While I walked down to the beach — New Order 2020

The first thing we did when we got to Miami was buy the drugs. By which I mean we walked past two very hopping clubs at 1:30am, complete with many people not wearing much in the way of clothing, and went straight for the 24-hour Walgreens with its bounty of NyQuil and VapoRub. It’s like a Northern Soul Revival if you squint hard enough, I swear.

(Although to be fair, the reviews for the clubs are…pretty terrible. Though I’m struggling to wrap my head around somebody spending $1500 (in cash!) on what’s clearly not a major or even that fancy club)

I’d like to say that we spent our one full day in Miami seeing all the sights that we could stuff into the 24 hours. What actually happened is that we got lunch in the Time Out Market, including some Bachour pastries, wandered aroun South Beach, and then we went back to the hotel where I laid in bed for the entire afternoon whilst Tammy worked out a concoction of cold medicines that would keep me up and running for the concert.

(let’s take a minute here to talk about The Fillmore Miami Beach. A wonderful art deco building that has surprisingly good sight lines even at the back of the venue, but the people running it seem to have absolutely no idea about how queues work or the chaos that results when you combine seating with general admission policies. Absolute madness ensued, and I’m still not entirely sure we sat in the right place)

New Order — fac 2020

If you were going to choose an era of New Order to see live, it’s likely that the post-2000 era is not going to be at the top of your list. Still, as I was barely a teenager when the 90s hiatus began, I can’t complain too much, and if I had to make a choice in this century, I’d definitely prefer seeing a lineup with Gillian Gilbert in it than one that doesn’t have her but does have Hook (cue my long-standing diatribe about how Gilbert has often got short shrift in fan circles over the years).

Anyway, the concert itself was good! Nothing on the scale of Taras Shevchenko, obviously, but a good fun mix of the hits people want to hear, new songs, songs that haven’t been played for a while, and even though they’ve been playing them for a while, the-still-surprising Joy Division songs (including Disorder, which they’ve only started playing again in the past couple of years). Was I disappointed that they didn’t play World In Motion despite 2020 being its 30 year anniversary? Sure, but I do appreciate that maybe Miami isn’t the ideal setting for an England World Cup song. And they played World (The Price of Love).

Also, whilst I will not be taking any questions at this time in response to my argument that the 12” version of Temptation is the only one that should be allowed to exist, the reworked Substance version they played did come with a strangely affecting nostalgia-heavy video including footage of BASF cassettes, ghetto blasters, radios, and even footage of OutRun. It’s still wrong, though.

A different concert experience than the rather Los Campesinos!-heavy ones I’ve had of late, but I have now seen New Order live and I’m very happy about having done so. And as always, many thanks to Tammy for managing to come up with a cocktail of cold remedies that kept me going all the way to the end of the concert before I collapsed back into a pile of snot. I have been ill every day of 2020 so far. I’m quite tired of it.