New Order Live: From Heaven to Heaven by Dec Hickey

Forewords by Peter Hook and Stephen Morris. Introductions by Paul Morley and Moby

Hardback; 198 full colour pages – 268mm x 325mm, landscape, art book-style format.

Over 400 unpublished photos of the band and 200 plus images of rare memorabilia. (ISBN:978-0-9569936-0-1)

Price: £30

Publication date: February 14, 2012

New Order grew to become as influential a set of musicians as any of their generation and From Heaven to Heaven follows the remaining members of Joy Division – Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris – from just months after having to come to terms with the death of their singer, Ian Curtis, as with the addition of Gillian Gilbert they began to find their feet again and move New Order on to worldwide acclaim.

With introductions by Morley and Moby, and forewords from Hook and Morris, the book is a unique and meticulously detailed eavesdrop through time, documenting – stylistically like none before – the formative years of one of the most iconic groups of all time.

From Heaven to Heaven is maybe unique on a number of fronts. Aided by a wealth of unpublished photos of the band and images of rare memorabilia, the main body of the book takes New Order, with just a dozen or so performances to their name, on a three and a half year journey through all their British gigs between early 1981 and June 1984. Besides the band and their crew, Dec Hickey was the only person present at every one of these gigs, and armed often with a camera and rarely without a tape machine or a group of friends/other New Order fans, he recounts capturing the band on this road trip, often as they went from soundchecks to gigs, to the odd (occasionally very odd) after show dressing room, whilst making history along the way.

It’s all but forgotten now but for most of the early 1980s New Order were mistakenly seen by sections of the press as oozing an air of dogged detachment. Bad experiences with the media had and would, for a while, continue to make the band recoil to some extent, but in that same period, and away from the scrutiny, From Heaven to Heaven finds the New Order camp to be relaxed, friendly and often very funny people.

Crucially, the book also spotlights New Order at the pivotal moment in their evolution, arguably leading to their most creative and groundbreaking period as a band. The new found affordability of electronic equipment was to see them at the forefront of a new era, often as that very technology strove to act like a dysfunctional fifth member with a (micro?)chip on its shoulder.

With a heartfelt chapter on the band’s manager, the late Rob Gretton and additional words from noted Joy Division and New Order contributor, Jon Wozencroft and the Wake’s Caesar, plus a more condensed but up to the moment summation in The Later Years, broaden then the perspective to that of a more general rock music read and From Heaven to Heaven, the first book to focus solely on New Order, hopefully gets across some of the buzz that fans from any era will have had as they have scrambled to chase down their favourite bands. Dec Hickey’s just happened to be three quarters of Joy Division and four quarters of New Order.

LINKS:

FROM HEAVEN TO HEAVEN: http://www.fromheaventoheaven.com/

By peter on February 1, 2012