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New Order’s Debut Gig: “The Surprise On People’s Faces Was Priceless”
Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
In Depth

New Order’s Debut Gig: “The Surprise On People’s Faces Was Priceless”

With their debut live gig, New Order forged ahead after the death of Ian Curtis to prove there was life after Joy Division.

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It’s fair to say that the small but attentive crowd gathered at Manchester’s Beach Club on the evening of 30 July 1980 were not prepared for what they were about to witness. Having arrived to see Factory Records act A Certain Ratio supported by Action Holiday, the audience were astonished to see three very familiar faces taking to the stage to kick off the evening’s entertainment. Yet while Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris were the remaining members of Joy Division, they weren’t here to play their old band’s songs. And though they weren’t billed as such on the night, the trio were about to play their first-ever live gig as New Order.

Listen to the best of New Order here.

The backstory: “We asked ourselves, ‘Do we want to carry on with music?’”

With hindsight, the simple fact that the three musicians were back onstage at The Beach Club barely two months following the death of their friend and bandmate Ian Curtis now seems astonishing. Yet, in addition to the grief they had to process, the loss of Joy Division’s charismatic singer left Sumner, Hook and Morris with a stark choice in terms of their own futures – and dithering over it wasn’t going to make the decision any easier.

“We had dinner in Macclesfield and asked ourselves, ‘Do we want to carry on with music or go back our day jobs?’” Peter Hook wrote in his memoir Substance: Inside New Order. “We agreed to rehearse on the Monday following that and over the weekend I wrote the riff to Dreams Never End [later released on New Order’s debut album, Movement]. I took it in and we worked on going forwards.”

Initially, the three bandmates struggled as they settled into their new configuration. Over the summer of 1980, they recorded their first demo at Cabaret Voltaire’s Western Works studio, in Sheffield, and also cut a track, Haystack, with Leicester-born vocalist Kevin Hewick, whom Factory Records boss Tony Wilson felt might be worthy of consideration as a vocalist for what would become New Order. When that didn’t work out, Sumner, Hook and Morris had to think long and hard about who would front the group from now on, and they continued to work diligently on new material.

New Order’s debut gig: “The surprise on peoples’ faces was priceless”

The trio already had the songs Ceremony and In A Lonely Place left over from Joy Division’s final days, but within weeks they’d also have worked up tentative versions of several new songs, among them Dreams Never End, Truth, Homage, Cries And Whispers and Procession. Believing his charges now had enough material to get back onstage, their ever proactive manager, Rob Gretton, swung into action.

“One gig is worth ten rehearsals. That’s what Rob used to say,” Peter Hook wrote in his memoir. “He was desperate to get us gigging again, so when The Names, a band from Belgium, pulled out of a Factory Records night at The Beach Club in Manchester, he decided we should do it as ‘The No Names’. He thought that was hilarious.

“Come the night and the audience didn’t know, the other bands didn’t know, the promoter didn’t know,” Hook continued. “The surprise on peoples’ faces as we set up and played was priceless, and A Certain Ratio were amazed.”

“It was so weird, even I was nervous!” Stephen Morris’ then girlfriend – and future New Order synth queen – Gillian Gilbert said in a 2020 interview with Record Collector magazine. “You could feel everyone’s eyes on them. I think all three sang a bit and there was a tape machine. It just felt really strange.”

A regular club night at the small Oozit’s pub on Manchester’s Newgate Street, The Beach Club was hardly Madison Square Garden, but as the first venue the future New Order needed to conquer, it still presented a challenge. Recalling that Sumner introduced the band by saying they were “the last surviving members of [Factory act] Crawling Chaos”, Stephen Morris also noted that the fledgling group executed their set without too many snags – and that their freshly minted music hinted at their future direction together as New Order.

The legacy: “Not being bottled off. That was the most important thing”

“Things were all right – for a first-ever gig in the nervous, jittery way that most debuts tend to be,” the drummer wrote in his memoir Record Play Pause: Confessions Of A Post-Punk Percussionist. “It could have been a lot worse. Looking back at it now, besides the obvious vocal struggle, it was the drum machine’s appearance [that was new]… There it was at the very first New Order gigs, confidently chattering and pinging away, just quietly biding its time. The [Roland] Doctor Rhythm was in!”

Amazingly, the gig even yielded what amounts to New Order’s first live review – and a positive one at that. “No one could agree as to whether the material was modified instrumental versions of familiar material or new compositions in the same vein,” said the independent weekly paper New Music News in their 10 August edition. “But we were all agreed that the intensity and novelty of the performance conspired to produce an overall effect rarely equalled. If the band can maintain this level, then their future is assured, whatever their name.”

“All I can remember of it was being terrified, setting up and playing, and me operating our trusty tape machine with all the keyboard parts on a backing track,” Peter Hook recalled in Substance: Inside New Order. “And not being bottled off. Now that was the most important thing. Not being bottled off.”

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