Movement

Movement is a first hesitant step in the transition from Joy Division to New Order. After the tragic loss of Ian Curtis, the three remaining members of the former band added keyboardist Gillian Gilbert and soldiered on. Despite a relatively assured debut single ("Ceremony," which didn't appear on the album), the first New Order album revealed a band understandably caught up in mourning for its former lead singer. (But of course, themes of loss and isolation were hardly novel for them.) Movement was made up of songs written just after the suicide of Ian Curtis, and it was recorded with alternating vocal spots to see whose would fit best; although neither bassist Peter Hook nor guitarist Bernard Sumner sounded quite worthy of the mantle. Sumner wound up taking lead on all the tracks except for "Dreams Never End" and "Doubts Even Here." At times, both vocalists' hesitancy makes it sound as if they were recording guide vocals for a Joy Division LP, expecting Ian Curtis to come in later. Despite the band's opaque lyrics, there are easily spotted references to Curtis all over the record, with despair and confusion reigning, especially on "Senses" ("No reason ever was given") and "ICB" ("It's so far away, and it's closing in"). More so than on any Joy Division record, it also revealed a group unafraid to experiment relentlessly in the studio until it had emerged with something unique. It showed, too, on tracks like the very hooky "Dreams Never End" or the insistently danceable "Chosen Time," some of the pop smarts that would flower fully later on in their career. Spurred on by producer Martin Hannett, despite his antagonistic relationship with the band (and perhaps, because of it), New Order produced a ghostly, brittle record, occasionally up-tempo but never upbeat, with drum machines rattling and echoing over dark waves of synthesizers and Hook's iconic bass work. A masterpiece in the career of any other post-punk band, Movement paled only in comparison to the band's later work.

Newly Re-Ordered

NEW ORDER
June 30, 1983
Cabaret Metro, Chicago IL USA

It’s not often something like this sort of falls in your lap.

June 30, 1983 was the hottest day of the year to date in Chicago. The now-legendary venue Metro - then known as Cabaret Metro - had been open for roughly a year. New Order finally made their debut appearance in Chicago. Attendees say it was unbearably hot inside the Metro that night. And allegedly even hotter on the stage. That day, the high temperature reached near 100° F in Chicago and it had barely cooled as the evening went on. Making matters worse, the band took nearly two hours to get on stage after the opening act, which made an uncomfortable and stinky audience even more strident.

The set starts out as your typical New Order set of the era would. Things seem OK, maybe a bit rowdier crowd than normal, until late in the fourth song “Truth” when the sequencer starts to act up. They launch straight into “Leave Me Alone” which ends uneventfully. Then, the power goes out (as you’d have it). A restless crowd begins complaining amongst itself, with audible complaints about sweat dripping into eyes, another mentioning rubbing ice all over their face, and vocalized thankfulness that they brought paper towels in. Random sequencer bleats punctuate the rumbling crowd, as the roadies and venue staff try to get the power sorted. Hooky mentions needing a shower. Eventually, “Your Silent Face” starts. It devolves into a unique and fascinating exposition on what a sequencer-using band does when the sequencers are failing mid song - Steve Morris jumps behind the drum kit far earlier than usual, and essentially drives the song to its skittering end as the sequencers never recover. I think this take is spectacular and I think you’ll agree.
Barney then makes reference on stage to equipment and power problems, mentions the band’s just going to jam, and Steve then pounds out the drum riff for “Denial”. Instead of jamming, the band then finishes the set with four straight sequencer-free tracks, ending on the majestic “In A Lonely Place” well into the wee hours of the morning.
There is no jamming, no acoustic “Blue Monday” despite the venue owner’s misremembered statements made over the years since. It’s possible of course at some point these did exist and were edited out from this tape upstream, but I doubt it and all other recollections of this gig fail to mention any acoustic “Blue Monday” performances.
For the past 34 years, this set has been legendary in the New Order community due to the circumstances which befell it. And a tape was never known to exist, nor a setlist for that matter. With the 1980 Beach Club set, it was part of the Holy Grail pair of lost New Order sets.  That changes today.

Everything’s Gone Green Again

Factory boss Tony Wilson once called Everything’s Gone Green “the most important song in the modern world, the first time anywhere that people used computers (primitive Apple computers with soldering irons and wires coming out of them) linked to 1970s synthesisers”. Wilson was never one to undersell things, but New Order’s first venture into electronics (as opposed to synthesiser washes) is a seminal record. Sumner had found an old synth with an oscillator and experimented with synching it up to drums. The result was a song that reflects the influence of Donna Summer’s I Feel Love, coasts on a juddering sequence of electronic notes that provide melody and rhythm at the same time and acts as the blueprint for the combination of electronics, bass and guitars that would eventually produce Blue Monday. This was New Order’s first venture into self-production and Sumner’s lyrics – “Won’t you show me, please show me the way” – perhaps hinting at lingering insecurities, but the shimmering electronica takes existential angst on to the dancefloor. If you listen closely from 3’16” there’s an early example of Sumner’s now trademark whooping.

