Hot on the heels of his Joy Division exhibition at Proud Camden in 2012, Kevin Cummins - rock photographer, music mag photo stalwart, documentarian of UK bands for forty years - returns with a strange and interesting look at New Order. 

New Order were a Factory band comprised of former Joy Division members, formed in the grief and fog after the death of Ian Curtis. The exhibition is dedicated to various points in the eighties, nineties and two-thousands, but the focal point is New Order in America, post-'Blue Monday', enjoying international acclaim. New Order in America were the strange, English ‘other’ band, and spent a long period in ‘83 touring around the States - more specifically, New York. 

In the middle of the exhibition is a photo of Bernard Sumner standing on a training pitch in an estate in front of John Barnes. Sumner looks grumpy. Barnes looks confused. There is a can of Stella on the floor. This photo represents the incongruity of Cummins’ best work, work that is typically English. The black and white New York stage shots of Peter Hook in leather trousers, bass slung low while playing a gig are greatest-hits-album-insert gold, but visually they aren’t nearly as interesting as when Cummins is setting the scene outside of a normal magazine photo shoot. He is at his best when he is photographing a band on a stage other than a live one - he is a masterful director when setting the band in a context less traditional than NME live pictures.

In the exhibition, photos of perennially sunglassed-Bernard Sumner looking grumpy in America are juxtaposed with photos of Bernard Sumner looking grumpy on stage. But although the onstage photos are (ironically) less staged, strangely they are less about the band than the posed ones. Visually, what is most interesting about New Order are the shots taken in the gaps between their performances: Gillian Gilbert wreathed in shadows; Sumner looking grumpy with an American number plate;Peter Hook bisected by shadows, lighting a fag, eyes to the floor; a tetraptych of the four band members basking by a pool in LA sunlight in 1983 during the height of their fame. Those sunbathing Kodak borders of C-type pictures epitomise New Order in the middle of something unreal: they look like they've wandered in from a Brett Easton Ellis novel.

The exhibition (in the middle of Camden market - prepare to walk through enthusiastic tourists and Noel Fielding fanboys to get there) is a view of Cummins’ transition, or perhaps evolution, through the ages. Between 1983 and the reformation of New Order in 2011, Kevin Cummins took staged photos of a Mancunian band not at home and bathing in America after 'Blue Monday' came out and a US tour beckoned. And these gelatin silver photos belie a band in the middle of a strange dream. Cummins’ exhibition is not Madchester, it’s not the Hacienda, it’s a band out of context. I would highly recommend you go and see it immediately.

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©Kevin Cummins

Catch the exhibition, New Order by Kevin Cummins, at Proud Camden (23rd April - 7th June 2015). You can find out more at www.proud.co.uk

This year marks the 35th anniversary of both the release of Joy Division’s final studio album Closer and the death of lead singer Ian Curtis. Over the years, it’s been easy to say that people should have seen his suicide coming. His marriage was falling apart, his epilepsy was worsening, and so his songwriting became filled with imagery of unremitting desolation, emptiness and alienation. “For entertainment they watch his body twist/Behind his eyes he says, “I still exist”” sings Curtis on the distorted, tribal sounding opening song ‘Atrocity Exhibition’.

Produced by the eccentric Martin Hannett, Closer is even more claustrophobic, more inventive, more beautiful, and more haunting than its predecessor. From start to finish this is Joy Division’s masterpiece, a true representation of everything the band wanted to be. The ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ leads to the relentless yet somehow still economical ‘Isolation’, the group have clearly become more confident in themselves and in their arrangements. The death march ‘Passover’ is a clear sign that the band is fully aware of their ability to be both melodic and despondent, and then in ‘Colony’, the crunching guitar has a stop-start sound that takes us back to the sound of Unknown Pleasures.

‘A Means to an End’ is where the album switches into another gear. The absence of a chorus is not only symbolic of the album, but also of the band’s transition into what could have been their new direction. Which leads onto the stuttering drumbeat and haunting bass that creates a minimalistic and isolated feeling to the song ‘Heart and Soul’.

‘Twenty Four Hours’ is Curtis’ final attempt on the album to reach out for help, despite knowing he can’t escape the inevitability of his mortality. ‘The Eternal’ is a song that most would consider to be the bleakest song the band ever recorded, with lyrics such as “Cry like a child though these years make me older/With children my time is so wastefully spent”, I see it as a sign of where the band wanted to go next and showed their ever increasing development. The album bows out with ‘Decades’. Curtis sounds as though he is singing a ghostly ode to the loss of youth: “We knocked on the doors of Hell's darker chamber/Pushed to the limit we dragged ourselves in.”

This is the one band and the one album that, no matter what, I will always come back too. It is one of the most beautifully honest albums of the last century and if you haven’t discovered it yet, I urge you to find a place for it in your record collection.

Closer is available from Amazon and iTunes.