Comparable to the arty B-52s or their heroes, Delta 5, The Stick Figures released one self-titled EP in 1981 before moving to New York City and disbanding soon after. Though their discography was minimal, their impact on the Florida post-punk scene was massive: they played a large role in nurturing the underground scene of artists and outsiders during that pivotal moment in music history. In their short period of time, the band managed to open for The Fall and The Lounge Lizards, receive praise (and airplay!) from John Peel, and be deemed “better than all the other Velvets/Television/Feelies-derived aggregations”  by music journalist Gary Sperazza!

Archeology includes The Stick Figures EP, as well as previously unreleased tracks and live recordings of the band. We are happy to premiere one of the never-before-heard tracks, “Yesterday,” an upbeat and raucous song with Rachel’s endearing vocals. Listen below:

Additionally, members Bill Carey and Robert Dansby discussed the Florida post-punk and punk scene, their dream lineup (yes, it includes Joy Division and Siouxsie), as well as what it’s been like rediscovering The Stick Figures’ catalog 40 years on.

The post The Stick Figures, Florida’s Long Lost Post-Punk Band, Premieres the Unreleased Track “Yesterday” + Interview appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

ZE Records sprung out of the ashes of disco: a veritable island of misfit toys for the post-punk, no wave, new wave and sometimes unlistenable talents of the Downtown crowd. ZE’s founders, Michael Zilkha and Michel Esteban, injected disco with a hefty dose of irony by dragging yesterday’s news into the sleazy world below 14th Street, and letting the weirdos have their fun with it. The duo’s financial backing, social connections and conceptual savvy got the ball rolling. 

Zilkha explained the genesis of the fledgling label: “The first album I put out was James White and the Blacks, which was the Contortions slowed down to a disco beat, because they didn’t wanna sign to an unknown label and I wanted a dance band. Then August Darnell from Kid Creole and the Coconuts slowed down Contort Yourself. That really became the basis for mutant disco.”

ZE’s eclectic roster gleefully mixed genres and criss-crossed racial divides, often with sophisticated humour. ZE Records boldly defied the anti-disco snobbery of the punk scene by incorporating wry intellectuals, the avant-garde, and straight-up oddballs. They ushered the dying disco era into Valhalla with a veritable Brechtian salute, particularly with Cristina’s debut.  John Cale, Alan Vega and Suicide, Richard Strange, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Lydia Lunch, The Waitresses, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and James Chance and the Contortions all added their names to the ZE Records roster over the next couple of years.

“I always had lots of patience for rock critics,” says Zilkha. “The jazz critic for the LA Herald Examiner called me and said there was this extraordinary record I should hear.  Don Was flew in from Detroit to play me Wheel Me Out, and it was exactly what I’d been trying to do with the Contortions and with Kid Creole. It was the perfect melding of metal and dance. And it turned out that David Was was that jazz critic at the LA Herald Examiner!! I had no money at the time, but they let me have the record anyway…partly because no one else wanted it, and also because it really belonged on my label.” 

Between 1978 and 1984, ZE managed, against many odds, to score a few hits with their motley crew of eccentrics, but structural issues with the record company cropped up and he left for Texas to start an energy company with his father. “I felt like I said what I had to say,” says Zilkha. I didn’t feel like the records I was making at the end were as vital. Once you’ve had hits, record companies expect you to make more hits, and I had done everything in a vacuum.” 

The Mutant Disco influence, however, still remains. You can still hear echoes of Cristina, Lizzy Mercier Descloux and Suicide in NYC-based bands like Hennessey, Scissor Sisters, LCD Soundsystem, and The Vacant Lots, who all stemmed directly from that scene. 

At that point in musical history, the microgenres hadn’t yet gelled; they were formed and informed by each other at breakneck speed. Forty years later, each genre has a distinct flavour, but in the late 70s and early 80s, these producers were using the same recording equipment and techniques to explore sound. If Kraftwerk serves as a Book of Genesis for synth music, Planet Rock may well be considered the Big Bang: after its 1982 release, the tectonic plates of the entire electronic music world shifted. Kraftwerk, if indirectly, played as much of a role in the formation of hip-hop as it did in minimal synth wave. Planet Rock, produced by Arthur Baker and John Robie, melds early rap with electronic elements, as well as a repeating motif painstakingly recreated from Trans-Europe Express. 

Cut to thirty-five years later: Zilkha joined forces with his old friend, producer John Robie. Robie, best known in the hip-hop world as the genius behind Afrika Bambaataa’s Planet Rock, also produced tracks for Cabaret Voltaire and New Order. Both producers are adamant about quality writing in their output, which is why their creative alliance has withstood time. They’re old friends with similar tastes and flow, bouncing back and forth with stories, geeking out over the history of pop music, and remembering stories throughout their careers. The two started working on a semi-autobiographical musical, resulting in a timestamp called The Future Is Mine.  The song, performed by Mister Biggs of Soul Sonic Force and Houston rapper Bun B under the name MegaDoom 2, underwent several incarnations. 

