2020 11 New Order "Power, Corruption and Lies" Boxset Review, Record Collector

Power In The Darkness

An artistic rebirth celebrated. By Tim Peacock

New Order

Power, Corruption & Lies - Definitive Edition

★★★★★

Rhino cat no tbc (2CD+LP+2DVD)

They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and that old adage rings true when you consider New Order’s early years. The band themselves were the biggest critics of their flawed, but underrated, 1981 debut, Movement, but they had to endure the growing pains of making it to emerge from the long shadow cast by their recent past as Joy Division.

In retrospect, it’s astonishing Movement was ever completed at all. Not only were the fledgling foursome still reeling from the loss of Ian Curtis, but their relationship with Martin Hannett hit rock bottom during the sessions. Movement still bore the mercurial producer’s stamp, but his increasing irascibility, burgeoning heroin habit and lack of faith in the band sans Curtis led to an inevitable parting of the ways.

Few would have guessed it at the time, but their acrimonious divorce from Hannett was actually a blessing in disguise for New Order. Their first self-production, 1982’s Temptation, was a significant step forward in their quest to fuse their natural melancholia with the brightness of electronic pop, but they would swap their trademark wintry black and white for glorious technicolour on their second album, May 1983’s Power, Corruption & Lies.

In a recent YouTube retrospective, Stephen Morris noted that making the album “felt like we'd become New Order, like we’d done something ourselves with a bit of an identity”. He’s spot-on, too, for despite its Machiavellian title, Power, Corruption & Lies is tantamount to a full-blown artistic rebirth and still sounds box fresh today. Indeed, the air of new-found optimism is palpable from the off as Peter Hook blasts out the joyous bass motif launching the robust, anthemic Age Of Consent, while Bernard Sumner bursts with unexpected joie de vivre on the sparkling The Village, which even includes the atypically romantic kiss-off line, “Our love is like the flowers/The rain, the sea and the hours.”

Having fallen back on a faltering sub-Curtis delivery to get him through Movement, Sumner begins to come into his own as a vocalist here, even convincing on the more pensive material such as We All Stand and the introspective all-guitar workout, Leave Me Alone. As Ecstasy, the strident Ultraviolence and the sumptuous, Kraftwerkian Your Silent Face reveal, though, Power, Corruption & Lies marks the point where New Order began to incorporate electronica and the sounds of contemporaneous New York super clubs into their angular guitar framework and come up with something uniquely theirs - and that’s why it’s still such a monolithic entry in their catalogue.

Sticking to the template established with last year’s expanded Movement, the upgraded PC&L arrives newly-remastered and bumped up to a four-disc package with a cornucopia of rarities, though once again the new pressings of the era’s standalone 12” singles (Confusion, Thieves Like Us and the epochal Blue Monday) aren’t included and require separate purchases. RC isn’t privy to some of the DVD footage, but can confirm that the live sets from hometown shows at The Hacienda circa June '82 (where the band’s gigantic PA famously blew out the power onstage) and July ’83, plus the Tolworth Recreational Centre show from ’83, have long ranked among the most desirable - and most bootlegged - New Order live outings from the era. Elsewhere, there's the legendarily shambolic performance of Blue Monday from TOTP that sent the song whizzing back down the charts; fractious live TV slots from long-lost shows Switch and Countdown; and the wonderfully surreal Channel 4 documentary, Play At Home, from ’83 wherein Gillian Gilbert interviews Factory supremo Tony Wilson in his bath and Martin Hannett cradles a revolver while discussing his estrangement from Factory Records. Happiness is a warm gun, indeed.

Completing the picture, there's also a tranche of previously unreleased or hard-to-source audio. Comprising instrumental demos of most of the PC&L tracks minus Sumner’s vocals, the writing session demos are no great shakes, though three demos of Blue Monday offer a fascinating insight into how New Order’s signature hit came into being. Perhaps best of all, though, is the John Peel session from June ’82 featuring a ghostly yet compelling one-off cover of Keith Hudson’s Turn The Heater On, recorded in tribute to Ian Curtis.