New Order > Power, Corruption & Lies [Collector's Edition] > Fact 75 Power, Corruption & Lies < Peter Saville

"We always ended up working nocturnally," says Stephen. "There was a lot of acid about, Power, Corruption & Lies was a psychedelic sort of thing. You'd have a little bit..." "Apart from me," adds Gillian.

In Britannia Row, the group would jam songs onto 4-track and then programme them, adding synthesizers and overdubs, and finally vocals. Age of Consent, the irresistible power surge that opened the album, was completed like this; the repeated pulses of Ultraviolence certainly sound like they was put together using instinct rather than foresight. The ensuing tension, generated by the rhythmic imperative of dance and the power and lyricism of rock, put plenty of fuel in the tank. Hooky's bass playing on the beautifully simple Your Silent Face, for example, interacts with the gliding sequencers like a dream. 5-8-6, an embryonic Blue Monday, has its mechanistic, symphonic disco moves undercut by tortured vocals. The somnambulant We All Stand is like the Peel session cover Turn The Heater On as narrated by Richard Burton's character in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. They were fusing rock and electronics when no one else wanted to, and the effects are electrifying.

The amount of electronic gear also made concert performances a high wire walk of crossed fingers and ingenuity. "Oh God, we had so many breakdowns playing live," says Gillian. "It was like spinning plates anyway, and stuff would go out of tune and out of time because the power wasn't very good, and everybody'd look at eachother, or me! Or these synths that were made for being left in a studio with air conditioning on would overheat. We used to have condensation dripping on them and throw 'em in trucks! It was worth it though - we've been watching gigs that Rob used to video, and they sound fantastic, even the mistakes. There's one where Barney sings 'who killed my father?' (the original title of Ultraviolence) and you hear SKKKKKSSS!, the whole PA goes. Dead spooky!"

The live New Order experience was shared by many millions on March 31 1983 when Blue Monday rose high enough for the band to invited onto on the BBC's chart run down Top Of The Pops. Introduced by jocks Richard Skinner, Steve Wright and a man in a bunny suit, this inscrutable performance saw Steven and Gillian immobile behind synths, Hooky adding syn-drums and backing vocals and Bernard wearing a denim jacket in honour of that week's fellow performer, rockabilly guy Shakin' Stevens.

Though not as impressive as the recorded version that was painstakingly pieced together in Britannia Row, the incongruity and high weirdness of the event could not be denied. "I thought that was stupid actually," says Bernard. "Blue Monday was really breaking us, and it wasn't really a great song, I saw it more as an amazing sonic event. It's got this amazingly propulsive beat, a great bottom end - so to put all that time and effort into the production, and to then go and plug your little sequencers straight into the BBC's mixing desk, and they'd never recorded a live band before on TOTP, it wasn't gonna be good. It was more Rob's idea, but of course he didn't have to go up onstage and actually do it. It was commercial suicide... but from an ideological perspective, it was good."

To New Order, the ideological perspective was all-important, as a way to demonstrate their creative and promotional autonomy - that elusive, self-willed quality that meant you never even questioned Hooky's right to be bearded. It also completes a circle for this reissue's second disc to restore Blue Monday to its parent album, as on the original American issue of Power, Corruption & Lies. Cited as the biggest selling twelve-inch singles of all time, it is representative of the quality of this much-imitated piece of music that none of its many remixes have come close to bettering it's thunderous power. "If you hear the sound of Blue Monday," remembers Hooky, "It's down to us putting a speaker in the bathroom in Brit Row. We'd pump the bass drum through this speaker and record it! That's why the bass drum in Blue Monday sounds the way it does." A danceable Mexican stand off between you, fate and death, it's tempting to adapt nineteenth century biologist Thomas Huxley's famous quote about chess to be about the song: "Blue Monday is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the Universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature and the player on the other side is hidden from us..." Keep on dancin'.

Present too is the Arthur Baker production Confusion, frankly shocking on its first release and still inarguable. This collaboration was another serendipitous event; having been piqued by Baker's electro-dance productions of Afrika Bambaataa's Planet Rock and Rocker's Revenge's Walkin On Sunshine, the group went to New York in 1983 without a pre-prepared song and, says Hooky, gave him 12 hours of jamming to work on after he put them in a studio for the day (later Baker's pal John Robie would also become an important part of the New Order story). When complete, Confusion amounted to being trapped in a game of disco-tetris surrounded by slamming piano lids; a de rigueur selection on New York radio station WBLS, its video was filmed in the Paradise Garage with Baker and Madonna's sometime-boyfriend Jellybean Benitez gauging the dancefloor heat from the DJ booth.

Also reunited with its contemporaneous album is the Factory Benelux 12" Murder, a Movement-flavoured blast of drums and noise featuring samples from the movies Caligula and 2001: A Space Odyssey, plus a whip cracking sound effect made out of string and gaffa tape by Bernard who had, says Steven and Gillian, taken to wearing a white lab coat at the time. "We'd got into sampling, that was the thing on Power, Corruption & Lies," says Stephen. " We'd got the Emulator, which was like the first sampling keyboard. I remember it turning up in Cheetham Hill. All this technology, thousands of pounds, and do you know what the first thing they did was? Sampled a fart. Ha ha! It didn't appear on a song though..."