“At first it had a sort of intergalactic, love and peace to the world sort of message, but Michael and I decided the track deserved a stronger lyric,” says Robie. “I looked up the history of black oppression and riffed off that, and Mister Biggs came up with all those fantastic chants.” Zilkha adds: “Initially the history lesson went up to about MLK’s assassination, but once we decided this song was going to stand on its own rather than be part of the musical, that’s when the last part became “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” 

The Future Is Mine is anything but conformist. The opus of brutal American history clocks in at just over eight minutes, peppered with synth arpeggios galore. The track was faithfully produced in the style of the era. It springs literally from the very source of that sound, hearkening back to a time when hip-hop, new wave, no wave and all the other musical mish-moshes dwelled under the roof of places like The Mudd Club.

Robie and Zilkha remain committed to the craft and lament the sacrifice of vibrant creativity in favour of generating revenue. For The Future Is Mine, Robie wanted that authentic drift that he brought to Planet Rock. In order to do so, he rejected modern technology and used the computer as a recording medium. “I didn’t use MIDI at all,” he said. “I went out and bought an old Prophet-10 synthesizer which has a step sequencer in it, recorded it in 808, and tracked the 808 which triggers the step sequencer. I had to program every note and every chord one by one, and triggered it with the trigger from the 808. Everyone thinks that the 808 is based on the sound of the synthesis, but it’s not…the 808 drifts. That’s why it feels so funky. You can use a computer and MIDI and use it as a way to make sounds, but it’s not going to feel the same as a track that’s all generated from the click of an 808. All the instruments follow the drift of the 808.”

Production was very time-consuming and had to be played in real time, which meant repetitive recording. “I was dedicated to getting that feel,” says Robie. “Many people probably won’t believe it, because these days it’s so inconceivable to think of playing synthesizers in real time like this, or not to utilize MIDI. The reason why older recordings had a lot more vital energy is because if you’re in a recording studio and had a finite amount of tracks, you had to plan what you were doing because you only had 24 tracks, but also because you were paying tons of money to be in a recording studio. So you had to be prepared and committed to each individual track. Now with MIDI, you can noodle around and you’re never committed to it…But if you cut and paste something, it’s a cop-out.  You’re not going to get the same forward motion.”

Zilkha suggested they create a video revolving around the photojournalistic work of his friends Fred Baldwin and Wendy Watriss, who chronicled the Civil Rights Movement. The photographers donated use of their work, and the video took root. 

“Using news footage turned out to be impossible, so we tried a different creative route by staging it ourselves,” says Robie, who directed the video. “We dressed up kids as Putin and Trump, which became surreal. We replaced the news footage with original drawings by Mirella Morcheva, and contemporary documentary photographs by Alice Teeple because they chronicle our current situation of economic inequality better than anything else. It had an organic flow to it. In a way the obstacles ended up helping us be more creative.”

Zilkha remains proud of the fact that ZE’s releases focused on clever lyrics, as well as some of the earliest use of sampling in music. “The first overtly political song I made was Tell Me That I’m Dreaming, which had Ronald Reagan’s first State of the Union address that we chopped up. There were other political songs, but that was the first time we really started using people directly. There weren’t any samplers, we just got it off TV, sitting there with a tape recorder. Samplers were extremely expensive and didn’t sample for very long. Warner Brothers were a little worried but it turned out it was fine because it was in the public domain.”

Robie believes there is a lack of substance in mainstream contemporary music. “There are these endless anthems about phony notions of self-empowerment,” he scoffs. “That’s the new protest song…a narcissistic approach, constantly looking in the mirror. It’s become a musical version of a selfie. Look at the diversity in the Billboard charts of around 1968. It’s staggering. On one hand you have Cream, Vanilla Fudge, Jimi Hendrix and right alongside them you have Andy Williams, Perry Como, and absolute fluff like Ohio Express’s Yummy Yummy Yummy. I don’t see that level of diversity anymore.” 

Zilkha agrees, “You certainly wouldn’t see Suicide endorsing a product in their music. The whole culture was different. I left NYC in 1986 because I couldn’t stand it any longer. The reason was money had really destroyed NYC. When Ronald Reagan came in you suddenly had bankers securing mortgages. It all became about money. Cristina, my then-wife, her friends were trying to commiserate with her because I wasn’t a banker. It got really weird in NYC so I left. It changed, it really did change, and gentrification started then. I guess it seeps into the music and becomes its own reality.”

After The Future Is Mine started taking on a life of its own, Zilkha revived ZE Records for the release of this single, knowing the label would help both with distribution and with his new publishing company, ZE Books, which recently released Intelligence For Dummies, a compilation of Glenn O’Brien’s writings. 

Does this mean ZE will release more music in the future? Zilkha is still on the fence, but open-minded, particularly in the vein of protest music. “I don’t know who I would work with, but I had wanted to make protest songs for some time. I could never get August from Kid Creole to do them with me, for instance – he just said “that isn’t who he is.” I don’t want to do anything that isn’t art or doesn’t have significance. I don’t want to do product.” 

The Future Is Mine video:

More offerings from ZE Records:

The post ZE Records Revived With “The Future Is Mine”: Interview With Legendary Producers Michael Zilkha and John Robie  appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

Mallinder got little sleep during the time of recording Pow Wow. He worked with Cabaret Voltaire at Western Works studio in Sheffield during the day and forged on with his solo work at night when everyone else had gone home. Its result is an effective blend of post-punk and experimental electronics that are industrial-tinged but soft and malleable—Pow Wow demonstrates what type of role Mallinder took in Cabaret Voltaire. “It was done on 8 track and very multi-tracked, so lots of recording, then bouncing, and overdubbing, to get the integrated feel of the tracks,” Mallinder says. “I became very adept at pressing record then jumping onto equipment to play it – it was actually a very ‘live’ record in that sense. I’ve always seen rhythm at the core of what I do so I loved the layering of counter rhythms.The sequence/arpeggiator parts were all drum machine triggers that were played live. It was about creating a distinct groove so arrangements came from weaving in and out of those linear grooves.”

