108. New Order - Touched By The Hand Of God (Factory)

Three weeks at number one from 2nd January 1988

While we were discussing the entry for “True Faith” on Bluesky, a number of followers jumped in to offer early praise for this follow-up single. This caught me off guard. I have a rule to myself that I won’t discuss future blog entries on social media; for one thing, I don’t want to pre-empt the contents, and for another I’m conscious of ripping other people off; after all, if somebody comes up with a particularly insightful, red-hot take, it’s going to be really hard to ignore it and stick to my own path – and in the end, it might seem as if I should have asked them to write about the record instead.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the vocal support this single seemed to be get. In my mind, it’s always been one of the weakest New Order 45s – a strange cut from the tail end of one phase of their career, a stand-alone single which half-heartedly drifted mid-way into the 1987 Christmas charts and was then largely forgotten. I was so concerned I might have got it wrong that I took the unusual step of putting it on a playlist and listening to it again for a couple of weeks, living with it and trying to find a fresh way in. A fortnight later, I am still none the wiser.

It’s not that “Touched By The Hand Of God” doesn’t have some appeal to me. There’s a brightness, a burbling, grumbling charm right from the off, which ensures it’s truly not a bad single. The rhythm tracks rumble and the orchestral hits act as the fireworks every time Bernard Sumner sings “touched”, suggesting that he’s possibly not singing about a woman here, but potentially a drug. The synth lines slowly and airily drift skyward, creating a strange kind of electronic gospel feel (this stuff would become increasingly common across the board as 1988 progressed).

The problem is that once it sets out its stall, it barely progresses. The rhythm track is embedded from the first ten seconds, the central riffs are unyielding, and despite trying to convey the sensation of elation, it starts to give the impression of being stuck in a rut. A couple of Bluesky users also pointed out its similarities to mainstream synthpop, most specifically Ultravox – while New Order may have drifted close to these domains in the past, this is the first time it feels as if they’ve truly rooted themselves there.

It also put the group in the strange position of putting out another non-studio album single straight after “True Faith”. “Touched” sits as part of the soundtrack to Beth B’s black comedy film “Salvation!”, a film about a televangelist which was almost universally critically panned and appears to have fallen into a strange cultural oubliette since – I’ve never seen it myself, and if it’s mentioned at all these days it seems to be in reference to this one single and some New Order obscurities the soundtrack spawned (the album also contains their tracks “Salvation Theme”, “Sputnik”, “Let’s Go” and “Skullcrusher”).

Given their heavy involvement, a hit album should have been guaranteed despite the general disinterest in the film, but it sold poorly and left behind a series of New Order tracks which even fans seem strangely incurious about; though only “Hand Of God” itself offers anything more than instrumental decoration or ambience, so this is easily explained.