Having opened her solo account with the song-based long player ‘Moving Spaces’ in 2021 and an ambitious radio play presentation entitled ‘Kyoto Dreams’ the year after, Laura Dre enters the world of cyberpunk with ‘Akari LD-01’ to showcase another facet in her musical armoury.
An instrumental record featuring fast paced trancey club tracks alongside moodier mid-tempo offerings, ‘Akari LD-01’ is high on Sci-Fi and retro-futurism in a story that features augmented humans and androids made by the Xetashell Corporation. It imagines the sort of music that might be played in the 23rd Century underground techno clubs of Tokyo and Hong Kong with a distinct ‘Blade Runner’ inspired vibe looming throughout.
Laura Dre talked to ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK about the making of ‘Akari LD-01’ as well as discussing the journey of independently producing and releasing music in today’s climate.
After your first two albums were released on Outland, you have gone independent with ‘Akari LD-01’, how has the journey been?
Pretty good actually! ‘Akari LD-01’ was my 2nd Kickstarter crowdfunder and it was successful. Sure, the workload is a little higher but also the reward! Being independent, you carry a lot more responsibilities, but it also allows you to directly connect with your fans which is super important to me.
What are the pros and the cons of going it alone? Would you recommend it to other artists?
Being independent, you’re in full control of everything!
Pro: You can set your own prices, the physicals and merchandise you want to offer, decide on design and you can actually earn some money. There is no “waiting until the money is recouped” unlike a record label. If you do crowdfunding and if it’s successful, you will have the capital to get things into production, whether it’s producing an album or getting physicals manufactured.
Con: It’s a lot of work and as an artist you have to be prepared to do everything: design things yourself, placing orders with manufacturers and packing and shipping etc and most importantly: communicate regularly with your fans / backers! It’s definitely not an easy task and not everyone can handle the huge amount of work associated with it. You have to be a ‘beast’ in order to run your own business.
How do you look back on those two quite different albums ‘Moving Spaces’ and ‘Kyoto Dreams’ which was a very ambitious undertaking for a second album?
These 2 albums are so different from ‘Akari LD-01’, I quite enjoy composing / producing a variety of music in different genres, since I listen to music on a broad genre spectrum.
You gone all club-friendly instrumentals on ‘Akari LD-01’, what was the concept?
Some of the songs I wrote 5 years ago, when I played a video game called ‘Mass Effect’. I also recently played ‘Shadowrun Hong Kong’, both games have a lot of club scenes where I loved the vibe and the music that was played, so I visualised my songs being in a game like that, which was the whole inspiration behind the album.
Was Paul Oakenfold’s Perfecto imprint an influence on the sound of a track like ‘Resistance’?
Oh yeah, of course I listened to his stuff back in the 90s. I’m influenced by a lot of 90s music as well growing up, especially 90s EDM that was very popular here in Germany.
You have previously covered DEPECHE MODE’s ‘Strangelove’ and ‘Habitat 5’ has some chord and structural similarities, is that a coincidence?
Coincidence or perhaps signature sound, I’ll let the listener decide 😉
‘L1thium’ had this melodic shine that is a bit distinct from some of the other tracks?
I try to incorporate as much variety as possible, which also includes the selection of synthesizers I use.
‘Division 3184’ has a very ominous apocalyptic mood to it…
I think this pretty much captures “the dark side of Laura Dre” haha. I’m not all happy synth-poppy or city-poppy, I like a good mix between upbeat and dark tracks.
Have you a favourite track from ‘Akari LD-01’?
No favourite track, I love all of them.
You went for some interesting physical formats for ‘Akari LD-01’ like the USB floppy disk?
Yes, I thought why not 🙂
Never limit yourself! Plus I found it fitting with the whole cyberpunk theme, it’s retro on the outside but modern on the inside.
All the ‘Akari LD-01’ formats have a thoughtful tangible quality about them but do you have a favourite format from this campaign?
This is hard to answer as I’ve not received any physicals at this point in time, but I’m sure the whole set is going to be stunning.
You have been categorised into the “Synthwave” sub-genre but how has that worked out for you? Or has the term become far too limiting for what you do?
I actually don’t care where people categorise me in, I’m more interested in who my listeners are. I see that I have a lot of followers from lots of different backgrounds which is nice, I’ve got some Goth and Metalheads digging my music, as well as people who are lawyers, programmers, game developers, single mums with 2 kids, people in the beauty industry, people with anxiety problems who thank me for making them feel better and of course people from the synthwave and synthpop scene. The diversity is just amazing!
How do you see the environment for female and LGBT+ artists at the moment? Is there enough positive progression?
Not enough yet, we still have a long way to go to get visibility. As it stands, the percentage of female music producers is still at 2% worldwide and I’m hoping to see an increase in this soon. And in terms of LGBTQ+, I have not seen many artists in my niche, but I’m currently helping a fellow LGBTQ+ artist Montse Torres with producing and mixing her songs. I worked on ‘Tokyo’ and ‘Dancing In Paradise’, which has boosted Montse’s Spotify stats from 31 to 1.2k monthly listeners 🙂
I do a lot of production and mix jobs for various artists and I’m always happy to help people who reach out to me.
What is next for you, will you return to more song-based material in the future?
Yes, the next album is lined up and it’s going to be ‘Moving Spaces II’ 🙂
After that I will look into going on tour and I might branch out on the ‘Kyoto Dreams’ or ‘Xetashell’ franchise again.
ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its warmest thanks to Laura Dre
A thoughtful electronic pop record, ‘Watching Sleepers’ is the debut long form release by BLACKCARBURNING.
Although the solo vehicle of Mark Hockings, lead singer of Bristol band MESH, BLACKCARBURNING features guests Mari Kattman, Neil Francis and Janne Marvannen of LAKESIDE X who take the lead vocals on a number of songs.
With the multiple roles of singer, songwriter, programmer and producer, Hockings addressed the existential crisis than emerged following the pandemic. While a number of tracks could easily have fitted onto any MESH album of the past 15 years, there are different paths taken, including songs in a more classic pop vein such as ‘Watch Me Die’ and ‘Love In Control’.
A man who has rarely given interviews as a member of MESH, usually leaving media duties to bandmate Richard Silverthorn, it was a pleasure to have Mark Hockings speak to ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK about the collective ethos behind BLACKCARBURNING and the making of ‘Watching Sleepers’.
What was the seed that planted BLACKCARBURNING?
I guess this is starting to become a bit of a cliché, but this whole project started during the pandemic when I had a lot of quality time on my hands. I’ve always made music and worked a full-time job, but the amount of useable free time that opened up was unexpected, even though I continued to work throughout that time. I’m someone who has to fill free time productively, and this seemed to present an opportunity to do something different. Initially I just planned to write a few instrumentals and put them on Bandcamp. I even toyed with ringtones for phones.
The start of this whole project however was my work with Mari Kattman which went in a direction that I really didn’t expect. I’d done an instrumental and had used some vocal samples. I’d already done some work with Mari on a (so far unreleased) track MESH track called ‘Bury Me Again’ which turned out unbelievable well. I asked her to replace the samples I’d used to just give it a more natural and original feel, but it ultimately ended up as a full blown song.
That song became ‘Divide Us’, the title track from the third EP. Once I had that track, and endlessly gone over the possibilities in my head, I made the decision to try and write an EP. The EP became an album plus several EPs. That was essentially how it all started. It was the result of a number of gambles, text messages, blind leaps and of course, a global health emergency.