We chatted with Mallinder about the reissue, Spaghetti Western influences, and quarantine. Read below:

First off, how are you doing during these times? Do you find yourself to be productive despite all that’s going on in the world?

Yes it’s such a strange time to living through and had to adapt but I’ve been really busy —the Pow Wow release was underway before the ‘situation’, so to speak, and we all just kept moving ahead.

When it all locked down we were just completing tracks for a release with Julie Campbell (LoneLady), Benge and myself so all three of us have been finishing them remotely. 

And I’ve got lots of other things ongoing – we managed to do a video from home with Dan Conway for a spoken word release that I contributed to it’s an album by Khost ‘Buried Steel’. And I got another one to do for a track with Mark Stewart and Eric Random… my bedroom is my film studio. Now I’m doing some recordings with Aki Haruna, an amazing artist who made our recent Wrangler videos.

There’s always something to work on, plus I teach on a Sound Arts programme which is very testing in lockdown.

Do you look back on Pow Wow fondly? How do you feel about it in 2020?

Yes I have great memories, not just making the record but also that time which was mad, exhilarating, and so many interesting people and opportunities emerging. Partly because it was that vital time, but also being in our prime so we were all full of it.

I’d not listened to the album for such a long time until sorting out the re-release so I came to it quite disconnected and fresh. It was nice, it reminded me of a different way of making music, but also the similarities of what I’m drawn to in creating tunes when I’m left alone. 

And why did you decide now would be a good time for its reissue?

I’d had a few offers of re-issuing but it was only when Jason [Amm] approached me that I was interested. We’d been connected through Wrangler and Solvent and I’m a massive fan of his work. I have great respect for his taste and attitude. I knew he would do such a fantastic job. 

Much of the album comes across as experimental post-punk that blends guitars with electronic elements, as well as including interesting methods and processes of recording. If you can recall, what were your inspirations at the time? What sort of gear did you use?

It was done in our Western Works studio… mostly at night because I was doing Cabaret Voltaire during the day. I was built up from drum machines triggering simple sequencers, mono synths, and lots of live overdubs – drums, bass, guitars, horns, percussion. Then ambient and TV extracts.

What were you listening to?

I was listening to such a cross section of music and it seemed to reflect that. We were making electronic music but delving into esoteric stuff everything from Gamelan to John Carpenter soundtracks, Jon Hassell, Terry Riley, but also Sun Ra, Don Cherry, lots of funk, systems music, you name it.

Some tracks such as “Del Sol” really have components of CV that fans recognize and love but then you seem to add touches of playfulness and, in this case, a sort of Spaghetti Western sound. What approach did you take with your solo work that was separate from Cabaret Voltaire?

Ha ha, yes I was devil for early Morricone. I think I took the opportunity to focus on music with my voice taking a supporting, rather than leading role as with Cabaret Voltaire. I had the chance to play every instrument so I indulged the music and playing with the form. I somehow wanted to bridge Neu! with the other elements—a bit of funk, a bit madness.

Why you chose “Cool Down” as the single and can you tell us a bit about the video that goes with it?

Originally Fetish released “Cool Down” as 12-inch, it came out separately from the album so it had a bit of previous  as a single. It worked well as a track that captured the vibe of the album and was quite direct so lent itself to a video.

Robert Fantinatto, who directed the truly wonderful I Dream of Wires film, offered to make a video. We shared a love of brutalist design, and minimalist 70s sci-fi and this was the result of his labours, and think it captures the fluid movement and flow of the music: sparse and clean … and a bit weirdly unsettling.

The post A Bit Funk, A Bit Madness: A Stephen Mallinder Interview for “Pow Wow” Reissue + Video Premiere appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

Thus, new wave pop culture rose as the hope against this injustice. A revolution began scored by the sound of synthesizers and cold romanticism worldwide etched in the grooves of the vinyl records.

Part of this revolution were Canadian synthpop legends Rational Youth, who without knowing had made a huge impact in November of 1991, with their song “Dancing On The Berlin Wall” which to some became an anthem to the closing of the cold war era.

That specific song was included in their debut album which was released a decade before.

Now, on December 6, 2019, Universal Music Canada will reissue Rational Youth’s debut album Cold War Night Life, expanded and remastered!

I sat down with founding member Tracy Howe for a long talk about it all, the cold war, the wall, remembrances, the music, and he also gave me a little info on something new by Rational Youth!

30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Universal Music Canada will (on December 6) publish an extended reissue of your debut album ‘Cold War Night Life’, a record which has a special place as part of the new wave soundtrack of the Cold War era.

How do you see your debut album’s relevance in our current times?

Hello Mike! My great hope for this re-issue is that people will learn about its place in the popular culture of the Cold War period, and its significance as an early example of pure synthpop; and we also hope that we will have a chance to hear from them about how they feel it works (on a musical level) in our current times. The album represents synth music before any of the multitudes of contemporary sub-genres came into being and it is honest in its intent and its execution. As for how it relates to our current times with respect to the lyrical content and social context of the album, I can tell you that it was conceived in dangerous times, similar in many ways to the current ones we are living through now. I hope that comes through to new listeners, and that they will find that they can identify with it.

