There are lots of different ways of thinking about singles, of which let's just mention two. The album-oriented Rock Way is suspicious of singles: It's cool if a band writes something easy-to-like by accident, but to sit down and do it intentionally would be, like, crass and commercial. The Pop Way, on the other hand, is interested in how singles can work in a big social context-- the way you and 80% of everyone in a 10-mile radius can know and share the experience of, say, dancing to "Dancing Queen". The fascination here is that there's some conversation going on in Our Common Culture, and that a song can carve out spots in the lives of millions of people, whether or not said people actually buy the thing, or even know who sang it. This mindset holds slightly more sway in the UK, where it's a matter of more or less national trivia who holds the #1 single at Christmas time, or who's been picked to do the next Bond-movie theme.
I mention this because the product we're talking about today is a complete collection of the A-sides from New Order's 31 UK singles. That means these discs basically upgrade and/or supersede the Substance compilation, which is already most Americans' primary take-home method of engaging with New Order; this grouping updates stuff to the present, which means a bunch of latter-day singles that fewer people actually care about. For a lot of bands, this kind of thing would be a Greatest Hits proposition-- a run-down of album highlights, plus maybe a remix or soundtrack tune. With New Order, it is, of course, anything but. What you get instead is something like a timeline of this band's peculiar and ever-changing relationship with the single as a format, and all the notions of participation in Our Common Culture that come along with that. And the really weird twist is this: Part of what makes the collection so engaging in the fact that New Order have not always been good at negotiating this stuff. From leftover Joy Division songs to 12-inch dance edits to World Cup anthems, they tend to be sorting it out as they go along, which turns out to be more interesting to follow than if they knew exactly what they were up to.
The first four singles here accomplish as much as most bands do in their careers, which is to find their sound and make it work. This is where the energetic hustle and excited riffing of certain Joy Division songs turns over into the "happier" major-key gut-stirring stuff that makes New Order anthems so lovable: Vocals have shifted from dour, gruff Ian to starry-eyed Bernard, Gillian has come in on keyboards, and by the time you get to the 7" version of "Temptation" the whole thing has coalesced into the cruising, casual, hook-filled style that would sustain this band's pretty-great rock albums for years to come. (And not just them: the guitar and bass sounds here are the basic DNA at the core of a massive chunk of indie.) The not-very-good single from this period, in fact, is "Everything's Gone Green", in which the band discovers a) Computer-based sequencers, and b) Almost the exact vocal line from "Blue Monday", and stumble their way through an awkward dry run-- i.e., for a second, they were actually doing better not trying anything new.
Then they embrace dance music: the drum machines and sequencers, the extended 12" mixes, the single as something totally distinct from the album version, the iconic "Blue Monday". Given how successful all that stuff turned out-- you probably hear "Blue Monday" more than "Dancing Queen"-- it's tempting to think this is the part where New Order start aiming their singles the Pop Way. The truth, though, is possibly the other way around. Geeking out on computer music, Italian disco, and Kraftwerk, collaborating with NYC dance producers like Arthur Baker: This stuff was New Order abandoning a working formula to follow their own muse, one exploratory enough that it was probably more likely to lead them to the punks-gone-dance obscurity of A Certain Ratio than the dance-pop stardom of Duran Duran. And yet, and yet: "Blue Monday" became the best-selling British 12" single.
One reason for this is that "Blue Monday" is totally fucking sweet. (Even if you think it's "overplayed," which it is, it's still totally fucking sweet.) Another essential thing, though, is that starry-eyed ultra-earnest quality of Bernard's. The English seem to have a soft spot for anyone who can credibly fit the everyday white guy into dance music, which is usually assumed too futuristic or "soulful" (read: non-white) to accommodate him-- see also Happy Mondays, Primal Scream, "Born Slippy". New Order's best dance music did exactly this: It allowed the group to work, genuinely and enthusiastically, in all sorts of cool new electronic dance tropes while still allowing Bernard and bass-playing Peter to function like everyday white-guy indie lads. (Bernard's chronically clunky lyrics might even have helped: This is a guy who doesn't just rhyme "June" with "spoon," but requires seriously dubious associations just to rhyme "own" with "phone." All while talking about serious stuff.) The combination's not only totally thrilling-- all the perks of dance, pop, and indie in one seamless package-- but accessible to all sorts of people in all sorts of ways. The magic here is that New Order may not have initially courted big popular dance singles; it's possible that they got the popular to come to them.
And then look what they could do with it! The middle of this first disc contains all of the moments for which New Order are so well-remembered, even by folks who've never heard any of their albums. "Blue Monday," obviously. Maybe better: "The Perfect Kiss", a sunny blend of that early rock cruise with disco claps and soul phrasing. A few singles later, and they've consolidated their dance-edit success with their pop cruise even more deftly-- now they're sitting down and writing smash singles in the Pop Way, new Common-Culture icons like "Bizarre Love Triangle" and "True Faith". God knows how, but it makes it even better to hear them fail in between peaks like that-- note the 12" mix of "Sub Culture", which turned out iffy enough that regular designer Peter Saville supposedly declined to do a sleeve for it. (One of its problems: Bernard evidently getting self-conscious about the white-guy thing and recruiting Actual Black Women to double his lines, which never works for anyone.) It's good context for those highs, and some of the lesser-known singles are just a testament to the sound: Even when the songwriting's formless and Bernard's using the same chants you heard on the last track, the results are still terrific listening.
Just as interesting is the period where New Order are-- on the basis of those smashes-- irrevocably involved in this conversation about Our Common Culture, something that nets any number of curious effects. "Fine Time" was the band's response and contribution to the late-80s wave of UK acid house. "Blue Monday 88" was a smoothed-out remix by none other than Quincy Jones. "World in Motion" was the official theme song for England's 1990 World Cup squad, and was totally freighted by all sorts of terrific Common-Culture concerns, from hooliganism fears to the incipient rise of rave culture; this is the kind of "talking to the kids" Art Brut dream of. The peak of it all is 1993's "Regret", which is sort of the ultimate New Order song-- a fine-tuned pop single in that same old early-cruising mode, most everything you could love about them crammed into one joyous smash-hit victory lap. I doubt you'll be surprised to hear that the excitement ends there, though the good songs don't. Some singles sound a bit limp, or dire, or offputtingly elder-statesmanly, but there's nothing wrong with or unlovable about, say, "Crystal" or "Here to Stay" or "Waiting for the Siren's Call"; there's something just plain basic and familiar and comforting about this band's signature casual pulse, and it's almost reassuringly beautiful to hear them settle ever more comfortably into its formulas.
Given the intro to this whole overlong deal, you might assume that I'm in favor of that Pop Way of thinking about singles. And yes, if you put that rhetorical gun to my head and asked me to be a partisan, I probably would be. But the point here is maybe something else-- that all those multiple multiform ways of thinking about how a format like the single can work (Pop Way, Rock Way, Dance Way, Mixtape Way, whatever) create a whole astounding system in and of themselves. And when it comes to the various stories of bands negotiating that system, I can't think of too many that are as fascinating as New Order's-- a story that's pretty much audible on these two discs.
