These are the shownotes that go with The Infected Season 3 Episode 12
Love and Rockets – Saudade (Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven 1985)
Love and Rockets were an English alternative rock band formed in 1985 by former Bauhaus members Daniel Ash and David & Kevin Haskins after that group split in 1983.
With Love and Rockets they moved away from the serious goth sound of Bauhaus. They added more poppy elements and overly complicated pretentious lyrics. They were accused of being sell-outs by Bauhaus fans.
Love and Rockets released their first album, Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven, in 1985. It received mixed reviews. However, in the late 80’s the group had a devoted following, resulting in a surprise Top Ten hit single, “So Alive,” in 1989. During the early ’90s, the group’s audience steadily declined, although they still retained a number of loyal fans.
The band members were also working on some solo projects but reformed in 1992 to make a new album together. They added dance/electronica elements to their sound but were afraid the world would not be ready for it. So they waited until 1994 to release it. In the meantime a fire destroyed the studio they were working in, and all material was scrapped in the end.
I believe from then on they mainly went their own ways and continued on with their solo projects.
We’re going to listen to the beautiful and dreamy track Saudade, from their first album. By the way, Saudade is a Portuguese word that describes the nostalgic feeling of missing something or someone that once was, but isn’t anymore.
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Arab Strap – The Turning of our Bones (as days get dark, 2021)
Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton both grew up in Falkirk, Scotland. Their debut album was released in ‘96. At this point Gary Miller and David Gow joined the band and became the rhythm section, creating a more dynamic live experience when the band started touring.
Arab Strap’s marked characteristics include sexual, personal, yet honest, lyrics. Their lyrics are sung in their native Scottish tongue. At first essentially an electro-acoustic band with a brooding, spare sound, later albums and gigs saw them develop a fuller sound that draws deeply on both indie and darker music, the lyrics continuing to focus on sex, drink and drugs.
On 9 September 2006, the band announced on their website that they were to split up. They went on tour in Europe for the last time at the end of 2006. In 2013, Middleton said he “didn’t think Arab Strap will ever record new music again,” because “we could only write songs of that ilk at a certain age”.
Arab Strap performed live a few times after the split, in 2011 for a one-off gig, and then in 2016 for a run of festival dates. In 2017 Moffat told a fan after the show that the performance was likely to have been their last ever gig.
‘The Turning Of Our Bones’ however, is from the year 2020 and so it was their their first new song in 15 years. Arab Strap said they were “back from the grave and ready to rave”. “‘The Turning of Our Bones’ is an incantation, a voodoo spell to raise the dead, inspired by the Famadihana ritual of the Malagasy people of Madagascar, in which they dance with the corpses of loved ones.”
Now this is an interesting ritual, to say the least;. The Highlander people of Madagascar bury their dead not once but twice. First, they use individual graves for the corpses. But at least two years later, they dig up their dead, and dance with them held high over their heads, this is Famadihana. After the party is over they rebury them, this time in a family tomb.
As Moffat said of the new song in a statement: ‘it’s really all about resurrection and shagging.”
Dif Juz – No Motion (Soundpool, 1987)
Subconsciously I have selected quite some introspective and dreamy tracks this week. It must have something to do with feeling a bit melancholic while recording our final podcast. We’re going to talk about Dif Juz for a bit.
Dif Juz developed out of a punk band called “London Pride” that was formed by the brothers Alan and Dave Curtis. In late 1979, Alan involved with new wave band Duran Duran. He soon disappeared and missed a particularly volatile gig after the band hired the owners of the Birmingham Rum Runner nightclub as managers. In a 2003 interview, John Taylor (bass guitarist for Duran Duran) said “straight away Alan Curtis skipped town, thinking that if he would get involved with two nightclub owners meant he would end up chopped in pieces down a city alleyway.”
Dif Juz may not have been the most successful band on the 4AD label, but their music sure typifies the label’s Ethereal and moody approach. Dif Juz was an all-instrumental quartet that made very mesmerizing and evolving compositions. In fact, you can state that they invented the “post-rock” genre that would emerge 15 years later and after the group disbanded. In total Dif Juz recorded some EPs and a full length album in 1985 called “Extractions”. The album was produced by Robin Guthrie and featured guest vocals by fellow Cocteau Twin, Liz Frazer.
It is believed that the name Dif Juz was adopted as a play on “different jazz,” but according to Alan, it was a spur-of-the-moment utterance that “didn’t mean anything”.
Blue Monday – New Order (Blue Monday, 1983)
The lyrics were written by the group’s guitarist/lead singer Bernard Sumner, who admitted to being under the influence of LSD while making the song, along with the rest of the band.
This is the best-selling 12-inch single of all time in Britain, a fact pointed out in the great mockumentary 24 Hour Party people, which we have recommended before. It is also one of the longest charting singles ever, at 7:25. The single wasn’t issued as a traditional 7 inch until 1988, which helped boost sales of the 12 inch.
