Some excellent writing here, Nitsu. My suggestion would be to cut your piece in HALF. If you want to make it as a mainstream music journalist, you can’t get too technical, you’ll lose your reader. Try to loosen up and add a little humor. You show some real promise. BTW, check out a little known band called “The Sound” you can find out about them through UNCUT Magazine’s website; I think they’re right up your alley. Trust me, Swan

There are lots of different ways of thinking about singles, of which let’s just mention two. The album-oriented Rock Way is suspicious of singles: It’s cool if a band writes something easy-to-like by accident, but to sit down and do it intentionally would be, like, crass and commercial. The Pop Way, on the other hand, is interested in how singles can work in a big social context– the way you and 80% of everyone in a 10-mile radius can know and share the experience of, say, dancing to “Dancing Queen”. The fascination here is that there’s some conversation going on in Our Common Culture, and that a song can carve out spots in the lives of millions of people, whether or not said people actually buy the thing, or even know who sang it. This mindset holds slightly more sway in the UK, where it’s a matter of more or less national trivia who holds the #1 single at Christmas time, or who’s been picked to do the next Bond-movie theme.
I mention this because the product we’re talking about today is a complete collection of the A-sides from New Order’s 31 UK singles. That means these discs basically upgrade and/or supersede the Substance compilation, which is already most Americans’ primary take-home method of engaging with New Order; this grouping updates stuff to the present, which means a bunch of latter-day singles that fewer people actually care about. For a lot of bands, this kind of thing would be a Greatest Hits proposition– a run-down of album highlights, plus maybe a remix or soundtrack tune. With New Order, it is, of course, anything but. What you get instead is something like a timeline of this band’s peculiar and ever-changing relationship with the single as a format, and all the notions of participation in Our Common Culture that come along with that. And the really weird twist is this: Part of what makes the collection so engaging in the fact that New Order have not always been good at negotiating this stuff. From leftover Joy Division songs to 12-inch dance edits to World Cup anthems, they tend to be sorting it out as they go along, which turns out to be more interesting to follow than if they knew exactly what they were up to.

The first four singles here accomplish as much as most bands do in their careers, which is to find their sound and make it work. This is where the energetic hustle and excited riffing of certain Joy Division songs turns 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 this band’s pretty-great rock 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– i.e., for a second, they were actually doing better not trying anything new.

Then they embrace 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.

One reason for this is that “Blue Monday” is totally fucking sweet. (Even if you think it’s “overplayed,” which it is, it’s still totally fucking sweet.) Another essential thing, though, is that starry-eyed ultra-earnest quality of Bernard’s. The English seem to have a soft spot for anyone who can credibly fit the everyday white guy into dance music, which is usually assumed too futuristic or “soulful” (read: non-white) to accommodate him– see also Happy Mondays, Primal Scream, “Born Slippy”. New Order’s best dance music did exactly this: It allowed the group to work, genuinely and enthusiastically, in all sorts of cool new electronic dance tropes while still allowing Bernard and bass-playing Peter to function like everyday white-guy indie lads. (Bernard’s chronically clunky lyrics might even have helped: This is a guy who doesn’t just rhyme “June” with “spoon,” but requires seriously dubious associations just to rhyme “own” with “phone.” All while talking about serious stuff.) The combination’s not only totally thrilling– all the perks of dance, pop, and indie in one seamless package– but accessible to all sorts of people in all sorts of ways. The magic here is that New Order may not have initially courted big popular dance singles; it’s possible that they got the popular to come to them.

And then look what they could do with it! The middle of this first disc contains all of the moments for which New Order are so well-remembered, even by folks who’ve never heard any of their albums. “Blue Monday,” obviously. Maybe better: “The Perfect Kiss”, a sunny blend of that early rock cruise with disco claps and soul phrasing. A few singles later, and they’ve consolidated their dance-edit success with their pop cruise even more deftly– now they’re sitting down and writing smash singles in the Pop Way, new Common-Culture icons like “Bizarre Love Triangle” and “True Faith”. God knows how, but it makes it even better to hear them fail in between peaks like that– note the 12″ mix of “Sub Culture”, which turned out iffy enough that regular designer Peter Saville supposedly declined to do a sleeve for it. (One of its problems: Bernard evidently getting self-conscious about the white-guy thing and recruiting Actual Black Women to double his lines, which never works for anyone.) It’s good context for those highs, and some of the lesser-known singles are just a testament to the sound: Even when the songwriting’s formless and Bernard’s using the same chants you heard on the last track, the results are still terrific listening.

