‘Touched By The Hand Of God’ was one of a handful of tracks by New Order included on the soundtrack to the movie ‘Salvation’. Released as a single in December 1987, it was remixed for the occasion and also acted as the follow-up to the surprisingly big chart success that ‘True Faith’ had gifted the band a few months earlier.
This particular small object of desire is the UK CD single format, which is a curious item. I didn’t buy it at the time, only much later. (I didn’t start buying CDs until 1990.) Its track listing on the sleeve is as follows;
- ‘Touched By The Hand Of God’ Twelve Inch Mix
- ‘Confusion Dub 1987’
- ‘Temptation’ Original Mix
However, it’s not quite so…
This CD single includes the 12” mix of ‘Touched By The Hand Of God’ but otherwise breaks with the 7”/12” sequencing by including two completely different additional tracks and therefore has no room for ‘Touched By The Hand Of Dub’.
The 7” and 12” formats featured the Arthur Baker produced versions of ‘Touched By The Hand Of God’ on the A side and ‘Touched By The Hand Of Dub’ on the B side. In both cases the 7” and 12” mixes are different. The 7” mix of the A side is easy to come by on CD, since it is featured on various compilations, but the B side versions not so much – there are a couple of Japanese CD singles, one of which has the 7” dub version, the other has the 12” dub version.
Those two additional tracks have their origins with the ‘Substance’ compilation album that, notionally, gathered together the bands single A sides of an extended 12” nature. ‘Notionally’ comes geared for some heavy lifting here, as two of the tracks were present in re-recorded form, not the original 12” mixes. One of those tracks is included here, ‘Temptation (1987)’. The other additional track on this CD single is ‘Confusion Dub 1987’ – while this wasn’t on the album directly, as the title implies, it is a dub version that is based on the re-recorded ‘Confusion (1987)’ from the album.
Note: I added the (1987) portions to the title – the ‘Substance’ album just listed them as ‘Temptation’ and ‘Confusion’ – you would only know from the finer sleeve credits they were new versions, where it states for both of them ‘New Version – 5/87’.
‘Confusion Dub 1987’ is the rarer beast of the two here. It is a highly polished and tightened up version of the otherwise primitive and fragile electro of the 1983 original. Extensive vocoder use is one of the key elements to the fore here, along with some admittedly lush synth strings of later ‘80s vibe. Although the sleeve states that it is ‘Temptation’ Original Mix it is actually ‘Temptation (1987)’ that is included. It’s pretty different though maybe not quite so radically, again it’s a tidying up affair that for some may throw the baby out the bath water in respect of the earlier fragile charm. If you like your beats precise and sequenced these two mixes are probably much more up your street.
