New Wave
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Kent, England’s beloved Catherine Bush turns 61 today. After a half-century of songwriting, the artist can look back proudly on a career that has balanced commercial success with the respect of both critics and admirers of sophisticated pop music. We can only hope there’s more to follow. Meantime, a plainly subjective take on her 10…
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A big Kangol tip to The Power of Independent Trucking for securing a copy of New Order’s legendary 1983 set at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago. I’ve written before about what an important year that was for the Mancunian hit makers. This previously hard-to-find bootleg represents a high point during the band’s most creative period. “Blue…
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The lead single from Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s 13th studio disc drops today. “La Mitrailleuse” is a vintage slice of the electropop that made the Wirral, Merseyside duo rich and famous in the 1980s. The title is French for “the machinegun,” an all-too apt reference these days. It features looped recordings of gun and…
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In 1985, right about this time of year, my friends and I navigated our way downtown to Toronto’s Concert Hall to see Cabaret Voltaire. I was two months shy of my high school graduation. But that was nothing compared to the excitement of finally getting to see the great trio from Sheffield. The Cabs…
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If you’d told my teenage friends and me that we’d one day watch a 56-year-old Bernard Sumner prance around Toronto’s posh Sony Centre stage singing: “How does it feel, to treat me like you do,” not one of us would have believed it. Of course, Rick, Dan and I saw that exact thing in October…
The Moderns 