“Subculture” by New Order

New Order's "Subculture" lives two lives. On Low-Life, the band's 1985 album for Factory Records, it's a sleek, chilly synth-pop cut the band produced itself, with Michael Johnson engineering and all four members, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert, sharing the writing. By the time it came out as the second and last single from that record, John Robie had remixed it into something else entirely: a club-ready electronic workout with soulful female backing singers riding high in the mix.

The flip side, "Dub-vulture", stripped it down to an instrumental, a different seven-inch edit of Robie's mix later landed on the 1987 compilation Substance, and Razormaid remixes in 1986 brought in extra vocals from Deborah Iyall of Romeo Void. It came wrapped in a plain black sleeve, and for years the rumour ran that Peter Saville thought the mix didn't deserve his design work, leaving him credited only for the lettering.

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