Critics—like parents—make the same mistakes generation after generation. Fashions and labels may change, but still one artist is dismissed for an unfocused emotionalism, another for offering style as a substitute for substance. Rock critics often ape their more literary counterparts, and are not immune to their ailments. For instance, a friend—a reformed rock critic and onetime member of a garage band who’s now employed by the music industry—called about a year ago, and when talk turned to New Order and its compilation record of 80s dance music, he said, “They call it Substance, but that’s just style.”
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New Order’s approach to the music and its packaging—in all formats, from singles to albums to videos to newspaper interviews—is so distanced and self-effacing that it invites misinterpretation. The band has taken the trouble to list its members on only a couple of its albums, and on the one occasion when photos were permitted (1985’s Love Life), they were distorted. The band members do not often take part in interviews of any sort. This all tends to anger writers and critics—who in a typical catch-22 see this all as a pose designed to attract yet more fans—resulting in charges that New Order is a cold, selfless band that emphasizes style over substance.
Yet even a coarse familiarity with the music tells otherwise. Bernard Sumner/Albrecht, the group’s guitarist and lead singer, would be a poseur if he were any less shy on record than he appears to be in real life. His vocals—like almost all the other elements of the band’s music—run counter to the traditional blues roots of rock ‘n’ roll. They don’t attempt to project emotion so much as they stifle or reject it. This would be an indictment in a rock band, and it would be a fatal flaw for most dance music (think of the recent “What You Don’t Know” with Sumner singing), but New Order turns it into a grace point by its higher ambitions—as a pop band.
The band would have been well-advised to take the same tack in its live performance at Poplar Creek late last month. After the gross, self-aggrandizing performance of Johnny Rotten and Public Image Ltd., New Order could have been no better set up for a performance of straight music—four heads bobbing in time as the songs pour out of the speakers. Instead, while Gillian Gilbert and Steven Morris hovered on the side and back of the stage on synth and drums, Sumner and bass player Peter Hook stepped out as polar opposites. Hook played aggressively. He wore his bass slung low, almost down to his knees, and he stressed notes with hefty shrugs of his shoulders and hips; he played bass the way some people move pianos, a metaphor stressed by his jeans, boots, sleeveless T-shirt, and hair tied back in a ponytail. Sumner, on the other hand, appeared on stage looking like someone who had just stepped off the sand at Grand Beach. He wore a pale blue New Order-tour T-shirt and long pale blue shorts—almost knee length—above Converse high-tops. Unsatisfied merely standing at the mike but uncomfortable with the usual rock-star poses, he circled with his arms out, like a child playing airplane, during the more transcendent moments; then he doubled over, hand on knee, to sing into the microphone during moments that demanded a more pained expression. Sumner doesn’t work a crowd; he attempts to charm it with an almost cloying ineptitude. For a band whose music is so successfully contrived on record, it is perhaps the worst possible impression to give an audience.
