There was a point last year where I saw New Order’s second studio album Power, Corruption, Lies at every record fair I went to and in every secondhand record shop – and then all of a sudden, they seemed to disappear. Who knows why, but perhaps people had discovered what a great album Power, Corruption, Lies, released in May 1983 is?

Either way, this album saw the band’s sound move on since the release of Movement eighteen months or so earlier, becoming more electronic, with greater emphasis on synths. Many critics saw it as the album where New Order finally stepped out of the shadow of Joy Division. The album itself regularly made the best 100 albums of the 1980s lists and was ranked 216th in the NME’s top 500 albums of all time.

None of the tracks were released as singles, in keeping with the previous two albums and in fact is characteristic of New Order’s interesting relationship with the commercial world. They refused to go on Top of the Pops in the early 80s because they weren’t allowed to play live and Stephen Morris, the drummer, once commented that ‘if you believe in the charts, you might as well believe in fairies’.

Power, Corruption, Lies opens with the cracking Age of Consent described by Morris as a ‘fast dancy number’, with drums reused from the Hannett version of Love Will Tear Us Apart with a minor few changes. Other highlights include The Village, the title of which was inspired by the television series ‘The Prisoner’. The lyrics seem to reference the cover, but this was a co-incidence. It is however, the first song from New Order that had more than one sequenced bass line. 5 8 6 was named after the number of times each riff should play and some bits evolved into Blue Monday, which became the best selling 12″ of all time. Your Silent Face features a melodica and was referred to as the ‘Kraftwerky one’ as the band wanted it to sound like the intro to Europe Endless, though it too, soon evolved (as Morris says, you’d never catch Kraftwerk swearing!).

Morris says that the title of the album comes from the back of 1984, the dystopian George Orwell novel that Peter Hook (the bassist) was reading at the time. The artwork for the album was originally intended to feature a painting of a Renaissance prince as Saville felt that would fit with the decidedly Machiavellian title. However, Saville had gone to the National Gallery and searched in vain for something suitable. He recounted to The Observer in 2011 that after giving up for the day, he was in the giftshop buying some postcards, when Martha Ladly (of Martha and the Muffins fame) his then-girlfriend, asked him if he was going to use the Fantin-Latour painting, ‘A Basket of Roses’ for the cover. Saville thought it was a great idea because he felt the flowers suggested the way in which power, corruption and lies insinuate their way into everyday life. Now all that remained was to get permission to use the painting from the owner. At first, the National Heritage Trust refused to allow Factory Records to use it. However, when Tony Wilson (the head of the record label) phoned the National Gallery to ask who owned it, he was told the people of Britain. Wilson replied “I believe the people want it” and the rest is history…

There is minimal text on the album cover which fitted with the belief of the band and Saville that it was cooler not to have names or titles on the album. If you really liked the record, you’d find it… Whilst neither the band’s name, nor the title of the album appear on the UK release, there is a colour code in the top right that which represents the catalogue number, FACT 75 and is only decipherable using the colour wheel printed on the back. The code is used again on the inner sleeve and spells out the name of the album and the band. The bright, block code also provides a strong contrast to the still-life flower painting.

The album cover features in the Royal Mail’s Classic Album Cover postage stamps from 2010. This set also featured Tubular Bells with it’s photography from Trevor Key who worked extensively with Saville in the 1980s (more on that in a later post…), beginning with Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart.

So if you’ve not listened to PCL before, you’ve a treat in store. And if you have, well, you don’t need me to tell you that! Shall we start with a fast, dancy number?

What links camouflage and an experimental album from 1983? Read on and all will be explained, faster than the breeze over stormy seas…

Dazzle-ships in Dry Dock in Liverpool

Dazzle camouflage was invented during World War I by Norman Wilkinson. It’s contrasting colours and shapes are not meant to work as traditional camouflage and make the ship ‘fade’ into the background; instead, dazzle camouflage makes it hard to determine the speed, heading and range of a ship, making it harder to attack. So what has all this got to do with my exhibition?

Edward Wadsworth spent some of the War painting dazzle camouflage onto ships and afterwards, created the painting Dazzle-ships in Dry Dock in Liverpool in 1919. Peter Saville saw the painting and used it as inspiration for the sleeve of Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark’s fourth album, Dazzle Ships.

Dazzle Ships is one of those strange albums that seems to have managed to rehabilitate itself and has become considered something of a classic, a far cry from the less than complementary reviews it received on release; one writer described Genetic Engineering as prissy and twee and Time Zones as ‘pointlessly mundane’. Another describes Dazzle Ships as ‘half-baked, pseudo-intellectual ballast’. Ouch! I think we can agree that critics and the public at the time found it somewhat ‘challenging’. It sold just 300,000 copies on release, compared to 3 million copies of Architecture and Morality, OMD’s previous album. The singles, Genetic Engineering (with fantastic photography from Trevor Key on the sleeve) and Telegraph, peaked at 20 and 42 respectively. The track intended to be the third single, Radio Waves, was never released. It seems the sound collages might have proved too much for some: the title track Dazzleships (parts II, III and VII)* consists of samples arranged to give the impression of ships at war, Time Zones samples speaking clocks from around the world and Radio Prague is the call sign of, unsurprisingly, Radio Prague.

