The Song: “Bizarre Love Triangle (Shep Pettibone Remix)” from the 1986 album Brotherhood by New Order (though see below)
But let yourself go. You are inclined to get muddled, if I may judge from last night. Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight, and know the meaning of them.
E. M. Forster, “A Room with A View”
I’ve never been a huge fan of remixes. I can’t say for sure why, though: like many things I have a mild dislike for, it seems to have lodged itself in my mind at some point in the unfathomable past. Perhaps it’s the implications of endless tinkering that annoy me: a remix is a reworking of a song that’s already finished, which to me means two things — either you don’t have enough faith in your musical abilities, or you’re shamelessly pandering to other audiences, neither of which are good for artists. But my actions tell a different story: I have a healthy love for that sort of thing, from “Cold Heart” to “Tom’s Diner” to whatever Charli XCX has been putting out in the last year. God help me, I even like the Giles Martin remixes of the Beatles’ albums.
This also extends to New Order, a band whose reputation basically HANGS on remixes. Take their most acclaimed “album”, Substance 1987 — yes it’s nothing more than a compilation of their 12-inch singles, but almost every track on it is a banger; nay, a brilliant, cathartic journey. But for all the praise it’s gotten, there’s quite a number of tunes on there that are disparaged by the New Order fandom; to hear NO Redditors tell it, the versions of “Ceremony”, “Bizarre Love Triangle” and “Temptation” — the latter specifically remade for Substance, mind you — are a pale shadow of the originals, which are messy, slapdash confections that point at the punkish driving force of New Order and their predecessor band.
This is especially true of penultimate track “Bizarre Love Triangle”, where the majority of commenters have few nice things to say about the extended dance mix found on the album. Prepared by Madonna’s favourite DJ Shep Pettibone a year earlier for the song’s single release, a common complaint is that Peter Hook’s excellent bass work, given prominent pride of place in the version put out on their previous album Brotherhood, has been mostly excised save for a few bits in the intro. (Hook, for his part, has been quite vocal about perceived slights in this arena as well.) That’s an opinion I respect, but at the same time, I have to defend the 12″ remix that’s on Substance 1987. Put simply: “Bizarre Love Triangle” on Brotherhood is a song. “Bizarre Love Triangle” as remixed by Shep Pettibone is a whole story. Allow me to elucidate.
Normally when I do a write-up of a song on here, I like to use the lyrics as a springboard: I know that modern listening habits, at least in the Western world, place less and less emphasis on the lyrics, but at least it gives me a basic idea of what a song’s supposed to be about. For New Order, though, this is just not a feasible approach: not only does the band have a habit of making up irrelevant titles for most of their songs (including “Bizarre Love Triangle”, which is not about a ménage à trois), but Bernard Sumner’s lyrics are notorious for their opacity — you’d never guess that “True Faith” was a song about heroin addiction, or that “Round & Round” was about Factory Records’ Tony Wilson, simply by reading the lyrics of those songs. One would have more success analysing an actual salad for meaning than Sumner’s word salads, and this applies to “Bizarre Love Triangle” as well: at one point, he sings “but that’s the way that it goes and it’s what nobody knows/ Well, every day my confusion grows”. Indeed.
In fact, “every day my confusion grows” might just describe the experience of listening to the remix of “BLT” perfectly: it is a soup of musical elements, some artificial, some organic; bass drums and electronic synthesisers collide against each other, while Sumner’s voice threads its way throughout. This doesn’t really happen in the original, where the instruments form a very orderly queue: the synths get their time in the spotlight, and so do the vocals and the bass. There’s a progression you can spot in the way all the elements line up. By contrast, the remix begins by smacking you repeatedly across the face with synths, as if they were breaking containment; no sooner have you registered this sudden assault then they disappear, never to be seen in this particular form again. The only thing that’s left is a steady drumbeat, one that sounds suspiciously in sync with the beating of your startled heart.
