep diaries going right through until December. I'm presently transcribing some of these diaries for my own entertainment, and I have in particular noted firstly just how much I obsessed over certain bands at that age, and secondly, how little sense any of the rest of it makes thirty years down the line. I have therefore found myself having to look up quite a lot of stuff on the internets and the Googles in order to work out what the hell I was writing about, and it is during one such search that YouTube suggested I might also like to have a listen to New Dark Age by the Sound on the grounds of my watching something else that had happened in the same year. The cover art of both Jeopardy and From the Lion's Mouth - the first two albums - looked vaguely familiar, but I had never heard of the Sound. Then I recalled them as the band which had appeared on the front of issue seventeen of Alternative Sounds, the Coventry based fanzine produced by Martin of Attrition and which had been mentioned on Look! Hear! on the telly and everything. I went to the vault to investigate, but it was actually a band called the Silence who had appeared on said cover. Sound and silence - I suppose you can see how I might get them confused. Anyway, I recalled New Dark Age as something once recorded by SPK - a satisfyingly portentous title if ever there was - and so I clicked on the video to see what these Sound lads had been about.

A week later, I've developed such an obsession that I'm making my way through the four discs of this reissue of their first three albums, playing them over and over and over, and I'm seriously fucking bewildered as to how this bunch somehow escaped my attention. How they slipped past my teenage radar I will never know, given that they weren't particularly obscure, as indicated by the John Peel sessions and BBC Live in Concert bonus disc included here. The only explanation I have is that the Sound only exist in retrospect, their entire career having been retrofitted to the early eighties by some time-active power.

The excessive ghastitude of my flabber is down to the Sound being so much the distillation of everything I loved at the age of fifteen in musical terms that it seems inconceivable that I should only discover them now, three decades later. I suppose you might describe them as a cross between Wire and Joy Division with more of a power pop sensibility; except the more you listen, the poorer a fit such comparisons seem; and was there really ever a half decent band who suffered those Joy Division comparisons aside from Joy Division themselves? Maybe it would be better to suggest the Sound were quite clearly sprung from that same well of emotionally volatile post-punk which yielded Echo & the Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes and U2 - before they turned into Rio Tinto-Zinc - but then the Sound clearly pissed all over those bands too. Maybe the Sound were how we all hoped New Order would turn out, how New Order might have been had they not spunked up the entirety of their potential on that first album.

Well whatever, the Sound are - or I suppose were - sparse, punchy, tuneful, and intense, the song writing is of such absurdly powerful quality as to mean there's not a single track to be skipped amongst these four discs. Almost everything here could have been a hit single had we not been distracted by all the other shit that was around at the time, Bauhaus and the Cure and all those other sucked-in cheeks tosspots who somehow managed to forge out careers without a single decent album to their names. I Can't Escape Myself, Contact the Fact, Winning, Sense of Purpose, Party of the Mind, Monument, Calling the New Tune, Skeletons, Unwritten Law - one of those rare wonders wherein the bassline seems to bear no relation to the rest of the song and yet it all fits together with absolute perfection of intent, and Missiles - one of the most emotionally powerful anti-nuclear songs I've heard... all air-punchingly fine; and after a while you realise there's not much joy in picking out individual tracks, there being nothing which lowers the average, not even the four rare tracks recorded with Kevin Hewick who at first sounds like one of those horrible sub-Bowie types from some mushroom tea based Canterbury group. Even the live material sounds amazing, which is something very few groups ever managed on disc, in my view.

After three weeks of this lot on heavy rotation, I had to force myself to pack away the box and listen to something else. Absurd though it may seem, the Sound were just too good, too powerful. Never mind hairs stood up on the back of the neck, some of this stuff was beginning to bring tears to my eyes. I'm slightly fucked off that it's taken me thirty years to discover this group - particularly considering the tripe I've endured in a similar vein which isn't anything like so good - but better late than never.

Lagowski - Ashita (1997)

Several thousand years ago I found myself sharing a house with a sculpture student from Ipswich named Reuben Pinkney. This was my first time away from home so it all seemed quite strange, but happily it turned out that my housemate and I had similar tastes in music.

'Try this,' he said one evening, handing me a cassette tape of four tracks, no titles on the inlay card, just the name of the band which was Nagamatzu. 'They're from Ipswich. You'll like them.'

