Category: Electronic

(with apologies to those of you who saw this the other day when I pressed publish instead of save!!)

An very abridged potted history, edited from the Electronic ICA pulled together back in 2019.

“Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner first worked together when the man from The Smiths/The The contributed guitar to Atom Rock/Triangle, a single on Factory Records by Quando Quango which the man from New Order was co-producing.

Five years on and the increasing tensions within New Order led to Bernard contemplating a solo record, but instead he called on Johnny, and together they came up with the idea of Electronic, thinking of issuing instrumental house music for clubs via white labels only. Next thing you know, they’re talking to Neil Tennant and found that he was interested in helping out…but with his distinctive vocal delivery, there was no chance of anonymity.

First single Getting Away With It was released in 1989.  By 1991, the initial ideas had crystallised into a self-titled debut from which two more chart singles – Get The Message and Feel Every Beat were lifted.  They then went off and did things with their bands, getting back together in 1992 for Disappointed, a single which again utilised Neil Tennant.

The next burst of activity was in 1996 with the album Raise the Pressure.”

This was the ‘comeback’ single, released in June 1996:-

mp3: Electronic – Forbidden City

There was a fascinating snippet of information within the sleeve of the CD, in that Karl Bartos of Kraftwerk played keyboards and Ged Lynch, most recently with Black Grape,  was on drums.   The single didn’t give any indication as to how much Karl Bartos had been involved – there were no writing credits offered up, and just Barney and Johnny appearing in the artwork.

It was only a few weeks later, when the album Raise The Pressure was released, did we learn that Karl Bartos had a co-write credit on six of its thirteen songs, including Forbidden City.  I’d have imagined that his contributions would have led to much more synth-type songs, and while this did prove to be the case with some of the album tracks, there’s no question that the lead-off single is guitar-orientated….and I’ll happily confess that it’s one of my favourite songs that Barney and Johnny were ever involved in, no matter who they were surrounded by.

There were two other songs included with the single, neither of which were included on the album.

mp3: Electronic – Imitation Of Life
mp3: Electronic – A New Religion

I’m not sure if Karl Bartos was involved in writing either of these, but the former, which extends out to almost six minutes, has a greater use of keyboards, albeit it wasn’t that different from what had been written for the debut album some five years earlier – which isn’t a criticism, by the way!!!

The latter has a lot to take in.  In places, it feels like a mid-tempo New Order cast-off, albeit with a heavier guitar sound, and then just before the two-minute mark, the distinctive voice of Denise Johnson comes in to take it in a different direction.  The most noticeable thing is that Denise shows up just how limited a singer Barney really is……which isn’t a criticism by the way!!!

Forbidden City reached #14 in the charts, one of six Top 20 hits the group would enjoy between 1989 and 1999.

JC

Yup.  It’s come out in the 7″ lucky dip.   I wrote about it in October 2013.  I’m more than happy to cut’n’paste as I can’t really better what was said at the time.

When Barney met Johnny, and they team up with Neil.  Proof that supergroups sometimes do work:-

mp3 : Electronic – Getting Away With It

The debut single. Hugely anticipated on release, it didn’t disappoint.  Reviews were almost universally and deservedly positive:-

NME  :  “The most complete pop record of the week, by an infinite margin… A lovely airy melody drifts in and out of the song; gently weighted with obtuse, lovelorn one-liners… The record somehow manages to be much more than the sum of its parts and stubbornly refuses to give up its element of mystery”

Sounds :  “It’s nothing shocking, nothing that surprising, it’s just that every time you think you’re tired of it you can’t help flipping back the stylus to catch that chorus”.

Over the next decade or so, Electronic would write and record some brilliant dance music with some of the best guitar work that Johnny Marr ever laid down.  But they never again got as close again to the sound of Italian House that was all the rage for a while at the end of the 80s.

The orchestral arrangement came courtesy of Anne Dudley of The Art Of Noise.

The b-side is total house music and was for a number of years uses as the theme tune for a football highlights programme here in Scotland:-

mp3 : Electronic – Lucky Bag (edit)

A #12 hit in the UK.

JC

Electronic – Electronic (1991)

Collaborations don’t work.

The sentiments of a tongue-in-cheek song by FFS in 2015….FFS, of course, being the ‘supergroup’ formed by Franz Ferdinand and Sparks.

Musically, such coming togethers should be a disaster, with too many egos likely to get in the way.  It wasn’t the case in December 1989, when Bernard Sumner, Johnny Marr and Neil Tennant came together to record and released the sublime single Getting Away With It.  

