My own favourite music of the year has to be (New) New Order’s Music Complete, out on Daniel Miller’s Mute label, clever modernist cover art by Peter Saville and associates, and majestically monstrous tracks reflecting the last thirty years of dance culture. Even though it seems a profanity to like NO without Peter Hook it is a great album, with help from Iggy Pop, Brandon Flowers of The Killers and Tom Rowlands of the Chemical Brothers. Thirty Seven Year Party People! Since Ian Curtis, Stephen Morris, Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook began playing regularly as Joy Division in 1978, that’s effectively twenty nine years up to May 2007 when the Curtis-less New Order officially ended their reign in the rainy city when Peter Hook walked away, though not in silence. And Tony Wilson of Factory Records died. Thirty seven years since the beginning with Hooky and Bernard its longest serving artists; if you take the first Sex Pistols gig, which Hook and Sumner attended along with Pete Shelley, Howard Devoto and all the other ‘Manchesterati’, at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester in June 1976 as the point of origin and take it up to today it is actually thirty nine years. The reformed (without Peter Hook, replaced by The Other One, Bad Lieutenant’s Tom Chapman) New Order in 2011 (Gillian and Stephen, Phil Cunningham and Bernard) hardly alters this history – Hook’s caricature of the band as ‘New Odour’ speaks volumes for the legal and personal wrangles which have developed since the ‘final’ split in 2007. Court chaos looms as the judge has recently waived Hooky’s claim into the juridical arena. Who is ‘iconic’ now (to quote a knowing lyric from the new album)? New Order created a global pop aesthetic in those years; ‘original modern’ I call it. Peter Saville christened the city of Manchester ‘original modern’ on becoming the Creative Director for Manchester City Council in 2004. Saville was Factory’s designer and a partner in the enterprise and still art directing for all he is worth on the new album cover. They are revisiting this original modernity in the new version of New Order and Peter Hook’s The Light but it was essentially built from early Joy Division beginnings in 1978 and not disrupted for long by Ian Curtis’ suicide in 1980. Original modernity is like that. Everyone trying to recapture what was fleetingly new, shiny and vibrant. All that is solid melts into air, as Karl Marx once said, in his own, peculiarly long lasting definition of modernity. Music Complete is the sound of living for years in original modernity.
