Slippery Trollopes on Blue Monday

Hi everybody. Ignore all that 'Blue Monday' rubbish: it's just an abuse of science in the name of PR. Instead, have some music. Starting, appropriately, with New Order's 'Blue Monday'.



As it happens, I collect cover versions of New Order and Joy Division songs. One of my favourites is this 'Blue Monday', by the Côr Meibion Brythoniaid to promote the rather wonderful Festival No. 6, held in the weird and wonderful fantasy world of Portmeirion. Much to his shame, my experimentalist drone-rock friend Alan's dad is one of the singers.



I went to a very different musical event on Saturday. Wearied by making hollandaise, marking and teaching preparation, I headed to Birmingham's Symphony Hall for some virtuoso violin action. I'm not normally a fan of the classical western canon, preferring the medieval and the twentieth-century's dissonance and experimentation, but I couldn't resist Joshua Bell whatever he played. The highlight for me was Brahm's Violin Concerto: I didn't know he could be so exciting. The first movement's cadenza (improvised by the violinist) was just stunning, and deserved the applause it earned. After the interval Bell and the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields played Beethoven's Eroica: familiar and beautifully performed, but not as acrobatic as the Brahms. It all made up for Stoke losing to Crystal Palace earlier…almost.





Teaching started today. For me, it was straight in with the final-year students and the first of two weeks on Trollope's The Way We Live Now. It's a great big brick of a novel and resoundingly unfashionable. This baffles me: how can a novel obsessed with dodgy businessmen, élitist politicians, snobbery, public displays of wealth and racist attitudes towards incomers not strike a chord today? I don't know why the BBC doesn't repeat its 2001 adaptation.

I wasn't expecting any of the students to have finished it by this point, but I was pleased that so many of them were a good way in, and more of them than usual were ready to talk about it. I also discovered that they have a Carry On sense of humour: much giggling when I said 'Trollope is a bit slippery'! I was talking about his narratorial technique, kids!

Blue Monday?

Yesterday was far from being a Blue Monday, unless we're talking about the azure-coloured sky. I went to a wonderful place (the Weaver Hills and their environs), walked, saw countless larks and watched an enormous hare coolly leap a high wall topped with barbed wire.

But buying Hannah Peel's music-box covers of various songs including Blue Monday reminds me of a little hobby of mine: collecting Joy Division and New Order cover versions. So here are a few of my favourite Blue Mondays and a couple of others.

Here's the original:



Here's Hannah Peel's. The EP version is actually better: layered and lovely. But this is pretty good too.



I'll never tire of the Brythoniaid Cor Meibion's version, promoting last year's Festival Number 6. It's just magisterial.



As you probably deduced, I tend towards the melancholic: under the Detroit-influenced beats, much of New Order's work is downbeat and lost - the dichotomy is what makes them work. That said, here's Nouvelle Vague's Blue Monday, which I find insultingly clodhopping. This isn't a band in love with the material. Far too ironic.



Orgy, on the other hand, are heavy but perhaps too respectful:



Kylie Minogue's mashed up Can't Get Blue Monday Out Of My Head is a slice of cheeky genius though:



Also-rans: The Enemy should be ashamed. Chancers. Thankfully not online. I'm not sure how I feel yet about the Jolly Boys' calypso version either. And although I like elements, especially the viola, the Vitamin String Quartet's cover feels a bit like attention-seeking slumming. The Gregorian Chant version is execrable. Way too mannered (and this is from somebody who rejected everything about Catholicism except for the music) and frankly beneath them. The Brian Jonestown Massacre and Country Teasers versions are jolly thrashes, but not distinctive enough to detain us. You've got to do something different for a decent cover. Otherwise, what's the point?

Which is why I have a soft spot for these other New Order covers. First up, Boo Radleys' early shoegaze/thrash attempt at True Faith:



Then there's Frente's achingly beautiful 'Bizarre Love Triangle': the original buries the lyrics deep in the mix. Nouvelle Vague do a passable version too.



Then there's Rheinallt H Rowlands' gorgeous 'Gwawr Newydd yn Cilio', his  cover of Joy Division's 'New Dawn Fades'. I'm a huge fan of RHR. He covered several JD tracks: get them (legally) here, but don't believe a word of the biography.

Gwawr newydd yn cilio

Finally, some more stately misery. Firstly, June Tabor and Oysterband's rendition. I adore Tabor, but I'm not entirely convinced by this one. After that, Susanna and the Magical Orchestra's sparse, echoing version: good with the lights off.