Just as interesting is the period where New Order are– on the basis of those smashes– irrevocably involved in this conversation about Our Common Culture, something that nets any number of curious effects. “Fine Time” was the band’s response and contribution to the late-80s wave of UK acid house. “Blue Monday 88″ was a smoothed-out remix by none other than Quincy Jones. “World in Motion” was the official theme song for England’s 1990 World Cup squad, and was totally freighted by all sorts of terrific Common-Culture concerns, from hooliganism fears to the incipient rise of rave culture; this is the kind of “talking to the kids” Art Brut dream of. The peak of it all is 1993’s “Regret”, which is sort of the ultimate New Order song– a fine-tuned pop single in that same old early-cruising mode, most everything you could love about them crammed into one joyous smash-hit victory lap. I doubt you’ll be surprised to hear that the excitement ends there, though the good songs don’t. Some singles sound a bit limp, or dire, or offputtingly elder-statesmanly, but there’s nothing wrong with or unlovable about, say, “Crystal” or “Here to Stay” or “Waiting for the Siren’s Call”; there’s something just plain basic and familiar and comforting about this band’s signature casual pulse, and it’s almost reassuringly beautiful to hear them settle ever more comfortably into its formulas.

Given the intro to this whole overlong deal, you might assume that I’m in favor of that Pop Way of thinking about singles. And yes, if you put that rhetorical gun to my head and asked me to be a partisan, I probably would be. But the point here is maybe something else– that all those multiple multiform ways of thinking about how a format like the single can work (Pop Way, Rock Way, Dance Way, Mixtape Way, whatever) create a whole astounding system in and of themselves. And when it comes to the various stories of bands negotiating that system, I can’t think of too many that are as fascinating as New Order’s– a story that’s pretty much audible on these two discs.

For a group of folks nearing the half-century mark, Get Ready was pretty damn good; but for New Order, that return-from-wherever effort was a bit meh. New Order’s “meh” is often better than most group’s “hell yeah,” but that doesn’t disguise their shortcomings, and “Who’s Joe”– the first track from New Order’s latest album, Waiting for the Sirens’ Call– is a continuation of the underwhelming competence of the band’s previous album. That track isn’t as in love with the sound of space-age guitars as Get Ready, but it’s still a three-minute song that’s given an extra two minutes’ worth of rope to turn stiff and tepid. Combine that with the unwarranted focus on Bernard Sumner and his lyrical stylings– not often a main attraction for New Order (and for good reason)– and I’m settling in for another reasonably competent, mildly underwhelming effort from a group that doesn’t need to prove a damn thing to anyone.
But then the second track, “Hey Now What You Doing”, manages to make its five-minute length seem like half that. Credit the pronounced presence of that nifty Peter Hook basswork, or the pithier words Sumner spits (”You have the brightest future/ Writing songs on your computer”– believe me, it sounds better in context), but this sounds more like a group that’s doing the damn thing and not just coasting on their own coattails. And then the title track comes on, and it’s this gorgeous effortless shimmering thing, mournful and ebullient all at once. And then the first single, “Krafty”, with its synth flourishes and corny pop-perfect sentiment (”But out there the world is a beautiful place/ With mountains, lakes and the human race”) blows the doors wide open, and any trepidation I had regarding this record dies on the vine.

In his review of Get Ready, Pitchfork’s own Joe Tangari makes note of how much the album rocked, which is probably why it felt to me as if the group went astray. First and foremost, New Order is a pop band– just ask Frente!– and for them to try their hand at loud guitars and loud beats doesn’t play to the group’s strengths. Nor does such a maneuver do them any favors when compared to their contemporaries– Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie made a guest appearance on Get Ready, which is fitting, since his group’s XTRMNTR did what Get Ready attempted to do, only bigger, louder, and– most importantly– better.