Is BLACKCARBURNING a solo project or is it more a collective with you as the musical director, a bit like how ELECTRONIC with Bernard Sumner and Johnny Marr was?
Mark: If I reluctantly had to classify it, I would say it’s a new band. I would not have been able to do this without the help of my collaborators, so I also wouldn’t say it’s a solo endeavour. I might even disagree with the term ‘project’. That implies that it’s something temporary, and it isn’t. As the band moves forward, I’m hoping to create something that feels more permanent and structured.
You began tentatively with some EPs, but was a full-length album always the intention?
By the time ‘The Mirror’ was (self) released, I already had the bones of an album. The intention was to release that album fairly soon after the EP. However, I was lucky enough to be introduced to Christian Petke and COP International and a record deal was signed. This changed the trajectory significantly and essentially gave me more focus and breathing space to get more album material together and release three more EPs. This all sounds very organised and structured, but it really wasn’t to start with. I was in unknown territory and really didn’t have a plan as such. It all worked out because of COP and Christian’s support, vision and direction.
Had any of this material been written originally for MESH like ‘All About You’ or ‘Reset’ for example?
Mark: Actually, not really. The only track that I considered as a MESH track was ‘Echo Chamber’. I’ve kept this work separate from MESH. I’d written a number of songs for the next MESH album before I started BLACKCARBURNING and those songs are still waiting to be worked on. The MESH work is very much a collaborative effort so it’s been easy to keep the two things apart.
What tools and hardware were you using in composition and pre-production?
Mark: I’ve got a fairly hardware based setup. I’ve used a lot of modular and semi-modular on this album, but also workhorses like the Moog Sub 37, Sequential REV2, Moog Grandmother, OP-Six. The Stylophone GEN-R8 is also used a lot as it’s so dirty sounding. Roland’s ACB machines SH-01 and the TR-6s are also very useful and sound great.
I’ve used a more hands on approach to the electronics, the modular being a part of that process. But also I’ve been using a lot of SOMA gear like the Pulsar 23 drum machine, Lyra 8 (drone synth), Enner (difficult to describe – you play it my bridging electronic circuits with your hands), The Pipe (again – difficult to describe – you play it with your voice), and Ether (detects and amplifies electrical interference in the environment). I’d like to get the new Terra but it’s expensive. That will have to wait for now.
Are you quite into modulars?
I use a lot of Noise Engineering and Make Noise modular gear. I particularly like Morphagene, X-Pan and Q-PAS from Make Noise. But things like Voltage Blocks and Quad LFO from Malekko – these signal processors are so flexible and can be routed to any CV input, modular or not (like the S37). I’m a real fan of Behringer to be honest. The Pro-One and the 2600, and I’ve just bought the Pro-800. I pretty much own all their guitar pedals because they are robust enough for the studio and cost about £20 each. Behringer have changed the game for a lot of musicians wanting the sound of rare and expensive analogue gear, but can’t afford the entry price. They take a lot of criticism, but personally I’m on board.
I’m a big fan of loop stations and use the RC-505 and RC-3 to build up large vocal lines or make some big toplines with guitar or synth. The results are unpredictable and interesting and very useable in most cases. Software wise, the most used stuff is XFER Serum, XFER LFO Tool, XFER Nerve (drum machine), XFER Cthulu. I’ve got a couple of cloud accounts with UVI and Roland. The UVI stuff is amazing and I use it on every track somewhere. The ACB Roland cloud stuff is also excellent and gets used a lot.
Guitar wise, I just use a Line6 Variax (James Tyner) which is a modelling guitar so you can use it like a Fender, or an acoustic, whatever you want. I really love it. Everything is sequenced with Cubase Pro. The album was written with a combination of v11 and v12. Remote vocal sessions were done with VST Connect / Performer – an incredible piece of software which allows me to run proper singer / producer sessions in real time.
‘Watching Sleepers’ is a very diverse record, what influences were you able to bring into the pot that maybe you hadn’t been able to before?
Certainly with ‘Watching Sleepers’, I felt a little more free to explore avenues that maybe wouldn’t feel like they fitted with my work in MESH. I’ve never felt restricted in MESH, but at the same time there are certain boundaries or a corridor that you need to be mindful of. Most of the songs on the album probably wouldn’t sit comfortably on a MESH album as such, but there is obviously a familiarity there that I think still appeals to MESH fans.
I’ve been able to be a bit more into the weeds with the writing, programming and sound design knowing that the buck essentially stops with me – nobody was going to step in and rescue the songs if I messed them up. I’ve also felt a little more free to try new directions and just see where they lead – I could take my time and wasn’t under any particular pressure – that helps a lot.
Working with Neil, Mari and Janne also opened up somewhat of a can of worms. It was something I’d not considered really. Particularly with the live VST sessions with Neil, I realised I had control over a voice that far exceeded what I could do myself, and this presented a raft of possibilities that would not have been possible before.
Having Mari Kattman singing ‘Divide Us’ is something of an outlier for the album, was it written for a female lead from the off?
The general direction of the album was to try not to get too much into any kind of blueprint. I want to be able to use this as an outlet for some experimentation and musical exploration. From my perspective I think everything ties together nicely, and Mari’s track is a typical example of where I wanted to go with this, not unlike Neil’s ‘Love in Control’ or ‘You Do What You Want’ from ‘The Mirror’ single, or ‘The Ghost of Being Alone’ from the ‘Reset’ single, or Janne’s ‘You Heart is Like An Island’ etc. I see them all as having something “off- kilter” but at the same time, they are a coherent body of work. But then I’ve lived with many of these tracks for a long time, so I’m maybe not the best person to judge.
Was a throbbing Moroder-esque electronic disco tune like ‘The Mirror’ something you had always wanted to do?
Yeah, love that kind of stuff. I’m just generally a fan of arpeggiated bass lines. I don’t think you can go far wrong with a repetitive sequence and a Roland drum machine. Not so much of a fan of disco, but certainly Moroder. I’ve always loved the way bands like DAF, NITZER EBB and PORTION CONTROL used the technique, but I always longed to hear something like that with a little more melody. These influences still play a big part in what I try to do and they raise their head periodically.
‘Echo Chamber’ brings in vocoder and throughout ‘Watching Sleepers’, you use a variety of vocal processing and tuning techniques, what do you say to those who feel that technology should not be used on the voice as it is cheating?
Vocal manipulation is pretty much a mainstay of every record now. If you have the tools to fix vocal issues, then most people will choose to use them. It doesn’t make any sense to release something that contains fixable mistakes. That said, I did all the vocals on ‘Watching Sleepers’ with little to no tuning work, instead opting to re-sing them where pitching was a noticeable problem. I had the time to do this, so it wasn’t an issue. I think it made the album a lot more ‘organic’ sounding and opened up the dynamics in general.
HOWEVER – I’ve got no problem in taking backing vocals and tuning them until they are unrecognisable, completely changing the melody and timing. Creating artificial vocal lines using the DAW, or tape recorders, loop stations, vocoders – whatever – all fair game. I don’t know about cheating – I find excessively tuned vocals obvious and annoying. I like the natural sound of untuned or ‘minimally’ tuned vocals, but I certainly wouldn’t leave obvious flaws unfixed if I thought it made the record worse for it.
How did the idea of using other vocalists for certain songs come about? How much of the album had been completed before this happened?
