New Order's Power, Corruption & Lies, 35 Years on

There are very few songs that have the indelibility of New Order’s Blue Monday – a track that turned 35 years old in March. The biggest selling 12'' single of all time, it remains iconic – a snapshot of an era, a turning point in British electronic music, and a crucial link between Seventies disco and the dance/house boom that took off at the end of the Eighties. Nowadays, you can hear Blue Monday being played in clubs all over the world alongside modern house music, yet it still sounds visionary – even in a contemporary context, and up against modern production.

Synth-pop had been a pervasive force in Britain for several years, but Blue Monday exhibited something rare in British popular music: a dance record that borrowed influences from the New York club scene while also indebted to Kraftwerk’s futuristic bent. New Order showed us that the whole point of inspiration is that you take something as a starting point, and then make it your own. That distinctive semiquaver kick-drum intro, for instance, was partly borrowed from a Donna Summer B-Side called Our Love, but it’s become a trademark; a sonic emblem for British electronic music, if you like.

Despite their disparate qualities, Blue Monday was in some ways a continuum of Love Will Tear Us Apart. Both are anthems synonymous with the city of Manchester: side-by-side, they represent the notion of change, a contradictory tale of a city in two parts. Love Will Tear Us Apart connects with people because of the emotional content within the song; Blue Monday connects with people because of the startling lack of emotional content within the song. It was indicative of music’s new landscape: the despondent pessimism of post-punk was forgone in favour of simply wanting to make people dance.

Blue Monday marked a long-awaited shift in New Order’s trajectory, too. The group finally separated themselves from their Joy Division associations on the subsequent Power, Corruption & Lies album. While Blue Monday didn’t appear on the original LP, the album was a veritable, lasting success, and a vast leap from debut album Movement. The dance/pop crossover (via a heavier use of electronic techniques) was primitive by today’s standards but worked strikingly well.

Released in May 1983, Power, Corruption & Lies offered an alternative to mainstream pop music, and showed us what pop music could be if it dared to defy conventions. In some ways, New Order managed to blur the lines between underground movements and mainstream culture. To some, however, Power, Corruption & Lies was a product of a band still living in the shadow of what happened three years before. Even the cover, taken from a painting by sleeve designer Peter Saville, could be mistaken as a commemorative symbol for Ian Curtis. It represents a new dawn and depicts reformation – like a flower in bloom – the process of moving on, finding their feet as well as their sound.

Power, Corruption & Lies is filled with moments that resonate and gnaw away at your subconscious years after its release. Peter Hook’s bass lines play a pivotal role in New Order’s sound here: look no further than Age of Consent for conviction, the opening bass line now instantly recognisable to even the most casual observer. Elsewhere, those glorious synth parts that linger between verses elicit a certain kind of nostalgia – the yearning for happier times; faint recollections of distant memories.

Power, Corruption & Lies’ triumph is partly down to a propensity for fusing melody and pop alongside more danceable elements, a quality that made New Order early proponents of the acid house movement. This is an album of stark contrasts: the juxtaposition between foreboding electronica and playful naivety is faultless; the ice-cool detachment of Your Silent Face is at odds with Age of Consent's joyous opening. It’s these nuances – the contiguity of light and dark – that bring the record to life.

There’s a newfound optimism on The Village – a track that demonstrates the same blissful innocence heard on the likes of Temptation and Ceremony. Across the album, lyrics remain cryptic, except for the sporadic moments of cloying sentimentality from Bernard Sumner: 'Our love is like the flowers / The rain, the sea and the hours,' he sings. Again, these parallels – a world where idiosyncrasy and poppy accessibility collide – are a persistent theme.

Remnants of Joy Division still linger on We All Stand and Ultraviolence; the latter is heavily informed by Kraftwerk’s pulsing synthesis, while the former sounds like a brooding outtake from Closer. The album’s pinnacle comes from the fleeting balladry of Your Silent Face, however. 'You caught me at a bad time, so why don’t you piss off?' sings Sumner, casually: poised, and negating the usual strain in his voice that pervades the rest of the album. New Order’s shimmering, melodic impulse shines brightly here, as does their unrivalled interpretation of the synth-pop love song. On the surface, New Order conjure feelings of desolation, despair, euphoria and heartbreak, but in actuality, their music was often introspective, sometimes sentimental, and heart-achingly romantic.

While Movement was a claustrophobic conclusion of a phase and time – a record that lived up to the perceived grey gloom of Manchester post-punk – Power, Corruption & Lies denotes optimism and a lighter new lease of life before the Haçienda helped to usher in a brighter, more hopeful generation. A more optimistic album, perhaps, but not a happy one – you only have to look to 586 and We All Stand to find the glimpses of sadness and anger still at play. It’s a gentler, less alienating version of New Order for sure, in part thanks to Gillian Gilbert’s increasingly critical role as keyboardist. It’s this version of the band that best stands the test of time.

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Power, Corruption & Lies by New Order was released on 2 May 1983, via Factory Records