Released on 25th Sep 2000

Contains all the album versions of those the live tracks on [Maybe Its Right To Be Nervous Now] from [Play] 'except' Model Worker which is replaced by 'You Never Knew Me' and the tracks from [Magic, Murder And The Weather] are different.

• Shot By Both Sides [Shot By Both Sides]
• Motorcade [Real Life]
• The Light Pours Out Of Me [Real Life]
• Definitive Gaze [Real Life]
• Parade [Real Life]
• Rhythm Of Cruelty [Secondhand Daylight]
• Back To Nature [Secondhand Daylight]
• Permafrost [Secondhand Daylight]
• Feed The Enemy [Secondhand Daylight]
• Sweetheart Contract [The Correct Use Of Soap]
• Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) [The Correct Use Of Soap]
• You Never Knew Me [The Correct Use Of Soap]
• Song From Under The Floorboards, A [The Correct Use Of Soap]
• Because Your Frightened [The Correct Use Of Soap]
• About The Weather [Magic, Murder And The Weather]
• This Poison [Magic, Murder And The Weather]

Michael Bracewell :-

Back in 1977 - as British punk rock's first vital energy was on the point of burning itself out - Howard Devoto - the founder - lyricist and front man of Buzzcocks - decided to make a change.

In a statement issued that February - to announce that he was leaving Buzzcocks - Devoto wrote: "I don't like most of this new wave music. I don't like music. I don't like movements. Despite all that - things still have to he said. But I am not confident of Buzzcocks intention to get out of the dry land of new waveness to a place from which these things could he said. What was once unhealthily fresh is now a clean old hat."

It's difficult to imagine - nearly twenty five years later - quite how radical such a pronouncement could seem. In the first place - to the majority of British punks - the whole movement of punk rock - as music - clothes - and - most importantly - as an attitude - was still fresh - and still dangerous. To call your own genre - then - "a clean old hat" - was worse than simply weird - it stank of heresy.

Buzzcocks - as formed in Manchester by Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley - had become a major ornament in punk's crown jewels. It was Buzzcocks - after all - who had supported The Sex Pistols at Manchester's teaser Free Trade Mall and at the legendary punk gathering at The Screen on The Green - in Islington - North London. It was Buzzcocks whose debut EP - "Spiral Scratch" - on the New Hormones label - had brought the world such classic punk tracks as "Boredom" and "Breakdown" - which would come to define that particular era. And now - here was Howard Devoto - slipping away to new concerns before the dust had settled. What could it possibly mean?

One answer to that question would be given in the single word - Magazine - the name of the group which Devoto went on to create after Buzzcocks - and with whom he would release five of the most critically acclaimed - and passionately embraced LPs of the post-punk period. Under the name of MagaBne - itself a slippery mixture of meanings - with that quality of spilt mercury which defines nearly all of Devoto's writing from this period - shattering when touched to create an irridescent scattering of itself - there would lodge a whole new attitude: an unease with accepting the way of things - a disaffection with the usual routes of confrontation - and - most surprisingly - a curious kind of glamour.

Above all - one feels that Devoto was out-of-patience with the complacency which punk had developed so quickly. It was almost as though he had foreseen the dilution of punk rock into chart friendly "New Wave" music - or endlessly cloned imitations of The ClaBsh - end decided to jump ship well in advance. But his decision was probably also based on far more than just a canny eye to musical fashion.

A former student of philosophy - deeply absorbed in the exploration of his feelings - and of the place of those feelings in the world ("Real Life" would be the title of Magazine's debut album) - Devoto was searching for a way to articulate his particular driven instinct to understand himself. Speaklng in 1999 - he described punk rock as "a new version of trouble-shooting modern forms of unhappiness." With his group Magazine - between 1977 and 1981 - he created a performance of self-questioning which remains one of the great anatomies of anxiety.

