Originally Posted by: Andy 
Just last week, I signed up for Bob Stanley's Record Room on Patreon. I liked his group, Saint Etienne and have appreciated his books on pop music. Though I'd never signed up for anyone else's Patreon account, his discussions on Twitter had convinced me to give his subscription service a try ($4 per month). One of the features is that every Tuesday, you get a new article on pop music. For my first week, incredibly, the article is New Order in flux: 1981/82.
I unfortunately don't have time before work to digest the entire piece. But from a quick scan through it, what I can say is that New Order really need to be the subject of his next book. Excellent. I will report later on the highlights of the article.
The article wasn't as long as I first assumed. It's essentially like an online article, with photos and links to songs and artists he mentions. I can copy and paste the text so you get the idea without all the bells and whistles that the subscription version features. Don't rat me out. I don't want to be banned from his group on my first week! (I feel a little guilty as this isn't from a big magazine publication, only his Patreon account)
New Order in flux: 1981/82"World In Motion would have reached number one in the charts almost exactly ten years after New Order came into existence. The difference in the circumstances from June 1980 to June 1990 is unimaginably great. After Ian Curtis’s death, there was a very real chance the new group would falter and splutter. Even after debut single Ceremony in 1981, nothing was certain. Their first album had a beautiful sleeve, but was almost entirely let down by a paucity of good songs, clearly nervous musicians, and a producer, Martin Hannett, who had his own demons to contend with. Everything’s Gone Green, hesitantly placed on the b-side of Procession in late '81, was the first real suggestion of a future; Temptation, in 1982, allayed all fears.
The early, anxious days of New Order – with hindsight, stripped of then-recent tragedy - are fascinating. The avenues not taken. No one really had a clue where they were going musically, least of all, I suspect, the four members of New Order. Though none of these groups had suffered the death of its singer, pre-punk giants Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac and Genesis had all been left in similar positions. The departures of Syd Barrett and Peter Green through breakdowns left the first two struggling to find a way forward for years and years, with pretty intriguing results (it’s my favourite Pink Floyd period); Genesis simply promoted Phil Collins when Peter Gabriel left, and found he had a remarkably similar voice. New Order took the latter route. Bernard Sumner’s voice didn’t have the resonance of Ian Curtis’s, but his phrasing was definitely coming from the same place.
Tony Wilson and Rob Gretton thought New Order could build their mystique by not doing interviews. This was true. I can’t imagine anyone in 2024 thinks there’s a great deal of mystique around New Order, with their spats, with Peter Hook’s cheap appropriation of their legacy, and Barney’s peculiar interests - his defence of the Falklands War, his curiosity in (non-existent) street brawls between (also non-existent) ISIS branches in Bradford and Keighley. No, their hearts are on their sleeves these days, their guts are wide open. 1981 was not like this. Reporters were sent out to track them down, to try and glean anything. Record Mirror found Peter Hook in a pub once. He wouldn’t talk. They still ran the story. Labelmates on Factory were loyal and kept schtum. Eventually someone cracked, maybe the bassist from Tunnel Vision, I can’t be sure. Maybe the drummer from Crispy Ambulance. He said to one of the music papers that Peter Hook liked to go scrambling, on a scrambling bike. That was it. It seemed implausible to me. I could only imagine them rehearsing in a disused cotton mill, something like the setting for the Love Will Tear Us Apart video. Scrambling indeed.
Ceremony, released with no advance notice in February 1981, caught everyone by surprise and was an instant classic. You know Ceremony, I don’t need to talk about it here other than to recall a moment when I saw it played live, and not by New Order.
When I saw Galaxie 500 play Ceremony at a show in Brighton in 1989, people were visibly shocked; they were either upset, angry, or laughing at the group’s cheek – Dean Wareham later said he had no idea about the special place it held in people’s hearts, that it was almost sacrilege for another group to play it. (an aside - I’m not sure this was entirely down to it being Ian Curtis’s last song. Think of the oft-cited greatest single of all time, Strawberry Fields Forever c/w Penny Lane – how often is either side covered? Candy Flip’s 98bpm cover of the former was seen at the time as much as a throat-slitting severance with the past as 1990's embrace of 1967’s hedonism. It worked as both, and remains a valid bit of musical graffiti. Ceremony was such an unimpeachable record, real perfection, that to cover it seemed like madness. All power to Galaxie 500, then, that they intensified the emotion by stretching it out, not at all an easy feat – look at Vanilla freakin’ Fudge).
