NEW ORDER BY IRVINE WELSH
I hate writing about music. You either love a tune or a band or you don’t. The whole point of it is that you never really know why. So you talk a lot of irrelevant personal nonsense, about how a group is so important to your own ‘timeline’ - as we’re now psychotically inclined to designate our lives.
So here goes.
Like a lot of New Order fans of my vintage, I came to the band through having been a Joy Division obsessive. For me, like most, it was a painless succession. The same talented people were still making great music, and like the band, I was also emerging from a doom-laden period (though there would be more to follow) in favour of something a little more upbeat.
It would be lazy to try and define such a successful group as New Order by the tragedies of Ian Curtis and Rob Gretton. It would also be extremely silly, especially given that the band’s personnel are all people who so evidently enjoy their lives. The loss of both would have been considerable however; with the death of Curtis, the band went from being a bunch of North West of England young bloods, having fun and making post-punk music, to growing up in public in the most dramatic and harrowing way.
To outsiders, the death of a famous youth often provokes both unfathomable tragedy and phantom romance, the latter part amplified by stardom's iconizing qualities. As you get older however, you see that the real horror of this is just how widespread the illness of depression is, and how devastating it can be. In Ian's case, this was compounded by the terrifying onset of epilepsy. As a group, those young friends were suddenly forced to confront both existential and practical issues: What is this? What do we do? Do we carry on? Despite their youth, they all managed to do this with an incredible decorum and dignity.
New Order grew out of this desire to build on the Joy Division achievement, while producing a less bleak sound. Movement, the band's first album, with its iconic minimalist Factory records sleeve, was awaited with a kind of eager trepidation by fans of the original group. Shamefully, I recall dismissing it before I'd heard it -in the way of the arrogant young clown- just because a good friend had bought a copy of it first. If I'd allowed it to be great, I would have undermined the competitive relationship that inspired the Renton-Sick Boy friendship in Trainspotting. So I waited for Power, Corruption and Lies to appear, in order that I could announce to my mate that the band had 'found their feet with this album'. It remains one of my favourite albums of all time.
So it was that New Order became one of the essential acts that have provided the soundtrack to my life. It’s hard to mark out a definitive New Order era; they’ve covered so much ground that I can’t think of them as an 80’s or 90’s band, or even of the twenty-first century. For very straightforward, personable individuals, New Order collectively retains a strange mystique, with a prevailing sense of enigma resilient in their music. An upbeat track will always carry an ominous undercurrent, while a darker piece invariably comes bundled with a subversive joy.
A further complication lies in the strength of the album tracks. Though known as a big pop hits band to the masses, the purists will tell you that it’s easy to compose an alternative ‘best of…’ album from tracks that were never released as singles. Your Silent Face is probably my favourite New Order song; a quintessential dance/rock n roll fusion, it’s all at once hypnotic, melancholic, sinister and uplifting. Back when we were talking about the inclusion of songs for the Trainspotting movie soundtrack, everyone had their favourite artists, but the only consensus was that a New Order track was totally essential. There was, obviously, far less accord around exactly which tune that should be.
Thus the New Order sound is highly diverse, but still very markedly their own. It owes a lot to the clash of distinctive melodies and throbbing, angry bass lines. The most interesting thing about the band is how they often manage to eschew a lot of traditional pop structure. Many of their biggest tunes swerve the verse-chorus-verse orthodoxy, developing instead more like classical songs, such as Age of Consent and Run.
For aficionados like myself, Peter Hook's departure from the band felt like a much-loved couple of friends going through a messy divorce. But just like that example, such an estrangement is generally unfathomable to everybody but the parties involved. Whatever has or will be publicly uttered on the matter, it's a sad fact of life that people sometimes grow apart. Best to just leave it at that and celebrate the fact that there are now two acts out there for fans to enjoy.
New Order survived and thrived after this, principally because they are natural collaborators. The band members have always been excited to embrace a number of side projects and have thrived on working with different artists. I recall being at an impressive Bad Lieutenant gig in Dublin some years ago, and thus it was no surprise that Tom Chapman became a member of New Order. As individuals, they remain remarkably easy-going and laconic, brimming with a trademark sly Mancunian wit, and apparently unfazed by the trials that have come their way.
Now they have an amazing legacy, which they can augment with new material or curate through gigs, as they see fit. Going to a New Order show is like a zooming through a history of British cultural life of the last few decades, while marveling at just how many big hits and great songs they have knocked out over this time. I’ve danced, partied, wooed, lost, won, courted, got married to New Order, been taken under the wing of their ex-label boss, the incredible Tony Wilson, and become friends with the band.
But I really didn’t want to write all this, as it’s pretty much tangential to the real message, which is: I just absolutely fucking love New Order.
neworder.com / facebook.com/NewOrderOfficial / twitter.com/neworder
www.mute.com