To see Magazine perform was to watch Devoto keel-hauling himself under the bows of his own sensitivities and fears - this was a man who used to read Dostoyevsky and Camus in Manchester's Central Library - but had studied Iggy Pop and Alice Cooper with equal attention - to emerge (bringing his audience with his - gasping - sweat drenched and exuberant) with reports from the depths. The songs became rituals of catharsis - even though the relief of self -expression was never guaranteed; to put it another way - the lyrics were important.

But first things first; who were Magazine - exactly? And where did they fit into the scheme of punk rock's immediate legacy? Devoto had placed an advert - as he had for Buzzcocks - thus meeting Pete Shelley - asking for musicians "to play fast and slow music". And from the very beginning - as a con-sequence of these auditions - the group was a formidable teaming of players and their respective influences.

This personnel would change a little over the group's career - but the core players of Magazine were Barry Adamson (bass) - nave Formula (keyboards) - John McGeoch (guitar) - John Doyle (drums) and of course Devoto himself. Unlike most groups - these players knew very little about one another prior to their joining Magazine.

The group had a natural genius for the drama (and melodrama) of music - for that edgy - filmic quality which could pick its way to the beginnings of sell parody before suddenly jolting back to the vitality of the original theme. Their intuitive leanings toward a type of music which expressed nervousness and apprehension - a soundtrack - if you want - for film of a poorly-lit turn in the dark corridor - were matched by their ability to pick up on the glamour and urgency of- for instance - spy movie themes from the 19605 and 1970s. Mixed together into their own unique sound - these influences became the ideal vehi-cle for Devoto's equally eclectic - yet perfectly poised - combinations of lyric - vocal and performing style.

Listening to Magazine now - is rather like listening to early Velvet Underground - the first two albums by Roxy Music - or the tragically neglected of Cockney Rebel. Not that Magazine sound like these particular groups - but that they share that rare mix of seemingly disparate elements - held in place by an utterly original vocal style - the articulation of an entire sensibility which goes to create a genuinely pivotal and inspirational groups.

If you think about the mix of personnel and influences in The Velvet Underground or the original Roxy Music album line-up - it would seem as though such an outlandish collaboration could never work. But it is out of these apparent collisions that the real originality - and rock music has always been a reasonably conservative medium - breaks through.

Andrew Mackay - Roxy Music's saxophone and woodwind player - once likened such unlikely (but artistically important) combinations of musicians to a recipe in Marinetti's "Futurist Cookbook" called "Car crash": "It's a hemisphere of pureed dates and a hemisphere of pureed anchovies - " he explained about his experience Of early Roxy Music - "which are then stuck together in a ball and served in a pool of raspberry juice. I mean - it's virtually inedible - but it can be done."

As this new compilation of Magazine's work reminds us - the power of the group lay in its visceral expressionism: the music seems to throw out wildly exaggerated shadows - and distort perspective certainty - sometimes playful almost the crooning of a sleazy cabaret - then taking a dead drop into pum-melling - base-driven energy. Dave Formula's keyboard style slides effortlessly between languour and suspense - luxury and menace.

The end result of Magazine's sound - as with Roxy Music or The Velvet Underground - - is a new variation on the old theme Of glamour. Etymologically - the roots of the word "glamour" are in a conflation of "language" and "magic". Devoto himself becomes - perversely - a supremely glamorous figure: the aesthete pioneer into extreme states of mind - bringing back reports of terminal romanticism. Not surprisingly - it was rumoured that Morrissey had Devoto in mind as one of the inspirations for his song - "The Last Of The Famous International Playboys".

Devoto's vocal style can twist the dizzying syntax of his lyrics into matching displays of virtuosity: the sound of his voice plays with insinuation - seduction - nervousness - mockery and anger - he becomes a kind of ring master in the circus of emotions he is letting boss.

As you listen to these songs - you wonder who their subject might he -. Devoto himself? a nameless - constantly inconstant lover? - until they catch you in their hall of mirrors: a philosophy of emotional entropy. Of this period of his work - Devoto has said - "I'm sure that I was speaking about the Importance - to me - of paradox and contradiction. That there is some state of grace or point of ultimate knowledge in trying to come to an aesthetic understanding of these things."

