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New Order, that most modernist of bands, would presumably hate to think of themselves as the focus of nostalgia or a heritage act in the vein of, say, The Eagles, these days. But a new exhibition at Berlin\u2019s .HBC arts space, sponsored by T-Mobile\u2019s Electronic Beats programme, makes hay from the enduringly popular band\u2019s illustrious history, or more precisely the stuff surrounding their myth for 30 years or more.<\/p>\n
\u201cNew Order\u2013An Exhibition\u201d (note the missing spaces on either side of the em-dash separating the words \u201cOrder\u201d and \u201cAn\u201d \u2013 tr\u00e8s Factory, non?) shows a range of documentary photography by the band\u2019s perennial pal, portraitist and fellow Manc Kevin Cummins, along with the louche Peter Saville\u2019s sleeve artwork, which over the same time frame has spanned from the sumptuous and the austere.<\/p>\n
Naturally, the iconic, loss-making 12-inch sleeve for \u201cBlue Monday\u201d is there, along with his thermally-imaged designs for 1989\u2019s \u201cTechnique\u201d LP. In Cummins\u2019 photography, meanwhile, we see the band in the Paradise Garage, at a Liverpool football field (for the brilliantly preposterous \u201cWorld In Motion\u201d video) and on the streets of New York. In the minds of some \u2013 this writer, for instance \u2013 the photos of Bernard Sumner fl\u00e2neuring through NYC in his cherubic prime seem to solve the conundrum of whether New Order where actually a synthetic \u201cmachine\u201d group in the vein of the Human League, or a laddy guitar band who prefigured the Happy Mondays and Oasis: perhaps what they really are is a kind of intellectual boy band which happened to include one non-boy. There are also some of Cummins\u2019 chiaroscuro photos of Manchester\u2019s Arndale shopping centre, which, before it was blown up by the IRA in 1996, could match anything in Berlin for architectural ugliness. Brutalism, football, disco and NYC \u2013 all the stuff that put the \u201cnew\u201d in New Order.<\/p>\n
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The exhibition brings some accompanying merchandising \u2013 posters, T-shirts and so on, along with an attractive photo book which includes the artworks, an intriguing round-table convo between Max Dax, Bernard Sumner, Gillian Gilbert and Stephen Morris (in which it transpires that drummer Morris owns not one but four WWII tanks), plus a curious monograph on the band\u2019s history and meaningfulness by music critic and sometime provocateur Paul Morley, all delivered in his trademark neo-Futurist prose (\u201cThey created a new sort of nature,\u201d Morley contends.)<\/p>\n
The exhibition also launched with a further round-table talk in .HBC\u2019s cinema room with the band members, Cummins and Saville, a day before the band played Tempodrom. It was pouring with rain that evening, so much so that, surrounded by Karl-Leibknecht-Stra\u00dfe\u2019s blank platenbau high-rises and a DJ playing difficult disco, krautrock and NO hits, one could easily have mistaken the place for the Manchester of the early Eighties itself.<\/p>\n
Nostalgia \u2013 it\u2019s nothing to be afraid of really.<\/p>\n
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