‘Thieves Like Us’: The New Order song Peter Hook that was overlooked
At this point, hating your biggest hit has to be one of the most tired of rock and roll clichés. The reason it’s up there with hating critics and multiple divorces, though, is that basically everyone falls victim to it. Radiohead took a decades-long break from playing ‘Creep’ live. Fountains of Wayne know that ‘Stacy’s Mom’ would make them both a one-hit-wonder and a novelty act. MGMT purposefully tanked their career after attracting huge crowds who only wanted to hear ‘Kids’. One would think that if your biggest hit was ‘Blue Monday’, though, you could live with it. Not so, according to New Order.
To be clear, it doesn’t take a whole lot to piss off Peter Hook. Just ask anyone who’s ever been in a band with him. So perhaps it’s no surprise that he doesn’t view New Order’s crowning achievement, one of the best and most enduring songs of the 1980s, with the fondness and respect his fans do. If anything, it’s a surprise he doesn’t seem to outright hate the song. He just believes that the band outdid it with its follow-up single.
In an interview with Q Magazine, Hooky said, “I honestly thought ‘Thieves Like Us’, the single after ‘Blue Monday’, was far superior. ‘Blue Monday’ is not a song. It’s a feeling, but once people hear that drum riff. they’re off”. In a way, you can kind of see where he’s coming from. ‘Blue Monday’ is a club song, an extended set of hooks and motorik beats perfectly crafted to match the peaks and troughs of a DJ set. An acoustic version of ‘Blue Monday’ would have to almost completely rework the original, and that’s not the case with ‘Thieves Like Us’.
Now, as with everything Peter Hook says, this could be bitterness speaking. After all, ‘Blue Monday’ managed to be a special kind of hit. A hit so big it lost them money. New Order, along with their label Factory, packaged the single in a special, die-cut sleeve that made it resemble a floppy disk (Google it, kids). Sure, it was expensive. In fact, each individual copy sold would recoup less than the amount spent packaging it. That would only be a problem if the single sold by the bucket load, and would a weird, six-minute club track like ‘Blue Monday’ do that?
Yes, it did. In fact, it’s the best-selling 12-inch single of all time. A case of getting exactly what you want so spectacularly inverted it must have been a wish made to a cursed monkey’s paw. So it could be that, since ‘Thieves Like Us’ followed up that particular fiasco, it doesn’t have the baggage involved with ‘Blue Monday’. However, it could also be that ‘Thieves…’ is a pretty spectacular pop song in its own right.
With its skyscraping chorus and synth hook, ‘Thieves Like Us’ works much better as a traditional pop song than ‘Blue Monday’. If anything, that’s the issue. While New Order were a great pop group, what made them special wasn’t their pure pop songs. It was the way they combined them with forward-thinking club bangers and fizzing indie rock riffs.
It’s telling that half the songs on Movement and Power, Corruption & Lies could have easily been released in 2006 or 2018, but ‘Thieves Like Us’ remains completely of its time, for better and worse.