I did. They sounded a bit like Joy Division, but about forty or fifty times better than all those other bands who sounded a bit like Joy Division; Atmosphere era Joy Division without Ian Curtis singing one of those I'm referring to something spooky without telling you what it is songs; in fact they were what New Order should have sounded like, I decided, except instrumental. Fuck it - they were actually superior to any of the bands with which I felt qualified to draw lazy comparisons - driving bass, sharp rhythm programming, and the sort of panoramic cloud banks of synth that evoke spiritual revelations on warm summer evenings, but better than that and without lending itself quite so easily to my admittedly purple prose.

Years later I discovered that these tracks - which I still had on a tape somewhere - were actually from the recently reissued Shatter Days, and that the membership of Nagamatzu had included one Andrew Lagowski whose name I'd encountered on numerous occasions without my ever realising there was a link; and within about a week of learning all this, I happen upon a copy of Ashita in my local Half-Price Books. It's all connected, you see. Woooooooo!

To briefly swerve off in pursuit of yet another very loosely associated train of thought, many years ago, but not so many years ago as when I shared a house with a sculpture student from Ipswich named Reuben Pinkney, my friend Carl worked at a massive and fairly well known photography and design studio near the Post Office Tower in London. One afternoon I turned up to meet him from work as we were going to a gig, or to the pub, or to the Raymond Revue Bar or something or other. I went up a floor and into a studio space full of desks and light boxes.

'You see this lot,' Carl told me in sotto voice, a furtive glance to all the others working away at their computers. 'Every single one of them is a DJ.'

The information was not offered as something which might impress me. I looked around at all the heads close-shaven to circumnavigate the onset of male pattern baldness, the self-conscious hipster spectacles, the near identical clothes, and those zippy record bags left laying around stuffed with rare Bulgarian tech-stomp twelves picked up from Flabby's in Soho at lunchtime, records I probably hadn't heard of, but which they had.

I wondered how Carl could stand to work in the place, amongst so many people all trying far too hard, all labouring under the delusion that arranging a group of records produced by other people in a particular order is a profoundly creative act. It's not that the art of the DJ is entirely without skill or merit - and by DJ I refer to the phenomenon as it has emerged from rave culture as opposed to the whole cutting and scratching deal associated with rap and hip-hop - but things seem to have got out of hand, and media driven hyperbole has elevated the status of people who choose records to something far beyond that which they actually do. My guess is that this is because it can be sexy to rock a crowd with your two record players, to be seen to have it large, and to be recognised as someone who knows how to choose a jolly tune - if you'll pardon all the terminology - and much sexier than sitting in a studio scratching your arse and programming a drum machine like a saaad specky nerd who reads books and has never done it with a girl - or a boy depending upon personal preference. As with any sudden and popular shift in that which has caught the imagination of the general public, the past is either revised or ignored with Cromwellian zeal, and so thanks to sexy DJ culture, that which was once unpopular and even reviled is moved to centre stage with a new coat of paint, hence all the clueless fuckers who will swear blind that electronic music was invented by Aphex Twin or Daft Punk; and whatever that other stuff was, well it wasn't the same and it was saaad.; although this view apparently also makes me a hipster.

Due to my having records that you haven't heard of, but which I have heard of, the first track I came across by the apparently award-winning Burial inspired the thought that this sounds like Nagamatzu, but not as good, and oddly the same equation has worked with Autechre and Lagowski. It isn't that I feel I should necessarily be congratulated for having taste when everyone else was rolling up the sleeves of their jackets and listening to Climie Fisher - although it would be nice - but I sense an injustice in so much as it would be nice to see persons such as Andrew Lagowski and the rest getting some credit, or even wider recognition after all this time, and it seems a shame that people will happily miss out on some great and genuinely innovative music simply because it isn't wearing a backwards baseball cap and asking you to check out my jam, yeah?

Ashita is quite clearly tapped from the same inspirational well-spring that informed Nagamatzu, and as such still sounds about ten years ahead of the folks who haven't quite finished reinventing Lagowski's earlier records; and listening closely it serves as a lesson in how to do this sort of thing right, and how to keep it interesting. It's all electronic, roughly ambient or whatever you want to call it, but it feels organic in a quite fundamental sense, sounds and notation which seem to evolve and expand upon themes as though part of some subatomic process, the formation of cosmic strings or whatever. Nothing here sounds like something you will have heard before in quite the same way on another record, even down to snare and cymbal hits which don't ever quite repeat on themselves let alone on anyone else; and crucially everything is at the volume at which it needs to be, so some details remain half heard whilst others move slowly towards the foreground - might be worth noting just how many lesser producers can't mix and keep everything at the same flat level. All of this serves to invoke a space, pretentious as that will almost certainly sound, a great void defined by the musical elements cohered about its periphery, a subtle and pleasant differentiation of the more common result of just whacking the reverb up to 99.9 seconds and deciding fuck it - that'll do.