The artist and ideologue Linder Sterling - whose monoprints from 197? were used for the original sleeve of "Real Life" - and for the packaging of this current compilation - has described the spectacle of Magazine's particular brand of disquieting glamour in different terms. Recalling one of their concerts - and the sight of Devoto - drenched in sweat - slinging "The Light Pours Out Of Me" - the crowd before him - a single mass of bobbing bodies to the rhythm of the beat - Sterling remarked: "The last great radical act of Twentieth Century art is to declare your own divinity".

In those terms - Magazine have found their niche on the cathedral of Modernism.

Best-of CD of the week

Following an initial period of liberation - punk - like all revolutionary forces - soon substituted new orthodoxies for those it had blown apart. Anarchy became codified into a brand embracing clothing - behaviour and political conduct - and it wasn't long before the movement's freer spirits chafed at the deadening restrictions. Howard Devoto's mind was moving quicker than most. Having formed the Buzzcocks with Pete Shelley - a fellow student at Bolton Institute of Technology - Devoto quit in January 1977 - a mere week after the band's debut EP Spiral Scratch was released. Intent on challenging the new order no sooner than it had been established - he took the name Magazine for a group that renounced badgewearing for contrariness and unapologetic intelligence. Perhaps unsurprisingly - given pop's reductionist impulses - they would always stick out - never to earn the popular acclaim afforded to less talented contemporaries.

Which is why this box set is such a glorious indulgence. Pooling tracks from all four Magazine studio albums with non-LP singles - B-sides - live versions and alternative mixes - plus the band's four John Peel sessions - it provides an uneven but graphic testimony to Devoto's nonconformist instincts. This was the man who in his first NME interview told Paul Morley: "I'm not stupid and I refuse to pretend to be." Asked to sum himself up - he invoked ee cummings: "An 'intelligentleman'." Magazine's debut single Shot by Both Sides made good on such scholarly pretensions - welding the spirit of Camus' The Outsider to an ominous ascending guitar motif - while Devoto's opening lyric - "This and that - they must be the same" - laid bare his ambivalence towards political engagement with any camp from the outset. Shot by Both Sides was a shattering declaration of principles - and its paranoid rumble still passes muster today. Here it is represented by a primitive - unreleased version.

Musically - Devoto was roaming far more widely than the prescribed texts of the day. He had - after all - perfected the two-chord thrash with the Buzzcocks' epochal Boredom - and was now looking to forge a sound that embraced the icy keyboards of Dave Formula - John McGeogh's splenetic guitar chops and his own overtly theatrical vocal performances. With McGeogh also providing saxophone - the debut Magazine album Real Life came on like a post-punk Eno-era Roxy Music - simmering with synthesised alienation and brilliant pop tunes. The Light Pours Out of Me saw McGeogh cranking malice into the riff from Gary Glitter's Rock & Roll. Formula's simplistic style cemented the Eno debt on Definitive Gaze - the live version of which sees Devoto at his sardonic best: "So this is real life! You're telling me!"

Wan-faced children of the new wave regarded Devoto as a pan-sticked cultural divining rod - through whom they were just as likely to discover Russian literature - 1980's A Song From Under the Floorboards adapted its lyrics from Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground - as Captain Beefheart - whose I Love You You Big Dummy was covered by Magazine on an early B-side. And anyone who had thought David Bowie a little passé for such cutting-edge times were prompted to reassess by the second Magazine album Secondhand Daylight - with a doomy timbre explicitly indebted to Bowie's Low and Heroes. Lyrically - Devoto wasn't exactly cheering up - either: "I will drug you and fuck you/On the permafrost - " he advised in the album's keynote dirge - Permafrost.

