New Order: Original Masters

Blue Monday: art over wealth and ego

When I was awarded my first recording contract in the early 90s I was shocked at how the music business still encouraged childish images of rebellion and pretentious attitudes from artists, because I thought that had all been killed off. Not by the then current rave culture but by New Order, surely the best band of their era. The most iconic image, for me was their Top of the Pops appearance for Blue Monday. Seemingly dragged from Manchester via the Co-op clothing department, they looked gaunt and uncomfortable as they shambled their way through their beautifully melancholy electronic symphony. They imsisted on playing live and, as though to prove it, even the synthesizers were out of tune. Such a world away from Miami Vice, big hair, big grins, big voices, big wallets, wanker DJs, the whole shebang.

Hearing recent pastiches of their work by The Ting Tings and Sugarbabes reminded me to restock my New Order CD collection, as when my old discs were either played to death or killed by trampling and oxidisation. All their 80s albums now come remastered in a collector’s edition with a second CD of remixes. The original album tracks still sound fresh, with Bernard Sumner’s little stories and/or streams of consciousness are always poignant and warming even when intending nonchalance and sarcasm. The backing is mostly inventive, and can fluctuate from charmingly naïve to toweringly statuesque in a brilliantly disarming fashion. The effect is heightened by the fact anybody with a modern PC could theoretically make this music, but nobody ever will. The remixes, however, from the likes of Shep Pettibone sound hideously dated and weren’t that great in the first place, overlong and literally laced with bells and whistles. Blue Monday ‘88 sounded bad by 1989, its shameless commercialism standing in monotonic contrast to the accidental ethics of the original’s infamous loss making sleeve design. The pleasingly restrained remastering process whilst adding nothing to the recordings, doesn’t spoil anything, making it no worse than pointless. The Perfect Pit is a glaring omission from the Lowlife CD – a short deconstructed version of The Perfect Kiss which I beleive to be the precursor of 808 State’s Cubik – the track which defined early ‘90’s hardcore and remains influential.

New Order were so hardcore from a marketing perspective that many of their singles didn’t appear on the albums at all. But the remastering of the relatively recent singles compilations has fared much worse than the albums, with the sound compressed to all but eliminate dynamics in order to raise the volume – perhaps to appeal to the severely disabled listener incapable of adjusting his or her hi-fi controls. I don’t really see the point of remastering old material at all – the originals sounded fine and translated well to CD so what’s the point? Current music is mixed in the knowledge of what the modern mastering process involves, and therefore is well suited to the procedure. Take the aforementioned Sugarbabes’ About You Now, for example. Its titanium clad production thrives on the mechanical pummelling and squashing like a super-knight, but older recordings cannot survive the punishment that they were not designed for. There is no point in imposing these 2008 production values onto old recordings, any more than there is a point to applying 21^st century moral values onto a 17^th century witch-hunt.

So as well as recommending the old editions of the New Order albums, a real must-have is Substance 1987 – now widely available for well under a tenner. Over two hours of New Order single heaven with their own remixes, completely untouched by misguided tweaking. The one problem – you might have to turn the original masters up.

Racing Green?

F1 tryers

In another embarrassing attempt for Formula 1 motor sport to gain ecological credentials, this weekend’s Japanese Grand Prix will feature cars with green striped tyres. Personally, I love the sport and am happy to spend a couple of hours of excitement and escapism, tending to forget the prospect of being globally warmed. All the silly painted tyres will do is remind viewers of the car’s huge fuel consumption - as well as mass air travel to the races, and possibly even how the automotive industry are using Grands Prix to promote road car use in the new markets of the Middle and Far East. Indeed, if F1 continue to draw attention to the political issues inherent in international motorsport, perhaps the promotional material for the last few races of the season could look something like this…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Get off my back, DUDE!

 

After being too ill to cycle for a over a year, I sometimes peruse my Raceface hydropack that lurks in the kitchen. I first bought a hydropack around ten years ago – it’s a backpack that contains a plastic bladder (usually around 1.5-2 litres) to fill with water or energy drink, a tube goes over your shoulder and you suck on it to have a drink. There’s also space in the pack for a few spares, pump, inner tubes etc – I guess you get the message that it isn’t an especially glamorous piece of equipment. In fact, I used to get some very strange looks. SCARY!

However, around five years ago some “extreme” mountain bike riders were photographed wearing hydropacks whilst performing outrageous tricks – road gaps, cliff drops, 360s and even fully inverted – upside down and fully hydrated. WOW!

To begin with I thought there to be some humourous fad, but no. These were freeriders (previously, “freerider” was cycle company Cannondales’s copyrighted term for non-race or downhill mountain biking) who, the story goes, ride on 45lb bikes pulling mad tricks but covering enough of Canada to require tools and water. Now the UK cycle industry are playing it is that, if you’re on a normal UK trail rider you need an expensive overbuilt bike with 6 inches of suspension travel – plus a hydropack - presumably for bandages and morphine. MENTAL!

Even more bizarre, though, is the appearance of backpacks is new quad bike videogame Pure. They may have lost the plastic tubes, but I recognise ‘em – hydropacks worn whilst the riders race and perform fantastical freeride manoeuvres – a utilitarian device rendered free of any practical use! Now we’re just literally twiddling our thumbs – controlling a virtual hydropack. AWESOME!

I blame Red Bull for making the link between drab items and adrenaline fueled excitement – their marketing has implied for years that opening a can of pop may make you an F1 pilot or aeroplane racer. But I remember long before Red Bull there were Pepsi Max adverts making the link between extreme sports and soft drinks. Now even PCs are also often described as “extreme” – another thumb twiddler. Along with shitty brick-slow 4×4s. And every other crappy TV programme that inserts the word into the title to luridly suggest voyeuristic danger – all from the safety of one’s own armchair. CRAZY!

The word “extreme” and most of the surrounding vocabulary were wrought into marketing buzzwords around the turn of the century, and you can blame the same kind of marketing people who re-invented the hydropack. Or maybe it was Bill and Ted. But I’d rather imagine it was an elite squad of London-based media chicks, replete with 3 litre hydropacks containing enough vodka and Red Bull to talk shite for weeks. LET’S ROCK N’ ROLL

 

Links

Pinkbike.com has thousands of genuinely awesome freeride shots – with and without hydropacks

Camelback are the originators of the hydropack

Before the drugs kicked in, this post was going to be about Pure, a quad bike game – see developers Black Rock Studios