➢➢ Shapers of the 80s ➣➣

2011 ➤ Clarke and Wilder pile in for Depeche Mode’s ultimate remix album

Posted on 28 Mar 2011 | Leave a comment

Three faces engraved by a life in rock: Depeche Mode’s Andy Fletcher, Dave Gahan and Martin Gore have between them survived depression, addiction, mental instability, attempted suicide, divorce and fatherhood

❚ ESSEX BOYS DEPECHE MODE TODAY offer an audio stream exclusively at Facebook as a taster for the release of their newest compilation album titled Remixes 2: 81–11, through Mute Records on June 6. Both of the early members of the band have contributed tracks to the album which covers three decades of music. Songwriter and synth pioneer Vince Clarke, who established DM’s identity in 1981 as the first techno-pop clubbers to break the UK charts, has remixed Behind The Wheel; and Alan Wilder has remixed In Chains. He took Vince’s place in the lineup from 1982, but in 1995 regretfully departed to pursue production and his solo project Recoil.

The mainstays of today’s band remain Dave Gahan (vocalist, who not long ago told Interview magazine “Depeche Mode music somehow appeals to the oddball”), Martin Gore (keyboards, here telling BBC 6Music about the places in the world that were crucial to Depeche Mode’s history — and the problem with the UK), plus Andrew Fletcher (keyboards and on-off manager). Depeche Mode are without doubt one of the greatest of British alternative bands, whose sound and image have grown darker and more provocative with the years. They boast 48 UK hit singles and international album sales said to total 100 million, among which 12 titles were studio recordings and four live.

Depeche Mode, Remixes2 81–11, Mute Records , album The new release (left) comes in various formats: a three-disc version holds 37 remixed tracks, while a one-disc version has 13, spanning the decades from the 1981 debut Speak and Spell, through to 2009’s Sounds Of The Universe. Purists will welcome the 6 x 12-inch vinyl LP box set.

See the tracklistings at Depeche Mode’s news page.

❏ Today at Facebook all 3,456,660 fans of the band’s page must have been attempting hear the free stream simultaneously because for a long while it became impossible to join up and listen to the Alex Metric Remix of Martin Gore’s 1989 song Personal Jesus. To ease the pain for DM fans who don’t belong to Facebook, here’s a quick clip:
❏ Update April 4 — Since last Monday 56,290 people have sampled the Alex Metric Remix just mentioned. Today, another track is being streamed free at Facebook from DM’s upcoming album, with more to follow on future Mondays. Here’s a taste of Martin Gore’s 1987 number Never Let Me Down Again in its Eric Prydz Remix:
❏ On May 14 Martin Gore and Andrew Fletcher will be playing DJ sets at Short Circuit which is a two-day celebration at London’s Roundhouse of Mute’s influence as a label, featuring performances, workshops, screenings and installations by its artists who include Erasure and Alison Moyet on the Saturday. Friday May 13 has Mute founder Daniel Miller deejaying as well as Moby, plus Richie Hawtin, Recoil, Nitzer Ebb and other acts.

Depeche Mode, Dave Gahan, New York Times , Roberto Cavalli

Dave Gahan wearing Roberto Cavalli jacket, $4,615, and pants, $2,285, styled by Bill Mullen, photographed by Mikael Jansson for The New York Times T Magazine in 2011

➢ Visit Ballad of a Thin Man in The New York Times T Magazine, March 11 — more skinny looks on Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Bryan Ferry, David Johansen and other godfathers of glam

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Posted in Fashion, London, Media, North America, Pop music, Uncategorized, Youth culture

Tagged 2011, Alan Wilder, albums, audio, Dave Gahan, Depeche Mode, Remixes2, Short Circuit, streaming, Vince Clarke

➤ Mick Karn takes a last journey in Dalis Car 2

Posted on 28 Mar 2011 | 2 comments

On video: Muriel Gray interviews Mick Karn and Peter Murphy as Dalis Car on Channel 4’s weekly music show The Tube in November 1984

❚ CONFIRMATION COMES TODAY of the last musical collaboration by Mick Karn, former bass player with Japan, who died of cancer in January. His longtime associate Debi Zornes announces today at Facebook: “Mick’s final work has yet to be released and is a collaboration with Peter Murphy as Dalis Car 2. The duo were reunited in a studio in Oxford at the end of September last year to begin work and four tracks were completed over the ensuing months — a slow process due to Mick’s declining health. Steve [Jansen] has just finishing mixing the four tracks which will be released as an EP. More news to follow soon, including release date.”

Mick Karn, Peter Murphy, Dalis Car, pop music

Mick Karn and Peter Murphy: teamed as Dalis Car in 1984

Debi also thanks everyone who sent messages of condolence and support and donations. “They were invaluable in providing support for Mick and his family during those last 7 months. It allowed them to relocate to London to receive better care and be close to friends.”

