Cuttings

THE NOT VERY GOOD MIXER NEW ORDER The Rest of New Order (London/All formats) AH, THE "art" of the remix. Ostensibly, it's all about "Reinvention! Rejuvenation!" but all too often, as with those "New! Improved!" washing-powders, it's really just marketing shorthand for "Not Good Enough In The First Place!" At least, that's the case with habitual indie remix victims from The Soup Dragons to Ned's Atomic Dustbin, for whom the term polishing a turd was doubtless coined. But now it's New Order under the cosh. Which makes this album the equivalent of buffing up... what? Platinum? Diamonds? MR SHEEN'S EXTRA-SHINY SlLVERWARE? Of course, what it's really all about is polishing off what little patience New Order fans have left. Since the collapse of Factory, their legacy has been handled with all the sensitivity of The Stone Roses' Silvertone material. The difference is, you only have to wait five years for a ne...

POSTER MODERNISM Renegade Art Terrorism or bumper tax loss, Barney Sumner or Benson Hedges, New Order or Soft Sell? Well, you‘re the customer! Wherever you live in these septic isles, there’s a good chance you‘ve had your recent bus journeys enlivened by the sight of a 20 foot-high Day-Glo Cupid by the roadside. Silk Cut go Lysergic? No, merely the latest in a series of post-modernist wheezes by those lovable situationists at Factory. Bearing only the legend ‘New Order, advertising Technique’, it is, in case you’re a bit slow, a reminder that the lads have a new record available. As Factory informed me: “As you’re aware NEW ORDER dislike the idea of advertising in the press, yet we still have an obvious duty to inform people that they have a new LP out. So originally we talked about flyposting but that, of course , is illegal. So we decided on the idea of billboards since it’s unusual and Peter Saville‘s sleeve makes for a really striking image and a rather neat pun (‘advertis...

Manchester declares 'Republic' NEW ORDER’s first recordings for three years will be released on their own ‘Manchester’ label, which has been set up as part of their new deal with London Records. A new single ‘Regrets’ (out April 5) will christen the label, which will be exclusively for “New Order and their friends”, according to bassist Peter Hook. The band are currently remixing the B-side, ‘Mixed Regrets’, at Liverpool’s Parr Street Studios. An Andy Weatherall mix has already been completed. It will be followed in May by a 13-track album ‘Republic’, New Order’s first since ‘Technique’ in February 1989. In a sleeve designed by Peter Saville, tracks include ‘Regrets’, ‘World (Price Of Love)’, ‘Avalanche’, ‘Chemical’, ‘Liar’, ‘Everyone Everywhere’ and ‘Techno 2’. The new material was recorded entirely at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studio in Bath and produced by Stephen Hague before the collapse of Factory Records, said Hook. He told NME: “it was a bit of bad timing re...

EVERYTHING IN ORDER NEW ORDER WEMBLEY ARENA YOU KNOW a band has made it when the people sitting at the back are in a different postal district to the stage. New Order are overwhelmingly a boys band and the Wembley Arena is a riot of colour in a thousand different shades of grey. People are being forced to drink Hofmeister out of bottles and buy sweatshirts for £20. It seems unlikely that anything close and frail and secret could go on in the middle of so much ugliness. but it does. New Order take a little while to adjust to being dropped into an air hanger but when they do Mr Albrecht is a post-apocalypse Nick Heyward with a mighty catalogue of tunes to show off, from the sinuous twangings of yesteryear to today‘s wistful Eurodisco. The songs are stretched so tight you worry they‘re going to snap, but they never do, balanced all clean and metallic in a uniform chrome glare on top of that marvellous empty biscuit tin drum sound. My favourite bit is when the guitar comes flailin...

