You know you are getting older when your favourite musicians make it on to the cover of Mojo. Still I’ll be down WHSmiths later to get hold of this cover-mounted CD of covers from New Order’s Power, Corruption and Lies.
There’s also a heap of nostalgia to persuse on its website. Here’s a fine collection of YouTube hits
So to Manchester last night to see The Light play at the Factory. Fronted by Peter Hook, the band performed songs from Joy Division’s second album, Closer, on the 31st anniversary of singer Ian Curtis’s death, no less
Somewhat, surprisingly Hook, the former bass player in Joy Division, didn’t play bass last night, but instead stood centre stage where he sang all but two of the songs (Rowetta of the Happy Mondays sang the others). He did a fair interpretation of Curtis, growling like a tomcat cornered with a stolen piece of meat and angrily shouting in the right places, although he lacked the vocal range to render the more tender moments with much meaning.
The best bit? The encore where the band re-visited Joy Division’s punk roots, banging out a quartet of Warsaw songs and a rollicking version of Transmission.
Fitting tribute for Curtis or tribute band? Definitely the latter in my opinion, New Order actually played quite a few Joy Division songs towards the end of their stage career, but I never thought I’d here the likes of Ice Age performed live. Hearing them in the former-HQ of factory records belted out by one of the original members to the band to a pogoing audience was indeed a good way to celebrate their music.
Peter Hook’s new band The Light release their debut EP in early May featuring Rowetta (of Happy Mondays fame) on lead vocals and a back-catalogue of Joy Division songs to revisit. The EP, on Hacienda Records features Atmosphere, Insight and New Dawn Fades (all sung by Rowetta) plus Pictures in my Mind, with Hooky on vocals, which was an unfinished Joy Division song recently unearthed.
Doubtless the purists will be outraged that Hook is choosing to cover the work of his former band. My view is that if anyone is going to write the gospel it ought to be one of the disciples.
The cover (above) is by local digital artist James Chadderton. It shows the view of Whitworth Street West in Manchester. The building in the middle ground is the Hacienda, which of course has already been knocked down.
Here’s Hooky talking about the project on 6Music
I went watching an audience with Hooky at Wakefield last year and it was compered by Howard Marks, so it was two seriously cool men on stage. But after a great interview and some classic anecdotes he started playing tracks from the doomed Freebass project and it was terrible. So I’m interested to see what this album is like, I’ll definitely give it a listen.
Rowetta played with Hooky at Versus Cancer last year and did a few Joy Division tracks, though it was also with Tim Booth of James and Andy Rourke. It was incredible. Rowetta’s voice goes really well with Joy Division songs, especially Atmosphere.
Love Will Tear Us Apart: A History Of The Haçienda Granada Television documentary from 1999. I think it had something to do with the death of Rob Gretton – presented in five YouTube parts (sorry but can’t embed it here)
A limited edition A4 colouring book. Being sold as a ‘Buy It Now’ on eBay, priced at £15.99. The perfect Christmas present for the Factory obsessive in your life (me, me, me!)
Every slice a veritable division of joy (via dangerous minds)
This very nice looking cake was baked and photographed by Heidi, more of her delightful confections here
Have been enjoying Jon Savage’s occasional column on the Guardian Music Blog. Lately he’s been celebrating the best of early eighties dance music. Here he is on Soft Cell’s Bedsitter and Fingers Inc’s Mystery of Love, here on Cybotron’s Techno City. Today he chose Section 25’s simply wonderful Looking from a Hilltop (megamix) remixed by New Order’s Bernard Summer and A Certain Ratio’s Donald Johnson. He’s right, but the vocal mix was always the one for me.
“In the end, Looking from a Hilltop (Megamix) is all forward motion. At eight minutes, the track isn’t a second too long: all the elements are subordinate to the irresistible Moroder-esque modulations, which give a framework over which the group and the remixers pour backwards synths, wailing rock guitar, and all manner of ambient noises. With this epic – one of the best tracks from a great year for electro – Section 25 finally achieved the grandeur that they had always sought. Released in June 1984, the 12″ – with a bright orange sleeve – made waves in the UK and was a club hit in New York. It was also picked up by black radio stations in the Chicago area, and consequently fed into the early house scene.”