By album number three - 1980's The Correct Use of Soap - Magazine were fraying at the edges. Devoto was bridling at the commercial imperatives of being on a major label - while McGeogh - who along with Formula and bassist Barry Adamson had already been playing in Steve Strange's Visage - was soon to quit and join Siouxsie and the Banshees. With production from Martin Hannett - Soap was a strong record - but would be the band's last essential achievement. A succession of guitarists came and went - and Magazine made one last studio album - the generally uninspired Magic - Murder and the Weather - before Devoto wound matters up in 1981 - as ever sensitive to the mood of the times.

Until now - Magazine's legacy has been largely unheralded - in part because the music defied crass compartmentalising. In recent times Devoto has collaborated with neo-prog drones Mansun - while doubtless Virgin must be hoping for some residual interest from curious Pulp and Radiohead fans who might discover in Devoto a proto-Jarvis Cocker/Thom Yorke. Yet such fly-by-nighters are advised to check this set's single-CD companion collection - Where the Power Is. Maybe It's Right to Be Nervous Now - on the other hand - is a pngt for serious scholars of the age and nostalgics who want to relive the magic of hearing this strange - defiantly perverse sound.

Given that such characters were most likely exposed to Magazine through John Peel - the CD given over to session tracks is the biggest inducement to purchase. Purer and less overproduced than some of the album versions - their unselfconscious confection of punk attitude with Grand Guignol conceit conveys surprising reserves of power to this day. As for Devoto - his demonstrably prescient end-of-the-millennium psychosis - best enunciated in A Song From Under the Floorboards - feels more relevant than ever: "I know the meaning of life - it doesn't help me a bit."

MAGAZINE : Maybe It's Right To Be Nervous Now

The Herald

A flip through the Magazine Howard Devoto's deserters from the Punk Wars get their boxed-set retrospective at last - writes NEIL COOPER

Among the slew of punk-rock revivalist nostalgia that's been re-packaged - re-mastered and realigned on CD racks across the land over the past few years - one band has been mysteriously airbrushed out. Truth is - Howard Devoto's Magazine ducked out of the phoney punk wars early on - moving into a more sophisticated sphere that would leave them forever on the musical margins. Until now - that is - for the long overdue release of Maybe it's Right to Be Nervous Now - a three-CD boxed set chock-full of Magazine's greatest misses - shows off a band adored by the few - an influence on the many. Almost 20 years since the band's implosion - Howard Devoto's arch existentialist hangover - articulated via his self-consciously literary lyrics set to the lushest of musical backdrops - still lingers.

Devoto had dispensed with acting dumb in the prototype edition of the Buzzcocks - the band he founded with Pete Shelley in 1976. Together the pair promoted and supported the Sex Pistols at their first Manchester gigs and released the seminal Spiral Scratch EP - one of the first independent releases of the new wave - which itself was re-released on CD earlier this year. But that was as much three-chord thrash as Devoto (né Trafford) could stomach - and by the time his ambiguously- named new band - half coffee-table gloss - half AK-47 - released their first single - Shot By Both Sides - safety pins and spitting seemed like passé relics from an archaic age. Magazine sounded like the future - and Shot By Both Sides - a paranoid dispatch from both sides of the barricades - its manifesto. Its B-side - My Mind Ain't So Open - poached its lyrics from Shakespeare.

The band's first album - 1978's Real Life - showcased a sound filched from Eno-era Roxy Music and David Bowie at his most portentous - translating it - through the interplay between John McGeoch's scratchy and sumptuous guitar - the gulping bass of Barry Adamson - and Dave Formula's primitive but now vogueish squiggly-wiggly keyboard sound - into ambiguous little narratives - delivered in Devoto's studiedly aloof but strangely theatrical vocal style.

By the time the misunderstood masterpiece that was Secondhand Daylight was released in 1979 - those same people had grown tired of Magazine's too-clever-by-far - flavour-of-the-monthness. 1980's The Correct Use Of Soap - though - revealed a band at its peak. A stripped-down - less opaque sound exposed a funkily soft centre that matched Devoto's more nakedly direct lyrics perfectly. "Why isn't this man famous?" asked the NME beneath a picture of Devoto in its end-of-year round-up. Why - indeed?

