Visage - The Anvil

As promised, here's the original full length second album from Visage, circa 1982. This is the original vinyl edition with textured cover and poster, photographs of which have been included in the archive.

From Wikipedia:

This album sparked a brief controversy at the time of its release for being named after New York's infamous gay club.

The only musician of the first album line-up that didn't participate in this album's recording was John McGeoch. McGeoch commented in an interview: "One time I was in Spain [touring with Siouxsie and the Banshees] at the same time as Visage were recording the second album in London. Rusty wanted me to put a guitar solo on something or other but I only had one day off and there was no way that I could fly home on my one day off. Rusty is not a man to be put off by such things and he was actually trying to put together a satellite linkup from Madrid to London for this one guitar part. Not surprisingly it didn't come off but I was sorry not to have been as involved on The Anvil as I had been on the first album".

The Anvil was also the last Visage project to feature Ultravox frontman Midge Ure who left the band after its release.

The original vinyl release of The Anvil came in an embossed/textured sleeve (considered as deluxe packaging for the time), and a limited number of copies came with a free poster of Steve Strange posing in front of a hotel with a number of models (the same models can be seen on the cover of the single The Damned Don't Cry).

The album saw a re-release on the CD format in 1997 with bonus tracks, though they are tracks from the 1980/1 Visage era and not that of The Anvil. For a long time, this was the only official CD version and was extremely rare.

'The Anvil' was re-released on CD again on 17 March 2008, containing more bonus tracks and detailed liner notes.

I'ts a bit patchy, but there are some great tracks on here. "The Horseman", in particular is sounding great to this pair of ears, although it's a more guitar-y sound than that which was their signature. Midge's presence can be felt heavily on that one. Can it really be time to reappraise "Vienna" as well?

A couple of tracks are sequenced together on side one, so I haven't split them in the edit. As (super)nature intended.

Vinyl rip at 320 Kbps.

Link Expired

Visage - The Damned Don't Cry 7"

Enough with the maudlin shit. Let's have some fun.

The recent and ongoing popularity of 80's inspired electropop has given me the excuse, if one were needed, to dig out some more Visage. And at the risk of temporarily transmogrifying into one of those Eastern European blogs that post this stuff without distance or irony, I hereby reserve the right to have my cake and eat it by posting this stuff inside big inverted commas, while secretly being as filled with love for it as I always have been (off and on) throughout the years.

This is from the brilliant second album, which is MUCH better than the first. By this time McGeoch had exited, but even better, Barry Adamson had turned up. So what we have is some of Magazine and some of Ultravox all topped off with just a little too much Steve Strange. I seem to remember that the Helmut Newton photo shoot was more expensive than the recording budget for the whole album. How Eighties. And worth every penny.

The instrumental B side, "Motivation" is a solid classic which genuinely sounds like a funked up Magazine sans Devoto, but with that Adamson bass in FULL effect. Genuinely fantastic.

I'll be posting the second album, "The Anvil" in all it's glory over the next few days. You lucky bastards.

Vinyl rip at 320 Kbps.
Full artwork.

Link Expired.