New Order #9 1985 11 10 Hammersmith Palais

Close, but not quite close enough, to being my second New Order double-header, Hammersmith was only two nights after Hemel Hempstead.

I'd ordered the tickets before the ULU gig, but two more mates decided later on that they would come along, and managed to get tickets from touts for £10. I noted that drinks were expensive at £1.40 (roughly £4.50 in 2022 prices, so it looks like I wasn't far off the mark).

This was my only ever visit to the Hammersmith Palais, yet another venue that is no more. I seem to recall that in a rectangular space, the stage was on one of the longer sides, which is a bit unusual.

A Certain Ratio were the support - the third time I saw them this year. Although they performed a very good set, the crowd were incredibly indifferent to them.

The bootleg I have (which, during the first song - Seems Like Something Dirty - features me telling one of my mates that the show was being taped) has Jez Kerr after that song saying that New Order audiences don't move much. After Flight, one of my mates carried on clapping long after everyone else had stopped, which got the comment "At least there's one person alive in the audience tonight", before commenting "That's what I love about New Order audiences, you're all cunts".

It was really only Bootsy and Only Together that were fairly pedestrian in an otherwise very good set, and the final Si Firmi was great (only played once this time).

Set and song timings
1 Sounds Like Something Dirty	6:03
2 Shack Up	3:25
3 And Then Again	2:45
4 Only Together	3:33
5 Bootsy	5:31
6 Wild Party	4:16
7 Flight	5:49
8 Inside	5:55
9 Knife Slits Water	5:39
10 Si Firmi O Grido	6:35

New Order were introduced by Alan Wise (who at that time was completely unknown to me) as "Blue Monday" and started with an excellent Temptation, with a great drum fill in the intro.

The Perfect Kiss (introduced as a song about "Nothing in particular") was followed by the question "What would you like us to play?". I wouldn't have thought many would have chosen State of The Nation.

Things quietened down with Elegia (described as a "funeralesque dirge"). It seems like I didn't remember As It Is When It Was from ULU as I noted it a as a ""new one" I hadn't heard before, that I thought sounded a little like LWTUA (which Hooky recently noted in a Tim's Twitter Listening Party for Brotherhood).

This Time of Night was followed by a promise to do a song with a good drumbeat for the meatheads in the audience, which proved to be 5-8-6.

Sub-Culture preceded an excellent Blue Monday, that included lots of extra guitar enhancements.

Sunrise and Face Up were equally good, and then there was a long gap before the encore - so much so that even the houselights had gone up. Donald Johnson from ACR played drums on Confusion, and the final song of the evening was Ceremony.

As the press review below attests, this was an excellent show.

Set and song timings
1 Temptation	7:59
2 The Perfect Kiss	9:11
3 State of The Nation	6:28
4 Elegia	5:07
5 As It Is When It Was	4:00
6 This Time of Night	4:48
7 5 8 6	5:39
8 Sub-culture	5:11
9 Blue Monday	7:43
10 Sunrise	5:27
11 Face Up	5:19
12 Confusion	5:30
13 Ceremony	4:09

NEW ORDER
Hammersmith Palais

IF you view New Order as you'd view any other band, if you disregard the reputation and take the objective pursuit of fact as your target, you'll still reach the same conclusion. Truculent bastards they may well be but they know their stuff.

You can't wander during a New Order set, the sound is omnipresent, even at the Palais where the upstairs bars are usually a retreat your attention is claimed, demanded by the sheet intensity from the stage. Of course they draw their own audience, a peculiarly mixed intelligentsia, dope heads, yuppies and probably some idle sightseers too, but once they took the stage this was not the place for social chit chat.

New Order demand a level of respect without once having to ask. Their aloofness is an illusion. I found a friendliness here that came less from the people than from the music itself. Let no one tell you New Order are a cold entity, devoid of warm emotion. Such homage to machinery perhaps denotes a clinical precision and their records have sometimes left this reviewer a reluctant convert but, live, they swathe the audience with an almost tactile embrace, compulsively energetic, a physical contact at once exuberant and humane.

Its beauty is in constant motion, Albrecht's vocals stronger than I've heard before (and was it an illusion or were New Order smiling this time?), a centrifugal force to ground the swirling matrix of rhythmic intricacy that lends pattern to elevating guitar and keyboard competition.

Ostensibly New Order hold us at arm's length (no sweet talk from the stage) but here was evidence of an intimacy that defied the inarticulacy of language.

To indulge in banter would somehow devalue the depth of feeling in their music. The maturity they practise needs no verbal justification. I don't give a damn for your hypotheses on New Order or your dissection of their career and frankly you can intellectualise 'till you’re blue in the face. Their reluctance to encore may be an artifice but it stems from no inadequacy and makes not a jot of difference to their effect.

I came away with admiration and feel it still. New Order rise above all the theorising and render it irrelevant They were simply and inarguably brilliant.

HELEN FITZGERALD