In comparison, Sirens’ Call features the Scissor Sisters’ Ana Matronic– she gets a verse and a few background lines in “Jetstream”, a chirpy, flippant track where “you are my jetstream lover” and a sense of laconic confidence out-Kylies Ms. Minogue at her own coy game. When it’s firing on all cylinders, Sirens’ Call offers manic pop thrills that either recall the group’s heyday, or slyly recalls the noise made by other people that were touched by New Order– dig that Ace of Base action in “I Told You So”. The track lengths don’t lend themselves to a tidy, hit-and-run pop experience, but they do offer a taste of what the inevitable extended dance remix would sound like.

The one track that most conforms to the three-minute radio oligarchy is closer “Working Overtime”. It’s a garagey barn-burner, not too dissimilar to Get Ready single “Crystal”. These track’s placements on their respective albums are a telling sign of New Order’s confidence level. “Crystal” was Get Ready’s centerpiece and calling card, the document that was supposed to announce to the world that New Order Is Back and could ably play ball with the kids they fathered. In some sense, it was a capitulation by a group that had no need to capitulate. “Working Overtime” is an afterthought, a track that does what “Crystal” did with less pomp and exerted effort, announcing to all those aforementioned indebted groups that, oh by the way, they can write these sorts of songs in their sleep, and they can put them at the end of their records, because they don’t need to play ball with the other kids. They invented the game. In other words, they’re New Order. And you’re not.

It took about 10 seconds after singer/guitarist Bernard Sumner, bassist Peter Hook, drummer Stephen Morris, and newbie guitarist/keyboardist Phil Cunningham walked on stage at the sold-out Hammerstein Ballroom in midtown Manhattan two weeks ago for me to realize something surprising:

New Order are fun.

No, it was more than surprising. It was like simultaneously discovering that my dad is a wizard and my mom is a superhero. After all these years of flatlined grooves, austere artwork and Ian-Curtis-died-for-your-sins doom and gloom, I expected an evening of dour, faithful recitations with little fanfare or movement but lots of darkness and smoke machines.

Well, I was right about the smoke machines. Hook positioned himself right in front of one, letting it blow his long blonde hair back romance-novel-style. With his gray wifebeater, copious tattoos, and leering grin, he reminded me more of a creepy dive bar bouncer than the bassist in the most revered post-punk band of all time. Sumner, too, was all smiles, looking like a soccer dad going to the office on casual Friday as he strapped on his guitar. Then he picked up a melodica.

I guess I’d always known that those dinky notes heralding the start of “Love Vigilantes” came courtesy of that goofy little instrument, but the sight of Sumner huffing and puffing away to kick off his group’s first New York performance in over ten years was equilibrium-altering nonetheless. Blue lights flashed, smoke billowed, Hook struck rock-god poses, Sumner awkwardly hopped up and down, and any notions of New Order as some sort of historical museum piece were smashed to bits.

It was a living, breathing rock and roll band up there, irreverently tearing through their back catalogue and celebrating songs from their comeback albums, 2001’s Get Ready and this year’s Waiting for the Sirens’ Call. Favorites such as “True Faith,” “Temptation”, and “Bizarre Love Triangle” were gleefully delivered as the danceable, populist pop songs they truly are, with Sumner interjecting incongruous “WHOO”s and “YEAH”s throughout. (I’m also pretty sure I heard him shout “BLACK POWER!” at the end of “Regret.” WTF?) The canned beats and piped-in diva backing vocals on newer tunes such as “Crystal” and “Krafty” sizzled with extra cheesiness, and Ana Matronic from the Scissor Sisters took the stage to add lusty moans to latest single “Jetstream.” Show-closer “Blue Monday” exploded with a sample of Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ and enough strobe lights and industrial menace (courtesy of Hook’s primeval pounding on a drum pad) to rival an Orgy c! oncert.

But at no time did New Order piss on their legend more than in their renditions of four Joy Division classics. “Transmission”, “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, “She’s Lost Control”, and Atmosphere” were stripped of all proto-goth melancholy and transformed into zippy crowd-pleasers. “This is a good old-fashioned sing-along,” Sumner announced before “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, and indeed it was, complete with much hand-clapping and shoulder-hugging from the sold-out audience. “Love, love will tear us apart again. YEAH!” Sumner shouted, as I watched two dressed-down Wall Street types clink their plastic beer cups in a toast.

