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New Order / Brotherhood review

David Quantick on New Order’s fourth album

By david quantick

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New Order / Brotherhood cover

On the eve of the ‘Definitive Edition’ box set, David Quantick looks back at New Order’s 1986 album

There have been very few bands who’ve evolved in public the way New Order did. For a start, they weren’t always New Order: they were Joy Division until the suicide of their singer Ian Curtis: and before that they were a clipped punk band called Warsaw, who played like the Stooges had read Franz Kafka.

Joy Division were a serious band: live, Curtis brought an intensity to his performances rarely seen on stage, and his attitude and lyrics gave the band a clear direction. Like Curtis’ words, Joy Division’s music was bleak and emotional at the same time. It was half-Ballardian urban soundscapes and half-pain-wracked descriptions of relationship trauma. And when Ian Curtis took his own life, that structure was gone.

Early New Order struggled to find a new sound: they rotated vocalists, recorded a reggae cover, tried to be Joy Division and then, with new keyboard player Gillian Gilbert, discovered the new ‘80s sound: synths and beats. Added to this were vocalists Bernard Sumner’s somewhat eccentric lyrics – often frivolous and surreal in contrast to Curtis’ anguish and despair – and New Order finally began to emerge as a fresh entity.

By the time of their third album, Low-Life, New Order’s sound seemed to have settled: the experiments of earlier records had been set aside for a smoother direction, where Sumner’s guitars and Peter Hook’s extraordinary bass playing were in perfect harmony with Gilbert’s keyboards and Stephen Morris’ drums and drum machines. New Order were what the Americans horribly called “dance rock”. There were other guitar bands using electronics, and there were synth bands using guitars, but nobody quite got the balance right like New Order did.

Low-Life, then, was the kind of musical template that most bands, having discovered it, would happily used for the rest of their careers. New Order, however, being New Order, did not feel this way. The even balance of Low-Life was actually a blanket covering a deep chasm of disagreement. Morris and Gilbert, who were married to each other, were also married to the idea of continuing with the electronic sound, while Peter Hook, the one who had a beard during punk and wore biker jackets and boots when everyone else was wearing Breton caps and espadrilles, was not keen to progress with synths.

The result was a lot of tension and disagreement. Added to this was the fact that the band, now finally enjoying the success that had escaped their grasp after Joy Division ended, were now living a claustrophobic existence: constantly recording, touring and promoting their work, New Order needed a break: but they didn’t get one.

As a result, the new album – and in retrospect “Brotherhood” sounds like a slightly ironic name for a record born of conflict – was not a tidy collection of like-minded songs. Quite the opposite: Morris said later that Brotherhood was “kind of done in a schizophrenic mood where we were trying to do one side synthesizers and one side guitars.” To be fair, the album doesn’t actually sound like 20 minutes of synth pop followed by 20 minutes of guitar rock, but what it does sound like is peculiar.

Throughout, in fact, there’s a lot of guitar. Generally nicely distorted guitar as Sumner (who according to Peter Hook, never rated his own guitar playing) digs away intensely. In fact, most of Brotherhood is pretty intense, from the claustrophobic opener ‘Paradise’, which seems to be taking place in a small tin can, to the lyrically powerful ‘All Day Long’, a song about child abuse.  Most of side one hurtles past like a mad truck, almost matching the speed of Power Corruption & Lies’ ‘Age Of Consent’ and the whole thing is a bit of a blur, as songs like ‘As It Was When It Was’ and the bluntly-named ‘Weirdo’ fire at the listeners like arrows from a bow. The whole thing sounds harsh and metallic, appropriate given Peter Saville’s stainless steel cover design, and it all goes by in a mad amphetamine rush best taken as a wall of sound in a hurry rather than a set of individual songs.

Side two, as the kids with their vinyls call it, begins with a delight: the album version of ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’, one of New Order’s greatest singles and a song so good that Sumner included it in the live set for his side project Bad Lieutenant. Like all the best New Order singles, ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’ is both thunderous and yearning, like a mammoth in love: it’s followed with the entirely contrasting ‘All Day Long’, which starts quiet and ends epically and somewhat guitarishly like Low-Life’s ‘Elegia’: with its lyric about an abused child, it’s possibly the New Order song with the quietest anger. ‘Angel Dust’ (formerly ‘Evil Dust’) follows, a classic middle-of-side-two New Order song, and the side ends (on vinyl) with ‘Every Second Counts’, a gorgeous song which, being New Order, starts with the line “Every second counts/ When I am with you/ You look just like a pig/ You should be in a zoo” and ends in ‘Day in The Life’-like chaos. (The CD has the inferior single ‘State Of The Nation’ tacked on the end, which is annoying and pointless and fits about as well as a glove on a foot).

