Synopsis

New Order perform amid a restless collage of urban movement, crowded streets, traffic, buildings, flashing graphics, and rapidly changing images. The video repeatedly returns to men and women in business suits who appear to be thrown through the air by an unseen force, their bodies frozen in dramatic, off-balance poses. Near the end, the music abruptly gives way to a black-and-white conversation about reincarnation before cutting back to the song. The result is an intentionally disorienting visual counterpart to the track's emotional uncertainty.

Factoids & Trivia

• The video was released in November 1986 to promote the single from New Order's album "Brotherhood."

• The airborne figures in business clothing are based on Robert Longo's "Men in the Cities" art series, translating its tense, suspended poses into moving images.

• Rather than following a conventional performance-video format, the clip combines art-film imagery, city scenes, time-lapse effects, graphic inserts, and brief glimpses of the band.

• Its most unexpected device is the interruption of the song by a black-and-white dialogue scene. Jodi Long and E. Max Frye debate reincarnation, after which the music suddenly resumes.

• The video was issued as a Factory Records promotional VHS under catalog number FAC 173 in 1986.

• The stop-start structure and deliberately fragmented editing helped make the clip one of New Order's most distinctive visual statements of the 1980s.