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What Joy Division tracks do you think Martin Hannett totally overproduced and ruined for the studio versions he did?
I would say...
Atrocity Exhibition (the Picadilly Radio session is the best version IMO)
Insight (that long intro on UP is awful, but the Peel session is great!)
Autosuggestion (terrible, terrible on record...but decent live)
...and some others to add later.
Spot on with Insight and Atrocity Exhibition.
These Days and Isolation too. I never felt JD got She's Lost Control quite right on record, although both versions have their good points.
She's Lost Control and Insight are rivalled by their live counterparts.
Generally, I have mixed feelings about the production on Unknown Pleasures, just as I do for Movement. However, I think Closer is pretty much flawless.
These Days (the Picadilly version is fantastic)
Atrocity Exhibition
The Sound of Music (Peel Sessions recording stomps all over the Hannettised version on Still)
New Dawn Fades (I don't mind Hannett's muting of the guitars on Unknown Pleasures otherwise, but I think this one suffers too much next to the live version)
Day of the Lords is another one that's really muted on UP. Not to say that I don't like what Hannett did with it, but the live versions are a completely different creature! On record it's a pretty somber affair, but the live takes would tear a hole through a moose.
Had there been no Hannett's "overproduction", then all their songs would have sounded like those on the RCA unreleased album (aka "Warsaw"). ;)
And I think it's great to have such a difference between live renditions and studio masters. :)
True, I don't like Atrocity Exhibition on Closer and prefer a live version, but it's so different that it leads me to think that the band deliberately delivered that studio version, for an album's sake.
I really like the UP version of Insight - other versions I have heard (Peel Session/live) are too sharp... I like the muddiness of the UP version... Same for AE - the 'dischord' fits the song (haven't heard too many live versions, having said that...)... The session version of These Days is superior to the 'official' one, however... One JD track I've never liked and this may be down to the production is Glass...
SHEDi xxx
Wheres the best place to get hold of the picadilly sessions and the peel sessions?
No official release, right?
|| | ||| 6217|| 8 || 3 wrote: And I think it's great to have such a difference between live renditions and studio masters. :)
Good point there. When I listen to Insight, Interzone or Wilderness I prefer the live versions but those wouldn't have fitted on UP sounding like that. Hannett was going for a cohesiveness in sound and achieved that pretty well, even though I still miss the guitar power on that album.
blunt laser wrote: Wheres the best place to get hold of the picadilly sessions and the peel sessions?
No official release, right?
i believe the Heart and Soul boxset contains the picadilly sessions and the Peel sessions. the peel sessions have been released separately on a few things, but ive never seen them anywhere
I reckon Autosuggestion is a great song well-produced. There's an almost tangible atmos (sic) on the intro: the sound of Curtis sparking up a fag and the delayed ambience before he finally utters the opening "Heeeeeeeeere-errre...everything is kept inside" is magic.
The sheer control and the contrast between the formerly languid mood and the sudden bursts of anger are magnificent, especially as Ian really gives it loads on "Lose some sleep and say you tried...say you tried...say you tried!". It's up there with the other magic JD moments.
I personally like the mood-setting Hannett did with Insight, the lift sound effect etc. Likewise listen to Decades: he cuts back the reverb on Ian's vocal on the second verse to assist the perception of moving inside as in "We're inside now" etc. Hannett was a master of real subtlety and a good deal of his work only really reveals itself after many listens. A lot of Joe Meek and Conny Plank's work is like that too.
Absolutely, Chemical! Well said! Great comments about Autosuggestion. The Conny Plank/Joe Meek comparison is well made. These guys are REAL record producers - taking risks and using their imaginations to create something new. The last thing that great music like JD needs is a dull 'everything in it's right place' production.
I don't get the term 'overproduction' in the thread title? People talk about the music and the 'production' as separate entities, and seem to wish that if only the producer had done less (of what?) it would somehow sound 'better'. That shows a misunderstanding of what good production is and what it brings. There seems to be an idea that if Hannett hadn't got his hands on JD, Unknown Pleasures would somehow be a driving rock album, more like the live sound. It could have been done, but it wouldn't have sounded like that without a hell of a lot of production work to make it so.
Now, if you said 'I don't like the lift noises on Insight' or 'I don't like the backwards guitar on Autosuggestion' or 'I don't like the metallic scrapings on Atrocity Ex' then, OK, that's a question of taste, but to cover these with a blanket term 'overproduction' doesn't really make sense to me.
Indeed and cheers.