Beginnings Of The New Order

Borrowed from ThePowerOfIndependentTrucking blog, words spewed forth as ever by the Analog Loyalist:

As you know (or should know), Joy Division ceased as a living, breathing entity when singer Ian Curtis removed himself from existence early in the morning on May 18, 1980 - the day before the band was to fly to New York to start their first US tour. Having long had an internal pact to cease trading under the Joy Division name if any member was to leave the band (probably not expecting the harsh finality of Ian's leaving, but there you go), the band found themselves in another "having to change the name again" situation.

So after an appropriately short mourning period, the survivors regrouped and punched the big red RESET button. Finding themselves bereft of Ian-less material, they wrote a few new songs, tightened up a couple new "unrecorded" Joy Division tracks that had just been written in the weeks prior to Ian's death as "bridge" tracks, and played a few mostly-unannounced gigs in July/September 1980, prior to flying to the US for a very brief East Coast tour and recording session in late September.

As Joy Division, they were close with Sheffield's Cabaret Voltaire, having shared several gigs and compilation records with the Cabs. At some point, JD was going to work with the Cabs in the Cabs' own Western Works Studio in Sheffield, but this opportunity had not yet come to pass at the time of Ian's death.

Suddenly with no lead singer and a wide-open new beginning, the survivors (now known as New Order) took the Cabs up on their offer and decamped to Western Works on 7 September 1980, just two days after their third gig post-Ian. Safely away from the spotlight, and with no Martin Hannett to impose his will on the session, the band laid down several tracks with the Cabs' Chris Watson engineering. (Due to a date mixup dating back to the early 1980s, this session had long been thought to have taken place in early July 1980. It was only with the release of Joy Division/New Order manager Rob Gretton's notebooks in 2008 that we learn this happened on 7 September 1980, and not July as previously thought. Which makes sense in a way; these are a lot of tracks to write from scratch in the few short weeks between Ian's death and early July.)

These tracks show the band's emotions - both musical and lyrical - laid out to bare themselves to the world. Hesitant yet brave, restrained yet oddly forward-looking, New Order find themselves seeking the path at this very early stage - a path that would not be truly explored publicly for at least another 12 months - that would lead them out of the Joy Divsion shadow into completely new realms of song craft.

This material has been circulating amongst New Order fans since the early 1980s but never before heard by the general public in this release-ready quality.

Kind souls, who wish to remain anonymous rescued this material from a 1/4" reel of tape that was up for auction on eBay, advertised as something else, and it was only in the reel transfer that it was discovered what this reel actually contained. It's been theorized that if this is not the master reel itself from the studio mixdown sessions, it's at the very least a direct, professional copy of it. The band could release this today, as-is. So I am honoured to present it here.

First we have two different mixes - but the same base recording - of "Dreams Never End". The first version is the common version that had already circulated - albeit in much poorer quality - amongst the fans. The second version, however, is a heretofore-unknown alternate mix featuring much louder guitars than the original take - but besides that, it's identical to the first take. Both takes slower than the version eventually recorded for the debut LP in 1981, this track even moreso sounds like bassist (and singer on this track) Peter Hook's own little memorial to Ian. "A long farewell to your love and soul", indeed.

Then we have the musically very JD-like "Homage", with Bernard Sumner on hesitant vocals, laying bare his emotions for all to see. It's blatantly obvious why this track didn't survive past September 1980 - all you have to do is listen to the very bare, emotional lyrics. Notably, you can understand them for the first time ever:

The next track is drummer Steve Morris' turn on lead vocals with a very interesting take on "Ceremony", one of the last two Joy Division tracks written just prior to Ian's death. Famously having no written lyrics they could use (if Ian wrote them down, they weren't available to the survivors at the time), New Order had to run the Joy Division rehearsal recording of this track (which you can hear in the previous post on the blog) through an equalizer to attempt to pick out Ian's lyrics. Considering that even with modern audio software it's nearly impossible to extract Ian's vocals, or at least make them clearer, it's impressive what they were able to pull out of it. Steve sings lead on the verses, with Hooky taking over a chorus as well. Interestingly enough, when the time came three weeks later to record this track "officially" in New Jersey's Eastern Artists Recording Studio with producer Martin Hannett, the lyrics Bernard Sumner sang started off markedly different - which makes one wonder if they were rewritten by New Order.

