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NEW ORDER - Bizarre Love Triangle (1986)
Amid stiff competition, my pick as the best band to come out of Manchester: New Order.
Almost the best band ever out of the United Kingdom too, if only I were able to count the combined brilliance of New Order with Joy Division as one entity.
Here’s a live-in-studio version of the Brotherhood album’s key track, “Bizarre Love Triangle,” and as a bonus, it’s in the preferred LP arrangement. The version most people are familiar with is actually an extended club remix by Shep Pettibone, but New Order were never keen on lip-syncing for the cameras. Hence, this is as live as if it were on a concert stage. While that live-only mentality would give us both the subpar (“Blue Monday” on Top Of The Pops) and the sublime (Jonathan Demme’s official video for “The Perfect Kiss”), I’m happy to mark this clip here, broadcast on French television in 1987, as one for the win column.
I like a lot of Shep Pettibone’s remixes, but the Brotherhood album arrangement of “Bizarre” is a little more organic. The club-fave Pettibone remix is too brittle, too sterile, and while it highlights those gorgeously chirpy staccato notes in the pre-chorus, what the song needs, if anything, is the meat-and-bones oomph provided by Peter Hook’s sawing basslines and Barney Sumner’s choppy rhythmn guitar. Listen for it, muscling in through the last minute of this clip, from 3:11 onward.
There’s some kind of audio dropout affecting Barney’s guitar, and his vocal’s a mite too low in the mix, but neither’s really enough to detract from this gloriously euphonious performance. Just listen to it as a slice of sound. Man, everything works here, from Barney’s sighing everyman verses to the fantastically uplifting fake string interludes to the unforgettable singalong chorus to the churning, locked-down vamp. Oh, it’s so five-star-perfect my heart hurts. (The frickin’ video cuts off about three seconds early, a typically YouTube-y shock to the system.)
With 1986’s Brotherhood, New Order broke away from the pristine, synth-led sound they’d perfected on their mid-decade singles (“Blue Monday,” “Confusion,” ”Thieves Like Us”) and albums (Power, Corruption & Lies and Low Life). With guitar and a chunkier drum sound to the fore, Brotherhood’s (relatively) earthy quality was as close to a trad band sound as New Order would ever get during their heyday, as songs like “Paradise,” “Weirdo” and the lovely “As It Is When It Was” boasted an unmissable live quality. “Bizarre Love Triangle” and “All Day Long” were the album’s hybrid pieces, playing the new, beefier live sound against some startlingly beautiful orchestral flourishes that wouldn’t’ve been out of place on older records (“I listen to a lot of classical music,” Sumner said in a November 1986 interview with the Toronto Star).
1989’s “All The Way” and 1993’s “Regret” covered similar ground, but the rough ‘n’ tumble Brotherhood has always been a good place to start a prospective fan coming over from a rawk background.
