Love Will Tear Us Apart

I nearly walked out of The British Heart Foundation charity shop in Chepstow that day without noticing the box of singles near the checkout, but I'm glad I stopped to look as there were several good things therein, best of which was an original 1980 pressing of 'Love Will Tear Us Apart'. My copy is one of those on translucent deep purplish-red styrene, rather than black vinyl.

On the 33rpm B-side are two tracks: 'These Days' and (uncredited) the earlier and less morose "Pennine" version of 'Love Will Tear Us Apart'. I was unaware, until reading it on Discogs just now, that the text "For ML" on the A-side label refers to Martha Ladly (of Martha and the Muffins and, later, The Associates) who was apparently designer Pater Saville's then-girlfriend.

Would I have heard the song when it was first released? I was eleven at the time so maybe not - but it had a persistent afterlife owing to its status as Ian Curtis' swansong, and I surely would have known it by the time of its re-release in '83.

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All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

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Onslow

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...

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