Their label also needed them to pull through, and maybe they felt the pressure. 1981’s A Factory Quartet – a double album with one side each from the Durutti Column (outtakes), Blurt (home recordings), Kevin Hewick (live, poorly recorded, apparently with no artist consent) and the Royal Family and the Poor - was a mess, Factory’s own Ummagumma. A Certain Ratio were by now moving into straighter jazz funk territory, without the windswept aspect that had made their early records so intriguing. Section 25 were just Section 25, no matter how good they were – and the same went for Crispy Ambulance, the Names, Minny Pops and all the other Factory acts that no one (certainly not in the press) other than die-hard Factory followers seemed interested in. A lot was resting on New Order’s success, artistic and commercial.
Their second single was Procession, released in September 1981. Procession sounds like a single and - despite the moody Yes-like synth chords that open and close it, and the lack of an obvious hook until the late-on “your heart beats you late at night” - it has more in common with the Haircut 100 of late 1981 (Favourite Shirts, even Love Plus One) than it does with Everything’s Gone Green on the other side. Here was the future they did take: the sequencer, the dancefloor pulse, even the “whoo!” barely audible but there sure enough on the fade. This was not what anyone expected. (note: There’s an especially fierce rehearsal of Procession included on the 2019 edition of Movement, no vocals, but – not a word I’d use often – cathartic).
New Order were in a state of flux in 1981, and two recordings from this period are intriguing clues as to where they could have gone if Arthur Baker hadn’t helped to turn them from an endless musical wake into stars of shimmering mid-eighties electro dance.
Both of the clues are to be found on John Peel sessions. Dreams Never End was recorded for a session in January 1981, before Ceremony was even in the shops. The vocal was by Peter Hook and it’s one of their greatest performances. The bell-clear guitar interplay, the sense of release in the break at the end of the chorus, it’s a long way from the literal dirges they were initially writing (These could be summed up as “a long farewell to your soul”, an ongoing, public grief process – who could blame them?). Hooky’s voice is light, almost angelic, not what you’d expect from that bearded postie face. It was closer to one of the more melodic Liverpool groups of the day – the Wild Swans, for instance - than their grey mac-wearing Manchester cousins. The Wild Swans were unrecorded at this time. Hook would also sing the song on Movement and the version is similar but way less joyous, the product of unhappy sessions. What’s more, his vocal has dropped an octave; whether this was to make Dreams Never End seem more in keeping with the rest of the album, or whether Hook (or Hannett) suffered a loss of nerve in the studio, I don’t know. Kevin Pearce would quote the song in his script for Paul Kelly's 2003 film Finisterre. It feels like hidden gem in New Order's catalogue. And it’s quite a peculiar thought that, had it got more attention in 1981, Peter Hook could have become the singer in New Order.
Their second session for Peel was broadcast on June 1st 1982. This included a version of dub artist Keith Hudson’s Turn The Heater On. Hudson’s Pick A Dub (which doesn't actually include Turn The Heater On) is now widely acknowledged as a classic in its field though, at the time, despite being an avid reader of the music press, I hadn’t come across his name before. Its minor chords, spooked ambience and mysterious lyric – “gonna beat them all, gonna beat them all, tonight” – suited the group’s sound, and Hudson's song pushed them somewhere unexpected. It also showed how dub’s echoes, drops and spaciousness could be captured by the group without having to rely on Martin Hannett. That must have been comforting for them. At this point both Sumner (Stockholm Monsters’ Happy Ever After) and Hook (the Royal Family and the Poor’s Dream) were trying their hand at outside productions, albeit for other Factory acts. But the sound of Turn The Heater On would not be one they’d follow up. Barney’s affection for the melodica, like a Mancunian Augustus Pablo, would be pretty much their only real ongoing connection to dub. (note: this session also included an early version of We All Stand, which would turn up on Power Corruption and Lies in 1983. The keyboard line on the album version is reminiscent of Timmy Thomas or Sly and the Family Stone, a dark early 70s lost soul, and there are still touches of dub in Stephen Morris’s drumming. The Peel version - rather remarkably - has a piano sound which suggests the keyboard line came from Bill Evans or at least some modern jazz pianist – one of you might know a specific source).
New Order In Dub, or Peter Hook dueting with John Barnes - neither of these things came to pass. In the end, the movement from Joy Division into New Order – two of the greatest and most influential groups of the 1980s – seemed pretty seamless. I’m not complaining with the path New Order took, not at all… though I do wish they’d stopped with Regret; that and Ceremony really would have made beautiful bookends."
Bob Stanley's Record Room
