Suicide Covers

Blast First Petite continues its year-long celebration of Suicide frontman Alan Vega's 70th (fucking hell) birthday with more limited 10" singles featuring Suicide covers - among the latest sees Soft Cell's Dave Ball and Gavin Friday of The Virgin Prunes tackle "Ghostrider" and Peaches take on "Jonny". Previous highlights have included Sunn 0))) and Pan Sonic's woofer-bothering collaboration on "Che", long since sold out, plus contributions from The Horrors, Primal Scream and Bruce Springsteen. Not clear from the label's site how many are left to go, although I seem to remember Grinderman's effort is yet to be released. Ball/Friday and Sunn/Pan Sonic featured below, followed by Suicide themselves, and, just to be completist, Soft Cell with Jim Foetus performing "Ghostrider" live in 1983 in a performance that's just conceivably chemically enhanced on an unknown BBC program that probably isn't Swap Shop.

Suicide's self-titled debut remains an essential album, readily available on vinyl in a 2009 reissue from Red Star and on a 2CD reissue from Mute where the album itself is complimented by a live disc including a CBGB's soundboard recording plus the infamous 23 Minutes Over Brussels bootleg that sees the duo make a mortal enemy out of the entire population of Belgium in under 90 seconds.

Halloween Week: Soft Cell - Martin

Kicking off a week of vaguely Halloween-inspired clips with Soft Cell performing a truncated "Martin" on The Tube in 1983. Released in its original eight-minute format as one of two tracks on a 12" single tucked into initial copies of 1983's bleak and brilliant The Art Of Falling Apart, the song takes its inspiration from George A. Romero's 1978 sort-of vampire film of the same name, although the opening "Martin is talking to you" and repeated killkillkills suggest that someone had paid some attention to Harry Manfredini's soundtrack work on the Friday the 13th films.

The lyrics run the gamut from the inadvertently hilarious ("Martin had a lot to live down/Growing up in a mining town" to the genuinely unsettling "Martin has hallucinations/Dreams that he's dead." Dave Ball layers on the unease with clanging, scraping and that patented creepy Soft Cell rattlesnake noise thing that showed up all over Falling Apart.