Commercial success - though - was hard to come by - and McGeoch's departure from Magazine seemed to dissipate Devoto's inspiration. A live album couldn't disguise that lack - and - just prior to the release of the patchy Magic - Murder and the Weather - Devoto decided to call it quits. Magazine had fizzled into indifference like a love affair in one of Devoto's lyrics - in which both parties walked away and no-one's heart was broken.

For all their early hype and promise - then - Magazine turned out not to be the future after all. But what of their individual fortunes? John McGeoch went on to play with Siouxsie and the Banshees - Richard Jobson's Armoury Show (alongside drummer John Doyle) - and Public Image Ltd. Dave Formula was last sighted producing Radio Tip-Top's pastiche of M's Pop Music. Original drummer Martin Jackson did a couple of albums with Swing Out Sister. Bassist Barry Adamson has been the most visible of Magazine: following a stint with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - he released a series of noirish instrumental albums steeped in sixties soundtrack influences that one could trace back to Magazine's bizarre cover of John Barry's Goldfinger.

Devoto himself has proved a more peripatetic figure. A solo album - Jerky Versions Of The Dream - acted as a patchy precursor to fronting Luxuria before he disappeared from view. Devoto now works in a North London picture library - though an unlikely but brief collaboration with Mansun brought him out of hiding a couple of years back. And a few weeks ago - Devoto and former Buzzcocks partner in crime Pete Shelley played together for the first time in 23 years.

Working as Buzzfunkst - they played a set of new - Krautrock-influenced material - which - if there's any justice - will be released into the big bad world at some point. But for now - we must make do with the umpteen alternate and live takes on Maybe it's Right to Be Nervous Now - highlight of which is the CD containing all four of Magazine's John Peel sessions - including a version of The Buzzcocks' Boredom alongside a take of Definitive Gaze less soaked in melodrama than the album cut.

Thrill - then - to the barely contained muscle-and-guts malevolence of long-lost single Give Me Everything and the anti-Glitterisms of The Light Pours Out of Me - with Devoto sounding like Peter Cook's tortured rock star in Bedazzled. Taste the melancholy - half-life aftershock on the self-explanatory I Want to Burn Again. Be surprised by the jaunty - dancehall ska organ of My Tulpa - offset against a typically obtuse lyric that seems to hint at the pleasures and pains of unrequited passions.

Such contradictions were at the heart of Magazine's oeuvre. They self-consciously flirted with a clinically cold exterior that both kept its distance from and craved intimacy via songs shot through with barely hidden semantic games of dominance - submission - and implied emotional self-laceration - yet kept old-fashioned rock structures rigidly intact. "Songs about love - songs about fear. Songs about the fear of love and the love of fear - " as the NME so accurately and explicitly put it in its review of The Correct Use of Soap. And then there is the undisguised epic ennui of A Song from Under The Floorboards - a three-verse-and-chorus re-appropriation and congestion of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground that the sallow-faced - overcoated youths who in a pre-Smiths era adopted it as some kind of bedroom-bound anthem - even if they only pretended to understand what the hell it was all about - might just say was Magazine's most accomplished - most sublime moment.

There are - however - some serious omissions. Some of the best tracks from Secondhand Daylight (Talk to the Body - I Wanted Your Heart - Believe that I Understand) have gone awol. And what about the whirligig waltz of Real Life's The Great Beautician in the Sky - which sits somewhere between Broadcast's lo-fi sci-fi and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band's Delilah. Or the bittersweet bon mots of The Correct Use of Soap's You Never Knew Me - ("You were hell and everything else was just a mess/I found I'd stepped into the deepest unhappiness"). Even Philadelphia - from which the box set takes its title - is missing. Which is a pity - as that song contained some of Devoto's pithiest epigrams. "I've got a good face for memories - " he snarled. "I'd have been Raskolnikov/ But Mother Nature ripped me off." And you know - he's probably right. Twenty years ago - whose soap were you using?

