Rounding out May’s posts is the standard UK 7″ issue of New Order’s first single release of 1985, ‘The Perfect Kiss’.
On first sight, and in comparison to many other New Order singles of the ’80s in particular, it looks quite uninspiring and bland, taking minimalism all the way by being packaged in a high gloss plain black card sleeve, with minimal silver print typography on plain black labels. In the grooves though we find two edits that are unique to only this 7″ single and which have never found their way on to any later CD releases.
^ New Order – The Perfect Kiss UK 7″ front sleeve and label design.
This post will look at the various releases of the Hard Corps compilation album, ‘Metal and Flesh’ and its multiple mixes and selections across a small but surprisingly varied releases.
I have posted about Hard Corps before, they remain, even after all these years, a favourite. At a time when bands were increasingly content to rely on the clean gleam of the new digital instrumentation wave, Hard Corps were synthesising their own sounds from a variety of elements. In the rhythm department in particular, none of the obvious go-to sources of the era, save for a Roland TR-808 to provide a basic chassis in early stages of a track’s development, swapped out as they progressed for their urgent, hard, insistent pure electronic beats driving the music. Whether in the more in your face and up tempo signature pieces as ‘Metal and Flesh’, ‘Dirty’ or ‘Desolation Land’, or on the slower, more melancholic works such as ‘The Bell’ or ‘Respirer’. My goodness, how well did Regine Fetete’s abstractions describe in fragments such bittersweet worlds to marry with the music produced by Hugh Ashton, Robert Doran and Clive Pierce.
Hard Corps ‘Metal and Flesh’ 1990 CD
The CD was the first version of the album to appear, I received my copy by mail order on 19th September 1990 (having ordered it from an advert for Beat Route mail order back in August). The Discogs.com entry gives an earlier release date of 18th June 1990 though. I don’t know the background to the album and how it came to be. Seems to gather together earlier, harder and more melancholic tracks along with later period ones where the sound has softened a little over time. I have no idea if it is really as clear cut as that, but I wonder if there was some kind of change, perhaps related to when the band’s working relationship with Polydor must have soured and led to be a period of inactivity. 1986 in particular saw, for example, little if any live appearances.
^ Hard Corps ‘Metal and Flesh’ 1990 CD – front cover design
Lifted as the second single to promote the band’s 1988 ‘A Bell Is A Cup (Until It Is Struck)’ album, the opening track ‘Silk Skin Paws’ was remixed for 12″ and 7″, with a ‘Filofax’ format 3″ CD single along for the ride for added ’80s gimmickry.*
Wire – Silk Skin Paws – UK CD, 7″ and 12″ singles front covers
We return once more to the intriguing story of the variations to Gary Numan’s ‘Telekon’ album in this post, by way of the lavish and unique ‘80/81’ box set from November 2011. I found this a quite tempting release at the time for reasons I can’t quite recall now, other than it was a pre-Christmas treat to myself – well, why wouldn’t you?!
The Box
Packaged in a sturdy, matt-silk finish black box with the familiar double red ‘Telekon’ bars, the 80/81 title is picked out in high-gloss spot varnish. May all be either tasteful high-tech minimalism or just a bit too plain for some, depending on your taste.
Some while back I posted about the wonderful (thought of its time) He Said album, ‘Take Care’. The supporting single release for the album was the uneasy ‘Could You?’. Who knows for sure what the ‘text’ by Graham Lewis really alludes to, but for me it has always leaned towards some cryptic confession of murder/mercy killing. Despite the opaque nature of the lyric, it looks like there were high hopes for its commercial success as a single and it provides rich pickings for version craziness to be uncovered, with no less than six mix variants across the ‘Could You?’/’Could You (Too)’ main variants.
^ He Said – Could You? – UK 12 inch single front sleeve design.