What do you do, when faced with such auditory desolation? You could sit there cowering in fear, but there’s still an onslaught of instruments, jumping out at the most unexpected moments: those synth stabs sound like they could come back at any moment. No, the only way to discover what this is all about is to go exploring, and so you start stumbling around, trying to make sense of this odd new world. Now and then little curiosities of sound enter the track: the drop-kick of the bass drum, the careless synth chords dropping like scattered showers. But the overall feeling is still of chaos — you’re sifting through all the layers, trying to find something that might help this all make sense.
Even at such an early point in the track, you can’t help but start to wonder: is this what looking for love feels like? It certainly is for me: trying out different things, piecing together how I feel towards different people, wondering why (despite my best efforts) it never feels like it makes sense. The whole field seems to be ruled by confusion and novelty: what works with one person never really seems to work with anyone else, and I can’t escape the feeling that I’m getting buffeted from one force to another. There are some parts I recognise — tenderness, curiosity, specific styles of humour — but I confess to being perplexed by it all, and not really knowing where to turn.
Should I have known better? Should I have given up years ago? But somewhere through your journey you find a shred of hope — a recurring element, a refrain, that offers you some promise of an answer. And so it feels in “Bizarre Love Triangle” when the central riff finally comes, heralded by a thunder of drums: metallic yet warm, it bounces incessantly from one foot to another, pulsing with nervous energy, always on the verge of stumbling over itself. Yet even as those synth notes cycle, trying to figure itself out, it seems to be always ascending, always striving towards something. It’s there that you hear it, your answer, your lodestar in a sea of perplexity; even as other elements clatter to life and surround you with their noise, you can’t help but hope for its imminent return.
But before that, there are words to voice, thoughts to expunge. It has taken us almost a minute and a half to get here, but we have not been idle: love is a profound emotion, and figuring it out has always taken time. So when Bernard Sumner finally says his first words, it feels like the result of a long struggle: “Every time I think of you, I feel shot right through with a bolt of blue.” That sudden weakness in the word “shot” — a word Sumner doesn’t sing so much as expel — contains multitudes. It’s dislocated, exhausted, wonderstruck; it’s the sound of somebody admitting that they’re floored by the person they love. It might be the single most important sound in the entire song.
Yet what might be the climax in a love story is just the beginning here: Sumner continues to let his mind wander, pondering what it means to him. As I’ve said before, very little of his musings make sense: forget cohesion from sentence to sentence, there doesn’t even seem to be logic within any given line. But honestly none of this seems to matter: I’ve never really paid attention to the verses while listening to “BLT”. Instead it’s the musical elements that capture me: the swirling bass work, the cavernous drumbeat, and above all that swirling riff, sitting pretty in the background while Sumner tries in vain to piece his thoughts together. They lie fragmented, strewn across weird frontiers like jewels on a treasure map…
My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.
John Green, “The Fault in Our Stars“ (and basically the tagline for this entire blog)
Over the years, in an attempt to better understand romantic love, I’ve talked to quite a few friends who’ve been luckier than me in this particular field. Some of them had lightbulb moments in their relationships, a moment where it all fit together and they realised they’d found the right person. But most of us did it slower, gradually feeling our way towards that realisation instead: we grappled with questions, emotions, incidents that we sort of understood, and then slowly, we figured it out. In other words, we don’t get the explosion of sound that serves as the chorus in “BLT”’s album version; sure there might be fireworks at some point, but it’s more probable that you experience love the way of the remix, where you merely get the same sonic background as the verses, plus a few “aaaahhh”s from an artificial holy choir thrown in somewhere in the mix — they’re the same disjointed thoughts, but suffused with a rosier glow, with a bit more hope.
Every time I see you falling I get down on my knees and pray I’m waiting for that final moment: You’ll say the words that I can’t say
And all of a sudden, clarity: whereas the verses were incomprehensible prattling, somehow these four lines coalesce into cohesive thought, into a suddenly relatable reality. I don’t get down on my knees to pray these days (bad for the knees), but that skipped-beat moment is universal: the despairing helplessness you feel when you see your secret loved one sliding towards confusion, the yearning to do something, anything that might direct them on the right track, which is usually a track that heavily involves you. It might not be fully satisfactory, but it feels at least like the beginning of wisdom: with the serenades of the faux-angelic choir, and Sumner sighing about how his lover might “say the words that I can’t say”, the inalienable truth about romance feels attainable from this bizarre love jangle.
