New Order

From Joy Division

New Order formed in Manchester in 1980. Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris, who had played together in Joy Division, made their live debut as a trio at the Beach Club on 29 July 1980. Keyboardist Gillian Gilbert, suggested by manager Rob Gretton, joined that October. Their first single, Ceremony, came out in January 1981 and the album Movement followed in November. A visit to New York in 1981 introduced them to post-disco, freestyle and electro, and Morris taught himself drum programming. The singles that followed pointed toward dance music, and when producer Martin Hannett left during the mix of Everything's Gone Green, the band produced Temptation themselves. The Hacienda, the Manchester club they largely funded, opened in May 1982.

Blue Monday and the dance floor

Power, Corruption & Lies arrived in May 1983 with a Peter Saville cover based on a Fantin-Latour painting. Pitchfork's Tom Ewing heard it as an attempt to reconcile Temptation with Blue Monday, the 12-inch single released two months earlier. Blue Monday appears on the album only in certain cassette and CD editions. It became the best-selling 12-inch single in history, and Saville's die-cut sleeve cost so much to produce that Factory lost money on each copy. Sumner told NME he saw the song less as a song than as a machine designed to make people dance. Ewing argued that the band's secret was fluidity: Sumner was less a frontman than a target man, and at any moment any of the four might supply the hook, whether Gilbert's keyboards, Morris's sequenced percussion, Hook's liquid basslines or Sumner's own guitar lines.

Low-Life, Brotherhood and Substance

Low-Life, released on 13 May 1985, mixed guitar-band and electronic approaches. It is the only New Order record with the four members photographed on its sleeve, and it yielded The Perfect Kiss, whose live video was filmed by Jonathan Demme. Brotherhood (1986) split the two approaches across its sides and contained Bizarre Love Triangle, which never reached the top 40 in Britain or the United States on release. In 1987 Substance gathered the 12-inch singles and added a new one, True Faith. It reached number four in Britain and became their first single on the US Hot 100, and its Philippe Decoufle video won British Video of the Year in 1988. Substance sold over a million copies. The 1987 summer also saw them tour North America with Echo & the Bunnymen.

Technique and Republic

Hook urged the band to record on Ibiza after a series of records made in London studios that he described as dark and horrible. They spent four months there, with Sumner saying the album was about 20 percent finished, before moving to Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios in Wiltshire. Technique came out in January 1989, opened with Fine Time, and was their first number one album in Britain. In 1990 they recorded World in Motion, the official song of England's World Cup campaign, as EnglandNewOrder. It was their only UK number one single.

The band never had a formal contract with Factory, so when the label collapsed in 1992 they owned their recordings and signed to London Records. Republic (1993) produced Regret, their highest-charting US single. Meanwhile members ran side projects: Sumner formed Electronic with Johnny Marr in 1988, and Gilbert and Morris formed The Other Two in 1990. After Republic the band went on hold.

Return

At Gretton's suggestion the band reconvened in 1998 and played the last night of the Reading Festival. Get Ready (2001) was guitar-led, with Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins playing guitar and singing backing vocals on Turn My Way, and Waiting for the Sirens' Call followed in 2005. Peter Hook left in 2007. In 2011 they returned to the stage with Gilbert back after a ten-year break and Tom Chapman on bass in place of Hook, and signed to Mute in 2014 before Music Complete appeared in 2015. At the 2005 NME Awards, New Order and Joy Division received the Godlike Geniuses award for lifetime achievement. The Killers, the xx and Moby are among the musicians influenced by them, and in 2026 Joy Division and New Order were inducted as one act into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.