Customer Reviews
Very nice DVD release - New Order on top form here - By: L. Green, 04 Jul 2008 
Barcode: 0825646333721
Thank God for New Order! 2007/2008 hasn't looked promising what with the 'have they split?/haven't they?' so to have this new DVD is a nice reminder as to what a fantastic band New Order are - over 25 yearsin the business & still on top form. We haven't really had any major releases since 2005 so this DVD package is a real treat for us fans.
I'll start by saying the production quality of this whole package is very good. The menus are simple but look good, as does the packaging itself. In terms of the Glasgow gig itself (which is contained on disc 1), its well shot, giving all members of the band their time on screen + the lighting is just right. Sound quality is pretty good too; drums & electronicsin particular sounding particularly crispin the mix.
The setlist is decent, balancing 5 tracks from their most recent (and as it stands, quite possibly their final) album, Waiting For The Sirens' Call against olderr material. While i personally i'd have liked to see more from Technique & Republic, the inclusion of Regret will have to do. It's also interesting to see 4 Joy Division covers played too (5 if you include Ceremony), they are done very well though & the crowd go mad for Love Will Tear Us Apartin the encore.
As the band themselves attest to, there are some tracks that 'just work' live & Temptation is one of those - the crowd has a proper singalong to that one. On the whole, the band whip through the set list with ease & remarkable energy. I also like the quick little interview interludes spread throughout.
Other highlights include The Perfect Kiss seguing into Blue Moday & it's nice to see the little sample of 'Set me free...' from Kylie's 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head' used here. On the whole though, the tracks stay pretty close to their studio versions, the exception being True Faith which is done as a nicely executed 'raved-up' early 90s dance version. It's little touches like this that are testament to the band's continuing innovativeness & ingenuity.
As for the band, Hooky looks like he's really enjoying himself, getting right to the front of the stage, grinning through most of the gig while Stephen's drumming is as awe-inspiring as ever. Bernard isin good spirits too & although he seems to have a bit of trouble with his earpiece at a number of points, there's a confidence to his performance which really hammers this home as a great live performance. And, as one of the other reviewers on here said, Phil's contribution is much appreciated too, performing equally well on guitar & keyboards, helping to really beef up the sound of the band.
On disc 2 we get a number of curios from the past, or, as the disc is titled - 'rare & unseen footage' - presumably mostly dug up from old video recordings, the quality is abviously not the best with the Rome & Cork gigsin particular suffering from being filmed from the audience. The recent performance at Hyde Park is obviously of a higher quality & while on the whole this second disc is a bit hit & miss it's nice to see the development to the band's live performances over the years.
[Note: There is also a limited edition version of this DVD available with the catalogue number '5051442846829' which also contains a CD with a cut-down 12 song version of the gig on it]
Glasgow review - By: Mrs. S. F. Chapman, 30 Jun 2008 This dvd of their concert exceeded my expectations. I liked
the interspersed interviews. Having now watched it 6 times on
the last occasion played track listings only. I think that
they should do another album, I believe they have only just
reached the peak of their ability.
Burn Out... or Fade Away? - By: Mr. M. A. Reed, 08 Jun 2008 So this is permanent. A record, an addendum, a summary of New Order who,in various forms & names, lasted 30 years as a stubbornly individual fixturein Manchesters musical legacy. With this, "Live In Glasgow", their sixth concert film, New Order reflect & restate everything about them that they were for so long.
While New Order have always been frustratingly uneven live, "Live In Glasgow" demonstrates that,in their final decade, New Order always managed somehow to overcome their previous neurosis & somehow became a relatively smooth & efficient machine that allowed them to rejoicein their music - even if their lives were falling apart. It's hard to believe on the strength of the performance within, that New Order had less a month & 9 live shows left within them.
