NEW ORDER: Republic

 

(#479: 15 May 1993, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Regret/World/Ruined In A Day/Spooky/Everyone Everywhere/Young Offender/Liar/Chemical/Times Change/Special/Avalanche

 

They are on Venice Beach, recording a Top Of The Pops appearance to promote their single “Regret.” There is some kind of tie-in with the American television series Baywatch, whose star David Hasselhoff introduces their performance. Various bikini-clad extras decorate the scenario. But the band themselves do not look particularly happy.

 

When last we visited New Order it was four years before. Something to be known as “Madchester” was due to break big before that year’s end. The Stone Roses and 808 State were busy making themselves known and Happy Mondays had already become known. Indie and House were happily chatting with each other. Everything appeared hopeful, exciting and colourful.

 

But now it is the spring of 1993. Madchester has long evaporated. The Stone Roses are under long-term legal lockdown because of a contractual dispute. The Mondays disintegrated the year before. 808 State are still out there, as are the Inspiral Carpets (if, by this stage, only just). New Order have glumly regrouped for a new album after years of doing their own things – Electronica, Revenge and The Other Two.

 

“Regret” was hopeful, I’ll give it that, but even though it was still spring, the record and song sounded autumnal. It was one of their best and simplest pop songs, with a guitar hook which isn’t really “Talk Of The Town” but close enough to remind some people of a past. I would deploy the adjective “elegiac,” but everybody uses it with regard to New Order at some point or other. But the song did sound as though the band were closing down.

 

They had split from Factory Records, with some rancour, and much of Republic can be interpreted as commentary on the break – “Ruined In A Day,” “Liar,” “Times Change” and, especially, “Special” make fairly direct references to it.

 

The trouble is that on Republic the band mostly sound split from themselves. This is largely down to the record’s producer Stephen Hague, who seemed intent on turning them into another Pet Shop Boys (or closer to Electronic) – this is not the only 1993 number one album to include a song entitled “Young Offender” (though New Order’s is one of the freshest and lightest things on here – it sounds directed at the collapsed Mondays). Peter Hook is effectively sidelined, or buried too far back in the mix, throughout the album; when we do hear him, it is in the manner of a distant Dire Straits-ish guitar line – and, as we know from the sorely overrated Music Complete, New Order without Hooky is not New Order. On “World,” one struggles to detect any band breaking through the bland wall of rote backing vocals and session drum programming (although stylistically some of the album does point fairly directly to affairs such as entry #1192).

 

And yet Republic is unsettling in its melancholy. When there is a genuine rapprochement with then-contemporary dance music – “Spooky,” “Chemical” – the results are quite engaging, but “Ruined In A Day” sounds sufficiently downbeat to rekindle memories of this band’s previous incarnation. The song “Special” is quietly bitter, and by the time of the closing instrumental, “Avalanche,” we are effectively back in the world of Joy Division.

 

But the record is worth keeping for “Everyone Everywhere,” which is one of the very greatest things New Order ever created, a song so grand and sad I wish the Pet Shop Boys had covered it. Here they are not attempting to be Depeche Mode or the Future Sound Of London; they are their own essence, with that huge embrace of tears which was fully present in the absence of Closer a lifetime previously, and galleons of guitars ascending, burning and falling, bearing echoes and hues of golden hues, the fugitive light catching the cloisters, the encyclopaedic conclusion to a life’s experience.

 

The song ends. But even before it has ended, the band have vanished. With a single breath, their world had gone. Their instruments stand on the beach, motionless, unplayed. To mark where they once had been. Where had they been?

Cliff RICHARD: The Album

 

(#478: 1 May 1993, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Peace In Our Time/Love Is The Strongest Emotion/I Still Believe In You/Love’s Salvation/Only Angel/Handle My Heart With Love/Little Mistreater/You Move Heaven/I Need Love/Hold Us Together/Human Work Of Art/Never Let Go/Healing Love/Brother To Brother

 

Cliff Richard’s seventh – and to date most recent – British number one album is unique in that it is the only one of those seven albums to be an actual Cliff Richard album in and of itself. He had to split the first one fifty-fifty with his backing group, and then there were two film soundtracks and three hits compilations. Hence the title The Album carries an extra significance in that context.

