Song in My Head

I'm quickly wrapping up the book "Shadowplayers" by James Nice about the rise and fall of Factory Records. It's tremendously dense and very thorough. And the best thing about it is that it has put me in a permanent state of wanting to listen to the great Factory bands from the 80s, and even some of the not so great ones. But I've been thinking a lot about Factory's greatest band -- New Order -- especially because they're touring (again) and several of my friends have seen them in the past few days.

So with that, I report that New Order's "Face-Up" is the Song in My Head. It's the boppy closing track from 1985's Low-Life, complete with a beat reminiscent of "Temptation", a horn section, and some of Bernard Sumner's worst lyrics, save for his reference to the Joy Division song "In a Lonely Place". I mean, "I feel so low, I feel so humble/Sometimes in life we take a tumble" is pretty dreadful, right?


I recently picked up Low-Life on CD -- I found the original Factory Records UK release FACT 100 for four bucks so I snagged it. I had the cassette back in the day -- but not the Factory release -- they were on Quincy Jones's Qwest label in this country.