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.
"Out of Control" by U2. It came on Sirius this morning and it instantly flashed me back to high school, when I got really into early U2. Here's a 1981 live performance from a concert in Belfast -- where they were the opening act and actually had to introduce themselves. And they sound phenomenal. By the way, has there ever been a band who has stayed relevant for as long a time as U2 has? They were still doing great stuff well into the 2000s -- I noticed that VH1 ranked "Beautiful Day" as one of the top songs of the decade. What a run from the boys from Dublin.
OK, you can knock me for this one. It's "A Good Heart" by Feargal Sharkey. I probably haven't thought about this song since 1984. So why is it in my head? I'm reading Shadowplayers, James Nice's incredibly dense book about Factory Records. And in a passage about an early Happy Mondays' track called "Delightful", Shaun Ryder is described as having a great voice in his pre-drug years, a voice reminiscent of the Sharkey's. For the uninitiated, Sharkey led the band The Undertones during the 1970s. In the 80s, he was employed briefly by Depeche Mode founding member Vince Clarke, who had formed The Assembly after disbanding Yaz with Alison Moyet. The Assembly had a big hit in the UK with the rather schmaltzy "Never Never", which is vintage Clarke and sounds just like everything else he's ever done from "New Life" era Depeche Mode, to Yaz, to Erasure. Which is to say it's pretty good. (Here's more.)
New Order's "Blue Monday" is the best selling 12 inch of all time. It's a sequencer-fueled, sample-rich classic -- belonging in equal measure to dance clubs and alternative radio. And I'm learning more about the roots of this classic track.
First, check out Donna Summer's "Our Love" (and the great dancing in this video) -- New Order borrowed the beat wholesale.
Next, some arrangement from Italian club hit "Dirty Talk" by Klein & MBO.
Add a sample from Kraftwerk's "Uranium" (listen for that droning sound)
Finally, as James Nice puts it in his very thorough book about Factory Records Shadowplayers, the "grove and bassline" from "(You Make Me Feel) Mighty Real" by Sylvester. And who says disco is dead?
Oh yeah, add acid. Which Bernard Sumner says the band was out of their heads on when they wrote "Blue Monday". Either way, the result is undeniable: A track that -- three decades on -- has stood the test of time.
Kate Bush is one of those who's a household name in England, yet can only manage a cult following in this country. Her 1985 song "Cloudbusting" is an absolute classic. It's vintage Bush -- with warbly vocals, esoteric lyrics (about Wilhelm Reich) and production via the Fairlight CMI synthesizer, a staple of the phenomenal Hounds of Love album and the state-of-the-art machine of its day. And consider this: "Cloudbusting" was the last track on Side 1, which also featured "Running Up That Hill" and "Hounds of Love". What a side!
Over the years, plenty of artists have gone back and mined Kate Bush to bust clouds of their own. Take Utah Saints -- the Leeds EDM duo sampled Bush's "Cloudbusting" vocals in the appropriately titled "Something Good" from 1992 (and did it again in 2008). That track never fails to put me in an upbeat mood. More recently, the Blacksburg, VA band Wild Nothing turned out a more traditional cover version of the song.
For whatever reason, a lot of Kate Bush songs have lent themselves to very strong cover versions. Like the Futureheads version of the aforementioned "Hounds of Love", and Placebo's version of "Running Up That Hill". And last year, Das Racist's Himanshu sampled "Suspended in Gaffa" for his track "Kate Boosh".
I've been a Kate Bush fan ever since hearing her otherworldly track "The Dreaming" for the first time when I was about 11 years old. I'm just glad her music lives on as new artists discover it.
In my day job, I cover politics and frequently report on public opinion polls. Today, I got an email from Public Policy Polling, a pollster we often cite, with results of a poll they conducted on music.
Some highlights:
Elvis Presley, The Beatles, and the Beach Boys are overall very popular: All three have favorability ratings in the 70s and unfavorability in the teens. Not so for Michael Jackson, who's 48 favorable, 44 unfavorable. And Madonna and Kurt Cobain are under water in terms of favorability -- more people have unfavorable views of them than favorable views. They even polled on Morrissey, who scored a 17 percent favorable rating versus 31 percent unfavorable (with 52 percent not sure).
Now, when you break things down by political persuasion, things get interesting. Democrats overwhelmingly have a favorable view of Michael Jackson, while Republicans do not. And when you ask people who their favorite Beatle is, Democrats say John Lennon while Republicans say Paul McCartney.
Finally, Republicans say the 1950s were the best decade for music. Democrats say it's the 60s. No surprise, there. But overall, three quarters say the best musical decade was either the 50s, 60s or 70s. My favorite musical decade -- the 80s -- only got 15 percent. But at least that beat the rock-and-rap 90s, which had a paltry 6 percent! Sorry, Limp Bizkit.
A good cover song should spotlight the song in a different light. A cover song is weakest when, say a band does the cover in the same vein as a predecessor. Take "I Fought the Law" - probably one of the most covered songs in rock & roll. Originally written by Sonny Curtis in 1959, it gained notoriety when the Bobby Fuller Trio covered it in 1966. Thirteen years later, the song gained a second life when the Clash took it on and transformed it from a ballad of love lost, to an anti-establishment anthem. In 2004, Green Day, the main stream punk, band decided to cover it, but did no justice to the song, playing it exactly like the Clash did in '79. As stated in the movie Multiplicity,
"You know how when you make a copy of a copy, its not
as sharp as... well... the original."
So for today's cover song, I chose Lionel Richie's "Hello" off his mulch-platinum album, Can't Slow Down. The song is probably most famous for the video, with Richie stalking a blind girl, who reciprocates her love for him by creating a clay bust of his head. The song is sappy with it's iconic line "hello, is it me you're looking for..." and a smooth jazz guitar solo.
The cover is by punk rock super-group, Me First and the Gimme Gimmes. The Gimmes are nothing more than a cover band who wear quirky, matching outfits like Hawaiian shirts, or Western wear. or Nehru suits with a fez. They give a completely original take on the song until the end (which nearly ruins the song) when they close with the infamous Three Stooges "Hello."