 

The singer was now fifty-two but still keen to be perceived as contemporary. Most of his albums have been passed over here and generally remain undersung; not just the better-known ones such as I’m Nearly Famous (1976), Every Face Tells A Story (1977) and Always Guaranteed (1987) but also nearly-forgotten but excellent albums such as the song cycle The 31^st Of February Street (1974) and the American-recorded Something’s Goin’ On (2004).

 

Yet The Album might be the most unfairly-overlooked one of the lot. As far as early nineties adult contemporary pop albums are concerned, it is very good indeed. As a statement of the feelings and spirituality of a middle-aged man, it is something more.

 

One has to applaud Cliff for his brave choice of lead single – the knottiest and perhaps least commercial-sounding song on the record (which nonetheless became an unlikely but fitting next-door neighbour to “Jump They Say” in our top ten). Written by Andy Hill and Peter Sinfield for the One Moment In Time 1988 Summer Olympics album – the original was sung by Jennifer Holliday – “Peace In Our Time” became a major North American hit the following year when covered by Eddie Money. The song is characteristically (for Sinfield) cynical in places (“We're never gonna break down these walls/And build a prison with the stone”) but fundamentally determined and hopeful, and Cliff’s reading fulfils those requirements with quiet gusto.

 

Elsewhere there is very smart pop – “Love Is The Strongest Emotion” and “Human Work Of Art” both came from the same songwriting duo responsible for Charles and Eddie’s international 1992 hit “Would I Lie To You?” (Mick Leeson and Peter Vale) – with only the occasional dated misfire (“Little Mistreater”).

 

Yet the overriding concerns of The Album appear to be those of faith and belief. “Only Angel,” a premature bereavement lament, and “Handle My Heart With Love” – this record’s “Miracle Goodnight” – are not especially remarkable songs in themselves, but Cliff sings both as though his life depends on it.

 

When we consider the pleas expressed here – “You Move Heaven” (harmonically vaguely reminiscent of “Betcha By Golly, Wow”), “I Need Love,” “Hold Us Together” (a great track, where strings and lounge memories – echoed synthesised flutes, 1968 meets 1998 – combine in a manner anticipatory of Air’s Moon Safari), “Healing Love” (a mutually beneficial meeting between Cliff and Nik Kershaw) and especially “Never Let Go,” where Cliff sounds close to desperation – we have to ask ourselves whether he is actually singing to a lover, as such, or whether he is addressing his fans or, indeed, God.

 

Consider the closing song “Brother To Brother,” a requiem for someone who never actually was (Cliff has had three sisters, but no brothers). I don’t know whom or what it is supposed to be about – I wonder if he had his paternal grandfather, Frederick William Webb, in mind - but the singer sounds mournful, yet not bereft of hope (the song was co-written by Steve Glen and this album’s musical mastermind Paul Moessl, who joined Cliff in the mid-eighties as a keyboard player, became his musical director and co-produced/co-wrote [and played on] much of The Album; Moessl later moved into soundtrack work for films and television), even though he intones the song as though making his last, dignified stand in the world.

 

By far the best and most lasting song on here, however, is “I Still Believe In You.” Though composed by two Americans – David Pomeranz and Dean Pitchford – it is not to be confused with Vince Gill’s 1992 song of the same name. Perhaps it was intended as a response to Brian Wilson (“You Still Believe In Me”). However, it might be the single most extraordinary thing that Cliff has ever done (and indeed Richard Hewson, who arranged the majestic strings and percussion with Moessl), since with renewed pride and energy he dares to renounce the illusion of love, all the better to accept its reality. “But one by one, those fantasies have failed,” he sings, “while you keep shining through.”