But then, disaster. The track dissolves again after this brief interlude of lucidity, and we drift on into another verse, into another abstract collage of drums and synths, into chaos. The sound fragments we get continue to morph and multiply; new sounds enter the scene and bamboozle our senses (more than once I’ve mistaken the bleeps and bloops in the background for the ringing of my office phone). Imperceptibly we shift from “I feel fine and I feel good” back into muteness and uncertainty; we just don’t know what to say, we’re not sure what all this could mean. By the end of the verse, Sumner’s denying the truth of what we’ve just experienced (“I don’t think you’re what you seem!”), and we’re on the verge of giving up: it’s just too much. There’s nothing to learn here at all; that moment of clarity was a fluke. Move on.
INTERMISSION
(in which Chamois draws attention to himself once again)
I start to notice a pattern in your music writing i think But its like first u spiral going very deep trying to decipher it Then u are like, hmm maybe ive gone too deep, lemme take a step back Oh but i still cant stop thinking about that deep thing
Chels to the author upon reading his last piece (reproduced with permission)
For many years now — from the very first article I wrote in this series, in fact — I’ve been pondering the relationship between pop and romantic desire. Yet as I’ve said before, this is a false relationship; one of the lessons my recent relationship taught me is that popular music actually bears very little resemblance to actual romance. Whether written by Leiber & Stoller or Olivia Rodrigo, love songs are often little more than abstract moods that can only ever encapsulate just one tiny aspect of romantic love, as experienced or imagined by one particular person; anything more than that is just wilful projection on the part of the listener.
I’m pretty sure you know this. Anyone who’s had romantic experience knows this. Yet this has not stopped decades, if not centuries of music consumers from finding meaning within these love songs; in them we find shreds of hope, sounds of empathy. (Just ask any Swiftie — hello, Bev and Joyce!) My break-up was in no way a dramatic matter, yet that has not stopped me from pouring my sorrow and anguish into belting out “The Look of Love” every time it comes up on the playlist; judging by how it still gets touted as a classic romance song, I’m not alone in finding echoes of myself within it, either.
Catharsis is one thing. But what of actual meaning? Do these songs help me work out a philosophy of love? Since “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”, I’ve spent tens of thousands of words, as well as many sleepless nights, trying to figure it out. So many times I’ve thought “this is it, this is the one that holds the key”; so many times I have been unsatisfied with the results, and dove back in for more — in the next piece, the next song, even the next paragraph. It’s not that my searching has been unfruitful: even if the relationship between pop and romance is a fallacy in itself, it’s still helped me become slightly more adept at putting a name to the complex emotions I feel. The problem is, I’ve now got so MANY complex emotions that I don’t really know what to do with them. Experience does not bring clarity; every day, my confusion grows.
And that brings us back to “Bizarre Love Triangle”: there are now so many elements within the mix that even Bernard Sumner — the man, you will remember, who led us into this labyrinth in the first place — doesn’t know what to do. He has no more thoughts to utter, and so he has stopped singing. Yet we have still almost three minutes of song to get through… what do we do, now that we are lost within this world of music with him, now that the truth is buried within layers of noise?
I guess there’s only one way out.
PART TWO
It doesn’t sound like the apocalypse. It’s too familiar to be the apocalypse. But it might as well be: a cavalcade of rhythms, of drumbeats, of instruments surround us. The drum clatters on, thrashing and thundering; the angelic choir vocalises wordlessly; even the electric bass continues to thrum away repeatedly, as if it’s scratching at a particularly persistent stain. As we get carried away from the second chorus, more and more elements jostle to make themselves heard: chimes, snares, everything.
Now, this happens in the original as well: the last minute of the album version is not so much a post-chorus as an orgy of sound; every single instrument is just there, blasting away as loud as they can. Perhaps in New Order’s mind, this made for a euphoric experience; a final ascension to heaven, to nirvana, to the ultimate enlightenment. Yet I’ve always felt it to be unearned and hollow: you get this sudden tsunami of volume, it rushes at you and envelops you for a full minute — then it’s gone, just as suddenly as it appeared. No build-up, no conclusion; the song simply crashes to a halt. It’s utterly unfulfilling, both as listening experience and as emotional experience; it’s almost like it doesn’t care for the listener searching for solace within it.