Dydd Llun Glas

I don't normally do advertising, but I was impressed by the Festival No 6 line-up and location - in Portmeirion, the bonkers architectural fantasy used as the set of The Prisoner. I particularly love their stunningly powerful Welsh male voice choir's cover of New Order's 'Blue Monday', by Cor y Brythoniaid



Welsh male voice choirs are great, but the material is often awful. Not this time. And if you like Welsh translations of Joy Division/New Order, try Rheinallt H Rowland's cover of 'New Dawn Fades', 'Gwawr Newydd yn Cilio', which is ravishing:

Gwawr newydd yn cilio

Why Ben's Wrong, or, How I Learned To Love St Etienne

I was chatting to Benjamin and @Pangalactic this morning about summery music: he's listening to Dodgy, the kind of wet hippy hack music he normally teases me for liking. So I suggested St Etienne instead. Big mistake:

St. Etienne are in my top ten worst bands. Soulless, joyless, dinner table dance by numbers.

So naturally I responded by reaching for critical theory and adding New Order to the list. Because I'm kind of pompous that way.

I've always seen them as a meta-critique of soulless dance. Hence their cover of Only Love Can Break Your Heart. 

Like New Order. Using the techniques of those cultures to both critique and improve on them.

Again, a red rag to a bull.

I hate New Order too. No soul. No joy. You react intellectually to music, I react emotionally.

and from @pangalactic:

unfortunately their meta-critique of soulless dance produced the same utter rubbish

(That bit's wrong: I react emotionally and intellectually to music). So we had a discussion about whether being boring is ever intellectually or artistically justified. I pointed out that Henry James is deliberately boring quite a lot: very long sentences which leave the reader struggling for comprehension and a break, as a way of reproducing the ways we really think and speak, rather than in beautifully-constructed aperçus.

All in all, a very enjoyable morning's teasing. But I've thought about this before, and I'm right (surprisingly). As far as I understand them, St Etienne's musical style communicates a deadpan detachment from emotional commitment. It's not accidental: I think it's a critique of a society predicated on surface and simulation, as Baudrillard puts it. I think you have to get hold of this, and then realise that there is symbolic exchange (i.e. meaningful emotional content) in their songs, but it's harder to detect because their core subject is the alienation inherent in urban consumerist capitalist culture. Which is why one of their earliest songs was a cover of Neil Young's 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart', which is either a satire of hippy solipsism or a lament for the damaging effects of narcissism.



St Etienne's dance-oriented cover updates these sentiments for the E generation, in which a starter drug provided emotional experiences otherwise denied a generation atomised by capitalism.

They're not alone. The genius of bands like the Stereolab (Franco-British marxist dance), Pet Shop Boys (particularly focussed on gay culture and suburban isolation), Kraftwerk (post-war German techno-fascism and the new state as a 'machine for living in') and New Order is that, like St. Etienne, they reproduce the limitations of postmodernist alienation while suggesting that hidden within it are the seeds of emotional and artistic recovery.









They've all learned from the minimalist classical composers that authenticity and organic art is no longer possible, but also no longer important: symbolic exchange is still available, but in the gaps, if you listen hard enough - just like in real life, and unlike the production-line pop which wears its heart on its sleeve without the slightest trace of sincerity. They're having it both ways: using the tools of shiny postmodern pop both to critique and reconstitute it aesthetically.

A Christmas Carol

I'm a huge fan of Joy Division/New Order/Electronic/Revenge/Monaco/The Other Two and whichever other splinter groups there are. And so I'm proud to present their Christmas song, 'Rocking Carol'.

Genius at work.


And you may as well have their rendition of 'Ode to Joy'.

What took you?

One of my boring, tedious, holier-than-thou rules (channelling Bill Hicks) is that if a band licences its music for use on adverts, I don't buy their music any more. They don't need my money, because they've got lots fro allowing the music which previously existed as an autonomous work of art to support someone else's quest for money (I exempt bands who've lost control of their work from the rule).

One of the most painful losses was New Order, who've popped up on a Mars Bar ad, though with their complicated backstory, they may well not have any control over their catalogue.

But what really surprised me was hearing The xx on an advert yesterday. They've released one album, which won the Mercury Music prize a couple of days ago, yet they've already decided that what they do is simply a saleable commodity, rather than art.

I know, of course, that bands need to make a living and that the record industry is in flux, but this band is hugely acclaimed. They'll sell lots of records and sell a lot of tickets - there's no need to eke out a declining career, or to fund their pensions by licencing big tracks, as fading bands perhaps understandably do. Instead, they've taken the conscious decision to trade on their moment in the sun.

So farewell, The xx. You don't need me, won't understand me, won't miss one miserable old git's £10, but it matters to me.

Cue scornful response from Ben.