Unlike some of their once contemporaries - the Factory-processed-and-reformed Happy Mondays who became a tribute band featuring three original members & a different pre-existing band bolted on around them, or the 78/08 Let's-Play-An-Ancient-Album-In-Full of OMD - New Order were never a nostalgia act : they never pretended that 1988 or 1998 didn't happen, they never pretended to existin a hermetically sealed time capsule, they always moved forward, wrote new material, tried different things. Even at this late stagein their 30 year history, the albatross that was "Blue Monday" was being revamped, reworked with new parts & different flavours. When The Stones play "Satisfaction" it sounds exactly the same as it did 40 years ago, & thus, it ever was, whilst New Order dispense with the nostalgia & the need for the comfort of reassurance, even the oldest songs sounds oddly topical & vibrant.
Starting with a late-period "Crystal", the band seem musically at least to be firing on all cylinders. Hooky prowls as the road beast he is, Morris enthusiastically plays with the passion he did when he was 20, & Sumner appears to have grown used to being the focal point by messing with the audiences preconceptions of what exactly he should be doing. New recruit Phil Cunningham meanwhile performs with no shortage of skill & acquits himself as more than suitable for the role. Thankfully, he's not `edited out' of the film as certain, vain bands have a habit of hiding their new members : when I saw Pink Floyd at Live 8 on the DVD, I didn't even know they had a Jon Carin as second keyboardist/ additional guitarist as he was never even seen on the screen once. This leaner New Order have also dispensed with an extraneous & incongruous backing vocalist seen on earlier toursin favour of a classic four piece configuration. It is a credit to the band, & their integrity, that they never pretended that "Tonight New Order Are Gonna Rock YOU! Scream For Me Long Beach!" Spinal Tap fashion. Even at their most celebratory - the comback shows of 1998 - New Order had a certain detached reserve & Bernard Sumners off between song interjections seemed a knowing mockery of existant rock cliché.
The set draws heavily from recent past, with five songs from their final album, & an unapologetic acknowledgement that the past exists - & that they, like everyone are here because of it - but also firmly resist the end-of-the-pier karaoke temptation of the aging career musician. As a live recording, the band have finally produced, for the first time, a document that captures not only the performance the band give, but also what it feels like for the audience : the audio mixing reflects the joyous celebration, the dedicated & heartfelt communal hymns these songs eventually became. The audience becomes part of the show itself, with the backing vocals & chorus lines for these unwitting anthems being sometimes almost as loud as the band itself : the melody line for "Temptation" unwaveringly becomes a massed hymn of unconscious abandoned, as a thousand Indie bedrooms from the Eighties & air guitarist fantasies become flesh for a few short minutes. And not only that, but the newer material - such as "Guilt Is A Useless Emotion" are keenly executed unapologetically as statements of intent that even to the end, New Order may have become old, but never old hat nor old skool.
The final two songs of the main set - a resurrected & powerful "Perfect Kiss" & a revised "Blue Monday" (that also cheekily transmogrifies briefly into Kylie's "Can't Get Blue Monday Out of My Head" cover version then back again), run together into a quarter-hour medley : much like the bands tradition of yore where they remixed songs on stage & improvised as they went along. The concert ends with three Joy Division songs as an encore : timely reminders that Joy Division & New Order were one, but not the same, two sides of the same coin, together, yet alone, joined - but apart. These Joy Division songs could never equal the original recordings as time marches on, the grinding fist of poverty & teenage ambition has been conquered, but are faithful, powerful moments that show that no one can ever be as good as Joy Division - or even come close - apart from the original members themselves.
The second disc is both under- & over-whelming. Taken, as it clearly is, from a cupboard of hundreds of old VHS tapes filmed by the band all over the world during their career, it captures a nascent band tentatively debuting on local television - & falling over drunk on stage at a primitive 1981 Glastonbury, a handful of songs from their 1985 shows that are cheaply recordedin dark roomsin Toronto & Rome, before becoming an unwitting US Arena Actin 1989. The final two songs see the band on their final tour, battling rain & malfunctioning equipment to perform "She's Lost Control"in a monsoon. It's a blessing to see the band present themselvesin a warts-and-all fashion, but ultimately frustrating given that there's at least 75 minutes of unused space on the second disc, & the fragments of the shown are short excerpts from full-length shows, as well as failing to tidy up the cornucopia of long-deleted blink-and-you'll-miss--them VHS-only releases from the 80's.
