New Order - The Peel Sessions (1986)

I bought this recently, having somehow spent the last thirty or so years failing to notice that I didn't actually own a copy - which was fucking weird when I realised. This was New Order's Peel session from June 1982, something which loomed quite large in my own personal mythology. Myself and my little group of pals - or the other two if you need an actual head count - had been fairly keen on Joy Division and took to scrutinising New Order's subsequent development with obsessive intensity. We bought Ceremony on the day of release, and Movement too. I bought two copies of the Ceremony 12" even though I'm fairly certain they're exactly the same record but for variant covers. We stayed up late to tape Peel, or Graham did, and each time I hear the music on this record I can still see the gold and black of the BASF blank cassette on which Graham recorded it from the radio. I think it was BASF.

These four tracks are therefore embedded in my consciousness like nothing New Order have recorded since. Movement had been an astonishing record, and this was apparently where they were headed. The reggae number, Turn the Heater On somehow made perfect sense, and the rest built on Movement and even Closer with greater emphasis on the electronics - still sombre, but somehow lighter as though acknowledging the necessity of life carrying on. The green shoots were beginning to show, and my little gang could hardly contain our anticipation of what was to come.

Then Power, Corruption and Lies emerged and I never got around to buying a copy for reasons I no longer recall. More recently I noticed that actually I had bought a copy at some point, and yet was unable to remember doing so. I listened, the disc came to the end of side two, leaving me unable to recall anything of what I'd just heard beyond that it had been dull. I still don't know what happened to this bunch, how the band which had recorded Movement turned into something with which to soundtrack a slightly zappy automotive commercial, and not least because both 5-8-6 and We All Stand were re-recorded for the offending second album. They sound incredible here on the Peel session, and so I guess this was the last truly good thing, depending upon how you feel about Blue Monday.

Such a waste.