Now what did I do with that one Front 242 CD of mine? You know, Front by Front?
For I must have the original big dancehall hit Headhunter on my Farewell to Front 242 playlist I’m putting together for all my “i” devices. After all, no Front 242 Farewell playlist would be complete without their driving twist on theme music for movies about killer sharks cutting through the seas, followed by the lyrics about hunting down men to capture them or make them slaves or sign them up for an insurance policy: after all, that’s where they came up with that line, when one of the members took a day job selling policies and heard a lecture about how to snare customers.
And as a diehard completist, I also must put together all the versions of the song on my playlist. Sure, I already have Headhunter 2000 (Emperion Mix); a fierce, live-in-Chicago Headhunter I copped for free on a digital promo the label Alfa Matrix sent to HookLook, Inc., my corporate editing and writing service that also surveys music trends; and something called Headhunter (Private Mix).
But I still not only need the original, known as Headhunter V30, but also the extended Headhunter v10 included on the CD.
So where did it go? Not stuck in the middle of the Naxos classical CDs: Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Schoenberg, Cage … all those I used to buy for a little more than a few bucks at Tower Records, before it was crassly cut down by the forces of predatory capitalism. Not anywhere in the producer Rudy Van Gelder remixes of classic Blue Note jazz albums. No, not with my valuable Bowie Rykodisc label collection of his classic albums with swell bonus cuts.
Ah, success. Here it is, with that sinister cover – the blown-up microscopic shot of some kind of spiked virus bug that’s on most of the Epic rereleases of their earlier stuff. Like, illustrating the first song on Front by Front, Until Death (Us Do Part), that ominous but danceable dirge to virus attacks on the system, individual and social:
“Now I’m making my way inside/Now I’m feeding myself with you”
At the time, mid to late eighties I’m thinking, probably their response to the Aids crisis … but you have to say, way ahead of the curve when it comes to our new grave world of mass virus infection.
But look here, I seem to have come across two copies of Front by Front. Stands to reason, as Front by Front is their best album, technically speaking, though I do tend toward Official Version because of the extended workouts that get the body to body moving without jumping from song to song. Then again, along those dance lines, when it comes down in it, I got to ultimately go with Mut@ge.Mix@ge, a regular Front 242 symphony with a single track that features separate movements remixed by The Orb and Underworld.
Yes, I have to say that Front 242 is my favorite industrial-metal-hard-disco band of all time. And this will amount to a farewell playlist, because it’s the end, my friend.
After 40 years, they are calling it quits, with Chicago as the focal point of the going away festivities in November, given that The Front first achieved their stateside success on the Wax Trax imprint here. A history of Electronic Body Music film, band member DJ sets, two concerts at The Metro, even a Magical Mystery Tour bus trip to sight see Wax Trax and Front 242 sites: I have no idea what those could be, though I hope one stopover is the site of what was formerly The Crash Palace, you know, the hangout of the Wax Trax crowd and the setting for my novel, Zelda Rising.
For sure, I’m going to be missing those monster-black-metal-techno-riff beats, sounding like a soundtrack to a commando raid. Pounding tribal throwdowns for the heavy metal, black-and-silver set … and no, I don’t wear lots of steel rings on my fingers or chains on my chest, and I never did own a black leather jacket, but I make sure, always, to go to these concerts with head to toe, dressed in black.
I first met their music you know while I was living in Europe. On a massive collection called This Is Electronic Body Music that also included Click Click, Neon Judgement, Chris & Cosey and the immortal Skinny Puppy. Matter of fact, I still have the original cassette I bought during the glorious eighties, working as the Arts & Letters editor for The Wall Street Journal/Europe, along with editing copy about the skewed wisdom of installing NATO cruise missiles on European territories during the late days of the Cold War, smack like that.
The Front must have simply appealed to my mordant mood swings tinged with pure irony at the time. Their Terminator-Predator look, their sporting aviator shades. Drummer Richard 23 with his Travis Bickle buzz-cut mohawk. Those samples on their songs: “Follow the Red Team”; Reagan intoning “we tried quiet diplomacy and demonstrations of military force”; “yes, we’re hitting them again”; and my favorite, “Five Yard Penalty, First Down”. Totally off-the-freaking-wall album covers, like the one on the extended single for the song Don’t Crash, from a Soviet propaganda film showing a scowling infantryman with a machine gun, blasting away.
Eventually, I started seeing Front 242 as somewhat of a reflection of their essentially divided country. In the south of Belgium, the French-speaking Walloons within their old rust belt industrial factories that had fallen on hard times: that’s where The Front got their iron beats. While on the northerly side of the country, you had something like a Flemish Silicon Valley, with a thriving computer software industry, which fits the techno side of The Front: booming synthesizers and electric pad drums, savagely laying down the beat into the dancefloor mix.
And all this met in the center, Brussels, into the boiling brew of Electronic Body Music (EBM). Yeah, this was European Community stuff, what with The Front singing in a strangely phonetic kind of guttural English along with one song on Front by Front in German as well as their knack for speaking French in interviews.
Okay, with all that said then … who would have figured that Front 242 would go on to play a strange role in my historically stupid romance life, kind of like if Bryan Ferry took to driving a bulldozer as an artistic statement?
See, one year, I made a big mistake taking a beautiful American girl name of Lorie [winsome and sassy with eyes as blue as a spring Paris sky] to a Front 242 concert. I say “big mistake” because she wasn’t exactly of the heavy metal, black-and-silver slant: I mean, consider that I had helped her publish a profile of Lloyd Cole, the dapper troubadour of distant, sly cool at the time, on the Arts & Letters page. Compare that to The Front, who sounded like power drills in a coal mine, pun intended.
“There’s too much bass,” Lorie said, as she covered her ears during the show. “Don’t they ever turn it down?” No, things were never the same between me and Lorie after the concert. It didn’t help that a friend of ours who joined us at the concert said The Front were part of the neo-Nazi movement, those mock combat antics of theirs totally escaping him.
[A sidenote, Wikipedia wonders if the name of the band “could have been chosen in tribute to United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 which formally established the ‘inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every State can live in security’ ”. Well, works for me.]
Yes Lorie sigh. When I think of her, I always get a little misty when I hear The Front song Lovely Day:
“Now that I've lost your track/How could I bring you back?”
Anyway, I could keep going on about The Front. The concerts [one year, saw them in Belgium and a few months later, in Chicago, both excellent. Another Chicago show, this one at the moldering Congress Theater, where lead singer Jean-Luc De Meyer was dressed up like space-age mechanical-aluminum man], the videos [from the minimalist Belgian RTE TV vids to the one for Quite Unusual with the little maniacal villain, to the Brussels shoot for Headhunter costarring cooked and cracked eggs], the side projects [De Meyer sings lead on the Revolting Cocks song No Devotion, post-punk atheism at its deepest].
Me, I’m just glad I doubled down, as they say, with the Front by Front CD. Because you can never have enough Headhunters cued up and ready to set loose for those special moments, like, when you’re thinking of signing an insurance policy.
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