I read one of your recent posts on FB regarding the single, ‘Dancing On The Berlin Wall’, where you said:

“When we did the original version back in 1982, it was a whimsical fantasy because we really believed the Wall would be there forever. We never seriously thought that people would actually dance on it, but seven years later they did.”

May I ask what was your reaction when you saw it all on TV?

I was absolutely astounded, quite honestly. I mean I had been following the events leading up to the Fall, the demonstrations in Leipzig and so on, and it seemed likely that some sort of change was coming, but I imagined Perestroika and Glasnost in the DDR, not that they were actually going to open the Wall! That wall was something I assumed would be there forever, I really did. It all happened so fast. I have even read that it was actually opened by mistake, i.e. misunderstood orders by the border guards, but of course, once it was opened there was no going back. It was just an incredible thing to see. Now, I was not what you would call an anti-communist cold warrior by any means, but a wall is a wall. It was made to essentially imprison people, so when it came down it was a good thing for humanity, regardless of ideology. At the same time, I would have been very interested to see if the DDR could have been reformed, but that’s all water under the Glienicke Bridge now, isn’t it?

From where Rational Youth artistically emerged?

Very much the Montreal post-punk music scene of the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s. And a mutual love of Kraftwerk.

In the early 80s new wave and electro-pop music became the real urban soundtrack. Both described the uselessness of the cold war, with both genres railing against hypocrisy – mocking the prevailing political ‘ethos’. 

Who were Rational Youth?  What do you remember the most from that time?

Well, we were two young musicians, Bill Vorn and myself, who evolved out of what literally was the post-punk scene in Montreal in the late 1970s and into the 80s. I had been in a band called Heaven Seventeen (yes, that really was the name of the band) which was influenced by John Foxx era Ultravox and Magazine, and was the first local punk/post-punk band to feature synthesizers. Bill had been a member of a five-member all synthesizer band called U. He came more from the Klaus Schulze/Tangerine Dream end of things. We were both big fans of Kraftwerk and decided to try and do a pop band using only synths. There wasn’t any need to decide what sub-genre we had to present ourselves as. Just doing a ‘synth-pop’ band was a statement in itself. We did want to sort of advocate for the democratization of the music production process and the DIY ethic, but in terms of content on the musical side, everything you heard had to be produced by voltage-controlled oscillators, filters, and envelopes, apart from the vocals. The lyrics fell mostly to me, and I had my preoccupations with geopolitics and spy novels, which you can hear on the album. The thing about being in Montreal at that time was that we were all alone. There were a few of us in a sort of post-punk scene, but people there were only finally getting into actual punk rock at that time, whereas we had moved on. The rest of the music scene there was dominated by progressive rock, disco, and Quebec nationalist hippie folk music. To be honest, we were pretty isolated, and our ambition was to make a record and play some shows. The idea that the record we made would be still around almost four decades later was as unimaginable as, you know, that Wall coming down

Now that Universal Music Canada is reissuing your debut album. What do you expect impact of the record to be in this new era of electro-pop and synth-wave?

‘Cold War Night Life’ was always a sort of cult album. People who were really deeply into synth music knew about it, but unlike records of the period from the UK and Europe, because of the way it was released and distributed independently in Canada, and licensed in Europe through a label (Ram’s Horn Records) that mostly specialized in disco music, a lot of people who might otherwise have found the record missed it. Nevertheless, the record has endured in some way all this time to the point that a major label has decided to re-issue it in a rather deluxe package now, so this is an opportunity for the record to take its proper historical place within the broader synth music narrative. As I said, it’s hard to know what the response will actually be, but I think it’s reasonable to say with regard to the current “synth-wave” movement, that what they’re recycling is the music bands like us created in the early 1980s. This is positive for us, but in terms of doing new music and carrying on, we consider ourselves a real band that is functioning now as part of the synth scene, and not a nostalgia act.

Who have been the principal members of Rational Youth through time? Who were and are now the cult of RY? I am asking because we know that in 2016 Artoffact Records released ‘The Future Past Tense’ EP, while the same year you appeared on the ‘Heresy’ compilation, released by the Cold War Night Life label. This album featured covers of Rational Youth tracks by 18 artists from various countries, including former bandmates Dave Rout and Kevin Komoda…

The original founding 1981 lineup of Rational Youth was Bill Vorn and myself. We were joined by Kevin Komoda toward the end of the Cold War Night Life recording process. After Bill Vorn left to go back to university in late 1982, Kevin Komoda and I continued with the addition of Angel Manuel Calvo and Denis Duran through 1983. During 1984 I made an album for Capitol Records with Dee Long as co-producer, and a host of session musicians called Heredity, which was released in 1985. After that, I moved permanently to Toronto, and there was a long period of inactivity until the band was reformed with Dave Rout and Jean-Claude Cutz in 1999. We recorded and released the album To The Goddess Electricity. Dave and J-C were/are fantastic synth musicians and I really love that album that we did. We did several tours, mostly in Scandinavia around that time, then ceased operations again until my wife Gaenor Howe and I reformed Rational Youth about 5 years ago. We have toured quite actively, as well as releasing the album Future Past Tense. As to your question about the cult of Rational Youth, it was largely centered in the Swedish synthpop scene of the 90s and its equivalent in Germany.

