Gig review: New Order at First Direct Arena, Leeds

“I can’t remember the last time we played in Leeds,” ponders New Order’s singer and guitarist Bernard Sumner. “Something embarrassing must have happened.”

Thankfully no such incidents marred the veteran Salford band’s return to a city where Sumner and drummer Stephen Morris played some of the earliest gigs at John Keenan’s F-Club when they were members of Joy Division.

Here their set-up is altogether slicker, with constantly changing widescreen projections giving their stageshow a cinematic air, while lasers and strobe lighting turn Leeds’s 13,000-seat arena into one giant nightclub during the euphoric rush of Bizarre Love Triangle and Vanishing Point.

What’s most apparent, though, is just how well the band – whose core of Sumner, Morris and keyboard player Gillian Gilbert have been making music together for 43 years – have moved with the times.

Songs such as Ceremony, Age of Consent and Your Silent Face are four decades old, but the latter in particular sounds stunning in a new arrangement. Isolation, which Joy Division recorded for their 1980 album Closer, is even given a makeover that sounds surprisingly jaunty.

The Perfect Kiss is given its first airing on the current tour in barnstorming fashion. Two selections from their 2015 album, Restless and Plastic, don’t sound out of place amid their classic material from the 1980s, and even 2021’s standalone single Be A Rebel slots neatly into a run of uptempo numbers as the set glides into its second hour.

Gilbert’s crystalline keyboard riff feels like an old friend in a sublime rendition of Sub-Culture, and guitarist Phil Cunningham is let off the leash to add some distorted riffing towards its end.

As Morris’s pounding kickdrum introduces True Faith, the whole house is up on its feet. The only minor peeve is that Tom Chapman’s bassline, such a fundamental part of the song, sounds slightly lost in the mix.

There are no such issues, however, with Blue Monday and Temptation, which brings the set to a bouncy conclusion, as the audience takes over singing the jubilant ‘Oh, you’ve got green eyes, oh, you’ve got grey eyes, oh, you’ve got blue eyes’ section.

They encore with three superb Joy Division numbers – Atmosphere, Transmission and Love Will Tear Us Apart – during which grainy black and white images of the late Ian Curtis are respectfully projected behind them.

Embracing the past while simultaneously managing to sound fresh and relevant to modern times is a difficult trick for bands to pull off. But here New Order accomplished it with ease.