Everything’s in order

New Order have had a career spanning four decades, releasing ten studio albums and winning a handful of NME awards along the way. Now, the rockers arrive in Dubai

An outdoor arena in the North-West of England was packed for a much-loved band’s hometown gig. The frontman was 60 years old, introducing songs as old as some of the audience, but no-one was sitting down – and everyone knew the words.

Last summer, New Order weren’t simply playing to a Manchester crowd hungry for nostalgia, they were as eager to please as a fresh young band with everything to prove. Bernard Sumner will never be a vivacious frontman – he’s too long of tooth and dry of wit for that. But, as his band- mates (minus, infamously, low-slung bassist Peter Hook) rattled through songs old and new they felt as vibrant, exciting – and excited – as the classic New Order of the 1980s.

Perhaps such renewed vigour came from their highest charting album in more than 20 years. It was certainly no coincidence that 2015’s Music Complete was a bonefide return to form, a nod to the poignant electronic pop that made them so influential in the 1980s and early 1990s. Tutti Frutti, Restless, People On The High Line – any of these new songs could sit happily alongside the career highlights of Blue Monday, True Faith or Bizarre Love Triangle.

So when New Order play Dubai for the first time on April 7, they will arrive in rude health. Which, as dedicated New Order watchers know, is something of a miracle in itself. After all, this is a band who have – sometimes accidentally, sometimes wilfully – self-destructed in the past. New Order formed after Ian Curtis, the frontman of their previous incarnation, Joy Division, died. They wrote the biggest-selling 12-inch single of all time in Blue Monday, but the die-cut sleeves cost so much to manufacture, their record label Factory lost money on every copy they sold.

And, famously, they built one of the most era-defining nightclubs in Manchester’s Hacienda, where dance music was effectively hothoused in the late 1980s. It was packed every night. Peter Hook says it lost them £18 million (Dhs82 million) by the time it closed in 1997. They stopped talking, they fell out, they sued each other.

But then, that bittersweet journey through a career in pop is shot through their music, too. The pulsing electronic disco of 1983’s Blue

Monday might sound euphoric, but it has no chorus to speak of, and the payoff is “how does it feel, when your heart grows cold?” Four years later, True Faith, one of New Order’s most straightforward pop songs, has the regretful line “again and again I’ve taken too much/Of the things that cost you too much”.

And talking of Regret, the New Order song, there was something brilliantly incongruous about a bunch of miserable Mancs singing “I was upset you see, almost all the time”, on the permanently sunny set of Baywatch as they promoted their 1993 single.

Of course, these are songs that are decades old now – the equivalent of the writers chronicling New Order’s pomp in the early 1980s arguing that Perry Como ruling the charts 34 years previously in 1949 was somehow relevant. But the difference is, New Order are anything but an irrelevance for generations of music lovers who have grown up since their heyday. Most of their collaborators on Music Complete – Elly Jackson from La Roux, The Killers’ Brandon Flowers or The Chemical Brothers’ Tom Rowlands – weren’t even teenagers when Blue Monday was released. As The New Yorker put it in 2015, such is their influence on “the large, hybrid musical territory we might call ‘synth pop’ or ‘dance rock’ that entire careers are impossible to imagine without [them]”. The fact that they still care enough to make exciting new synth pop or dance rock is encouraging enough – that they will bring it to Dubai along with their classic songs is cause for celebration. April 7

Dubai Duty Free Tennis Stadium, Dubai, 8pm, from Dhs349. Tel: (04) 4573112. Taxi: The Irish Village. platinumlist.net