I see that you will be playing shows in Toronto on Jan. 25, and Mississauga on Jan. 26. Are you planning other shows too? Will we see any surprises on stage? Are you going to play in Europe in 2020?

Yes, we have tried to get to Europe every year since we reformed. This past year we did a nice tour of Germany and also appeared at the W-Festival in Belgium. We have a new European booking agent now and we hope that this next year will be very active for us.

Do you have any new material from Rational Youth in the works, i.e. a new record?

Yes indeed! We are working on it now and hope to have it out in spring 2020.

Thank you very much for this interview. Anything else you would like to add?

Thank you for this interview. I really enjoyed the opportunity to talk with you and the questions were interesting. I invite Post-Punk.Com readers to check out Cold War Night Life and let us know if THEY find it relevant to these times!

The post Dancing on the Berlin Wall | An Interview with Tracy Howe from Legendary Canadian Synth-pop Act Rational Youth appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

During the tour for said album, however, the Banshees’ guitarist John McKay and drummer Kenny Morris (both now referred to as The Blackheads) quit the group, leaving founders Siouxsie Sioux and Steven Severin in a lurch, scrambling to find replacements for the tour.

Slits percussionist Peter Edward Clarke aka Budgie was recruited on drums, becoming a permanent member of the band—but Severin and Sioux still had a hard time enlisting a guitarist.

Robert Smith of The Cure decided to offer his services as his group were already the support band on tour in support of Join Hands.

After the tour, Robert returned to full-time duties with his own band, and Sioux and Severin then had a proper audition, and the pair recruited Magazine and Visage guitarist John McGeoch to join the band, which was the perfect arrangement until his departure from the Banshees following a nervous breakdown at a gig in Madrid.

Robert Smith was then recruited a second time into Wonderland to join his hand on guitar as a Banshee, now becoming a full-time member. Smith at the time was still recovering from the emotional anguish of The Cure album  “Pornography” (which led to Simon Gallup leaving The Cure, a major reason for the band’s hiatus).

This was a pivotal moment, as this was period where Robert Smith fully developed his trademark big backcombed hair and hooker red lipstick initially developed during his Pornography era—possibly having its permanence influenced by being part of Siouxsie’s entourage, and hanging out at The Batcave.

“Robert’s mad. His nickname’s Fat Boy, but he looks so big half the time because he forgets to take his pyjamas off when he gets dressed. He’s very cuddlesome. Sometimes we don’t speak for a month, for some unknown reason, and then we bump into each other and have a month of conversations in one night.”-Budgie in Smash Hits May of 1984

Smith would then go on to record the cover of The Beatles’ “Dear Prudence”, and shortly thereafter become an official Banshee for the September 30th, and October 1st concerts at The Royal Albert Hall that would be recorded as the Nocturne concert film and live album.

Smith would also record the singles “Melt!”, “Dazzle”, “Swimming Horses”, and the fantastic Hyaena LP. Smith is also featured on the Oxford Road Show performance of the reworking Overground (which was released later as a single credited with his replacement  John Valentine Carruthers from Clock DVA.

In addition to his work with directly with the Banshees, Smith also formed a band The Glove with Steven Severin, which included Porl (Pearl Thompson), and Andy Anderson from The Cure, as well as Jeanette Landray, a dancer featured on Top of the Pops, who was the ex-girlfriend of Budgie.

Sadly, The Cure had ended their hiatus in 1983, and Smith was juggling too many bands at once, and had to leave The Banshees before they could tour in support of the Hyaena LP.

This, unfortunately, did not sit well with Sioux:

“It wasn’t like he was ill. He was one of those people who just didn’t say ‘no’ to anything, so when it’s self-induced it’s hard to have sympathy. To actually say two days before a tour that’s been planned in advance that he can’t do it – f*** off! What a lightweight.” Siouxsie from a 2005 issue of Uncut Magazine

Robert however, meant no hard feelings:

“. . . but I think Severin understood and, by then, my mind was made up. After all, I’d given them two weeks’ notice, which was longer than any guitarist had given them before!” Robert Smith Ten Imaginary Years

Robert Smith and Steven Severin have always remained friends it seems, recently meeting up in Scotland to catch up after Severin had been recovering from an illness. It remains unclear today if the ice had ever thawed between Siouxsie and “Bobby”.

Regardless, we thought their collaborations worth celebrating, and below is a gallery just about all the photos and videos we could find from one of the greatest collaborations in the history of Post-Punk and Goth.

Enjoy!

*Siouxsie also contributed backing vocals to “I’m Cold”, the B-side to The Cure’s “Jumping Someone Else’s Train”.

Photos

Music Videos

Dear Prudence

Swimming Horses

Dazzle

Interviews and other stuff

1983 Riverside Special featuring Siouxsie and The Banshees, The Creatures, and The Glove

An interview when they visited Wellington New Zealand in February 1983

Television and Live Performances

Something Else’ 1979
Love In A Void

Regal Zone

Old Grey Whistle Test’ November 11th 1982
Melt!

Painted Bird

Oxford Road Show December 3rd, 1982
Melt!

