New Order, Olympia Theatre, Liverpool

A New Beginning

"It's like we've never been away," says New Order's Bernard Sumner, and they haven't, really. After all, they played a New Year's Eve show in Manchester, it's only three years since they headlined Reading. Those performances were lacklustre, it was generally agreed, and with no new material on show, they were beginning to feel like a nostalgia act.

Nevertheless, tonight's show, in a recently reopened Fifties theatre which used to play host to teddy boy hops, feels like a new beginning. For a start, Bernard's slimmed down, and looks indecently boyish for a fortysomething. There's a new line-up on show, too, with former Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan, a longtime New Order fan, living out his fantasies by joining them on guitar. And yes, there's new material. But not yet.

Sumner makes a dedication to their manager, Rob Gretton, who died recently, and surprises us all with the unmistakeable intro to "Atmosphere", a holy relic to the sort of diehards who maintain that Joy Division were better than New Order.

New Order were the band who understood the power of the 12-inch when their contemporaries were still putting seven-inches in plastic bags, so rumours that they'd "gone guitary" were worrying. Keyboardist Gillian Gilbert, at home tending her unwell son, is replaced by ex-Marion man Phil Cunningham, but her absence can't explain the lack of electronics on the new material. At first hearing, tracks from the forthcoming Get Ready album like "Slow Jam" and "Rock the Shack" and new single "Crystal" sound neither like stunners nor stinkers, just New Order standards, with looming top string bass riffs present and correct.

There's another surprise in "Your Silent Face", a song they haven't played for 15 years, and from then on it's Greatest Hits time, an irresistible reminder of why New Order were so vital for so long. Such is their enigma: the disco existentialists, the lads' band who made art, the northern weirdos who made a football record, the only band who would share a microphone with Ian Curtis and John Barnes. Welcome back.

s.price@independent.co.uk