It’s been more than fifteen years since New Order and their ex-bassist Peter Hook went on their separate paths, and as time has gone on it’s felt a bit like when parents split up. They’ve both met somebody else who seems ok, but what you really want is for them to get back together.
Everyone continues to be just fine though, and tonight in Leeds it’s the mothership that rolls into town, a first gig in the city for as best as anyone can make out, thirty-eight years. The place has missed them, and Bernard Sumner addresses the gap drily at one point by quipping “Something really bad must’ve happened last time”.
Back then they were still pioneers of their own unique brand of rugged synth-pop, but now without a new record since 2015’s Music Complete the idea of a show is as close to greatest songs plus bits exercise as you can strike a bass chord to.
Familiar never has to mean not fun though. The luxury of such an extensive back catalogue means choices, but here they rarely make for bad outcomes. Trusty opener Crystal thuds as an example, the fact that its host album Get Ready was an uncharacteristically brittle start to the Millenia now long forgotten.
In the space of the first half dozen tracks we criss-cross more than four decades of history, with Regret, Age of Consent, Ceremony, Restless and Isolation all rapturously met, the latter reworked from its icy post punk roots into a more industrial, dancefloor heavy manifestation.
If the music is timelessly evocative, the idea of spectacle which was once seemingly anathema is embraced for modern times; the lush visuals are a reminder of the unique iconography Peter Saville once created for the group, whilst the lasers dazzle and strafe the arena as if it were a rave.
Against these backdrops the room allows you to slip back into a place of your own, be it somewhere in the cavernous depths of Your Silent Face, wide eyed in Vanishing Point’s Balearic glow or locked to True Faith’s ubiquitous, robot disko.
Despite the scale there’s also still chance for mutual connection, no barriers between crowd and stage where there perhaps once were. In this mutual embrace by the time Blue Monday arrives dancing has broken out far and wide in the miles back rows, a Saturday night anthem which started out a test, became a millstone but is now part of an unrepentant climax; Temptation then follows, at times threatening to transcend the night entirely.
The inevitable encore consists of three Joy Division songs, not necessarily because that’s what makes for a further jolt of adrenaline, but speaks instead to the sinew between the two bands, of how the respective sister and brother identities are now meshed as a whole.
The trio are a reminder that nothing is ever as straightforward as it seems, that you could have a three-hour conversation with either band’s music then leave having learnt nothing more about it all. In this haze Atmosphere and Transmission however are not maudlin waymarks setting out another man’s life, just shells to project yourself into. The climax though is something else, a communal rendition of Love Will Tear Us Apart which as a song has become a celebration in the way strands of what accidentally end up as culture often do. Interpretations are after all in the mind of the beholder.
It wasn’t really an evening for absent friends, or absent anythings. The parents may never be getting back together, but the kids are still very much alright.
Picture courtesy of Nick White.
The Voice Of Unreason 