Bernard Sumner’s favourite New Order song
Following the tragic death of Ian Curtis in 1980, the surviving members of Joy Division had the tough challenge of drying their eyes and returning to the stage. Deciding that Joy Division was no more without their former bandleader, the group aptly renamed themselves New Order.
In 1979, Joy Division welcomed Gillian Gilbert to accompany them at one of their live performances in Liverpool as a guitarist to support Bernard Sumner. At the time, Gilbert was a member of a local punk outfit named The Inadequates. She began her musical career as a guitarist, inspired by the idea of female involvement in punk music. As she told The Music in 2019, “My dad always said, ‘You changed as soon as you saw Siouxsie And The Banshees on television'”.
After forming New Order, the remaining Joy Division members invited Gilbert to join them on a more permanent basis. Initially, she handled secondary guitar parts to alleviate the pressure on Sumner’s shoulders as he took on heightened responsibility as lead vocalist. However, following New Order’s debut album, 1981’s Movement, Gibert began to try her hand at the synthesiser as the group’s pivotal infatuation with electronic music blossomed.
Throughout the 1980s, New Order surfed on the cutting edge of the synth-pop movement while maintaining their darker, post-punk facade. Accompanying their eclectic albums was a steady stream of more danceable synth-pop singles, many of which became iconic 12″ masterpieces of the genre, especially 1983’s ‘Blue Monday’ and 1987’s ‘True Faith’.
‘Temptation’ was one of the earliest of these more pop-orientated singles. The track was released in May 1982 and rose to number 29 on the UK Singles Chart, an impressive position given that the influence of their top ten hit ‘Blue Monday’ was still to come. The 7″ version of the track was markedly different from its 12″ counterpart: the former was more synth-governed, while the latter centred on a more traditional rhythm.
In a 2015 interview with Mojo, Sumner described the track as his favourite New Order song. “It’s got a spirituality to it,” he explained. “It’s really uplifting without actually getting a specific message across. It was interesting to see that you could do that while, at the time, being fairly abstract. I struggled with the literalness of my lyrics in the early days. I didn’t want to expose my inner feelings to the general public.”
“‘Temptation’ is a song that showcases every element of New Order as a band, and that’s another one that always goes down a storm when played live,” bassist Peter Hook added in a 2014 interview with Songfacts.
Listen to New Order’s ‘Temptation’ below.