Ben Kelly, the architect of the Hacienda, has released this stunning pair of limited edition prints (above) of the legendary Mancunian club. They are not photos, nor paintings but digital renderings from a full-scale digital model being produced to celebrate its 25th anniversary. £600 each, £1000 the pair (via the excellent Cerysmatic Factory)
I have been sailing through Peter Hook’s The Hacienda: How Not to Run a Club his account of the decline and fall of the Factory empire. Although he is not exactly Tom Wolfe or Nick Kent he tells his tale with some wit and much stoicism. The legendary club nearly ruined him and the rest of the band, as they sank in many millions of pounds to keep it going. Hooky reckons that for every person who came through the door of the Hacienda, it cost him and the rest of New Order around £10. So buy him a drink next time you see him.
The books full of anecdotes and quotes from many famous factory figures (Tony Wilson, Rob Gretton, Mike Pickering et al). Here’s the club’s former DJ Dave Haslam on the Hacienda’s wonderful music policy:
“Whereas music in clubs is now pigeion-holed and segregated, in those first years of acid house, the dance floor was open minded. In retrospect DJs have tried to convince us of thier purist underground credentials; that wasn’t really the case. In the acid-house era you would have heard hous, and techno, but also hip-hop records like ‘know How’ by Young MC, New Order and Euro-disco tracks by Italian production teams.”
Hi I reach this site when i was searching bing for this
I couldn’t agree more with Dave Haslam’s words in the quoted text about current DJ’s seeming to retrospectively try and convice their audiences of their purist underground roots, however I can’t agree with what times were like as I’m new on the scene, and that time… was before my time…
I couldn’t agree less with Ricki
urrmm… site moderator.. please delete the above duplicate comment, meant to comment on the article and not reply to Ricki… sorry Ricki…. you can blame Bing for that one….
I couldn’t agree more with Dave Haslam’s words in the quoted text about current DJ’s seeming to retrospectively try and convice their audiences of their purist underground roots, however I can’t agree with what times were like as I’m new on the scene, and that time… was before my time…
I couldn’t agree less with Ricki
This week see the 30th anniversary of the release of Joy Division’s debut album, Unknown Pleasures. Somewhat surprisingly, to me at least, the New Musical Express has published an anniversary “special” featuring interviews with the surviving members (sadly not online), which we can probably take as a sign that the nation’s 16/17 year olds still think Joy Division matter an awful lot. Which is amazing for an album that peaked at number 71 in the album charts on its initial release.
The album was recorded in the winter of 1979 in an unheated studio in Stockport and it captures the mood of imposing decay of Northern Britain with its austere and dark production. Unknown Pleasures is firmly fixed in a time and place: the Manchester of the late seventies, and yet its appeal endures.
At the time Jon Savage, writing in Melody Maker in 1979, praised, ” Joy Division’s spatial, circular themes and Martin Hannett’s shiny, waking-dream production gloss. …. [a] perfect reflection of Manchester’s dark spaces and empty places: endless sodium lights and hidden semis seen from a speeding car, vacant industrial sites – the endless detritus of the 19th century – seen gaping like rotten teeth from an orange bus.”
In remains, to my mind, one of the greatest albums of all time. From the deliciously minimalist cover designed by Peter Saville (which was recently parodied as a Pelican Classic, above right) to the equally minimal, and haunting, production by Martin Hannett, to the ten beautifully crafted songs which simply refuse to date. We are still in its axis, musically at least. Think of this way, we are as far away in time from Unknown Pleasures as Joy Division were from the music of Perry Cormo and Frankie Laine and yet still it features on the front cover of the music press.
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Jimmy Batista is writing a new book about FAC 51 The Haçienda. It is ear-marked for publication around the end of this year. He is looking for people who were regulars at the legendary Manchester club. He is also looking for original pictures from the club and associated scene, as well as scans of flyers and posters or any other kind of memorabilia.
Naturally I’ve offered to help him out. So, my old friends, if you don’t want your messy stories publicising, perhaps you want to consider a bribe?
If you would like to participate please contact fac.off@hotmail.fr.
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Arkitip has a new video interview with Peter Saville, the great Mancunian designer. It shows the mock-ups of Unknown Pleasures, the first Joy Division album, where the famous diagram of an image of a pulsar, taken from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy, had originally been rendered as a three-dimensional model (see right). Moreover, the a couple of versions of the said model still exist.
(via)
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Glad that you liked my photograph enough to use it for your post. Nonetheless, I would have liked to have been informed beforehand. I gladly give permission for use my photos but I like to know where there being posted.