As I said, it initially started with ‘Divide Us’ and Mari Kattman. She also later contributed to the track ‘Watching Sleepers’ and ‘The Grace of Heavy Lifting’. I then asked Neil Francis to do the vocals for ‘Love in Control’, which again was somewhat of a revelation. Neil subsequently sung on ‘Happiness’, ‘Get Ready’, ‘Hive’, ‘Have You Seen Them Fight?’ and ‘Watch Me Die’. He also did backing for ‘Losing Our Way’ and ‘Echo Chamber’. With Janne, the process was slightly different. With all the other collaborations I’d done to that point, I’d recorded the songs with my vocals and we worked from there. With Janne I wrote the track specifically for him, taking into account his work with his band LAKESIDE X.
You did a combination of joint and remote collaborations, an example of the former being with Janne?
All the collaborations were done using VST Connect apart from Mari, where we just swapped files. The same was true with Howie Venton and his piano contribution to ‘The Sound of Running’. That worked well with Mari and Howie, but I did find the VST Connect experience so much more productive and flexible with Neil and Janne. What was great is that we could work together in real time, trying ideas, making up new harmonies, talking about arrangement, adding new musical parts etc. without having to wait for files to be sent. I could do as many takes as I thought we needed and at the same time I could keep an eye on background noise, levels, popping, mic presence and so on. It’s a game changer for me and has opened up a world of possibilities.
Were you pleasantly surprised when Neil Francis presented this Gene Pitney vibe to ‘Love In Control’?
‘Love in Control’ is a track that both myself and Neil are very proud of. He definitely brought something special to that recording and it remains one of my favourite tracks on the album, if not of my writing career. I was always looking for a kind of 50s feel to that track, and he delivered something that was both vintage and contemporary. We’re both very proud of the results.
Do you have any particular favourite tracks on ‘Watching Sleepers’?
I love all of the tracks to be honest. It’s difficult to single anything out as they all have their stories and they all mean different things to me. I just love the album as a complete body of work. To me, it would be like naming your favourite part of a new car – sure, it’s possible, but it’s all about how it works as a whole.
You also recently did a cover of ‘The Other Side Of Life’ for the JAPAN tribute album ‘Still Life In Polaroids’, what inspired you to record a version of the ‘Quiet Life’ album closer?
I was asked to contribute to the Coitus Interruptus Productions’ album ‘Still Life in Polaroids’. I actually chose a different track, but someone was already working on it, so I went with ‘The Other Side of Life’ although I hadn’t heard the track for some time. When I finally got around to listening to it again, I’d forgotten that much of the track is instrumental and it’s pretty long. So I kind of arranged it like a single and tried to get to the meat of the song without making it too meandering. It was pointless trying to emulate the musicianship as I’m not that skilled. To me it has a great hook, but it’s somewhat buried on the original. It was fun and thanks go to Yvette Winkler for making it happen.
Where have you gained the most satisfaction in doing BLACKCARBURNING?
My main satisfaction with music is twofold. I love the programming and working with electronic instruments – it was the reason I started writing music in the first place and remains my passion.
Secondly, I love the moment when something is finished. Many musicians struggle with this part of the process and for those people, nothing is ever really finished. I’ve got very good at drawing a line under something and moving on, so that moment when that decision is made and I can listen to the track as a finished piece of work is very special to me.
What is next for you?
My primary focus over the next year is going to be new MESH material and new BLACKCARBURNING material. I’m setting myself up for a lot of work, but I’ve learnt to manage my time and my priorities better (work and people) over the last couple of years, removed a lot of time-wasting and general distractions that were stopping me from being as productive as I like.
I’m also going to take some holiday…
ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its sincerest thanks to Mark Hockings
Additional thanks to Christian Petke at COP International
CREEP SHOW are back and their second album ‘Yawning Abyss’ is possibly more accomplished than their acclaimed debut ‘Mr Dynamite’.
An electronic supergroup comprising of John Grant, Stephen Mallinder, Ben “Benge” Edwards and Phil Winter, ‘Yawning Abyss’ was produced in Cornwall at Benge’s MemeTune studio.
John Grant is a successful singer / songwriter in his own right while Stephen Mallinder first found fame as a founder member of industrial dance pioneers CABARET VOLTAIRE before joining Benge and Phil Winter in WRANGLER.
While ‘Yawning Abyss’ began as a bunch of sonic experiments using mostly Roland and Moog synths before being taken to Iceland for Grant and Mallinder to record their vocals, what particularly comes across in this sophomore CREEP SHOW adventure is its sense of fun and camaraderie, despite the tensions and menace captured within the resultant music.
With Stephen Mallinder slightly distracted by TikToker Rachel and her amusing posts about being disturbed by hearing CABARET VOLTAIRE’s ‘Soul Vine (70 Billion People)’ on a “cursed” mispressing of the Taylor Swift album ‘Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)’, he took time out from his Twitter account and sat alongside John Grant to have a quick chat with ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK about the making of ‘Yawning Abyss’…
How do you look back on the making of ‘Mr Dynamite’ and its reception with your relative fan bases?
John Grant: I just remember that we had a lot of fun in the studio and didn’t really have a specific vision for the record. It was just friends seeing what they could come up with and we all had pretty hectic schedules at the time, so it wasn’t terribly easy to get together.
Stephen Mallinder: I think on reflection it was such a joy because we had no intention other than exploring all the ways the four of us connected artistically and refusing to have anything but a good time doing that. I’m glad people liked it but with respect, we did what we thought was right for us and figured that’s what people would want.
You all met up in Cornwall to lay down the musical bones of ‘Yawning Abyss’, was all the material created from scratch or were there ideas that you didn’t use in your own various guises and productions which were brought in?
John Grant: It was all from scratch.
Stephen Mallinder: It was all us from the very first note…
With this being your second album together, were there any new methods or roles in the creative dynamic that were consciously altered since ‘Mr Dynamite’? Were things even more relaxed this time round as sophomores?
John Grant: I would say we all pretty much played the same roles. Things were even more relaxed this time around. I even fell asleep a few times. While I was singing ‘Yahtzee!’ for example.
Stephen Mallinder: It was a big soup each of us adding ingredients until it tasted perfect. Yes, I had to shake the man awake in ‘Yahtzee!’
Which was everyone’s favourite synths or devices that they used on the album?
John Grant: Maybe the Serge or Mod Cam modular.
Stephen Mallinder: The modular to play hi-hats… old school wrangling…
The lyrics were written and recorded in Iceland, what did that vibe provide that wasn’t possible in Cornwall?
John Grant: I don’t think Iceland made anything possible that wasn’t possible in Cornwall. Except maybe working with engineer Kurt Uenala who has a deep knowledge of Ableton which is what we worked in during the session in Iceland. So he always has a trick or two up his sleeve.
Stephen Mallinder: Iceland was a result of needing to make the most of our available time but it did give things a twist and as John said, Kurt was great to work with and, for me, time in one of the most stunning places on earth.
‘The Bellows’ opens the album and features an array of vocal treatments and Middle Eastern resonances to set the scene?
John Grant: I’m pretty sure this is not a question.
‘Moneyback’ features an alternating avant-rap on crypto currency, how was that inspired?
John Grant: We’re always thinking about the myriad ways the money system sucks as one confronts that all day every day.
Stephen Mallinder: It was a nice way to bounce our voices together and the track pushed it into to the pacey electro vibe.
How did ‘Yahtzee!’ come into being, it’s quite bonkers!?
