Shot right through with a bolt of blue: Revisiting Bizarre Love Triangle
In November 1986, I went to see New Order at the Congress Centre in Ottawa. Peter Gabriel was playing that same night in an arena across town; instead of a nosebleed seat there, I went for the floor and a chance to see a favourite band up close. (I got to see Peter Gabriel on a later tour. Whew.)
The night was a bit fraught. I had bought tickets also for a coworker and her friends who would be visiting from Montreal — and they decided at the last minute to not come. I had tickets to unload! I paced outside the congress centre, which is on the threshold of Parliament Hill, and eventually found people to take them.
The show, as I recall it, was pretty great. You can see the setlist for the night right here.
The band was touring behind the then just-out album Brotherhood, which pushed their electronic(a) fascination even further, matching it with another half that was rougher and with a rock edge.
The key song on the album was Bizarre Love Triangle, which stands up as a great New Order single, and which — as keyboardist Gillian Gilbert says in an interview that can be seen below — “still sounds new to me, even to this day.”
Bernard Sumner wrote a lot of Bizarre Love Triangle while learning how to use MIDI-based sequencing. As bassist Peter Hook suggests in the video below, it was like watching paint dry. Very boring waiting for things to happen.
The electronic fascination was on the stage that night in Ottawa. While Hook frequently played bass, Sumner played guitar and drummer Stephen Morris was behind the kit, there were also four keyboard banks, and at least once not only were all four behind them — but (as if to prove what sequencers were capable of doing) they all lifted their arms at one point, while the music continued to play without human touch. It was a cheeky bit of electronic humour, I guess.
Bizarre Love Triangle (the words in the title of course are nowhere to be found in the lyrics) continues to entertain me, almost four decades later. I love listening to it in the car, windows down. And, yep, it doesn’t feel that dated, as much as it’s a hallmark of the mid-Eighties.
Tucked inside the programming and synths is a song. That came to the fore in 1994 when the Australian outfit Frente! released an acoustic-leaning version of Bizarre Love Triangle, stripping it down to a raw kind of heartache.
The song can also be played on the simplest instruments. To wrap up, check out this live version by the busking duo Fukushima Dolphin, who loop themselves to build up the arrangement. It was filmed at Brighton’s beach, before a spectacular sunset and some bemused tourists. It’s kind of fun watching them see the song gradually come together.
New Order (sans Peter Hook, who parted ways almost two decade ago now) has continued to perform through the years, although a few weeks ago I read that the husband-wife duo of Gilbert and Morris would no longer be touring. I’m not sure if it’s really New Order anymore.
Bizarre Love Triangle was always a standard of their shows, bested only by Temptation and Blue Monday for most-performed live songs, which makes sense, as each is older.
Here’s how New Order played it at a Glastonbury show in 1987, about eight months after I saw them.
An update for the playlist
I’ve been building a playlist in Spotify of songs mentioned here on the blog, and have updated it with the New Order and Frente! versions of Bizarre Love Triangle.