The music press would provide the occasional snippet of information that plans were in hand for further collaborations under the Electronic banner, but the longer the time passed the more it felt, to those on the outside, that the egos were probably getting in the way. It wasn’t until April 1991 that we next heard from Electronic, with a single which blended the most wonderful things about New Order and The Smiths:-

mp3: Electronic – Get The Message

One month later, the debut album, which included Get The Message, but not Getting Away With It, hit the stores.  As someone who thought the world of Barney and Johnny, I rushed out to pick up a copy.

It hardly left the CD player for about a month.  I also made a copy onto cassette so that the album could accompany me on the daily commute to and from Edinburgh.  And later in the year, shortly before Christmas, when they played a very rare live show at the Glasgow Barrowlands, I made sure I got there early to be right at the front, worshipping literally at their feet (Johnny’s in particular).

I know I came to this album pre-judging that it would be nothing short of a triumph.  There were even occasions as I played it so often in 1991 when I thought it was better than anything else either of the two main protagonists had been involved in.  I really did consider it to be a perfect record.

Time has passed, and my initial giddy excitement has dissipated slightly.  I still love and adore the debut Electronic album, but I do fully accept and acknowledge that the protagonists have made better, more influential and more enduring records. Spoiler alert – this isn’t the last time Barney or Johnny or Neil appear in this rundown.

JC

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.

JC

This is my sneaky attempt at rescuing what has been an ignored new series, in which I take something written within an ICA and repost it. Maybe offering up the song as a high-quality vinyl rip will help matters.

mp3: Electronic – Get The Message

From ICA 205, February 2019:-

The long-awaited follow-up single to Getting Away With It. It’s been said that Johnny Marr was reluctant to layer multiple guitar parts as he was really unsure of recreating old stuff when he was so keen to move on, but persuaded otherwise by Bernard Sumner for which we should all be hugely grateful. Backing vocals are courtesy of (the late) Denise Johnson, probably best known for her work with Primal Scream.

JC

WE DON’T NEED TO ARGUE, WE JUST NEED EACH OTHER

An Electronic ICA

An abridged potted history.

Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner first worked together when the man from The Smiths/The The contributed guitar to Atom Rock/Triangle, a single on Factory Records by Quando Quango which the man from New Order was co-producing.

Five years on and the increasing tensions within New Order led to Bernard contemplating a solo record but instead he called on Johnny and they came up with the idea of Electronic, thinking of issuing instrumental house music for clubs via white labels only. Next thing you know, they’re talking to Neil Tennant and found that he was interested in helping out…but with his distinctive vocal delivery, there was no chance of anonymity.

First single Getting Away With It was released in 1989, going to #12 in the UK charts but more importantly in terms of the developement of the band, it was a hit in the USA and led to them being invited to support Depeche Mode on a stadium tour in 1990.

By the following year, the initial ideas had crystalized into a self-titled debut LP which really showcased their talents and abilities, with a largely upbeat package, from which two more chart singles – Get The Message and Feel Every Beat were lifted. It was an album filled with catchy melodies and choruses, with plenty for fans of the old bands to acknowledge and love.

They then went off and did things with their bands, getting back together in 1992 for Disappointed, a single which again utilised Neil Tennant.

The next burst of activity was in 1996/97 with the album Raise the Pressure (which spawned three hit singles) and then 1999 saw the release of Twisted Tenderness, an album which they made as a more conventional 4-piece band thanks to contributions from Jimi Goodwin of Doves and Ged Lynch of Black Grape on bass and drums respectively.

Three albums worth of top-class material has made for a few tough choices for this ICA….it’s packed with singles but that’s because the boys and their record labels (Factory for album #1 and Parlophone thereafter) knew what would sound huge blasting out of the radio.

SIDE A

1. Getting Away With It

The debut. One reviewer said “It’s nothing shocking, nothing that surprising, it’s just that every time you think you’re tired of it you can’t help flipping back the stylus to catch that chorus”. And that’s what makes it such a work of genius and a timeless piece of art.

2. Tighten Up

The third track on the debut album. One reviewer said “..the devastating marriage of Smiths guitars and New Order technology that nervously excited fans the globe over were anticipating from Electronic. Imagine a sublime splicing of ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’ and ‘Dream Attack’, then multiply by 12” Indeed.

3. Forbidden City

The comeback 45 in 1996…quite different in sound to what had come before with Johnny very much recreating the guitar sounds of his first band at a time when his old mucker’s solo career was in a bit of disarray after the panning given to Southpaw Grammar. It felt like a two-fingered salute in many ways…and it sounded sublime.

4. Lucky Bag

The b-side to the debut single….and the only time that they came close to realising the initial idea of Italian house music. It’s unlike any other Electronic track, and while I won’t make any claims about it being among their ten best, it just seems to fit into the ICA at this stage quite perfectly. Little-known fact…Lucky Bag was used, for a couple of years, as the theme tune for a weekly showing of Scottish football highlights on the BBC.