Yes, it was all quite disconcerting, but in a good way. Knee-jerk deference to the canon is for purists I wouldn’t want to party with anyway. And neither would New Order.

“Would you like me to play you a song?” asks Peter Hook, the bassist for New Order, as he plucks the strings on a long bass guitar in a conference room on the first floor of the Soho Grand Hotel. With his rangy beard, long, curly brown-blond hair, and northern-England accent, Hook looks and sounds something like a Renaissance-era troubadour. This almost courtly scene is an unlikely way to encounter a band whose very name signals the modernist distrust of the past and that has managed to revolutionize pop music twice over. First, Hook and bandmates Bernard Sumner and Stephen Morris were members of the legendary post-punk band Joy Division in the late seventies, combining the wide-open sonic spaces of dub with claustral, melancholy lyrics. Then, in the wake of front man Ian Curtis’s suicide in 1980, the remaining members of Joy Division recombined as New Order; by the early eighties, the band was masterfully fusing a purist punk-rock ethos with electronic dance grooves. Hook & Co. created some of the most innovative, and most pleasurable, pop music of their era.

But Peter Hook’s minstrel-hippie mien can’t help but make you wonder just what era New Order now believes it’s in. With its new release, Waiting for the Sirens’ Call, the band seems firmly planted in the more emotionally direct sort of rock that marked its early releases. The songs are lilting and melodic and could be played acoustically without any significant reduction in power or resonance. “Our fans were complaining because they missed the prettiness,” Hook says. “So we went back to what we did best, we sort of relaxed, and that’s why it’s so lovely. ‘Lovely,’ I think, is a nice way to describe it.”

This new, lovelier New Order is partly the result of age. “As you get older you tend to get lighter,” says Hook, who will turn 50 next year. But New Order’s lightness, its ease with itself, is also a direct outgrowth of the band’s tragic past. “When you come off something as traumatic as the lead singer’s suicide, you have to be optimistic, really,” Hook explains. “The thing is, we all thought Joy Division would be finished then. And yet here we are 25 years afterward still playing Joy Division material, and people are making films about Ian.”

The legacy of Joy Division is so potent that it tends to overshadow New Order. And the earlier band is gaining a fresh bout of renown thanks to the many film projects surrounding it. Jude Law is rumored to be up for the lead role in the upcoming Ian Curtis biopic tentatively titled Control, Moby is working on yet another film about the band, and Curtis was played by Sean Harris with vivid, twitchy intensity in the 2002 film 24 Hour Party People. But Hook says he doesn’t mind. “We’ve been asked to meet with the producers of Control, which is great,” says Hook, “and we’re meeting Moby later for dinner. I mean, two Ian Curtis films? It’s fucking wild, innit? But I loved Ian. In all the years since he’s been dead, we’ve never been without him. He’s always there. He’s not there. But he’s always there, and he’s always fucking everywhere else. I live with him every day, someone mentions him every day, I hear him every day, so I’m absolutely fine with all of this. One thing the transition from Joy Division to New Order did was give us the opportunity to look at it all more objectively.”

But New Order is an enormous influence in its own right. Up-and-coming bands and pop stars—e.g., the Killers, Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, Bloc Party, and (yes) Moby, who covers the band’s hit “Temptation” on new CD Hotel—have clearly adopted New Order as a key reference point and stylistic influence. “It was weird at the beginning, but I suppose I’ve gotten used to it,” Hook says of the many acts now staking claims to parts of New Order’s legacy. “It doesn’t change anything, though. It doesn’t give you money, doesn’t give you security. It’s like someone saying you’ve got a nice shirt on. It’s like, ‘Cheers, fucking great, thanks.’”

Much of Waiting for the Sirens’ Call is also a nod back to the band’s pop-romantic heyday—albeit without the pulsating synthesizers of its eighties work. “Simple is good; it’s very, very good,” Hook explains, “but it takes a long time to be simple. You tend to always overthink, to push yourself too far.” Waiting for the Sirens’ Call was made in a few months, a big change for a band that has famously taken years between projects. “We recorded eighteen songs, and we didn’t hear any B-sides,” Hook says. “So now we’re in the unique position of being three quarters of the way though our next LP, which I’m sure our fans will be over the fucking moon about because usually we take so long. It took 28 years for this to happen—but it finally happened.”

the Manc legends are not just taking the piss but bottling it up and selling it on as ’salt-fortified’ apple juice.

