Revisiting New Order’s ‘Get Ready’ Track by Track: the lost LP that never got to see the stage
A ‘honeymoon period’ between two estranged friends. An absence of half the band. And a comeback record that was never played live… until now.
Illustration by Jacob Ainsworth
In this, I revisit New Order’s seventh studio album, track by track, in anticipation of Peter Hook & The Light’s upcoming Manchester show, where the celebrated Joy Division / New Order bassist and co will be playing Get Ready in its entirety… twenty-four years after its release.
Get Ready is a peculiar album by a peculiar band. After 1993’s car-crash studio effort Republic, many thought it was the end for New Order. They, too, likely thought it was the end.
But on the cusp of a new century, New Order reformed to make a comeback record. That comeback record became 2001’s Get Ready, peaking at number six in the UK album charts.
The recording process was a long-awaited reunion for the estranged Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner, and the two Joy Division founders put aside their differences to enjoy a fruitful, intimate recording process together — even if drummer Stephen Morris and guitarist/keyboardist Gillian Gilbert were largely absent. According to Hook’s ‘Substance: Inside New Order’ memoir, he and Sumner enjoyed the best working relationship they’d ever had, and made a record that they were both immensely proud of.
And, yet, the record, for various reasons, was never toured… much to Hook’s dismay. Now, in 2025, Hook is touring the album in its entirety. Before watching the album played live, I want to revisit the record track by track to see how Get Ready, New Order’s lost comeback album, has stood the test of time.
Crystal (6:50)
“We’re like crystal / We break easy”, and so New Order’s twenty-first century recording career began.
When the band reformed after almost a decade of absence and side projects, it was obvious that something big was needed for the Manchester veterans to successfully get back on the horse. Not only to reassert New Order’s place in the contemporary pop/rock canon, but also to make up for the mess that was Republic — a record so frustrating to make that it put Hook and Sumner off the idea of working with each other for the whole of the 90s.
Crystal is exactly what the band needed: a deliriously infectious electronic-rock single that catapults the group into the gargantuan sheen of modern production.
60 Miles an Hour (4:34)
A rollicking venture through New Order’s ‘rockier side’ (previously immortalised on Brotherhood’s vinyl split between rock on the A-side and disco on the B-side), ’60 Miles an Hour’ is an adrenaline-fuelled, guitar-heavy romp. There isn’t too much else to say about the second single from Get Ready. It’s confident, it’s in-your-face and, whilst it may lack some of the subtlety and, well, artsiness that’s sprinkled throughout the best of New Order’s catalogue, it makes up for it in pure catharsis.
Turn My Way (5:05)
Get Ready is the first New Order record to welcome artist features: a fascinating move into the twenty-first century from a twentieth century outfit infamously insular and particular.
Featuring on Turn My Way is Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins fame. The maestro behind hard-rock milestones such as 1993’s Siamese Dream is a strange, but effective, addition.
Corgan duets with Sumner, playing the part of repressed, tortured conscience for Sumner’s straight-talking Mancunian pub-goer. Corgan croons ethereally, like a ghost of partying past, as Sumner stumbles between past regrets and confused ambitions. Although firmly anchored in the New Order canon by Hook’s mastery of the bittersweet bass line, Turn My Way is still one of the most unique cuts in the group’s whole catalogue… and, as someone who never enjoyed helping my dad wash the car, one of my personal favourites.
Vicious Streak (5:40)
Get Ready’s fourth track is not only one of the best songs on the album. It’s one of New Order’s best songs, period.
Owing back to 1983’s chirpy, yet lonely, sequencer experiments (Your Silent Face), Vicious Streak sways with a simple, hypnotic combination of Kraftwerk-esque sequencer patterns and lo-fi drum machine riffs. Hook’s trademark bass swoops in with all the discipline of an acrobat: the high-fretted melody braces itself against the steel, swings up into the clouds, composes itself in mid-air limbo, before landing with grace. Hook dips in and out of the mix, harmonising with Sumner’s vocal melodies in the most deliciously New Order way… honeymoon period, indeed.
The first time I heard this track, I was on a ferry crossing the channel between Dover and Calais. I gazed out of the window: the gentle synthesiser pattern bubbled along with the surf, in time with the ocean’s movement. Vicious Streak glides along with a certain melancholy, strangely oceanic, as Sumner weaves an ongoing admission to unrequited passion (“I keep hanging on… and I swear by God, you’re the only one…”). A memory I will never forget.
Primitive Notion (5:43)
Hook opens the final song of Get Ready’s first side, and it’s like he’s back in 1979… a striding bass intro straight out of Unknown Pleasures. Primitive Notion is perhaps New Order’s most apparent call to their proto-goth past since 1981’s Movement. In another world, Primitive Notion could be a Joy Division song… with the late Ian Curtis singing, instead of Sumner.
