New Order (continued)

New Order are touring on the back of a great album Music Complete which blends their offhand insouciance and Technique era dance-rock into a streamlined animal.  Tonight the songs from the album are backdropped by abstract, Mondrian-esque designs on the video screens to augment their gnomic presence, older tracks underlined by footage from the late seventies.  From their earliest beginnings Joy Division/New Order were both widescreen and homely, the everyday made epic and universal, and that is still true today.  In a show as big as The National's there was still time to observe Gillian's wry indulgence as Barney elbowed his way to do a keyboard solo on Blue Monday.
Nothing was as nape hair raising though as the last number, Love Will Tear Us Apart.  The use of images of Ian Curtis was the polar opposite of tawdry, it tapped into a collective feeling of lost opportunity and eternal optimism that levitated the crowd.  I swear!  The big screen graphics fell away to a minus sign then a plus sign, a minus, a - a +, a - a +,black and white, as if to say, all we lost, all we gained.  The last time I saw Bernard and Stephen performing the song was at the Sheffield Top Rank when Joy Division supported Buzzcocks.  In truth my memories are impossibly vague, I can barely remember anything beyond being there, and no-one had any way of knowing what the future held.
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