The group who “changed what a band could be”, according to Bono
The important part of any rock band is that there are normally no set guidelines. Some people may want to put their favourite artist in a box once they find a sound that they like, but there are no rules that say that a musician has to keep on playing the same kind of music for the rest of their lives. Music is all about expanding one’s palette most of the time, and Bono knew that New Order shifted things on a dime the minute that they debuted.
Granted, New Order’s rise to the top wasn’t necessarily by choice. Although the group could have easily kept on keeping on as Joy Division after Ian Curtis’s death, the association with their name was going to be nothing ut morbid if they just tried to write the same kind of nervy post-punk all over again.
What they needed was a complete reinvention, and reimagining themselves as one of the leading synth bands of the 1980s was one of the more ingenious ways to separate themselves from their past. After all, what better to replace the doom and gloom side of their sound than try to make something that sounded like one of he most euphoric sounds of their time? Even when they were making emotional pieces, songs like ‘Blue Monday’ sounded gigantic compared to Joy Division’s muted sound.
While Bono was still cutting his teeth with an early version of U2 when New Order debuted, he thought that they set the template for how to operate, recalling in Surrender, “Listen to Joy Division, the great Manchester band of the late 1970s, then listen to New Order. Joy Division, however experimental, still sounds like a rock band. New Order is an electronic act, and with their song ‘Blue Monday’ began to change the concept of what a rock band could be.”
There’s no denying that New Order is still an electronic act, but their choice to go in a different direction than their origins is still a massive part of their rock ethos. The instrument of choice now might be a synthesiser, but if there’s one rock-based player in the group, it’s Peter Hook, always coming through with some of the thickest basslines of the underground scene.
That ingenuity in their genre switch also helped U2 find their path when they started seeing diminishing returns on their own sound. Once they hit the ceiling on The Joshua Tree, there was nowhere else to go, so instead of calling it a day, their decision to deconstruct everything and lean into electronic sounds is ripped straight from New Order alongside David Bowie.
And at the risk of facing ridicule from every punk, New Order might have a much broader influence on the greater music scene than Joy Division had. There are still people willing to make haunting music as Curtis did, but the idea of someone making tracks by themselves using a synthesiser is something New Order helped pioneer when throwing together their classics.
That influence continues on their more recent output, with Hook featured on the Gorillaz song ‘Aries’, which often sounds like Damon Albarn’s excuse to make his own New Order track from the ground up. Releasing emotion through guitars is still the main characteristic of rock and roll, but New Order proved that people could still unleash their feelings with a keyboard in front of them.
