Sunday, 08 June 2008
Burn Out... or Fade Away? So this is permanent. A record, an addendum, a summary of New Order who, in various forms and names, lasted 30 years as a stubbornly individual fixture in Manchesters musical legacy. With this, “Live In Glasgow”, their sixth concert film, New Order reflect and restate everything about them that they were for so long.
While New Order have always been frustratingly uneven live, “Live In Glasgow” demonstrates that, in their final decade, New Order always managed somehow to overcome their previous neurosis and somehow became a relatively smooth and efficient machine that allowed them to rejoice in their music - even if their lives were falling apart. It’s hard to believe on the strength of the performance within, that New Order had less a month and 9 live shows left within them.
Unlike some of their once contemporaries - the Factory-processed-and-reformed Happy Mondays who became a tribute band featuring three original members and a different pre-existing band bolted on around them, or the 78/08 Let’s-Play-An-Ancient-Album-In-Full of OMD - New Order were never a nostalgia act : they never pretended that 1988 or 1998 didn’t happen, they never pretended to exist in a hermetically sealed time capsule, they always moved forward, wrote new material, tried different things. Even at this late stage in their 30 year history, the albatross that was “Blue Monday” was being revamped, reworked with new parts and different flavours. When The Stones play “Satisfaction” it sounds exactly the same as it did 40 years ago, and thus, it ever was, whilst New Order dispense with the nostalgia and the need for the comfort of reassurance, even the oldest songs sounds oddly topical and vibrant.
Starting with a late-period “Crystal”, the band seem musically at least to be firing on all cylinders. Hooky prowls as the road beast he is, Morris enthusiastically plays with the passion he did when he was 20, and Sumner appears to have grown used to being the focal point by messing with the audiences preconceptions of what exactly he should be doing. New recruit Phil Cunningham meanwhile performs with no shortage of skill and acquits himself as more than suitable for the role. Thankfully, he’s not ‘edited out’ of the film as certain, vain bands have a habit of hiding their new members : when I saw Pink Floyd at Live 8 on the DVD, I didn’t even know they had a Jon Carin as second keyboardist/ additional guitarist as he was never even seen on the screen once. This leaner New Order have also dispensed with an extraneous and incongruous backing vocalist seen on earlier tours in favour of a classic four piece configuration. It is a credit to the band, and their integrity, that they never pretended that “Tonight New Order Are Gonna Rock YOU! Scream For Me Long Beach!” Spinal Tap fashion. Even at their most celebratory - the comback shows of 1998 - New Order had a certain detached reserve and Bernard Sumners off between song interjections seemed a knowing mockery of existant rock cliché.
The set draws heavily from recent past, with five songs from their final album, and an unapologetic acknowledgement that the past exists - and that they, like everyone are here because of it - but also firmly resist the end-of-the-pier karaoke temptation of the aging career musician. As a live recording, the band have finally produced, for the first time, a document that captures not only the performance the band give, but also what it feels like for the audience : the audio mixing reflects the joyous celebration, the dedicated and heartfelt communal hymns these songs eventually became. The audience becomes part of the show itself, with the backing vocals and chorus lines for these unwitting anthems being sometimes almost as loud as the band itself : the melody line for “Temptation” unwaveringly becomes a massed hymn of unconscious abandoned, as a thousand Indie bedrooms from the Eighties and air guitarist fantasies become flesh for a few short minutes. And not only that, but the newer material - such as “Guilt Is A Useless Emotion” are keenly executed unapologetically as statements of intent that even to the end, New Order may have become old, but never old hat nor old skool.
The final two songs of the main set - a resurrected and powerful “Perfect Kiss” and a revised “Blue Monday” (that also cheekily transmogrifies briefly into Kylie’s “Can’t Get Blue Monday Out of My Head” cover version then back again), run together into a quarter-hour medley : much like the bands tradition of yore where they remixed songs on stage and improvised as they went along. The concert ends with three Joy Division songs as an encore : timely reminders that Joy Division and New Order were one, but not the same, two sides of the same coin, together, yet alone, joined - but apart. These Joy Division songs could never equal the original recordings as time marches on, the grinding fist of poverty and teenage ambition has been conquered, but are faithful, powerful moments that show that no one can ever be as good as Joy Division - or even come close - apart from the original members themselves.
The second disc is both under- and over-whelming. Taken, as it clearly is, from a cupboard of hundreds of old VHS tapes filmed by the band all over the world during their career, it captures a nascent band tentatively debuting on local television - and falling over drunk on stage at a primitive 1981 Glastonbury, a handful of songs from their 1985 shows that are cheaply recorded in dark rooms in Toronto and Rome, before becoming an unwitting US Arena Act in 1989. The final two songs see the band on their final tour, battling rain and malfunctioning equipment to perform “She’s Lost Control” in a monsoon. It’s a blessing to see the band present themselves in a warts-and-all fashion, but ultimately frustrating given that there’s at least 75 minutes of unused space on the second disc, and the fragments of the shown are short excerpts from full-length shows, as well as failing to tidy up the cornucopia of long-deleted blink-and-you’ll-miss--them VHS-only releases from the 80’s.
The postscript of interviews with the individual members, filmed after the event and with each member alone, clearly demonstrates to even the most amateur psychologist that philosophically the band were fragmented and fractured. Whatever one claims to love, another claims to loathe without even knowing it. As an epitah, “Live In Glasgow” shows that despite all other things, the fire never really went out within the band, even to the end, and if it is the final farewell from the band, then, realistically, at least they went out with both their integrity and their abilities intact.Only registered users can write comments.
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