ANIMAL New Order: impenetrable darkness, enveloping gloom and clinging blackness. NEW ORDER Republic If The Smiths were the best British group of the 1980s, then fellow Mancunian miseryguts New Order were the most important. Their restless welding of successive waves of dance music and new technologies to Barney Sumner’s ever-improving singing and ever more personal lyrics continually redefined the edges of indigenous rock and pop. Many more commercially successful groups, Pet Shop Boys and The Cure among them, owed a debt to the sometimes meandering, always understated New Order. The band’s last studio album, 1989's truly great Technique, a seamless meshing of synthesized rock grooves, traditional instrumentation and Sumner's plaintive lyrics, was largely hatched on Ecstasy island, Ibiza, and, along with The Stone Roses' debut, it remains the artistic peak of that whole UK acid/E/Madchester thing. Everything New Order have done since (the Electronic, Revenge a...

A VITAL GLEAM NEW ORDER Goldiggers, Chippenham IN this age of musical compromise and half-baked ideologies, there are still pockets of resistance where certain groups and individuals make their own way and as such are landed with the responsibility of supporting the need for greater commitment and relevance. Whatever theories are proposed and dissected in relation to what New Order represent (and believe me there are enough of them), or why they still choose a solitary approach, there can be little doubt over their maintained ability to simply ignore all the barbed criticism and animosity which is laid at their door. For one, the watery eye of nostalgia is not their way, nor meeting convention even half way, with promises never made and expectations never met. Tonight's show at Virgin's recently acquired Goldiggers Club was a reinforcement of the positive growth New Order are making, in their own time and on their own terms. The solemn and rarely heard "In ...

THE COLUMN THAT LIKES TO SAY NOOOOOOO ! YOU MUST have seen it by now: it's the most sickening advert on TV. The work of Beelzebub, the current ad for First Direct bank that uses Joy Division's magnificent 'Atmosphere' to accompany footage of middle-class stereotypes living their lives of quiet desperation and paying their bills by phone. Advertising is nauseating: personally, I'm with Bill Hicks when he advocates that people in advertising and marketing just kill themselves. Surely all decent people are outraged by the way that ads plunder great music to sell banal products: Mozart sells motors, the Velvets sell tyres, The Clash sell Levi's... But what the f— do Joy Division have to do with bank accounts? Banks are institutions more dangerous than standing armies; bankers' decisions in Frankfurt kill millions in Africa. Banks are the paymasters of war, famine and pestilence the world over. Worst of all, they are currently pushing everyone toward...

PREMIER DIVISION JOY DIVISION HEART AND SOUL  - THE BOX SET (London/CD only) IT WAS ALL GREY trenchcoats, black expressions, post-industrial depression and existential ennui in my day. Oh yes. As if the recession, inevitable nuclear destruction and Spandau Ballet weren’t bad enough, all indie music (you were allowed to call it ‘indie’ then - hell, people were PROUD to be ‘indie’) was depressing as f-. You weren’t allowed to smile, or wear anything with a colour or have nice hair in case you got it mistaken for a member of Blue Rondo A La Turk. And the two bands chiefly responsible were The Smiths and, originally, Joy Division. Manchester, eh? So much to answer for. Joy Division’s appeal has, however, far outlasted their tragically short life because, if' they were miserable, they did miserable differently. And what strikes you most about Joy Division from listening to this collection is not their mythical, mysterious singer, but the band, how they frequently sounded lik...

LAST ORDERS FOR NEW ORDER? NEW ORDER look likely to split up after fulfilling the last of their commitments in the coming month. A spokesman for the group said it would be premature to suggest a split, and that the band had decided to take six months off early next year. But sources in Manchester say Peter Hook has openly told friends the group was finished and he intends to work on other projects. Also, Bernard Albrecht is currently negotiating a solo deal, and will be busy promoting his own material in 1988. New Order are currently rehearsing songs for a new album, perhaps their last, and have a single, ‘Touched By The Hand Of God’, out next month. It was produced by the group and Arthur Baker. A major London show will take place in December, probably at the Brixton Academy or Wembley Arena, followed by a handful of European dates in January, and then the diary is blank. The band spokesman said he fully expected them to get back together next summer, but Hook’s attit...

