February 2002:

You could also peruse this in a slightly more æsthetically pleasing form at http://anonymousjuice.com/print/2/neworder.html
Anonymous juice now has a website, and they worked on the no logo site too. Happy day! Dance in the streets!

Peter writes about one New Order song. Just one, Temptation. I listened to Temptation from Taras (Fact 77) while HTML'ing this, then about a year later when listening to the same recording I decided to put it up. On with it.

It's a Tuesday evening sometime in the dark days of winter, January 1983, in a dingy mining town in the north of England. I'm curled up in bed fiddling with my new digital dock radio, a recent Christmas prsent with which I am very pleased. The clock radio is brilliant, the height of modernity. It's made out of sci-fi white plastic with elegant, angular sryling, and has lime-green LCD numbers. It has a "sleep" button which will switch the radio for an hour (or less, if you want to mess with it) and then switch off automatically, returning when the alarm wakes me at six thirty so I can do my paper round before school. I'm getting into the habit of doing this every weekday night, going to sleep with John Peel's late night music show, his alternative music and avuncular musings lulling me off.

This probably accounts for a lot. A couple of years later I would find out about tapes that teach you languages and stuff in your sleep. As you are lilling asleep your brain is completely open, and things go straight in to a deep, subliminal level and stay there. When I was falling asleep to the strains of Echo and the Bunnymen, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, Einstursende Neubauten, The virgin Prunes, The Red Guitars, the occasional bit of Benjamin Zephaniah and, of course, a liberal smattering of The Fall, it definitely started something that I am still playing out years later.

On this particular night in January 1983, I'm just nodding off when I gradually became aware of a party happening on the radio. There's a chorus of raucous male voices, clumsily attempting a flilsetto, singing:

"OOH-oohoohooh
OOH-oo-ooh-ooh
oohoohooh-OOH
oo-oo-ooh-OOH-

It sounds so dumb. It sounds like they're trying their best not to burst out laughing:

"Oh you've got green eyes
Oh you've got blue eyes
Oh you've got grey eyes-

It sounds like they're making it up as they go along. It sounds like they didn't know what they were doing.

"And I've never
Met.
Anyone.
Ouite like you before.
No I've never.
Met.
Anyone.
Ouite like you before.

And I've never heard anything like this in my life, and I wonder how anyone can get away with something so beautiful and arrogant, such rmnshackle brilliance, and how it can still be my secret. I just can't believe that anything can possibly sound this good.

Fast forward sixteen years. It's July 1999, and I'm doing the disco at the wedding of my sister in law in Chester, Nova Scotia It's been a magical day. We're in a hotel right down on the bay shore, and the wedding ceremony was lit by a hazy sun which shone through the sea mist to create a halo around everything.

I've been asked to do an eighties disco, and I'm a little alarmed that these are the records I played last time I was a DJ and now they're part of a nostalgia trip. There's a rather nice local microbrew called Propeller and people keep refilling my glass, and I'm drinking steadily without really noticing and getting quite drunk. The more I drink, the more comfortable I get with using the microphone between, or even during, the records. But it's going well, and everyone's up and jumping, so I'm feeling bold and I take out Substance 87, the first 'Best of...' album from New Order, and instead of playing Blue Monday, like I probably should, I cue up my song. It was remixed for this album. It's slightly shorter and a little more polished than the eight minute long original I heard that first time back in my bedroom. Not quite as good in my opinion, but still awesome.

So I introduce it over the mike with the words, "This is the best song ever written, and if anyone disagrees. I'll fight them." Two minutes into the song there's a bloke standing by me, staring. I lean towards him and he shakes my hand, grins nervously and says, "I agree," before running away.

It was a long journey between these two points. Back in that northern mining town, I started my life among the musically aware as a devout mod (we'll skip over the pre-teen fascinaflon with The Osmonds if that's all the same with you). But with my new clock radio my horizons were bmadening, and I harboured these guilty yearnings and experiments alone in my bedroom, along with all the others who tuned in to John Peel and dreamed of forming `alternative' bands. That night in January 1983 swung the balance and made me really fill in love with music rather than just follow a particular lashion or clique. There would be other songs, and other bands, but it was this particular song Temptation by New Order that started it all.

Music is one of the most powerual forces in evoking memory. A particular song can recreate even the smell in the room at the time when you had your first kiss or when you first got drunk. Many songs do this for me. But the thing about Temptation is that itso encapsulated the sense of euphoria I felt at all these key events, every time I wanted a song that suited a party, or sounded like a party, I'd stick it on. This meant I played it every time there was a party happening, which in turn increased the amount of associations the song evoked the next time.