Maybe it's Right to Be Nervous Now (Virgin) - available now. An accompanying single CD compilation - Where the Power is (Virgin) - is released simultaneously.

MAGAZINE : Where The Power Is (Virgin) **** CD V2 924

MAGAZINE : Maybe It's Right To Be Nervous Now (Virgin) **** MA GBOX1

Magazine (Maybe It's Right To Be Nervous Now) VIRGIN MAGBOX1 3xCD

Magazine- (Where The Power Is) VIRGIN V2924 CD

from 'The Wire' #200 - p.67-68 (Oct 2000)
article: Louise Gray
editor: Rob Young
publisher: Tony Herrington

Of all punk's first wave stars (and one uses the 'S'-word here with a certain hesitation - given the optimistic - if ingenuous - antipathy towards such charismatic figureheads) - Howard Devoto has been most silent over the intervening decades. Certainly - there was the small matter of a solo album - Jerky Versions Of The Dream (1983) and a couple of Luxuria albums - the project that Devoto - ne Trafford - undertook soon after disbanding Magazine in 1981 - but there was no tacky guest slot on The Sex Pistols' reunion stages - no endless Clash. If anybody has - he has kept his dignity intact.

Lyricist and vocalist Devoto had the knack of walking out at unpredictable moments. He did it with The Buzzcocks - the Manchester group he formed with Pete Shelley - soon after they released their debut Spiral Scratch EP for New Hormones (re-released earlier this year by The Grey Area of Mute). He went on to form Magazine - whose semantically ambivalent name was especially apt. Welcomed in a flurry of enthusiasm - their first single - the Shelley/Devoto composition "Shot By Both Sides" still stands up as a balled-up fist of nervous energy - Devoto's Magazine made an instantaneous impact. I say Devoto's Magazine - because there was never any doubt about the group's dominant personality - even as its settled format included such notables as a young Barry Adamson on bass - guitarist John McGeoch - later of Siouxie & The Banshees - and Dave Formula - producing keyboard swirls inspired by Bowie and Eno's Low. At the time - Devoto's reputation was based on a persona that combined a glacial - ironic distance with a literacy that expanded the horizons of punk beyond its heady sense of Dionysian release. His references came from Dostoevsky - Huysmans - Redon.

The Maybe It's Right To Be Nervous Now box features new artwork by Linder (Ludus) Sterling - still based in Manchester - and provocative sleeve notes by Michael Bracewell - who makes a case for Magazine as representative of a stylistic force that - although predicated within a music industry - owed more to an entire history of experimental art. For Bracewell - Devoto occupies a similar space to Roxy Music during the dandy ascendancy of Eno - or the early Velvet Underground. There is some truth to this claim - Magazine were on a parallel path to the rest of the new wave - both similar and separate. Yet what is most immediately striking about the box set is how Magazine were the funk group that never was. Their cover of Sly Stone's "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)" is an obvious starter - as is their take of Beefheart's "I Love You - Big Dummy" - but there are other signs. A hitherto unreleased version of "Boredom" features heavy bass lines - a boogie piano and Devoto's revision of his own lyrics - which - in throwing out "ennui" and "lassitude" - signals both his authorship of the song and his separation from his past. Magazine never played "Boredom" live.

Maybe- is magnificent - "Rhythm Of Cruelty" - "The Light Pours Out Of Me" - a live version of "Definitive Gaze". It is portentous ("Burst" - "Parade" - "A Song From Under The Floorboards"). And - yes - it is also pretentious ("Permafrost" in triplicate). Go for the box set for a grasp of punk's great outsider group in both their studio and live incarnations; otherwise - released simultaneously as it's edited companion - Magazine- (Where The Power Is) is - like 1987's Rays and Hail compilation - a pretty straightforward rampage through the group's studio albums.