Murphy said that the recent collaboration was the first time that the musicians had seen each other since the 80s. He wrote of Karn’s last months in his own tribute in January: “Mick’s wry sense of humour, keen creativity and graciousness were there even in the times of most physical distress.”

Mick Karn, Peter Murphy, Dalis Car , Waking Hour, pop music During 1984, after Karn and Murphy left their hugely successful and innovative bands, Japan and Bauhaus, they collaborated with Paul Lawford on percussion as Dalis Car to record an album, The Waking Hour (left), and a single, The Judgement is the Mirror, viewable at YouTube with other keyboard and bass- driven songs such as His Box.

Peter Murphy, whose iceberg cheekbones and baritone voice came to prominence with the British rock band Bauhaus (1978-83), has been dubbed the Godfather of Goth. Right now he is touring in the US until April 10, and signed to Nettwerk Music Group to release I Spit Roses as an EP on March 22. A new album titled Ninth is expected on June 7.

➢ 2010, Ure rallies support for Japan’s bassist Karn
➢ 2011, Farewell Mick Karn, master of the bass and harbinger for the New Romantics

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Posted in London, Pop music, Youth culture

Tagged 2011, Dalis Car, Mick Karn, Peter Murphy

➤ Anna’s Army — how the English-born editor of Vogue became her own global brand

Posted on 25 Mar 2011 | Leave a comment

◼ ONCE IN A WHILE a piece of journalism actually reveals stuff you didn’t already know and a great big penny drops. For its April issue, WSJ., the glossy magazine published by The Wall Street Journal, puts Anna Wintour on its cover (photographed by ex-Blitz Club barman Mario Testino), while writer Joshua Levine explains in thorough detail how her power and financial clout reach far beyond her own editorship of Vogue, which she assumed in 1988.

By mobilising a “fully connected network” of allies and celebrity shock troops Anna shapes micro-economic forces around the world, to become “basically a global brand”, in the opinion of Deborah Needleman, editor of WSJ., “someone whose power extends beyond what she does”. Or as a former colleague who attended corporate matchmaking sessions between fashion’s biggest brands says: “She’s really the McKinsey of fashion.”

A coalition of the willing: Anna Wintour’s army of allies extends her influence well beyond Vogue. Here are a few key people in what one academic calls her “fully connected network”. Graphic © WSJ. magazine

When some of New York’s 1,000 targeted stores balked at joining up to her Fashion’s Night Out initiative to rebuild sales amid post-recessionary thrift, she was calling it in from command central — “I’ll get you Sienna Miller at the store, I’ll send you Justin Timberlake!” Timberlake and Miller are among Wintour’s most zealous Hollywood allies. “She understands fashion is a frame of mind, not just the clothes,” Timberlake says. “She’s figured out that all these small moving parts come into play to make a bigger picture.” A year later FNO had become an international event in 16 countries, when Istanbul, for example, logged clothing sales of $2 million in three hours.

At the age of 61, Anna’s globe-trotting, matchmaking and event-planning have not only made her a force among fund-raisers but are fuelling rumours that she is angling for a job in Washington as an ambassador. Indeed, Michelle Obama is one of the first names Wintour mentions when asked whom she most looks up to. Read on to discover Anna’s response…

➢ The business of being Anna — in WSJ. magazine

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Posted in Fashion, Media, North America, Social trends

Tagged Anna Wintour, fund-raising, Interview, New York, Vogue, WSJ

➤ Crazee or crazed? Lynch’s view of Duran from within his hellish cave

Posted on 24 Mar 2011 | Leave a comment

Duran Duran, streaming, live concert, Amex,YouTube, Unstaged, David Lynch, Los Angeles

Duran live on YouTube: a choice of three camera streams and “Lynchian effects” smothering John Taylor’s performance on All You Need Is Now

What’s with the floating heads? Kelis joins Le Bon for The Man who Stole a Leopard

❚ WHAT RUM NIGHTMARES DAVID LYNCH must have in bed at night, but then, he did direct Eraserhead after all. For the best part of two hours, today’s much vaunted Duran Duran live web concert in the Unstaged series kept making you want to hurl virtual cabbages at the screen, enraged by a director whose intent was to obscure the act from view with his relentlessly potty toy-box full of widgets. From 2am UK time till almost the dawn chorus, the band onstage in California had no idea what web audiences in 22 overseas territories (432,000 channel views by 6.30am) were enduring as they pushed on through 18 numbers where musically there was much to enjoy (though Simon Le Bon did lurch badly off-key a couple of times). Two of the guest performers Kelis and Beth Ditto added real pleasure to Duran’s output old and new, as did a medley of Bond themes arranged by Mark Ronson.