ORDER NOT ORDURE So, the New Order backlash starts here does it? How sadly predictable! Reynolds thinks 'True Faith' is the ”final nail in New Order's coffin". Dear oh dear, everyone's favourite indie group go Top Five - quick, find another hero,jump on another bandwagon. ‘True Faith’ is a bloody good record, almost the perfect pop song but not quite, that was ‘Blue Monday'. Good music is good music no matter who it’s by - New Order, Terence Trent D'Arby, Pet Shop Boys, Prince. The latter is probably the most perfect example of an artist who is massively successful yet manages to retain artistic integrity. New Order, if one ignores the trite remix of ’True Faith' and the gimmicky repackaging of 'Brotherhood' last Christmas, fall into the same category. Playing live on TOTP and The Roxy may not stand for much but it surely stands for something. Besides Mr Reynolds, New Order don’t take themselves seriously so why should you? Dave Ell...

New Order: the director's cut NEW ORDER’s documentary neworderstory has been extended to almost two-and-a-half hours for its video release, with the inclusion of 14 promos and rare archive footage. The video, to be released on November 22, was originally broadcast as an hour-long TV programme the same night as New Order’s Reading Festival show in August. It will be followed by the release of a new single, ‘Spooky’, before Christmas. Joy Division and early New Order clips from TV shows, including Top Of The Pops and Something Else , have also been added, along with the American Sunkist TV advert featuring an edited version of ‘Blue Monday’. Director Paul Morley told NME , “Everything that was in the original programme has been extended to its full length. And to keep the balance we have also added interview footage.” Morley said that the video includes extra backstage film from the Montreux Jazz Festival, as well as extended clips from interviews with the likes of Qui...

Last night nerves - NME NEW ORDER, PIL, THE SUGARCUBES NEW JERSEY “UP YOURS too, ya wanker..." In the bowels of a New Jersey basketball stadium, two Englishmen - one a pineapple-topped dayglo Andy Pandy, the other sporting a £500 Comme Des Garcons suit jacket, tangerine acieed shorts and flip flops- are swapping V-signs . . . The cartoon aggressor is rotten PiLlock John Lydon; the pricily casual clotheshorse is Factory Records supremo and all-round smartass Tony Wilson. Whether their snarling interface is genuine antagonism or playful release is hard to say. This is, after all, the last night of a three month marathon that has seen PiL, New Order and The Sugarcubes on a coast-to-coast grind from one air-conditioned dome to another, so any emotion is possible. High above the designer slanging match, 18,000 kids - guys in Peter Saville T-shirts at $25 a throw, chicks in Madonna/Estefan/Easton lace bras - are blissing out on the climax of what they know is the hippest US...

LOW RIDERS - Sounds NEW ORDER 'Low Life' (Factory FACT 100) **** Perhaps the new dawn really is upon us. New Order, if not yet allowing the full glare of daylight to fall upon their faded carpets, have at least allowed a half-light to penetrate the black bedroom curtains. It may even be that our dour friends have had a discreet boot up the bum. Because guess what? Opener 'Love Vigilantes' grabs you by the throat and yells 'Dream Syndicate!'. A slab of American pie among mushy peas, and the direction suits New Order as naturally as a baggy suit. The Beatles play ‘Blue Monday' - you‘d better believe it! Though the rest of the package doesn't quite match up to this spectacular and unexpected promise, it does give a less bittersweet, more palatable slice of listening. Grey industralist disco fans won't, though, cast it aside with a snarl of the upper lip and a flick of the flat top. But they should approve of this new taste of variety which...

NEW ORDER: neworderstory (PolyGram) THIS IS the history of the most elusive and sardonic band ever, coos a dreamy and oddly Americanised Jenny Seagrove over Paul Morley's multi-layered retrospective, but "who's to say it ever happened...?" In its original South Bank Show format, neworderstory was all high-gloss highlights and snappy asides. This two-hours plus remix throws in extra footage plus a dozen dazzling promos: 'Touched By The Hand Of God', 'Bizarre Love Triangle', 'True Faith' and many more. By showcasing the foursome's abrasive and petulant side alongside their precision-pop finery, a far more faithful - and, perversely, more amiable - portrait emerges. The slick, pacy momentum is lost, but the soaring peaks and gloriously pig-headed mistakes of a truly seminal career fall into sharper relief. For once hitting the perfect tone, Morley rightly reinforces the band's myth, wallowing in the glamour and absurdity of it a...