Overground (with The Venomettes)

French Television for Christmas 1982
I’l Est Né Divin Enfant”

Top of the Pops, September 1983
Dear Prudence

‘Nocturne’ Royal Albert Hall 1983

Live 1983 at Roskilde Festival in Copenhagen Denmark
Red Over White

The Tube 1984

• Running Town
• Bring Me The Head of the Preacher Man
• Blow the House Down

The Tube 1984

Top of the Pops 1984

Swimming Horses

The post Siouxsie Sioux and Robert Smith appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

During this residency the Northampton born Goth legend has scheduled 2 nights each for his most popular records such as Love Hysteria and Deep, as well as “a handful of Bauhaus classics”. The final two dates are being billed as “very special shows”, that could very well be reserved for an entire set of Bauhaus material or something else entirely.

“I have always wanted to do a residency and while i was performing at The Chapel on the Stripped tour last year. I felt like this was the perfect venue and that the time to do this was now,” said Peter Murphy. “There are a lot of songs on these albums that I haven’t sung in years. This is a rare chance for fans to see them performed live.”

“The Chapel is extremely proud to be hosting this unique, career-defining retrospective from one of the greatest musicians in history, Peter Murphy,” said Fred Barnes, Chapel GM. “‘Living legend’ is a title that is thrown around all too often these days, but Peter is an artist so powerful and unique that an entire culture has emerged in his wake, it takes a very rare talent to achieve such longevity and impact as Peter Murphy has. When Peter played at The Chapel last December, he said he had finally found the place he believed he could finally host this residency, which had been an idea for him for some time and we could not be more thrilled to be able to host this historic event.”

Tickets for all 15 shows go on sale Monday, March 13 at noon Pacific. Here are the dates with the corresponding albums:

Peter Murphy – The Chapel residency:
Tue, June 20th – Should the World Fail to Fall Apart
Wed, June 21st – Should the World Fail to Fall Apart
Thu, June 22nd – Love Hysteria
Fri, June 23rd – Love Hysteria
Mon, June 26th – Deep
Thu, June 29th – Deep
Fri, June 30th – Holy Smoke
Sat, July 1st – Cascade
Mon, July 3rd – Cascade
Thu, July 6th – Dust
Fri, July 7th – Dust
Sat, July 8th – Ninth
Tue, July 11th – Stripped
Thu, July 13th – Very Special Show TBA
Fri, July 14th – Very Special Show TBA

Peter Murphy has also released today Bare-Boned and Sacred, a live album which was recorded at NYC’s Le Poisson Rouge during last year’s Stripped tour. In addition to the release, on Tuesday, July 11th, Peter Murphy will be performing an encore  performance of the stripped set featured on the LP.

You can order the live album here

*Header photo by Gabriel Edvy

The post Peter Murphy announces 15-show album residency in San Francisco, Plus new live LP ‘Bare-Boned and Sacred’ appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

We had a chance to talk to Hooky about the touring with The Light, his new book Substance: Inside New Order, and the infamous Unknown Pleasures album art. All of this—unsurprisingly, as it is Hooky’s specialty—sprinkled with a bit of trash talk. North American tour dates are listed below.

This tour you’re playing both New Order and Joy Division Substance albums in their entirety—what’s the history there?

The New Order album was done specifically by our record company guy [in 1987] because he bought a car with a CD player in it. He decided the first CD he wanted to play in his car was a collection of New Order singles. Our singles had never been released before on LPs, they were always stand-alone. His idea was to collect the 12” singles together and put it out as a record to play in his car. And it was our cheapest album, which was quite interesting, because all the songs were done and they just needed to be put together. When it was released it became our biggest selling album ever. And it sold 2 million on double vinyl in America alone in 1987. Substance made New Order a huge success.

Joy Division’s Substance was done afterwards to mirror it, actually. It was a much different record though. The New Order album is a collection of singles, so they all have a likeness, a poppiness to them—how people usually do singles to make them successful. Joy Division’s is a lot darker. The tracks on it were little-known so it had a completely different feel. It’s quite weird when we play them both together—they feel completely different.

It’s interesting because, in a way, you’re appealing to two different fanbases.

The thing is that I’ve noticed with Joy Division fans—because we started The Light celebrating Joy Division first with Unknown Pleasures, Closer and Still—they are different. When we moved into New Order, we saw different reactions. But the thing I like about playing albums in full is that I like the awkwardness it creates. It feels more arty in the way that they’re difficult. On the New Order LPs there were some songs that we never played live—ever. We deemed them too difficult.

But when The Light came along to play the albums, we had to learn how to play the difficult songs. And we do succeed. I just think groups are pretty lazy when it comes down to it. Playing the albums in full is a delight because they’re long, and I can see people go through phases with tracks they like or tracks they find a bit weird. And I quite like that as a musician—it appeals to me. After years of being in New Order where we played a greatest hits set, it was all about pleasing the audience. It’s actually quite nice to get to [the full album] concept. And I must admit, it makes the band work very hard. You can feel that people have grown to appreciate the difficulty involved in doing what you’re doing.

My idea is to play every record I ever recorded before I join the several musicians in the sky, I’m on album number 7 and 8, so I’ve got a few more to go.

I saw The Light in 2010 with Unknown Pleasures, and then your last tour with the Brotherhood and Low-Life albums. Your shows are always high-energy and fun—I love that awkwardness you talk about, when you play tracks that maybe not everyone knows or appreciates.

It was Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream that gave me the idea. When he revisited Loaded, the tracks that he liked best were the ones they didn’t usually play because tastes have changed and maybe [the songs] felt newer. That’s exactly what happened when I came to look at Joy Division albums. The tracks we didn’t play a lot… well, all of them we didn’t play a lot, we didn’t play any Joy Division music for 30 years. To get them back was an amazing feat—it felt wonderful.

