Private View

Product Information

Did the clobber make a slightly overawed 1980s pop star feel more at home with the trappings of celebrity? Private View is not a confessional album, but rather an album from an artist who knows how to use his art and talent to tell his stories and explore not only his own emotions, but also the impact of the world around him.

You get this stuff out of your system, but what you don’t want to do is burden everyone else with it. We were in the dressing room, and they all said ‘Right, we’re going on…’ so we did the secret ritual, then they left me alone to gargle because I’d been ill. Private View is set for release on London Records almost exactly 40 years to the day since they released their debut, Happy Families.

But… we did a Greenpeace thing, standing with John Hurt next to an inflatable whale in Hyde Park – as you do – and then went off to do a concert at the Royal Albert Hall. This neat, full circle is also reflected in the album itself, being the perfect crystallisation of four decades of Arthur’s creativity. There’s a deft marriage of futuristic electronic sounds, Neil Arthur’s unmistakable vocal hooks, and songs veer from buoyant and joyful to dark and brooding. A couple of weeks prior to our meeting, Neil had tweeted a picture of himself wearing the Indian-style linen tunic he’d first sported 38 years earlier, in the video for ‘The Day Before You Came’ – an Abba cover flavoured with the santoor and tabla of regular collaborators Deepak Khazanchi and Pandit Dinesh.

The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network. They did run-throughs for all the camera angles, and I could see somebody in the shadows singing ‘You keep me running round and round, well that’s alright with me…’.So it ran its course, and one of the reasons we originally stopped was – I think – to save our friendship.

We ambled on, Stephen started the cassette player with the backing track, and I was still playing guitar at this point.

years and 16 albums later, Blancmange have re-signed to London Records with the captivating and inspired Private View, melding futuristic electronics, Neil Arthur’s unmistakable vocal hooks, and songs spanning buoyant and joyful to dark and brooding. All the sounds and feels you'd want if you love Stephen's previous bands, but with some new twists and ideas keeping it fresh. This led to a career in radio, writing for various publications, and ultimately a radio show about The Beatles (Beatles Universe), which ran for over four years. Register for a See account here to import your Spotify library or ‘follow’ artists you find on our site to add them to your ‘favourites’. Conceived in the wake of the pandemic, the album looks beyond the trials of the past two years and strives to find answers and, moreover, solutions to the situation we’ve arrived at, with Neil insisting the desire to keep moving forward underpins the set.

Take the aforementioned ‘Everything Is Connected’: “Hang the washing out / Do the washing up / Close the door and then lock it”. It was only half past eight in the morning, but for me it was seven o’clock in the evening and I was ready for a pint. Some Times These’ also retains a fuzzy kerrang element although the chorus keyboard theme has an immersive Eno-esque air that echoes his work on “Heroes”. And that made me think about the miner’s strike, and all kinds of other stuff from the late 1970s and early ‘80s. For a while I was making music, and if you’re successful there’s a tag that comes with that: ‘Pop Star’.So Fader and Blancmange have fundamentally different starting points, even though it’s the same two people.