From Joy Division's ashes, New Order made the best-selling 12-inch ever
When Ian Curtis died in May 1980, the three remaining members of Joy Division kept a pact to drop the name. Rebuilding as New Order, they discovered New York club culture, taught themselves drum machines and in 1983 released Blue Monday, which no other 12-inch single has ever outsold.
Curtis took his life on 18 May 1980, a day before a planned first North American tour. Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris played their first gig as an unnamed trio at Manchester's Beach Club on 29 July. Their manager Rob Gretton spotted the name in a Guardian headline about Kampuchean rebels; they briefly weighed The Witch Doctors of Zimbabwe instead, and insisted the name carried no fascist meaning. Sumner became frontman though he found singing while playing guitar hard, and Morris's girlfriend Gillian Gilbert joined on keyboards in October 1980.
The debut album Movement, from November 1981, felt like a low point to the band, still grieving. Yet producer Martin Hannett taught them to use a mixing desk, letting them produce themselves after he walked out midway through a mix. A trip to New York exposed them to electro and post-disco, and they cheered themselves up with Italian disco while Morris learned drum programming.
Factory Records' club, the Haçienda, opened in May 1982, largely paid for by the band and given its own catalogue number, FAC51. Power, Corruption & Lies arrived in May 1983, blending guitars with the influence of Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder, while Blue Monday was left off the album. True Faith, from 1987, became their first American top 40 hit, and Technique, partly made on Ibiza, entered the UK chart at number one in February 1989. Peter Saville's cover art gave the records their cool look.
The group split in 1993 and re-formed in 1998, though Hook left in 2007 after disputes. Their tenth studio album, Music Complete, came out in 2015, and in 2026 the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame honoured Joy Division and New Order jointly, as a single act.
Source: New Order (band)
