Now, what is anniversary tour without an album to accompany it? and what is an album anniversary anyway, without a new companion album?
So here we have The Joy of Sextet, the companion album to Sextet.
Sextet was our third studio album, it was described on release as “… an album of the present, killing the present and agreeably ignoring the future” by Sounds and more recently reappraised by Pitchfork who said it “still sounds like no other record”.
Well we realised that we had the original tapes and challanged our pal Andy Meecham (The Emperor Machine) to do a new mix of the album.
Andy has created a brand new mix and we love it, says Andy “Taking on an epic album like this involved pushing up the faders again from the original 1981 2” multitracks adding some new dynamics while recapturing the sound of 1981 without losing the original raw energy and feel.”
We love how it turned out and hope you do too.
And here is Force Majeure, the companion album to Force.
Force was recently described by The Quietus as “their purest moment”. Force Majeure is a newly 9-track album that gives you a deep dive into the world that we inhabited 40 years ago, with unreleased original versions of tracks including ‘Force’ the title track, which didn’t appear on the 80s release. The album was produced by ACR and the late Stuart (Jammer) James, who presented us with the long forgotten 4 track recordings he’d made of tracks that would go on to be on the album. Stuart helped us record the tracks to review the songs for a possible album, to work on arrangements and practice playing them live. Listening to the recordings many years later we were surprised at how good they sounded, so we decided to share them with everyone for this Force companion album”.
Both albums are available as limited edition coloured vinyl and CD, both have photos from our archives and sleeve notes that are made up of our recollections of the time.
Trevor and Craig Johnson created some new artwork for them both and made, as usual, the albums look fabulous.
Anniversary Tour
