The Cure

[k-punk]

Actually I think it was on BBC3 not 4...

Perfect Kiss... for me, painfully awful now... I have all their singles up to Technique I think, but there's something in general about that mid-80s period (the fairlight clunk a sonic equivalent to big hair and shoulder-pads) which makes it horribly dated, an urge for contemporaneity which somehow bypassed the iciness of modernism in favour of a dull gloss that was warmly ingratiating but instantly disposable...

Power, Corruption and Lies is where it starts to go wrong for NO IMHO... The early singles, where they are trying to imitate themselves still do it for me... like Joy Division with the centre (Curtis) imloded into a black hole.... the early NO much more impersonal, impassive than JD .... 'Blue Monday' the template for a bleak dance music that they were unable to follow (but others would).... But the turn to blokishness, towards willed desublimation ('we just make up the lyrics, they're nonsense', 'it's just a job') was already in place on Power Corruption and Lies: a certain thawing.

I'd be prepared to reassess Disintegration; the three I wrote about + 'Three Imaginary Boys' are the only ones I have intimate knowledge of really.

 

[Tim F]

Mark, you had me up until that last post!

Mind you I tend to love "that mid-80s period (the fairlight clunk a sonic equivalent to big hair and shoulder-pads) which makes it horribly dated, an urge for contemporaneity which somehow bypassed the iciness of modernism in favour of a dull gloss that was warmly ingratiating but instantly disposable..."

The production on "The Perfect Kiss" is awesome! Same goes for "Bizarre Love Triangle".

 

[k-punk]

The production on "The Perfect Kiss" is awesome! Same goes for "Bizarre Love Triangle".

I can't believe you say that.... for me those records are absolutely awful... Unlistenable... I'd be stunned if I was on my own on this...

 

[owen]

heheheh!

i do love 'procession' and 'movement' and whatnot but i find the records tim mentions cretinisingly blissful- in a similar way to 'cupid and psyche 85' there's something about this overload of gloss, micropercussion, irrespective of how ideologically dubious it might be, that i'd find it churlish not to submit to....

 

[k-punk]

Owen, think there might be a generational thing here lol

liked those records at the time but now find them just horribly time-bound to what was in retrospect an awful period, with misplaced loyalty to NO blinding me to the fact that they were already half way to Lad Central... funnily enough was thinking as I wrote the above denunciations that Scritti stand up so much better than those NO records... partly it's the lyrics, which in NO's case are so slapdash can't be arsed...

 

[Diggedy Derek]

New Order's production is pretty great- the problem is surely that almost all of their songs sound exactly the same.

Now, Technique is a great album, and they've done some good songs apart from that. But I don't think I'd ever want more than a well compiled CDR of their stuff.

 

[owen]

Owen, think there might be a generational thing here lol
QUOTE]

maybe so

i do think there's an interesting libidinal thing in eg 'perfect kiss', a kind of confused, slightly baffled sexuality...i think slightly of the bits about 'emptied' voices in 'blissed out' here....though the laddishness does occlude that by the 90s

 

[Tim F]

Ha ha "The Perfect Kiss" and "Bizarre Love Triangles" are total gay club classics! So "Laddish" in that sense at least...

Might well be a generational thing. I can't remember 1984 or 1985 at all.

Speaking of ideological dubiousness, I often find a stirring humanist techno-utopian vibe in some of that over-produced mid-80s stuff, by nature stuff that <i>doesn't</i> fit into the Cyberpunk mould. New Order come just after The Blue Nile and Kate Bush for me in that sense (what else? Jane Siberry? There's probably heaps that's not coming to mind right now... at the absolute chart-pop end maybe something like Kids in the Kictchen's "Change In Mood") - like the Ursula Le Guin to the Ballard/Dick of all that other stuff.

I love love love Future Bible Heroes' <i>Memories Of Love</i> for seeking to recreate this vibe and taking it to a previously unheard of extreme.

 

[k-punk]

Ha ha "The Perfect Kiss" and "Bizarre Love Triangles" are total gay club classics!

and student disco classix too

So "Laddish" in that sense at least...

Yes, that's it.... mid-80s are where Lad meets Gay.. ghastly

like the Ursula Le Guin to the Ballard/Dick of all that other stuff.

nice way of putting it... think the de-Ballardization of mid 80s stuff has a great deal to do with finding technology comfortable; it was no longer a problem, no longer had to presented thematically...