A rough draft of future greatness, New Order’s 1981 debut has never quite shaken off the tragic context surrounding its creation. Still grieving from the suicide of singer Ian Curtis, the surviving members of Joy Division were also fighting bitterly with producer Martin Hannett, by now a serious drug casualty who made his contempt for the new group’s raw talents very plain. Movement is a transitional album from an uncertain band whose morale was at rock bottom. No wonder they have virtually disowned it ever since, and almost never play any tracks from it live. But the passing decades have been kinder to Movement, partly because New Order themselves have neglected it for so long. The songs now come back to us with the vivid freshness of half-forgotten, long-lost childhood snapshots. Bernard Sumner may be clearly channelling Curtis on haunted, liturgical dirges like Truth and the brooding electro-rock monolith ICB, but there are some surprisingly fully-formed songs here, too, like Peter Hook’s zingy, melodious, bass-chiming album-opener Dreams Never End. A handful of lesser tracks feel like skeletal goth-punk sketches but the techno-tribal clatter of Senses and propulsive Denial now feel like teasing pointers to the band’s glorious dance-pop rebirth, which lay just months away. Remastered and expanded into a four-disc package, this box set gives New Order’s scrappy debut some much-needed heft and hinterland. Among the extras are their first ever studio recordings, laid down in a few hours at Cabaret Voltaire’s Western Works in Sheffield in September 1980, when they were still a trio with no clear lead singer. Long available as scrappy bootlegs, these embryonic efforts receive their first official release here. Featuring all three band members on lead vocals, with interjections from manager Rob Gretton and Cabs co-founder Stephen Mallinder, the session yielded a rowdy early version of New Order’s debut single Ceremony, plus a throwaway funk-jam experiment composed in a marijuana haze which was later titled Are You Ready For This? Variable quality, but a significant baby step. More substantial, and more interesting to New Order completists, are the dozen previously unreleased pre-album demos recorded at Cargo studios in Rochdale and in the band’s North Manchester rehearsal space. An early mix of Ceremony sounds sluggish and muddy, but Senses and Procession have a thrilling, biting rawness. This is a parallel-universe New Order, with more of the visceral heavy-rock muscle that Hook and Sumner always pushed for against the unyielding Hannett. But arguably the real buried treasure here lies in the three-hour DVD of archive concert clips, which opens with the three-piece New Order’s fabled show at Manhattan’s Hurrah club in September 1980. Shot by Merrill Aldighieri on a primitive hand-held video camera, the footage now looks blotchy and murky, but this compact half-hour set still has an electrifying, ramshackle energy. Dressed with Mormon severity and looking schoolboy-young, the trio play with a pleasingly punky intensity and trade vocals between songs. To this day, drummer Stephen Morris remains mortified by his bellowing efforts, which his daughters now use to embarrass him. But this vintage film also proves what a fantastically tight, kinetic, metronomic percussionist Morris has always been. A human drum machine, perfect for New Order. Shot in more conventional wide-angle pan-and-scan style, a late 1981 show from New York’s Peppermint Lounge finds the four-piece New Order more settled and confident in their roles. Gillian Gilbert is now formally embedded, sharing guitar and synthesizer duties with Sumner. The band’s sonic palette is already noticeably more electronic, full of glitch and crackle and sequenced throb, including a muscular early version of their future game-changing anthem Temptation. Terrific stuff. Two further TV concerts, filmed for Granada’s Celebration in 1981 and BBC’s Riverside in 1982, are much more professionally staged but lack the same immersive concert feel. Kicking off an ongoing series of New Order box sets, Movement is a very promising start. The only sour note is that four classic 12” singles from the same period – both versions of Ceremony, Everything’s Gone Green and Temptation – are being reissued separately. This feels a little tight given the anthology’s steep price tag, especially since these tracks were previously included in the two-disc Collector’s Edition back in 2008. The replacement of Peter Saville’s iconic Futurist sleeve design with a blandly tasteful powder-blue cover also seems an odd editorial choice. But overall, this grand repackage has both musical and historical value, paying honourably thorough tribute to an underrated debut.
While Substance 1987 aimed to showcase New Order's 12-inch singles, Singles instead features mostly seven-inch versions, some of which are rare and differ from the album versions.
Movement – Definitive Edition is released on 5 April.