Joy Division and New Order

On June 4, 1976, the Sex Pistols played their first concert outside London, at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester, to perhaps 30 to 50 people. Two childhood friends from Salford, Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook, went separately. Sumner said the Pistols had “destroyed the myth of being a pop star”, and the next day Hook borrowed £35 from his mother to buy a bass. Ian Curtis, who knew them from earlier gigs, was at the Pistols’ second show there that July. He answered their advert for a singer in the Virgin Records shop and was taken on without an audition.

They called themselves Warsaw, after David Bowie’s “Warszawa”, and played their first gig in May 1977. Stephen Morris, who had been to the same school as Curtis, was the only drummer to answer their next advert. Early in 1978 they became Joy Division, a name taken from the 1953 novel House of Dolls, where it names a wing of a Nazi concentration camp. At a gig at Rafters that April, Curtis berated the Granada TV presenter Tony Wilson for not putting them on his show, and the club’s DJ, Rob Gretton, was so taken that he became their manager. Two of their songs, produced by Martin Hannett, were on A Factory Sample, the first release on Wilson’s new label, Factory Records.

Joy Division made Unknown Pleasures over three weekends in April 1979 with Martin Hannett, who thought punk sonically conservative and used the studio to make space. He brought in digital delays, a smashing bottle, someone eating crisps and the sound of the studio lift, and recorded Curtis’s vocal for “Insight” down a telephone line. Hook and Sumner disliked it at first: their gigs were loud and heavy, and Hook said it sounded like Pink Floyd. By 2006 he conceded: “Martin Hannett created the Joy Division sound.”

Factory pressed 10,000 copies. Sales were slow until the single “Transmission” that November, and unsold boxes filled the label’s office in the flat of its co-founder Alan Erasmus. The album never made the UK albums chart in Curtis’s lifetime, but it was No. 2 on the first indie chart in January 1980, and its 40th-anniversary reissue reached No. 5 in 2019.

Ian Curtis grew up in Macclesfield, a bookish boy with a flair for poetry, and worked as a civil servant while the band got going. He married Deborah Woodruff in 1975, and their daughter, Natalie, was born in April 1979. He was the band’s only lyricist, and he would not explain the words: “the lyrics are open to interpretation,” he told a fanzine. Through the spring of 1980 his epilepsy and depression grew worse, and he was anxious about how American audiences would react to his epilepsy.

Curtis died by suicide on May 18, 1980, aged 23, the day before Joy Division were to leave for their first North American tour. In his obituary, Jon Savage wrote that “now no one will remember what his work with Joy Division was like when he was alive; it will be perceived as tragic rather than courageous.”

Joy Division recorded Closer between March 18 and 30, 1980, at Britannia Row in London, again with Hannett. Five of the nine songs were guitar pieces written in late 1979 and played live that year. The rest, written early in 1980, such as “Isolation” and “Decades”, lean on synthesisers, some of which Sumner built himself. Hook and Sumner were unhappy with Hannett again: Hook said he made the guitar on “Atrocity Exhibition” “sound like somebody strangling a cat”.

It came out two months after Curtis’s death, reached No. 6 in the UK and was the NME’s album of the year. Tony Wilson had told Sumner that this time next year he’d be “lounging by a swimming pool in LA with a cocktail in your hand”; Sumner thought it “the most utterly ridiculous thing anyone had ever said to me.” By 1982 Closer had sold over 250,000 copies.

Long before, the band had agreed that if any of them left, the rest would change the name. Sumner, Hook and Morris played their first show as a trio, still unnamed, at Manchester’s Beach Club on July 29, 1980. Gretton found the name New Order in a Guardian headline, “The New Order of Kampuchean Rebels”; they had also considered the Witch Doctors of Zimbabwe. On a short US tour that autumn all three took turns singing, until Sumner took the job, though he found it hard to sing and play guitar at once.

In October Gretton suggested Morris’s girlfriend, Gillian Gilbert, who had once played guitar at a Joy Division show, and she joined on keyboards and guitar. The first single, in January 1981, was “Ceremony” with “In a Lonely Place”, the last two songs written with Curtis. As a quartet they recorded “Ceremony” again, for a 12-inch that September.

New Order recorded Movement at Strawberry between April 24 and May 4, 1981, still learning to write and arrange without Curtis. Their rapport with Hannett had worn away: he was in a legal dispute with Factory and struggling with drink and drugs, and the band found him uncooperative. Hook sang lead on “Dreams Never End” and “Doubts Even Here”, and Sumner on the rest. Gilbert’s arrival let them push further towards synthesisers.

It came out weeks after the Joy Division collection Still, to a tepid reception, and peaked at No. 30. The band saw the time as a low point, and Hook said the one good thing to come of it was that Hannett taught them to use a mixing desk, so they could produce themselves from then on. Later he changed his mind: “when you consider the circumstances in which it was written, it is a fantastic record.”

The Haçienda, Factory’s nightclub, largely funded by New Order, opened in a former yacht builder’s warehouse in Manchester on May 21, 1982. Its name came from a Situationist slogan, “The Hacienda Must Be Built”, and the cedilla was added because “çi” looks like 51, its Factory catalogue number. The comedian Bernard Manning opened it with “I’ve played some shit-holes during my time, but this is really something”. New Order marked the night with a nearly 23-minute instrumental, parts of which turned up on “Blue Monday”.