New Order were there at every significant event in my life, from when I was aged fourteen onwards, and Temptation became a centre of high gravity that attracted all the best memories of growing up. By the time my gang and I were all eighteen, we would play it in the small hours at house parties and lie on the sofa or even the floor and beat our fists on the doors to the rhythm of the drums, and chant along to the ooh-ooh-ohs like religious cultists.

A particular song can recreate the smell in the room. Fine. Temptation did more than that. It didn't just revive the memories, it was a key part in creating the experiences in the first place.

I know other people people with poorer taste than me, obviously who claim that there are other songs which do the same for them. But there's something missing. I'm not the only person I know who feels about Temptation the way I do. One thing we have in oommon is that we defend our song a little more enthusiastically then those we argue with. It matters a little more to us, and we'll go the extra mile. Hence my potentially upsetting comment at the wedding. When it's this song that hooks you, the barbs go deeper than they do with lesser, ordinary songs.

So why do I think it's so bloody special? What's the big deal?

Well, part of it is that it's just the perfect song by a rock band. The best examples of the collaborative arts film, theatre, orchestra or songs produced by bands are at their best infinitely more interesting and intoxicating than anything protluced by one person alone. Sure, there are great novelists, composers and artists, but when the same artistic vision is successftilly articulated by a group of people it means so much more. It acquires an element of mggic that you can't quite put your finger on. When a group of talented minds work together their results flir exceed the sum of the part each of them can produce separately.

This has been demonstrated better by New Order than by any other band with a surviving shred of credibility. Every member of the band has participated in an off-shoot project which would have been great by anyone else's standards, but which was immediately compared to their previous efforts in New Order and therefore found lacking.

Bernard Sumner, lead singer and guitarist, went first. He joined up with another eighties Manchester alternative music hero, Johnny Marr formerly of The Smiths, to create Electronic. On paper it was an indie supergroup. On record, you could hear the elements you were hoping to hear Bernard's laconic vocals, nursery thyme lyrics and scratchy guitar but it didn't quite gel in the same way. Nothing really wrong, but the magic was missing.

Next, bassist Peter Hook went off to form Revenge. The mad Viking's magical bass guitar style, overcranked and played like a lead guitar, was there at the forefront of every song, but there was nothing else. Nothing at all. Years later Hooky realised his mistake and recruited someone who sang just like Barney to form Monaco. Again, Monaco were great by anyone's standards except New Order's. Hearing Hooky play with someone who sounded like Barney just made you want to hear him play with Barney.

The other two, Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert, got in on the act with their imaginatively named band, The Other Two. Stephen, the phenomenal percussionist who just about made drum machines obsolete almost at their birth, sounded a bit tame, but Gillian's lush keyboards were as intoxicating as always. Again though, a pale shadow.

By contrast, Temptation was the first song where each member's contribution came into its own. And the trade marks of the New Order sound were here working in perfect harmony, and because it was the first time anyone had heard it we didn't know what to expect. In later years they were in dang er of becoming clichéd, even if we didn't care about that because we didn't want them to change. But Temptation still sounds fresh, all these magical elements working together perfectly for the first time.

But that's not all.

New Order were more than just the soundtrack to my youth, they encapsulated what it was to be young. And they grew up as I did. They were special, sure, but as a band they were young and naïve. They had such enormous talent, and they didn't quite know where it had come from or what they should really do with it. Sometimes it worked beautifully and sometimes they fell flat on their laces. In the beginning,

When they came up with Temptation, their collective talent was bigger than they each were individually and they were not quite in control of it. They used young, new technology which an earlier generation of musicians didn't understand, and they used it in an arrogant and cocksure manner, abusing their instruments. And at times they got drunk and fucked around and pretended to be really po-laced and serious, not because they were, but because they thought was a laugh.

Temptation is the sound of adolescence and all it entails. It's the happy, dumb accident when everything goes right and you think you're invincible. It's the sound of you going to a party, gening horrendously drunk and being as funny as you really think you are, walking home the girl you always dreamed about, then waking up the following moming and not having a hangover. Sure, this sounds impossible. By the time you're thirty you doubt it ever really happened. But it did. Maybe only once, but it happens to everyone at some point, and deep down the memory stays with you. It's so fresh at the time that you just luxuriate in it. You know it can't last for ever, deep down at the back of your mind, but you push those thoughts away and celebrate the now, and bang the drum and chant.