New Order – live Salle du Baron, Orleans, France – December 13, 1985 – Radio France International
New Order this weekend. Recorded live at Salle du Baron in Orleans France on December 13, 1985 and preserved for posterity by Radio France International.
The 1983 single “Confusion” firmly established New Order as a dance music force, inspiring many musicians in subsequent years. In 1984 they followed the largely synthesized single “Thieves Like Us” with the heavy guitar-drum-bass rumble of “Murder”, a not-too-distant cousin of “Ecstasy” from the Power, Corruption & Lies album. KROQ Los Angeles DJ Jed the Fish claims New Order had more to do with the emergence of house music than the Warehouse music of Chicago and “Frankie Knuckles and the whole so-called House music scene. Unless you were actually from regional Chicago, had you ever heard of House music until New Order? Be real, now.”
1985’s Low-Life refined and sometimes mixed the two styles, guitar-based and electronic, and included “The Perfect Kiss”—the video for which was filmed by Jonathan Demme—and “Sub-culture”. In February 1986, the soundtrack album to Pretty in Pink featuring “Shellshock” was released on A&M Records. An instrumental version of “Thieves Like Us” and the instrumental “Elegia” appeared in the film but were not on the soundtrack album. Later that summer, New Order headlined a line-up that included the Smiths, the Fall, and A Certain Ratio during the Festival of the Tenth Summer at Manchester’s G-Mex.
Brotherhood (1986) divided the two approaches onto separate album sides. The album notably featured “Bizarre Love Triangle” (a Top 20 hit in Australia and New Zealand) and “Angel Dust” (of which a remixed instrumental version is available on the UK “True Faith” CD video single, under the title “Evil Dust”), a track which marries a synth break beat with Low-Life-era guitar effects. While New Order toured North America with friends Echo & the Bunnymen, the summer of 1987 saw the release of the compilation Substance, which featured the new single “True Faith”. Substance was an important album in collecting the group’s 12-inch singles onto CD for the first time and featured new versions of “Temptation” and “Confusion”—referred to as “Temptation ’87” and “Confusion ’87”. A second disc featured several of the B-sides from the singles on the first disc, as well as additional A-sides “Procession” and “Murder”. The single, “True Faith”, with its surreal video, became a hit on MTV and the band’s first American top 40 hit. The single’s B-side, “1963”—originally planned on being the A-side until the group’s label convinced them to release “True Faith” instead—would later be released as a single in its own right several years later, with two new versions.
To refresh your memory, or make an introduction, crank up this concert, recorded during this crucial period of their development. Further insight to what New Order was all about in the 80s.
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