5. Get The Message

From the debut album and the long-awaited follow-up single to Getting Away With It. It’s been said that Johnny was reluctant to layer multiple guitar parts as he was really unsure of recreating old stuff when he was so keen to move on, but persuaded otherwise by Bernard for which we should all be hugely grateful. Backing vocals are courtesy of Denise Johnson, probably best known for her work with Primal Scream

SIDE B

1. Disappointed (7″ mix)

The involvement of Neil Tennant in the early days led to the inevitable christening of Electronic as a super-group, which was used in a derogatory way by those who didn’t like them. This was the stand alone single from 1996 and in reaching #6, gave them their biggest UK hit. I’m thinking most casual listeners just thought it was a Pet Shop Boys effort.

2. Vivid (radio edit)

If, more than occasionally, the songs were reminiscent of the other bands they were all involved in, then there’s little doubt that the lead-off single from Twisted Tenderness is more than a nod to The The, with Jonny hitting the harmonica early doors. Again, not necessarily one of their best ten songs, but important to have it in an ICA to demonstrate what it was all about.

3. Idiot Country two

The original Idiot Country provided an adrenalin-filled rush to open the debut album….a couple of years later, it was given the remix treatment with some added dialogue and backing vocals as well as an extra 80-odd seconds. It was provided as the b-side to Disappointed and went some way to lessening the pain of paying £4 for a CD single!

4. Gangster

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.

5. Feel Every Beat (7″ mix)

A five-minute version of this closes the debut album and tempting as it was to use that here, I have to bow to the remixing skills of Stephen Hague who chops about a minute off the original and helps deliver something which captures perfectly what Jonny and Bernard wanted Electronic to sound like and what they wanted a band to be….’we don’t need to argue, we just need each other’

JC

 

As a way of background, I’d like to refer you to this posting from back in October 2013.

Not too long ago I picked up the 12″ vinyl remix of the single with the catalogue number Fac 257r. There’s three different versions of the single (two of which are more clubby and likely to be of interest to Swiss Adam, among others) and another excellent mix of the house-style instrumental that was on the b-side of the ‘proper’ single:-

mp3 : Electronic – Getting Away With It (vocal remix)
mp3 : Electronic – Getting Away With It (nude mix)
mp3 : Electronic – Lucky Bag (Miami edit)
mp3 : Electronic – Getting Away With It (original version)

The first two of the remixes are the work of Mike Pickering and Graeme Park and seem quite typical of the sort of work they were doing back in 1989.

JC

It was just over a year after the relase of  Phobia by Flowered Up that this track became known:-

mp3 : Electronic – Feel Every Beat

The combined talents of Bernard Sumner and Johnny Marr, made Electronic a highly listenable band, coming to  prominence with the hit single Getting Away With It (featuring a co-vocal from Neil Tennant) in late 1989. However,  the next hit, Get The Message didn’t appear for some 15 months.

The self-titled debut LP hit the shops in April 1991 to near universal critical acclaim along with enough sales to propel it to #2 in the album charts. Factory Records must have been confident of getting the band a third successive Top 20 single when they released a remixed version of Feel Every Beat in September 1991. Regarded by many as the strongest track on the album with its mix of dance/house/indie rock appealing to a very wide audience, it was put out on vinyl in 7″ and 12″ form as well as on CD single with two top-notch previously unreleased tracks  to supplement the remixes, all of which have something to offer:-

mp3 : Electronic – Feel Every Beat (7″ remix)
mp3 : Electronic – Feel Every Beat (12″ Remix)
mp3 : Electronic – Feel Every Beat (Dub Mix)
mp3 : Electronic – Feel Every Beat (DNA Mix)
mp3 : Electronic – Second To None
mp3 : Electronic – Lean To The Inside

One of the few lyrics ever to be explained by Bernard, Feel Every Beat registers his disgust at the criminalisation of rave culture in the UK over some of Johnny’s finest guitar work. But to the bemusement of all involved, it got no higher than #39. It deserved much better.

Enjoy

Today’s friend electric is Phil Spector. No, not the one in the photo above, but the one from Ayrshire in Scotland who is responsible for Plain Or Pan, a blog which describes itself as being ‘outdated music for outdated people’, in which case I am very happy to be outdated.

