Welcome to a new segment, New Order: By The Numbers, where we take a deep dive into the stats of New Order in concert over the years.
If you know me, you know I absolutely love compiling data on live concerts of my favorite bands. And if you know New Order, you’ll know that they are one of the few bands who consistently mixed up their set lists from night to night, especially in the early years of their careers. Not so much now, but back in the 80’s, you never knew what you would get when you went to one of their gigs. Which led me to the question: what if you could?
As such, I logged all the data from all of their shows from 1980 to the present day, divided it up into album eras and tried to figure out, if you went to the next show in a particular era, what would be the most likely set list you would hear? And that is what we’ll present here, the live set list you would probably hear next from New Order if their Movement era had continued on without the introduction of Power, Corruption, and Lies tracks.
I wrestled with the choice of playing live tracks or the studio versions with live enhancement. Due to the varying quality levels of New Order live in their very early days, I have opted for the latter for now, but this may shift or blend as we move into later eras with professional level live recordings of certain tracks.
THE DATA
Spanning from July 30, 1980 until January 23, 1982, New Order played 53 shows with known set lists that we can compile data from. At their next show on February 26, 1982, they introduced “Leave Me Alone,” thus ushering in the Power, Corruption, and Lies era, which we will look at next time.
Over the course of these 53 shows, New Order played 19 different songs (4 singles, and 15 non-singles). On average they played 8.3 songs per show, so we’ll round that down to 8. And of those 8, they played an average of 2 singles per show. So, the next task was to determine the percentages of how often a song got played during that period based on when it was introduced to the catalog. This is important because, for example, although a single like “Procession” was played more overall than “Everything’s Gone Green,” it also existed as an option for longer, and here is where “Everything’s Gone Green” gets the nod because percentage-wise, from the time it was introduced, it was being played far more frequently. And we’re focusing on what the next show would be.
Looking at the singles, “Everything’s Gone Green” was played 87% of the time since its introduction, with “Ceremony” second at roughly 77%. So these 2 will take the 2 single-spots in our most likely next Movement era show.
| # | % | Song |
| 1 | 87.0% | Everything’s Gone Green |
| 2 | 77.4% | Ceremony |
| 3 | 71.2% | Procession |
| 4 | 66.7% | Temptation |
The other 15 non-single tracks ranked as such in terms of how often they were played since their introduction to the live set or catalog. We’ll take the top 6 to round out our 8 tracks needed for the most likely next Movement era show.
| # | % | Song |
| 1 | 100.0% | Dreams Never End |
| 2 | 94.4% | Denial |
| 3 | 91.3% | Senses |
| 4 | 84.9% | Truth |
| 5 | 72.7% | Chosen Time |
| 6 | 71.7% | In a Lonely Place |
| 7 | 67.4% | The Him |
| 8 | 54.5% | Hurt |
| 9 | 45.7% | ICB |
| 10 | 27.3% | Doubts Even Here |
| 11 | 25.0% | Mesh |
| 12 | 21.6% | Cries & Whispers |
| 13 | 3.9% | Homage |
| 14 | 2.0% | Hour |
| 15 | 2.0% | Sister Ray |
After that, it becomes like a logic puzzle from your GREs. In my data log, I tracked which quadrant of a set each song was played and also in what percentile of the set it was at (early, mid, late, etc.). From there we look for overwhelming data indicators, such as “Denial” being played 82% of the time in the 4th quadrant, and having the latest percentile of any of the 8 songs. All that means, of these 8 songs, it’s being played last.
| # | Song | Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | Q4 |
| 1 | In A Lonely Place | 45% | 18% | 18% | 18% |
| 2 | Chosen Time | 29% | 33% | 4% | 33% |
| 3 | Dreams Never End | 19% | 53% | 9% | 19% |
| 4 | Everything’s Gone Green | 5% | 20% | 15% | 60% |
| 5 | Truth | 2% | 42% | 49% | 7% |
| 6 | Senses | 0% | 2% | 45% | 52% |
| 7 | Ceremony | 24% | 7% | 2% | 66% |
| 8 | Denial | 6% | 9% | 3% | 82% |
Then, you add in songs to the placement based on the data. While 4 songs were candidates for their 4th quadrant, only 2 can fit, so you go with the 2 which were most predominantly there, “Ceremony” and “Denial.” For the others, you look at their secondary quadrant to find a home. Of the 8 songs in this set, 5 are in their dominant quadrant, and 3 are in their secondary (“Chosen Time”, “Everything’s Gone Green”, and “Senses”). For “Chosen Time” and “Senses”, their secondary quadrant are only a few percentage points below their primary one, so they slide into those easily. “Everything’s Gone Green” was the only polarized song with it fitting mostly into the 4th quadrant (which is already filled from these 8 with “Ceremony” and “Denial”), and then a clear drop off into its secondary one in the 2nd quadrant, but it was played there a handful of times, so it’s not out of the question.
POWER RANKINGS
A side data set I look at as these go on is: what is a song’s PRI (Power Ranking Index) compared to the others? It’s a complicated formula, but basically it tries to determine how strong a song is based on the frequency the band plays the song (which indicates how much they like the song internally and how well they think it goes over with the audience), while also taking into account how many songs they played in each set, how many songs were available to choose from, and how many singles vs. non-singles are being played, etc. As time goes on, it factors in if songs get brought back from previous album tours, consecutive tour selection, etc. As such, singles and non-singles are graded differently as one expects singles to get played more than the non-singles. Below are how the PRI stands as the Movement era draws to a close.
| # | PRI | Singles |
| 1 | 1.24 | Everything’s Gone Green |
| 2 | 1.00 | Ceremony |
| 3 | 0.96 | Temptation |
| 4 | 0.87 | Procession |
| # | PRI | Non-Singles |
| 1 | 2.14 | Denial |
| 2 | 2.02 | Dreams Never End |
| 3 | 1.92 | Senses |
| 4 | 1.72 | Truth |
| 5 | 1.64 | Chosen Time |
| 6 | 1.37 | The Him |
| 7 | 1.36 | In a Lonely Place |
| 8 | 1.28 | Hurt |
| 9 | 0.94 | ICB |
| 10 | 0.56 | Doubts Even Here |
| 11 | 0.36 | Mesh |
| 12 | 0.32 | Cries & Whispers |
| 13 | 0.05 | Homage |
| 14 | 0.03 | Hour |
| 15 | 0.02 | Sister Ray |
As we move on to the next album and its data set, this PRI list will grow longer with the introduction of new songs, and these positions will change as songs accumulate more points and/or disappear from the live sets. Have fun discussing!
Thank you for reading and be on the lookout for the next installment of New Order: By The Numbers!