Brotherhood has aged well: its dense sound contains both energy and determination, and if some of the songs aren’t always standouts, everything here works and some of it is brilliant. New Order wouldn’t release another album for three years (the Ibiza pill party of Technique) but as they had the enormous Substance collection out next, the world was fine about that and New Order became bigger and more famous, then fell out with each other, reconvened, fell out again, etc etc, and continue to tour and all that.

This new edition of Brotherhood features a generous dose of extra material, including demos, remixes and instrumentals, and tracks from the little-known Salvation soundtrack. They’re all enjoyable and a welcome addition for fans, of which there are many.

Review by David Quantick. Brotherhood is reissued on 22 November 2024, via Parlophone.

Tracklisting

Brotherhood New Order /

    • CD 1: Brotherhood 2024 Remaster
      1. Paradise
      2. Weirdo
      3. As It Is When It Was
      4. Broken Promise
      5. Way of Life
      6. Bizarre Love Triangle
      7. All Day Long
      8. Angel Dust
      9. Every Little Counts
      10. State of the Nation
    • CD 2: Extras
      1. Shellshock (AOR Version) *
      2. State Of The Nation (Japan Demo) *
      3. Paradise (Robert Racic Remix)
      4. As It Is When It Was (Japan Demo) *
      5. Broken Promise (Instrumental) *
      6. Bizarre Love Triangle (Stephen Hague 12” Remix) *
      7. All Day Long (Instrumental) *
      8. Evil Dust
      9. Every Little Counts (Full Length) *
      10. Salvation Theme
      11. Skullcrusher (Full Length) *
      12. Touched By The Hand Of God (Salvation Version)
      13. Let’s Go (Salvation Version)
      14. Sputnik
      15. Blue Monday 1988 (Michael Johnson 12” Remix) *
      * previously unreleased
    • DVD 1
      Live at the Academy Brixton, 1987
      1. Bizarre Love Triangle
      2. The Perfect Kiss
      3. Ceremony
      4. Dreams Never End
      5. Love Vigilantes
      6. Confusion
      7. Age Of Consent
      8. Temptation
      Peter Hook / Stephen Morris Interviews
      TV Appearances: BBC Northern Ireland – Channel One 1986.
      1. Ceremony
      2. Love Will Tear Us Apart
      TV Appearances: The Tube 1986.
      1. State Of The Nation
      2. Broken Promise
      TV Appearances: Top of the Pops 1987.
      1. True Faith
      TV Appearances: Les Enfants du Rock, Rockline  1987.
      1. Paradise
      2. Bizarre Love Triangle
      TV Appearances: The Roxy, 1987.
      1. True Faith
      TV Appearances: 11pm, 1987.
      1. Bizarre Love Triangle
      Extra Material
      1. Stephen’s Fly On The Wall Documentary 1985.
      2. Recording ‘As It Is’ and ‘Shame of the Nation’ at Denon Studios, Tokyo (May 1985).
    • DVD 2
      Live at the G-Mex, Manchester, 19/07/86.
      1. Elegia
      2. Shellshock
      3. Paradise
      4. Bizarre Love Triangle
      5. Way Of Life
      6. State Of The Nation
      7. Face Up
      8. The Perfect Kiss
      9. Ceremony
      10. Temptation
      Live Extra Material: Glastonbury, 1987.
      1. True Faith
      2. Sister Ray
      Live Extra Material: San Giovanni, 1986.
      1. Dreams Never End
      Live Extra Material: Pier 84, New York, 1987.
      1. All Day Long
      2. Angel Dust
      3. Shellshock
      4. Weirdo
      Live Extra Material: Rapido, Paris 1987.
      1. True Faith
      Live Extra Material: G-Mex, Manchester, 1988.
      1. Touched By the Hand of God
      2. Every Little Counts

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