Upcoming compilation of music produced by New Order

LTM Records is going to release a new compilation in October, titled Cool As Ice, featuring bands produced by New Order like Section 25, Quando Quango (of future M People leader, DJ and Deconstruction founder Mike Pickering), 52nd Street, and even Thick Pigeon which were rumoured to be drummer Steve Morris and keyboardist Gillian Gilbert themselves, a sort of earlier incarnation of The Other Two... See details on this page of The Crepuscule And Factory Pages: http://home.planet.nl/~frankbri/ltm2377.html

Paddy McAloon - I Trawl The Megahertz

Prefab Sprout have always been a truly special band, their leader Paddy McAloon is one of the greatest geniuses contemporary music has ever had, creating original, intelligent, sophisticated and emotional pop songs, taking much further, in an Eighties post-new wave enviroment, Steely Dan's intuitions about pop being accessible and yet amazing through unpredictable chord changes, soul and jazz attitude and rich instrumentation. His music is where you can hear Burt Bacharach, Stevie Wonder and The Go-Betweens (and much more) at the same time.
There is also a soundtrack element in many Prefab Sprout songs, the tunes and the way they're orchestrated wouldn't be out of place as an intense score for a movie, and while Prefab Sprout's more recent releases were made more and more of perfectly well formed pop songs about love, this first Paddy McAloon solo album is mostly instrumental, magnificently orchestrated and finally reveals the genius as the potentially greatest soundtrack writer ever, the dream of a movie director... if I made a movie I'd write a contract with my blood to have music like this scoring it.
There have been many rumours in the past of McAloon having hours and hours of unreleased adventurous music projects, like a box set about the history of the world, or an instrumental album called I Trawl The Megahertz about voices from the radio. At some point it was believed they were just legends and there was nothing true. Well, now we have this album and we can see at least one rumour was founded. Here there aren't pop songs, this is contemporary music of the highest quality.
The concept behind the album is really emotional and I'd let explain it to the words of Mc Aloon himself, from the booklet of the CD:

Paddy Mc Aloon: I Trawl The Megahertz seems to be a portrait of a woman who is trying to make sense of her life by reviewing selected memories. She is like someone with their hand on a radio dial, tuning into distant stations, listening to fragments of different broadcasts... In 1999 I went through a period of ill health that meant I was unable to write music in my usual manner... the problem was eye surgery followed by shingles followed by eye surgery... so, unable even to read I passed the time by listening to and taping all kinds of TV and radio programmes, concentrating on phone-ins, phrases that originated in different time zones and different frequencies would team up to make new and oddly affecting sentences... it was organising what I had collected into something that was part love song and part lament. Have you an idea how many sad stories are floating over the airwaves after midnight?

So we have the touching title track, 22 minutes long, with a superb orchestration, a really melancholic theme recurring and evolving and the voice of Yvonne Connors reading phrases which speak of really sad and poetic stories... "I said: your daddy loves you very much, he just doesn't want to live with us anymore" or "Oblivious to the opinions of neighbours I will bark to the moon like a dog"...
This masterpiece is followed by wonderful shorter tracks which are entirely instrumental, where sometimes a theme returns but mostly there are amazing melodic evolutions, they have all great orchestral performances and reveal McAloon as the Morricone of the 21st century.
Anyway there are two more tracks with voices, one is I'm 49, which seems like an appendix of the title track, voices from the radio start saying "Do you feel completely abandoned and lost? What's wrong? I'm 49, divorced...".
The other track is Sleeping Rough, and this time the voice is the sublime voice of Paddy McAloon, singing "I'm lost... I'll grow a long and silver beard... and let it reach my knees. I'm lost... and duty will not track me down... asleep among the trees", and while we see now the beard has finally gone, at the turn of the millennium he actually did grow a very long and silver beard...
Believe me, it's one of the most touching moments in music history, the melody, the lyrics and the way he sings, rarely music has seen such emotional music... I think of Billie Holiday singing I'm A Fool To Want You at the end of her glorious but troubled life, or Bjork singing Scatterheart in Dancer In The Dark... I don't think there's anything else that can be compared to this. Sleeping Rough is an unvaluable precious gem, it's just a pity it won't be heard from the pop masses usually purchasing Prefab Sprout albums.
Mc Aloon says this album is a one off, he doesn't plan a solo career, he's working on the next Prefab Sprout album, and while I can't wait for it to listen again to their perfect pop I also hope more of those legendary solo works will surface one day, if only they're as good as a small fraction of I Trawl The Megahertz it's unfair they stay unreleased.