John Grant: It’s a meditation on the state of things in the US. Pretty much wrote itself. It’s just what came into my head for that music in that moment.
Stephen Mallinder: Pure energy from John and pulls no punches. A response from the gut to the times we live in.
It’s interesting how varied the tracks are with the trancier house influences on ‘Wise and the darker funkier territory of ‘Matinee’ as well?
John Grant: This is also not a question…
Stephen Mallinder: Variety is the spice … we ain’t one trick ponies, nor could ever be.
‘Bungalow’ is possibly the most conventional song on the album, it’s like electronic Bond theme?
John Grant: That sounds about right.
Stephen Mallinder: I think it’s the most beautiful and evocative track on the album – the perfect marrying of one of today’s greatest voices with lush, creeping electronics. An honour to do.
Do you each have a favourite track from ‘Yawning Abyss’? Would you like to do a third CREEP SHOW record?
John Grant: I love the melancholy of ‘The Bellows’ and how haunting the vocoded vox are. We definitely want to do another record.
Stephen Mallinder: I’m with John on ‘The Bellows’ but also think the title track captures what we achieved with the album.
There are a number of live dates coming up this summer, what will be the set up for that and what’s next after?
Stephen Mallinder: Come along and see… who knows what’s on the next page?
ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its grateful thanks to John Grant and Stephen Mallinder
Midge Ure celebrates his 70th birthday and a life in music this Autumn with a special concert at The Royal Albert Hall on Wednesday 4th October 2023.
The start of his career included a spell as a teen idol in SLIK, embracing punk in its offshoot PVC2 and a doomed attempt to cross THE SEX PISTOLS and BAY CITY ROLLERS in the power pop of RICH KIDS with Glen Matlock, Steve New and Rusty Egan. But the demise of the latter coincided with the wider emergence of electronic music such as KRAFTWERK, LA DÜSSELDORF and YELLOW MAGIC ORCHESTRA which inspired Ure to buy his first synthesizer, a Yamaha CS50.
Licking his wounds, Ure went on to help pioneer the sound of the New Romantics in VISAGE with a collective project inspired by an idea from Rusty Egan and fronted by Steve Strange, the face of The Blitz Club. Another involved in VISAGE was Billy Currie and at his invitation, Ure joined him, Chris Cross and Warren Cann in the classic line-up of ULTRAVOX in 1979; the quartet had an impressive run of hit singles and albums with their unique brand of symphonic electronic rock which has since been borrowed and taken into the stadiums of the world by MUSE.
With a successful solo career that has included several No1s around the world, the lad from Cambuslang near Glasgow can also add his central role in BAND AID as well as collaborations like ‘Yellow Pearl’ with Phil Lynott, ‘After A Fashion’ with Mick Karn and ‘Dark Dark Night’ with Moby to his name.
This is all without mentioning a number of adverts including original music for ‘Levi’s’ in their iconic ‘Rivets’ campaign and the title song from his 1996 album ‘Breathe’ soundtracking a memorable Swatch campaign in Europe; more recently ‘Fade To Grey’ which Ure co-wrote with Billy Currie and Chris Payne has featured in reels for fashion houses Chanel and Dior. Meanwhile, there have been a number of key TV synchronisations, one of the most notable being the use of ‘Vienna’ during the final episode of the unsettling 2017 Netflix series ’13 Reasons Why’.
Midge Ure spoke to ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK about his recent live tours, his back catalogue, music technology, collaborating with a former member of KRAFTWERK, his upcoming 70th birthday concert and his future plans…
You are fresh off the back off the ‘Voice & Visions’ tour and had the ‘1980’ tour before the pandemic, has the success of these tours surprised you?
Yes! I won’t lie! I really wasn’t sure how things would pan out. The thing about the music business is it’s like riding a rollercoaster. Sometimes it takes you to the heady heights of fame, the other times it takes you to almost obscurity.
I just consider myself a working musician, it’s all to do with perception. There are people out there who given the opportunity of finding that you’re playing somewhere, will come and see you because they bought the records or followed you for “X” amount of years. But they get side-tracked with family or whatever; then they’re off the radar and don’t know what you’re doing because they don’t go to venues, they’re not on social media, they don’t look at posters, they don’t buy music papers (if there is such a thing anymore), all of that stuff!
So it was a new young agent who came along and said “you’re missing out on a lot of people here” and he was brilliant at marketing. When we did the ‘1980’ tour, I was stunned at the amount of people who said “Wow! Are you still touring?”… WELL YEAH! CONSTANTLY! But I could be playing down the road from you and you wouldn’t know! *laughs*
It’s just how it works so it’s been a lot of that. The ‘1980’ tour was great and I had trepidations about the ‘Voices & Visions’ tour not being able to stand up next to it… but I think it’s superceded it, I think it got better so yeah, I’m very pleased that was the case 😀
Your audience generally doesn’t appear to like standing up and dancing much?
You have to understand the demographic you know, there’s a lot of the audience who do want to stand up but a lot of the theatres and venues that you play don’t want people standing up for whatever reason! I mean, they’re hardly the age group that’s going to start trashing the joint!
But a lot of venues, when you do see people standing up to have a little dance or try to get into the aisle or come down the front, you’re not allowed to do it. Also, there is an element of the audience who can’t, they want to sit down… I’m sure they’d love to be able to get up and do whatever but it doesn’t work that way, a lot of venues just won’t let them do it and physically they can’t.
In an ideal world, you’d have a venue that has a seated upstairs and a standing downstairs, that would appeal to everybody but it’s just one of those things, we can’t control that. So usually at the end of the set, I’m sure you’ve seen it, in the last couple of songs, I say “Right! Stand up, it’s too late to throw you out so get up!” and they do.
Yes, the ones they do always seem to get up for are ‘Dancing With Tears In My Eyes’ and ‘All Stood Still’, two songs about nuclear Armageddon which does have a sort of amusing irony about it… *laughs*
That IS an amusing irony about it, I hadn’t thought about that! *laughs*
But it’s probably more to do with the fact that we’re doing slow atmospheric tunes… normally when you build a set, you would finish with the last 5 or 6 songs all up there like ‘Hymn’, ‘Dancing…’ and ‘If I Was’. You stack it full of things so that people don’t get a chance to sit down, that’s how you would do it. But in true ULTRAVOX form, we ended up finishing with ‘Visions In Blue’ and coming back on to try and build it all back up again, making it difficult for ourselves! *laughs*
Your pal Glenn Gregory once said to me that HEAVEN 17 has three distinct audience types, the loyal fanbase, those who only like the first two albums and those who only like the hits, have you worked out your audience demographics?
Not really, I suppose the majority of the audience will be people who bought the ‘Vienna’ album and all of that stuff in the first place, so they’re kind of revisiting their youth. They’ve probably never gone away as such as music lovers, but there’s maybe an element of the whole retro thing about it, everyone would like to be 18 again and relive the folly of what they were up to and re-wear the clothes and still have the hair they used to have, all of that stuff!
But there’s also people, a much smaller element, who have just discovered you though a sync on movies or Netflix series or video games or whatever, they’ve discovered you through an entirely different route and in a retrospective way, they hear a track they find interesting and then look you up to find a world of music they didn’t know existed and they work backwards. That’s great that it happens so there’s them and people coming back reliving their retrogressive thing. It’s a bit of a mixed audience, but I can’t categorise them all lie that. I’ve got solo fans who won’t necessarily like ULTRAVOX and vice versa.
