The Back To Mine series has been going for a number of years; if you haven't seen it, the basic idea is like this: for each release, the organisers select an artist or group and ask them to compile a CD's worth of their favourite songs, or those which have had an influence of them; the tracks are then put onto a CD, all DJ-mixed together into one seamless mix (which is good for listening non-stop, not so good for making mix tapes, but I digress). So far, artists as diverse as Orbital, Danny Tenaglia (he's some famous house DJ or something) and Everything But The Girl have contributed; and now, they've managed the coup of getting New Order on board.

When I first heard about it, I had high expectations; New Order have been around for over 2 decades, have influences all over the field (from punk to krautrock to disco), and have in turn influenced numerous other artists. So, with any luck, the compilation would contain some interesting material, which it indeed does.

New Order's starts off with the psychedelic blues-rock of Captain Beefheart (Big-Eyed Beans From Venus), and ends with a collaboration between Giorgio Moroder and Harold Faltermeyer (E=MC^2, a vocoder-driven piece of post-Kraftwerk electro, that sounds like it was probably an influence on electro-funkster Roger Troutman as well), along the way passing through a dozen other tracks all over the place. Some are there because of their influence on New Order, and range from the obvious (Donna Summer's I Feel Love, here edited down to a more manageable 9 minutes) to the obscure (The Groundhogs, anyone?). Then there are some acts who are post-New Order, and were influenced by them. Fellow Mancunians Doves appear with M62 Song, and Primal Scream make an appearance with their synthpop-meets-mind-altering-drugs anthem Higher Than The Sun (this was from the early 90s and the wake of the "Summer of Love", before they started shouting about swastikas over fucked-up noise loops and such).

The highlights include The Velvet Underground's Venus In Furs, a coolly kinky piece about the book which gave the world Masochism. Two songs later is Roxy Music's In Every Dream Home A Heartache, a love song for an inflatable doll, at once creepy and ridiculous; its images of dehumanisation amongst material luxury sit well alongside Ian Curtis' most morbidly detached moments. The latter track is followed by a cheery little electronic drum-machine-and-synthesizer instrumental from, of all people, Cat Stevens, and then by New York electro-homies Mantronix, with a combination of electro-hiphop and house music (or perhaps just electro-hiphop with a TR-909 drum machine; does a 909 automatically make something house music?) Detroit techno and krautrock make their appearances as well (with Rhythim Is Rhythim's The Dance and the dirty funk of Can's Mushrooms, respectively). And then there's the obligatory song by Missy Elliott, who seems to be the serious listener's contemporary "R&B" artist, as evident in all the neo-ironic bootleg remixes featuring her. (To be honest, I don't quite get the significance of Missy Elliott, especially since much of the stuff she does was done 10 years earlier by Roxanne Shante and Queen Latifah, but I digress.)

As you might expect, trying to catalogue all of New Order's influences on a single CD would be a game of compromises, and there would be perceptible omissions (for example, Kraftwerk themselves do not appear here; neither do Iggy Pop or the Buzzcocks, but then again, this isn't the Joy Division Back To Mine). Nonetheless, this Back To Mine CD contains enough interesting tracks to make it worth getting. Needless to say, if you're a New Order fan, you'll definitely want to get this.