I always thought that my favorite side of Brotherhood was the acoustic side. Yet, when we came to play the sequencer songs which make up side two, it was those that I loved! I like the fact that side two is a little bit more difficult and different. With New Order in particular, I felt I got into a rut with playing the same set all the time. It was deathly boring—especially with the repertoire we had. I was delighted to see when [the rest of the band] came back as New Order they did exactly the same thing again. My wife always says to me: “Aren’t you glad you’re not there?” And I’m like, “You know what, I am!” It’s richer and more interesting to dig out these little nuggets and go: “Look at this, this is really difficult to play but what a great tune!”

With the fans, when we started out in 2010, there wasn’t a lot of them. We’ve certainly grown a lot in stature as a group because the fans have got to trust what we’re doing. And I can’t thank them enough for it. Having two bands in competition with each other—Peter Hook and the Light and New Order—and to get the accolade that you play New Order stuff better as The Light than New Order do, it’s a wonderful thing!

So what’s next? New Order’s Technique and your other project, Revenge?

Yes! Potsy [David Potts] and I have had many discussions—he plays guitar in The Light and was the guitarist and co-writer in Revenge. He was also my co-writer in Monaco—so we’ve been thinking that.

It’s weird because Technique is my favorite New Order record. I’m really looking forward to playing it. And Republic will benefit greatly from being played in its entirety. When you listen to Republic, it’s very Pet Shop Boys-y, it’s quite camp. We had a bad time making it. The trouble with having a bad time making it, is that it colors you from then on. In the New Order book [Substance: Inside New Order] that’s out in October, I wrote about how it is a good album and there’s some good songs on it. But whenever I listen to it, it always reminds me of something that wasn’t quite comfortable—I wasn’t happy and it doesn’t take me to a happy place. Obviously, a lot of people that listen to it have a completely different feel, which is nice. The Light will do our best to do it justice, without a shadow of a doubt. I think it will sound a lot better.

Since you brought up your upcoming book, I think it’s interesting how you titled it Substance while you are playing the two Substance albums at the very same time.

Originally, when I fell out with New Order, the book was called Power, Corruption and Lies because I was feeling a bit bitter. It’s 800 pages, and that’s cut down from the e-book, which is nearly 1,600 pages. It was too substantial to be called after an album. Maybe i should have called it Substantial, but the book, i think, seems to have a lot of substance.

New Order were a fantastic group and I’m proud of everything we achieved. And I must say that Barney [Sumner] did a real disservice in his book [Chapter and Verse] in the way that he didn’t write about our achievements. He’s done something so wonderful in his career that I couldn’t believe he resisted the temptation to write about the wonderful things he did. Instead, he focused on the shitty things that he accused me of. I didn’t know if to feel flattered or sad in the way he ignored New Order to have a go at me. Out of the 100 pages he devoted to New Order, I think 69 were calling me a bastard.  So I will have to take it as a compliment.

I was going to ask if you read Bernard’s book.

Yes, I had to get legal advice and get him to change some of it because most of it was wrong. He had to change quite a lot in the book.

At what moment did you realize what a huge impact Joy Division had on music’s history—not only for post-punk, but for all of it in general?

Since we’ve been playing Joy Division around the world, there’s been a few moments. I thought a lot of these gigs would be full of fat old blokes like me—all bald and old—then we got there and the audience is really young. That actually surprised me. To play in a place like Mexico City and to realize the average age of the audience was about 21, 22, or 23, you’re like “Whoa!” People still resonate with the music—young people especially. Martin Hannett, who was the producer of Joy Division, really did a fantastic job.

And that era of music—Death Cult, Sex Gang Children, Play Dead—it’s quite dark, quite Joy Division-y isn’t it? It’s interesting that people love it today. Great music is timeless, not only for Joy Division but The Doors, Iggy Pop, and Velvet Underground. I’m delighted to say that most bands get compared to Joy Division. If you don’t get compared to Joy Division, then you get compared to New Order. I happened to be in bloody both! I struck it quite lucky there. When you realize we were 21 when we wrote Unknown Pleasures, musically it sounds very mature. It amazes me, actually, how far we’d come from punk, which was just about screaming at everybody and telling everyone to fuck off. To become quite an accomplished musician in order to make an album like Unknown Pleasures, and repeat it again with an album like Closer, I don’t know where that came from. I don’t know whether it was a combination of luck, talent…

Bernard and I, from being old school friends at 11, certainly were very lucky in that it prepared us to stay together and we really accomplished a lot in our chosen field—which was music. Neither of us were a musician until we saw the Sex Pistols at age 20. It seems quite bizarre now to go around the world and see Joy Division everywhere, to get this host of bands that sound like Joy Division: from Interpol to… my god, all these people. It was quite funny when New Order split up, Interpol was advertising for a bass player—I applied and they turned me down.

Really—why?

I don’t know—I applied as Peter Hook. Maybe they thought someone was taking a piss.

What do you think of the mass appropriation of the Unknown Pleasures album art?

Sadly I’ve just gone through this legally. We took it from the Cambridge Encyclopedia, and it’s the chart readout of the [Pulsar] called CP-1919—that’s the graph that it left. All we did, instead of it being black and white, was change it to white on black. The music gave it a completely different significance.