Were there any particular of those ULTRAVOX and VISAGE songs which you played on those two tours that have you rekindled a love for?
Yeah, I absolutely loved doing ‘Rage In Eden’ which is a lovely one to do. I love that little textural section we did in the middle of the ‘Voice & Visions’ show where is all kind of calmed down and got moody and all simplistic. I love doing that stuff as much as strapping on a guitar and making all the noise. I don’t get the opportunity to do that often, to delve back in and pull things out.
In the same way on previous tours, we rediscovered ‘I Remember (Death In The Afternoon)’, we rediscovered ‘Lament’, you kind of forget about them. You categorise them in your brain and go “that was then, I’ll do other things now” and then you play it out of the blue and it just comes back again, the reason that you liked it and the feeling you got from playing it all comes flooding back… it’s not gone away, I’ve pushed it away, put it in a cupboard and locked it. But now I’ve opened up the cupboard again, it’s the exact same thing! It’s fantastic there are many songs that still lend themselves to live performance.
One non-single track that found a place on both tours is ‘Astradyne’ which is still mighty after all these years; I was saying to Vicky Harrison of POLYCHROME at the Cambridge gig about how the synthwave scene seems to think the soundtrack of ‘Drive’ and other synthwave instrumentals are The Bee’s Knees, but I always throw ‘Astradyne’ at them! *laughs*
Yeah, it seems to work, it works on many levels for me having just sung on stage for an hour and a half, it gives me a 6 minute respite, a chance to catch my breath and let the vocal chords rest a bit. By the time I’ve done ‘Astradyne’ which was the first track in the encore, I’ll be screaming my head off doing ‘Dancing’ and ‘All Stood Still’ on top of having just done the main show. So in that respect, it’s good for me, it paces me and it gets me ready for the last couple of songs.
As a piece of music, ‘Astradyne’ still works, it’s incredibly simplistic and it takes me right back to what it was like in that rehearsal room with ULTRAVOX and we started throwing our ideas round for the ‘Vienna’ album. I remember distinctly prior to the album coming out in America when I was there to do some promo and when they thought we were going to be huge there, they had me in a limousine with a couple of record company bods. We were driving to Long Island to do WLIR which was one of the New Wave radio stations that would play us and the record company bods wanted listen to the album. So I put this cassette on and you could see their faces drop a minute in when realised there weren’t any vocals! They asked “Is this is the first track?”, I replied “Yup! This is the opening track” and they were telling me “you can’t use that!” *laughs*
It worked for us and it brings back good memories.
Was ‘Himmelblau’ by Wolfgang Riechmann an influence on ‘Astradyne’ at all?
I’m not sure, but Riechmann was one of the artists that Rusty Egan used to play at Billy’s and The Blitz Club. It was probably more CAN, NEU! and eventually LA DÜSSELDORF, all that kind of melodic German stuff. The idea for the melody, I did that and I have no idea where it came from, it’s probably subliminal, there’s probably snippets of styles and elements that I’d heard in the club. It’s not a melody as such because I’m not a keyboard player, it was something that just came up with my natural sense of melody. Of course, Billy was doing that lovely piano thing underneath it all and it made it all move, it was great. I love doing it.
‘Fade To Grey’ continues to have a life of its own and has been used recently in those stylish Gris Dior and Coco Chanel Crush adverts… have you seen them and how well do you think they’ve used the music?
I think they’re re-recordings aren’t they? Or is one of them an original?
They both sound original, especially the Coco Chanel Crush one…
It’s a very dodgy area, I know some adverts use the original recording but since Rusty and Steve Strange tried to get together in 2011 to do a VISAGE Part 2, they opened up a nest of worms and certain people were allowed access to the songs! There are some very good copies out there that sound very much like the original that Steve sang, so it’s very difficult to tell what the original one is! These programmers just do an amazing job and copy it note-for-note, then the original recording doesn’t have to be paid for or whatever. So there’s a way round the whole sync thing and the cost of putting originals on commercials and films!
A lot of artists do it and re-record their own songs note-for-note and try to make it sound like the original so that when they’re asked for example, a ‘Vienna’ or whatever, you’ve already done a brand new ‘Vienna’ that sounds exactly like the old one and then you get all the money… but I couldn’t think of anything worse, I’d rather go to the dentist and have my teeth pulled out than go back and try and recreate something that you’ve done! *laughs*
Talking of VISAGE, ‘The Anvil’ album is in my opinion, one of your most underrated bodies of work and it didn’t get included as part of the ‘Voice & Visions’ tour?
It didn’t and that’s simply because if you start cherry picking and looking at the stuff AND things people would expect to hear, you’d be on stage for 3 hours, it would have been crazy!
Yes, there was something quite grown-up about that record I think. The first VISAGE album was done in a very sporadic way, it was grabbing moments of studio time, and it was rare there was more than two people from VISAGE in the country at the same time! It was spread out like over a year or so, a pocket of time here and a pocket of time there. So it was a very broken up project.
When it came to doing ‘The Anvil’, it was more succinct, you could get together and go write, get a studio in London. The first VISAGE album was done in Martin Rushent’s studio before he had even built it, in his hut at the bottom of his garden; the facilities weren’t great but we still managed to pull it off.
So there’s something more coherent about that second album and it had moved on from just the electronics, there was Gary Barnacle and his sax on ‘Night Train’. Is it overlooked? I don’t know, a few people cite that as one of their favourite albums, maybe because it was a bit more “human”, more “soulful” than the first, and maybe because a bit more time was spent on it, rather than scattering seeds to the four winds you know…
You are celebrating your 70th birthday at the Royal Albert Hall, will this be an all-encompassing career show or will it mostly centre around the BAND ELECTRONICA format which you have had since 2017? Are you planning any special guests, is there anything that you can talk about?
Anything I can talk about? That I know about of course! *laughs*
No, not that I know of! When I did the Albert Hall in 1991 under my own steam, I had a gospel choir, guests like Paddy Moloney from THE CHIEFTAINS, all these people coming on and I’ve kind of done that. The speculation online is just rife, like “ULTRAVOX are back!”, “there’s going to be a choir”, “there’s going to be an orchestra” and “the full ‘Orchestrated’ album is going to be performed”… AAARGH! I’m not sure!
It’s like when you have a new record coming out and you’ve just started it, you’re doing interviews about it and people ask “what’s it called?”… well, I’ve got no idea, it will be called something when I’ve finished the album *laughs*
So I’ll know what will be in the show when I’ve formulated those ideas, because it’s still very fresh… when you get the Albert Hall, you have to tell people it’s going to happen and then figure out how you’re going to fill it and what the content is going to be. But I’m already formulating a few little things, but I don’t want to throw the kitchen sink at it because that can just detract from what it is. It’s a celebratory thing, I will cherry pick songs in various formats that I think were important during those 70 years I’ve been breathing oxygen. I still haven’t figured out how I’m going to do it, but the basis of it will be the BAND ELECTRONICA basis because we’re up and running, we’re hot just now and we have to consolidate what we have already to be sensible about it.
Have you ever thought about doing ‘Rivets’ live, perhaps as an intro into another song like how you did with ‘Yellow Pearl’ in your various show?
I haven’t! BUT IT’S NOT A BAD IDEA!
