1987 12 19 New Order Wembley Arena - NME Review

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 flailing in, in the middle of ‘Temptation’ in a triumphant clatter; it just doesn’t sound like anyone else, it‘s a brilliant, austere, stately sort of frenzy.

A lot of slightly depressive 19 year olds are having nearly the best time it is possible for them to have - cavorting wildly and flinging themselves off balconies with delighted abandon. I always thought there was something faintly dull and workmanlike about New Order, but I can’t imagine anything less miserable than this sound; it is very nearly uplifting. They seem to have opened out as personalities over the years; turning round to face the audience, even saying “Thank you.”

This evening they become positively eloquent; seized by the Saturday afternoon atmosphere of the crowd and hit on the head by a plastic glass full of beer, Bernie turns to his adoring fans and says “Manchester United”.

This really is at least as good as it should be. New Order carry the whole thing off with more dignity than you would think possible in the circumstances; there is something spiritual about the way they don’t use the black notes.

I've never seen so many fervently upturned faces as during “In A Lonely Place‘; it’s almost as good as a Queen video. This pop music business is a good idea after all. Without the boring encores it would have been perfect.

Happily crammed into a Jubilee line cattletruck on the way home, a fan shrugs his shoulders: “I was a bit pissed off with ‘Blue Monday’ though, it wasn’t long enough.”

Ben Thompson