Ashita treads an impressively fine balance, achieving a sort of split second musical precision without exactly sounding composed, or trying too hard as I guess I mean. Rhythms build up from sparse throbs of deep bass, becoming hypnotic without ever quite sinking into simple repetition. As with the greatest of art, it's as much about what is left out as about what is used, and Andrew Lagowski is a true master in this respect; and as with Nagamatzu, the emotional impact is incredible and subtle, something falling between mournful and sublime without pulling any of the obvious tricks, the plinky plonky boo hoo piano notes that have probably just been reinvented for the umpteenth time by the latest whining incarnation of DJ Tosspot feat. Mercury Music Prize Fuckface.

Whilst it may well be true that I've heard of this record and you, dear reader, possibly haven't, it's not like I have all existing copies locked up in my basement, so the rest is up to you.

Go on, be a devil.

Funky Alternatives: Best of Volume One to Eight (1996)

In case anyone has forgotten, 400 Blows were at least notable for citing their main influences as Chic and Throbbing Gristle, which made a lot of sense given their authentically funky yet oddly gritty sound and a handful of mostly decent records of which at least The Return of the Dog and Declaration of Intent should be considered works of true inspiration. When they started releasing the Funky Alternatives compilations through their own Concrete Productions label it seemed like a minor revelation from where I stood, at least in bringing together massive names like New Order and The Shamen with more obscure but equally noteworthy groups such as Nocturnal Emissions and of course 400 Blows themselves.

I kind of lost track after the first few volumes, and the last I encountered was the fifth one which I saw in a shop a few times but was never tempted to buy, probably due to the presence of My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult. The eclecticism of the first few discs had given way to that late 1980s understanding of electronic dance music as a skinhead in one of those vests with a German eagle motif grunting along to a soundtrack of drum machine, sequencer, and a tape of a man saying Praise Jesus! It seemed like the game was up, at least judging by the fact that even Phil fucking Collins was making records with tapes of American televangelists.

Also, I suppose I had begun to wonder just what was meant by Funky Alternatives - alternatives to what exactly? It seemed like a vestigial hangover from the punky loam in which 400 Blows and others had at least some of their roots, dance music but not that disco shit like Tony Blackburn plays, oh no - an unnecessary bit of asceticism if ever there was, particularly as it unwittingly resulted in the formation of the Exploited, and Earth, Wind & Fire now sound like the Sex Pistols compared to Justin Bieber or whoever. That said, club-orientated white guy dance music - as something distinct from music you can dance to - was, with a few exceptions, pretty much a waste of time prior to the rise of DJ culture so far as I can tell, racist though that may well be. Whilst I have multiple reservations about DJ culture, or specifically about the DJ culture which ended up stood in fields in Somerset at 4AM waving a luminous stick above its head for six hours, it did at least engage with dance instead of just assuming anyone could do it because it's just a drum machine and some stuff innit. It sought inspiration from what was going on in Chicago, Detroit and other places, rather than that Work! Obey! music by bands with names like Efficiency Unit and the Funky Marchers.

From what I can tell, most of the tracks on the latter volumes of Funky Alternatives seemed to have derived from these wilderness years: plenty of those horrible roadies let loose in a studio and having a go bands like Pop Will Eat Itself, Meat Beat Manifesto, and the Revolting Cocks: thump thump thump thump - heavy metal guitar - thump thump thump thump - Praise Jesus! - thump thump thump thump - bit of rapping by someone who can't rap etc. etc.

Also featured here are Die Krupps who can piss off on the grounds of having named themselves after a German arms manufacturer who famously supported the Nazi regime and made use of slave labour during the second world war, although in their favour, their so earnest it might almost be a pisstake brand of stomping EBM at least fosters an appreciation of how Nitzer Ebb - unfortunately absent from this collection - were actually nothing like so generic as you might recall. Actually Nitzer Ebb sound like Led Zeppelin compared to half of these tracks.

The rest of the disc is okay I guess - some fairly good stuff, some steaming shite - although mostly it inspired me only to seek alternative listening, either those first three greatly more eclectic volumes of the original series, or some Front 242 who did this sort of thing with a lot more imagination.