coded messages from the Hacienda

From a very encyclopedic discography of New Order. One possible explanation of the abstract color schemes which seem to recur through early New Order albums:

"Peter Saville designed a colour code for use on several releases circa-83. The decoder is the wheel design on the reverse of the cover to Power, Corruption and Lies. To clear things up a little, the colour wheel describes the meaning of the coloured squares on (not only) Power Corruption & Lies, (but also) Blue Monday and Confusion.

To decode the wheel, use only the outer two rings. You could divide the outer two rings into full colour, various on green, and various on yellow. The inner segments appear to be meaningless. Start with the full colour sections, the first of which will be the green one... This is 'A'. Work your way clockwise naming each colour the next letter. There are exactly 26 segments around the disc. From 'Z' work back into the full colours, the first of which is '1'. This means that the full green segment is either 'A' or '1', and the colour for 'I' is also that for '9'.

You should be able to decode the squares now. Start with the 5 on the front of Power Corruption & Lies, and you will find (if you have the vinyl) that the first 4 squares spell 'FACT' then next square is divided into two, with the lower half being '7' and the upper half being '5'. Therefore the code is 'FACT 75' which is the Factory number for this release. The code for the CD front cover is 'FACD 75'."

If only New Order had sublimated some of this abstruseness into writing better lyrics.