However, this is music that can never leave you feeling ripped off and, given that ‘Singles’ brings together every New Order 45 to date, it’s the only compilation that can claim to be truly comprehensive.

The first disc (covering their halcyon days of 1981-1987) is non-stop brilliance from start to finish. Originally penned by Ian Curtis but re-recorded after his death with a very nervous sounding Bernard Sumner performing his first vocals, ‘Ceremony’ begins the New Order story by elegantly placing a full-stop at the end of Joy Division’s brief but blessed existence. The melancholy, however, is short-lived. The half-a-tab euphoria of tracks like ‘Temptation’ and ‘True Faith’ still carries enough power to dilate the pupils of any dancefloor and even the overstatement police could not possibly have any cause for complaint with the claim that these are the songs that invented Goldfrapp, The Bravery and The Killers. Oh yeah, and that ‘Blue Monday’ wasn’t bad either.

With at least three of the greatest songs of all time making up disc one [Steady on now - Ed], it’s understandable that disc two might feel like a bit of a let (or should that be ‘come’) down, but there’s still more magic to be enjoyed in New Order’s latter years than there is in David Blaine’s entire career.

Released after long lay-offs in 1993 and 2001 respectively, ‘Regret’ and ‘Crystal’ are two of the best comeback singles you’ll ever hear and let’s not forget that in the shape of ‘World In Motion’, New Order have recorded something 100 per cent unique - a football song that is worth listening to even when there isn’t a World Cup on.

In a way, it’s things like that which underline New Order’s greatness the most; we could talk about their pioneering usage of synths until the next NME Awards and make 20-page lists of all the bands that they’ve influenced but these muso arguments won’t ever make the music any more enjoyable than it already is. Leave the theory and method in the library because at its heart, ‘Singles’ is a peerless and ultimately simple example of how wonderful pop music can be.

Hardeep Phull

New Order don’t even have to be this good. They should have been gone years ago - Joy Division found themselves without a singer on the eve of a breakthrough American tour, the Hacienda ate everybody’s money and died, their last album, 1993’s ‘Republic’ wasn’t particularly well received, their manager died…

But here they are, minus keyboardist, but fucking good again… And minutes into the album, as the chorus-less and huge ‘Crystal’ works its magic, you know this. The sound is immaculate, and lyrically, here, and everywhere else on the album, Bernard Sumner is heartbreakingly teenaged.

“I don’t know what to say/you don’t care anyway”

And check the gloriously summery ‘Turn My Way’:

“I don’t wanna be like other people are/don’t wanna own a key don’t wanna wash my car”

Hooky still plays bass like a guitar throughout, and the absence of keyboards means ‘Get Ready’ does indeed sound more like ‘Closer’ than ‘Republic’… but like ‘Closer’ with a smile on its face. Like ‘Closer’ if it had got laid. We even get a beefed up MC5 styled amp blower in the shape of ‘Rock The Shack’, which fuzzes along marvellously and features the ever-fantastic yelps of one Bobby Gillespie. But perhaps ‘Close Range’ sums up the album best… a ketamine nightmare on wheels for the main, and an explosion of gorgeosity for the chorus, which could well be an ode to the mid-nineties Sumner:

“You’ve got to pull yourself together man/you’ve got to get back on you’re feet again/you’ve got the world in your hands”

New Order are one of the best bands in the world again. Get ready.

Adam Alphabet

New Order have the uncanny knack of always sounding hip. For this, their eighth album, the band (who are fast approaching 50) slot neatly in with Franz Ferdinand, The Killers and the whole new indie scene. While their back catalogue is being raked over by a generation of American bands looking for hipster inspiration, New Order’s combination of melancholic pop and killer bass lines sounds as apt now as it did when they stumbled from the ruins of Joy Division all those years ago.