Steve continues on with the lead vocals on "Truth" which, even at this early stage, is remarkably similar to what they'd end up doing with the track when recording it for their debut LP in 1981 (except with Bernard on vocals). I particularly like this version though; it's much more poignant, fragile and spacious - as it should be - than the released variant.

And then we have the biggest revelation of the reel: A heretofore-unknown new New Order track, or rather, a collaboration with the Cabs and New Order, featuring none other than NO manager Rob Gretton on lead vocals! This has been confirmed by a New Order member directly to your humble blogger, and furthermore, this same member revealed that it was entitled "Are You Ready Are You Ready Are You Ready For This?" and was just one of two collaborations they recorded with the Cabs, with the other (still unknown) sounding much more New Order-ry than this track. What is special about "Are You Ready" though is that, Rob's vocals aside, musically it shows the band taking great liberties with the established Joy Division sound - and the early New Order sound - and is very much so a signpost to the musical path the band would further explore starting with fall 1981's "Everything's Gone Green".

Monday Blues, On A Tuesday

New Order’s first four singles accomplish as much as most bands do in their entire careers, which is to find their sound and make it work. This was where the energetic hustle and excited riffing of certain Joy Division songs turned over into the "happier" major-key gut-stirring stuff that makes New Order anthems so lovable: Vocals have shifted from dour, gruff Ian to starry-eyed Bernard, Gillian has come in on keyboards, and by the time you get to the 7" version of "Temptation" the whole thing has coalesced into the cruising, casual, hook-filled style that would sustain the band's pretty-great albums for years to come. (And not just them: the guitar and bass sounds here are the basic DNA at the core of a massive chunk of indie.) The not-very-good single from this period, in fact, is "Everything's Gone Green", in which the band discovers a) Computer-based sequencers, and b) Almost the exact vocal line from "Blue Monday", and stumble their way through an awkward dry run; for a second, they were actually doing better not trying anything new.

Then they embraced dance music: the drum machines and sequencers, the extended 12" mixes, the single as something totally distinct from the album version, the iconic "Blue Monday". Given how successful all that stuff turned out (you probably hear "Blue Monday" more than "Dancing Queen") it's tempting to think this is the part where New Order start aiming their singles the Pop Way. The truth, though, is possibly the other way around. Geeking out on computer music, Italian disco, and Kraftwerk, collaborating with NYC dance producers like Arthur Baker: This stuff was New Order abandoning a working formula to follow their own muse, one exploratory enough that it was probably more likely to lead them to the punks-gone-dance obscurity of A Certain Ratio than the dance-pop stardom of Duran Duran. And yet, and yet: "Blue Monday" became the best-selling British 12" single.

Everything’s Gone Green

The early New Order singles, as relentless as the album tracks on Movement, are more beat-oriented and feature synthesizers more prominently. On "Temptation," you can even make out the lyrics clearly, a New Order first. These 3 singles began the change away from (the) Joy Division towards (A) New Order.

The 5 track EP was put together mainly for the American market as a compilation of three of New Order's early singles. It contains "Procession" from September 1981, plus the 12" versions of "Everything's Gone Green" (released December 1981) and "Temptation" (released May 1982) plus two of the b-sides, "Mesh" and "Hurt". A second b-side to "Everything's Gone Green", "Cries and Whispers" is curiously omitted; as is New Order's first single "Ceremony" / "In a Lonely Place". The sleeve was designed by Peter Saville and uses a painting from his then-girlfriend Martha Ladly.

The songs of this era (in particular this version of "Temptation") signalled a critical turning point in the development of New Order as the group shifted from simply being the remnants of Joy Division after the suicide of lead singer Ian Curtis to becoming a singular band in its own right. The EP is frequently viewed as the bridge from the group's debut album, Movement, to the new electronic-based sound contained on their softmore album, Power, Corruption & Lies.

This version of "Temptation" has been described as being "where Manchester's finest stop hearing ghosts in their shell and stake their claim to a danceable pop of unprecedented grimness and power," noting that it was "the first real song this sharp-cornered sound-and-groove band has ever come up with.”

The EP also documents the band's break away from producer Martin Hannett, who had produced both of Joy Division's studio albums and Movement. While Hannett produced "Everything's Gone Green", "Procession" and "Mesh", the other two songs on the EP were produced by New Order. Bernard Sumner remarked: "Martin's last track was "Everything's Gone Green" – fact he walked out halfway through the mix because Hooky and me asked him to turn the drums up"