But what we do have here is a 1979 post-punk track gone modern. Sumner and Hook lead the frock with aggressive string-playing. Galloping behind is a drum pattern with a subtle delay effect, always a millisecond off the melodic leads (a clever trick commonly used on synth-pop masterpiece Power, Corruption & Lies). It’s a sin that this deep-cut was never played live.
This one will undoubtedly steal the show when Hook strums that opening riff this April.
Slow Jam (4:53)
Slow Jam is a puzzling track. Arguably one of the most laddish recordings the band has ever released, the only thing separating Slow Jam from being a 00s Oasis track is a Peter Hook bass line. It’s really that close to mediocrity.
One can’t help but wonder if the absence of founding member / guitarist / keyboardist Gillian Gilbert partially led to such a rushed sludge of Britpop-lite lad-rock. The band have always benefitted from a feminine presence, carving them out as an outfit not doomed to be seen as a ‘boy’s club’. Get Ready, at times, admittedly suffers for this.
For any other group, it’d be a half-decent song for a sunny day. But for New Order? It’s almost sacrilege.
Rock the Shack (4:12)
I like to call this section of Get Ready the ‘lad section’. Moving away from synth-pop, or post-punk, Slow Jam and Rock the Shack do nothing much of stylistic note. There’s no tense mix between electronica and rock ‘n’ roll here. It sounds like a band not quite sure who they are anymore. How it goes from Vicious Streak to Rock the Shack is one of Get Ready’s many mysteries.
Featuring on Rock the Shack is Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie. Whilst it’s a nice novelty to hear the Screamadelica vocalist and Psychocandy drummer sing on a New Order song, it feels like there’s slightly too much middle-aged testosterone in one recording studio for my taste. Corgan’s feature works because it contrasts Sumner’s vocal. Here, the vocalists are too similar… like a drunken karaoke between seminal dance-rock icons.
Hook, the ball’s in your court to see if Rock the Shack can work in the live setting… the setting where it probably belongs.
Someone Like You (5:42)
Gone is the overbearing lad-rock. Someone Like You is the crowning gem of Get Ready’s second side… a true ‘dance-rock’ tune in every sense of the term (a hybrid genre that New Order inadvertently created). It has everything that fans have come to expect of the band through decades of electronic misadventures: an insistent drum pattern that shifts between the analogue and the synthesised, an ear-worm lead bass hook, and nonsensical lyrics of the 3am sleep-deprived brainstorm variety.
Someone Like You battles within itself: flurries of keyboard textures ricochet against Sumner’s aggressive guitar interludes, female backing vocals drag, somewhat uncomfortably, the ex-Joy Division guitarist’s vanilla vocal style into American glitz.
Dance-rock should be somewhat tense. It should disagree with itself. New Order have made a career of disagreeing with themselves since 1980. Tracks like Someone Like You show that we’re all the better for it.
Close Range (4:13)
A cautionary warning from one to friend another, Close Range is a surprisingly bubbly cut exploring drug abuse. Disco synthesisers glitter in the verses, guitars chug away in the choruses. Unfortunately, it has nothing over the band’s previous addiction-centred floor-filler True Faith.
I always feel like this track gets lost in the record’s crevasses. It’s simply not inspiring enough for New Order.
Run Wild (3:57)
A somewhat confusing album deserves a somewhat confusing conclusion. Bernard Sumner delivers on this by attempting to write a New Order folk song.
Run Wild is a stripped-back, breezy number that doesn’t fit in with the record’s rock ‘n’ roll vigour, or the record’s bittersweet electronica, or anywhere in between. It stands on its own, for better or worse.
The finale features a catchy melodica part, casting the mind back to the band’s very beginning, where Sumner and Hook would often harmonise between the melodica and the leading bass. It’s the instrumental sections that shine, Hook’s swooning bass solo saving another scrappy Sumner vocal performance from being left well alone in the vaults.
Get Ready on Tour
So, how does the 2000 album hold up? I think there’s a lot to still be decided. Is it a successful comeback record? How does it fare genre-wise amidst the commercialised post-punk revival of the 00s? Where does it sit in the ranking of New Order’s best and worst records?
Writing this retrospective, strangely, hasn’t helped me to answer any of these questions. It’s by no means one of New Order’s best albums, but it’s certainly one of their most intriguing, most illusive, and most conflicted… and, possibly, the one I listen to the most.
I wonder if this ambiguity is partially down to the fact that the record was never toured. Songs like 60 Miles An Hour, Primitive Notion or Someone Like You deserve to be heard outside of a pair of headphones. Unlike classic records such as Lowlife or Technique, they never received a chance of life as live material.
I now leave the discussion, as it were, in Peter Hook & The Light’s hands. There’s still so much to be explored in Get Ready. The stage will tease out countless more peculiarities, perhaps even hidden victories and surprising revelations.
New Order’s seventh studio album may just get a second life from this month onwards.