New Order - Sobell Centre 28 January 1985

NME - NO GLOW IN THE GYM

NEW ORDER

London Michael Sobell Centre

THIS VENUE - a hangar-Sized indoor sports complex — seemed unwittingly appropriate as Manchester's perennial championship challengers left the platform of this ‘gigs for jobs do.

The stagefront rowdies were a Kop-style sea of waving arms demanding. and getting. an encore; albeit an embarrassed ‘Happy Birthday for Gillian and a headspinning drag-strip chicken run through ‘Temptation’ - last one to the coda's a cock rock crowdpleaser!

Meanwhile. further back in the vast brick and parquet echo chamber, less enthralled mortals contented themselves with outbreaks of the traditional ‘fuck off you Northern bastards'. New Order had achieved a hard earned draw away from home. A result, Brian.

The boo boys had no case. OK. so the set was ragged and rattled, often only kept mobile by the grim ferocity of Hook's pighead macho playing — only Burnel has ever been allowed to play rock bass this dominant, this free, this arrogant- and Morris' unrelenting rush of rhythm. But the frayed, nervy edges served best to confound those who accuse New Order of airless, lab coat, robotics.

And, sure, all their pounding noise sounded much the same (nearly brilliant, brilliant or very brilliant) but this is one band who must never stray a degree to either side of their chosen line. If they did they‘d be Kraftwerk, Chicory Tip, The Stranglers, Cabaret Voltaire, Rick Wakeman or Johann Sebastian Bach. But they don't and they're not.

No, the major cause of dissatisfaction seemed to be that New Order don't try. They achieve their reckless, emotional, velocity without sweat, without tears, without toil, without — Hook's wardrobe mirror gyrations apart - even movement. Where most rock performers (schools of Iggy, Cave, Strummer, Bragg, Morrisey) whip themselves into a lathered frenzy. New Order stand aloof and mercilessly drive the music to its logical, as in sense making extremes, no further. They eschew rock‘s work ethic and it makes them seem smug, distant and smartass assured. People hate them for it. People want circus and they want blood.

But what‘s the point? If NO were more organised, more approachable, more diverse, more inclined to spectacle, I sense the spell would be broken and, for a few plastic grins and beads of perspiration, we'd have lost one of our most compelling, fascinating, flawed and wilful live bands. No sort of bargain, I think you‘ll agree,

Danny Kelly

MELODY MAKER - ETERNAL VICTIMS

NEW ORDER

Michael Sobell Centre, London

SO where's the mystery, where’s the majesty?

New Order excel in the illusion of vulnerability. Deliberately cramped into a tiny gap in the monstrous PA in the even more monstrous Sobell Centre, they huddled and collided like waifs in a storm of their own conjuring. Seldom can such utter lack of charisma have been turned to such devastating advantage.

Bernard Sumner. empty-eyed and Belsen-cropped. draped round the mike like a mugged victim at a bus stop. Peter Hook stooped and gyrated. bass hung knee-low like a Lemmy impersonator on amateur night. Stephen Morris gasped, drowning in his sea of contraptions, but Gillian Gilbert emphasised best how New Order function. Lip-bit and frail, every time Sumner wandered across to re-program the tapes or tap a pathetic new coda on a couple of keys, it appeared he was bailing her out of some almighty trauma. We felt suspended. bearing witness to some crisis of confidence, some threat of disintegration, and our inability to help thrilled us with uncertainty.

But then, almost certainly New Order‘s vulnerability is more concrete than that. How else could four years’ work be jumbled into an hour's performance and produce this manner of hypnotic monotony? They offer no songs really, just one movement, one clatter of mounting rhythms underpinned and, occasionally, impeded by an appalling simplicity. On the upstroke, when melody surfaced, when Sumner crashed into the chords of “Temptation" or the gadgets rattled into ”Blue Monday”, they possessed the awesome physique of thundering dance. At other times, rendering much of "Power, Corruption and Lies", New Order appeared content to disappear into the overwhelming mediocrity of their own devices as if the highs begged emphasis from staggering lows.

Watching them dispassionately watching us worry, then dipping us into a frantic flurry, it was hard at times to associate New Order with the noise they were making. Certainly "Blue Monday" seemed to play them, or at least could have played itself. Then. during other more fragile, private moments, the puppets pulsed blood and the absence of Hook's hoofing bass or Sumner’s floundering leads would surely have signalled collapse.

And this, I suppose, is the essence of New Order's success, the reason nearly 4,000 people crushed themselves into a heaving pulp to what is essentially a series of skeletal backing tracks unnaturally highlighted and barely embroidered by a pitiful vocal. In existing at all, New Order are a celebration of survival and, in refusing, in a sense, to get better, in refusing to eschew the illusion of spontaneity for some safe, mechanical grandeur, they continually emphasise the triumph of the spirit over the system.

And if that spirit is often perplexingly wan and wayward. it is as often catalytic, so much more than the sum of its parts. Better these awkward poses than the pursuit of perfection.

Oh. and yes . . . they did play an encore.

STEVE SUTHERLAND

Probably bought from Camden market, the bootleg of it!