They wrote “Blue Monday” in their rehearsal room in Cheetham Hill, with a Moog Source bass on a sequencer Sumner built, an Oberheim DMX drum machine and choir sounds sampled from Kraftwerk’s “Uranium”. It was before MIDI, so an engineer designed a circuit to keep the machines in time. Gilbert wrote the sequence out by hand on a long roll of paper and added an extra rest by mistake, which threw it slightly out of time; they liked it and kept it. It became the best-selling 12-inch single ever, with 1.16 million copies sold in the UK.

On their second album New Order found their footing, mixing the guitar sound they came from with sequencers and the influence of Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder. “5-8-6” has been called “a literal interpretation of early house music”. “Blue Monday” came from the same sessions but was kept off the album in the UK.

In Rolling Stone, Steve Pond called it a “remarkable declaration of independence” from Joy Division and a “quantum leap” over Movement. Robert Christgau called it “their nicest record ever”, and Slant later called it “their first perfect pop record”.

Low-Life is where New Order finished turning from a post-punk band into a dance-rock one, with more synthesisers and samplers but the rock still in it. AllMusic called it “the point where the band’s fusion of rock and electronics became seamless”. The concert film Pumped Full of Drugs, shot in Tokyo just before it came out, is built on its songs, and Jonathan Demme directed the video for “The Perfect Kiss”.

In Smash Hits, Neil Tennant gave it 8 out of 10 and called it their best: “not just doomy electronic workouts but memorable melodies with a sense of humour lurking in the words.” Melody Maker liked most of it but called “Love Vigilantes” “an appallingly naive self-parody”.

Brotherhood split New Order’s two sides onto the two sides of the record, one for guitars and one for synthesisers. Morris said it was made “in a schizophrenic mood”, and later that it “didn’t quite work”. “Bizarre Love Triangle”, its only single, was their breakthrough in the US and Australia.

Christgau made it a pick hit: “Bernard Albrecht’s vocals have taken on so much affect they’re humane.” Uncut’s David Quantick saw New Order becoming themselves: “if anyone was entitled to not be Joy Division, they certainly were.” The next summer the singles collection Substance gave them “True Faith”, their first US top 40 hit.

Hook pushed for Ibiza after a run of records made in “dark and horrible” London studios. The band spent four months on the island and fell for its Balearic club music: “They’d put an acid record on and then the next one would be a Queen one,” Morris said. They left with the album “20% complete”, Sumner said, and finished it at Peter Gabriel’s Real World in Wiltshire, in a “much more sober atmosphere”.

Hook called it “an epic power struggle between the sequencers and me”. Technique was their first No. 1 album in the UK. Back in Manchester the Haçienda, which had lost money for years, had been full every night since early 1987 on house music, and in July 1988 it began an Ibiza night called Hot.

Hook said they were forced to make Republic to save the Haçienda, which was losing a great deal of money. They were told that without another album Factory would go bankrupt, and the band, who had guaranteed loans for Factory and the club, would be ruined. He and Sumner were “at that point in the relationship where you hate each others’ stinking guts”. New Order reportedly spent £400,000 on it, and Factory went bankrupt in November 1992.

London Records had wanted to buy Factory, but the deal fell through: New Order had never signed a contract, so they, not the label, owned their records. The album came out on London, went to No. 1 in the UK and No. 11 in the US, and was nominated for the Mercury Prize. After the Reading Festival that August the band stopped. “We were turning into the sort of group we used to hate,” Hook said.

In 1988, frustrated that the others didn’t want more synth programming, Sumner called Johnny Marr of the Smiths. As Electronic they put out “Getting Away with It” in December 1989, and made three albums by 1999, with help early on from the Pet Shop Boys. Hook formed Revenge, whose One True Passion came out in 1990, and Gilbert and Morris became the Other Two. While Sumner was away with Electronic, the other three wrote a whole instrumental New Order album, shelved when he came back.

They met again in 1998, at Gretton’s suggestion, agreeing first to “iron out” any grudges, and made the guitar-heavy Get Ready (2001) and Waiting for the Sirens’ Call (2005), with Phil Cunningham in for Gilbert, who stayed home with her and Morris’s children. In May 2007 Hook told the radio station Xfm, “Me and Bernard aren’t working together.” New Order came back in 2011, with Gilbert and with Tom Chapman on bass.

Music Complete was New Order’s first album without Hook, the first with Chapman on bass, and the first as a five-piece, with Gilbert back and Cunningham staying. After two guitar records it turned back to electronics. Elly Jackson of La Roux, Iggy Pop and Brandon Flowers of the Killers sing on it, Tom Rowlands produced “Singularity” and “Unlearn This Hatred”, and Stuart Price worked on “Superheated”.

In Rolling Stone, Barry Walters wrote that Hook’s departure “frees them to create their most varied and substantial work in decades.” Uncut called it “easily New Order’s best album since Technique”. As of 2026 it is their most recent album.

New Order toured Music Complete round Europe in late 2015, and in 2017 played the Manchester International Festival with the artist Liam Gillick. In 2020 they put out “Be a Rebel”, their first new song in five years, and in 2022 they toured North America with the Pet Shop Boys. At a show in Osaka in February 2025 they played “State of the Nation” for the first time since 1987.

In 2026 Joy Division and New Order were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame together, as one act, after nominations in 2023 and 2025. That June the band announced that Morris and Gilbert would not be touring for the foreseeable future, for “personal health reasons”.