New Order - Glasgow Barrowlands 12 September 1986

Melody Maker - ORDER ORDER!

NEW ORDER
Barrowland, Glasgow

HALF this audience looks like it got lost on the way to some other, unspecified event. There are punks, bikers, grimy 15 -year~old intellectuals, split-ends-ridden hippies and a million metres of grey overcoat. There's an aroma of sweat and cheap hair gel, a sense of enormous, overbearing passivity. And then, finally, New Order come on.

Fifty minutes later, they go off, having hammered out an overfast, sickeningly brutalised version of "Love Will Tear Us Apart", dedicated to the memory of the woman who ran New York's Danceteria, tragically killed last week. "This song's for a friend of ours, who unfortunately couldn't be with us tonight ... because she's dead . . . " Yeah, very moving, lads. Very subtle. Very cool,

New Order want to to be a machine, turning out tunes 'n' rhythms in the classic Kraftwerkian industrial mould. But where Kraftwerk at their best managed to inject both humour and a sense of sporadic humanity into their machine-age anthems,  New Order, from their name to their overtly uncaring,  manipulative music. are withered, zombie androids lacking either feeling or fun.

They've taken enough stick about the fascist origins of their name. but the truly corrupt nature of this music is only evident when you add moustaches and frizzy wigs to the cartoon faces on stage. Hey presto! It's Yes circa 1974. Or Greenslade, or somebody else with a Roger Dean stage design and immensely attractive lighting. It's music made to a formula, soulless, sullen and worshipping at the altar not of technique, as in those decrepit Seventies groups. but technology-as-iron~fist.

Bernard Sumner/Albrecht sings with all the style and passion of a Dalek, though the rippling biceps on display tonight indicated that attempts at passion were being made. And all the time Peter Hook‘s increasingly deft bass-playing spiralled around the leaden synth-thump like a brain-dead Jaco Pastorius jamming with a Casio organ.

New Order want to crush, break down, disintegrate their disparate, but unified-in-angst audience into a mashed-up puree of organised emotion. l tasted the result, and found myself spitting like a punk again. This band are worse than bad. They're a crushing bore. There were more than 2,500 people at this sold-out gig who loved every second, but well, that's showbiz. Ain't it?

TOM MORTON

NME - Shame of the nation?

GLASGOW BARROWLANDS

AND HOW the mighty have fallen. New Order - the last bastion of cred, sole refuge from the harmonised haircuts and one of the few who could be deep and danceable simultaneously - are starting to sound like OMD.

And it that isn't bad enough, Bernie actually said it, The worst rock cliche that Glasgow audiences have ever had to (and who regularly, at the hands of one Jim Kerr, do)  suffer, is the old empty head “Glasgow audiences are so much better than etc etc etc.“ It drew a howl of appreciation from people who should know better. Yuk. l preferred it when he didn't say anything. Maybe that‘s why he didn't say anything?

Mind you, if they are faintly reminiscent these days, at least it is OMD on a good day (hardly imaginable, I know). For a band who were rockers at heart - you only have to look once at Peter Hook for confirmation of that - dramatic backlighting, ultra-twee audience participation (they know all the words. the little pets) and incredibly bad sound cannot hide the fact that, for the first half of the set, they are a limp-wristed synth band that Depeche Mode could wipe the floor with. Even classic oldies suffer. “Dreams Never End', although crunchier than most chocolate bars, inevitably didn‘t back up the bite.

Sealing their fate as Britain's most disappointing live act of '86, they defeat their purpose by perfection — a new song 'Every Second Counts' is sweet, sincere, happily devoid of angst and, well, dull. In fact, the ultimate high-spot of the evening was the bit in the second encore when Hook took his shirt off ...

And it was as predictable as that. Coming in with a whimper and out with a bang, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart' dedicated, as Hook put it “To an absent friend  who can't be with us tonight because he's dead“. At least ‘Blue Monday’ and 'Perfect Kiss' guaranteed warmth before leaving, but it wasn‘t there all the way through it.

Three good songs at five quid a ticket? Are you sure it wasn't Depeche Mode?

ANDREA MILLER