But then again, you’d have to figure out where you would do something like that. Doing that in front of your own audience is fine, but doing that in the ‘Let’s Rock’ and ‘Rewind’ Festival things, people are still scratching their heads as to why I’m playing the ‘Top Of The Pops’ theme because the majority there, they’re not your audience! *laughs*
My audience, there’s a very good chance they will know that ‘Rivets’ was a piece of music that I did with Chris Cross… it’s certainly food for thought, I’ve never played it live so it would be interesting! *laughs*
Of course, what became ‘Love’s Great Adventure’ was intended as music for a Levi’s advert? What happened there?
The ‘Rivets’ thing was very last minute, I got a phone call from one of the guys at Chrysalis saying he was on this board and he saw this big budget Levi’s commercial that was filmed by one of the Scott brothers, it had gone right up to the line. It was shown at this big premiere in Stockholm and someone at Levi’s said they didn’t like the music! This person said he needed something that was rousing and atmospheric like ULTRAVOX.
So this Chrysalis guy said he knew me and I got the call a few days later. I saw the clip in the afternoon and wrote the ‘Rivets’ piece of music that night. I recorded my parts in the studio but then did the mix with the ad agency and the Levi’s people which was a pain in the backside because all they did was talk through it and I was getting fed up. I was telling them “This is your piece of music, do you want it good or do you want it bad? If you want it good, don’t talk, get out and leave me alone! Let me do the music”.
They had no time to sit and think about it, so they put it on and they loved it. It got a fantastic response so 6 months later, they come back to me and said “we’re doing a follow up called ‘Threads’”, because it was all about the rivets before, but now it was threads! So this ad had been filmed in Mexico, there’s this guy fishing for marlin, there’s all these marlins jumping out of the water, it’s a man in the sea against beast type of thing and he’s fighting and then he cuts the line and the line disappears through the water and you zoom in on the line and you see it’s a Levi’s thread to show you how strong it is!
I thought great but this time, they said they wanted it more rhythmic and for me not to do anything melodic, they wanted this pounding thing. So I went off, got my little sampler and banged a garage door again like I did on ‘The Chieftain’, I hit everything and made this very Burundi style rhythmic metallic sounding beast of a thing! I thought it was fantastic and that they’d love it. 3 weeks later, they said “there’s not much tune!”… but they asked for something with no melody or tune! “Oh but we need a melody, we need something that people can sing…” 🤦♂️
So OK, I watched the film again and I saw the marlin jumping up and I came up with this triumphant ‘633 Squadron’ type thing with this stomp. I took it to them and told them “this really works well”… 3 weeks later, I get the phone call, “Umm, can you put more bass on it?” and I was like “do you mean bass guitar or bass drum or bass synth or overall bottom end, more body?”. Then this is the straw that broke the camel’s back, they said “we want it to sound like the feel of Formica!”. At that point, I asked them to give me the music back, I gave them back their money and that was that.
I think they got Jeremy Healey of HAYSI FANTAYZEE to do some music, I took the track back and Billy Currie put various bits on it, I wrote some lyrics, a topline and turned it into ‘Love’s Great Adventure’. Their advert failed miserably and a month later, they had to put on ‘Rivets’ again as they had all these bookings in the cinemas around the world for this ‘Threads’ advert! It was an interesting thing but it wasn’t my planet!
You’re known for guitars and also for synths, so you combined the two when you got a Roland GR700 guitar synthesizer in 1984 and demonstrated it on ‘Old Grey Whistle Test’, how did you find using it and why do you think they never really took off in the way say wind synthesizers did?
They probably did, they’re much better now than they were back then, they didn’t track very well. A keyboard, unless you actually press a key down, you don’t get a note from it. If you touch the strings on a guitar synth, it triggers the synthesizer! So just by scratching the strings (which is all part of the sound of normal guitar playing), there’s a sound. So you have to play a guitar synth with kid gloves, you had to be really careful how you played things!
We used it on stage with ULTRAVOX, I can’t remember what we used it on but it was on a couple of things, it was just so volatile and not user friendly. You would have to use it in the studio and it wouldn’t do things that a guitar would do, you can dub strings on a guitar or a violin, but you couldn’t really dub strings on a guitar synth because the synth sound would still come out whether you were holding the strings down or not. So it was a very different way of playing.
They are much better than they were, I’ve got a synth controller guitar here in the studio and it seems to work incredibly well. But technology then hadn’t yet caught up with the idea, so it went the way of many things…
Did you have a favourite keyboard-based synthesizer?
I liked the PPG Wave because it was a hybrid of analogue front end with rotary controls and digital internal. So it was one of those synths that you think you know what kind of sound you are looking for, but on the way to that sound, you create something better or more interesting, this leftfield that’s gone off on a tangent.
A major part of the end of ULTRAVOX and the beginning of the solo stuff, a lot of sounds that are very definable that weren’t presets, that were my sounds, are from that. It was a good instrument to do that with. But you end of getting rid of all the hardware and you end up with software instruments and you’re back to square one *laughs*
Your most recent new track in 2021 was ‘Das Beat’ which you co-wrote with Wolfgang Flür who was in KRAFTWERK, does collaborating with other electronic trailblazers interest you at all?
I wouldn’t have done this had Wolfgang not asked, he came to see me in Germany doing the ‘1980’ tour and we met backstage. He said he was doing an album and he’d love me to be part of it. I thought “great” but it was a matter of what, when and how. The next day on the bus, this thing kept going around my head, ‘Das Boot’ the Wolfgang Petersen movie and then I was thinking ‘Das Beat’ because Wolfgang is the maestro, he’s the electronic rhythm guy, he was the guy we all listened to, the master of “Das Beat”… it tied in so well but he wasn’t too keen on the title until I found out it doesn’t mean anything in German! *laughs*
Wolfgang said it should be “Der Beat” as the correct way of saying it but of course, me not speaking German, I thought ‘Das Beat’, you are the guy, THE BEAT! He wasn’t keen and I think he wanted to try his hand at his own lyrics. I said that there was no reason why we can’t do 2 versions, so he did his own thing on his eventual ‘Magazine 1’ album although he kept the chorus that I’d written with my vocal and I had my own BAND ELECTRONICA single.
But it was great fun delving back into the influences that sparked me off down that particular route, the sounds and the style and writing something in the vein of a very catchy pop version of KRAFTWERK. When I heard him half speak / half singing his lyrics and stuff, I thought “My God, it’s so good, it sounds brilliant!”
I never plan collaborations, they come about just because you meet somebody that you like and they like you, they like what you do and you like what they do. Low and behold, you end up doing something, otherwise, it’s a bit like hard work… you mean you want me to go and write something? *laughs*
What’s next, is a ‘Lament’ + ‘The Gift’ tour a possibility in the future?
Everything is possible in the future, I said many times prior to this ‘Voice & Visions’ tour about how difficult it was fiscally, because we’d agreed costs and fees back in 2019 and the cost of doing it in 2023 was horrendous. I kept saying this was unsustainable, you cannot keep doing this and do this at a loss. The days of record company advances and people buying large amounts of your records are well and truly over. So you have to try and make it work, fiscally as well as musically.
I think the bottom line is we scraped through by the skin of our teeth on this one without having to raise ticket prices… I’m not saying it’s always going to be like that, but you have to figure it all out. You have to think “X” amount of people will want to see you, it costs “X” amount to do the show, “X” amount to pay the crew, the buses, the trucks, the lights etc. And people expect high quality performance, they want to see the great light show, they want to have the atmosphere there. I’m loathed to say we have to stick a fiver on the price of a ticket to make that happen! The end result was great, the response we got from the tour was fantastic.
