Forty Minutes Of January And February Songs

A month ago I had the idea that at the end of January I'd put together a January mix, songs with January in the title or lyrics, and then maybe repeat throughout the rest of the months of the year. For one reason and another it didn't happen and now it's February. No problem, I thought, I'll just roll January and February together, and do that. It turns out I have not very many January songs and even fewer February ones- the only February songs I could find were Lou Reed's Xmas In February and Billy Bragg's 14th Of February and neither really fitted with the vibe I started the mix with. I extended February's reach into Valentine's Day and that, no surprise, made it much easier. All of which is a long winded way of saying here's a forty minute mix of songs about January and February. 

Forty Minutes Of January And February Songs

• The Orb: Perpetual Dawn (January Mix 3)
• M- Paths: January Song
• The Durutti Column: Requiem For A Father
• My Bloody Valentine: Soon
• Lizzy Mercier Descloux: My Funny Valentine
• Charlotte Gainsbourg: Deadly Valentine
• New Order: 1963
• Half Man Half Biscuit: Epiphany (Peel Session)

Perpetual Dawn is an Orb classic, remixed twice by Andrew Weatherall in fine style. For their album Aubrey Mixes: The Ultraworld Excursions, released and deleted on the same day in 1991 The Orb remixed songs from Beyond The Ultraworld, finding new shapes and sounds for seven essential early Orb tracks including the January Mix 3 version of Perpetual Dawn- early 90s ambient house at its best.

M- Paths release ambient/ electronic music, sometimes for Mighty Force and sometimes on their own label. Now down to the core figure of Marcus Farley, who also records as Reverb Delay, this track came out a year ago, at the start of January 2025, an archival M- Paths recording for the new year.

Tony Wilson, TV presenter and founder of Factory Records, was also from 1978 the manager and friend of Vini Reilly. When the original band version of The Durutti Column split in 1978 Wilson decided that the future for Durutti was Vini Reilly and whoever else was around but that Reilly was such a talent that he should make Durutti Column his own. Wilson also decided that he would put all Durutti Column records out on Factory and that he would manage DC/ Vini along with fellow Factory founder Alan Erasmus. Wilson formed a management company on the 24th January 1978 and called it The Movement Of The 24th January, borrowing the name from the Situationist students who formed their own International Movement on 22nd March at Nanterre University 1968 (Mouvement 22 du Mars). Here is a copy of the letterhead Wilson designed for his company...

Requiem For A Father is from The Return Of The Durutti Column, the debut album released in January 1980, Vini's guitar playing and Martin Hannett's echo and delay devices and synths in perfect harmony, Vini playing a song for his Dad and Hannett making a rhythm out of a digital machine that sounds like a cat purring close up. 

My Bloody Valentine have been never very far away this year to date, their songs soundtracking much of January 2026. Soon is from Loveless in 1991, a track that did things with guitars that genuinely hadn't really been done before. Kevin Shields' guitars following Vini Reilly's is exactly where my head is at right now. 

Valentine's Day is less than a week away lovebirds. 

Lizzy Mercier Descloux was a French punk, friends with Patti Smith and Richard Hell, published Rock News and moved to New York where she set up ZE records with her partner Michael Esteban. Lizzy released several albums, minimalist punk/ No Wave, wrote poetry and painted, retired to Corsica to write books and lived a full and varied life. She died in 2004. Her cover of My Funny Valentine, the Hart and Rogers song, is from her 1986 album One For The Soul which had Chet Baker guesting on some of the tracks including this one. 

Sticking with French artists, Charlotte Gainsbourg released Rest in 2017, her fifth solo album and one that dealt with the death of her father Serge and alcohol addiction. Deadly Valentine was a single and is dramatic synth pop with a lively throbbing bassline and feathery vocals.

1963 is from the B-side to 1987's New Order single True Faith, a giant in their back catalogue. 1963 could have been a single in its own right. Bernard's lyrics are peculiar/ awful (delete according to taste). 'It was January/ 1963/ When Johnny came home with a gift for me'. Bernard once spun a line that the song was about JFK and Marilyn Monroe arranging for Lee Harvey Oswald to shoot Jackie Kennedy so they could get together but Oswald shooting the wrong person. Bernard may not have been entirely serious- Marilyn died in 1962 so at the very least his chronology's off. Producer Stephen Hague thought it was about domestic abuse. Whatever the lyrics deal with, the music is New Order 1987 magnificence.

