New Order’s career has been pockmarked with such dramatic highs, lows and happenings that it seemed a complete anathema to everything they’d done and been through when it looked like they were petering out of exist as the 2000s were coming to an end.
Musically, it was hardly a decade to write home about given what had gone before, with two middling records to show for their efforts (2000’s guitar-heavy, Billy Corgan-featuring Get Ready and the equally rock-based 2005 follow-up Waiting For The Sirens’ Call) but the main takeaway was age-old tensions coming to the fore. To that end, totemic bassist Peter Hook left in 2007. Soon after, he went on XFM to tell the world that New Order was no more.
Talk about an anti-climactic way to go. New Order, the band who had rallied themselves and formed out of the ashes of Joy Division after frontman Ian Curtis’s suicide, who had navigated bankruptcy, illness, drug habits, drink habits, death and more death whilst writing some of the most trailblazing and euphoric music of their generation, a sound that melded synth-pop, pulsing rave beats, wiry post-punk, acid house exhilaration, alt-rock scope, wistful indie singalongs and, for one song only, a rap from John Barnes, were finished. And not only that, they were finished via an interview on XFM.
Except that’s not what happened. Instead, buoyed by the both the return of keyboardist Gillian Gilbert, who had taken an extended break from the group to care for her and drummer Stephen Morris’ ill daughter, and the success of a handful of 2011 gigs, New Order sans Peter Hook decided to write a batch of new songs. It should be added that an additional fuel was likely Hook’s decision to tour Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures with his own band – suddenly the previously-held idea that New Order was not New Order without Hook no longer seemed to hold sway. “We thought, ‘God, if he’s got the audacity to do that, why aren’t we doing New Order?’,” singer and guitarist Bernard Sumner told Q Magazine in 2015.
What began as a clutch of live dates quickly blossomed into shows all over the globe, from South America to Australia to Miami, gigs that directly fed into what would become New Order’s tenth album Music Complete, which turns 10 today. First off, they reasoned, if the band was going to properly get going again, they couldn’t play a greatest hits set for the rest of their lives. “We were like, ‘If we’re going to carry on, we need something new’,” Gilbert recalled to The Quietus.
Secondly, the shows had underlined to them just what an important part of New Order the dancier side of their sound was, an aspect of the band they had ever-so-slightly neglected for over a decade. “People love Regret and Ceremony at the shows but they really go apeshit for the dance tracks,” Sumner told Q. “In a lot of countries they think we’re a dance act, so I wanted to revisit that sound.”
“For me, the electronic, synth direction was down to going to see bands like Factory Floor – new electronic bands using sequencers and synths in the way we used to when we started off in New Order in the early 80s,” Morris explained to The Quietus. “And I thought, ‘We used to do that. Let’s have another go at doing that.’ So it became, ‘Let’s just make something that’s a bit synthy and dancey.’ And then the first song we wrote was a guitar song – which is just the way it goes! No matter what you say, you’ll do the complete opposite at some point.”
Whilst there are a couple of crack guitar-led songs – the surging minor-chord uplifts of opener Restless and the chiming, hypnotic riff underpinning Academic - on there, Music Complete was the band’s most electronic effort since 1989’s masterful Technique. It was also a late-career classic, a record where the 2015 version of New Order – Sumner, Morris, Gilbert, guitarist Phil Cunningham and bass replacement Tom Chapman – reached into the past for sonic inspiration but emerged with a record that fizzed with the excitement of the here and now. There are future-funk disco boogies (Tutti Frutti and People On The High Line), driving contemplative pop epics (Superheated) and dance bangers (Plastic). At its best, Music Complete came across like a New Order best of made up of new songs.
Although it was pre-dominantly produced by the band themselves at Morris and Gilbert’s converted farmhouse studio on the outskirts of Macclesfield, New Order brought a dance music sensibility to Music Complete that meant its collaborators were intrinsic to its kaleidoscopic worldview. Two of the songs were produced by Tom Rowlands, one half of the Chemical Brothers, whilst electronic dynamo and pop wizard Stuart Price helped them to put together Superheated. Guest spots from an array of artists, meanwhile, dynamically broadened the record’s horizons: La Roux appearing on Tutti Frutti and People On The High Line, Iggy Pop on Stray Dog and The Killers’ Brandon Flowers on Superheated.
Released on 25th September 2015, the record seemed like a fresh start for a newly-reconfigured New Order at the time but now increasingly resembles a fantastic, fitting send-off. Whilst the band have been involved in numerous projects in the intervening years, including reissue campaigns and a podcast, semi-regular tours and the release of a one-off new single in 2020, an 11th album has yet to materialise. Music Complete, then, could well be the definitive last word from one of the UK’s most important and game-changing groups. Ten years on, it remains a heck of a record and, if it turns out that way, a heck of a sign-off.