The postscript of interviews with the individual members, filmed after the event & with each member alone, clearly demonstrates to even the most amateur psychologist that philosophically the band were fragmented & fractured. Whatever one claims to love, another claims to loathe without even knowing it. As an epitah, "Live In Glasgow" shows that despite all other things, the fire never really went out within the band, even to the end, & if it is the final farewell from the band, then, realistically, at least they went out with both their integrity & their abilities intact.
Here are the old men... - By: Colin Mccartney, 07 Jun 2008 
...and they must have had a weight on their shoulders if Hooky's in-between songs comment about his bad back is anything to go by.
In fact though, the title of this review is inspired by disc 2 of the package: which is about as useful as Joy Division's "Here are the Young Men" VHS (if anyone remembers that?) i.e. poor quality vision & sound. It starts off well enough - the first 3 tracks from "Celebration 1981" look as though they have undergone some sort of digital restoration process, albeit ICB & Chosen Time probably don't rank among anyone's favourite New Order numbers. The Glastonbury 1981 piece is also interesting (even surprising)in a wacked-out, AHW-esque kind of a way & provides a reminder of what Glastonbury used to be like (I would imagine, never having been)in the days before Fearne Cotton was born. It's all down hill after that I'm afraid - murky, one-camera shots & an unintentionally (or perhaps intentionally?) hilarious version of Ultraviolence. To say nothing of Barney's awful Mr Turkey shortsin the Toronto 1985 segment. Only someone with a scatological level of interestin NO (admittedly mine's not that far off) would be entertained by this. There's a wealth of NO material previously unreleased on DVD that could have been on here (I'll start with PFD - but the list is endless) so why the hell did they bother with this garbage? Anyway, as a hardcore fan, disc 2 was the reason I bought this release & was disappointed but...
Disc 1 is surprisingly good! Thankfully Mr Sumner's Haven Holidays' Dancing Dads Competition-style dancing (as seenin the awful Finsbury Park Live DVD) is kept to a minimum this time around. There's a real feel-good factor about the performance which makes this a worthwhile purchase - the grin on Peter Hook's face as the band launch into Love Will Tear Us Apart says it all.
Young 'uns will wonder what all the fuss is about though (suggest a better starting point for newcomers is the Reading live DVD that came out a while back). Plus it goes without saying that things aint the same without Gillian.
New Order being, well, New Order! - By: Dm Babidge, 03 Jun 2008 Summing up New Order can be hard. Are they dance pioneers? Are they indie rock godfathers? Are they a shadow (play?) of their former selves or are they just three lads n' a lass (well four lads now) ambling throughin that slightly unearving way?
One thing is for sure is that explaining New Order just got a whole lot easier with this DVD.
Just stick both these discs on & let the debate rage.
Disc 1 with it's Glasgow concert interdespersed (I think Amazon should mention thisin the description!) with interviews shows every possible facet of the band & goes a long way to explaining the current split. The sound is great, the crowd & band up for it. The songs are played with passion (if not skill) & Barney dances around like a drunk uncle again (look out for the shot where he has a break & a nice sip of red wine!)
Disc 2 is just as hit & miss as the band. Raiding the vault the tracks here varyin quality but are a great little reminder of the early days & how things have changes. Nice to see Rob Grettonin the (oh so arty) Glastonbury segment.
Disc 1 is how to do a concert DVD, though I would have left the interviews out of the main concert section & had them as extras. The shots are well composed & really capture the lighting & 'feel' of the gig unlike the recent OMD DVD which went to show how poor shot choice & sound can ruin a great gig.
Overall well worth getting just for the Perfect Kiss mixing into Blue Monday & Barney's sarcastic 'You all know what this is?'
Lets hope they settle the current falling out so we can have Glasgow (or anywhere) 2009 DVD.
This is for me the best of the New Order live DVD's (so far?)