Rating: 9/10

NEW ORDER interview on RockSound, April 2003

This is the rough translation of the interview to New Order appeared on the April 2003 issue of Italian music magazine RockSound. 


NEW ORDER
Our first twenty years
The band from Manchester, without any doubts, was the first and the most believing to bring the punk and new wave audience to the world of dance music, influencing irrevocably the last twenty years of pop culture.

Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Steve Morris (the fourth member, Gillian Gilbert, is temporarily out of the band because of family matters) have just released a luxury 4 CD set box, Retro, and a compilation, International, marking another arriving point.
"The fans were asking us from many years to release a box set, something that could summarize, at least in part, our career. Anyway we weren't interested in the traditional concept of "greatest hits", so we involved other people in the process to choose the tracks. Two journalist friends, Miranda Sawyer and John McCready, have compiled the first two CDs, with stuff from our records, Mike Pickering, the historic DJ at the Hacienda, chose our best remixes, and finally Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream did the live selection. We usually prefer to deal with the new songs, to work on future albums and it did seem interesting to leave this project in external hands.
We were sometimes amazed from the choices too, we rediscovered some tracks we didn't even remember, like the reggae remix of Regret by Sabres Of Paradise. There are also many pictures in the booklet with Retro, which is unusual for us, we used to never use them on our records. Some are truly embarrassing...
The genesis of International, on the opposite, is very easy: it's a compilation especially for our younger audience, which maybe knows us only for our last two or three records. A sort of general introduction to New Order, then."

The most interesting choice is about Bobby Gillespie doing a work of "archeology", researching in twenty years of live recordings to extract only one CD.
"He dealt with this task as a true fan, preferring passion to digital quality, and from a certain point of view I understand him. When you're passionate about a band, yuo buy anything, even badly recorded bootlegs, just to have unreleased tracks. Let's say that between the four of them, it was the most difficult CD to make, because it made emerge again weird sensations we thought we had forgotten."

As we were saying early, New Order have been essential in the passage from the new wave to the indie scene, and the following dance explosion. The track identifying best this fact is, no doubt, the epoch making Blue Monday, of 1983.
"At the time we made a sequencer with a do it yourself kit, and we were starting to experiment with the first drum machines. Blue Monday was useful as a mean of experimentation, it was rather a casual try. The rhythm was made pressing the wrong key, but we immediately liked it. At the time we had friends in Berlin who were sending us boxes with German and Italian dance records, and that was a huge inspiration. The bass line of the track was inspired from Sylvester, the one of You Make Me Feel, while the instrumentation from Dirty Talk by Klein And The MBO, an Italian disco band. We assembled everything like the DJs do today, and we recorded it in a studio where Pink Floyd had worked as well. It had giant speakers and when we heard the track for the first time we went crazy: it was really like being in a club, it was perfect to dance. "

Between 1983 and 1989 New Order had their maximum frenzy period, with a dozen of singles and four albums.
"In that period there wasn't anything else in our lives other than music: we were vampirized by that. We couldn't go on like that, it didn't make sense, we would have stayed one dimensional men, with no alternatives. They were crazy years, and we passed them with a full immersion in the club culture, with all its excesses. We played, we took small amounts of acid, we stayed awake all night to dance in the club: we stopped before it was too late."

For almost their entire career, New Order refused external collaborations. In the recent years things did change. Why?
"Actually it's strange. Only recently we started to deal with external musicians like Bobby Gillespie or Billy Corgan. I think part of that past attitude came from Rob Gretton, our manager, who wanted to protect us from the outside. We are self learning musicians and the easiest way to learn for us is to deal with other people; for this reason, when we start to work on a new album, before playing the instruments, we prefer to listen to all the new music around, and make us indirectly influenced by that. It doesn't always work, though. At the time of Republic, in 1993, our idea was to listen to the Top 10 of Dance music to find some possible source of inspiration. It wasn't possible, they were all just shitty records. "

Interview by Stefano Gilardino

Solo album from Prefab Sprout's Paddy McAloon

Prefab Sprout's ( http://www.prefabsprout.com ) leader Paddy McAloon will release his debut solo album (mostly instrumental), I Trawl The Megahertz, on June 2.

New album by Steely Dan!

Steely Dan ( http://www.steelydan.com ) will release their new album, Everything Must Go, on June 10.