Phil is another whose breadth and depth of knowledge of all things musical is quite astounding. He’s another of those incredibly talented writers who make things look very easy. It’s also a blog which you can never quite predict what is coming next…

Once again, there were so many things I wanted to steal and post here, but in the end I’ve only gone back a few months to a post put together when the news that Johnny Marr had broken his hand emerged:-

It’s All Right Marr, I’m Only Bleeding

March 20, 2014

I got my first real six string when I was 16. Bought it second hand from a wee guitar shop in Irvine that disappeared the day after I paid my £30 for it. The guy who ran it was never seen again. About 2 days later, indulging in a spot of fat-fingered She Sells Sanctuary riffing, the pick-up gave me an electric shock and a temporary Sid Vicious haircut. That guitar was a right temperamental block of wood, but I loved it. I played it till my fingers bled. To paraphrase even further, it was the Summer of ’89. That’s when I realised I’d never be Johnny Marr.

I’ve always loved Johnny Marr. In The Smiths, he wrote an obscene number of brilliant, inventive tunes. Lazy writers would go on about his ‘chiming‘, ‘jangly’ guitar sound, but there was far more to his arsenal than that. There was always, even in the Smiths’ most tender moments a bite to his guitar. He could fingerpick. He could play inventive chord patterns. He could fingerpick and play an inventive chord pattern underneath it at the same time. With 10 fingers sounding like 25. ‘Like Lieber and Stoller piano lines playing alongside the guitar‘, to misquote him from the early days in The Smiths. Then there were the open tunings, the Nashville tunings, the hitting strings with knives to get the desired effect. He reinvented the wheel.

Johnny was (and probably still is) my idol. Even though he dyes his hair. And runs over 50 miles for fun each and every week.

Slightly on the wrong side of cocky (and so would you be if mercurial quicksilver tunes like those fell off your fingers and onto the fretboard as effortlessly as a bride’s knickers), he’s not much older than me, yet he’s done a ridiculous amount of music. Previous posts on here have gone on at length about all the non-Smiths stuff he’s done. There’s literally hundreds of things he’s been involved in. Not always up there with the vintage riffing of yore, but always fresh-sounding and never anything less than interesting. Clearly, he’s the guitarists’ guitarist, the one they call when they need a bit of magic sprinkled on top.

Last week when he broke his hand, my first thought was, “I wonder if I can play ‘Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others’ better than him now?“

Probably not, is most definitely the answer. One of my favourite non-Smiths Johnny moments is on Electronic‘s Forbidden City, from the patchy Raise The Pressure LP released in (gulp) 1996.

mp3 : Electronic – Forbidden City

It runs the whole gamut of Johnny’s guitar attack. A heady rush of major and minor chords played on an acoustic guitar here and electric guitars there, Johnny picking his trademark arpeggios atop some mid-paced strumming. He plays terrific little 2-string run-downs and fills between the singing that are concise and snappy and perfect. On the chorus he lets the right notes ring out at the right times. In a lesser pair of hands, it all might sound a wee bit lumpen. But Johnny knows just how to make his guitar sparkle and sing. By the middle eight, he’s flung in a backwards bit and dooked the whole lot in a bath of feedback before coming back to the song in a ringing, shimmering blaze of glory. The whole track is, of course, carried along brilliantly by a Bernard vocal that recalls New Order at their uplifting, melancholic best. And I believe that’s Kraftwerk’s Karl Bartos on drums as well. What’s not to like?

In a typically Marresque coda to all of this, Johnny’s broken hand was put into a special sling that’ll allow him to perform his day job without compromise. Broken hand or not, no-one plays guitar like Johnny.

Told you this guy was good…….

More Friends Electric tomorrow.

Proof that supergroups sometimes do work:-

mp3 : Electronic – Getting Away With It

The debut single. Hugely anticipated on release it didn’t disappoint.  Reviews were almost universally and deservedly positive:-

NME  :  “The most complete pop record of the week, by an infinite margin… A lovely airy melody drifts in and out of the song; gently weighted with obtuse, lovelorn one-liners… The record somehow manages to be much more than the sum of its parts and stubbornly refuses to give up its element of mystery”

Sounds :  “It’s nothing shocking, nothing that surprising, it’s just that every time you think you’re tired of it you can’t help flipping back the stylus to catch that chorus”.

Over the next decade or so, Electronic would write and record some brilliant dance music with some of the best guitar work that Johnny Marr ever laid down.  But they never again got as close again to the sound of Italian House that was all the rage for a while at the end of the 80s.

The orchestral arrangement came courtesy of Anne Dudley of The Art Of Noise, the full effect of which can be heard on the extended version:-

mp3 : Electronic – Getting Away With It (Extended)

The b-side is total house music and was for a number of years uses as the theme tune for a football highlights programme here in Scotland:-

mp3 : Electronic – Lucky Bag

A #12 hit in the UK, I’d guess that out with New Order this may well have been the biggest selling single ever released on Factory.

Enjoy