 

It is as though, after half a lifetime of trying, he finally made that quantum leap and took the vital choice to live rather than exist. Of course, he could still be addressing his audience (as they felt he was when they returned the song to our singles chart in 2014 as an expression of returned, renewed faith to its singer in the midst of terrible circumstances). There are less happy endings in pop, and fewer happier ones.

David BOWIE: Black Tie White Noise

 

(#477: 17 April 1993, 1 week)

 

Track listing: The Wedding/You’ve Been Around/I Feel Free/Black Tie White Noise/Jump They Say/Nite Flights/Pallas Athena/Miracle Goodnight/Don’t Let Me Down & Down/Looking For Lester/I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday/The Wedding Song

 

(Author’s Note: The original CD issue of this album includes three bonus tracks – an “alternate mix” of “Jump They Say,” a Meat Beat Manifesto remix of “Pallas Athena” and the album outtake – many still protest that it should have been the lead single – “Lucy Can’t Dance,” essentially an extended jibe at Madonna, which may explain why it was not.)

 

Just as the synthesised train effects at the beginning of the song “Station To Station” were oddly reassuring, so are the tubular bells which introduce “The Wedding” and therefore this album. The bells are played by Michael Riesman, normally musical director of the Philip Glass Ensemble – and that is far from this record’s only reference to an illustrious predecessor.

 

The bells yield to an engaging, midtempo study in semi-static funk, with a bassline which may stem from “White Lines” – but wouldn’t it be nice if he had gone directly to “Cavern” for his inspiration? – and which acts as an informal leitmotif throughout the album (it resurfaces on “Nite Flights”).

 

Then emerges a very familiar, and formerly quite desolate, sound – that saxophone which its player seems intent on treating like a synthesiser, or at least a mellotron; a sound source which is experienced rather than performed. We recall its doleful coda to “Subterraneans,” a piece of music which seemed literally hope-less (though for keenly attentive listeners it turned out not to be the case)…and it is as if this spirit, this casualty, has risen, become reborn, has returned to the visible surface of things.

 

Did I mention that, despite its frequently desperate lyrical nature, this generally comes across as such a happy album?

 

It is as if the ghost of that jazz club has materialised in tandem with the falling of the Wall. The annexation of Eastern sensibilities – which recurs as late in his day as “blackstar” – remind us that she is Somalian. The woman who married the artist, who probably saved him. There are some wordless falsettos – not made-up words, but no words at all – possibly filtered through a Fairlight but heavily reminiscent of…well, do I need to say which Scotsman? An abrupt backwards vocal loop, like a genially gnarled signature, concludes the opening. The speed of life, indeed.

 

I think it was very good of Bowie to come back with an Associates record.

 

Once past its drone introduction, “You’ve Been Around” – a song from Tin Machine days – settles into sharp but amenable art-funk underlined by an amicably jogging bass, again reminding us of what The Glamour Chase by the Associates could have been like. Again he remodels the song as an effective tribute to his wife, with some self-fourth-walling (“But you’ve changed me/Ch-Ch-Ch-Changed!”). The album’s co-producer Nile Rodgers, finally able to make the avant-pop album he’d expected to have been asked to make a decade previously, is deep but audible in the mix; in contrast, Reeves Gabrels’ guitar contributions are scarcely detectable (his own lead lines provided a significant difference in the song’s original version) – my understanding was that this was intentional on Bowie’s part.

 

Nonetheless, his new sparring partner now comes bounding into the arena; that other Bowie, from St Louis, possibly the outstanding (and almost certainly the most recognisable) musician in post-Coleman jazz, his instantly identifiable trumpet boldly skittering into the picture as surely as it had done on “Theme De Yoyo” over twenty years earlier. Apparently one of the Bowies had long been keen to work with the other one, and throughout the record Lester proves a marvellous foil.

 

“I Feel Free,” the Cream original of which is the first record I can clearly remember hearing in my infancy, is from Bowie’s core era of the mid-sixties, and his reading here effortlessly outshines everything on Pinups (on which the song had nearly appeared) – he seems to take Low’s “What In The World” (which itself referenced the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love”) as a template and his at times comical baritone suggests that he is trolling Iggy (who also appeared on “What In The World”).

