new order

There are a number of reasons to be interested in bands and a lot of them have nothing to do with music really. Bands are obviously soap operas whose lives are thrown into relief by the weirdness of their signposts/goals/success measures, albums and singles and shows and line up changes that show whether they're winning or losing at life. 

I decided this morning, god only knows where the idea came from, that I wanted to hear some New Order. TBH most of the time if I heard New Order for instance in the supermarket (which by the way I don't, whereas I do hear a lot of their contemporaries) I'd be as repelled as I am when I hear, you know, 'What About Me'. But I have long owned a copy of their first greatest hits album, no doubt squeezed out sometime around the time of their first or perhaps second financial crisis, and I particularly wanted to hear 'Bizarre Love Triangle', but it's in the middle of the side which also has 'State of the Nation' and, you know, some other song and so I listened to them too. 

The thing about New Order, and I don't think even their biggest fans would dispute this, is that once they used up all the Ian Curtis lyrics, which didn't take long, and in any case IC lyrics were naff in a different way a lot of the time but at least they held to some kind of set of ideals, schoolboy poetry usually to be accompanied by a margin sketch of a skull with a bloody dagger through it even though it's a skull, but as I was saying once they used up all the IC lyrics, they were left scratching around for what to do instead, and usually it would seem they got Bernard Sumner to write lyrics and sing them, and whatever the principles at play, let's be fair, his lyrics suck shit and his singing - well, he doesn't try, is the easiest way to put it but a better way to put it is, he tries to not try. He sing-speaks these completely schmetarded words that even when they aspire to something like poetry they are horrendously, face-burningly self consciously so. 

I mean they could almost have been better if he just made up a nonsense language and sang in that. Because clearly these lyrics are not meant to be meaningful, they're a version of 'Scrambled Eggs', but they just didn't bother writing better lyrics. But also, while they're terrible lyrics, they're also the best lyrics possible, because they take you away from focusing on the notion that Sumner has anything to say or even that he's feeling anything in particular that he wants to communicate in a song, and instead they make you notice the music. I read somewhere recently that the Smiths were rockabilly and I was like - oh shit, yeah actually they are often rockabilly, not always obviously, but that's often their default. But with The Smiths even knowing they're great players you often forget they're there because you think of everything in terms of Morrissey's extraordinary lyrics. Even 'Some Girls are Bigger Than Others' or whatever it's called, you're still mainly thinking, 'hush everyone Morrissey's got something to say'. Whereas with Bernard Sumner's lyrics for New Order you're mainly thinking, 'dufus'.

I appreciate it! And now, having played this side of the New Order greatest hits record, I will not play any of it again for 5-10 years.