...and they must have had a weight on their shoulders if Hooky's in-between songs comment about his bad back is anything to go by.
In fact though, the title of this review is inspired by disc 2 of the package: which is about as useful as Joy Division's "Here are the Young Men" VHS (if anyone remembers that?) i.e. poor quality vision and sound. It starts off well enough - the first 3 tracks from "Celebration 1981" look as though they have undergone some sort of digital restoration process, albeit ICB and Chosen Time probably don't rank among anyone's favourite New Order numbers. The Glastonbury 1981 piece is also interesting (even surprising) in a wacked-out, AHW-esque kind of a way and provides a reminder of what Glastonbury used to be like (I would imagine, never having been) in the days before Fearne Cotton was born. It's all down hill after that I'm afraid - murky, one-camera shots and an unintentionally (or perhaps intentionally?) hilarious version of Ultraviolence. To say nothing of Barney's awful Mr Turkey shorts in the Toronto 1985 segment. Only someone with a scatological level of interest in NO (admittedly mine's not that far off) would be entertained by this. There's a wealth of NO material previously unreleased on DVD that could have been on here (I'll start with PFD - but the list is endless) so why the hell did they bother with this garbage? Anyway, as a hardcore fan, disc 2 was the reason I bought this release and was disappointed but...
Disc 1 is surprisingly good! Thankfully Mr Sumner's Haven Holidays' Dancing Dads Competition-style dancing (as seen in the awful Finsbury Park Live DVD) is kept to a minimum this time around. There's a real feel-good factor about the performance which makes this a worthwhile purchase - the grin on Peter Hook's face as the band launch into Love Will Tear Us Apart says it all.
Young 'uns will wonder what all the fuss is about though (suggest a better starting point for newcomers is the Reading live DVD that came out a while back). Plus it goes without saying that things aint the same without Gillian.