DVD BLURAY & TV
NEW ORDER
EDUCATION ENTERTAINMENT RECREATION (LIVE AT ALEXANDRA PALACE) PICCADILLY RECORDS 8/10
Spotlight-shy Mancunians present an immaculate curation of their peerless back catalogue
Outracing their doom: New Order earn their adulation
WARREN JACKSON
RETURNING to stage at the end of this delirious, daft, diligently compendious 140-minute journey from Salford to Wood Green, via West Didsbury, Brussels, Berlin, New York, Ibiza and Los Angeles, New Order play a three-song tribute to the band they used to be. “Any Joy Division fans out there?” asks Bernard Sumner with idle northern diffidence, as if he might be asking for a light or if you saw the match last night. The screens behind him are illuminated and Kevin Cummins’ black-andwhite portrait of Ian Curtis gazes balefully out across the cavernous hall of Alexandra Palace.
As they summon the spirit of 40 years ago, through “Atmosphere”, “Decades” and the closing “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, director Mike Christie superimposes writhing video of Curtis upon the living band and there’s an uncanny glimmer. For a moment you wonder whether New Order are ready to join Frank Zappa, Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson and Buddy Holly on the lucrative hologram circuit.
The more cynical would suggest that Factory founded their church on the corpse of the man, dead at 23 in his Macclesfield kitchen, and the full house in north London almost 40 years later is testament to the enduring power of their mythologies. But in truth it’s hard to think of a band who came farther from their origins, who outraced their doom and so profoundly reimagined themselves as New Order. Their peers – The Cure, the Bunnymen, Simple Minds, even U2 – might draw similarly impassioned crowds of midlife geezers, eager to catch a glimpse of their epic teenage yearnings. But only New Order could take you on such a journey from adolescent abjection to adult abandon and beyond, to midlife regret and rueful acceptance.