Joy Division are the most bootlegged band in the world from each point of view. There’s a bit of a joke in it, how we sell the most merchandise of any band, yet no money comes to us. If you go on Amazon or Ebay, it’s full of Joy Division bootlegs. Strangely enough, the only time the rest of the band get pissed off with the logo is when I use it. Which I suppose, in a funny way, just about sums it up for them: it’s okay to use it at the end of their show, but it’s not alright for me to use it. The battle is still waging royal between us. It’s an odd one really, because Peter Saville, the designer who did the sleeve, took it from public domain and it should remain that way. Joy Division has the music and that’s the most important thing.

I’ve seen the logo on Mickey Mouse t-shirts, drawn in with cats…

It’s funny that Walt Disney was bootlegging us because they are so careful and so angsty when anyone bootlegs them. That was a funny one—we got to send them a couple nice letters poking fun at Walt Disney because it was definitely a mistake on their part. But I’ve got one! I made sure I got one as part of the deal—they withdrew the shirt and now it’s a collector’s item. If you go online you can see someone bootlegging Walt Disney’s bootleg of Joy Division’s bootleg of the Cambridge Encyclopedia. It’s enough to make your head spin.

It’s a tricky one, anything like that is difficult. But, you know, it always makes me think that it’s part of everything: Ian Curtis is a huge part of Joy Division and of Joy Division’s history. And what happened to Ian was awful. It shouldn’t happen to anybody: his depression and his epilepsy, especially when he was so gifted as a musician and was just on the verge of huge success. It’s quite a complete story, isn’t it, Joy Division? It has many facets to it. I have to say, as Joy Division’s bass player, I’m very proud of it all.

Peter Hook’s book on New Order will be published in the U.S. at the end of January 2017. ORDER HERE

Book Tour Dates:

Feb. 1: Saint Vitus Bar, Brooklyn, New York
Feb. 2: Book Revue, Huntington, NY
Feb. 3: The Regent Theatre, Los Angeles
Feb. 4: JCC Of San Francisco, San Francisco

The post Peter Hook’s Substance: An Interview appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

The concerts were two homecoming gigs after the band had performed abroad in Japan, Australia, and Israel—and followed the release of the “Dear Prudence” single which marked the enlistment of The Cure’s Robert Smith as an official member of the band. Smith had previously been a temporary member replacing John McKay for the remainder of the Join Hands tour in ’79, so this was the Cure singer/guitarist’s second time filling in for an outgoing Banshees guitarist—in this case, the hard to fill shoes of the brilliant John McGeoch.

Along with the televised performance on Rockpalast, Nocturne showcases Siouxsie and The Banshees at their very best.

Tracklist:

1. “Israel” (6:45)
2. “Dear Prudence”  (3:55)
3. “Paradise Place” (4:28)
4. “Melt!” (3:48)
5. “Cascade” (4:35)
6. “Pulled to Bits” (4:03)
7. “Night Shift” (6:27)
8. “Sin in My Heart” (3:31)
9. “Slowdive” (4:18)
10. “Painted Bird” (3:56)
11. “Happy House” (4:39)
12. “Switch” (6:35)
13. “Spellbound” (4:31)
14. “Helter Skelter”  (3:42)
15. “Eve White/Eve Black”  (2:58)
16. “Voodoo Dolly” (8:42)

DVD:

1. “Israel”
2. “Cascade”
3. “Melt!”
4. “Pulled to Bits”
5. “Night Shift”
6. “Sin in My Heart”
7. “Painted Bird”
8. “Switch”
9. “Eve White/Eve Black”
10. “Voodoo Dolly”
11. “Spellbound”
12. “Helter Skelter”

Bonus

Here are a few interview clips from New Zealand and Australia from February of 83,

The post Siouxsie and the Banshees | Nocturne appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

“This Corrosion” was ultimately featured on the second studio album from The Sisters of Mercy, and the band pared down to the core two-piece of Andrew Eldritch and Patricia Morrison, creating a record that re-defined the sound The Sisters of Mercy stood for.

If one were to imagine a definitive “Goth Rock” sound, the gospel choir opening “This Corrosion” or the haunting bass line of “Lucretia My Reflection”. and/or “Dominion” with its glimmering guitar riff will immediately be echoing in your brain—becoming earworms and ultimately giving you goosebumps. Tracks like “Flood II” or “Driven Like The Snow” are still live favorites today. Being close to an Andrew Eldritch solo album—Floodland’s ultimate place in TSOM’s discography may be unclear to some. Sure, a step sideways from the rock roots the band openly celebrated favoring Motörhead to Alien Sex Fiend, but if seen as a solo album, clearly a pure moment of Eldritchian glory and bombast, which can be contributed to Jim Steinman, with whom he also collaborated for on  More, featured on Vision Thing.

Tracklist:

1. Dominion/Mother Russia
2. Flood I
3. Lucretia My Reflection
4. 1959
5. This Corrosion
6. Flood II
7. Driven Like the Snow
8. Never Land (a fragment)

The post The Sisters of Mercy | “Floodland” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

(PS: Also included in the article is a reference to Siouxie…um, who the hell is Siouxie?)

h/t to The Cure-Pictures of You

The post The Cure in Sounds (UK) November 8, 1980 – “Playing For Today” | Plus bonus Dutch Television interview from 1980 appeared first on Post-Punk.com.