bernard sumner – Plain Or Pan

It’s an accepted truth that Electronic was very much a bit-part project, an occasional coming-together of alternative music royalty in the gaps of downtime between their respective day jobs; Bernard and New Order, Johnny and The The…and The Healers…and The Cribs… and whoever else was looking for a six-string gunslinger for hire. The reality is much different.

Although conceived by the duo of Sumner and Marr as a collaborative and ever-shifting line-up of guest musicians and vocalists, Electronic was an active and going concern for almost every year of the ’90s. The self-titled debut album was worked on quietly in the background for months at a time before seeing the light of day in 1991. The follow-up, Raise The Pressure, took two years to put together. 1999’s Twisted Tenderness, the third and presumably final album in Electronic’s discography took a similar time to conceive. Johnny has oft-debunked the notion that he and his pals reconvened for a couple of weeks now and again to throw an album together; a studio head since the earliest days of The Smiths, to him, being part of a group is a 24-hour thing. Bernard, with his patience and dedication to programming and getting the most out of ever-changing technology, is cut from a similarly dedicated cloth.

1996’s Raise The Pressure was written during interesting times. Conceived in 1994, it began life just as Noel Gallagher was borrowing guitars from Johnny to use on the first Oasis recordings (look on the cover of Supersonic and you’ll spot Johnny’s famous black and white Rickenbacker) and was released just as Noel’s band (and Johnny’s Les Paul) were getting ready to headline Knebworth. For one of these acts (and it ain’t Electronic), that’s quite a trajectory.

Raise The Pressure was a product of the last great fertile period for UK guitar bands, yet it never quite made its mark. Here’s an album recorded by two of music’s leading lights, one of whom at least, with his moddish hair and Clarks shoes – and uncanny ability to wring seven shades of melody from six strings – could be considered the uber-cool uncle of the entire movement…and no-one is all that bothered about it.

Lead single Forbidden City is a much under-appreciated track. Despite coming gift-wrapped in New Order melancholy and ever-evolving Marr riffage, it clunked its way to number 14 before vanishing for good. Just what was wrong with the record-buying public?!

Electronic – Forbidden City

The track runs the whole range of Johnny’s guitar styles; layers of sparkling electrics sprinkled across a bed of ringing acoustics…open chorded majors in the verse…barre chorded minors in the refrain…lovely complementary run downs between vocal lines in the third verse…the up the frets dazzling stuff during the choruses…the groaning, multi-layered (and sometimes backwards) feedback solo in the middle… Forbidden City really has it all. In an era of retro bores who were happily rehashing their way into the charts and getting folk to part with their money in Our Price seven days a week, thanks to their Who and Stones and freakin’ Herman’s Hermits rip-offs, (Hello Power! Hello Ashcroft! Hello Fowler ‘n Cradock!) Forbidden City deserved so much more.

Even an appearance on prime time telly couldn’t really help it.

On TFI Friday, Bernard ‘n Johnny are backed by Doves’ Jimi Goodwin on bass, with Black Grape’s Ged Lynch keeping Karl Bartos’ drum stool warm. Bernard is a ball of on the spot sprung energy, punching the air between lines, doing his trademark whoops when he needs to take a breath, gurning indiscriminately at an audience equally hopped up on the good vibes of the times. By the looks of it, Johnny hasn’t yet discovered running and is in the midst of his fat Elvis phase. Unruly hair, jawline as loose as the jeans he’s wearing and dressed in some sort of fleece/fur overcoat, he chews gum while stomping on and off his pedal board, giving, as he always does, good camera. There’s more than a whiff of chemical enhancement to the whole thing – it is the mid 90s after all – and it’s all rather fantastic.

A chart smash though? A definitive track of its era? A firm favourite amongst the masses? There’s not a hope, as the song goes.

Like many of the tracks released by the constituent parts of the group that created it, Disappointed by Electronic was released as a standalone single, a gap-plugger that sated the appetite of their fans in the period between the first two albums. A fantastic gap-plugger it was too.