Since then, it’s been voted 25th in the top 100 albums of 1983 in Slicing Up Eyeballs reader vote, as well as being cited as influences on bands such as Saint Etienne and Death Cab for Cutie.

The album, or any of the tracks from it would fit perfectly into the theme of my exhibition. If you want to contribute a memory related to any of the tracks, you can do so through the link on the homepage. It could just be a sentence or it could be longer, but I’d love to know why it’s special to you.

I love Dazzle Ships in all it’s slightly off the wall glory and I shall certainly be ‘dancing to some geo-political tunes’ tonight during Tim’s Twitter Listening Party and loving every minute!

*Dazzleships parts I, IV, V and VI was an audio visual installation in the Edmund Gardner pilot ship at the Museum of Liverpool in 2014 and 2015, and was a collaboration between OMD and National Museums Liverpool.

Never one to turn down the opportunity of a pun, I’m starting my blog with Roxy Music’s Flesh and Blood album, because Bryan Ferry studied at Newcastle (Fine Art, 1968). If you’ve recently studied at Newcastle, you’ll have walked past his picture near the Student Union loads of times.

Roxy Music were also a big influence on Peter Saville; he stated he learned more from Roxy Music than he did from college and that Roxy covers were where he first became interested in fashion. For the 18 year-old Saville, Ferry represented glamour that was accessible – you could have it if you wanted it – and it didn’t require an Aston Martin, unlike Connery’s James Bond!¹

In terms of the music, Roxy Music had become a three-piece band featuring Bryan Ferry, Andy Mackay and Phil Manzanera after the departure of the drummer Paul Thompson. Other  musicians were drafted in when necessary and included Paul Carrick, who later replaced Jools Holland in Squeeze and was one of the vocalists in Mike + the Mechanics, and Andy Newmark, former drummer with Sly and the Family Stone and drummer on Lennon’s Double Fantasy.²

The album received mixed reviews, with Ken Tucker of Rolling Stone panning it. However, the audience clearly loved the album as it was certified platinum in the UK and the US.² Even if you don’t know much Roxy Music, if you’ve listened to a radio station playing 80s music, you’ll probably be familiar with at least one of the singles.

The sleeve design for Flesh and Blood, Roxy Music’s 7th studio album and their penultimate before splitting, was conceived by Saville with photography from Neil Kirk. It featured javelin-wielding women Aimee Stephenson and Shelley Mann on the front, and Roslyn Bolton on the back. It was created with no input from the band but was very much in the vein of their previous albums with women featured on the cover.³ The album spent a total of 4 weeks at number one in the UK album chart and spent 60 weeks on the chart in total.

The first single from the album, was Over You, co-written by Ferry and Manzanera and released in May 1980. The single peaked at number 5 in the UK charts and helped send the album to number on for a week in June – not bad for a song written in 5 minutes!⁴ A cover of the Byrds’ 8 Miles High was included on the promo 12″ single and also featured on the album, but the 7″ was backed with a re-recording of 1979’s Manifesto single.

The second single, Oh Yeah was written by Ferry to evoke Americana: nostalgia filled summer evenings at the drive-in.⁵ It certainly reminds me of summer days in the 80s before life got complicated in the way it inevitably does when you grow up! Fittingly, it was released in July and it also peaked at number 5 in the UK singles chart. On the back of this release, Flesh and Blood headed back to the top of the album charts for another three weeks in August. The single sleeve featured Peter Saville’s design; “OH YEAH” in a Palatino family font printed on textured white paper to resemble white leather – is it the leather of a Corvette seat? Or is it a wedding chapel bible? For Saville, you didn’t need to see the car – and this was a important facet of Roxy Music’s sleeves – the image on the cover was the key to the subtext beneath.¹

Same Old Scene was released in October 1980 and climbed to number 12 in the UK charts. The song was used on the soundtrack to the film Times Square, released in 1980 and (much!) later, in 2008 played over the closing credits for the pilot of Ashes to Ashes, (the sequel to Life on Mars which finally explains what happened to Sam Tyler – both series are well worth a watch if you’ve not seen them).

The album is an accessible route into earlier Roxy Music, so if you’ve not heard them before, why not start with Flesh and Blood? And if one of your favourite tracks appears on this album or Avalon, please use the link on the homepage to tell me why it’s special to you.

¹ Wilson, C. (2003) ‘Interview with Peter Saville’, in Designed by Peter Saville. London: Frieze