Half Man Half Biscuit recorded Epiphany for a Peel Session. It starts out with Nigel Blackwell narrating a chance occurrence on a Friday in July that then unfolds in surreal Blackwell style taking in Dictionary Corner, black apes gibbering on dark lawns, a lime Dyson, a date in Parbold (near Wigan), a crossed telephone line, a sickly foal, a straggle haired girl called Karen Henderson, songs recorded for a a hospice, bus outings, Billing Aquadrome and busking at Embankment Tube before concluding 'January the 6th. Epiphany'. 

You Took My Time And You Took My Money

New Order in the summer of 1987. I was seventeen and was listening to the True Faith single repeatedly that summer, thirty two years ago (Substance, the singles compilation came out in August 1987 too). The band played True Faith on Top Of The Pops and it rose into the top five the week after. They played live, as this clip shows, broadcast recently on BBC4's re-runs of Top Of The Pops. The re-runs are deep into 1987- and it has to be said it was a year of largely terrible music on the nation's favourite chart run down show- most of the episodes can skipped through in minutes with your finger on the fast forward button on the remote control. The week New Order appeared they shared the BBC canteen and dressing rooms with Sinitta and Spagna. This version is, as you'd expect, less sleek and produced than the Stephen Hague single with Hooky's clanging bass more prominent (glorious as the single is) and has a truncated guitar break. I've posted this clip before but watching them the other night I thought it was worth doing again. True Faith is a song I don't get bored of.



True Faith is a New Order tour de force, a single aimed at selling copies in large quantities- earworm keyboards and boom- bash metronomic drumming providing the rush, a song pitched in a sweet spot between pop, indie and dance. Hooky complains in his autobiography Substance that they'd left nowhere for his bass playing in the mix (but he found his way in) and that the only shot of him in the video is his left foot. Bernard was talked into changing a lyric to ensure radio play (altering 'now that we've grown up together/now they're taking drugs with me' to 'now that we've grown up together/ we're not afraid of what we see'). The song feels like a group effort whatever everyone's actual contributions were. I think I read somewhere that Deborah Curtis, Ian's widow, said she couldn't listen to New Order after Ceremony, it was too much following Ian's death, but with True Faith she could listen to them again and enjoy it- which tells you something about the way the song was received and something about the distance travelled from 1980 and Closer to 1987 and True Faith. I love it- partly because at seventeen years old you're so susceptible to these things and partly because it is in some way definitive New Order. It would make it onto any New Order compilation I'd put together.

Peter Saville created a beautiful sleeve, the falling leaf painted gold against the blue background, the leaf idea coming to him as he sat in his car and one fell onto his windscreen. The single was followed by a remix 12" with an alternative Saville sleeve, a remixed version of the song, a different mix of 1963 and also this Shep Pettibone dub.

True Dub

New Order toured in 1987 too, at home and through the USA (the US leg being the scene of much Hook and Sumner debauchery). The graphic on the tour t-shirt below is very 1987.

Last year Denise Johnson, backing singing extraordinaire, released her own, more emotional reading of the song, done acoustically.

Something's Got A Hold On Me

This song was released thirty years ago today. Let's not get hung up on its age or the passing of time but celebrate a band in their absolute pomp releasing records that changed the world you lived in. New Order come in after the titles and thirty seconds of Gary Davies...



And because the video was pretty significant too...

Johnny Don't Point That Gun At Me

Johnny also showed his face in New Order's epic 1987 song 1963. Having recorded one of their highest high points in True Faith, a song destined to put them into the charts, New Order put 1963 on the b-side in what must be one of the strongest singles of the 1980s. And so 1963 got a bit overlooked. It was released in its own right in 1995 and got a video too (with Jane Horrocks in it). As a purist I don't quite count that release as a 'proper' New Order single. Although I like Jane Horrocks and the video.

In the song Bernard's lyrics start out 'It was January, 1963,when Johnny came home, with a gift for me'. Events take a turn for the worse. Soon enough Johnny changes from being 'so very kind, so very nice'. He comes home with another wife and eventually Bernard sings'Johnny, don't point that gun at me' and a shooting occurs. Producer Stephen Hague has called the song 'the only song about domestic violence you can dance too'. Bernard has suggested that the song is, like yesterday's post, about John F Kennedy. Accordingly, in the song JFK arranges for a hitman to kill Jackie so that he can 'do one with M. Monroe'. Lee Harvey Oswald shoots JFK by mistake, leading to Jack Ruby bumping off Oswald for doing such a bad job and causing Marilyn to commit suicide. Barney has his chronology askew here- Marilyn actually died a year earlier and JFK was shot in November '63 not January. But then I've never been sure Bernard was being entirely reliable in this explanation of the song.

The 1995 version of 1963 was re-worked by Arthur Baker (and isn't nearly as good as the magnificent 1987 version but I don't have the original on the hard drive at the moment so you'll have to put up with it).