Good news for modern man! One of the earliest obscure but potent albums it was my pleasure to champion in the early days of PPM is once more available, and in digital format. “Method In The Madness” from Gardening By Moonlight was a dazzling cornucopia of Post-Punk technique and direction [with a fantastic Peter Saville sleeve!] that I picked up in 1983 on John Foxx’s recommendation in print. Decades later, I managed to find most of the singles from it and made a REVO CD of it in 2007, though one 7″ still evades my reach. Last week I was checking out the J.J. Johnson website to see if it was still active and it was! More to the point, GBM mainstay Johnson [Electric Chairs, Thomas Dolby’s Low Noise, Skids] had now remastered the album and its two non-LP B-sides and it is awaiting purchase at Bandcamp in the CD quality format [or less] of your choice!

Gardening By Moonlight: Method In The Madness – UK – DL [2022]

1. Method In The Madness
2. Letters
3. Diction + Fiction
4. Whistling In The Dark
5. Weights + Measures
6. Strange Views [Is It Safe?]
7. Chance
8. Strange News
9. Method Again
10. Green Light
11. History

Johnson’s musical partner in GBM was the great Duncan Bridgeman [Shake Shake, John Foxx, various productions] I can go on and on about the manifold merits of this album, but it’s been done…thirteen years ago, so let’s just link to it and move on with our lives. Suffice to say that it was an album that I considered myself to buy the one time I saw a copy in 1983! If you were not so lucky let it be known that due to the following credit, actual master tapes were used for this digital mastering. A leap over my meticulously transferred copy from the records.

Special thanks to DAVE KITTO @ www.cliftonbankstudios.com for Audio Transfer.
And DALE LUNHAM-HARRISON for Tape Tracing and Retrieval.

A sample with the earbuds just now suggests that this is clean, hot and has not been brickwalled, so three cheers for sound quality! While we’re a bit sad that there is still no glass mastered CD of this material, we are also relieved that it’s not just another LP that’s been pressed of this music as is today’s fashion. We already have the original. We don’t need two LPs of this. Enough of my chit-chat. If you’ve not yet made yourself familiar with Gardening By Moonlight, by all means hit that player below and explore. I would hope that anyone reading this site’s writing would be enthusiastic supporters of this music.

Given that the “History” B-side from the “Whistling In The Dark” 7″ is still not something I have in house, I may opt to buy this DL and upgrade my homeburn CD-R of this spectacular title with what seems to be the songs mastered from the original tapes. The other 12″ mixes on my copy were accounted for here so I may have to remaster my copies from vinyl and go for a hybrid approach on the remastered REVO 040. But that’s my problem to deal with. All you have to to is hit that button!