thanks for the welcome weirdo!
i'd have to trawl the e-damaged memory banks for any real recollections... although listening to the peel session version of 5 8 6 i just had a rush of memory about watching a saturday afternoon bbc2 session [richard skinner??? fuck me how come all this is still in there???] of them playing some of the tracks, on a portable tv in a caravan - i can remember exactly what i was wearing, and thinking, and feeeeling - 18yo, grey combat pants, grey shirt, regulation short back and sides, clutching a copy of neitzsche's beyond good and evil - i'd just read the aphorism 'without music, life would be untenable' and watching them play i knew it to be the truest thing i was ever likely to read...
gigs all over the north - hull town hall, playing in front of a huge organ, barney making the words up as he went along... playing bradford ceasar's palace - such a great name for a truly shithole venue, smelt like a gay toilet, tiny stage, amazing gig - the whole 'europe after the rain' tour - not sure it was called this, but it had that max ernst painting on the tickets... seeing em at the hacienda, thinking it was gonna be the best gig ever, when it turned out to be the pooest - awful, AWFUL sound - but then that was the hac...
above all else, feeling like you were a part of something - a community, a nation of fellow travelers, being at the birth of something you didn't quite get yet but knew was important... surrounded by good-looking boys with shaved necks, not knowing [at that time] why they looked so attractive 
[it was years before i came out...]
loving movement but knowing it couldn't go on like that - ICB indeed...
taking a detour in the new car i was supposed to be delivering for renault to find ian curtis's memorial plaque at macc crem... stopping a guy to ask directions, demuring as he asked if i had a late delivery, and feeling righteous and only slightly dishonest when i told him i was visiting my brother... changing the PIN number of my first bank card to 1805 in memory of him... buying every shitty bootleg of JD and NO live shows i could find at record fairs... listening to PC&L, feeling like it was the first real summer of my life travelling alone on a fookin coach from lincoln to glasgow to see them at barrowlands, so excited by the new tracks [off the yet to be released, nay even recorded i reckon, low-life] that i slept outside in a quiet corner of a park, full of sheer and sober delirium...
low-life was the end for me. i moved on[?], smiths, sonic youth, bad seeds, until hip-hop blew my head off, but if it wasn't for NO i'd never have got public enemy, the mondays wouldn't have existed, and acid house would've made no sense at all...
years later, seeing barney on manchester oxford road station platform, realising two things - that i was still too much of an awestruck fan to say hello, and that all those years before i'd obviously fancied the arse off him, cos i still did..
shoot ten years forward and the video for crystal started me laughing and i didn't stop for about a week! they were back, even if 'barney' did look like bobby gillespie's idiot younger 'french' brother... 
factory changed my life - an overused expression i know, but the sensibilty, references and attitude it instilled in me have made me who i am. i am now a graphic designer for a living - thanks mostly to the way all the factory covers made me feel - i wanted to do that!!!
isn't this mad - how vivid these things still are? but then the second gig i ever saw was JD in liverpool, the first time i ever visited the city i still live in. gestalt encoding. thank you new order. long may you reign...
peace and love
ade xxx
very salient point there. where would new order be if bono hadn't helped them out when the lads were starting out? why, they'd still be playing pub-rock in some dingy salford joint!
can someone send me a copy PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE HI MISSY
Ally.
