Section 25: Looking from a Hilltop, Megamix (1980)

 |   |  1 min read

Section 25: Looking from a Hilltop, Megamix (1980)

The jury is perhaps still out on Blackpool's Section 25: dismissed in some circles as a pallid version of Joy Division/New Order for their electronica dance music, hailed by others who heard in them an innovative band well in the vanguard of post-punk dance pop.

Sharing a label with Joy Division/New Order and A Certain Ratio (also with whom they were also sometimes unfairly compared) as well as having Joy Division producer Martin Hannett work the desk on their debut album Forever Now inevitably meant comparisons would be made.

Oh, and Ian Curtis was a fan so . . .

The success of labelmates Joy Division meant that Section 25's career never quite took off as perhaps it could have and they broke up -- for the first time -- after their second album.

Their finest moment according to many -- not the least being Peter Shapiro who wrote Turn the Beat Around; The Secret History of Disco -- was this, the remix of Looking From a Hilltop by New Order's Bernard Sumner and Ratio's Donald Johnson.

An emotionally cool and distant dancefloor favourite, it featured the vocals of founder Larry Cassidy's wife Jenny Ross.

Even now it possesses an indefinable something which makes it part disco, part Kraftwerk and part something even more remote.

In Shapiro's words, "despite al the electronics, it was almost pastoral with the little-girl-lost vocalist Jenny Ross giving it a kind of wind-sweeping-across-the-moors mystery".

That's a lot for an electronica dance single to encompass, but Section 25 -- albeit very briefly -- managed to pull it off.

For more one-offs, oddities or songs with an interesting backstory see From the Vaults

Share It

Your Comments

Dietmar Gsell - Oct 13, 2010

Still remember Section 25 playing support for The Stranglers(without Hugh Cornwell,who was imprisoned at that time)alongside Joy Division(Ian Curtis collapsed and fell into the drums).What a night and it was worth hitchhicking all the way from the Black Forest.
To replace Hugh they had Ian Dury,Toyah,Phil Daniels,Robert Smith and many more on stage....of course I had to hitchhike back too.Wasn't that funny,though!

post a comment

More from this section   From the Vaults articles index

Jessi Colter: Diamond in the Rough (1976)

Jessi Colter: Diamond in the Rough (1976)

The sassy Jessi Colter was married to the late Waylon Jennings and was something of a rarity in the Seventies, she was a woman (and a confident, songwriting woman at that) and part of the almost... > Read more

Flesh D-Vice: Legend of Lugosi (1989)

Flesh D-Vice: Legend of Lugosi (1989)

This is just here for those of us old enough -- and perhaps dumb enough -- to remember the sheer visceral power and life-threatening live shows that this band (from Palmerston North? I will stand... > Read more

Elsewhere at Elsewhere

THE BEATLES. LIVE AT THE STAR-CLUB, HAMBURG, GERMANY 1962, CONSIDERED (1977): Twist and shout, shimmy and shake

THE BEATLES. LIVE AT THE STAR-CLUB, HAMBURG, GERMANY 1962, CONSIDERED (1977): Twist and shout, shimmy and shake

The recording is of ridiculously low quality – just a reel-to-reel tape set up on table in a club with a single microphone pointed at the stage – and there has always been some debate... > Read more

JessB: Feels Like Home (digital outlets)

JessB: Feels Like Home (digital outlets)

It is perhaps unusual and maybe even unseemly that a man of a certain age (plus a decade or more) should be so taken with a young woman rapper. But from the first... > Read more