New Order (The Rest Of) New Order (London) ARTISTICALLY-speaking, remix albums are generally more bankrupt than Nick Leeson. And anyway, New Order have always been so good at remixing their own songs - most of which, given the way they were conceived and executed, were effectively remixes to begin with - that there seemed little point in getting - anyone else in. Nevertheless, they've assembled a quality cast here, running to Paul Oakenfold,  Shep Pettibone (a blinding True Faith), Terry Farley, Howie B and others. Not all of the results will be to the taste of Order purists, but the more adventurously-minded will find something to interest them. (ASm)

NEW ORDER: SUBSTANCE 1989 NEW ORDER aren't, admittedly, a band who lend themselves to the usual video toss: they don't smite much, they have no known pretensions to acting fame, and frequently they don't even appear to move. On the duff videos here, they are glimpsed standing on stage, sitting in cabs or hanging around in concert halls while the director intercuts interesting bits of drama — a bit of silly dialogue (featuring Jonathan Demme) on Robert Longo's vid for 'Bizarre Love Triangle'; a lot of Arthur Baker nodding along to 'Confusion' (the work of one Charles Sturridge)and I've already completely forgotten what happens in 'Shellshock'— and the result is wildly forgettable. However, when the director shows either sympathy for the band's attitudes or a creative imagination which matches New Order's style, then things are topper. Here we have Robert Breer and William Wegman's film for 'Blue Monday 1988', a m...

DARKLIFE! JOY DIVISION Permanent (London/All formats) HERE ARE the young men, then. The ultimate sixth-formers. When I arrived at college, 'Dead Souls' was blaring out of the next room. Not what I'd expected at all. I thought I'd be the only one who liked Joy Division. Their obscurity was one of their charms. Morons just didn't like this band because you couldn't like them for the wrong reasons. Young Mr Curtis crystallised the faraway romantic desperation of any lucid teenager. Morrissey with a badge and a gun. Drunk on his emotions and Holy with Youth if you like. The really powerful thing about the music is the primitive sort of counterpoint — you can hum all of Hooky's basslines, even the crap ones. Actually, love them just as much for being crap as for being godlike. Joy Division weren't great players. It was what they naively aspired to and sometimes glimpsed that made them like us and us like them. So much wank has been conjectured ab...

Manchester is united in its regard for punk https://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/jul/27/manchester-united-regard-punk-birthday-observer-archive From the Observer archive, 27 July 1986 The city's greatest bands help the tireless genre celebrate its 10th birthday in its spiritual home Jon Savage First published on Sun 27 Jul 2014 00.04 BST Punk is now a costume on the very clothes rack of youth style it set out to subvert. Its 10th anniversary is turning into one of the media obsessions of the year, yet just as the past is rewritten in the language of the present, then so is a series of complex and contradictory signs (about which no one can agree) reduced into a sludge of nostalgia and style recycling. The fact that nobody can agree about what punk was or is may well be a sign of its continued vitality, or at least nuisance value. One way out of the morass is to see punk as an approach to culture that worked. The speed of the media retrospectives hints at the broad inf...

JOYLESS REVISION NEW ORDER AND JOY DIVISION: DREAMS NEVER END Claude Flowers ( Omnibus ) BLOODY HELL. Once — just once — can't we read something about Joy Division which doesn't contain po-faced stuff like "Ian's suicide caused them all to grow up very quickly, their innocence died with him"? This story does not need any more hushed reverence or weary myth-making, thanks very much. As a New Yorker, Flowers displays a limited knowledge of Joy Division, Manchester or the general geography of Britain — physical or cultural. Unable to reach the band themselves, Flowers uses interviews with Tony Wilson, Peter Savile and various suits which were mostly conducted in the late '80s. He makes the most of outdated and second-hand material but his gushing assessments of New Order's music frequently border on the comical, finding in 'The Perfect Kiss' - "a chorus of synthesized frog sounds — hundreds of princes waiting to be kissed, any one of wh...

