Posts by Simon Grigg
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... but I think 15,000,000 exporters will start to get irritated when a prospective customer Googles "Chinese mobile phone supplier" and gets no hits...
If a prospective customer has any clue at all they'll likely use Ali Baba.
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If anyone suggests that Indonesia has the desire to invade anywhere I will slap them
Whaaa...you mean the whole Australian defence stance of the past fifty years has been based on a lie?
I'd get Greg Sheridan onto you if you don't take that back.
But, I suspect Tom's too late. The Chinese have already invaded.
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Rob, I think the point Sacha was making is the Freur (or more correctly @~~~>@~~~>@~~~>) is Underworld..same band.
And yeah, you are right, it was a hit in Europe, Canada, and, indeed the US. God knows why.
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Memory fades on the opening tune at either club. I'm betting Roger Perry would know, but Love song was another big meeting point between post punk and electronica, as was Theme For Great Cities. Big tunes, early 1980s at A Certain Bar etc, and hugely influential across the water in Detroit.
Jim Kerr...it all went a bit wonky after that.
I was playing Love Song when I DJed at Michael Meemee's 40th a few years back, and it was all going a bit nuts (old people thinking they're not courtesy of cheap white wine) when the filth burst in and shut down the party. I asked if I could finish the record but the angry police woman snarled and said it was rubbish anyway, so no.
I had a brief, ugly, Gideon Tait flashback.
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these must indeed be the final days...
The lineage:
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Hasn't this thread wandered places as I slept.
Of course, there probably isn't an apparently unique chord progression anywhere that's never been heard before.
Indeed, but it's eerily close. The flip side of this is like Being Boiled Pt2, but then the single was meant as a pisstake of the whole dour Northern Synth scene I think. There's a cool Diplo remix of that doing the rounds, that old 1% at work again.
here's some Alexander O'neil
Posted that on FB a week or so and got a flurry of swooning old club kids getting all hot and bothered. And, Rich, just so you know, maaaatttteeee, I won't have a word said against Luther either. ;-)
When I was living in mid 1980s London there could be found early on a Saturday morning, moving between nightclubs and football terraces, acres of young soul smoovies wandering the streets chanting Luffa, Luffa . He was like a soul god to hundreds of thousands and there were queues at the import stores when the new single was due.
I had a grounding in Luther and all things musical that were contemporary and black when I flatted with Murray 'Soulfinger' Cammick for 3 or 4 years before I left for London. I was extremely resistant but eventually those Marcus Miller basslines cracked the defenses.
The importance of Luther and Alexander (and not trying to lecture but I guess I am), was that they pulled soul out of the 'burbs and into the inner cites. In the UK The pirate stations banged the stuff out and mashed it with reggae and early hip-hop That eventually gave you the likes of Massive Attack and, yes, Portishead. In NZ you can draw a line between the South Auckland & Porirua kids arriving Luthered-up in the city and the rise of the urban soul movement in the late 1990s and beyond.
Plus they could, y'know, really sing.
Personally, I'm waiting for the critical reappraisal of the jumpsuit Elvis period
Yeah, I know he's almost dead, massive, a fashion disaster and it's one of the most mawkish songs ever, but what a voice.
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That's, to steal a phrase from the vid, ACE, Joe. I love the bit where Barney points to the usually emotionless Gillian and sings "I've never looked at you in a sexual way in my life before".
Never seen it before.
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Or so the typically Tony Wilson legend goes ... That might have just been the first pressing.
It was more than that. Any dosh that Factory made from New Order (and there there are bountiful income streams beyond the 12" sales) was largely funneled back into the black hole that was The Hacienda, and countless other Factory $$$ sponges. New Order must have generated vast sums in the 1980s but it wasn't until the London /FFRR deal was done with Roger Ames, when he extracted them from Wilson in 1990, that they saw much of it.
I'm also impressed that the first track to push the 12'' single vinyl format seems to still be its biggest seller
The 12" was around and selling in big numbers way before Blue Monday, with the first coming out of NY indies like Salsoul around '75 (I can put my hand up and say I co-released the first in NZ, complete with prescient Avatar imagery in '78).
Blue Monday was the first UK hit to be released only on 12", thus it's sales, which put it as the biggest selling 12" in the UK . Records like Beat It and Planet Rock sold many more on 12" worldwide, and another English act, the now largely forgotten Junior Giscombe, outsold it in the US on 12".
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Changing tack, there's a rather fab piece in the Feb Vanity Fair on Disco. The best quote comes from Nile Rogers:
We wrote “Le Freak” because we were denied entry to Studio 54 on New Year’s Eve 1977–78. Grace Jones had invited us to see her show, and she assumed that since our hit “Dance Dance Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah)” was so big we could get in. Normally we could, but it was sold out, she forgot to leave our names at the door, and [doorman] Marc Benecke wouldn’t let us in. He politely told us to fuck off. So Bernard and I went and wrote a song called “Fuck Off”: “Awww … fuck off … ” It sounded great, but I said we can’t have a song on the radio called “Aww … Fuck Off.” So I came up with “Freak Off,” but that wasn’t sexy. Then Bernard came up with “There’s that new dance everybody’s doing called the Freak.” That was our version of “Come on baby, let’s do the Twist.”
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I'd guess perhaps I'm a bit too young to 'get' the relevant context.
No offense intended, Rich, but that line always irks me. Amongst my most loved works are the Miles Davis collection, Birth Of Cool, Elvis' Sun Collection, a couple of Charlie Parker albums from the 1940s, an Ellington collection of remastered 78s dating back to the 1920s, Coltrane's Giant Steps, a swag of of NZ 45s from 60-63, many old Chess masters, and so on..all of which predate my time as a conscious buyer of new records. I love these records and fully understand their relevance and importance, in the same way I get the relevance of Guernicia or a billion other things that predate me.
A re-release with a couple of new remixes seems to come around every few years with depressing regularity, probably around the times the bank manager calls about the mortgage on the 3rd mansion (reckon we're probably about due for one, actually).
New Order notoriously made virtually nothing from Blue Monday in the 1980s (or from their records) although I'm sure they are not short of a few quid, but as of 2009, at least two if them still live in the same street they grew up in.
Blue Monday hasn't been remixed over and over again. There was the '88 mix, and then a brace of mixes in 1995, of which the Hardfloor mix was the killer (that was reissued in 2006), but that's all.
Anything else is a bootleg mix.
When you consider their stature and huge audience, it's amazing how little they've cashed in to date.