So what do you want to know?
To start with NewOrder are in a very devious way, a completely uncomplicated group. This carefully selected commercial compliation (the best of) of 16 such single minded grouped and seductive songs of love, longing, life and belongings surely sums up the heart pounding pop life of this devious, uncomplicated pop group, uncertainly the most secretive of English groups, certainly the most surprising.
What is this compilation?
It's a history of substance and success, a biography ghosted by the group themselves, the very best of irrational pop music, a question of identity, confession cut with dry wit, a deflecting adventure in thought and space, a question of style, a parting of the ways, the end and the beginning. a celebration of alienated consciousness, a sincere sell out, a voyage into the present, a full stop, a semi-colon, a question mark. Part art, part physical, part time, part space, it's the sensationally subdued career of NewOrder from the beginning to the best of, from the stop to the start from the start to the stop start; from the early 80's to the mid '90's, from charged young glory to discharged middle age anxiety, from movement to movement, from fate to fortune. It's the putting together in a perfect new order the light and heavy public and private lazy and intense calm and frenzied concealing and revealing hit and miss songs of NewOrder.
What was the question?
Here's one answer. Rhythm times and technological agility and punk disco and computermistakes and dynamic sensations and noise filled suspension and beside themselves and many meanderings and shy purpose and the question is motionless and the answer is eternal motion and vain desires and scattered moods and mixed meta-tongues and lyrical caresses and remote vision and great haste and points of obsession and unendurable happiness and the anguish of amorous subjugation and the crossing and clashing and trembling and splintering of mind and machine and the sound of feelings and melodies falling from the skies and shadowy beauty and grave ecstacy and inexhaustible restlessness and looking for life and stoned perfectionism and imprisoned perceptions and a low key engagement with a world of perplexities and uncertainties in which one can hope at best to achieve the small pleasures of life the small satisfactions and a kind of innocence that surrounds the enigma and what was the question?
Who are NewOrder? We may never know.
Where are NewOrder?
They are at home, I presume. Or they are flying acrossthe ocean. And they're right in the middle of this collection, their home from home, their flight from flight. But whereever they are, right now, they are, in their own special way, telling right from wrong, and indulging in slight extravaganzas.
Where do they come from?
1) The 1950's, 1960's, 1970's, and at a pinch the 1980's. 2) The North; the North of everywhere including the North. 3) Kraftwerk and Sylvester, Eno and the Velvet Underground, anarchy and tackiness, machines and glitter, drugs and day dreams, night clubs and idealism, sex and paranoia, war and peace, ordinariness and extraordinariness. 4) Joy Division. The most devastating imaginative rock group between The Doors and Nirvana. There is some sense in saying that all of the curiously naive, deeply biased and fundamentally instinctive music made up by NewOrder, their puzzling centrelessness and their edgy incompleteness,
the question mark that surrounds their motives, reputation, presence, absence, it all comes from trying to escape} the shadow of this superstar group that never was. The permanent shadow thrown out by Ian Curtis's suicide, the shadow created by the absurd halt to fame, notoriety and togetherness that his death caused.
In some ways the whispering and screaming songs on this collection are like echoes of displacement rippling out from the moment when Joy Division self-destructed. Evasion, resistance, elusiveness, vagueness, anonymity, indifference, all of these things that colour or drain the coklour from NewOrder's pop being can be traced back to the peculiar early days when NewOrder emerged blinking in the light out of the darkness of Joy Division.
Another answer to whatever the question might be is that this compilation of questions and answers is inspiring proof of how stubbornly and fantastically NewOrderhave managed to recreate and reinvent themselves after such an intense, traumatic false start. They danced their way out of deep trouble. They grew to use and
understand the shadows. They found out another new sound all of their own. Apart from anything else, this collection is the proud, powerful sound of a healing process, and ultimately the exposed noise of transcendence.
Why are NewOrder?
1) I have worked in one or two capacities with NewOrder, and played with them now and then, and let me tell you they're a bunch of difficult buggers but you can't help but love them. 2) They're kind of anti-stars. Perhaps if they'd showed willing and showed their faces more, and hadn't hidden behind themselves and their cryptic record sleeves, if they'd disguised their distrust of the media and acted a little more friendly to each other and others and just generally sold themselves a bit and weren't so perverse when it came to self-promotion, they might now be rock giants - post-punk Pink Floyds - instead of detached pop secrets - sub Pet Shop Boys, although it should be recorded that NewOrder came first, and how. But what the hell, they just thought, what the hell, and why not. They developed as true originals because of their independence, and they've stuck fast to an alternative spirit, firnly sceptical about the rock business, and they've come this far, to this best, which includes several top tens and a fancy number one, and which is the most accessible and spectacular example of the art of uncompromise you'll ever hear. So what the hell. They blew it and they made it and it couldn't have happened any other way.
Can you repeat the question?
NewOrder remain a mystery, to themselves as well as to others. I know them so well and really I know nothing about them. I know the music so well and I have no idea where it comes from and how it ends up like it does. Serious, emotional, preciously precarious, elegiacal songs such as 'Regret', 'True Faith', 'Perfect Kiss', 'Bizarre Love Triangle' pop and shimmer out of the luminous blue beyond of some history of pop that never actually happened. The best of NewOrder songs sound like they might just about be influenced by Love, Kraftwerk, Moby Dick and Cluster, but truly they belong to no tradition but their own. And how these songs make me feel, what they do to me, the result, of their mystical attention to detail and their troubling human touch, is directly suggested in the the first line of the first song on this magical collection. This is what happens to me when I listen to NewOrder and it's why I love them so much, for their courage, their insularity, what they do to sound and sense and the senses...When I listen to NewOrder...'I feel so extraordinary...'
Yes, that's it. They get a hold of me, and change me, move me, every time. And the answer to whatever the question might be concerning NewOrder these wild mild entertainers with chips on their shoulder something or other on their mind and hearts on their sleeve is no more and no less than...
Yes! Paul Morley October-94