New Order came up with the rhythm when they were experimenting with a new Oberheim DMX drum machine they had purchased. “Bernard [Sumner] and Stephen [Morris] were the instigators. It was their enthusiasm for new technology. The drum pattern was ripped off from a Donna Summer B-side. We’d finished the drum pattern and we were really happy, then Steve accidentally kicked out the drum machine lead so we had to start from scratch and it was never as good. The technology was forever breaking down and the studio was really archaic. Kraftwerk booked it after us because they wanted to emulate ‘Blue Monday.’ They gave up after four or five days. It was a collection of soundbites – it sort of grew and grew. When we got to the end I went in and jammed the bass; I stole a riff from Ennio Morricone. Bernard went in and jammed the vocals. They’re not about Ian Curtis; we wanted it to be vague. We were all miserable so I thought, ‘Blue Monday? Oh that’s quite apt.'”
The title is not mentioned in the lyrics, which is true of many New Order songs. Bernard actually took the song’s name from an illustration in a Kurt Vonnegut book, which Stephen Morris was reading. One of the illustrations reads: “Goodbye Blue Monday,”. It is actually a reference to the invention of the washing machine improving housewives’ lives.
Keyboardist Gillian Gilbert told in an interview how the song was made possible, in part, by er, flatulence. “The synthesizer melody is slightly out of sync with the rhythm,” she explained. “This was an accident. It was my job to program the entire song from beginning to end, which had to be done manually, by inputting every note. I had the sequence all written down on loads of A4 paper Sellotaped together to the length of the recording studio, like a huge knitting pattern. But I accidentally left a note out, which skewed the melody. We’d bought ourselves an Emulator 1, an early sampler, and used it to add snatches of choir-like voices from Kraftwerk’s album Radioactivity, as well as recordings of thunder. Bernard and Stephen had worked out how to use the sampler by spending hours recording their farts.”
The sleeve for the single does not display either the group name or song title in plain English anywhere. Instead, the legend “FAC 73 BLUE MONDAY AND THE BEACH NEW ORDER” is represented in code by a series of colored blocks. You could only decipher this with a key, which was printed on the back sleeve of the album Power, Corruption And Lies.
Peter Hook said, “I go through stages of intense dislike for ‘Blue Monday,’ which I’m sure every group does when they get one song they’re synonymous with, but the way it keeps getting reinvented is wonderful. It seems to be one of those tracks that’s timeless, which is amazing. We were using technology which could have dated like other ’80s stuff, but somehow we managed to swerve it. Was that deliberate? No, everything we do is by accident. The fact that for two years no one spotted that the sleeves cost more to make than the records confirms this.
‘Blue Monday”s not a song, it’s a feeling, but once people hear that drum riff they’re off. People used to go mad when we didn’t play it. We had a fight onstage with a DJ in Nottingham once because we wouldn’t play it – which was a very New Order thing to do. As You get older and mellower you appreciate what got you where you are. We play it now because people love it.”
This is one of the most influential electronica songs. Synthpop was already a major force in British popular music, but this was arguably the first British dance record to crossover to the New York club scene. This is Blue Monday.
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The Walk – The Cure (Japanese Whispers, 1983)
When this was first released many people thought The Cure had ripped off the sound of New Order’s mega-hit “Blue Monday.” Though many fingers were pointed at The Cure, no legal actions were ever taken because, as it turns out, “The Walk” was written and recorded before (but released after) “Blue Monday.” The likeness between the two was proven to be just a coincidence, as both bands were experimenting with electronic instruments, sequencers and drum machines, leading them to arrive at similar sounds around the same timeframe. Great minds think alike…
Fun fact: The Cure used an Oberheim OB-8 synthesizer and the same Oberheim DMX drum machine that New Order had bought, on this The Cure track. These were relatively new devices, and at the time, no one quite knew how to use them. At the beginning of the song, there’s a synth note over a drum beat that they didn’t want to have there but they couldn’t get rid of it, which is why the song starts in discordant fashion.
By the way, did you know that Joy Division actually opened for The Cure once at the Marquee Club in London? March 4th, 1979. The tickets were one pound each 😀
For those interested, an audio recording is available of the same Cure show that was recorded one week later. I’ll embed it in the shownotes on for this episode on www.theinfected.nl
Joy Division supported The Cure again three months later at the Odeon in Canterbury. The two bands only ever played together twice.
So about the origin of this song; The Cure had gotten into a fight and lost their bass player Simon Gallup and the band was in shambles when the remaining two members, Robert Smith and Lol Tolhurst, got together in the studio to compose this song, late 1982. Tolhurst came up with the keyboard riff, and Smith took it from there. The song became their biggest UK hit to that point, going to #12 and revitalizing the band.
It was the first Cure song to ever enter the UK top 20, and it put a lot of pressure on the band for commercial success. In a 1983 interview Robert Smith said: “There was so much pressure after ‘The Walk’ because it went in the charts and then everyone wanted another single. We had to resist the temptation, I don’t want to be bound to the same group of people, the same music.
The original master tapes of The Walk were lost, so there are several versions of this track. The band had to re-record it for their 1990 remix album Mixed up.
