I was doing a bit of browsing in the Monorail record store a couple of weeks back. There was still some stock left over from Record Store Day 2022, including a 12″ EP by Electronic which I took a closer look at.
Six tracks in all, consisting of remixes made between 1989 and 1992. Here’s the thing…..I thought I had everything that had been released during that period, thanks to me buying the albums and singles, with a mix of vinyl and CDs…..but I was looking at a sleeve which has a remix of the album track Gangster that I wasn’t aware of.
The dilemma then facing me is whether to fork out a reasonably substantial amount of money for just one song I don’t have. It did go through my head to just seek it out digitally and save money via a download, but that thought passed very quickly. About a nanosecond, I reckon.
So I took home the EP.
I didn’t rush into it….the remix I didn’t know was the third track on Side A, which meant I listened to the extended mix of Getting Away With It and then a DNA remix of Get The Message prior to Gangster (FBI Mix).
I was a bit nervous that I’d end paying for a duff piece of music. The original version of Gangster from the eponymous debut album from 1991 has long been a favourite. As I said when I included it on the Electronic ICA:-
Track six on the debut album and the one which provides a reminder of Technique, the last truly indispensable album ever released by New Order, complete with a lyric in which Bernard makes a number of torturous rhymes.
Turns out the remix is even more akin to the New Order record, straight from the opening notes:-
mp3: Electronic – Gangster (FBI Remix)
It got me wondering how I had missed it back in the day, and it seems it was made available on the 12″ version of Disappointed issued in America by Warner Brothers. I stand to be corrected, but I don’t think it was ever made commercially available on vinyl or CD in the UK until a few weeks ago.
Worth every penny. For the record, the b-side consisted of the 12″ remix of Feel Every Beat, the remix of Idiot Country that had been included with the UK release of Disappointed, which itself was the final track on the RSD 2022 release.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 
New to me too and like you I thought I had everything they released
I got all of the early Electronic CD5s in a mixture of UK and US editions, so the “Gangster” remix was always in the Record Cell. I didn’t think there was anything on this compilation that I didn’t have, but I never knew that “Gangster [FBI mix]” was a US only phenomenon. I liked Electronic, but never enough to go beyond those first four singles. As was my practice at the time, I often bought all of a band’s singles from the album with the intent of picking up the easier to get album later on. Thirty three years later… we still don’t have the Electronic album. And like any music from ’89-’90 [see also: “Raw Like Sushi”], I think of it as a “recent release” due to the fact that it didn’t date back to 1980-1981!