Being able to do the Albert Hall is phenomenal and I expect next year, there will be plans… we haven’t got anything in place right now for something, but whether I carry on with the two albums retrospective thing or not, I really don’t know. There may be some time out there for some solo stuff, do some of the solo stuff that doesn’t get an airing very often! *laughs*
You recently sold your back catalogue, what will this give you as an artist, is it financial security for yourself and your family?
Well, my family more than anything… I’m a fairly basic character these days, I think I learned humility with the demise of ULTRAVOX and the beginning of BAND AID. I don’t need a lot, I’m fairly satisfied with what I have. But the music industry is such a complex thing, my kids aren’t part of the music industry, they would never understand where money comes from or where you would go to get it that’s your royalties. It’s so complicated because labels sell on to other labels. You find releases that you didn’t even know were coming out but you are still on the royalties for it and you have to find these things.
It took years to try and sort it out and tie it all up with one big ribbon. A lot of artists are doing the same thing. I mean, if I’m not around, nobody is going to know where this is and it always goes into a big black hole and disappears. So it was the sensible thing to do to get your ducks in a row before you sing your final note…
What has been your artistic career highlight? How do you look back on getting a solo No1 in ‘If I Was’, something which was cruelly denied to ULTRAVOX?
There are loads and it’s not usually the big things, the No1s or whatever! I suppose it’s the collaborations, the buzz you STILL get from meeting someone you respect and admire, and THEY know who you are! You can’t buy that! That’s just crazy, there’s still that kid walking around Cambuslang in awe of everybody else and then you find you are stomping the same stage as them.
Those moments were great, playing guitar with Eric Clapton one-on-one, the duet with Kate Bush or being on stage with Peter Gabriel, whatever it happens to be. They’re the moments that success brings you, not owning the fleet of cars or a boat or whatever, those things are transient.
But the other stuff is real and that’s just amazing! So if you could tie all those up in a documentary, I’d sit and watch it! *laughs*
ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its warmest thanks to Midge Ure
Best known as a founder member of JOY DIVISION and NEW ORDER, Peter Hook is the bassist with the low slung melodic style that has spawned many imitators including Simon Gallup, Carlos Dengler, Rodney Cromwell and Pavel Kozlov.
Since his more than well-documented joyless division from NEW ORDER, Peter Hook has focussed on his biggest love, the live stage to present the albums of JOY DIVISION and NEW ORDER in full to The True Faithful. He has also published books about his time in both bands and as a co-owner of the Manchester night club ‘The Haçienda’ subtitled ‘How Not To Run A Club’.
There have also been the side-projects REVENGE, FREEBASS and MONACO, the latter of which with David ‘Pottsy’ Potts was the most successful, spawning the No11 hit single ‘What Do You Want From Me?’.
As well as undertaking an Autumn tour of Europe performing the material from the JOY DIVISION and NEW ORDER compilations ‘Substance’, PETER HOOK & THE LIGHT will be playing a number of festival dates including Rochester Castle Concerts in Kent with SOFT CELL on Friday 7 July 2023.
When the people listen to you, don’t you know it means a lot? In a break from rehearsals, ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK had an interesting lively conversation with Peter Hook about his past, present and future…
Photo by Mark Walker / MNW Visuals
You are going to be opening for SOFT CELL at Rochester Castle, did you know that ‘Temptation’ came out the same week as ‘Torch’ in May 1982?
No I didn’t! You’ve been doing your homework…
Haha! I’m just old enough to have bought both on release day! Did you feel you were onto a breakthrough when you recorded ‘Temptation’?
Not as such, we’d already experimented with the synths and drum machine on ‘Everything’s Gone Green’ which was the B-side of ‘Procession’, so we felt we were well on the way with that. ‘Temptation’ was jammed live which seems quite radical these days. Barney would have a few Pernods and then warble; we would listen to the tapes and pick bits that we thought sounded good, work on the lyrics together and then the song was done.
So ‘Temptation’ and funnily enough, all those early songs, we finished them afterwards live, we honed them and used the record as an experiment as well as using the live renditions. My god, we don’t do that anymore! *laughs*
But we did have a very strange attitude as soon as we’d written a song… to be honest, we had very little interest in it after it was done and the big interest was the next one. So after ‘Temptation’, we were off doing ‘Blue Monday’ and working on through to ‘Power, Corruption & Lies’. It was a very young attitude, we played them live because we needed to, but every time you got a better song, it would knock an older one off y’know… they were heady days shall we say!
Does this explain why in the rarer days back then that NEW ORDER would get on the telly, it would tie in with the release of a new single, but then you didn’t perform that new single and played something else? *laughs*
Yeah, we would just move on, we really weren’t made to “play the game” as such by Factory and we could more of less do what made us happy. It’s quite interesting because it’s quite naïve, we weren’t interested in chart success, we still wanted to act like THE SEX PISTOLS acted, to be awkward, to be anarchistic! The whole point about being in a group was to tell everyone to f**k off and enjoy it, to get your own back on all the people who made you do what they said etc and all this cr*p.
The thing was, we were very happy to “cock a snoot” shall we say, in the true tradition of punk bands by not doing what people expected. It got us into a few nasty situations all over the world from Bradford to bloody Hamburg to Australia, we’d have riots with people quite rightly not agreeing with what we were doing! It was intensely exciting and intensely intoxicating, we were very awkward for a very long time! *laughs*
‘Torch’ was actually a dancefloor favourite during the early days of The Haçienda, it was No5 in the first Members’ End Of Year Newsletter while ‘Temptation’ was No9!?
There you go, how interesting…
… but The Haçienda was quite different in 1982?
Oh my god! Y’know, The Haçienda was quite post-punk then, there weren’t many people there, it was very much a “dressed-up” audience… when you get to acid house and Madchester, it was very dressed down. But those days in 1982-1983-1984, the audience dressed up in The Blitz mode, that New Romantic style, there was quite a fashion aspect to the very few people that were there at that time. So I can well imagine ‘Torch’ being popular because it was very much of its day musically at that time, but things changed completely in 1986-1987 onwards!
Photo by Chi Ming Lai
For an event like this at Rochester Castle where you are not headlining, how do you go about choosing the setlist? Do you get all bloody minded and not play any hits, or… what’s your take on it now? *laughs*
Haha! My take on it now is that everyone is there to do the same thing, which is to enjoy themselves. And what we love is a bit of familiarity and shall we say, paying homage to great things that have happened to us while we were listening to this music. So it’s much easier to throw yourself into it. I mean, I do loads of gigs, so if I want to do a really awkward gig and play all the daft B-sides or the album tracks that are really out there, I can do that and most of the audience still turn up and that’s cool!
But the thing with a festival, it has a different vibe and you want to be part of it, it’s a wave and you want to go with the wave and surf on the top of it! You don’t want to be fighting your way through it. So it’s much easier to be of the moment at these gigs. The thing is, it’s SOFT CELL so if they didn’t play their hits, people do feel aggrieved don’t they because they want to celebrate the great times that have been a soundtrack to our lives.
So I will be doing songs like ‘Temptation’ and ‘True Faith’ etc enjoyably… the weird thing about NEW ORDER is we can safely say none of us enjoyed ourselves for year after year after year. I’m a lot happier and it’s about having that freedom to be able to play what you want to play, when you want to play it, without some miserable tw*t giving you grief! It’s just as simple as that! What do you need at a festival, you don’t want someone miserable do you?