 

Yet that is not why the song is here, and situated so closely on the record to “Jump They Say,” since both songs refer to his half-brother Terry Burns – while attending a Cream concert in Bromley with the younger Bowie in 1966, Burns suffered a severe mental collapse with lucid hallucinations; in January 1985, by which time he had been a long-term inpatient at the Cane Hill psychiatric hospital in Coulsdon due to schizophrenia, he sneaked out of the hospital grounds, walked to the local railway station and jumped in front of an oncoming express train. He was killed almost instantly.

 

Hence there are swathes of breakdown swirling around Bowie’s “I Feel Free,” and the climactic guitar solo was performed by a returning Mick Ronson, as though old ghosts were indeed being summoned up – Ronson had produced Morrissey’s 1992 album Your Arsenal (of which latter, more anon) and Bowie got back in touch with him. Already very ill with cancer, Ronson nevertheless turned up for the session, one of the last sessions that he was to play in his life – so the performance serves as a partially inadvertent memorial.

 

Whereas “Jump They Say,” which again uses “What In The World” as a broad stylistic template, is a rather clinical study case of a suicide which tends to avoid the issue of personal commitment; there is little to the unknowing outside observer to suggest that he is singing about family (which may have been an intentional coping process). Nevertheless, as a single, it made enough impact (at least in Britain) for people to regard it as an almost-pop record, “Let’s Dance” put right (but, paradoxically, never more wrongly, subject-wise); again, Lester Bowie’s contribution, mirroring the agony of the protagonist’s mind, helped make the song effective.

 

The title song is troubling but intriguingly so – its words refer directly to the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which Bowie and Iman witnessed, albeit from high-up, in the comfort of their hotel suite. The song also pours scalding scorn on the notion that “protest” songs can alter anything – he and co-singer, the Bostonian New Jack Swing operative Al B. Sure!, run through a series of examples, including “What’s Going On?” (prefaced by some guilty giggling), “We Shall Overcome,” “We Are The World,” “I Got You Babe” and, perhaps accidentally, “No Doubt About It,” Errol Brown’s own witness account of a space oddity. The song’s seemingly formulaic R&B setting is, I think, deliberate, since Bowie (and Sure!) waste no time in warping and detouring it, harmonically and otherwise. Strangely, the song fades out to a refrain of "Chick-A-Boom (Don't Ya Jes' Love It)," a 1971 novelty hit for “Daddy Dewdrop” (a pseudonym for the song’s producer and main performer, Dick Monda) written for the animated television series Groovie Goolies (“This really far out cat was screaming half crazy”).

 

In “Nite Flights,” Bowie finally comes to terms with Scott Walker, and interprets what was already a very Bowie-esque song precisely as “David Bowie” would have interpreted it. His reading is a recapturing as well as a salute, and the presence of Nile Rodgers suggests that Bowie had realised his true vision of 1978, since this version broadly sounds like the Walker Brothers as played by Chic (I must say, generally, how great it is to have the bass back on this album, given its effective absence from Bowie’s parched, stolid mid-eighties).

 

As with “The Wedding,” “Pallas Athena” was composed by Bowie for his and Iman’s marriage ceremony, and it was one of the most experimental things he had done for years; it sounds like a trip-hop variant on “Subterraneans” – he had obviously been listening to Massive Attack – with a more prominent, if still word-free, one-man vocal choir which indicates that “Weeping Wall” may have been more in Bowie’s mind. Added to this are the plaintive trumpets (overdubbed, both open and muted) of Lester Bowie, which sound like a homage to the then-recently departed Miles Davis. Over and over, a vocal sample (possibly a processed Bowie) declaims “God is on top of it all.” But on top of what – a dormant volcano?

