New Order - Belfast 27 January 1986 NME

NME

NEW ORDER/STOCKHOLM MONSTERS
Queen’s University, Belfast

SEEING as how Joy Division and New Order have become indirectly responsible for the massive, shuffling grey parade of overcoated young men ruining considerable proportions of the UK's record output since the late Seventies, the disinterested listener only familiar with a low-level of New Order product could be forgiven for fearing, live, the chronic level of stadium self send-up that usually comes to afflict the seminal.

Take support slotters Stockholm Monsters; Fred-Perried. clean-cut lads each straining in turn to be their favourite New Order member with a sound approach of mike clenching and guitar abrasion techniques slave-laboured through their mentors‘ mastadon bass and behemoth drum mix. (Simulating throughout, of course, the requisite hopelessness, despair and general malaise.)

It often seems that, with this prevalent level of mucking about by all these New Order reserves - the B-Team boys - the originals would be permanently disfigured. Suffice to say  that on this showing however the A-Team‘s only major weakening in the face of their own ascendancy is the decision to have a band like the Monsters With them in the first place.

New Order are simply an amazingly good rock ‘n' roll hand. Hook's "boy-can't-help-it" stage presence and Morris's Rocky-type drum workouts contemptuously blast out the fake alienated cool their contemporaries are so at pains to inculcate. And, live, Albrecht's voice is nowhere near as distant, flat and lazy as on record - his phrasing is loud, way upfront and heatedly effective.

For sheer listenability and active engagement, New Order wipe the mezzanine with other A-teams like Echo.

They‘ve got their techno tamed and their simplicity, confidence and economy of approach set their compositions well above the finnicky disco/funk crossover you get from others in similar fields. “Perfect Kiss" is bloody marvellous, bursting with reserves that could never fill vinyl. Same with "Ceremony" and "Age Of Consent". "State Of The Nation" and a couple of the newer cuts are slightly too typical to feel creatively comfortable with, though - too much self-regarding electro muscle-flexing all round.

The penultimate "Love Will Tear Us Apart" smacked out like something euphorically raging to get on "Never Mind The Bollocks", and the rare double encore of "Blue Monday“ and "Temptation" suffered only from an over-generous desire to provide even bigger splashes.

Still (sic) the original and best.

DANNY ADAMS