Like its antecedent, the remix degenerates into pandemonium. By the five-minute mark, the drums are literally locked in civil war — cutting into one another, slamming each other out of the way. It is perhaps an even MORE vexing experience than the album version; at least that one still adhered to basic quadruple time, whereas this one throws out all concept of structure, and mutates into a complete, atonal mess.
But then suddenly, the reset button is hit. The central riff, the backbone of this entire song returns. We’ve heard it so many times before, but now, more than ever, it sounds like hope: we remember that nervous energy, that determined ascendancy that accompanied first contact. We remember that we once saw it as the answer, the lodestar in a sea of perplexity; it is no surprise that most of the layers — most of the noises that distracted us and confused us — they all fall away, and the riff takes centre stage once again. It’s our best shot at a way out; we decide to follow it.
A sudden halt; the marauding drums return — was it all false hope? Then a voice comes to us once again, watery and dreamful, as if filtering to you from a hazily-remembered, distant past:
Every time I see-you fall-ing I get down on my knees and pray…
Distant, and yet at the same time so near; it zooms all around your head, one moment chanting tenderly in your left ear, then looping around to meet you on the right the next. Impossibly warm, you can practically hear it glistening:
… I’m waiting for that fi-nal mo-ment You’ll… say the words that I can’t say…
And gradually you realise that it is the voice of salvation: after all this chaos, after the big reset, you’ve found a way out. Those four simple lines may not have meant much on their own, but this time, you accept that it’s enough. Faced with all those conflicting thoughts, you realise that the fundamentals — this chorus, the central riff — are the closest thing to clarity you were ever gonna get. Then our singer finds his voice, finds himself repeating those same words; his voice seems even more softer, even more hesitant than before. Yet the slight pause in the second line feels like the ultimate release; it is a final surrender, an understanding that one can never have all the answers, and all one can do is get down on their knees, and pray.
And this is how we end the song: the central riff returns, accompanies us to the very end, then sends us on our way with a perfect kiss on the forehead. We are subdued, resigned, yet at the same time strangely triumphant. Because this was never a story about finding closure in your secret crush, about understanding the nature of love — with this song, as with any other song, we were doomed to abject failure. Instead, what we have in this remix is a story about us: about the way we think, about how we inevitably lost ourselves, and ultimately about how we succeded in slowly clawing our way back towards enlightenment again. THAT is what the remix teaches us; and even though I genuinely didn’t realise it until I was typing this very sentence, that stealthy switch in perspective is why I have always loved it so much more.
AND AFTERWARD
The songs we pick and put into our phones, our iPods, whatever listening device we use nowadays — those aren’t just people singing into a mic for three or four minutes. We choose to believe that some of those people reflect us, describe us, and even define us. It’s what these people say that illuminates a path forward, and gives us examples of how to conduct our lives and our loves.
The above is a quote from a piece I published five years ago this week for Qixi Festival. The longest piece I had ever written up to that point in my life, it was the first piece of writing I’d done for which I felt fierce, unabashed pride. I’d done meditations on both love and music before, but never had I poured so much of my heart and soul into one piece; I possessed more literal fluency, more emotional honesty, in analysing Gabrielle Aplin than I did in writing any part of my short story cycle that year. Since then, much of my writing has been a constant quest to recapture that feeling; I’ve managed it a couple of times, but I still count “The Power of Love” as one of the high points of my writing career.
I reread that piece before embarking on this one, and I still stand by a lot of the things I wrote back then — even though today, I don’t think I’d say the same things at all. Because I’ve changed as a person since 2020: I’ve fattened up, refined my writing techniques, and gone through a relationship. My perspectives as a person, as a listener, as a giver and a recipient of love — all that has shifted as I’ve added more ideas to my life, matured as a person. I already realised a couple of years ago that you really shouldn’t conduct your life according to pop music; as another man once said, if you put your life in the hands of a rock and roll band (or some other pop singer), they’ll only throw it all away.