Anyhow, thanks for the credit and links.
On the Arkitip article: I suppose you know that there’s also the special Saville edition magazine available. If not, you can see it here .
Cheers,
japanese forms
Oops ! – where there being posted. – of course, i mean where THEY ARE being posted.
I hate making stupid mistakes like that.
jf
It’s a year since Tony Wilson, the cofounder of Factory Records, died of cancer in Manchester.
Fellow Mancunian Mike Garry has written this poem dedicated to him. An ode to St Tony of Manchester. I won’t republish the whole thing here – but please click through as it’s an excellent poem. The first six verses give you a good flavour. You can also watch a spoken word performance of the poem here, it’s from the end of the recent Tony Wilson Experience. Factory’s design guru, Peter Saville, gives a little speech; Wilson’s son gets on the stage in for an emotional moment and then Garry comes on.
A poem for Anthony H Wilson
Saint Anthony
Saint Anthony
Please come round
Something is lost that can’t be found
Talk to me of Albion Anderton
Albrecht and art
The Arndale
Alan Turin
Acid House
Alexandra Park
Bez the Buzzcocks bouncing bombs
The beautiful Busby Babes
Curtis
Cancer Christies Catholicism
Crack and Curt Cocaine
Talk to me of all these things and one thing is for certain
I’ll see the face I’ll hear the voice of Anthony H Wilson
Dance Design Devotto Durrutti
Development of an industrial dirty Northern City
De La Salle
Dignity
And how in the end you hated the pity
Elvis Engels ecstasy
A girl called Emmeline
The hours I spent watching you on my black and white TV.
From So It Goes To Sunday Roast
Enchanting
Endearing
Extreme
Elephants washed by dwarves on 1970’s TV
Factory fame financial fuck ups
Poetic Form
The Fall
4 June 1976 at the Lesser Free Trade Hall
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Just been listening to the Tony Wilson Experience, a 24-hour long conversation celebrating the late, great music Tony Wilson, musical Svengali and proud Mancunian. Wilson died of cancer last year and today would have been his 58th birthday. Loads of good people on the bill: John Cooper Clarke, Clint Boon, Irvine Welsh, Paul Morley, Peter Hook et al. You can tune in to the live stream over here.
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Update: I’ve been enjoying a curmudgeonly Kevin Cummins bemoan the fate of the rock photographer. Cummings thinks that user-generated content is just a way for newspapers to “get a load of free content”. He’s dismissive of the generation of photographers coming out of sites like Flickr. He said: the newspapers “don’t care about quality. It’s quantity that they want.” He also said that blogs were mostly “just middle class letters pages.”
…
Even later: It is nearly 1PM and it’s getting really belligerent. The Manc poet John Cooper Clarke is on stage. He just recited his famous haiku:
To convey one’s mood,
in seventeen syllables,
is very diffic…
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The intelligence finally ran out about 3am. The Happy Mondays were on a panel and someone in the audience mentioned Stella Grundy, who I assume is Shaun Ryder’s ex-partner from the way he reacted. The guy in the audience was being provocative, but the reaction of the Monday’s, particularly Bez, was somewhat stereotypical. The guy was threatened from the stage (“you are fucking dead”, was the precise quote and worst was said after that) and for a moment I thought that it was all about to kick off. And then, the security intervened and started escorting the bloke out of the venue. Brilliantly, the Mondays then changed their tune and started berating the bouncers to let the man stay in the building. It was all rather touching and probably what Tony would have wanted.
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Thankfully, after a sleep, I awake to find the conversation has got much more intelligent again. This is much more like a more belligerent (I keep using that word) version of Radio 4. For the final conversation we’ve got Steven Morris, Peter Saville and physicist Brian Cox discussing the secrets of the universe. He reminded us how important Manchester has been to our understanding of the universe, and that the atomic nucleus had been discovered up on Oxford Road by Ernest Rutherford.
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That’s it. The poet Mike Garry has just read his poem Saint Anthony, and there’s talk of another one next year. I hope so. It was really good an pretty intelligent all the way through.
To whoever wrote this. My name is Stella Grundy. I am a playwrite. and Ex front woman for the Band Intastella. I was invited to speak at the Tony Wison Experience about my experiences as as an artist over the past 20 years along with John Cooper Clarke and Alan Wise . I was attacked by Shaun Ryder because I asked him a question about music he didnt like. I am NOT his Ex girlfreind !!! Women in music are not just wifes and girlfriends.