Bernard Sumner’s New Order were awfully fond of (perhaps even hell-bent on) ensuring singles stayed off of albums. Ceremony, Temptation and Everything’s Gone Green didn’t make it to Movement and Blue Monday, Confusion and Thieves Like Us didn’t appear on the chronologically closest Power, Corruption And Lies, although by the time of Low-Life, lead single The Perfect Kiss was a central part of the album and from then-on in, a good proportion all of their singles were used to promote a parent album.

Johnny Marr’s Smiths gave great value for money, regularly releasing one-off singles that would eventually appear as 33 rpm tracks on compilation albums further down the line; How Soon Is Now? (originally a b-side), Shakespeare’s Sister, Heaven Knows…, William…, Panic, Ask. All started life spinning at 45rpm.

Pet Shop Boys were perhaps the more conventional of the trio. On a major label they maybe didn’t have the same clout that an indie band might have on a small label (though what do I know?) and accordingly, almost all of their singles, in that imperial run from West End Girls and Love Comes Quickly through So Hard and Being Boring to 1991’s DJ Culture and Was It Worth It? were taken from their studio albums of the time.

Disappointed is very much a product of its time and place. Chronologically, it was written around the end of 1991, when Johnny was between The The projects and just before Bernard returned to New Order to record Republic. Despite being patchy in parts (and that’s a whole other blog post), the last decent album in New Order’s original form gave us Regret, arguably the last truly great New Order single; soaring and melancholic, built on a bed of asthmatic guitar and hard-wired technology, and, from the negatively-leaning titles in, you can draw a straight line between that New Order track and Electronic’s 4th single.

Electronic – Disappointed (7″ mix)

By the end of 1991, Pet Shop Boys had amassed 19 hit singles to their name (pop quiz – name them!) Anything they touched turned to sold and gold. They were the masters at minor key pop, “The Smiths you can dance to,” as Tennant famously said at the time. Arriving on a bed of synth washes and era-defining Italo house piano – conceived by Johnny’s brother Ian – Disappointed‘s hookiness (not Hooky-ness) is immediate and immersive, mainly due to Neil Tennant’s cooing ah-ah-aah refrain.

Three seconds in and it sounds like the greatest Pet Shop Boys hit that never was. Tennant employed all the best PSB tricks; minor key melancholy, smoothed-out spoken word in the verses, flying like a kite in the chorus, those earworming ah-ah-aahs and pulsing glacial synths to the fore.

It worked. On release in July ’92, the single climbed to number 6 on the UK charts, kept out of the top 5 by Mariah Carey’s helium-voiced take on the Jackson’s I’ll Be There. Ironically enough, the b-side to Disappointed was a remix of Idiot Country.

If you know your Euro-pop, and I’m sure many of you do, you’ll be aware that Tennant tips more than the brim of his trilby to Mylène Farmer’s Désenchantée single, a massive hit on the continent in 1991. It’s there in the smoothed-out synthesizers and mid-paced feel, the down-played vocal delivery in the verses and restrained euphoria in the chorus. I don’t think it’s a coincidence either that Tennant ‘borrowed’ her ‘Désenchantée/Disenchanted‘ lyric for his own chorus. Most of us in the UK would’ve been oblivious of this at the time (perhaps even Bernard and Johnny too), a fact I’m sure the pop boffin Neil would’ve been banking on.

Seemingly content to take more of a back seat at the time, Johnny has an understated role in the single. He breaks into full-on Nile Rodgers funk for most of it, riffing across the top 3 strings like he hadn’t done since 1985’s Boy With The Thorn In His Side, his right hand rattlin’ the rhythm while his left shapes the funk, but contribution-wise, Disappointed is probably 45% Neil, 35% Bernard and 20% Johnny. The sum is greater than its parts though. It’s a great single, almost a lost single really, given the ubiquity of Getting Away With It and its not-quite-as-good follow-up Get The Message, but one that deserves reappraisal.

Electronic – Disappointed (original mix)