Which brings me back to the idea of the remix. Way back at the start of this piece, I griped about how remixes alter songs that already exist, modify works of art that are already out there. But that’s not the end of it: as we’ve just seen, remixes can reframe our experiences and unlock within them whole new layers of meaning. They allow people to share and empathise in singular experiences — through the magic of a canny producer, a sombre alternative rock tune might become a dance anthem for numerous clubbers around the world. And as Charli XCX and Lorde proved last year, remixes can even provide a way for people themselves to progress, for them to mix, to merge, to forge something completely new.
And it’s only in writing this piece that I’ve come to realise just why people take to remixes so much. I think what I didn’t like about the concept was how it implied a constant fretful revaluation: it rejects what was originally given a self-contained, natural ending, in favour of extensions, embellishments, reworkings. But is that not what we are doing in life as well? Much as the urge to start over with a clean slate is appealing, one simply cannot reverse what has already happened: memory erasure or time travel being unfeasible, all you can do is examine what you’ve done so far, then build on what is already there. Of course, remixes are no guarantee of quality themselves: Pettibone’s next project for New Order, for example, turned my favourite song from the band into a scatterbrained, self-indulgent sprawl. But when they work, they can be breathtakingly beautiful.
This is why, on the fifth anniversary of one of my favourite pieces on this blog, I decided to tackle this song. It’s not because New Order has shaped my life or anything: I only discovered them in early 2023, and even though I’m quite fond of Substance 1987 and Technique I’ve never really fallen in love with the band’s entire discography like the Redditors who argue, day in day out, about the merits of each and every NO song. But there is something magical about the journey of the “BLT” remix that gets me, reminds me how much my perspectives have changed over the past half-decade. For let’s face it, much of my work since then has been a constant series of remixes: declaring that romantic love is overrated, screaming my loneliness to the heavens, and (as usual) refracting my desire through the lens of Paul McCartney. I didn’t really want to confront that — nobody wants to be told that they’ve been obsessively thinking about the same subject for five years, not unless your name is Wes Anderson.
Yet it has also been a productive journey, for two reasons. One is that I’ve become better at recognising what really matters: “Bizarre Love Triangle” may have been majorly transformed by Shep Pettibone, but it’s still recognisably “Bizarre Love Triangle”, what with that driving beat, Sumner’s soft, indecisive vocals in the chorus, and most importantly that hopeful riff that goes up and down, left and right. Learning how to identify these, to put them centre stage and strip it all down so that you focus on these elements: that’s the one thing that this remix never wavers from; and so it is for me, as I work my way through endless love songs, and learn to spot the eternal truths and happenings and persons that I’ve come to know; it is they who have saved me from eternal muddle.
But the second reason is even more personal: with each remix, I’ve also learnt a little bit more about myself. I mentioned earlier that people who glean meaning from pop music are merely projecting themselves onto the singer, but perhaps that is what good art does; it does not preach or teach, so much as reveal aspects of the spectator to themselves. As my perspectives change with age, so too do the conclusions I draw from pop music, and so am I driven to rework my thoughts based on these new revelations — doing away with the false leads, exploring new ones instead. That is what growth is: a constant journey of redefinition and reconstruction. What the “BLT” remix does is to show us this process in action, and remind us that it’s a normal part of life.
So, after five years and more of writing, am I any closer to a philosophy of love that I’m happy with? I doubt it: every day there’s something that teaches me another lesson, and every day I find the beliefs I have queried and tested. But I think I’m a little more at ease with this state of flux, and a little less desperate for concrete answers. Every remix is another chance to work things out, and who knows? Perhaps one day, I’ll find someone who can say the words that I can’t say — and that will be enough for me.
All life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work, and rejoice.
E. M. Forster, “A Room with a View”
Happy Qixi Festival, everyone!
(Cover by Factory Records. “Bizarre Love Triangle”, written and performed by Gillian Gilbert, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris and Bernard Sumner as New Order, and remixed by Shep Pettibone, is utilised here for criticism and review.)
Inkpot Shuffles in the Twilight 