Sorry Stella, as I said that was an asuumption. I had actually listened to a lot of the talk when you were on the panel and not heard your altercation with Shaun Ryder and assumed it was about something else, my mistake. No one though is saying that womein in music are just wives and girlfriends. Just click on my Last FM link if you don’t believe me
Sean
R.I.P Tony.
Has there been any evaluation of the event? Will it be public?
The Tony Wilson Experience website has some wonderful images but no forum: neither does it facilitate ‘social networking’ by making content re-usable for bloggers (the fanzine producers of today, and writers of tomorrow?). Rather, the cut and paste aesthetic of punk, house music and the appropriation which so inspired Factory (the name itself appropriated from Warhol) seems to be absent.
Cameras and mobile phones were banned from the event “The entire conversation is being recorded in HD. It will not be permitted to take any cameras, mobile phones or other recording/communication” – Participant Handbook e-mailed to participants.
To the ‘talent’ I spoke to over the course of the event, the following objective taken from the website did not seem to ring true:
“The Talent will gain unprecedented access to the ‘Experienced’ over the 24 hours as well as having an opportunity to meet other talented creatives based in Manchester in a unique setting. ”
It became apparent that the ‘Experienced’ hung out in the Green Room, guarded by a security guard, while the ‘talent’ either made up a studio audience watching the ‘expereinced’ or sat about talking between themselves.
Given that situationism was given such an airing as a core value of the event, the reduction of the event to a spectacle resembling a TV show sometimes seemed to be either ill considered or at others a subtle ironic gesture designed to anger ‘talent’ to overthrow the ‘experienced’ – now part of the establishment. Either way of looking at it has merit in my opinion.
Perhaps it is a case of what seemed to be television professionals organising an event the way that they know best. The event was it was highly efficiently scheduled and at times interesting entertainment as well as inspiring and thought provoking. Paul Morley and Irvine Welsh were so spot on when they were talking about anything edgy being co-opted by the advertising industry. The pictures of the event seem to have been a particularly good viral marketing campaign for Adidas thanks to the Adidas lanyard.
It would have been nice to offer up the pictures for ‘talent’ to use to write their own experiences up, and to talk about the event. I would have loved to read what some of Simon Armatige’s fans, eager on Sunday morning to meet the hero, whose poem they studied for GCSE.
It would have been nice to put the video on YouTube like the famous TED talks: young talent has taken to remixing footage and applying the cut an paste aesthetic. These are skills and passions which should be encouraged, and I think that the organisers have missed an opportunity to allow talent to flourish from this event.
At the end of the event I stood in URBIS looking at the space between the door and the Green Room. What would happen there I wondered.
A flag was rolled out on the floor. It was the cross of St George. In the left corner was Stone Roses / Pollock pattern. Tony Wilson’s son signed it, so did Bonehead and John Robb. Tim Burgess did as well. I thought about signing it, but didn’t. Unfortunately Paul Morley was not around to observe the situation for critical analysis. I would have loved to hear what he thought.
Perfect news.., dude
I’ve said this before about Anton Cobijn’s Control (and lived through the disappointment), but the new Joy Division documentary, which goes on release in May, looks fantastic. Jon Savage writes in today’s Observer Music Monthly about the difficulty of finding enough unseen footage to make the film interesting, and the joy of unearthing old reels of Super 8 film to make it so. The film, moreover, has the backing of the surviving members. Peter Hook, the band’s legendary bassist, recently introduced the film at the Salford Film Festival (a phase he says he never thought he would hear himself saying) saying that the film represented the truth “as opposed to the other one [Control] that didn’t”.
See this site for some Original Paintings of IAN CURTIS
web address : jessemosher.etsy.com
ENJOY !
Hi Sean
Good to find this blog and catch up with some of your Grauniad Education pieces. Thought you might like to see my Joy Division review:
http://itpworld.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/joy-division-ukus-2007/
I did like Control as well and I’m going to be teaching it in the Autumn, so no doubt I’ll be looking at it a bit more closely.
Cheers, Roy
Paul Anderson is discussing. 
richardgreenwood and 
Ricki Mavris are discussing. 
rantersparadise, and 2 others are discussing. 
venicelion and 
Northern Light 
Paul Anderson 1:07 am on January 3, 2012 Permalink |
You’re just getting old, mate. Happy new year!