Photo by Chi Ming Lai
This year, there’s been the 40th anniversary of ‘Blue Monday’ and ‘Power Corruption & Lies’, how do you look back on the making of those records?
Hahaha! The way I look at NEW ORDER, it’s like a parallel universe! We were together for 31 years, Barney, Steve and I, we wrote all the music together, we did everything together and the thing is, we fell out, just like most groups do. But in a typical NEW ORDER fashion, we’ve managed to carry this for nearly 20 years and none of us have been big enough to put an end to it. I always view anything to do with a celebration with… we don’t do celebrations in NEW ORDER because we can’t! It’s just the way it is! But ‘Blue Monday’ is still being used in motion pictures, five this week, it’s a wonderful achievement after all that…
‘Age Of Consent’ is rightly hailed as a NEW ORDER classic but ‘The Village’ is very underrated…
Hahaha! Songs like ‘The Village’ and ‘Face-up’, they’re such great pop tunes, yet never released as singles. ‘The Village’ has got an amazing sequenced keyboard line by Bernard, he really went to town in programming that! If you listen to the keyboard programme without taking notice of the vocals, he did an amazing job on it… it was really experimental, in a funny way like SOFT CELL or THE HUMAN LEAGUE than what people think of as NEW ORDER.
The thing is, NEW ORDER had to compromise between the rock side because of me (*laughs*) and the keyboard side because of Bernard, so you’ve got that wonderful marriage of rock and pop, whereas THE HUMAN LEAGUE or SOFT CELL would be much more keyboard-led. Do me a favour and listen to ‘The Village’ and the way the keyboard line builds and the way that it changes over those 4 and a half minutes…
I spoke to someone who Bernard has produced and he has definitely got this “something” when it comes to programming sequencers…
Oh god yeah, I mean Bernard really bored the arse off us while he was programming all these slightly different things. But then when you put them together, run it as a backing track and everybody goes over it, you got to give it to him, it’s the mark of a genius… I can’t stand the b*stard but I do have to give him his due for being such a wonderful musician.
The thing is, if you’re not programming, you can’t see or have the vision to wonder what’s going to happen and what you are searching for. And when you are doing it and you are right on the moment, you have a knack of disappearing and Bernard did that, shall we say! *laughs*
Photo by Chi Ming Lai
The ‘Low-life’ boxed set came out earlier this year, is ‘Brotherhood’ on its way? How do you compare the two albums as I see those as like sonic cousins?
Yeah, the ‘Brotherhood’ one is on the way… obviously we don’t work together on these! *laughs*
It’s done completely separately and very coldly, the record company are usually the referee on those, but they have put some wonderful stuff together. On these two albums, we had a lot of money so we could actually experiment more and were able to do more versions because we could afford the tape. When we were doing ‘Unknown Pleasures’, ‘Closer’, ‘Movement’ and even ‘Power, Corruption & Lies’, we didn’t have the money for tape, so we had to be very economical with what we were doing. We couldn’t even afford to put a cassette into the machine, we just didn’t have the money to do it.
So by the time of ‘Low-life’ and ‘Brotherhood’, there was a lot more freedom to have different versions, so that means the record company when they go through the tapes, they’ve got loads of different things that they can feature, even stuff that I’d forgotten about. They are exciting from that point of view. And also, you do get the thing about the rehearsal tapes which I don’t have access to sadly. They do have access to a lot of unfinished songs like they did on ‘Low-life’… these sounded quite interesting, even I was listening and thinking “we should have persevered with that one, we could have got a great song out of it”. These boxed sets are interesting but because we can’t stand the bleedin’ sight of each other, they’re always tainted…
Photo by Chi Ming Lai
You will be touring Europe playing both JOY DIVISION and NEW ORDER ‘Substance’ compilations this Autumn, is working out the running order some kind of art or is it actually really straightforward?
No, it’s really straightforward because its chronological as they happen on the records. The only problem you have really is whether you play the vinyl or the CD, because the CD obviously a lot more tracks on it, so you’re actually trying to work it out. The weird thing about the JOY DIVISION ‘Substance’ was a kind of clean-up album, it was everything that we left off or rejected from ‘Unknown Pleasures’ and ‘Closer’, so it’s much more of an intense deal. ‘Substance’ by NEW ORDER was a collection of the singles that largely weren’t on the LPs. So it’s like putting in a heavyweight with a lightweight! *laughs*
So you’ve got to be careful how you do it. The lucky thing for me as a musician is that both JOY DIVISION and NEW ORDER left all their best tunes off the albums! So you can indulge yourself in the albums and there are some really good songs there, but they tend to be heavier and more intense than the single. The wonderful get out clause is that you’ve got the singles at the end! So even though you’ve had a heavy atmosphere, particularly with JOY DIVISION, you’ve got ‘Glass’, ‘Transmission’, ‘Novelty’, ‘Atmosphere’, ‘She’s Lost Control’ and ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ to play.
For the people, and I must admit the whole reason I do this is to be with the people, who love JOY DIVISION and NEW ORDER and who’ve seen it before, it’s interesting for me to put different tracks in each time. So this time, we’re going to try and feature more tracks off the CD… because I don’t want to keep them there for 4 hours, you do have to be careful, I’m not Ken Dodd! *roars of laughter*
It’s funny now to think that ‘Substance’ partly came about due to the then-new technology formats like CD and DAT, yet decades later, the public want vinyl and cassettes?
I think it’s because they have a lot of soul… I did a programme for the BBC about the 80s, it was dead wacky and I really enjoyed it… they sent me a cassette of the interview and when I got it, I thought “oh my god, that’s wonderful”! *laughs*
Luckily for me, because I’ve got a huge collection of cassettes of JOY DIVISION and NEW ORDER, when cassettes started to go, I bought about 4 or 6 cassette players and I’ve got 3 of them still boxed downstairs in my studio. So I can play it… the noise, the imperfections on the vinyl and the cassette, it has a warmth and a personality that let’s face it, a computer and a memory stick just doesn’t.
What’s next for you after the ‘Substance’ tour?
I’m getting ready funnily enough (Boom! Boom!) to do ‘Get Ready’, so I will be doing that in its entirety very soon after the ‘Substance’ gigs in the Autumn.
Photo by Chi Ming Lai
And finally, is there any truth in the rumour that you’re going to do MONACO again?
Yeah, both Pottsy and I ARE going to play more MONACO when we do it… we’ve just had a request to do the first MONACO album ‘Music For Pleasure’ to be reissued on double vinyl with the singles and B-sides by a Dutch company, so you never know.
Both of us have actually moved on from MONACO, we did flirt with it for that festival in Belgium but then Covid came and it sort of just disappeared. It’s one of those funny things, both Pottsy and I are having a great time doing what we are doing, he’s now releasing a lot of music himself that he’s amassed over the years, so he’s happy now. And we’re happy doing THIS together.
So I don’t think we’d do MONACO again even though when we did the JOY DIVISION ‘Orchestral’ shows, we did a wonderful song inspired by Ian Curtis called ‘Higher Love’ which turned out wonderful… we never recorded it, just played it live at the gigs. It’s one of those weird ones, it’s a weird situation but you never know if this reissues LP comes out and it does well, maybe, but I’m not sure…
ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its sincerest thanks to Peter Hook
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.
Follow Us!