The YouTube HD media player offered viewers at their computers a choice of three image sources, but gallingly the director’s cut wasn’t simply an option — it was the main stream. A couple of handheld “fun” cams in the audience searching for alternative shots added nothing whatsoever (one vanished entirely), so you were stuck with Lynch’s hellish visions and flickering ghosts from within his own mental Plato’s cave.

Duran Duran, streaming, live concert, Amex,YouTube, Unstaged, David Lynch, Los Angeles , Gerard Way

Collision of vocalists: Le Bon and guest Gerard Way during Planet Earth

The trouble with the way-over-the-top “Lynchian effects” was that by shooting the band in broodily gloomy black and white, then adding a light-storm of flashing bleached-out effects resulted in obscuring the musicians for literally 90% of the concert. This utterly defeats the founding principle for televising live events — which was always to give the viewer a privileged close-up vantage point. Not to superimpose a veil of tears. What Lynch added to the often rousing performance in the Mayan theatre, Los Angeles, was a heavy-handed montage (loosely echoing Duran’s lyrics) of old clock parts, bicycle wheels, smoking twigs, flames, sparklers, crashing airplanes, shrunken heads on sticks, BBQ hot dogs, dancing mice, gnomes and the sock fairy.

All of which prompted scrolling comments onscreen from viewers: “I wanna see the boys”, “What’s with the floating heads?”, “This guy is on freaking crack”, “Fatuous visuals”, “Giving me a headache”, “I’m going dizzy” and “Fire Lynch!”

Conclusion: arm yourself with a couple of extra-strong Nurofen Plus if you feel up to catching either the whole concert restreamed for UK audiences at 8pm tonight on Duran’s Vevo channel at YouTube, or opt right away for what look like edited highlights which were already being uploaded as the live show ended. The highlights seem likely to linger online for the next month. But if Rhodes, Le Bon, and the Taylors can brace themselves to view the whole Lynchian farrago in real time — as we had to — they’ll never, ever repeat this kind of laughable venture live. The surrealists played this card in 1930, and won hands down.

Duran Duran, streaming, live concert, Amex,YouTube, Unstaged, David Lynch, Los Angeles , Beth Ditto

Ghost in the machine: the usually high-visibility guest Beth Ditto trapped in a Lynchian spinning jenny during Notorious

Given a roasting: Nick Rhodes gets barbecued during, appropriately, Come Undone

➢ Duran’s official website lists these 22 territories (based on YouTube licensing agreements) which are able to view Unstaged: Argentina,  Australia,  Brazil , Canada,  Czech Republic , France , Hong Kong , Ireland, Israel,  Italy , Japan,  Korea, Republic of  Mexico,  Netherlands,  New Zealand,  Poland,  Russian Federation,  South Africa , Spain , Taiwan Province of China,  United Kingdom , United States.

➢ Shapersofthe80s reports on Duran Duran in America — plus media verdicts on the new album All You Need Is Now

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Posted in Media, North America, Pop music, Technology

Tagged 2011, All You Need Is Now, Amex, David Lynch, Duran Duran, live concert, Los Angeles, streaming, Unstaged, webcast, YouTube

1932–2011 ➤ Liz Taylor — glamour to a T

Posted on 23 Mar 2011 | Leave a comment

❚ ENGLISH-BORN DAME ELIZABETH TAYLOR, one of cinema’s biggest stars, the epitome of celebrity itself, has died in Los Angeles aged 79. As the woman of the age, she was renowned for her magnificent beauty, her fierce independence, her daring and insolence. Her most notable performances are seen in National Velvet, Cleopatra and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — one of 12 films with the great British actor Richard Burton, in his day the highest-paid in Hollywood. Taylor herself was the first woman to be cast in a $1m role, that of Cleopatra, pictured in the epic with Burton on the Time cover, below. He married her twice in possibly the longest-running love story in showbiz, marked by its passion and turbulence.

Taylor won four Oscar nominations between 1958 and 1961, for Raintree County, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer and triumphed at her fourth attempt with Butterfield 8. Of screen-acting she said: “I learned that you had to feel it in your gut, and your guts had to get in an uproar.”

Her own favourite movie was Mike Nichols’s caustic portrait of a car-crash marriage, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966, above, nominated for 13 Academy Awards among which Taylor won Best Actress playing opposite her own husband Burton). Her beauty at age 18 is breath-taking as she plays a society girl alongside Montgomery Clift in the romantic drama A Place in the Sun (1951, below), directed by George Stevens. Beneath that a third clip shows Taylor giving full value as the mystery guest on the CBS television panel game What’s My Line? in 1954. It is a gem.

➢ A lustrous pinnacle of Hollywood glamour — the ultimate obituary by Mel Gussow in the New York Times

➢ The last film star: monster and empress, sweetheart and scold, idiot and wise woman — David Thomson in The Guardian

➢ “Married eight times to seven men… Other love goddesses, such as Hayworth, Turner and Gardner, were not in her league. Everything she did was news” — The Daily Telegraph obituary