I think that Hannett's work, especially with JD but also with Buzzcocks and even The Psychedelic Furs (on Soap Commercial, b-side of the original version of Pretty In Pink) is really something else. His work with JD made a huge difference: they already had the ideas and the songs but his singular production made the end result unique. If they stacked up to ninety percent, his was the extra eleven.
Like all great art, you can look deeply at the canvas a hundred times and each time see something new and that's genius.
It's true what both parties said after they went their separate ways (after Everything's Gone Green: they learned a good deal from each other, although neither side would admit it at the time! There's the drums thing for a kick-off: if you contrast the drum sounds Hannett was getting at the time with those other producers were getting, he's miles ahead. Steve has said that "most drums were being recorded as if they were being played with a wet fish" before Hannett got into his stride. The taking apart of Steve's kit to record his drums individually was...exotic at the time but the end result justified the means. Hannett was a man with a great deal of imagination and production vision, something which set him apart from his contemporaries and almost anyone that had gone before.
I think you need to be a bit of an eccentric to be an outstanding producer. You need that undefinable something which turns good songs into masterpieces and it's quite a rare commodity. It was said that Conny Plank "thought in sounds" and Meek was well-known as highly tempremental. A track like Telstar still sounds amazing some forty-four years after it was released. At a time when it was thought controversial to use effects on anything, he 'designed' what he thought Telstar (the satellite) would sound like if it passed you in space. As a production texture on both the intro and play-out it's damned near unbeatable and all this from a few pokey rooms above a shop on the Holloway Road!
It's strange to think that all three of them are dead now, their talents being realised over a short time but time enough for them to leave us truly inspirational examples of just how great great production can be.
Seeing something new each time describes EXACTLY how I feel about MH's production on Movement. Also Magazine's The Correct Use Of Soap, The Names 'Swimming' and the Pauline Murray LP.
I was reading the excellent booklet that comes with the Joe Meek boxset at the weekend - one of the bands (The Impac, IIRC) said ' When he played it back to us, we didn't recognize ourselves - it sounded so good'. I wonder if Hannett was a Meek fan? There wasn't much interest in Meek in the 70's and most of his work was long-deleted, but I hear some similarities in the way that they both used strings. I think the major differences between their approaches were that MH approached the sound from 'inside', i.e worried about tiny details to build up the overall picture, whereas JM started from the outside first - looking for radio hooks, trying to make it sound good on a transistor radio etc.
This is the sort of interchange of views and opinion that makes me keep coming back to NOOL. Reasoned, informative and interesting stuff about JD/NO that I can't get anywhere else.
And encountering nor just one but two fellow Meek fans, how rare is that. Sadly, JM also produced The Honeycombs and Jess(so bad he's good)Conrad. What the hell did they sound like without him?
Dug out a number of the tracks mentioned - some unheard for a while - and despite having limited live material to compare it's been fascinating to listen with fresh ears in the light of comments made.
Most of the studio recordings still sound great - happy with the production then and still happy. But there's always something you hadn't quite picked up before and you never hear a song the same way every time, particularly with new infomation or a new perspective (as we have in this thread).
The studio/live thing is pretty subjective of course but it's not very interesting really to have a live version simply duplicate the studio version. [With one exception: Arthur Lee's recent replication of Forever Changes]
hugh mcphail wrote: This is the sort of interchange of views and opinion that makes me keep coming back to NOOL. Reasoned, informative and interesting stuff about JD/NO that I can't get anywhere else.
And encountering nor just one but two fellow Meek fans, how rare is that. Sadly, JM also produced The Honeycombs and Jess(so bad he's good)Conrad. What the hell did they sound like without him?
Dug out a number of the tracks mentioned - some unheard for a while - and despite having limited live material to compare it's been fascinating to listen with fresh ears in the light of comments made.
Most of the studio recordings still sound great - happy with the production then and still happy. But there's always something you hadn't quite picked up before and you never hear a song the same way every time, particularly with new infomation or a new perspective (as we have in this thread).
The studio/live thing is pretty subjective of course but it's not very interesting really to have a live version simply duplicate the studio version. [With one exception: Arthur Lee's recent replication of Forever Changes]
Nice one, Hugh. The vast majority of Joe Meek artists hardly did anything without Joe, so we don't know what they might have sounded like. I have heard some Honeycombs tracks which were not worked on by JM, and unsurprisingly they're pretty much standard issue beat-group pop. They're unrecognizable as the same group because JM speeded up everything so much - the vocals sound completely different even though it's the same singer. Actually you can hear Have I The Right in two versions (English and German) on the box-set and the German is at close to 'normal' speed vs the familiar English version. God knows why the difference, but the comparison is interesting.
It sounds like JM and MH had similar working methods in some ways - like banishing the band from the studio once the track was in the can.
