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Neu Ordnung


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At the pavement table of a hotel bar on a sunny Sunday afternoon in London, Bernard Sumner is revisiting the most calamitous concerts of New Order's career in the kind of gleeful detail that your average musician would reserve for moments of glory. There was the time at Roskilde in 1984 when they appeared late and drunk with out-of-tune equipment and played so badly that the police were called to protect them from the crowd. Then there was the show in Boston when they performed for just 20 minutes in between DJ sets. "The police turned up in the dressing room," Sumner remembers, "and said: 'Do you know there's a fucking riot going down there, man?' There were people throwing stones at us when we came out. I got a phone call the next morning from Mo Ostin, the president of [New Order's US label] Warner Bros: 'What the fuck's going on Bernard?'"

He smiles. "It's a very Mancunian trait – don't take yourself too seriously. It was more important for us to have a laugh than have some great career strategy. If we enjoyed what we were doing, that was a great career strategy."

 

 

Few bands have been as mythologised as New Order and their previous incarnation Joy Division – the members have been played on screen twice, in Anton Corbijn's sombre-hued Control and Michael Winterbottom's antic 24 Hour Party People – while showing so little interest in mythologising themselves. Let others talk about how New Order rebounded from the suicide of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis to become one of the greatest bands of the 80s, or how records such as Blue Monday revolutionised the way rock groups assimilated electronic music. Sumner would rather talk about the time in the studio when, emboldened by MDMA, he performed his own northern version of Donna Summer's orgasmic vocal on Love to Love You Baby. "It was like: 'Come on love, come on love, oargh, oargh.' But everyone decided it sounded more like I was straining on the toilet."

 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/sep/06/new-order-unexpected-rebirth-bestival

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Also I wouldn't really say it's a Joy Division one as it's still got Sumner on the vocals, despite the instrumentals sounding slower in the Joy Division style of things.

 

The ones available with Curtis on don't sound anywhere near as polished.

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