 

With “Miracle Goodnight,” we are firmly in the land of Prince, with its cheery kids’ TV synthesiser riff (reminiscent of “Delirious”) which musically is progressively derailed by Bowie – a troubled, mumbled soliloquy, an elaborate Fairlight interlude of classical flurries, Rodgers’ Nigerian high-life single-note guitar meditations - but stands as one of his most open and moving proclamations of love. At times – “It was only ma-ake be-EE-lieve!” – we find that he is still emulating the mythical Anthony Newley.

 

“Don’t Let Me Down & Down” – so much better than “Never Let Me Down” – was an Anglicisation of the song “T'Beyby,” originally recorded in 1988 by the Mauritanian singer/songwriter Tahra Hembara, which came to Bowie’s attention via its inclusion on a mixtape CD which Iman had put together. Here, Bowie turns it into an R&B lurve ballad in the partial manner of Luther Vandross – who, eighteen years earlier, had sung on his earlier “plastic soul” experiment, Young Americans – and more so in the manner of Jam and Lewis/Alexander O’Neal. Though regarded by some commentators as an exercise in unforgiveable vulgarity, I find Bowie’s continued plasticity quite affecting – and there is a direct Newley reference (“What kind of fool am you and I?”). The piece is topped by a lyrical trumpet solo by Lester Bowie – broadly Chuck Mangione, with a touch of Harry Beckett – and I find it as moving a performance as “Can You Hear Me?” Indeed, the presence of Fonzi Thornton and others among the backing singers, as well as a very characteristic harmonic modulation which cycles through the song’s fadeout, caused my penny to drop – this is Bowie doing Scritti Politti!

 

“Looking For Lester” is a summery smooth(ish)-jazz-funk workout in the Barney Miller signature tune sense, or at least initially makes us think that it is. Again, Lester Bowie’s solo is compelling (like Herb Alpert on pep pills and slide whistles – though I wish I knew who the other trumpeters on the session were; I don’t think they are all multitracked Lesters) – but then Bowie’s alto re-enters the picture and acts, at length, as its own “direct inject anti-jazz ray gun”; it seems to want to dismantle any picture of “jazz.” Technically never an articulate saxophonist, Bowie nevertheless stayed focused on what he wanted to communicate via that instrument and how he wished to do it. In the event, his old pal Mike Garson pops up towards track’s end for a typically zippy piano feature.

 

Then, Bowie does Morrissey. He perhaps does him camply, but I think does him better. “I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday” had been the penultimate track on Your Arsenal (not a number one album) and in that Ronson-produced form could have been judged a send-up of “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”; Bowie presumably decided to return the homage to its sender and here treats it as a gospel epic, complete with strings, horns and backing choir - and some storming lead guitar from one Wild T Springer, a Trinidadian who came to Toronto in the eighties and spent some time as a member of the band Rough Trade before forming his own blues band, Wild T and the Spirit - although, once again, he is vocally far closer to Newley than to Andrae Crouch. His version acts as a friendly rebuke to Morrissey – hey, Steven, I meant it, you know. Was he simply trying to make himself matter again, rather than anti-matter, in 1993?

 

All I do know is that overall he sounds more contented than he had done on any of his previous albums – free of the eighties, free of Tin Machine, free in part from expectations (sales were generally disappointing; in Britain, they barely exceeded 100,000). Don’t call it a comeback? Perhaps call it coming out of an eighties coma. Some expected a friendly Stunning Return To Form and they got Fuck-You Art-Jazz-Rock – and I’m sure that is absolutely what Bowie intended.

 

But, just as the turnaround midway through “Station To Station” is the aural equivalent of a gigantic window finally being allowed to open and permit the sunshine to penetrate that blue room, Black Tie White Noise bears the hallmarks of liberation. It concludes, as his previous great album had done, with a bookend parallel reading of the opening track, now with words, sung, again, in the manner of Billy MacKenzie. Never did he sound more contented, Bowie, more at peace with himself. It represents the payback to “Be My Wife,” the single chink of honest light which he had hitherto allowed in. Reader, she said yes, and married him.