And now? Devoto works as a photo-archivist in London - although in September - he and Shelley showcased five new songs at the ICA - their first collaboration in 23 years. A future? Who knows?

MAGAZINE - Where The Power Is (Virgin)

SELECT October 2000 (p119)

Feature: Toby Manning
Editor: Alexis Petridis
Publisher: Emap

Career compilation from the '70s post-punkers - taken from their four studio albums.
OUT September 25 **** (of 5)

If Magazine have a modern counterpart - it's probably Radiohead - but a Radiohead composed solely of Thom Yorkes - with not an Ed O'Brien in sight. A refinement of punk's musical aggression - Magazine cultivated an aloofness that walked hand in frosty hand with the taut - Cold War discipline of their music. Not that it's devoid of passion - it's just so tightly coiled that it'd take years of therapy to untangle.

Opener - 1978's 'Shot By Both Sides' - is Magazine's manifesto - both musically and lyrically. Howard Devoto's acid account of political scepticism in an age of extremes is underpinned by an ever-tautening riff by guitarist John McGeoch. Even better is McGeoch's blood-freezing work on 'Permafrost' - perfectly matching the casual aloofness of Devoto's lyric ["I will drug you and fuck you on the permafrost"].

Of the 16 tracks - there's barely two tracks that resemble each other. For three LPs at least - Magazine studied detachment created music of untainted superiority. Teenage Thom was almost certainly watching closely. Sadly - so were Mansun - and a point must be deducted for Devoto's subsequent collaborative work with the Draper collective.

MAGAZINE Maybe It's Right To Be Nervous Now

Virgin MAGBOX1 (3-CD) (61:51) (55:43) (56:13)

Magazine -(Where The Power Is)

Virgin CDV 2924 (74:15)

Record Collector - Article: Kieron Tyler - Editor: Andy Davis - Publisher: Parker Mead - P.152

This three-CD set of Howard Devoto's post-Buzzcocks art-rockers Magazine is accompanied by "Magazine- (Where The Power Is)" - a single CD compilation that overhauls the already-reissued "Rays and Hail 1978-81". One track has been deleted ("I Want To Burn Again") and replaced with three others. Hence - "Maybe It's Right To Be Nervous Now" isn't intended as a 'best of' set.

What we have is every non-album Magazine track and a few from albums - spread over two CDs - supplemented by seven of the ten live tracks from the 1980 album - "Play" - as well as five differently mixed tracks that aren't too far removed from the familar versions. The third disc presents Magazine's complete John Peel sessions recorded for the BBC - spanning 1978-80.

The first two CDs are sequenced chronologically - with tracks confusingly interspersed with the 1980 live material. So - "Permafrost" - recorded live in September 1980 - follows "Back To Nature" - issued in March 1979. Weird sequencing aside - "Maybe It's Right" would be a pretty good jumping-off point for anyone wishing to sample Magazine.

Debut single - "Shot By Both Sides" - kicks things off. Although billed as the 45 version - it's actually a dry-sounding - presumably demo - take. The other interesting track on the first CD is a different - more percussive "The Light Pours Out Of Me". The second CD has few surprises - bar the alternate version of 1981's "Vigilance" - which is hardly essential. The third - sessions CD is more compelling for those looking for new perspective (sic) on Magazine.

"Definitive Gaze" - from their debut album is here under its alternate title - "Real Life" - in a version which opens up the song's filmic - expansive qualities - easily outstripping the issued version. Buzzcocks' "Boredom" is given a grandiose overhaul - in an ironic gesture from Devoto - who is famously keen to leave the past behind. The Peel sessions show a Magazine looser than evinced by their recorded output - sparser and readier to stretch things.

Throughout their life - Magazine seemed perverse - relying on keyboard textures and fussy - rubbery bass in a period obsessed with simplicity. "Maybe It's Right To Be Nervous Now" is just as perverse.

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