Dü the Dü

 

Currently at your local newsagent or record store, the December issue of The Wire features an essay-review by me of the Hüsker Dü box set Savage Young Dü. 

Bit of a nightmare keeping the umlauts consistent throughout the review! I think I missed only one. If you inspect the front cover, you'll see that they actually forgot the umlaut over the Dü.

Apart from umlaut-anxiety, this was a most enjoyable trip down memory lane - taking me back to the mid-Eighties, the moment just before I went professional, and a time when Hüsker Dü was pretty much my favourite band on the planet. They cropped up regularly in my Monitor pieces as a touchstone. Then, after joining the Maker, I reviewed Candy Apple Grey and Warehouse: Songs and Stories in swift succession. Finally got to interview the Dü not that long before they split up. 

Actually, continuing the diehard streak of reviewing, I also handled Bob Mould's solo debut Workbook when that came out. That review languishes somewhere in my ink-and-paper archive. Never did get into Sugar, though.  

Some years ago I read that Bob became a drum & bass convert and even recorded a whole album in that vein (seemingly following the same trajectory as Kevin Shields).  That seems to have been an exaggeration: listening now for the first time, it seems more a case of an uneasy merger of Mouldian noise-pop and electronica, not unlike that Jesus Jones record Perverse, perhaps, or even Earthling. 

  

Also in this issue of The Wire, a fascinating cover story by Rory Gibbs on the post-geographical virtual digitronica collective Quantum Natives: Brood Ma, Yearning Kru (love that name!),  recsund, Rosen and others.  

A different kind of electronic collective is celebrated in the freebie CD that accompanies the issue, and it couldn't be more up my avant alley: a compilation of electronic and tape-music pulled from the archives of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio.