COLOURLESS GREEN IDEAS SLEEP FURIOUSLY

Sountrack - Heart and Soul - Joy Division

Where do you want to go today?

What were you doing when this came out? How many records do you own which were made before you were twenty or before your were ten or before you were born? I have some that were recorded before my father was born though none before my grandfather was born. Take five is five years older than I am. Robert Johnson's recordings are the same age as my dad. There is not a lot before that. Favourites, top-tens, Friday fives are all stupid lists and do not mean anything. Music is something too precious to rate into top tens. You like it or you don't. I don't like everything on the CD I am listening to but lots of it is great and some of it seminal. 31 Songs indeed! The man tries to rate everything so that your very thoughts turn into simplified lists of the black and the white; it is a sort of Newspeak of criticism. Read the bloody review; don't look at how many stars it has. A star system has 5 or 10 grades; a review has a whole spectrum of emotion and feelings; just one listen has the whole cosmos of opinion.

That digital outboard like that ol' Janx spirit was a turning point. Put that box of tricks through a 32 track mixer and you get ... secrets. Try to record silence and then put it into a Glorfindel Box. I walked along that lonley ridge, a pile of industrial waste as dead as the industry which had made it, and recorded the wind and the silence and the distant big bang echo of the old days of powerful machinery. The sound of that hill top is like the remains of the big bang, always there to remind you of what was and will never be again. This is of couse from un-published pages of 24 Hour Party People and Ian Curtis was a genious and Tony Wilson is exactly what it says on the poster but you read it just the same