Before love tore Ian Curtis apart https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/may/04/tonywilson.musicdocumentary Joy Division Joy Division (93 mins, 15) Directed by Grant Gee; featuring Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris, Tony Wilson, Anton Corbijn, Annik Honoré The music of my mildly rebellious adolescence in the postwar years was traditional jazz which my parents thought cacophonous and its bearded, sideburned exponents bad role models. The recent deaths of George Melly and Humphrey Lyttelton, two of my heroes then, affected me deeply. Rock'n'roll, which arrived here during my early twenties, didn't touch me in the same way, though I did see Blackboard Jungle two days running just to hear Bill Haley's 'Rock Around the Clock' again. Punk impinged on me scarcely at all. The Manchester music scene of the late 1970s and the early death of Joy Division's lead singer Ian Curtis caused slight blips on my mental radar but never landed in my mind. I h...

The agony and the ecstasy  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/sep/27/hacienda-peter-hook Walking through today's regenerated and gentrified Manchester, it's almost impossible to recall how dark and depressing the city was in the late 70s. The home of the industrial revolution was at a low ebb and the only people who believed any kind of revolution was now possible were the romantic idealists behind Factory Records. Emboldened by the spirit of punk and an excess of civic pride, Factory's founders, in particular Tony Wilson and Robert Gretton, believed in Manchester more than they believed in themselves. The Haçienda club, launched in 1982, was the physical realisation of their vision; Wilson found the name in an essay by French theorist Ivan Chtcheglov entitled "Formulary for a New Urbanism" ("We are bored in the city, everybody is bored, there is no longer any temple to the sun... you'll never see the Haçienda. It doesn't exist. The ...

A divided joy: seeing my father on film h ttps://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/sep/30/popandrock.joydivision The new film about Joy Division singer Ian Curtis has been widely acclaimed. His daughter Natalie can see some flaws - but can't fault the music On a sunny day in August I finally got to see the finished version of Anton Corbijn's Control, a film about the life of Ian Curtis, my father and lead singer of the band Joy Division. Ian committed suicide in 1980 at the age of 23, when I had just turned one. I was involved with the project at various stages of production (the film was based on a book written by my mother and Ian's wife, Deborah, and the two of us visited the set several times) but I had no idea what to expect. For obvious reasons it was strange to watch. In addition to the weirdness of seeing my family made fiction, I found myself distracted by my own memories; not just of things I have been told about my father and events, but of my time on se...

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books-joy-a-funny-word-for-ian-1619550.html Joy, a funny word for Ian? SOMETIME in May 1980 a friend of mine was playing pin-ball in a Leeds pub when the door flew open with a crash, and a tragic voice announced: 'Ian Curtis is dead!‘ Cries of disbelief and anguish echoed round the room - it was a student pub, after all - and in the midst of the ensuing horrified silence, my friend, distracted for the moment from his game, remarked innocently: "oh... isn't he the lead singer with Secret Affair" Well, it was a long time ago. Let's just say that confusing the Young Werther of New Wave with the mouthy singer of a naff mod band was a solecism roughly on a par with thinking Kurt Cobain a member of Wet Wet Wet. I guess you had to be there to understand why a lanky nerd with a cracked baritone became a hero for a generation of mac-wearing teenage boys. "That man lived for yoli! That man died for you!“ screamed ...

NME - ASHES AND DIAMONDS JOY DlVISION  Substance (Factory LP Cassette CD)  THEY STILL make outlandish claims and say ludicrous things about the meagre legacy left by this Manchester band. Joy Division lived and recorded for three years (1977-1980). But during that time, it’s claimed they broached new areas of thought and deed, foresaw the millenium, inspired one writer to feel "I could spit in the face of God" and another to hear "the full stop, the end of pop." Even for the disclaimers and early champions of the band, Ian Curtis’ suicide gave a new, unerring fascination to the group’s music and subject matter. The fallout was anything but heathy. Joy Division, more by default rather than design, spawned a tunnel vision brand of English miserabilism. Their influence has often cast a self-pitying pallor over the culture they left behind. According to manager Rob Gretton, ‘Substance’ is released to help New Order, the band JD spawned, with their tax probl...