Somehow, while their past is being dug up for two upcoming films about Joy Division, they thunder on into the future. This is pristine, state of the art, pop: the usual perfect combination of great melodies and swooping atmospherics that you can dance to. As the granddads of the Manchester scene they can sit back and watch the Doves attempt to run off with their melancholic crown, or young upstarts Longcut nibble away with their brilliant appropriation of the bass-driven Joy Division thing. And as one of the UK’s most consistent indie survivors they can certainly show the Manics a few things about how to grow old gracefully while enlightening the misery indie mob of Keane and Coldplay with a few insights into making sad pop music that you can bop around to.

Because it’s all here on this album. On ‘Republic’, they went all guitary and did it very well. But this time they’ve decided to plunder their own back catalogue. There are moments when you can hear them remember what Joy Division sounded like on the brooding ‘Turn’, and the album’s title track or what those E-fuelled days down the Hacienda were like on some of the dancier numbers. There are hints of primetime New Order on current single ‘Krafty’ and even a nod to the fantastic Scissor Sisters- roping in sassy Scissor vocalist Ana Matronic on ‘Jet Stream’.

It’s like New Order’s greatest hits but with brand new songs. They may have all these different styles but they remember to play to their strengths, Captain Hook’s bass is as slung-low and drivingly melodic as ever, Barney still sings daft and cynical lyrics of love and life and sailing his yacht and makes them all mean something to the listener, while new boy Phil Cunningham sticks on some great little bits of slide guitar. Steven Morris programmes the clever beats and smirks.

The true survivors New Order still make great Krafty pop music. Fashions come and fashions go; they still remain at the cutting edge, the self styled ‘daft Salford twats’ who know so much more than they ever let on. They survived the death of their iconic frontman, the rise and fall of Factory records, the collapse of the Hacienda, Manchester being turned into a yuppie city and even the 24 Hour Party People film and they still make great pop music.

How cool is that?

JOHN ROBB

New order is a great band, like no other they are a classic band, no matter what people say even after thirty years they still make great music and i hope that they can put aside thier difference and still make great music. these are all the songs i like by them

Krafty
Waiting
Who’s joe
Turn
Crystal
turn my way
Primitive motion
Vicious streak
Regret
Ruined in a day
Spooky
Avalanche
Run
V anishing point
Dream attack
Love less
Temptation
True faith
Everything gone green
1963
Brutal
Lonesome night
Lets go for nothing
Such a good thing
The perfect kiss
This time of night
Face up
Love vigilantes
The village
586
Leave me alone
Age of consent
Every little counts
All day long
Way of life
Bizarre love triangle
Dream never end
The him
Senses
Blue Monday
World in motion
Love will tear us apart
Atmosphere
Isolation
Touched by the hand of god
Thieves like us
Ceremony
procession

Peter hook is a great bassist
Bernard sumner has a golden voice

Whatever. Hook is a genius b/c he had a hand in producing the Stone Roses. Sumner, great in New Order, but, ah, Electronic?

And once and for all, New Order is/was a thousand better than Joy Division. JD really only gets props b/c ian curtis offed himself. Yeah, they had some decent songs, but come on. Nothing they did holds a candle to Blue Monday, Thieves like us, Confusion, perfect kiss . . . there are simply too many to list.

They shoud off themselves.

I’m on a big fan of this British super band. They are like no other and even to this day, I feel the same now as then. That great voice. Great rhythms. Great guitar sound which is their signature sound. Drums. Harmonica. Keyboards. The late Ian Curtis. Gillian Gilbert. Peter Hook. Stephen Morris. Bernard Sumner. Each one’s talent has impacted the band’s sound then and now. As individuals who have side projects, more is never enough. As moody Manchesterians, they are in class of their own. They have a mystique of them which I have always respected. They are New Order. Band’s band. When life gets out of order for New Order,they still keep going at their thing. They are survivors.
They don’t spill the beans keeping private things private.
They are only human. They have fans all over. As a fan, I will always be fan of their music and won’t stop.
When life got these members down, they did not stop being musicians or play or listen to the music.
So why now?

they suck ballz

amen ck

bernie is wright-hooky needs to relax..

new order will always be a great band, one of the greatest ever

From Joy Division to the stupid arrogance of New Order? Please, these guys need to take a pill. Wankers the lot.

Funny…each person is claiming the other person is refusing to talk to him.

He probably goes by “Hooky” due to his erectile disfuntion!

This is the worst news ive heard. New Order is easily one of the best bands. Ever. Please dont break up.