24 Hour Party People: Music From The Motion Picture;Featuring The New Single By NE

24 Hour Party People OST – Various Artists – CD
The rise and demise of idealist (and stoically ideological) Manchester independent label Factory Records and scene-setting “Madchester” nightclub the Hacienda is the subject of Michael Winterbottom’s pop mockumentary 24 Hour Party People, the soundtrack of which naturally zooms in on the two bands whose sonic endeavours built the fragile empire brick-by-brick and beat-by-beat. Naturally, those bands are Joy Division–whose sombre granite majesty is represented by the three singles and the 12-inch version of “She’s Lost Control”–and their liberated offspring New Order who, aside from the inevitable and financially Pyrrhric “Blue Monday”, offer two previously unavailable tracks, a taut live version of “New Dawn Fades” with Moby (recorded in Los Angeles in August 2001) and their overdue collaboration with the Chemical Brothers on “Hear to Stay”, a happy Technique-styled flashback of Ibizan beach-weather pop. Plenty, too, from those incorrigible substance-ingesting wastrels the Happy Mondays, the shambling soundtrack to that brief “baggy” age of acid, Es and aggro, Factory’s last sunset before sweating over the sums and the Hacienda attracting unsavoury persons with machine guns. Pitted throughout are influential cultural reference points, the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK” (their Free Trade Hall gig in 1976, attended by many people who feature on this record, lit the punk fuse in England’s northern provinces) and Chicago house innovator Marshall Jefferson’s “Move Your Body”, veritable stations of the cross on Factory Records road to Calvary. A tale of the head ruled by the heart, it was Factory’s love for what they did that tore them apart. But the memories party on. –Kevin Maidment