Rosetta Stone – Subterfuge (Adrenaline, 1993)
Rosetta Stone are an English gothic rock band formed in the 1980s by Porl King and Karl North, plus their drum machine and synthesizer rack nicknamed “Madame Razor”. The guys wanted to escape the traditional Brit-pop scene that was going on in their hometown, Liverpool.
Soon they met Wayne Hussey from the well-established band The Mission, who offered to produce their first album. A very nice stepstone right?
Several singles were put out through the ’90s, and Rosetta Stone issued their first full-length album, Adrenaline, in 1993. It was during this time that Rosetta Stone helped lead the quite overlooked goth rock movement into the mainstream. Their early style and first album used plenty of typical goth rock jangly-guitar sounds, and their first big break came after live gigs supporting The Mission.
As you can hear they were influenced heavily by Bauhaus and especially The Sisters of Mercy. In fact, they almost sound like a copy of The Sisters of Mercy, but with less catchy hooks and less memorable if you ask me.
The band later moved to a more electronic sound but broke up in the year 2000, but resurfaced late in the 2010s with a pair of LPs.
The band is named after the Rosetta Stone, an Egyptian historical artifact, and the band used much ancient mythological imagery, especially in their earlier work.
The B52’s – Ain’t It A Shame (Bouncing Of The Satellites 1986)
The B-52’s are a band that certainly brought a lot of fun and madness to the New Wave movement. They formed in Athens, Georgia, in 1976. Several band members met in a Chinese restaurant and got wasted. They hit it off, and did a jam session the next day. That’s how they started.
The most recognizable members are Fred Schneider with his quirky vocals, together with Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson. Cindy and Kate featured the famous cylinder-shaped sixties hairdo. In fact, the name B-52’s comes from the similarity between that hairdo and the nose of a B-52 bomber airplane.
The band’s fun take on the new wave sound was a combination of dance and surf music. It set them apart from other bands of that time, also because of the unusual guitar tunings by Ricky Wilson and the high energy.
The biggest hits: Rock Lobster, Love Shack and Summer of Love. This is a more introspective one from their 4th studio album “Bouncing Off The Satellites”.
The guitarist Ricky Wilson tragically died after the album was completed and prior to its release. He had kept his illness a secret from his bandmates. Bouncing Off The Satellites is a very nice and slower album that also has some beautiful ballads on it, and sounds quite sad as a whole. A lot different than the jumpy sound that most people know them by.
In our Cover Me section it is time to feature a really nice goth metal cover of a classic DM track. This was released by Odyssey, a side project formed in 1999 by Swedish multi-instrumentalist Dan Swanö.
Now Dan is a special guy. He has played in and recorded with an unbelievable number of goth and death metal bands. His Wikipedia page lists more than 100 different bands that he has contributed to, and notes that even at over a 100 bands, that list isn’t complete.
His contributions include audio production, engineering, mastering and mixing as well as playing guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, and singing in various styles, from grunts and growls to clean and goth vocals.
In the late 90’s Dan started his own studio, called Unisound or Gorysound Studio, now located in Örebro, near his home in Sweden. Still, while he was doing all of this, Dan up until recently also worked full-time in Musikbörsen, a music store in Örebro. No wonder then that he rarely performs live with any of his bands. The man is just too busy 🙂
Odyssey’s first EP “Odyssey” contained 3 songs, which had a total playing time of 19 minutes, so you can imagine they are pretty complex, and progressive. The music was supposed to sound like a heavier Dream Theater.
After recording the first EP Dan let the project restfor ten years and then finally revived it in 2009, when he recorded seven of his all-time favourite songs by other bands, singing and playing all instruments himself. Together with the three 1999 tracks these were released in 2010 as a full album called Reinventing the Past. That album contains our cover for today: Let’s listen to Dan the Man, A.K.A. Odyssey:
Did you recognize the track? The original song is “Shake The Disease” Depeche Mode’s thirteenth UK single, originally released in April 1985. This is one of my personal favorites, even though it was never released on an proper Depeche Mode studio album.
I thought it would be fitting to finish The Infected with this song, as a message to all our listeners; the past one and a half year have been hard, they have been grim and filled with fear. Due to the infection, corona, we have been locked up and our favorite bands haven’t been able to play. We hope you’re all well and got through this thing safely. And now that vaccinations are being distributed, the world reopens and summer has returned, let’s hope we can all move on and… shake the disease.
So, on to the LAST track- and we think it’s a fitting end to this final episode
You have made it to the end! Congratulations. A prize awaits you. We have been working on a The Infected Megamix with all the tracks we’ve ever played. Yes, in all three seasons of this show, mixed seamlessly into ONE GIANT SET. This means a special mix with well over 200 tracks, so that is over 15 hours of dark music for your non-stop listening pleasure! Look it up on Mixcloud or stream it right here from the page:
Alternatively, download the mix in a single MP3 file from Mega.nz (1.6 gb)
Thank you, children of the night, for your attention, your follows, your love, your likes, your messages and your support on this journey. Thank you for your help to spread the Infection that is the love of music. You, Us, Artists, Fellow Podcasters, Listeners, we’re all in this thing together. We all are The Infected.
Stay Strange!
The Infected 