New Order in Poole, March 1986

The first gig I went to, New Order @ Poole Arts Centre 29.3.86 cost only £5, although one could buy a lot more with £5 back then. A flyer for the tour fell out of my old “Low Life” LP. I think we paid on the door so I never got a ticket stub. I remember there was an army of Joy Division bootleg tape sellers outside the venue. My friend Dan’s parents drove us to Poole from the Salisbury area and went for a meal whilst the three or maybe four of us went to watch New Order. They played most of their best album Low Life (maybe all of it), Ceremony, Temptation, Blue Monday, Shellshock and the at that point unreleased State of the Nation. When Bernard Sumner (“the twat!”) got his melodica out for Your Silent face it got the biggest cheer of the night. Peter Hook made me want to play bass guitar, so I did, on a black damaged three string bass. I taught myself almost every Joy Division bass line. I had an almost Ian Curtis fit moment. After the support band Tea House Camp (you never heard of them) we all pushed as far forward as we could into the densely packed crowd and got fairly close to the stage. It was so hot that I passed out, and so packed that everyone had no option but to push me back on my feet immediately. This meant I started the gig in the state of sensory derangement that blacking out brings on. I expect the gig was bootlegged, but unlike the second gig I went to (The Fall @ Southampton University) I’ve never tracked down a bootleg recording. I’ve never been back to Poole since that night. Years later I met Stephen Morris in Macclesfield and told him New Order were the first band I’d ever been to see at a gig. He asked what year and when I told him he said, “Oh sorry we must have been terrible then!” They were a hell of a lot better than at the Reading Festival 1993, which was the third and last time I saw them play.