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is going on beneath the stage. Curtis is inflamed from the start. In “She’s Lost Control,” part of what is scary is the way the singer maintains control: he’s lying, the song’s second mind says behind its words, its beat, the stitch-by-stitch countdown of what stands in for a melody, don’t believe me. In “Shadowplay” the singer might have left the hall altogether, singing from the street, accosting people to tell them to beware, to watch out, to look both ways and then step off the curb with their eyes closed. Pressure builds, and by the time the band gets to “Transmission” the crowd is drunk and loud. The music rushes past Curtis, and he makes no attempt to catch up. His singing is abstracted from itself; it’s been an extraordinary show, but what’s happening here doesn’t fit with anything that’s come before, and nothing will come after it. Lines in the song begin to fray, pants dragging in the gutter, each unraveling thread a signifier without an object. It is unhinged—you can’t imagine what it would have been like to see this, if, in the moment, youwould have been capable of seeing what now, in the comfort of your own room, with the singer dead and the rest of the band having gone on for more than thirty years as New Order, you can hear, and conjure up out of your own imagination. “Dance, dance, dance”—the words shatter, the rest of the band shouting behind Curtis. He doesn’t need them; they want to be part of it, to testify that they too are alive in this moment. “Dance, dance, dance, to the radio”—as the words batter against each other, nothing could be more loathsome, degrading, immoral.
    “I always felt that the ‘Dance to the radio’ bit was a bit of a cop-out, on that song,” Peter Hook said in 2013. “It seemed to be courting the radio, to me.” “To get airplay?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “Which is what Tony did say to me once. But when I spoke to Ian about it, it was the opposite. ‘ It was a call to arms ’—against the radio. It made me reevaluate the whole thing. But I —being the bass player ”—he laughed out loud at himself—“felt that it was the other way around!”
    It wasn’t that Hook ever missed the black hole of the song. “When you play it,” he said, repeating how a friend described it, “you push the whole beat, you’re playing in front of the beat, every note, so the rest of them are always trying to catch up with you, and that’s what gives it the urgency. From a bass player’s point of view, it’s a very, very simple riff. It’s a repetitious two-note riff, that you can really only—take up and down. In intensity. You can sit back on the verses,you can pound it out on the chorus, but the riff never really changes. The riff is the solid backbone of the song. The song actually changes quite a lot—around the bass riff. The vocals are very, very—almost Neanderthal. When it gets to that, Dahhhhhnce ”—with a dredging sound coming up behind the word as Hook pulls it out of his throat—“to play, to sing—the looks on people’s faces, when you do it, you actually tap in to a basic primal instinct with that roar. That Ian did so wonderfully. People cannot believe—every single piece—even to hate you, and be there to watch you fall on your ass —they still cannot believe— WHHHHAAAAAAA! at that moment, before the last chorus.”
    On John Peel’s Something Else, on television two months after the show at the Factory club, the song is speeded up, a way to keep the interest of listeners who have heard “Transmission” before, maybe of musicians who have played it too many times. It’s automatic. The Doors were always hovering over Joy Division, as if watching them go to places they had glimpsed but never reached; far in front of the sound, Curtis never sounded so much like Jim Morrison, somewhat distracted, forgetting where he is, then remembering, clumsy, then rushing, as if he’s trying to run right out of the