In the early to mid-1980s, Channel 4 in the U.K. had a series called Play at Home in which various bands were given an hour to do with as they pleased. Someone at Channel 4 had good taste: among the bands that participated were Big Country, the Angelic Upstarts, XTC, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Echo and the Bunnymen. The entry from Siouxsie was utterly singular, but the 1984 submission from New Order was unexpectedly fascinating and weird as well. For one thing, there’s a high quotient of humor in this thing, some of it quite sophomoric—not exactly the headspace I was expecting New Order to put me in. The opening sequence (executed in part by Peter Saville) resembles one of the mock-lofty moments from Monty Python’s Flying Circus (the example in my mind is “The Semaphore Version of Wuthering Heights” for some reason but Python did plenty of voiceover-heavy exterior bits). With the camera trained on a comely bit of landscape, a stentorian voice intones, “Factory Records: a Partnership, a Business, a Joke.” In short order the authority of that voice dissipates as it reads the “cast of characters” in a ridiculous and rapid register. The...