It’s fair to say that the small but attentive crowd gathered at Manchester’s Beach Club on the evening of 30 July 1980 were not prepared for what they were about to witness. Having arrived to see Factory Records act A Certain Ratio supported by Action Holiday, the audience were astonished to see three very familiar faces taking to the stage to kick off the evening’s entertainment. Yet while Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris were the remaining members of Joy Division, they weren’t here to play their old band’s songs. And though they weren’t billed as such on the night, the trio were about to play their first-ever live gig as New Order.
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The backstory: “We asked ourselves, ‘Do we want to carry on with music?’”
With hindsight, the simple fact that the three musicians were back onstage at The Beach Club barely two months following the death of their friend and bandmate Ian Curtis now seems astonishing. Yet, in addition to the grief they had to process, the loss of Joy Division’s charismatic singer left Sumner, Hook and Morris with a stark choice in terms of their own futures – and dithering over it wasn’t going to make the decision any easier.
“We had dinner in Macclesfield and asked ourselves, ‘Do we want to carry on with music or go back our day jobs?’” Peter Hook wrote in his memoir Substance: Inside New Order. “We agreed to rehearse on the Monday following that and over the weekend I wrote the riff to Dreams Never End [later released on New Order’s debut album, Movement]. I took it in and we worked on going forwards.”
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Initially, the three bandmates struggled as they settled into their new configuration. Over the summer of 1980, they recorded their first demo at Cabaret Voltaire’s Western Works studio, in Sheffield, and also cut a track, Haystack, with Leicester-born vocalist Kevin Hewick, whom Factory Records boss Tony Wilson felt might be worthy of consideration as a vocalist for what would become New Order. When that didn’t work out, Sumner, Hook and Morris had to think long and hard about who would front the group from now on, and they continued to work diligently on new material.
New Order’s debut gig: “The surprise on peoples’ faces was priceless”
The trio already had the songs Ceremony and In A Lonely Place left over from Joy Division’s final days, but within weeks they’d also have worked up tentative versions of several new songs, among them Dreams Never End, Truth, Homage, Cries And Whispers and Procession. Believing his charges now had enough material to get back onstage, their ever proactive manager, Rob Gretton, swung into action.
